The living world of languages
My story of liking, loving and leaving one language at a time
A friend looked at my Instagram profile and asked” How many languages do you know?”, assuming my travel history would also reflect on my tongue. I sheepishly joked” One and a half”. In my heart, I craved his assumption was right and that I was this multilingual sultry-voiced diva. After all, Shakira speaks 5 languages and Cleopatra spoke 8! In India, it is quite common to speak 3 languages, a lot of my friends even speak 4 because of how similar a few languages are. Except for the north Indian states of MP and UP where Hindi is our mother tongue and we learned English as our money tongue.
But what I crave more these days is to speak well in the languages I know. I get stuck mid-sentence often trying to remember a common word. I realize how I barely speak Hindi these days, my first language. Living in the southern part of India, English has become the de-facto language for most of my interactions, from auto wallahs to office people, and friends to texting on social media. I am writing about losing my mother tongue ..in English but isn’t this the language ALL of you would understand? Isn’t English how we connect to each other? But I suspect Hindi is how I would connect to myself, my roots, and my context.
Growing up I remember having a “language monitor” in the class. He or She would mark anyone speaking Hindi in school with negative points? We were encouraged, almost forced to speak English to become fluent in the colonial remnant. I started my reading journey with 80% Gitapress Gorakhpur Hindi books compared to 20% Enid Blyton and Ruskin Bond’s novels. I participated in Hindi debates and extempores and scored great in Hindi examinations, even if the grammar haunted me. And then over the years of moving forward in my career, the language just kept on vanishing. I exclusively read English books, a subconscious choice. My language monitor would have been proud of me. But in the slow embrace of my new language, my old one abandoned me. Monogamy in languages isn’t a real thing but somehow my brain thought so. It would have been somewhere back in college when I realized that I was thinking in English! And I was happy.
I remember writing down the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” to memorize the song when I was in 8th standard. I remember watching shows with subtitles because I could not understand the accent. And now these things seem like a default programming in my brain. I am not discounting the fact that it is a great accomplishment to become fluent in another language! I know how easy and expansive is my world, all thanks to English.
Yet I am nostalgic as my mother tongue lies abandoned like the 5kg dumbbells I ordered from Amazon but didn’t use even once. (They would have been atleast 5.5 kgs now!) So I try sometimes to read my mother’s books. To find the same belonging in a Pinjar as I do in Elif Shafak’s latest novel. Yet when the words don’t come naturally, the context lags behind and every book feels more like a textbook and less like a Narnia’s cupboard.
I have flirted with other languages over the years. I took Japanese accidentally in school. What school in Kanpur would teach Japanese to 7th standard students? Ours did, apparently. And while it was mostly a language for me and my friends to call other people “shoe” or “hat”( Anatawa kutsudesu/ boshideshu), I loved how the foreign letters felt like art. Years later, I took a Japanese calligraphy class and created the same letters using a brush and ink. I still cannot hold a conversation in the language beyond the basic greetings, unless we play a game where one calls people either shoe or hat and reply “thank you” in return.
I tried learning French during Covid, even taking a virtual class. When the teacher scolded me in the first week for not doing my homework and speaking English accidentally, the childhood trauma resurfaced. I ended up not giving my A1 levels and then forgetting about the language till my trip to France, three years later.
But my most toxic relationship in life has been with the Duolingo owl. He’s confused with the erratic attention I give and my love languages( Is it going to be French, Spanish or Italian today? Once I even did 2 lessons in Arabic), He’s angry at my inconsistency yet I keep leaving him for mute, visual explorations of different cultures.
"If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside."
-Khaled Hosseini
I am star-struck with flying keys like a Harry Potter side character while misplacing the key to my home-Hindi. I tried writing the Hindi alphabet last week. As I copied the “varnmala” from the Internet, something opened up within me. I ended up writing a poem in Hindi about Hindi. I did not get time to complete it but sharing it nevertheless.
As I find pockets of nostalgia and ways to return back home, I am realizing the importance of language. How it binds us all in a beautiful way, makes us dream and live more than what our senses can perceive in the present.
It’s a universal ache and is echoed by poems and books by various authors. One of the ghazals I really like is:
Listen! Someone's saying a prayer in Malayalam.
He says there's no word for ‘despair' in Malayalam.
Sometimes at daybreak you sing a Gujarati garba.
At night you open your hair in Malayalam.
To understand symmetry, understand Kerala.
The longest palindrome is there, in Malayalam.
When you've been too long in the rooms of English,
Open your windows to the fresh air of Malayalam.
Visitors are welcome in The School of Lost Tongues.
Someone's endowed a high chair in Malayalam.
I greet you my ancestors, O scholars and linguists.
My father who recites Baudelaire in Malayalam.
Jeet, such drama with the scraps you know.
Write a couplet, if you dare, in Malayalam.
My fingers fool around in different tongues, and I hold the hand of English like a reliable companion “Jab koi baat bigad jaye, Jab koi mushkil pad jaye” . One day I want to take English to my first home, to my Hindi. And hope I get understood. To be a reliable translator between my two tongues. Because I might have left in a hurry but I am patient with the slow return.
अनन्य, आपने इतनी सहजता से वह सब कह दिया, जो हिंदी भाषा और अंग्रेज़ी के उपनिवेशीकरण को लेकर मेरा भी विचार और अनुभव रहा है।
मेरे बचपन में भी भाषा के सिपाही अंग्रेज़ी न बोलने पर सज़ा देते थे। मैं हरियाणा से हूँ और पंजाबी हूँ, लेकिन न तो मुझे हरियाणवी आती है, न ही पंजाबी। और जो थोड़ी बहुत हिंदी आती थी, वह भी अंग्रेज़ी झाड़ने के चक्कर में भूल गया।
पिछले साल से मैं बहुत सक्रिय रूप से यह प्रयास कर रहा हूँ कि कैसे खुद को अंग्रेज़ी से दूर करके हिंदी को और मज़बूती से सीख सकूँ। इसमें कुछ हिंदी की किताबें मेरी सहायता कर रही हैं।
आप यह यक़ीन रखिए कि चाहे पूरी दुनिया अंग्रेज़ी बोल रही हो, मैं उनमें ज़रूर एक ऐसा व्यक्ति रहूँगा जो गर्व से हिंदी पढ़, बोल और लिख रहा होगा!
So relatable and well written ! Love the Hindi poem - hope you get some time to finish it !