Recession

“(A)phasia and double disfigurement . . . are fundamental to the racialized encounter with language in (post)coloniality” (Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker)

During my first summer back in Delhi as a graduate student, I had a conversation about feeling estranged from one’s language. Though I had spent a mere nine months away from home, I already felt that my language sat oddly on my tongue. I think of the Hindi word for awkward, “atpata,” which is positively onomatopoeic in its ability to capture the feeling of awkwardness. Each vowel, each consonant came out differently. Although I had been speaking in both Hindi and English to my family and friends while I was away (in the US), when I came back home, my tongue would still search for the right sounds inside my mouth, groping in the dark, as it were. The right words too would go away, though to my surprise, they came more easily than the sounds. It was hard to understand what had happened. I never spoke in an American accent. So why did my Indian accent go away, and why was it so hard to bring it back? 

It wasn’t just Hindi that receded, but English too—the English I had grown up with, the tyranny of the British, the medium of education in my school and many others, which told us, for instance, not to pronounce the “r”s at the end of words. Hindi being phonetic, we weren’t accustomed to pretending a letter wasn’t in the room, we weren’t into “silent” letters. We saw it, we said it. Vot-ur. Rub-burr. Paint-urr. Taught the de-Hindi-ization of our English, we learned to say Wat-uh. Rub-uh. Paint-uh. And then somehow, twenty years later, I found myself at a dive bar in a small beach town in California, USA, trying to tell a bartender that what I wanted was “waddar,” not vodka. My husband, a US American, is tickled every time I read “sizzler” as (what he hears as) “sizzla,” when I say “squirrel” instead of “skorl”. 

Particularly when it came to English—or perhaps this was more noticeable in English—my sense of loss pertained not only to my accent, the sounds that came out of my mouth. I longed also for certain words—or rather, a grammar—the economy that language in India seemed to contain. As to any outsider to the US, the profusion of “likes” and “sort ofs” and “kind ofs” in American speech grated against my linguistic soul and made me wonder why the Americans couldn’t just say the thing that they wanted to say, or why they couldn’t pause instead of filling up that pause with words that turn into meaningless sounds. It was an unnecessary and uneconomical proliferation of a vocabulary of evasion. If the American accent were a garment, I would toss it to the Tailor masterji to take it in, make it fit.

The ability to think this question of translation (thinking of the movement from a word in one language to the same word in another language) as a question of voice (a continuum between thought and language) was recent. 

My husband’s sibling, a singer and voice artist, sharing their recording of a French accent for a podcast, was talking about how it’s all about speaking from the “front of the mouth” when I realized how true it was that the American accent resides in the back of the throat. The American drawl, the “yeahhh” for “yes,” the many aspirated vowels where breath escapes not from somewhere just behind the lips, but bursts from deep inside. The “h” in “whole” is so deep that it often comes out as an Arabic "خ" (khe). To say a Hindi “la,” I make a bowl of my tongue. To say an American “la,” I make a canyon of it. 

Rey Chow writes of call center agents: “Insofar as these brown and yellow people must adapt their bodies–the shapes of their mouths, their lips, their teeth, and their tongues as well as their vocal cords–to the manner of self-expression deemed acceptable by North American and other English speaking customers, are not their skin tones also disfigurements, the defective corrections of what is already deemed defective?” As an immigrant in California, a blue state, the colour of my skin is easily consumed. It is when I speak that I become alien.

Songs/Viraha/Hijr

I experienced my loss of voice most poignantly in my inability to sing.

Before arriving in the US, I had begun to learn vocal Hindustani music, an interest that was bred in my family for a few generations, and that I returned to with every trip back home. Every year when I arrived in India, I would soon call on Shobhna aunty, erstwhile ghazal singer and my guru, to set up weekly lessons. Shobhna aunty taught me the holis, kajris ¹, and ghazals that had already infused my life and perspective as a native of Uttar Pradesh, the heart of the “Hindi heartland” in India, and as a consumer of Bollywood, even before I started singing them myself—songs for festivals, songs about the monsoon, songs about separation. It well may have been a reference to a kajri in Rahi Masoom Raza’s Half a Village that formed my decision to write my doctoral dissertation on Hindi literature. It would be an excuse to immerse myself in a language world that had grown inside me my whole life, and inside which I had grown, an indulgence of my own zubaan² and the ways of seeing therein—both the mix of Urdu and Hindi that one encountered in Bollywood, and the Awadhi of my aunts’ sohars³. Often, the succor that those songs would provide me when I sang them, but especially when aunty sang them, made me burst into tears.

But after spending two years in the US, as the language fumbled around on my tongue, so did my singing voice.

Though I sat down every evening for riyaaz⁴—for “ibaadat”—the sound of the tanpura setting the calm of a winter dusk upon my mind, there was no “ilham” ⁵. I thought up many reasons—allergies were reducing the sonority of my voice; I was singing too hesitantly; I was singing too forcefully; I was thinking too much about the how instead of the what; I didn’t have new songs to sing; I was singing in the voices of others, and so on. My mind recycled each of these possibilities regularly, and I perfected my perfectionism even as I wondered, “what am I trying to hide?”

Yet, in each of my excuses were embedded small truths that made an ilham, which at the time did not appear as such, or appeared as such only momentarily. I was singing in a voice that was not my own, because I did not know what my voice was anymore. I had bent and mis-shaped it, perhaps even contorted it, to make sense to the people around me, pronouncing my “r”s, saying more “pleases” and “thank yous” than were natural to my brown self, overusing exclamation marks in my emails and my speech—me, whose highest form of praise is calling something “very good” (I let vocal emphases indicate really how good). I wanted very much to be legible, although now when Americans tell me I have “no accent at all,” I’m not sure if what I experience is a gratification of that desire for legibility. In response, I am able to muster an awkward smile and a half-nod, that side-nod so characteristic of South Asians, the translations from Hindi and English into American English rattling in my brain as I shake my head and walk away not knowing if they know that what they meant as a compliment was experienced as a loss of selfhood.

Return/Milan/Vasl

The return of my voice, if it can be termed as such, comes in fits and spurts now. It came with certainty as I rehearsed songs for my own wedding in India, saturated with the joyous anticipation of seeing my family at one place after many years, hearing their voices, hearing their songs. It went, too, when my Green Card did not arrive in time, and the wedding had to be put off for a year. In the months before I was able to go home, when I was stuck in the US and a vast country felt like an 8x8 cage, I sang to a vacuum, and though the songs I sang had their own subjects, there was no resonance in me, emotionally or vocally. Often, I sang in a single voice rather than a multiple one, overtones and undertones hiding in the folds of a tense vocal apparatus. 

I now find myself often singing to the language itself, and the multitude of people speaking it, from my sister’s toddler who knows it only as sounds and inflections for now, to the auto drivers and rickshaw pullers and the people on the metro and multitudes in the bazaars—there is a world that holds the music of Hindi for me, to which I, my voice, and my singing are legible. (Here, I place the burden of keeping the language alive upon those, unlike me, who are deprived of access to English, which can only come through education—and the world of opportunities that follows with it).

Linguistic inheritance: Mother tongue

In her book, Chow offers a “counterintuitive proposal”: “the colonized’s encounter with the colonizer’s language offers a privileged vantage point from which to view the postcolonial situation, for precisely the reason that this language has been imposed from without.” For Chow, it is not only the colonial language that is a “prosthetic,” but also the native language; it is, in fact, precisely through the lens of the colonial language that the native language reveals itself as prosthetic—like the ghost that can only be seen in a mirror. And so, there is another reason why I study Hindi—to examine its plasticity, its appropriability, its deployability.

Hindi is my language, as much as one can have a language. But also/In fact, Hindustani is my language. Belonging to the Hindi belt, Hindustani, the blend of Hindi and Urdu that most ‘Hindi speakers’ speak, was the language in which my subjectivity was shaped. As kayastha, much of my family on the one hand belonged to the category of upper-caste Hindus, and on the other had a long history of a deeply segregated yet proximate relationship with Muslims. Like a golden thread, Urdu wove through their Hindi, and the suspicion of Muslims through their culture. They ate chicken and mutton (no beef, because they were Hindu, and no pork, because of the influence of Muslims). They held their awareness of both Urdu and Hindi in high regard and turned their Hindi noses up at people who pronounced their “sh” as “s”, and their Urdu noses up at missed nuqtas⁶. There was much pride—and discrimination—in this language. 

However, the kayasthas have historically been collaborators with ruling regimes—the quiet underdogs, the silent administrators whose monthly paycheck was to be assured no matter who was ruling. This meant that over the past ten years or more of the rule of Narendra Modi, I witnessed the slow but certain erosion of those nuqtas, the subtle dots under Hindi letters that denoted a sisterhood with Urdu as well as the possession of an intellectual capital. 

A few years after Modi’s arrival, I left India.

Reading Hindi

English was the language of my intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and academic makeup. Hindi was all of these, except the last. I emphasize here the difficulty of close reading Hindi texts without having access to Hindi TV, radio, speech, the Hindi speaking universe, and Bollywood surrounding me on all sides. Access, in other words, to spaces in which the encoding of thought in shapes taken by the language were all around, and all I had to do was to pick them up, and match them to my texts, for an alternate dimension of the text to be revealed. 

Linguistic inheritance: Another tongue

In “The Language of African Literature,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o writes of the loss of an indigenous language for the colonial subject as accompanied by the subject’s estrangement from herself, since it is the loss of a vocabulary within which indigenous subjecthood could be articulated. As opposed to this, the colonizer’s language is only capable of articulating a colonized subjecthood, always inferior. It was also, to Ngũgĩ, a loss of a world/vocabulary/community with which the individual was organically coextensive. “Since the new language was a product reflecting the ‘real language of life’ elsewhere, it could never, as spoken or written, properly reflect or imitate the real life of that community.” I recall a young child in India asking her mother, “Why are storybooks always talking about ‘a beautiful sunny day’ when sunny days are so hot and miserable?”

In India, while there was undoubtedly a privileging of the colonial language over indigenous languages, accompanied by apparatuses of surveillance and shame in the school system, there was yet the prevailing presence of indigenous languages. Embedded within the linguistic landscape of India, a country whose Constitution recognizes 22 languages, is a bilingualism or multilingualism as a result of which some classes are equally conversant with their mother tongues and English, and others have access only to their mother tongue. Others still speak their mother tongue as well as Hindi, in part due to the association of Hindi with India, and in part due to its dominance in Bollywood films, and English in addition to the two. 

Like many members of the middle class, proud products of Macaulay’s Minute, the colonial document that located the success of imperialism in the creation of “a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” I express myself in my mother tongue and English, and both have become, in different ways, the language of my being. 

I did not face a language loss, and for me, the bilingualism came easily—I had too many people around me who knew English well, but chose to speak in Hindi, and spoke it with an emphasis and pride that was accompanied by cultural capital. (The easy access they/I had to English meant that the mother tongue was not, as it is to many people of the working classes, a language of deprivation. We could speak Hindi with pride because our existence did not rely on it). Many of my friends attending similar elite English-medium schools as me did face this loss. Their Hindi was frail and arose to their tongue only when they addressed people of the working classes—rickshaw pullers, auto drivers, maids, hawkers, laborers—who did not have access to English. I was surprised to find that they spoke in English even at home, with their parents, that Hindi was never their own language. I wonder now if they would call it their mother tongue. 

Although my own experience was not one of the active suppression of my mother tongue, as in Chow’s account, this was the experience of people in many other parts of the country. Students who spoke the mother tongue in school were reported, and a sense of shame instilled in one’s language as well as, presumably, in the sense of self inhering in that language. This is in fact still the case, particularly in semi-urban areas where the aspiration to English is greater, and access to it more limited.

Passing in English

“(T)he intellectually sophisticated ways of coming to terms with language as known to some of us—with their stresses on error, failure, defacement, disappointment, nonarrival, and so forth—have a vital parallel in the process of racialization, the shadowy tones of which are typically borne by those who are deemed inferior” (Chow).

I have been trying to pass as knowing the world around me, and what people are talking about. It was only recently that I became aware of this, and how this pretense at knowing is a corollary of the erasure of my difference, of assimilation, of becoming translated. The more I try to gain a different (American) voice, the more I become aware that I am not that, yet the voice enters me. When my English is called “impeccable,” what is unheard is the constant processing of my pronunciation before words come out of my mouth, of the right words before they are spoken (hours instead of timing; yard instead of garden, deck instead of balcony, trash can instead of dustbin, power instead of bijli/electricity/light, the list goes on). All I want is to be legible, so I do the translations myself (translate myself?) instead of requesting it of my interlocutors and thus asking too much. 

After coming to the US, the more I experienced my day-to-day living as translated, my thoughts and words shaped by what will or will not be legible to the people around me, the more I was drawn to studying literature in my own language–both because it continued to nourish my relationship to my roots, and because I felt compelled to actively shape the American academy by my outsider’s perspective, instead of being passively shaped by it. When a question about reading Hindi in the US is asked, then, I turn to my voice—I say, I kept reading Hindi because I wanted to keep it on my tongue, so I could both dream and curse in it. I’d rather translate than be translated.