Speaking of Tongues

Language Families in India
via Wikipedia

The reason I write today is this article by Saritha Rai on the NY Times' India blog, which my sister linked to. It laments the fact that the next generation in urban India is cut off linguistically from the country/ region/ their homeland because they speak - and think - in English. For me personally, this article has come about twenty years too late, because I have no hesitation in saying that English has always been my first language - perhaps not my mother tongue, or native tongue, but always my operational tongue (if you will).

I think it's a great article - but I also think it is an article that only scratches the surface of a deeper, wider phenomenon that "English as a First Language" is merely a side-effect of... what follows in this post is a predictably lengthy meditation on this phenomenon, as opposed to the symptom.



Context

"Uncha Maaza Zoka" is an ongoing daily soap on Marathi TV set in the late nineteenth century. It tells the tale of social reformer, Ramabai Ranade, who was married at the tender age of 10 to a widower in line with the norms of the age. That would've been her whole tale, except that the man she was married to, Justice Mahadev Ranade was a progressive thinker and she herself was prodigious learner. She came eventually to establish a precedent setting all girl's school in Huzurpaga - a school my grandmother, who belonged to the generation after Ramabai's spoke of proudly and often as her inspiration and alma mater (I think she went there either as a student or teacher, not sure which).

I never normally watch Marathi television, and only watched a few episodes of this series on a trip home because I had to reconcile with the fact that my parents almost exclusively watch Marathi channels on cable lately. Sure, I missed my reruns of "The Big Bang Theory" and "Doctor Who", but then sitting in front of the telly, I found myself giving this series a think...

What sets it apart is that it isn't the sort of derivative and wannabe drivel that makes up much of 5-days-a-week TV these days. For its budget, it seems to be taking pains to be fairly period authentic. (This does not mean sadly that it ignores the irritating conventions of Indian soaps - the slow pace, too many close ups, and rampant hamming are all very much present). No, I bring up this series because whether I watch it or not was never a function merely of whether or not I am comfortable with Marathi as a language: I love cinema, and have watched several foreign language films with subtitles!

Sitting there, cringing at the sight of a 10 year old ministering to her sick 20-something husband, and the sight of all the classic Puneri brahmins in their dhotis and pagdis and shaved heads with the gota, I felt like I was having anachronistic out of body experience. Watching the precocious 10 year old argue with a visiting Vaidya about Ayurvedic medicine made me wonder why the series is perpetuating an archaic and largely moot world-view.

Yes, I am comfortable with this having been the history of the corner of India I belong to... but no, I will likely never encourage the next generation to watch it, internalize it, or understand it. Do they really have to? Really? Well, then you go first in explaining to my 9 year old niece why the 10 year old Rama is married and wearing a nau-vaari sari!

Which (finally) brings me to my point - every language is rooted in tradition, in culture. The lifestyle and history and habits and the environment of the language and it's speakers gives it life. Remove the context, and the language loses its utility - unless it is dynamic and grows in pace with the changes around it.

Welcome then, to India 2012: an increasingly urbanized, globalized, segmented, unequal, and ambitious society. An age where the vernacular is falling victim to the global-capitalist consumerist outlook as is much else. An age where I can be a Maharashtrian living in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, working for a company headquartered in London, and having traveled in the past on business to Riyadh and Buffalo, NY. This certainly is an age where it is impossible for a child to reconcile his "mother tongue" (if one can be identified) with his daily life.

This is a life that comprises going to an 'International' school in a chauffeured car with his governess early in the morning... accompanying mom to a hypermarket in the basement of a mall in the evening... driving back to a gated community after riding lessons (or a quick dip in the pool) before snuggling up late at night next to a  video-conferencing dad and being entertained by a PSP.

To expect the child (quite often a citizen of another country like the US by birth) to speak in his or her "native tongue", when all day he or she has been mandated to speak in English in a melting pot school, is just cruel. To ask them to understand a word like "paar" which in Marathi means the platform built around a Banyan or Pimpal tree in a village square, also meaning a meeting place for debates and idle chit-chat on starry, TV-less nights is - forgive the pun - not par for the course. Their life experience is urban, their outlook global. They are being groomed to be the next generation in this service and manufacturing job market, and it is posh to speak English, and think English, and write excellent English.

Religion and Tradition

On the same trip where I watched the TV series, I ran into a devout traditionalist relation of mine, who was lamenting how people today don't understand half the rituals that make up an Indian wedding. In particular he was laughing about how when planning his son's wedding, a gentleman insisted one day be dedicated to "Sabandh Poojan" (literally, complete worship). He then painstakingly explained that the ceremony being referred to was more accurately called "Seemant Poojan" which would traditionally be performed at the edge of the village (the seema) by the bride's family when the groom entered the village. The groom would be sat down on the aforementioned paar, his feet washed, and he and his family would be introduced to the village...

Alas, we don't have a paar readily available any more, the village is now a suburb next to an international airport, and with largely nuclear families, you probably only have the groom's parents and a few first cousins and the like to entertain (as opposed to an entire tribe!).

Yes - even in a nation as obsessed with religion and tradition as India, there is a sea change in progress. Language is getting eroded apace with the breakdown in social structures.

Recently, my nephew, all of 8 years old, underwent a Hindu ritual called a munja. This is a coming of age ceremony, analogous to a bar mitzvah which marks the beginning of the boy's bramhacharyashram (monastic learning phase). Except of course that the kid has been in day care or school for almost all of his life, and almost certainly will not be married off at the age of fifteen at the end of his apprenticeship with a guru.

As the mama or maternal uncle, I had a role to play in the day's ceremonies, and a front row seat to how the kid took it all in... He was a great sport, even as he got his head shaved to match the turn-of-the-last-century style depicted in Uncha Maaza Zoka, learnt his first Sanskrit mantra from his dad and performed the yadnya as Brahmins have for millennia... he also took the pain to try to understand the meaning behind all the rituals...

But here's the kicker: he was so patient through the somewhat taxing day because he'd been promised a Nintendo Wii. He has spent the roughly six months since playing Star Wars Lego on his Wii... To him, Bheem is not the demigod strong man from the Mahabharat but Chhota Bheem - a cartoon character, just as Krishna is... but to date, he has asked me more questions about the Jedi and Sith than he has about Bheem and Krishna.

Young India has moved on from the old, and unless Indian languages catch up/ wake up to that fact, they will go the way of the Dodo...

The Future


Everything I say of course only applies to the affluent minority in India. The vast majority of rural India is still largely vernacular. To them English is a curiosity. They still have a paar they sit on. Languages will be hale and hearty for some time to come in the heartland... Urban India however, must perforce move on.

And yet, that too is changing. Science and technology today are best explained in English, because they are global fields in need of a lingua franca. For colonial hangover reasons, Indians have a faculty with English, and proud of being polyglots - and I think that is a fact  to be capitalized on.

I will not shed a tear if, as is likely, my kids don't think in Marathi or Hindi. A language is a tool, supported as I said by a culture. If their culture is more in tune with English - so be it! That too shall change.

Human beings have been speaking for a few thousand years, in perhaps a million tongues. If you don't spend a sleepless night lamenting Sanskrit or Aramaic or the language behind the Egyptian Hieroglyphs, you shouldn't worry much about Marathi or Hindi.

They may live, and they might die - the road of civilization is littered with many such corpses - but the continuity we seek to preserve transcends mere language.

That nostalgic "Oh I wish my kids spoke the vernacular" that inevitably came to my sister's mind was to me made ironic by the fact that she thought it after reading an article on the NY freaking Times website, reacted to it (in English) on Facebook, and ergo, caused me to blog about it (also in English) on my English based website.

If then, I have made a case in this ramble, I hereby rest it.