...You ask me what I mean

By saying I have lost my tongue.

I ask you, what would you do

If you had two tongues in your mouth,

And lost the first one, the mother tongue,

And could not really know the other,

The foreign tongue.

(from, Search for My Tongue – Sujata Bhatt)

 

Yeh ILU ILU kya hai? Angrezi mein kehtey hain ki, I love you,

Gujarati mein kehte hain, tamey prem karoon chho

Aur Bengali mein kehtey hain, ami tomakey bhalo bashi

Aur Punjabi mein kehtey hain, oye hadippa!...

(popular Hindi film song)

 

NEARLY all school-going children in India, whether from a village or the city, will sooner or later slough off their mother tongue and acquire a new formal ‘educated’ tongue and accent, along with a school uniform. Few of us though, will admit to how this slow swapping of a mother tongue with a ‘made in India’ variety of English or a formal Hindi (earlier heavily Sanskritized but now increasingly studded with English and Punjabi) will go on to bifurcate emotions for us into two streams: those that can only be expressed in the mother tongue, and a host of others that will need the acquired tongue for a proper articulation.

Most Indians educated in the English medium private schools are convinced that the Queen’s English that they have picked up in school (based largely on Wren and Martin’s grammar and the Oxford English Dictionary) is the only authentic voice of the upwardly mobile India and the only medium for civil discourse. For a while, at home and among old friends, the very young continue to speak in their original voice. But soon they also begin to feel that they must drop the childhood voice outside their home environs and speak in the one they have acquired for discussing areas of concern that democracy and cable and the Net have opened up in the 21st century.

To discuss subjects ranging from sex to secularism, Indipop to international relations, the young need a supple new language that can link them to the hemisphere where most of these ideas and terminologies were actually first mined. They are all aware of a globally wired world where call centres, social chat sites, blogs and bourses never sleep. Where Facebook and Twitter have replaced the old coffee house and geriatric townhall gatherings. Where one can chat up clients and friends across unseen oceans and post fiery anti-establishment opinions to the world community at the press of a button. The childhood tongue is now increasingly being folded up and kept aside for talking to the very old or family servants, as all over the country a carefully acquired English becomes the mother lode for the officially young.

Baby Kumari from Bhagalpur, Sivamani from Trichi, Keshto from Bhubaneshwar and Bobby from Patiala all are adept at handling the new communication technology driven by a hydra-headed new speech. Being a phonetic language helps Hindi speakers vastly to clutch at unfamiliar words as they grab and then chisel off their unfamiliar contours with their own grammar: ‘Pyaree meree Darlin, agar tooney ab bhi merey iss pyar ke message ko alt-delete kar diya to main bhi shift-A kar ke apney pyar ke sab fasaaney mohalley valon tak forward kar doonga!’ (My love, if you insist on deleting all my messages, I will select and mail them to our entire community) goes one message published on the Valentine’s Day special page of a Hindi daily. Thus Love and Loathing in the age of 2G and 3G spectrum waves.

 

Indian cinema had already wised up around the second decade of the last century to young India’s need for a language that could cut through political xenophobia and all those urgings about discarding all that was videshi, including English. While as a Gujarati speaking Gandhi learnt Hindi as the language of the new India and wrote his editorials in Hindi, Hindi cinema was marrying myths to create the persona of a much cheered Fearless Nadia. This young Anglo-Indian would arrive on screen clad in a cape and high boots and ask ‘Women of Hind’ to arise against exploitation by outsiders.

As the myth mutated in post-Independence years, we had the crooning Kuckoo and Silk Smitha (of the Thundering Thighs), and then the bindaas babes like Parveen Babi and Zeenat Aman seen smoking pot in the company of White hippies (Dum Maro Dum) and swaying seductively to western tunes in a pot-induced trance. Slowly, even old Uncle Doordarshan began to take notice of the new wave and its familiar ‘Rukavat ke liye khed hai,’ gave way to, ‘Miltey hain iss commercial break ke baad,’ and programmes like Chitrahaar were dusted and re-titled Truck Dhina Dhin.

 

With the opening up of the economy, privatization of school education received a big boost. Schools with names like St. Tulsi Convent and Oxford English Public School, and coaching centres like English Gurukul and The Boon School of Ranchi (advertised in hoardings as a coaching school for Bihari parents who want their kids to be admitted to the Doon School or The Mayo) began mushrooming in small towns. These new schools for the children of the upwardly mobile middle classes from Almora to Aleppy, laid great emphasis on school uniforms (replete with a hankey pinned to the shirt, a tie and shoes worn with socks) and learning good manners, like saying gooood moorning madam! please and thank you.

This impressive display of western good manners soon infected the lowly Hindi medium government and municipal schools where male and female teachers hitherto known as Massab and Behen ji (teacher), came to be addressed as Sir ji and Madam ji, shyampatt became blackboard and the ubiquitous vidyalay ka ghanta (gong) came to be re-christened as school ki bail (bell). Around this time, a guide to English language for the upwardly mobile Indian, titled ‘Rapidex Speedily English Speaking Course’ was published and became an instant hit. It went on to be translated into all of India’s vernaculars and to date has something like a hundred reprints to its credit.

 

In the age of 24x7 cable and dish TV and a huge demand for English medium schools from the taluka level onwards, we stand face to face with a new language: supple, cunning, extraordinarily capable of swallowing all our spoken languages and then regurgitating the lot as a uniquely pan-Indian medium for public discourse. This linguistic hybrid can spin verbs out of English adjectives (hum nervousay gaye), feminize adjectives (meri neighbour na, badi proudy hai,), carve out phrases like ‘talk time’, ‘Chak de India!’ and ‘match fixing’ for users of new gadgets and sports lovers, and with a generous re-mixing of English numerals with rural metaphors, even create unique rhyming haikus for the ‘backside’ of trucks and auto rickshaws:

‘84 ke phool 32 kee mala, buree nazar valley tera moonh kala.’

‘Iraq ka pani, driver ka paseena, donon se chalati hai yeh meri haseena.’

Thus, the arrival of a new urban speech to mirror an aspirational upward trajectory of a new India, warts and all. You may love it or curse it, but it is here to stay. Like the famous ‘item girl’ Munni of Dabangg, it cheekily promises to become your balm for many of life’s ills:

Munni Badnam huee darling terey liye

Main Jhandu balm huee darling terey liye.

Of course, old vernacular terminologies still come in handy for discussing ‘preparations’ for family rituals and India’s traditional arts such as classical and semi-classical dance and music. Vernacular terms continue to grace the elaborate invitation cards for weddings, mostly printed in English for rasams (rituals) like thaka, roka, varee, ghudchadi and sangeet et al with a plump Ganesha beaming at the top. The religious glaciers which gave us the fluid terminologies, however, are being affected by the ecological changes ushered in by Net and Skype that offer holy rituals like aarti, darshan of deities from major temples and holy immersion (dubki) during festivals, on lap top screens.

The ubiquitous pandas and astrologers have already been seduced by accurate horoscope and almanac reading facilities based on computer software specifically tailored to meet their professional needs. As English becomes associated with prosperity and the aspirations of the young in a nation where over seventy per cent of the population is below forty, the neighbourhood halwai becomes sweet seller, kesh kartanalaya becomes a hair cutting saloon (unisex), dhobi turns a laundry wallah and your local lala ki dukaan begins to call itself a grocery store.

 

A year ago an old aunt came visiting from Baltimore, where she has ‘settled down’ like many Indians in their eighties, with her sons and their America born children. She was accompanied by her grand daughter, a documentary film maker on her first visit to the land of her ancestors in a small Himalayan state. We were told she wished to make a short film on a traditional Kumaoni wedding with all those lovely folk songs and rituals she had been hearing about. She was particularly keen to shoot a ratyali: a ritual song and dance and impromptu theatre ‘do’ women celebrate with after the menfolk have departed for the bride’s house with the bridegroom.

Before we could warn her about the vast changes that have taken place in that particular arena, they were gone. They returned a week later and poor grand aunt was completely disenchanted. ‘Well, what do you know?’ she said, ‘All young women put on elaborate make-up and left for the bride’s house along with the males! In our days only hired dancing women went with marriage parties. And after the older women were free, they had a caterer serve them Punjabi chholey bhaturey and Madrasi iddly sambar with Bengali sweets and the songs they sang turned out to be cheap takes on filmy wedding songs!’ One Banna (a traditional song that describes the male beauty of the bridegroom) in particular drew her ire. The song, our hyperventilating aunt said, was crass. The Banna’s headgear, the old women sang, was sexy, sexy sexy, his trousers were sexy sexy, sexy and so were his boots!

 

What has happened to Bharat? she asked no one in particular.

‘What has happened Nani,’ remarked an irreverent niece, ‘is that Bharat has become India. And girls no longer want a Bharatiya Banna, but a rich and sexy man!’

Every migration, irrespective of its cause or scale, creates rifts and rifts produce stories. Stories, as we all know, even if they are contemporary, must have a beginning, a middle and an end rooted firmly in the past, before they can be told. All contemporary stories about languages thus take us towards a long history of the cross-fertilization of India’s rich little cultures and its vernaculars with those of the invaders.

The Aryans came to India clutching at a Sanskrit that they said was Devbhasha, the language of Gods. But as they proceeded, the Devbhasha fell in love with and married the darkly alluring beauties: Apbhramsh, Pali and Shaurseni and Magadhi, the sexy and fertile local dialects spoken by the natives. Unsurprisingly, even after the court language changed to that of the victors’, these were the languages the lower castes and women continued to use in Sanskrit texts ranging from plays to ballads and epics. Thus the washerman in Ramayana, the corrupt policeman and fishing folk in Abhigyan Shakuntalam. Language, says the clever fox to Yudhishthira in Mahabharata, is what marks men and their histories (akhyan) from animals.

 

The same story was repeated when the central Asians arrived with Islamic banners and a sophisticated and courtly Farsee (Persian) that replaced Sanskrit as the language of power discourse. But helmeted Persian speaking GIs too were human after all. They too hung around towns and army camps and market places and discovered the joys of the company of those that spake Braj Bhasha, Awadhi and Bundelkhandi. Soon Farsee had mutated into a beautifully flexible Urdu that everyone from your buxom neighbourhood inn-keeper to Mirza Ghalib and Nazeer Akbarabadee, that lover of the Chhammo Bhatiyarin, were using. After a few centuries, the British merchants brought English and the rest, as they say, is (contemporary) history.

Bharat that is India, has today a billion plus peoples speaking in over half a dozen constitutionally recognized languages, and a very local variety of English along with a pan-Indian variety of Hindi within the Parliament, the secretariats and the media. As it collectively croons Mumbai film songs like, ‘Tauba tera jalwa, arre tauba tera pyar, tera emotional atyachar!’, celebrates with a magical composition by a non-Hindi speaking Muslim A.R. Rehman, creates reality shows called Bigg Boss, Comedy ka Circus and runaway hits based in small town India like Dabangg, Peepli Live and Jab We Met, it is finally beginning to shed the sixty year old conflict over accepting India’s official language (rajbhasha) Hindi as also the national language (rashtrabhasha).

From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, India has opted for a language that works. Gone is the routine blackening of Hindi nameplates down South around Hindi Day. And everyone now agrees that the backlash against Hindi or Tamil or Bangla speaking migrants by right-wing groups is basically about power tussles between political parties than a real ire against any particular language. The market research firm, Nielsen, has also sounded out India’s premium goods marketers to take the country roads into the vernacular speaking areas. With the largest ever spurt in rural purchasing power boosted by a good monsoon, the rural customer is the new king and neither an official Hindi nor English but the local vernacular is the new language for power discourse. Enter the Prasoon Joshis, Piyush Pandes and the Vishal Bhardwajes.

 

In the age of a global revolution in information technology, nothing, but nothing suppresses the surge of the sea of Indian talkativeness, unmatched anywhere in the world. Despite occasional rioting over language issues and fatalistic cries from the media and the academe about India’s languages being polluted and killed – first by Hindi, and of late by English – a great and often involuntary intermingling of languages continues. As last year’s migrants become this year’s fellow travellers in city buses and local trains, and fellow discussants of local affairs at workplace and later at pubs and desi liquor thekas, a remarkable solidarity begins to emerge. Together, all begin to discuss and devise ways of getting electricity and water illegally into their shanties and finding jobs, and having landed one, see how their children can get into a school. Once all that is done, you may be sure they will quietly join the upwardly mobile middle classes.

 

Matters will slowly cease to get to the point of open conflict and territorial instincts will gradually get disciplined, and they will all begin to enjoy heckling the latest batch of vernacular spouting outsiders and bask in the glory of the new global language that has quietly entered their homes through their children and sweetened their shared mother tongue. ‘Oye! or Abey! or Ka ho!’ must then yield place to, ‘Hello Bhaisaab!’ and Tau and Chacha begin to be addressed as Uncle Ji. Those timid earlier days of struggle now serve as a kind of psychic inoculation against panic about linguistic rootlessness. And the English language may not lead to solutions of intricate problems of family and clan, but become a handy tool for winning friends and influencing people: ‘Ji, wo kya hai ki wife family way mein hai, so home going leave ki sanctioning ho jaye very kindly.’

Watching India’s Solicitor General speak in a perfectly accented English in defence of the Government of India, one realized that India today has several features in common with Elizabethan England. The popular language in both is like melting lava flowing out of a living volcano, bubbling with steam and fury, but a most pliable raw material in the hands of creative writers. The Hindi and English being spoken by the Singhals of the Sangh Parivar or our noble and erudite Solicitor General today, contrast sharply with the ground reality. Their language is like an impeccably dressed elder: respectable and erudite, but you cannot take liberties with it. The language of the market place is in contrast, as a fellow hack said, a creature of easy virtue like Munni or Billo Rani from a popular Bollywood film. Ah, but what a sinuously attractive creature!

What is happening to the Hindi writing in the Hindi belt in 2010, belongs to a brand new story. Gone are the days of a ghost language used by desperate writers who had crawled out of Mainpuri and Kanpur Dehat and Lal Mandi, Agra to mourn a yellowed, consumptive world peopled largely by starving farmers, petty desk clerks, street vendors, prostitutes, school teachers and their unrequited love for pale ethereal women. Today’s Hindi writing and films are neither a patriotic cry for all-out war against the class enemy, nor a pacifist’s manifesto. The sufferings of rural Indians are now confronted with the historic ordeals faced and surmounted by the millions who chose to migrate to the city and transform their lives.

 

Writings such as these come with complicated back stories, messy biographical experiences, and multiple narratives. The common denominator for writers and film makers as different from each other as Salman Rushdie, Alka Saraogi, Arundhati Roy, Uday Prakash, Amitabh Ghosh, Gulzar and Vishal Bhardwaj, is their language that invokes our collective messiness perfectly in an era of unsettled reality. To them, having more than one voice in their ear is not disorienting; it is a gift.

It was a war of ideas that began for us in 1951, the year we adopted our Constitution. It took us six decades to realize that in the context of being a multiracial secular democracy in 2011, one clear and controlled voice is perhaps too much to expect. After all didn’t our gods also split themselves wisely into numerous avatars through the ages to face the demons and find the perfect match?