Having just spent two months in a foreign city where I don’t speak the local language, I realise I often can’t tell whether two people are shouting insults at each other or just talking loudly. This is especially the case when I hear voices from the street and can’t see the faces of the people involved. The other day I realised that I would have no idea if someone were to abuse me in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, or Kannada, especially if they kept a straight face or even said the most nasty things with a smile. On the other hand, my linguistic radar is equipped to catch all sorts of abuse and abusive intonations in the Indian languages I do know.
Where abuse is taboo
Another interesting thing about abuse and curse words is that in India they used to be closely related to class. This has changed radically in the last few decades, but it was not uncommon for children in a vast chunk of our society, across different middle classes, to grow up in a culture where strong abuse was as taboo as eating some proscribed food. As a child growing up in a certain Gujarati Vaishnav, Sanskrit-loving ‘middle’-class, it was almost hardwired into me that you didn’t utter even the mildest ‘bad word’. The worst I heard from my parents was the word for donkey, and ‘ mala ’ which was a euphemism for ‘ saala ’. As far as English was concerned, I remember being seriously ticked off for using ‘gosh’ and then later ‘damn’, with the b-word that implies illegitimate birth being the outer limit of imaginable abuse. If I argued that our family was verbally repressed, I was told the story of Nagar Brahmins who were far more extreme — they would walk all the way to the garbage dump outside the village to whisper any abuse welling up inside.
As I grew older, I realised that both the working classes and some of the extremely rich were far freer in their expression. Growing up with people from different backgrounds, my vocabulary quickly expanded to include a lot of spicy words. I also realised that the abuses and insult-phrases were just delivery vehiclesl; the real payload lay in the tone and context of the utterance. The same incest-implying word could be a deadly epithet leading to fisticuffs or an expression of the greatest brotherly love. A corollary of this was the understanding that words don’t necessarily need to be abuses to cause humiliation or pain. In fact, it was often the powerless person who would ineffectively spray you with a limited curse-filled vocabulary whereas the powerful actor could cause you real harm by simply quoting from a rule book, deploying a number from the IPC code, by just a look or a small, grunting noise directed at his subordinates.
Increasing acceptability
Over the last fifteen years or so, the Indian urban middle class has become much more accepting of abuses that were once considered unutterable or ‘lower class’. This has come about due to several factors. For one, Hollywood opened up its language a little earlier and this has had an effect on our own commercial cinema. Parallelly, the more freely cursing north Indian culture has colonised many parts of the country, eliciting other languages to also bring their choice abuses into public discourse. Whereas Indian news channels and print media still stick to certain restrictions, the very different ‘international’ rules applicable to social media such as Facebook and Twitter have also contributed to a nation with a highly weaponised vocabulary.
While a good cursing session in certain contexts can be harmless, or indeed even necessary and very freeing, this increase in the acceptability of abusive language has fed into the rising level of physical violence in our society. Politically this means that a leader or Minister doesn’t herself or himself need to use violent language; they can use innocent-sounding ‘signal’ words or imply with their tone that their followers have the license to do the exact opposite of what they are saying. Once the signal is given, there is enough violent thought and emotion churning around in their followers for things to take their ‘own’ course. Couple this with a few precise, planned bits of bloodshed and you get the desired situation: a nominally clean-spoken leader, who from time to time gives lip-service to peace and amity, presiding over a populace agitated by constant fear.
I don’t know who shot Gauri Lankesh. But I do know which politician of which regional party smashed a photo-journalist friend in the head with a motorcycle helmet last year. We do know that it’s not just one party or one leader who uses the formula described above.
To repeat: create an atmosphere that encourages violence, paper it over with noble-sounding words that your followers know to ignore, let your foot soldiers do the actual cursing, beating and shooting, make sure your police do nothing to bring them to book, let your remote-controlled trolls carry on the abuse, feeding into further violence. I don’t exactly know how we can challenge this formula, but I do know that defeating it will involve a mindful, judicious and fearless use of words.
