A Linguistic Dilemma: Of Language, Culture And Historical Influence

Even in our parents’ era, nuclear families had relatives over, for long stretches, there being only one spare bedroom, and cousins slept on a mattress piled over the carpet in the front hall, blissfully happy for the entire summer. Oh! The chuckles and the giggles in the night, as whispered jokes, confidences, and tall tales were exchanged, or as an elder sibling tried to frighten us with a sotto voce narration of a ghost story! Sometimes a beloved grandmother, a real-life Dida/Thakuma, would be the taleteller, and we would all cosily snuggle up to her. We didn’t invite only as many of our kin over, as we could comfortably accommodate, that is, provide separate rooms for them. I remember reading with wonder, in Wodehouse and Austen’s books, of the Blue Room, the Rose Room, etc to be prepared for Lady “So and So” or Aunt “That” with fascination. Then quickly assimilating this as normative and upgraded my expectations to this new norm.

This was the change that also forges our minds via media of an education that was outsourced from another continent.

Even as an adult, when I had a foreign guest over, from Canada, I cringed because the room I provided her was not a bedroom per se, but an in-between space en route to our main bathroom, in our tiny apartment. It felt bad to infringe upon our guest’s privacy. I would have had less reservations had it been an Indian friend, and none at all, if it were a cousin, or kin visiting from our villages. We would all just fit in and even revel in such shared spaces. The trifling discomfort of a bit of a crush and squeeze would be compensated by the joys of reunion. To our way of thinking, objecting to temporary inconvenience was a poor sport and not very welcoming. My Canadian friend was a real sport about our cramped space, but I still felt like a poor hostess.

I give this as an example of how linguistic structures can mould mindsets on a very obvious level, casual statements read in PG Wodehouse, Austen, Eliot, Bronte, or other English novels, such as “Show him to his room”, “Take it up to her room”, or “Oh no! I have to share my room with my cousin, he snores”, seeping into the subconscious, as both legitimate occurrences and justified causes for concern. There are also subtle effects inherent in the very grammatical structures of languages that affect one.

I once read a hilarious article in a Reader’s Digest compilation, called Laughter is the Best Medicine, of how a nouveau French learner dreamt of cars and tractors, pulling their colours behind them! As in French, certain adjectives come after the noun. I have seen this phenomenon firsthand in both of my boys, who spoke their first Bengali phrases in the structure of English sentences. I am married to a Tamil man and we both speak in English at home, never having fully mastered each other’s language.

So they said, “Khabo Jol” (Drink water) instead of the usual Bengali usage of the noun followed by the verb, “Jol Khabo”,  (Water drink).

Here I cannot help but mention a cute incident. My Bengali maid from the village took it upon herself to teach my boys English, when I was not around, albeit with a heavy accent. I was certainly puzzled why my boys insisted on saying “SayBain” for seven, and “Aa-pail” for apple. When I succeeded in correcting that, (both my sweetheart of a big-hearted maid and my two precocious boys), I had another hurdle to face. In Bengali, we preface names with an Ei/Aai as a sign of affection. My son Luke was often addressed as Aai Leu, (Luke is a difficult word to pronounce for many Bengalis. And he has been alternatively called Lau, which means bottle gourd in Bengali, Lay-Euk, Laa-Euk, etc.) Funnily enough, our word for potato is aalu, and I never caught on to why my two-year-old would adorably pick up a potato from the kitchen in his hands, look at me lovingly, and coo, “Aai Leu!” Soon after, the penny dropped as to why Luke kept mentioning a potato, whenever he met new people! In kindergarten, his friend asked me, “Aunty, I told Luke my name is Roshan, but he won’t say his name. He only says Aalu, why is he so fond of potatoes?” The other shoe dropped.

My smarty pants toddler was actually introducing himself! This early imbibing of a tongue not our own, influences the accents that govern and dominate our speech as well. The harder phonetics of English with a stress on the first syllable has played havoc with my own Bengali, causing hard-core Bengali speakers to giggle, when I pronounce, Madras, (The prior name of the city Chennai), with a stress on Mad, swallowing up the Ras. Oh, the fun they had imitating me, “Oooh! Amrita wants to go to Mad-Rs, shall we enquire if there is room for her in Ranchi?” (A city known for its lunatic asylum.)

I regret to this day that I don’t dream of my beloved Bengali. Especially after my mother, an honours student of linguistics, passed away in 2019.

I was horrified to discover that the depths of emotion inside me had a richness and desolation that came solely from its Bengali core, dormant inside. It sprung from the deep well of my mother’s fond influence and it urgently, desperately sought expression.

It was near impossible to express that exclusive and internalised Bengali experiential emotional template using English alone.

Being fluent in English, and knowing its finer, deeper nuances did not help throw light on nuances and experiential paradigms that were so foreign to its realms. Just like the grey moors with purple heather blossoming is a charming but distant Blyton-ian landscape to our indigenous green lushness and the soft vermilion-clayed verdure of Bengal.

The Bengali ethos, is the generational rooted legacy of being born into a certain family at a certain time and place, with ancestors who lived in a nation that was not independent, ancestors who both worked under the British in an administrative capacity and fought bravely for freedom from them generated a unique degradation, a Stockholm syndrome, which our forefathers finally fought to rise above, though at a cost.