Speaking of identity, culture, language

AMONG the many problems of the present times that worry me, is the question of how an individual’s identity is formed. What made me different from my siblings, cousins and friends and to what can I trace this difference? I remember that as a schoolchild, I wrote my name on my textbooks and then, after the class and school, came what many of us added on for fun: the state, the country, the continent and finally (in bold letters) Earth, our planet. In those technology-deficient times, when we had no means of imagining a world beyond our little towns, we enlarged our sense of belonging to a wider human fraternity through these innocent markers.

How far we have come from then! What made me who I am then is also what essentially remains unchanged inside my head but now, with families scattered all over the globe, I wonder what those who have settled in other lands regard as their primal identity. Is their loyalty first to the country they have migrated to, or is it still attached to what they have left behind when they chose to live elsewhere? To all the above questions, there is another that lies at the heart of this riddle: what is the language in which you dream or swear? I’ve often heard people say, ‘You can take an Indian out of India but never India out of an Indian.’ This must be true of all the millions who speak one language among themselves and another in their workplaces or the street. Increasingly, as a family takes firmer roots in an alien land, the mother tongue disappears, taking with it a storehouse of memories and attitudes that are so closely connected to one’s mother tongue.

Why speak of those Indians who have chosen to live abroad, what about our own people here? The rich wealth of languages that we have is slowly being set aside as English becomes a kind of lingua franca. In my own case, apart from Kumaoni, Hindi and English we spoke when we were growing up, I encountered another Hindi when my parents lived in Lucknow and in Allahabad, where I received my university education. The sweet lilt of Lucknow’s Awadhi, the musical tones of Allahabad’s Purabiya were added to the Hindi I had previously spoken. My roommates in the hostel came from eastern UP, Rohilkhand and western UP and their speech carried a whiff of those lands. After I got married and moved to Punjab, I learnt to speak Punjabi, haltingly and shyly at first but with more confidence until I could read and write in Gurmukhi (thanks to overseeing the boys’ homework). On his first posting as an SDM in the small sub-division of Samrala, my husband had to decide cases regarding land disputes. While the appeals and arguments were in Punjabi, which he knew by then, the land records were in Urdu. An official, called a Reader, would read them out and soon my husband began to suspect that he was being led by the nose to pronounce judgments based on the Reader’s recommendations. So, an Urdu teacher was found and since I had nothing else to do then, I sat along and we slowly learnt to read in Urdu. I can still recognise some words but naturally, since we did not keep up with our reading after Samrala, gradually we forgot all we had learnt.

The other evening, we were having dinner at a friend’s home and no one spoke anything but English. One of them said, ‘You know, I love hearing your Hindi. How well you speak it!’ This from a person who belongs to UP himself and can speak Hindi too. I felt like saying that it was my mother tongue so what was the fuss about? In fact, if he had complimented me on my English, I would be flattered. But there was no point in getting into a tangle then and also with the binaries that are firmly established in our minds, thanks to the social media, we are very quick to decide what our political affiliations may be. Another dear friend, who was a colleague at Panjab University, recently asked me from Bangalore to recommend some Hindi fiction titles. In all the years he has lived there, it probably never occurred to him to try and pick up Kannada, a language with a very rich trove of literature.

The last thought I’d like to leave you with, dear reader, is how it is not just human beings who base their identity on a language but cities too. What is now grandly called ‘intangible heritage’ describes the unique personality of a historical city. Take Lucknow, for example. Anyone who belongs to it is immediately identifiable from the way she speaks or behaves. Patiala is another city as is Amritsar: both brand their speech, cuisine and social mannerisms from what the city imbues them with. It is an undefinable quality, yet this was confirmed recently when I went to a local tailor for the first time and after I had explained what I wanted, he asked me, ‘Aunty, aap Lucknow ki ho?’ I winced when I heard that ‘ho’ rather than ‘hain’ but I asked him, ‘Kaise pehchana?’ ‘Aapke bolne ke andaz se,’ he replied. I walked home on air after that compliment.