Reaching out to the natives
By Manohar Malgonkar

NOWADAYS all political rhetoric is ghost-written. The stalwarts who wrote their own speeches are gone. Jawaharlal Nehru was perhaps the last. He was a highly educated man who took pride in the way he wrote and spoke English. And Hindi, after all, was his mother tongue and in it he could reach out to the common man. He often spoke impromptu and even without notes and tended to ramble. But he was never stuck for words. He certainly needed no speech doctors.

I know that Nehru’s longtime personal secretary, O.P. Mathai claims that it was he, Mathai, who wrote some of the more memorable speeches that Nehru made, and indeed that it was he, Mathai, who coined that phrase "Tryst with Destiny" which, along with other such gems as "Of the people, for the people, by the people", or "Blood, sweat, toil and tears" is cited as an example of the awesome majesty of the English tongue. But then Mathai’s other claims about his influence on Nehru and his relationship with the Nehru family are so fatuous and spiteful as to reduce all that he says to flights of fancy or unrealised longings.

Winston Churchill, too, wrote out his own speeches. And the blue-chip demagogue that he was, he rehearsed them, practicing his stance and gestures and pauses before a mirror, even testing them out on a friend or relative. Churchill was as much an actor as orator, but it was these very attributes that made his audiences listen to his speeches with rapt attention.

The basic, the inescapable, requirement of a speech, is language; the more at home you are with the language, the more effective, more forceful, your speech. But the contrary is just as true. If you don’t know a language well, to try and make a speech in it is ridiculous, or, worse still; pathetic, something that aspiring political leaders should avoid.

But try and stop them! Not only political leaders, but men and women in public life thirsting for adulation are never averse to the idea of saying" a few words to the natives in their own tongue" if only to say: "Greetings, everyone".

That was what Ms Indira Gandhi was advised to say to her audiences during her election speeches in Chikamaglur, in the heartland of Karnataka:

Yellarige namaskara".

Ms Gandhi was, after all India’s pre-eminent political figure, a colossal personality, and she was speaking at an electioneering rally, organised by party loyalists. And this ensured — guaranteed — that there would be no non-conformists let alone hecklers. Whether she greeted them in Kannada or Swahili would have made no difference to their readiness to vote for her. This was an orchestrated exercise; party stalwarts from Karnataka presenting Indira-ji, as Indira-akka— why, here she’s greeting you in your own tongue! see?

Altogether understandable.

But what could have persuaded a worldlywise American President like John F. Kennedy that it would be a good thing if he were to say something in German to what, one presumes, was a sophisticated German audience?

On an official visit to what then was still the beleaguered city of West Berlin, standing on a flag-decked platform facing the Berlin Wall, Kennedy told its citizens:

Ish bein ein Berliner!

I am a Berliner. Were the citizens of Berlin flattered by that disclosure? — that this deep-dyed, corn-fed Yankee should tell them that he was, after all, one of the natives — John Kennedy magicked into Johann Schindler, mister into von.

Or were there some in that gathering who thought that this gimmick was a display of insufferable condescension?

But aspirants for political acceptance are not particularly sensitive to adverse responses, are they? I well remember what may well have been Sonia Gandhi’s initiation to public speaking in her country of adoption. Her husband, Rajiv, had become India’s Prime Minister, so Signora Sonia was being put through the paces of her new image as Sonia-ji. She was induced to make a speech in Hindi.

This was by no means a political affair, with the important leaders dressed in khaddar and squatting on the floor, but a formal occasion with patriotic overtones: the commissioning of a new submarine. Sonia Gandhi, as the nation’s First Lady, was called upon the proclaim its name. Her principal audience was naval brass, clean-cut young men in spanking uniforms glinting with gold buttons; and all of them more at home in English than Hindi. It was clear that the few words Ms Gandhi had to say had been rehearsed times out of number. Yeh, pandubbi something something.... It never became clear what. It was quickly got over, dutifully applauded.

Nowadays Sonia Gandhi speaks fluent Hindi — so they say — why, she has even mastered the art of sitting on floors at party meetings: Sonia-ji has become as homespun as say Mrinal Gore or Medha Patkar. And no Indian-born lady wears a sari with greater ease — or elegance.

But Indira Gandhi being presented to the voters of Chikamaglur as Indira-akka, or even John Kennedy transforming himself into a citizen of Berlin don’t seem as brazen as Deve Gowda’s efforts at image-building as a denizen of the great Hindi belt. If those others were like quick costume changes this one had the blunt-instrument wallop of an image-transfer in a Bharatnatyam drama. The stage lights get switched off for a few seconds and when they come on, Io and behold, the person on the stage had taken on a new avatar, a sadhu has become a warrior in shining armour, or, in this case, a ‘simple farmer’ from Karnataka, a rayaru in his own right from the depths of Dravidia, into a Palaji of the the Ganga-Yamuna soil. By comparison, even Yeh pandubbi, was a model of precise pronouncement. One could not help feeling a little embarrassed at those orotund ghost-written Hindi flourishes being chopped up into sound-bites to make them resemble their originals.

O.K. People in politics go through all sorts of hoops to win popularity, to make themselves acceptable to populations of other regions or, as in Kennedy’s case, other countries. But what incentive could someone like Princess Diana have had to take the trouble to learn a few phrases of the Japanese language to be able to speak to the people of Japan in their own language when she went there on a visit?

Clive James, a noted British writer and TV personality who had become a sort of PR adviser to Princess Diana, says that it was he who told her:

"That if she learned even a few words of the language... she would knock them out".

Well she was coached into saying those few words in Japanese by James’s own teacher, "a determined little woman called Shinko". Clive James is altogether ecstatic about what happened:

"Diana flew to Japan, addressed a 120 million people in their own language and made the most stunning impact there since Hirohito told them that the war was over".

Which just shows how the most hard-nosed of British writers tend to go overboard when they write about Princess Diana. A hundred and twenty million happens to be the total Japanese population, including babes in arms who don’t even know their own language. Did they all then, sit glued to their TV sets open mouthed to hear this Venus from a distant land tell them: Dome arigato gozaimashita?

Yellarige namaskara.

This feature was published on April 4, 1999