Don’t mind our language

The Americans were the first to show that a distorted version of another language could become a language in its own right, and actually be held in esteem. The American revolution of the word was clumsy and sometimes haphazard, but it demonstrated the flexibility of language. Even today, Americans like to feel that there was nothing official about their new jargon, but with Webster it got status and its own dictionary. When I was in college, I had a language teacher who was vehemently opposed to babu or brown English and firmly believed it was something to be laughed at. But many Indians like me have begun to dream and think in this alien tongue. The vernaculars view the new snob-marvel as a threat with the power to taint a way of life that is millennia old. But GIE — or General Indian English is a reality which cannot be laughed away. It has its own melody which may sound funny to someone not used to it, but then we have all had a secret giggle over what sounds like foreign gibberish.

The culture of Indian English was the result of an irresistible consummation of the relation between syllabic native Indian languages and the stiff stress-timed Germanic tongue. Its a mulatto meeting of the East and West that we live through every day, without giving a thought to how a foreign tongue has made a schism in our roots. I, for one, am a rootless bedouin but in my very rootlessness I have found my wellspring. There is a whole tribe out there like me that belongs in this midway province of neither here nor there. Indian English is new wine in an old bottle. There is no grammar to it as yet, but we’re getting there. Peter Sellers makes me laugh in The Party but at the same time I am insulted, because if you think of it, the movie makes a mockery of a language that I speak every day. It is the international equivalent of the language snobbery going on in Britain and the US, where certain forms are a definite no-no.

My tongue is a multilingual entity. If ever I write the great Indian novel, it will never be either completely Indian or thoroughly English. It simply cannot be so. It will obviously reflect a reality that most people are yet to admit to. It is the reality of a life that has my parents speaking in Malayalam, their alienated child trying throughout childhood to belong somewhere and in the end, consciously electing to become a nowhere person. She gives up one day thinking: “If this is what I am, then so be it.” Such is my lonely legacy. Thank you, Lord Macaulay.

What English teachers must realize quickly, before the confusion takes over, is that they are no longer teaching Received Pronunciation as we classically know it. The written language is still mostly indistinguishable from British English. But the spoken form had long ago found a niche for itself in the world language family. So what we mistakenly teach as the received form is actually very very Indian English only, yaar.

So that very same teacher, who had once lectured me on the ridiculous forms of Indian English usage, was unintentionally lecturing me in what was very obviously Indian English, and mind you that’s nothing to be ashamed of. The old Hamletian dilemma remains: which medium do we adopt, what is right? Stay with the familiar or go with change? To be or not to be, that is the question.