A Linguistic Dilemma: Of Language, Culture And Historical Influence

Individuality is a strange thing that can reach out and find its soul doppelganger at the other end of the world. Or in a more understandable instance, if you’re actually an expatriate or NRI living abroad, it would then be natural to use the language of the land where you grew up.

That is why I love Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories of the Indian immigrant experience in the USA, because really, what other language could she have written in, except in English? Or Sunetra Gupta’s evocative scintillating novels.  But I am primarily speaking from personal experience, about Indians living in India writing in English.

English is still exclusive to certain berths of society, our economic divides leading to educational divides, leading to cultural dissociation. This tends to turn our gaze into that of pseudo outsiders, not quite in, not quite out either.

Like a half-foreigner, looking in.

Yet not truly of foreign genesis either, as in we do get nuances of our culture that say a European wouldn’t get. How we translate it into our ink is what determines our effectiveness or authenticity. We can inject Indian colloquialisms all we like, to infuse our native spirit, but only a talented and brilliant few can bring it all together authentically, ontologically, yet creatively, not pedantically.

It is a huge challenge that does not exist for truly talented native-born writers in their own language.

A lot of the times when I just started writing I had wanted to use Western names like Tom and Pip, Mary and Jane. Or stick to idyllic, (in my world view), Blyton-like locales, Cornish seaside, and not our own Puri or Digha beaches complete with Batata poori and pani poori sellers. Beautiful, in a “hot messy” Indian way.

The need for order, a neat and clean beach, a pristine seashore with silent overhanging cliffs, where on earth does it stem from?

Our parents are cool about popcorn shell strewn overcrowded Indian beaches, with vendors of piping hot pakodas/batter fries and  Masala muri/ puffed rice hawking their wares stridently. They have no knowledge of any other but for a brief passing glimpse in a movie shot or a magazine.

Why do we crave the steep chalk white cliffs of Dover, or Enid Blyton’s Kirrin Cottage by the sea experience? Because from our formative impressionable years, our minds have been geared to accept that as normal and desirable. Our acquaintance, even through the medium of actual language in books, and the cinematic language of movies, is far more intimate.

Our earliest acquaintance, awareness, preferences, and proficiency were developed, in a language from another continent, climate, and culture.

This was gradually dealt with as I matured and realised that you can’t be halfway here and halfway there. What you’re describing is entirely different from what Louisa May Alcott or Enid Blyton was describing. You have to describe what “You see and hear”, but to do it, first, you also have to “feel it.” A deep inside visceral gut feeling.

I feel sad that I had to deal with it. That I had to push myself to observe, enjoy and depict my own country, with love. Embrace the beautiful living heart at the centre of the hot mess. Without hankering after macaroons and hot scones dripping butter at teatime or pancakes and waffles. But really knead that unfermented dough and get down to our own unleavened rotis and sesame and coconut laddus, our own delicacies. Taught and prepared by generations of grandmothers and great-aunts.

This is of course just one example of how while we mash up and pop roundels of Indian rice dal and vegetables into our mouths with our fingers, with relish, our preferred imaginary feasts are those of cakes and buns of  English boarding school midnight feasts and hearty British breakfasts of sausages, eggs and bacon. But we were invaded, willy-nilly,  in every aspect of our day-to-day lives, not just cuisine.

We were inundated, immersed in books from other lands and other cultures in far greater excess compared to the literature of our own Asian Indian heritage. Thankfully again, it was ma’s influence that brought about my lifelong love affair with Tagore, Sharat Chandra, and Bankim Chandra, after an initial mandatory brush with our own epics Ramayana, Mahabharata, our fairy tales, Thakumar Jhuli, and Amar Chitra Katha comics and the slew of Bengali magazines she subscribed to. Desh, Anandamela, and Sandesh for her, Shuktara and Chandamama for us.

Here I would like to go back for a quick peek at our present Indian movie scene.

We have pretty much wonderful small-budget independent Hindi flicks now, which I can comfortably watch without cringing too often, though stereotypes still play out predictably in far too many of them. Like a modern urban Indian badass woman must be portrayed these days as sputtering the F word in each sentence that spouts from her angry red gash of a mouth, however culturally inappropriate it may be! Say in a heated exchange with her mother, her in-laws or a doctor at the hospital. Overacting still seems the norm for acting. But nowadays I have grown a more universally ironic mind, and it amuses me to predict the exact split second in which a Hollywood hero and heroine will exchange saliva or at least brush lips. I am willing to bet men and women in the West don’t kiss just because it’s a Kodak moment either. Stereotypes are another form of tropes, though less indulged in in Western movies. I am digressing pretty heavily here, to bring home the point that there are universal thematics that our art, cinema, and books often fail to portray as realistically, and as sensitively as could be desired, so what gives? Why my discontent at my less-than-perfect expression of my own socio-cultural moorings?

It is possibly because it is way less than perfect, far more flawed than the mother tongue fluency levels of a literate well-educated person should be. I remember, when I was new on social media, I befriended a rag picker from a first-world nation and he wrote me a sensitive and stylish troubadour poem, of a noble knight serenading his fair lady, without possessing a college degree. And I recall thinking, but how? Then rationalizing,
“Because after all, it is his mother tongue.”

The language he said “Mommy” and “Daddy” in, the first letters he learnt, and the first emotions he expressed were in his own tongue. What a beautiful natural ownership that is, compared to how our generation grasped English, by the dint of some genetic linguistic flair, some family background of our parent or both parents, possessing an English medium education, and the rest was environmental exposure or lack of it. We learnt to excel in English despite the lack of a natural backdrop, by choosing it consciously over our own tongue, by cutting out and dropping certain influences, and by chasing others. Sometimes, our parents did it for us, though not mine, except in choosing English as the medium of our instruction.

We did the rest, by preferring to watch Different Strokes, Scooby Dooby Doo, Silver Spoon, and Small Wonder over reading Bengali comics, like Batul the Great, Nonte and Phonte, or adventure series like Tenny-da, Professor Shonku, and others. We dabbled in them briefly as a novelty, but our mainstay was always Marvel comics, Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica, and English translations of Asterix and Tintin. How can we then not dream in English of first kisses and dates, or idolize burgers and fries as the ultimate fast food? How can we write about the joys of popping Dida’s homemade Moa, or a laddu in our mouths with equal conviction? It was a poor second cousin, a second choice, and yet Moa, or puffed rice smashed into delicious balls dipped in molten jaggery is truly mouth-watering. But it is a taste to be acquired if you leave it till too late.

I have two more hilarious memories to share in this regard of the natural assimilation of tastes and experiences. When we fed our new chauffeur, a boy, fresh from the village, authentic Chinese cuisine from a posh restaurant, we expected him to be gratified. On the contrary, he was indignant.

“Saab, never feed me such worm-like food again, I thought they might start moving!” As for the lightly sautéed sweet and sour vegetables, he dismissed them as undercooked and raw. My maid too complained about being fed a generous scoop of Vanilla ice cream straight from the freezer:

I will catch a cold now, and miss a day or two of work because of you Boudi! All my other employers will scold me!

Food tastes have gone global and eclectic, yet you will hear how the white man had to drink tons of water to douse the raging fire of chicken masala, just the same way our rural Indian folks griped about food foreign to them. It is an entirely natural phenomenon, a healthy sense of identity and roots tied to familiar cuisine. While of course, willingness to experiment, as an educated Westerner with global exposure does, is equally desirable, note that they do know that this is not a food that their palates are, or should be used to.

Now ask any urban Indian kid about his favourite food, and he will mouth off hamburger, hot dog, pizza, and French fries, without a second thought, conceding our own fiery Biriyanis, or sweet pulaus, (Pilaf) a distant second place. The familiarity professed is with pale approximations of

Mediterranean/European and American cuisine, a far cry from what their grandparents ate. It does have an impact on Indian health, In a hotter climate where heavy consumption of meat is unnecessary, leading to clogged arteries and high cholesterol. But I am not talking about health issues or dietary issues here again, but how we are almost like in Plato’s Cave, gradually but inexorably getting “twice removed from our own reality.”

The second wave of colonial imperialism has been soft sold to us, and we have bought into it, The Great American Dream, The Rags to Riches Success Story, the Flaunt it if You have it Consumerism et all.

Even as I write this, I realise, we italicize our own produce, costumes, cuisine, and names as foreign, to be placed under quotes in a discrete ethnic bracket.

As I have done throughout the essay. We accept what is unfamiliar to us as global and universal, and that which is our own as the unknown, the other, in need of an explanatory note.

That is how our minds have been programmed to work, by assimilating a foreign language before our own. And ultimately to both accommodate this mindset and retrain it, I have provided brief explanations besides the italicized words, without lengthy accompanying footnotes. Caveat Emptor, Let the reader beware and be aware he is reading a mind from another land, perhaps do due diligence? That is also the best way to read a foreign work, and extract more from it.

I promise you, that the effort of finding out about Abol Tabol or giving Tagore a listen, will be worth your time.

To go on, how then, shall we, in our Janus-like situation, be original? Or know ourselves, truly independent of extraneous paradigms fed to us from infancy?

To quote my beloved T S Eliot in a scandalously cherry-picked manner:

“…Do I dare disturb the universe?

…And should I then presume? And how should I begin?

…Should I

…Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

…I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;

… in short, I was afraid.”

But it fits my mood, of uncertainty, really. How as a writer, I may not be expressing my best self, the highest truth I could have been capable of, if I had been more authentic and rooted.

Editor’s Note: This Article appeared first in Outlook Weekender and is reprinted here with the author’s permission.