When Jonathan Gil Harris flew to India after taking Hindi lessons in America, he did not expect to find he had learnt a “Hindi” no one in the country spoke.
“I went to a man on the street and asked, Kripaya bataaye, vishwavidyala ka pustakalaya kahaan hai ? [Please tell me, where is the library of the university], and the response I got was ‘Eh?’,” he told the audience at a session on “Global Desi: On being both foreign and Indian” at The Huddle here on Friday. It was only later that he was introduced to the living language which was a khichdi mix of Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Bhojpuri and English.
While Mr. Harris, Dean of Academic Affairs at Ashoka University, eventually learnt a more “useful” Hindi from Bollywood films, Padma Lakshmi, actor and model, took the reverse route — having grown up in America and Europe, she became a symbol of the “exotic Indian” to the West. The two global citizens, along with Alex Travelli, India correspondent of The Economist , joined in a conversation with Veena Venugopal, Editor of BLink , on what being a “global desi” entailed.
Anchor to a culture
For Ms. Lakshmi, her biggest anchor to her culture was the frequent trips she took as a child to India. “From age five to 17, I spent three out of 12 months of the year in India,” she said. Being Indian gave her the temerity to explore Indian cooking and, as a young girl, to teach her neighbours how to cook with curry leaves. “I would never have been able to write a book on spices had I not crossed oceans and cultures,” she explained.
For Mr. Travelli, who is married to a Bengali and settled in New Delhi, the challenge is to raise his son without falling into the bubble expatriates often live in. “I want him to go to an Indian school, and not one of the international schools, so that he grows up as an Indian, speaking the language of the street.”
Dialect debate
During the Q&A round, N. Ram, Chairman, Kasturi and Sons Ltd., had a question for Mr. Harris on the various forms of English he had encountered in the country. Mr. Harris replied that there were two ways of looking at English spoken in India. “One is that it is something brought by the British that Indians need to give up. Another is to see it as one of the many Indian languages.”
Pointing out that English too was born of the confluence of many languages, he said, “For this reason I consider English a fundamentally Indian language.”
