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Salaam, Namaste, Goodbye and
Good Riddance
What do we lose when we lose language? Asks
Sunny Bindra
Language is a unique
repository of knowledge, of culture. That is what we are going to
lose when we finally cannot speak or understand our mother tongues:
our knowledge of what we are.
 In
which language do you think? When I was ten years old, it became
clear to me that I generally think in English. Many years later, the
repercussions of this seemingly innocuous discovery became apparent.
Since then I have tussled with the idea of ‘my’ language, and its
loss.
‘My’ language is Punjabi. But Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati and Kiswahili
are also mine – I can speak and understand them (in varying
degrees). I grew up with them; more importantly, I feel for them. I
love their nuance and cadence, their idiom and rhythm. Sitting above
all of them, in terms of usage and general intimacy, is English. It
is the language I find myself conversing in and writing in most of
the time. I am devoted to it, but it also fills me with unease. Is
it ‘mine’? And in giving it the crown, what have I lost?
English is the language of South Asians in Kenya today. It is the
language of business, of general expression, of exuberance. Once
upon a time, it was the language of external communication:
our homes resonated with the sounds of Punjabi and Gujarati, of
Cutchi and Hindi. Outside – in schools, shops, public places – we
switched to Angrezi. But listen to the generation below thirty
today: English is not only spoken in every single situation and
every single interaction – it is the only language spoken.
So what? Languages do die out. There are more than six thousand
still spoken around the world today, but by the end of this century
more than half may have disappeared. Many argue that this is a good
thing; that it reflects the end of isolationism and heralds a new
integration of the people of the world. In the past, wars, invasions
and colonisations often led to the loss of indigenous language.
Today it is globalisation that leads the onslaught. English is
lingua franca – you either speak it or you stay irrelevant.
So it is with the young wahindi of East Africa. The old folks may
still be twanging the old tongues, but we who are modern can only
express our freshness in English. All our learning – of medicine, of
law, of science, of art – is conducted in English. Our expressions,
our elations, even our put-downs – all English. “Take a chill pill,
bro”, I hear you tell me. We are part of the South Asian diaspora.
We are entrepreneurs and achievers, and we’re on our way to ruling
the world. We can only do that in English. So don’t fulminate –
reciprocate!
And yet there is another interesting phenomenon at work. We don’t
abandon our songs and our movies – they have never been more
popular. Bollywood keeps booming; our crooners keep crooning.
Because of our films and songs, everyone has some sort of working
knowledge of Hindi and Urdu. We can’t really speak the lingo, but we
get the drift and don’t lose the plot. Hai na? It helps, of course,
that the dialogues of most new movies are increasingly peppered with
English (to sell to the diaspora) and have ve-e-e-ry simple plots
(to sell to half-wits).
 This ‘resurgence’ of the cultural values of home is largely driven
by the diaspora dollar. No matter how well the brethren do in
far-off lands, after a while of trying to fit in and doing as the
Romans do, a lament rises deep in the soul: this isn’t mine! I want
my songs, my words, my heritage. Sadly, this is not coupled with a
desire to learn or relearn the mother tongue: it only manifests in a
need to partake in ‘culture-lite’ – fusion music, movies with
international settings, folk songs remixed and redux.
Why am I worried? Because you can only express a culture in its own
language. Consider the following lines of poetry.
How will I ever prove to you
my smitten heart’s agony?
The problem is: my face lights up
whenever you are with me.
I know that it is the ‘garden path’
that leads to heaven’s door.
Yet, whether it is there or not,
Man lives in the happy thought.
Cheesy, but not too bad? The poet is struggling to make things
rhyme, clearly (‘agony’ with ‘me’; ‘not’ with ‘thought’); but we can
make out the glimmer of subtle thought: the lovesick one’s painful
yet comic dilemma; the poking of gentle fun at the idea of heaven.
Now, if you understand Urdu, read the original lines:
Un ke dekhay se jo aa-jaati hai munh parr raunaq
Woh samajhtay hain ke beemar ka haal achha hai.
Hamm ko maaloom hai jannat ki haqeeqat, lekin
Dil ke khush rakhnay ko, Ghalib, ye khayaal achha hai.
The original ghazal was penned, of course, by none other than the
legendary Mirza Ghalib, one of the finest poets (in any language) to
have walked on the face of the earth. The translation is from ‘Ghalib:
Cullings from the Divan’ by T. P. Issar. Mr. Issar has a genuine
‘feel’ for the subtlety and magic of Ghalib’s wordplay. Yet not even
he could begin to convey the artistry of the original. The fault is
not his;when you change the shell, the contents cannot remain
unaltered.
We cannot find our way back to the heart of our culture via
translation. We will discover only a sad surrogate, a pale proxy of
the real thing. Translations are useful in conveying the basics, and
in helping multi- ingual people deepen their understanding, using
the nuances of both languages; but we will not recapture in English
that which was not conceived in English.
Language is a unique repository of knowledge, of culture, of
traditions, of histories. It is a treasure trove of human
experience. That is what we are going to lose when we finally cannot
speak or understand our mother tongues: our knowledge of what we
are.
Which raises another point: why is it we don’t speak our own
language? What stops us? There are many answers: “No one speaks it
anymore.” “It’s what my parents spoke, and I’ve spent years getting
away from their outdated ways.” “English is the world’s essential
language – it’s what you need to get on professionally and
culturally; I just don’t have time to mess around with others.”
Actually, you should never need to find the time to learn your own
mother tongue. It is usually learned in the most natural way
possible: by speaking it in the home in early childhood. That’s the
way our parents learnt it; and that’s the way many of us did – by
usage, not by going to special classes or listening to CD-ROMs.
Sadly, the natural way is the way we have all tossed out of the
window.
Listen out: the language of parents and children today is English.
Children are instructed, guided, encouraged and admonished in
English. Their learning medium is English; they learn the English
alphabet and use English learning materials. English is the only
medium they ever encounter. ‘ Culture’ they perceive as dimly
understood ethnic rituals and songs. The future is clear, and it is
in English.
If it was just another language we were assimilating, there would be
little to worry about. But exclusive reliance on one language –
someone else’s – means that we are also assimilating someone else’s
ideas, knowledge, perspectives and view of the world. By making
English the sole communication medium of the next generation, we are
moving inexorably away from what it means to be us, towards someone
else’s idea of reality.
Why would we do that? A clue: I was on a family holiday at the coast
recently, and listened to the conversations of the multi-hued
families around me. The English families spoke, naturally, in
English. The Dutch, Germans and French children all spoke in their
natural tongues. The South Asian and African families all spoke in
English.
Another clue: if you go down the social ladder and eavesdrop on
South Asian (and African) families of a poorer background, you will
discover that they are still, even in today’s Anglophone, globalised
world, speaking in their mother tongues. As affluence comes,
however, the rustic sounds of the old language are dropped for the
crisp professional tones of the world language.
I can only explain our wilful abandonment of our identity by
thinking of self-hatred. A peculiar self-hatred it is, too. Is it
the colonial experience that did it to us, and is that why
continental Europeans and the Chinese have no problem retaining (and
rejoicing in) their own languages? Why are we so willing to place
our languages – and with them our poems and songs – on the rubbish
dump of the past? What shame, what inadequacy are we running away
from?
And when we want our children to learn a language other than
English, we think of French. How unspeakably sad.
All that conditioning in childhood: all those Archie comics; Hardy
Boys and Nancy Drew books; Disney and Bond movies; Biblical epics;
Shakespearean sonnets and Dickensian plots. We swallowed it without
question, and it swallowed us in turn. We emerged unaware of Ghalib
and Tagore; of raags and taals; of the Vedas and the Upanishads; of
three millennia of cultural history.
Perhaps we should not be too harsh about this. Not all the
abandonment of given tongues is happening because we’re too blasé to
care. In some
 cases, our mixing with the world has led to genuine
difficulty. Sometimes, the environment is such that we are genuinely
unable to practice and recapture what was once ours.
Yet, by and large, we are running very fast to be something other
than we are. We are chasing shadows. Once you have accepted
another’s way of looking at things at the expense of your own, you
have already assumed inferiority. Your way is better. Mine is
something to leave behind. Will unique development models,
methodologies and mentalities emerge from this mimicry? No,we will
always remain clones and replicas – never quite as good as the
original. Can you build anything great when you question your own
foundation as a human being?
All of life’s richness is reflected in its diversity. It is our
varied experience of peoples, foods, tastes, sounds and attire that
makes our lives exotic and interesting. Without diversity we are
doomed to experience life as humdrum homogeneity. Language is the
first loss; and all that is reflected in that language inevitably
follows. It never ceases to shock me that we are going to stand by
and let it happen.
Are there signs of a revival? Sanskrit is being learnt afresh in
parts of India – and as far afield as Germany and America. The
internet is being used as an effective medium by parents in diaspora
to recapture Hindi and Urdu. Even right here in Kenya, demand is
growing for language classes in temples and social centres. Perhaps
the call of identity is stronger than we think. Aage dekho.
(Sunny Bindra, a management consultant with Kenya’s top companies is
an M.Sc in Economics from the London School of Economics and is a
weekly columnist on the Sunday Nation. This article was originally
published Kenya’s ‘Awaaz’ magazine and is being reproduced here
after special arrangement with Mr Bindra.)
6 September 2006
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