We all live in language. Our first language is the boundary of our thought and all else is translation, an attempt to leap across the limits of our existence.
I was born in a Hindi-speaking family that raised me in meticulous English. My recollected childhood comprises nursery rhymes repeated like instructional tapes and cartoons that were closer to demo videos.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t grow up like any other child. It just means I grew up isolated from my mother tongue, an isolation that grew deeper and wider until it turned into alienation.
Sure, I studied Hindi at school, in recurrent recitation of vowel sounds, grammatical exercises, and vocabulary that was closer to the assigned syllabus of a board examination than what my grandmother spoke to me at home. As much as I loved language, I always associated Hindi with two-hour classes at a soporific 7 a.m., or horrendously long examinations with answer sheets that always came back embellished all over in red.
There came a point when I stopped associating Hindi with my identity as an Indian. Why would I? After all, only a fraction of India’s population spoke Hindi on a daily basis, and an even smaller number claimed Hindi as their first language.
Even my favourite Indian writers wrote in English, a language other than their own that they grew up with.
It was not a language of my own that I lacked, but a mother tongue. The language that should have connected me to the collective consciousness of my country, or to my roots, or whatever it was that I had grown up missing.
Linguistic rebellion
But by the time I was done with my Class 10 Hindi examination, I decided I didn’t need one. I was going to learn a new language, a foreign language. It was almost linguistic rebellion.
I picked Spanish, because I figured getting a perfect grade would be easier without having to practise my drawing skills through the calligraphy that Mandarin required, or trying to get my Mumbaikar accent to sound French.
Two years and several fill-in-the-blank grammatical exercises later, here’s what I learnt. One, learning a new language was a process of discovery. And two, Spanish has far too many verb tenses.
Despite my frustration with my second lesson, I decided to continue my study of Spanish because of the first, and because speaking Spanish makes everyone think you are more interesting, gracias a Ibiza and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara .
But learning Spanish did not just introduce me to Spain, it introduced me to Mexico and Argentina and Chile and Bolivia and Peru, and the myriad Hispanic nations that dot the globe; nations where native languages have been erased by Spanish or where the two languages — the indigenous and the immigrant, live in syncretic harmony. It made me think about the strained relationship Indians have with English. “Which language has not been the oppressor’s tongue?” asks Sujata Bhatt in A Different History as she narrates India’s struggle with its colonial past. Written in English, the poem is perhaps also a reflection of her own identity crisis, and the identity crisis of any Indian who adopted the language.
But Spanish taught me how to think beyond my duality of English and Hindi. It taught me how to appreciate languages, with their untranslatable nuances and their muddled origins, and the seeming contradiction of their permanency and mutability. It taught me how to look beyond the lexical surface and see the varied historical and cultural threads that formed their social fabric. It taught me that although my thoughts may be bound by the language I choose, my identity is moulded by all of them, and controlled by who I am.
In many ways, identities are languages, shaped by events far beyond their control. And it is our identity that is our language, never the other way around.
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