A Linguistic Dilemma: Of Language, Culture And Historical Influence

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, advanced by Edward Sapir in 1929 and developed by Benjamin Whorf explores how the structures of a language determine the native speakers’ perceptions, thoughts, and categorization of experience. I suspect being educated primarily in English from our preschool days has caused a propensity on our part, to think, organize our thoughts, and even dream in English. By “our”, I refer to many seventies and eighties convent or English medium-educated Indian kids.

My mother read to us in Bengali and taught it to us side by side with English. (The first language at our English medium school). So I can still swing it, and switch my thinking to Bengali with a conscious effort when required. If at a gathering or event in our own cultural milieu, at our festivities, religious or cultural ceremonies, the process is often organic, rooted in childhood precedents, and requires less effort. The presence of expectant elders of grandparental age, who are most often monolingual, groomed in the cultural mores of their mother tongue plays a huge role in this morphing of roles so to speak. When you want to hear your grandmother’s reminiscences, or that of a favourite great uncle you get into the habit of segueing into the mother tongue world, lured by the enchantment of Thakumar Jhuli, (Fairytales from Granny’s Bag of Tales), fascinated with the adventures of Lalkomal, Neel Komal and the Indian equivalent of the Unicorn or the snow white winged Pakshiraaj.

Other than fairy tales you also want to absorb every horrifying detail of India’s Partition trauma, twice, once for Bengal in 1905, and the wider more horrifying Partition of the subcontinent itself, into India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, in 1947.

The hardships, the terror-inducing riots, and how despite the polarization, neighbours, and friends from different communities hid each other’s families to save lives, is another sort of grim fairy tale that births our chaotic and complex reality, and yet holds out hope. We need and crave the real, and yes, our minds shift into one hundred percent Indian gear in the face of a crisis. We carve out an identity for ourselves from the trauma, that was the unique experience of Indians in the wake of British departure. There is an irony in describing this indigenous experience in English, and my Dida’s broken shaky voice, narrating how they had been hidden in the emptied dried-out tank on the terrace of a Muslim friend, has to be heard in the timorous soft accents of the mother tongue. How below, a raging mob rushed down the streets raising horrendous cries and scythes in the air. But this will have to do.

Once the tale is over, however, we resurface, into a quite different reality, of a tech-savvy developing democracy with high ambitions and a tendency to ignore its ground realities of extreme poverty, burgeoning illiterate populace, and a soul-crushing gap between Haves and Have Nots. The Great Indian Dream apes the Great American Dream without much common ground or correlation between the two differing sets of situations. Our real worlds, continue to accommodate two sets of languages, favouring the powerful foreign one as a tool for material advancement, (if your parents can afford to pay for it), and the mind bifurcates to take refuge in the values of two cultures. Two sets of ideas mean two different versions of life, The things that are our go-to, for comfort and consolation can then come from alien shores.

The financial and educational glass ceiling permeates all through, and this bifurcation of thoughts and mental processes is uniquely an anglicized Indian middle-class phenomenon. The well-educated Indian, conversant in English, with cosmopolitan exposure. The Other India, of rural or blue-collar populace is not so dichotomous and still eats, sleeps, and dreams in their own language, though this is changing. Without a wholesome understanding of what can be safely borrowed from the West and what can be incongruous with our own set of circumstances.

But I want to stick to the linguistic dilemma of learning a foreign language over and above our mother tongue in this essay. How it shapes the map of our very minds, our likes, dislikes, perceptions, values, and propensities.

Most Indian kids are used to co-sleeping with parents till the age of seven at least. I got my own bedroom at eight, true, but that was the exception rather than the norm. Daddy’s job entitled him to a commodious company bungalow. In India’s crowded cities, sometimes an eleven or twelve-year-old child from even an affluent upper-middle-class family, still sleeps in a single cot in the parents’ bedroom, if space is cramped. Or, the child is attached to a parent and refuses to be thrown out! We Indians don’t cut the apron strings early. I fondly recall co-sleeping every chance I got with visiting grannies, aunties, and cousins, all in a straight line on the terrace or the front hall, exchanging quips, or listening to fairy tales from the elders.

This not only fired our imagination, but it also made us empathetic and nourished our souls. The hugs and cuddles, the bonds forged by the casual intimacy of tucking an arm over a snoring grandmother’s chest may be a reason for our soft sentimentality, a clannish adherence to kinfolk!

Indian families are not uber-expressive or obviously demonstrative in physically affectionate gestures. We don’t say we love each other before leaving for work, or at any time of the day. Our parents probably said it a few times in their whole lives, in moments of great intimacy and solemnity. Probably our grandparents did too, but in absolute privacy, never casually in a room full of friends, family, or strangers. We don’t hold hands in the park so much, except when, with our Western education, we consciously rebel against our conservative upbringing and want to express our affection and take pride in it. That is not the same really as casually draping an arm around your girl because you are in a great mood, not really even thinking about it, or labelling it PDA.

But we are attuned to expressing love through a performance of duties. We won’t hug and kiss in public, but we share rooms. Sharing physical space is both a necessity and by extension an expression of intimacy. Of trust and a letting down of our guard. Maybe the famed lack of reserve of Indian families meeting strangers from the West on a train or plane immediately volunteering personal details, and asking probing questions stems from our life habits? We are cooped together in a coupe, ergo, we are temporarily, all family?

However, an English education, an early anglicized upbringing, puts such a premium on privacy and individual space that we start simultaneously craving it as impressionable children. It is that strange duality in our nature, an intriguing dichotomy that we are pulled constantly by two sides inside, that are quite in opposition.

Our private space, as sacred and uninfringeable, is deemed a favourable outcome, a right we are justified to, and not a privilege. Those fortunate enough are proud to have a room of their own. To ourselves, because we realise it is a luxury. Not a necessity, we have enough cousins, and friends, who sleep three to a bed, even in their teens. And we enjoy the midnight giggles, the muffled chuckles at anyone who decides to serenade us with snores.

Whereas in the countryside pre-teen children unpretentiously prefer co-sleeping, even hugging or cuddling up against the mother as a security blanket.  A little older ones might occupy a separate corner of the room or a separate charpoi/cot in the same room happily enough.

But for many of us, an early precept of autonomy shapes our preference for personal space and so, we hanker for it and feel deprived without it, in our daily lives. Yet as visiting guests we segue effortlessly into our inner Indian avatars, packed 13 to a bulky ambassador, sitting on each other’s laps, and filling up motel rooms, rest houses, and dak bungalows to full capacity. At our weddings, a few honoured guests are provided with a separate sleeping facility. The rest of us happily lie on a white cloth, spread over a thick red carpet in a huge hall, laughing and joking into the night. In fact, the night the bride and groom solemnize their vows is spent in full company of cousins and kin folk, exchanging raucous jokes, and impromptu and planned performances by the younger kids. It is fun, it is an organic and spontaneous way to integrate the new bride into the groom’s family. With a few of her cousins in tow too, to keep the boy’s side in check. This is called Bashor Raat in my mother tongue, Bengali, and it ends with the groom having to pay each of the bride’s sisters and cousins as handsome an amount as his pocket will allow. Or her skills in dancing or singing merited.

Yes, their actual wedding night, is the next night, in the groom’s house and called, “Phool Sojjya”, or the bed of flowers.

You can see we are a boisterous rambunctious lot, as spirited and lively in a group as we are reserved as individuals or as a couple. It is not two individuals, but their social milieus that really celebrate the relationship. The couple gets to celebrate in private, but we are very close, and very ambient in their personal lives and celebrations. A common Bengali saying is that our life partner is not ours but belongs to the whole family, to friends, and to society equally, and a happy union is one that shares itself in an unstinted manner.

And so we overshare and over-enquire gratuitously in an innocent effort to show we are indeed concerned and involved in your lives. Sometimes of course it is plain old human curiosity, and gossip-mongering, but not always. Sometimes it is the cultural vantage point we see you from.

In my grandparents’ generation when there were four to five to even twelve offspring, born to a single set of parents, with joint family cohabitation under one roof, with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, physical space was not regarded as essential for mental space. Children lined up dormitory fashion in bedrooms accommodating three or even four in a single king-size bed, or a double bed and a cot on one side.