Respect is a two-way street

I hope you are all as fed up with the continuous tracking of the effect Trump has had on markets worldwide and of what the political landscape of the country looks like now and will in a few months. As far as I am concerned, I’d much rather talk of books and ideas.

Let me then introduce my readers to an absolutely fascinating (and maddening) one that I have recently read. This is Peggy Mohan’s book, teasingly titled ‘Father Tongue, Motherland’, and it took me over a month to read and finally absorb the explosion of ideas it unleashed in my head. Peggy Mohan is currently teaching at Ashoka University and is a highly regarded academic there. Her lively take on how languages evolve and how they fade away is as much an exploration into orthodox linguistics as it is into social history and modes of communication. Simply put, this book is a continuation of her earlier one called ‘Wanderers, Kings, Merchants’, where she looks at what happened when indentured labour was transported to work in the sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean, Mauritius and Fiji.

Amitav Ghosh has written a memorable trilogy on this as fiction but in Peggy’s telling of the same story, we have someone who is the product of just such an encounter. Her father’s family came from Bihar while her mother was Canadian. She later married a Punjabi Indian. Mohan’s exposure to these multiple registers of languages and sounds has given her extraordinary insights that go beyond mere linguistics and fiction.

Creole, the language that is spoken all over the Caribbean, is the child of the encounter that happened as Bihari men married local women. Similar encounters took place in India when Hyderabad was annexed by the Khiljis and the men who stayed on married local women. The result? A new form of Urdu called Dakhini that we have all heard in films about that region and which is markedly different from the Hindustani spoken in the North. Mohan opens our minds to the possibility that languages draw on political power to hold primacy. Look at the rise of English after the British colonised us and how records previously inscribed in Persian and Urdu were gradually replaced by English. In a few years, perhaps they will be available in Hindi as it becomes the national language (if the present dispensation has its way).

The subject of how languages rise and fade away is part of the rise and fall of civilisations and empires. In my own part of the world, Kumaoni is spoken by fewer people and may one day in the future remain a wistful memory as Hindi and English replace it. As the digital world becomes the main source of information and communication, words from one language enter another and often the marriage of the two gives rise to a version that is a bastardised version of the two earlier ones. Just listen to how Punjabi or Haryanvi are entering a new vocabulary that has the bones of an earlier speech, while the flesh that clothes them now has a new kind of linguistic rhythm.

Let me now persuade those of you who have not yet seen ‘Adolescence’ on Netflix to watch it. I had virtually stopped watching films and serials as they are addictive in a dangerous way and put an end to reading books. I was urged by many friends to come out of my self-imposed exile and what I saw (just four deeply moving episodes) blew my mind. Young parents who allow their children unlimited (and unsupervised) access to smartphones don’t know what a hideous mistake this is. The deadly cocktail of pornography, sexual deviance, misogyny, jumping hormones and the desperate need to belong has effects that will be revealed as you see the episodes that drag the viewer into the absolute abyss of social breakdown. Schools that have abdicated their responsibility to discipline young minds and become seriously flawed because of a ‘liberal atmosphere’ where any kind of punishment, discipline and the authority of teachers means nothing, are producing a generation of young people who fear nobody and nothing.

We speak of the dreadful level of teaching in our own schools but believe me, things are no better in those societies that have lost control over their young. Bullying, shaming, indifference and a lack of interest in their curriculum teaching is a worldwide disease because parents and schools have no time or inclination to lay down the rules of civil behaviour. Parents and teachers want so desperately to be friends with their children that they forget that children need guidance and discipline from their elders. The friendships they need are for those who are their own age. If parents behave as irresponsibly as their own peer group, where does respect stand an earthly?

The question is, why are we afraid of our children? Why do we give in to their whims and fancies even where everyday food is concerned? As children, we were asked to eat whatever was placed before us and special dishes were cooked only as a treat or on birthdays. We didn’t dare to throw tantrums or have meltdowns if we were not gifted the shoes or designer clothes that other children may have, simply because we knew that our parents would not give in to our demands.

Respect is a two-way street: give it first to receive it.

— The writer is a social commentator