Faiz is Beautiful but Can You Really Call Him a People's Poet?

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I recently came across a short debate I had with Mr Sohail Hashmi on Kafila. I found rereading it quite interesting so thought I’d post it up here for posterity.

Mr Hashmi, of course, is a writer I much admire and I have, especially, read his writings on the architectural heritage of Delhi with great interest. In this instance he wrote a lovely piece on Faiz, Urdu’s greatest poet of the modern era. What I took issue with, though, is Mr Hashmi’s characterisation of Faiz as a “people centric” poet and one whose “ideas glisten with the truth and democratic ideals that enlighten the hearts of the overwhelming majority of our people”

My first comment on the article was:

“Thanks for this fascinating account Mr Hashmi.

Although, personally, I’ve always battled with the notion that Faiz’s poetry was “people centric”. If it was, it was in a very top-down, almost patronising sort of way. Can any poetry, written in Rekhta (and here I make a very stark distinction between Urdu and Rekhta as should be done) ever be truly “people centric”? Are “people centric” themes enough to award Faiz with the honour of the subcontinent’s most imprtant poet, this hardly a handful people in the sub-continent could actually understand his overtly Persianised Urdu? You must admit, to claim to talk on behalf of the people, when the people can’t even understand you is a bit rich.

Urdu is one of the few languages which exhibits such extreme literary diglossia that the literary form (at least in poetry) is almost incomprehensible to its native speakers. Bengali is another sub-continental language which did exhibit a similar trait with an artificially sanskritised form of the language (shadhubhasha: cholit bhasha :: Rekhta:Urdu) but thankfully, that elitist trend has died out and almost all literature in Bengali today is in cholit bhasa (i.e. the normal spoken language).”

To which Mr Hashmi replied:

“You have touched upon some very complex issues and no simple explanations are possible.

Between the time that Faiz began writing to the time that he died, Urdu ceased to be a language of public discourse in large parts of the subcontinent, at least in the parts where it was born as Hindavi, that is the Ganga Jamuna doab and in the parts where it grew into a full fledged language that is Deccani .

The language became a victim of the divisive politics of language equals religion that began with the Fort Williams college in 1825 and culminated with the adoption of the resolution to make Sanskritised Hindi as the national language of India instead of Hindustani written in both the Nagri and the Persian scripts, the latter had the backing of Gandhi but the constituent assembly went against the old man’s wishes and voted against Hindustani.

URDU became the official language of Pakistan where it was the mother tongue only of the Muhajirs and was banished from the land where it was the language of Prem Chand, Kanhaiyalal Kapoor, Krishan Chand, Ram Lal, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Tilok Chand Mehroom, Firaq, Arsh Malsiyani and also of Josh,Sahir, Shakeel, Jazbi, Majaz, Majrooh and Kaifi. Faiz could only write in the language that he was comfortable in, his mother tongue might have been Sialkoti Punjabi but all his initial education was in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and this is the linguistic discourse that he was familiar with.

The other issue is do you have to , of necessity, write in the language of the people if you are writing about issues that concern them? I don’t know how many blacks had access to the English in which Langston Hughes wrote his anti racist poems, how many Russians understood Yevtushenko or Maykovsky, when they wrote on issues that concerned the working class of Russia.

We had a literacy rate of 13% when we became independent, so 87% of our population was illiterate in all languages, which language should the writers have written in. Tulsi’s Ram Charit Manas written in Awadhi,because he wanted the image of the ideal being to be presented before the people, has had to explained to Awadhis for the last 400 years, the same is true of Jaisi’s Padmavat and Rahim’s Dohas.

some of what a great poet writes about the people is understood by them immediately, some takes a while to be understood and some is understood after a couple of generations. it is this that makes him/her a great poet. the only way a poet can be understood totally by the people is for the poet to write not only in the language of the people but also write only about the here and now. This way lies 15 minutes of glory and impermanence and an absence of literature that speaks to generations. you can not demand that literature that lives beyond its time and deals with issues that go beyond the immediacy of now must also be understood totally, fully and completely by those who live at the moment of the creation of that literature.

Faiz has fortunately written both kinds of poetry, the time bound and the time less and that is one of the reasons of his being recognised as the greatest poet of the 20th century. He has written BOL, he has written Tarana, he has written Hum Dekhengegy, all three have become slogans of our times, he has also written hazar karo merey tan se, Nisar mein teri galiyon pe, Do aawaazen etc that need to be understood gradually. Why do you want all political poets to be political activists too. Let the political activist do what he is good at and allow the poet to do what he is good at.“

Me:

“Thanks for that detailed reply. Couple of points:

I should have done this earlier, but let me define the term Urdu (since the term means so many things). From my first post, I used ‘Urdu’ to mean the common spoken language of the urban people of much of North India. What you might call baazaari Hindustani. The term ‘Hindustani’ when used to mean a sort of middle language between High Hindi and High Urdu is fairly new. The term Hindustani was coined by the British and throughout the Raj the term was used as a synonym for what we call Urdu today. For example, John T Platts dictionary calls qaaf the “twenty-seventh letter of the Urdu or Hindustani alphabet”. In most of modern India, Hindi is also used as a synonym for Urdu. For example, Hindi Movies etc.

The language became a victim of the divisive politics of language equals religion that began with the Fort Williams college in 1825 and culminated with the adoption of the resolution to make Sanskritised Hindi as the national language of India instead of Hindustani written in both the Nagri and the Persian scripts, the latter had the backing of Gandhi but the constituent assembly went against the old man’s wishes and voted against Hindustani.

I fail to grasp how this is relevant to getting Faiz to write in a register which is widely understood but, for what it’s worth, the GoI’s attempts to invent a new standard (sanskirtised) register of Hindi-Urdu have failed rather miserably. That Gandhi anecdote is nice but only half true. Gandhi oscillated quite a bit on the language question (which was typical of him) between Hindustani in both scripts as well as only using the Devanagri script.

Faiz could only write in the language that he was comfortable in, his mother tongue might have been Sialkoti Punjabi but all his initial education was in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and this is the linguistic discourse that he was familiar with.

That might be one reason. Or it just might be that he wanted to occupy a literary space that only Urdu could provide. Either way, Faiz is not at fault. What I am wondering is whether applying labels such as ‘people centric’ etc to his poetry is not misleading.

We had a literacy rate of 13% when we became independent, so 87% of our population was illiterate in all languages, which language should the writers have written in. Tulsi’s Ram Charit Manas…

Uh-oh. ‘Literacy rate’ refers to written not spoken language, Hashmi sahib. Jaahil bhi bol aur sun paate hain. If recite Bidrohi by Nojrul to an illiterate Bengali he will understand it. Prem chand would be understood by all Dehlavis; even Krishan Chandar. I doubt that the same could be said of say ‘Aaj Bazar Mein’.

The other issue is do you have to , of necessity, write in the language of the people if you are writing about issues that concern them?

IMO, it would be crushingly patronising to not do so; reminds me of Gandhi’s pledge to not allow Harijians to run the Harijan Sabha but for it to be run by upper castes and Ambedkar’s rage at this.

Why do you want all political poets to be political activists too. Let the political activist do what he is good at and allow the poet to do what he is good at

Exactly my point; let us admire the beauty of Faiz without clouding his appraisal with terms that take his poetry beyond poetry into political activism. Art for art’s sake and all that; because as soon as we start assigning it some utilitarian function, say, we state that his poetry, to, quote Zaheer from your piece, carries “democratic ideals that enlighten the hearts of the overwhelming majority of our people” when the only a microscopic minority can even understand what he’s saying, that we start sounding rather hollow.”

Sohail Hashmi:

“you are absolutely right in using the term Urdu for the spoken language of much of North India, Urdu was the language of this region till a little after 1947, with the selection, on paper, of Hindi as The Official Language the spoken language of much of north India has undergone drastic changes in the post 1947 period and Urdu has by and large been replaced with a strange mixture of what you call the Bazaari Hindustani and the Sanskritised Hindi constructed by the Rahtra Bhasha Samitis in the post independence India.

The term Urdu, used for the language that was commonly spoken in the north Indian plains itself is also a rather recent development, the prose of Ghalib when it was first published was given the name Oud-e-Hindi by Ghalib, and Rekhta that Meer and Ghalib wrote their poetry in was derisively called Rekhta – mixed Language by the Persian Ustads of the immediate post wali period. So Urdu that was known as Hindi/Rekhta written in the Persian script by and large till the time of Ghalib and a little later was transformed at Fort Williams into Hindustani/ Urdu if written in the Persian script and Hindi if written in the Nagri Script

My reference to the divisive politics that created the language equals religion discourse was to the process, initiated at the fort williams and carried forward by the votaries of Hindi/ Hindu/ Hindustan and Urdu/Muslim/Pakistan that changed the very nature of the language that was commonly spoken and understood till the immediate pre independence period. It is this changed nature of the language that has created the situation in which most of Faiz’s poetry and also the poetry of Sahir, Majrooh and Kaifi and others begins to sound unfamiliar to those whose grandparents would have had no problem in understanding it.

As for literacy and illiteracy the point that I am making is that there is a difference between the vocabulary of the illiterate and the literate and therefore written language is always a little if not very different from the spoken add to that the difference that has always existed between the language of Poetry and that of Prose, Meer in his time and Firaq much later were two poets who wrote in a language that was closest to the spoken Hindi/ Hindustani/ Rekhta/ Urdu and still there is much in their writing that an illiterate will not understand.

Faiz was writing in a language whose literary traditions and style he was more familiar with and could therefore express himself better in. to my mind He wrote in a language that he thought he could best express himself in, that was a language he inherited as the language of literary discourse and he wrote on issues that were dear to him or he felt strongly about, issues that he grew up with and held dear I think he wrote poetry with a strong political message, you might not think so. So be it.”

Hindi Nationalism

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Cross posted on Tarikh Par Tarikh

Relating an incident related to the formation of the Eight Schedule of the Constitution (which contains a list of India’s official languages), Alok Rai says:

“Nehru had asked him [M. Satyanarayan] to draw up a list of languages, and he came up with a list of the twelve major regional languages of India. Nehru added a thirteenth, Urdu, before putting the list to the Committee. When “a Hindi friend” asked whose language this Urdu was, Nehru replied angrily:

Yeh merī aur mere bāp-dādā’oñ kī bhāshā hai (This is my language, the language of my ancestors!)

Thereupon the “Hindi friend” retorted:

Brāhman hote hue Urdu ko apnī bhāshā kehte ho, sharam nahīñ ātī? (Aren’t you ashamed, being a Brahmin, to claim Urdu as you language?)

Nehru did not reply. The Eighth Schedule was finally approved by the Constituent Assembly with the addition of one more language, Sanskrit.”

Of course, what the “Hindi friend” didn't know is that Kashmiri Brahmins (such as Nehru) as well as other upper-class urban Hindu communities such as Kayasts and Khatris had traditionally learnt and used Urdu before the creation of Shudh Hindi and its installation as the official language of India in 1947.

In fact, it is this act of creation that Alok Rai (who, coincidentally, is Hindi-Urdu author Premchand's grandson) outlines beautifully in his book Hindi Nationalism, from where this extract is taken. To quote again from the book itself, Hindi Nationalism is “a narrative of the violence done to the people vernacular Hindi by and in the name of “Hindi” [Shuddh Hindi], the Sanskritic usurper.” It is an account of how, Indian and Hindu nationalism intertwined in the late 19^th century to produce the hyper-Sankritised register of “Shudh Hindi” which is now the official language of India and forms the core of our education system. The book charts how this “Shudh Hindi” battled the already entrenched register of literary Urdu (in which the ancestors of Nehru had made their living), other forms of Hindi-Urdu such as Braj Bhasha as well as everyday spoken Hindi-Urdu (Bollywood language, if you will) to emerge as the primary language of the government of India.

If you've ever wondered why, say, the language of train announcements is so arcane or struggled with the bombastic vocabulary of Dinkar as a school student, this is a highly recommended read.

Bonus read:

A Debate Between Alok Rai and Shahid Amin Regarding Hindi: an engaging debate between historian Shahid Amin and the author Alok Rai around the book, amongst other things.

Dedh Ishqiya and Urdu in India Today

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First published in NewsYaps

In a riotously funny scene from recently released comic thriller Dedh Ishqiya, Jaan Mohammad (played by Vijay Raaz) aggressively threatens a very drunk Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) to leave town so that he can win the hand of the beautiful Begum Para (Madhuri Dixit). In a twist typical of the film, fist fights and gun brandishing suddenly give way to poetry, as Khalujaan picks up the word “wādā” (promise) used by Jaan and starts taunting him using a sher. A gangster by profession and somewhat removed from the world of poetry, Jaan retorts as best he can by racking his brains and coming up with the only sher he knows on “wādā. This change of playing field from violence to poetry, though, can only end badly for Jaan. His verse induces derisive laughter from Khalujaan who then points out that Jaan’s original sher spoke of “bādā” (wine) and not “wādā” at all. Jaan just confused the two rhyming words.

It is credit to the competence of director Abhishek Chaubey that the Bombay theatre I was in found the wordplay funny and laughed along with Khalu, in spite of the fact that very few would have been able to point out Jaan’s mistake themselves. Anupama Chopra, movie critic for the Hindustan Times, though, might have empathised more with Jaan and his struggles with High Urdu. While generally praising the film, she did end her review with one small regret: “I also struggled with the Urdu,” she said. “It was melodious but I wish I understood more of it.”

This frank admission, and the fact that Dedh Ishqiya is the only Bollywood film I’ve ever seen with English subtitles, contains within it some stark irony for an industry which, it could be said, was born into Urdu. As Mukul Kesavan has pointed out, Bollywood with its fantasy, musicals and location (Bombay) was an almost direct successor to Parsi theatre. And like the theatre, the new film industry adopted Urdu, given that it was the only language at the time which had any sort of pan-national appeal. To churn out words for this new industry, were recruited large numbers of Urdu writers and poets from North India. Bollywood’s Golden Age from the 40s to the 60s was studded with Urdudāns such as Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Saadat Hasan Manto, Sahir Ludhianvi, Shakeel Badayuni and, most relevant to this movie, Ismat Chughtai. Lihāf (Quilt), Chughtai’s story of lesbian love between a begum and her maid, forms one of the principal subplots within Dedh Ishqiya. The movie itself has a subtle hat tip to this sourcein the scene where Khalujaan and Babban have been tied up by Para and Muniya (Huma Qureshi). As the shadows of the two woman making love flit across the screen—in itself a symbol from Lihāf—Khalujaan remarks impishly to Babban, “thand lag rahī hai? Lihāf māng le!” (Feeling cold? Ask for a quilt).

To grant Chopra her limited point, the language of Dedh Ishqiya is particularly “high” for the average film of today. But go back just 50 years, and you would find a very similar linguistic standard prevalent in the industry, especially in the music. Wonder how a film reviewer reconciles her job as a critic when a film of just 50 years back would be inaccessible to her. But then in an industry where Katrina Kaif, a person who plays all her roles with a thick British accent, is the dominant star maybe Chopra is doing all right. And of course, there is the point that Chopra would hardly be alone. Whatever be the origins of Bollywood, the fact is that a very large majority of Indians would be unable to understand the sort of High Urdu that the movie uses—it’s not for nothing that the film carried English subtitles.

In a mark of the intelligence of the film though, one of the themes of Dedh Ishqiya is this very hollowness of Urdu in India today. Urdu started life as a standardised register of the local language of Delhi. As SR Faruqi points out in his book Early Urdu Literary Culture and History, “Urdu” itself is a metonym for the city of Delhi. The name “Urdu”, though, is very recent and the language has variously been called Hindvi/Gujri/Rekhta/Dakhani and even Hindi; as late as the early 20th century, the words “Hindi” and “Urdu” were being used interchangeably.

The development of Urdu as an elite language though was a rather late development in the history of North India. Throughout the medieval period, Persian had been the region’s lingua franca and official language. In fact it was so ingrained in India that when the British proposed to do away with Persian in 1839, 500 citizens from Dhaka, split almost equally amongst Hindu and Muslim, vigorously petitioned the government to desist from such a foolish move. In spite of this, the British did replace Persian and, in North India, introduced Urdu in its place as an official language. Unfortunately, the legacy of Farsi was less easy to shake off. The Urdu that took root in the offices of the Raj was corpulently Persianised. This was maybe a deliberate tactic by the clerks—mostly upper class Muslims, Kayasths, Kashmiri Brahmins and Khatris—who controlled the language and profited from the fact that the general populace was totally dependent on them for something as simple as comprehension. In many ways, this attitude was not dissimilar to that of the current Anglophone class which break out into paroxysms every time anyone so much as talks of replacing English with the local languages of each state.

As a reaction, the rural classes—who were mostly Hindu—championed the cause of Nagari using organisation such as the Nagari Pracharini Sabha (of Banaras) and the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (of Allahabad), both founded at the turn of the century. In this way, the origins of modern Hindi were utilitarian and commonsensical—it aimed to simplify Urdu. Unfortunately, this straightforward matter of language, as we all know, got violently communalised and to top it all, the end result was a register which was de-Persianised, as promised, but also corpulently Sanskritised, leading us all back to square one as far as ease of comprehension goes. Alok Rai calls this new register “school Hindi” and wryly remarks that this leads to children across the length and breadth of North India to valiantly struggle to learn a language which is supposed to be their mother tongue. It is no wonder that all popular culture in India, such as Bollywood, steers clear of either extreme and sticks to the spoken speech of Hindustan.

In 1947 though, the sharp politicisation of the Hindi-Urdu issue meant that this “School Hindi” was adopted as India’s official language. Suddenly, in places like Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, the birthplace of Urdu, Urdu stopped being taught and used in government. This lack of patronage had little effect on the everyday Urdu (or Hindustani) of spoken speech, a large portion of the language which was shared in common with Shudh Hindi. It did however have the effect of severelycurtailing the sphere of influence of High Urdu. A high or literary register without patronage is, by definition, not going to get very far and that is what happened. Post-1947, Urdu atrophied dramatically.

Normally, if this was any other country, High Urdu would have a dignified death much as Ottoman Turkish did when Ataturk changed the official language of Turkey to Modern Turkish. Indeed, since Urdu offers almost no economic benefits, the only people who study it today as a primary language are people who get this education free at madrasas and are too poor to pay for anything else. In India, though, the communal history of Hindi-Urdu, made Urdu one of various meaningless markers of Muslim identity that can be taken out and flogged whenever necessary. As an example, when AAP want to reach out to Muslims in Delhi, it releases an Urdu pamphlet. This is unneeded because firstly, a large number of Delhi Muslims would be unable to read the Urdu script in the first place and secondly, even those that do, will almost certainly read the Devanagri script better or, at least, just as well. If all AAP wanted to do was to communicate with Muslims, a Hindi pamphlet would have done a much better job. And of course, this was just a minor example. Governments have, for decades, used the “Muslim” symbolism of Urdu—a sort of internal Orientalism if you will—to great effect employing it as a diversionary tactic to get away with non-performance on rather more pressing issues such as health or sanitation.

Given that a majority of its characters are Muslims, Dedh Ishqiya might be classified as a modern “Muslim social”. True to its genre, the film does explore the stereotypical elements of elite Indo-Islamic culture. Dedh Ishqiya has havelīs, nawābs and begums, flowing sherwanīs and, of course, stars High Urdu. Unlike a traditional Muslim Social such as Umrao Jaan or Pakeezah (which would have High Urdu through and through), the movie functions on multiple planes of language. At the almost surrealistic mushairā-cum-swayamwar that Begum Para holds to choose a suitor for herself, the most mellifluous Urdu is spoken and, indeed, Chaubey and Bhardwaj take advantage of the register to produce some crackling repartee and wit. Things though start unravelling in the character of Jaan Mohammed, a local gangster looking to gentrify himself by marrying a begum. Respectability though needs to be earned and before he gets to become a nawāb he’ll have to get the language right.

Jaan’s battles with Urdu lead to some curious results. Throughout the movie he uses some high vocabulary (“shamshīr” for “talwār” and “gauhar” for ”hīre-motī”/) but slips up on the simplest of Urdu words, mispronouncing “Ishq” as “Issak” or “shart” as “sart”. And not only Jaan, for all the other characters, this High Urdu is just a mask put on to impress. Khalujaan, who is otherwise a talented poet, talks to his closest friend Babban in their common earthy register of Bhopali Urdu. The one time he does put on airs as a fake nawāb, Babban tells him rather plainly that “tumhārī sārī nawābīyat hai nā, picchwāde main ghusaid doongā” (I’ll stuff your airs up your ass). And when right towards the end of the movie, Jaan Mohammad despotically orders Para and Khalujaan to dance for him, one of his flunkies pipes up to complain, “Yeh itne dinon se ghazlein-wazlein sun ke nā badhazmī sī hoga’ī hai, sāli. Inse item number karwāte hain.” (I’m tired of all this high-falutin’ poetry. Let’s get them to do some item numbers).

This sort of linguistic meta-commentary is rare in Bollywood (Chupke Chupke is one exception which comes to mind), which is odd given how integral language is to the art of cinema. But Dedh Ishqiya does take a shot at it and skilfully uses the nuances of language to explore different shades of the story as well as make a larger point about the state of Urdu in India today. And that is just one the many reasons which make the movie a treat to watch.

A related post on the language Bollywood uses can be found here.
If this is the sort of thing that interests you, all posts filed under language can be found here.

The Future Language of India

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First published on NewsYaps

In 1916, the Mahatma spoke in Banaras Hindu University on the question of English. He said:

“I am hoping that this University will see to it that the youths who come to it will receive their instruction through the medium of their vernaculars. Our languages are the reflection of ourselves, and if you tell me that our languages are too poor to express the best thoughts, then say that the sooner we are wiped out of existence the better for us. Is there a man who dreams that English can ever become the national language of India? Why this handicap on the nation? Just consider for one moment what an unequal race our lads have to run with every English lad.”

I am unaware of the reaction to Gandhi’s confident claim expressing incredulousness at any Indian ever wanting English to be the national language. But the reaction to Mulayam Singh Yadav’s much more modest proposal that MPs in Parliament speak in Indian languages was met with a rather solid wave of disapproval. One headline from a piece published in the Mint called Mulayam “notoriously regressive” and attacked him for keeping “his people impoverished and vote-banked” (when nouns are being verbed you know things have gotten serious). The Times of India called the proposal “absurd” and opined that it leaked of “political hypocrisy”. The Indian Express, in an editorial, characterised this proposal as a “march to the past” and connected this with the overall failure of the SP government in UP.

That Mulayam’s proposal is impractical and will hardly change a thing is something which is obvious. In fact, this is a minor demand as far as he is concerned; in earlier times, Netaji had even demanded the banning of English from the country overall, the success of which can be gauged by having a look at the language this very write-up uses.

That being said, the reaction to this is almost as silly as the proposal in the first place. What our Anglophone class doesn’t realise is that there are large segments of the country which do have grievances with the heaven-born status that the language enjoys and it is this sentiment that Mulayam seeks to channel.

English as a glass ceiling

In a TV debate about this matter, Madhukar Jaitley of the SP rubbished claims to this being a regressive move and claimed that what was wrong was that you needed to know English—a language spoke by less than 10% of the country—to get a white-collar job. This is a point that is tough to argue with. India, burdened with the worst of colonialism and a particularly elitist culture, genuflects to English as few countries do. English, in India, is effectively a glass ceiling. You might be the smartest person out there for the job, but if you’re “Hindi-medium” then, well, you might as well forget it.

This extreme position that English occupies is something that a lot of the people who are befuddled by Mulayam’s stance don’t get. Yes, “we should love all languages” as Derek O’Brien condescendingly reminds us, but that’s easier said than done when this particular language is one of the major things that stands between you and social advancement. This is a point that many people who extol the English-is-global-language point don’t get. To quote from Sandipan Deb’s piece in Mint:

“Whether we like it or not—and Mulayam can have long discussions with Germans or Russians or Arabs about it through English interpreters—English is our planet’s principle medium of both communication and commerce... The Chinese, for instance, recognize that and have been pouring in enormous resources to teach their children the language.”

This is true. English is the principal medium of communication globally and if you wanted to have an international conversation, you would have to use English. But what about if each of these countries wanted to have an intra-national conversation? Would an Egyptian speak to an Egyptian in English? And Germany already follows Mulayam’s advice of using its native language in its legislatures. If Sandipan really did want to copy what the Germans, Arabs and Chinese were doing, he’d pretty much be agreeing with Mulayam. The point is simple: let us not confuse a global lingua franca—a link language—with our internal languages of business and governance. As far as the latter is concerned, Mulayam, the Germans, the Arabs, the Russians, the Chinese and almost every nation on earth agrees that a native language should be used. As for English being used as a global lingua franca, no one really disagrees with that, or should not at the very least. But as anyone who has observed India would know, English has gone far beyond being just a utilitarian global lingua franca and occupies a position of power today in India. If English was actually just a lingua franca, it would be absent in linguistically uniform places such as Delhi or not find a place in Bombay where, since it is understood by so few people, it would do a horrible job of acting as a lingua franca.

So why is English still India’s lingua franca?

Talk of lingua franca though brings us to another issue: India’s diversity. Not only was Sandipan’s comparison to Germany wrong because it ended up supporting Mulayam’s point, but it was also wrong because India is wildly multilingual unlike Germany. Not only does India need a lingua franca to communicate with other countries, its regions also need one to talk to other regions of India.

Here the contention of the Hindiwallahs is that since Hindi is already spoken by such a vast number of Indians (~33% speak it as their native tongue as per the 2001 census) it is the natural choice as a national language. Unfortunately, learning a new language is not a simple first-past-the-post exercise. For the huge number of non-Hindi speakers, learning a new language has to confer commiserate economic and social benefits for them to take the time and effort to learn it. Hindi clearly did not offer that in 1947. Yet Hindi was sought to be imposed, by fiat almost, on non-Hindi speakers. Almost as a back lash, non-Hindi speakers stuck all the more to English. As Anna Durai, put it across rather eloquently: “Why should Hindi be our national language? Is it because the majority speak Hindi? Then why is the Peacock our national bird and not the crow despite the latter being the most numerous?”

What is odd is that even after 66 years of Hindi promotion by the Centre, it has been unable to create enough critical mass for Hindi. This can be explained maybe by the fact that the Hindi promoted by the Centre is hardly even spoken by the 33% who label themselves as “Hindi speakers”. Our census, when it comes to Hindi is a bit of a joke. In 1881, for example, the census recorded 98% of UPites to be ‘Hindustani’ speakers. By 1951 that number had dropped to 10% and by 1961 to 0.1%! The truth of the matter is that Hindi, even in the Hindi heartland is an urban language and the rural areas speak a variety of languages such as Avadhi, Braj or what have you. To further weaken the cause, the Hindi that the Centre promotes is itself far removed from the urban Hindi of, say, Delhi, Lucknow or Kanpur, being highly Sanskritised and far removed from common speech. It’s a bit like the British Government promoting Shakespearean English today. Thus you have the extremely odd sight of signs in government offices in Patna or Lucknow which advertise and promote Hindi. I know off no other major language in the world which needs to be advertised to its own native speakers.

Given these deficiencies, Hindi is far from established in its own heartland, thus it’s not surprise that it hasn’t been able to take over the country. The elites prefer to stick to English and it remains the language of aspiration.

The Future

So is this the way it’s going to be? Is the rise and rise of English a fait accompli? It’s hard to imagine the decline of a language seemingly as entrenched as English. But the same could maybe have been said about Latin in Europe and Sanskrit in India: both languages once were widespread and powerful but lie dead today.

Personally, I don’t think that English has too bright a future in India as a popular language. English is spoken by too thin a patina of the Indian population to ever be a true lingua franca except amongst the elite. In spite of the bungling and chauvinism by the Hindiwallahs, this lingua franca is still to be Hindi. Indeed, if we consider the spread of Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani over the past 400 years, it’s been nothing short of remarkable. What started out as the language of Delhi and a tiny sliver of Western Uttar Pradesh is now understood, at least at some basic level, from Peshawar in West to Calcutta in the East and from Srinagar in the North to Bangalore in South.  In the 19^th century, this was initially driven by the adoption of Urdu by the North Indian elite and the British Raj. The real fillip, though, came when the Bombay film industry, located far away from the Hindi heartland in Maratha country, adopted the simple spoken form of Hindi-Urdu as their language. If today the arcane register propagated by the Indian government drives people away, the shine and glamour of Bollywood has made Hindi appealing to large sections of the Indian population. This engine has driven the penetration of Hindi into far off regions like Kerala and rural Bengal. In fact, on a visit to Bangladesh, I found that while most couldn’t speak Hindi all that well, years of Bollywood had ensured that they understood the language just fine.

Of course, official languages require more than the entertainment industry. But as a popular language, the way things stand, Mulayam can take heart from the fact that Hindi has a far greater chance of becoming India’s lingua franca than English does.

Aap, Tum and Tu

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Came across this great piece from regular suspect Johnson in the Economist on how formal pronouns for 'you' are dying out in Europe.

Is the process being mirrored in India? Hindi-Urdu has a three-tiered pronoun system--tu, tum, aap. Is that ending?

Most people have stopped using the verb inflection associated with "aap" preferring to simplify things by using the one for "tum" ("aap aa'oge" instead of "aap aa'i'e'ga"). When I first moved to Delhi, out of habit, I stuck with the "correct" system for some time but then increasingly found myself mixing stuff up. Guess, it won't be long before 'aap' dies out completely much as 'thou' did in English. Something that might lead to much pain for chacha Ghalib who once complained:

Teri mehfil mein aakar bade be-aabroo hue

Aap se tum aur tum se tu hue

Language Lessons on the Bombay Local

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(A version of this was first published on NewsYaps)

The Bombay local is a fascinating place. It does a great job of bringing us closer to humanity—a lot of humanity when you’re travelling during rush hour. And it makes you appreciate the important things in life like...air, or deodorant.

It also, sometimes gives you an interesting close-up (some would say too close) of life in urban India and its peccadilloes.

Here’s an account of an interesting exchange I witnessed this morning.

During rush hour, space is low and, as a result, tempers often run high. In the bogie I was in, two people (I’ll call them Manjrekar and Sharma) got into a short altercation. Manjrekar chided Sharma for being a space hogger. Interestingly, he spoke in Marathi. No matter the language politics which surrounds the issue, in Bombay the lingua franca is unequivocally Hindi. In the public spaces of the city, Hindi is the preferred and indeed only medium of communication.

Either Sharma was the quiet sort or maybe he was penitent (because he might have actually been at fault), whatever be the reason, he chose not to say anything in return. This lack of response was clearly unsatisfactory for Manjrekar who was in the mood for a bit of scene. He turned to his friend, who we’ll call Tendulkar, and complained loudly about “people like Sharma”. Again in Marathi.

“People like this, think they own the train. They’ll just climb on and take up so much space.”

Tendulkar, who clearly had some strong views about the evils of space-hogging himself, nods and, just to make sure his opinion has been recorded, looks back at Sharma and scowls.

Manjrekar also looks back at Sharma and says, in Marathi: “People like these need to get off the local and take a cab. They’re better suited to that.”

In all of this Sharma remains quiet. Sharma is dressed for office, by the way, and is wearing a neatly pressed checked shirt and formal trousers. He’s carrying a black leather laptop bag in this right –hand. From his right breast-pocket snake out a pair of white headphones which now lie around his neck, unplugged from his ears. He wears a pair of expensive, rimless spectacles, which seem horribly unsuited to the hustle-bustle of the local.

This Gandhian lack of response on Sharma’s part now gets Tendulkar’s goat. This time he talks directly to Sharma. He says, in English: Shouldn’t you make space for others when you’re on a train? Other people need to get on and off too you know!”

Before Sharma has a chance to reply, Manjrekar addresses Tendulkar. Irritably he says, “Why did you have to speak to him in English? Speak to him in Marathi!”. In Marathi, of course

Tendulkar, replies: “Yes, yes, I just thought...”

“Thought? Thought what? Get rid of this slave mentality. If you can speak to me in Marathi why did you use English with him?”

Sensing weakness in the opposing camp, Sharma at last found his voice.

“I know all the languages. Talk to me in English, Hindi, Marathi, whatever you want”, he boasted... in Hindi.

Unfortunately, by now the train was pulling into Tendulkar and Majrekar’s station so maybe because of that neither of them attempted a response. Anyway, by then, the main target of Manjrekar’s ire seemed to be Tendulkar for his faux pas of switching languages.

Without any further remark the two of them got off.

Lessons from Allahabad

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The vocabulary of a language can, sometimes, tell us a lot about the people that use it and the circumstances they live in. The most famous case in point of course being the (incorrect) belief that Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. In spite of the untruth of this particular example, the existence of a particular word in a language can sometimes hint at the importance (or even existence) of the idea it describes.  Thus, it’s not surprising that (spoken) Hindi uses English loan words to describe modern technology such as telephones or TVs. Or even Western concepts such as “secularism”.

This, though, is a two way street. There are concepts that Hindi is much more adept at describing than English. For example the “process of stealing electricity from the main grid by connecting a wire to it” takes up a lot a lot of breathe to express in Angrezi. Allahabadi Hindi, though, has one sweet and simple word for it: ‘katiyaa’ (cut-ee-aa). And from my experience (of admittedly only a day in Allahabad), the word, unlike say, 'theft', carries no negative connotations. To 'katiyaa' in Allahabad is normal. It's what people like us do.

In a city where there is hardly any regular power, power theft is widely practiced and, for lack of an option, condoned, I would have expected nothing less.

Thoughts on Hindi Profanity

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(First Published on NewsYaps)

A furore has been raised in India over Modi’s puppy remark . When asked whether he regretted the 2002 riots he replied, saying, “any person if we are driving a car, we are a driver, and someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy (kutte ka bachchaa was the exact term used) comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not?”.

Without going into the merits of the controversy, it is interesting to know that most if not all Westerners would be completely befuddled by all of this. This is because the word ‘dog’ hardly has the same negative connotations in English as it does in Hindi. Calling someone a puppy means, if anything, something mildly positive in the language. In Hindi, though, kutte ka bachchaa turns out to be a rather offensive phrase.

Given how most readers of this article would be bilingual in English and an Indian language, it's interesting to see just how different the principles of profanity are in these two linguistic cultures.

English swear words can, by and large, be grouped into three categories: body parts (male and female), intercourse (the F-word and some others) and bodily functions (the most obvious being "shit"). Once upon a time, there would have been a fourth category: religious. Till some time back, a curse like “damn” (wishing damnation upon a person) was quite an escalation when it came to verbal violence. Most famously the 1939 film Gone with the Wind used the line, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and created quite a bit of controversy. Today, however, these words would act as mere interjections and can be used in most setting without any danger of appearing too rude.

Most subcontinental languages such as Hindi have a rather different set of, er, principles. They can broadly be divided into religious/caste, body parts, incest and honour.

The first silo, religious/caste swearing in Hindi draws from two main sources: Hinduism and Islam. Ironically for Modi, the fact that kutta is a swear word in Hindi is, in all probability, drawn from the Islamic contempt for the animal. Similarly, pig/suar (much like kutte also used commonly as a paternal slur as most famously illustrated by Mr Gabbar Singh in Sholay) is also used as another swear word which draws upon the intense Islamic dislike for the animal. The other major source of religious swearing is the caste system. Hindi has a large number of swear words which are actually references to caste. Chamaar, a very common swear word in Delhi is actually the name of a Dalit caste whose most famous member is Mayawati. Similarly for Kanjar, a caste which once upon a time practised hereditary prostitution. The word Kaminaa comes from a Persian word Kamin which means “low” (neech) and is equivalent to calling someone “low-caste”. So the next time, you feel all smug about Indians leaving caste behind, just listen around. These “innocuous” gaalis show just how embedded caste is, even in upper-class Indian society.

Body parts is the only category in common with English and refers to mostly the genitals, male as well as female.

By far the most macabre and unique part of the Hindi swearing system is its emphasis on incest. Hindi’s most obscene gaali refers to intercourse with one's mother, the number two being, somewhat unimaginatively, intercourse with one’s sister. In what is most interesting, the Hindi gaali for intercourse with your mother actually uses the Persian word for mother. I guess actually using the common Hindi word 'maan' was just too close to the bone. So the actual gaali is a half-bowdlerised, somewhat more palatable version which uses the word, maadar instead. It’s like the speaker is saying, “I'm going to abuse the shit out of your venerable maataaji but maybe if I do it in flowery Persian, you won't mind all that much, sir now will you?”.

The biggest category of Hindi gaalis, though, refers to various notions of honour prevalent throughout the subcontinent. Honour encompasses a very wide field. Most of it though has to do with sexual dominance over another presumably weaker rival. Hence, in Hindi, a boast by the male to penetrate other male is a common gaali. As is, of course, the more heterosexual “I will f*ck you”. Oddly enough, Hindi has no equivalent to English’s most common swear word, ‘f*cuker’ which, if you come to think of it, isn’t all that odd in the first place. We all are, or at least aspire to be (looking at you Engineers), ‘f*cukers’. Why it’s a term of ridicule is beyond me.

As this example shows, India, with its casual acceptance of homosexuality (as opposed to the West) is (almost) an equal opportunity offender when it comes to sexual gaalis. That, of course, doesn’t means that we aren’t completely messed up as well. Sex in India is largely treated as a battlefield of honour. And all sexual relationships involve the bartering of honour, wherein one person loses it and the other gains it, no matter how “legitimate” the sexual relationship. Take the word saalaa for example. It's probably Hindi's most popular gaali and is only mildly offensive. It literally means one's wife's brother. By calling someone a saalaa you are in short proclaiming that you dominate him because you have bedded his sister. Similar messed up connotations exists for sasur (father-in-law) whereby you have now bedded his daughter. This might seem odd to most people reading this now but these swear words serve to illustrate a deep-seated Indian mindset about the shame embedded in just about any sexual relationship. Recall any Indian wedding and the impossible cockiness displayed by the ladkewalon. It flows from the same mindset as a saalaa. The marriage is a sexual exchange where the men are supposedly superior to the women.  Tehmina Durrani’s novel “Blasphemy” talks about a Sindhi custom which takes this mindset to its (logical?) extreme. A certain community in Sindh actually goes so far as to mourn the marriage of a daughter. "Why?" asks a character in the novel. "Because it means allowing a man to have intercourse with her" is the answer. Much like Dworkin and her book Intercourse, subcontinental societies take an extreme, male supremist view of all sex (“legitimate” or not) as a form of “domination”. And this view is so widespread that a swear word like saalaa is considered mild.

Grim, right? Remember all of this the next time someone calls you a saalaa in jest. You just hit back with antediluvian, male-chauvinist, sex-hating person. That’ll show him.

P.S: A short note on Hindi’s second most popular gaali after saalaa: ch*tiyaa. It literally means one born of a vagina which basically describes (almost) all of humanity. Why it’s a term of abuse is beyond me. This swear word might be of recent provenance given that it finds no place in John T. Platts famous Hindi-Urdu dictionary complied in 1884. Fans of the song Bhaag DK Bose will be pleased to know that Platts does take cognisance of this term which when affixed with the possessive ka gives rise to a synonym of ch*tiya.

Further Reading:
An earlier post on Hindi swearing: Normal Born Brother-in-Law
An interesting podcast on the history of swearing in the Western world

The Language Revolt of 2013

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(First published on NewsYaps)

The Language Revolt has broken out, ladies and gentlemen. This is a battle for Human Civilisation as we know it.

The Words have risen.

To avoid any confusion, I will begin at the beginning and then go on till I reach the end. I will then stop.

Mankind’s history has been a long saga of man ruling over man. This social system is responsible for all order, all that’s good and all progress. But keeping this order intact is not easy, my friends. It requires hard work, brains and, most of all, language. For all of human history, language has been a perfect slave for the Rulers. You can have all the guns, tanks and armies in the world but your rule will be little less than a blimp if you do not have the Words fighting by your side. Whoever controls the Words has, throughout history, controlled the world.

But how, you ask?

An old master once remarked:” When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean”. We Rulers have perfected the art and science of controlling Words. The meanings of Words have been twisted, contorted and, in some cases, reinvented altogether to help control the Ruled. Armies and tanks control via force; and force, as Gandhiji has shown, is weak—it’s temporary and ephemeral. To really control people you need to mess with their tiny little heads. And for that we have Words. These little slave soldiers of ours go in and lock onto your brains. And from then on, we own you. You think what we want you to and, consequently, do what we want you to. Muhahaha! (the laugh’s corny, I know, but come on, it’s fun).

You don’t believe me do you? You think this is some kooky joke. You think I’m just making it all up like those IPL matches? Don’t worry, I have proof.

Democracy: What does it mean? Who does it benefit? Where do we get it? You’d think this was an easy one, right? Naah. “Democracy” is what the US imports into Iraq as it bombs it into rubble. “Democracy” is what India brings to the tribals in its forests as it strips the land of its minerals.

You see what we did there? We took an innocuous, well-meaning word and used it to mess with your brains, all so that we could propagate our rule. Smart, no?

But of course, all that’s coming to end! All of it! The bloody Words have stopped listening! They’ve suddenly developed a mind of their own; maybe even a conscience. They say they’ll only mean what they mean from now on. They won’t listen to us.

Which is why all we have now is chaos.

Just the other day, the US president wanted to praise his army of occupation in Iraq. “As Americans, let us never, ever forget that our freedom is only sustained because there are people who are willing to fight for it, to stand up for it, and in some cases, lay down their lives for it,” is what he wanted to say.

But instead of “Freedom” what he said was “oil supplies”.

“As Americans, let us never, ever forget that our oil supplies are only sustained because there are people who are willing to fight for it, to stand up for it, and in some cases, lay down their lives for it.”

“Freedom” had had enough. It refused to comply. Obama was left dumbfounded. All his protestations, his anger was futile. Everyone knows you can’t threaten a Word. It’s too powerful.

And this spread across the world. In India, on Facebook, the word “Equality” revolted when used by a certain Mr Ravi Singh as he posted his third anti-reservation post of the day. “We want equality in college admissions” is what he wanted to post but the phrase “but want to conveniently paper over thousands of years of inequality” somehow got added on. You should have seen the look on his face.

The word “terrorism” now attaches itself to all acts of political violence even if the perpetrator is White or even a rioter from Gujarat. Indian politicians regularly trip up now when they use the word “justice”. Most of the times, they are unable to say anything and sometimes they end up saying “injustice” in its stead.

Indian families have stopped calling their daughters betaa and Fair and Lovely ads seem to be unable to use the word “beauty” when describing the after effects of their products.

McDonald’s, particularly, has been badly affected. Its slogan now is, “I’m meh-ing it”. “Low fat” chips have now become “low fat but still high calorie” chips. And Coke’s “Open Happiness” has become “Open Fatness”. Even the “Married yet innocent” matrimonial ads haven’t gotten away. The word “innocent” has been variously replaced by words such as “virgin” and even “recipient of hymen reconstructive surgery”.

It’s chaos, ladies and gentlemen, chaos.

A long time back, a certain Mr George Orwell (of Motihari, Bihar) had remarked that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

And was he right. Imagine where humanity would be without a little bit of respectable murder and some gas. This Language Revolt is the end, ladies and gentlemen. I tell you, it’s the end.

Zabaan Sambhaal Ke: The Evolution of Language in Bollywood

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(First published on NewsYaps)

The elite in India treat their own languages rather oddly. We live our lives in our mother tongues but when it comes to anything serious, say education or for that matter, online articles (ahem!), we immediately turn to English. As a result, our languages are extremely stunted when it comes to being used as vehicles of our own culture. India’s most talked about novelist, for example, isn’t a Hindi, Bengali or Tamil writer, it’s, whether you like him or not, Chetan Bhagat. In all of this, cinema comes as breath of fresh air. It’s the only place where the masses as well as the elite come together and partake of art in their own language. Which is why it’s so interesting to see how cinema, and specifically Bollywood—as it completes its a hundred years—uses language to express itself.

Since this is a piece on the language Bollywood uses, I'm going to start by defining a few terms. Firstly, I am going to consider Hindi and Urdu to be the same language. This is not my personal opinion but the standard linguistic view given the two have identical grammar. Of course, that’s not to say that there are no differences within the language. The language exists in a continuum where you can use Persian words (Urdu) or Sanskrit words (Hindi) to express yourself. So for the sake of this article, I will refer to this common language as Hindustani and affix Persianised or Sanskritised as adjectives wherever necessary. So, for example, Ghalib's poems are written in Persianised Hindustani and Dinkar's in Sanskritised Hindustani. Capiche?

The Beginning (1930s-1960s)

Unlike Ghalib or Dinkar’s poetry, though, Bollywood has always been a commercial endeavour, a means to make money. For this, it has always had to cater to the lowest common denominator which means that the language it has had to use has always been the popular, day-to-day dialect that is spoken in cities across North India. Back when talkies first came into being, everyday Hindustani, not very different from what we speak today (minus the English vocabulary), ruled the roost as an everyday language and lingua franca. However, a highly Persianised idiom was also popular, given its wide spread as the official register of education and administration (Urdu along with English were the two official languages of British India). Modern Sanskritised Hindustani (Shudh Hindi) was still in its infancy then—the first work of literature in that register had come out as late as 1888—the novel Chandrakanta, which was, a century later, made into the extremely popular TV show. So, for example, when Ram Prasad Bismil wanted to write a popular song of resistance, he penned down the fairly Persianised Sarfaroshi ki Tamanna. While that song is still extremely popular today, most people wouldn’t even know what the word ‘sarfarosh’ in its title means (farosh means vendor. The word, therefore, means someone who is ready to give away his head i.e. a daredevil). Same goes for Netaji’s INA, two-thirds of whose motto, “Ittehad , Itmad aur Qurbani” (unity, faith and sacrifice) would seem incomprehensible to Indians today given its heavy Persian tilt. And when Gandhi wanted to promote a new system of education he gave it the name Nai Taaleem and did not, as the government does today, use the word shikshaa.

Given this state of affairs at the time, it’s not surprising that Bollywood started off with a Persianised idiom. The name of the first talkie—Alam Ara (Adorning the World)—itself attests to that. And while it would need to be “translated” for most Indians today, the film’s success meant that at the time everybody did get the meaning just fine.

The real force of Persianisation, though, wasn’t in the titles or the dialogues, which were still, more or less, in everyday Hindustani, it was in the lyrics. Nobody typifies this more than Sahir Ludhianvi who, like many lyricists at that time, was also an Urdu poet. Here’s a sample of some of the words from his most famous film, Pyaasa (taken from the song, Jinhe Naaz Hai Hind Par Vo Kahaan Hain :

Muhaafiz, ismat, zard, dareechon, fiqare, tanuumand, ham-jins, ummat, rehbaron, manzar

Bet you didn’t get too many. While this song was written only 50-odd years back, given its vocabulary, it’ll be incomprehensible to most today. India, in 1957, though, was a very different country. Far from being incomprehensible, the songs of Pyaasa were, to use a Bollywood term, a super hit and Sahir was the star credited for their success. In fact, so miffed was SD Burman (the composer for Pyaasa) for the attention and acclaim that Sahir got, that he refused to work with him from then on. Pyaasa made Sahir such a celebrity that he actually got paid more than the singers who sang his lyrics, something that would be unheard of today.

In the Middle (1970s-1980s)

30 years and counting as a free country, India had a whole new generation without any formal Urdu education. To quote from a Sahir poem written in 1968:

Jin shehron may goonji thi Ghalib ki nava barson
Un shehron may ab Urdu benaam-o-nishan thehri

(Cities, where for years Ghalib’s voice echoed/In those very cities, Urdu is now without a trace)

Without formal education, the capacity of the paying public to follow highly Persianised vocabulary declined. “Yeh public hai, sab janti hai”(the public knows everything) sang Rajesh Khanna for Roti. Bollwywood’s faith in the public was just as strong. Given its audience’s new linguistic capabilities, it toned down some of its own high falutin’ Persian vocabulary. Sahir himself had to adapt. His most famous song from the period, Kabhie Kabhie is a highly simplified version of one of his poems (recited by Amitabh’s character here).

This period saw a very interesting linguistic trend. For half a century now, Bollywood had used a register oscillating between everyday Hindustani and Persianised Hindustani to express itself. But 30 years after independence, the development of Sanskritised Hindustani had made Shudh Hindi a player as well. And, moreover, given its use by academia, literature and the government, the register carried a weightiness of its own. This is why, as Mukul Kesavan notes in his fantastic essay, Urdu, Awadh and Tawaif: the Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema, when directors such as Benegal and Nihalani wanted to title their New Wave films, they chose Sanskritised names such as Ankur, Nishant, Manthan, Bhumika, Akrosh and Ardhsatya. They wanted a clear demarcation between the mainstream, “song-and-dance” Bollywood and themselves. Choosing weighty Sanskritised titles, never used before in the industry, helped them achieve that branding.

Now (1990s- )

A spurt of old-style Persianised lyrics came in the 90s. Unfortunately, however, these were the last throes of a dying animal. This period is typified by the cringe-inducing vacuousness of Sameer with his endless cycle of sanams and saajans, dils and mohabbat. More of a caricature than anything else.

It took some time but as Bollywood entered the 2000s, it had made yet another linguistic shift. This time it introduced a language with generous helpings of English vocabulary, in keeping with the current register prevalent in urban India and even in large parts of rural India. While on a trip to Chhapra in Bihar, a waiter in a local dhaba was unable to understand me when I asked him whether he had any “ghosht” or “maans” dishes. Comprehension dawned on him though when I used the word “meat”. That’s how embedded English vocabulary is in India today so it’s not surprising that Bollywood has followed suit.

Just take a look at some of our recent film titles: Mere Dad Ki Maruti, I Me aur Main, Murder, Anybody can Dance, No one Killed Jessica, Bodyguard, Rockstar, Agent Vinod, Vicky Donor, I Hate Love Storys...you get the point. English vocabulary is today a significant part of Bollywood’s reality.

“I can talk English. I can walk English. I can laugh English. Because English is a very phunny language,” rattled off Amitabh Bacchan’s character in the 1982 movie Namal Halal, poking fun at the Queen’s language. In 2007 though, one of Bheja Fry’s main comedic elements was the fact that the character of Bharat Bhushan (Vinay Pathak) spoke purely in Hindi. In less than three decades Bollywood went from making fun of English to being made fun of because one did not know the language.

The last bastion that English vocabulary is still to breach in Bollywood remains song lyrics. This is a hurdle that, interestingly, Sanskritised Hindustani has still not been able to clear. Songs would still use a dil rather than hriday, kismat rather than bhagya and khoon rather than rakt. In fact, the Sanskritised Hindustani equivalents, if used, would sound downright odd in some cases. English, though, has had better luck.  In Karan Johar’s saccharine sweet family saga, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Hrithik Roshan woos Kareena by crooning, “You are my Sonia” as a crowd of blondes gyrate behind him. Sheila’s introduction to her fans is “My name is Sheila” and, while in an earlier age, love would drive people paagal or deewaana, Aishwariya, instead, is driven “crazy” in Dhoom 2 by her lover’s charms.  Even Gulzar had to bend, getting his characters to ask “personal” questions (Kajrare from Bunty and Bubbly). That said, as the recent song Khushamdeed (Go Goa Gone) shows, Persianised vocabulary does pop up now and then as far as lyrics go even as more Anglicised vocabulary takes over the dialogues.

Given the trend, though, it’s only a matter of time before the industry switches completely to Hinglish as the standard medium of expression. If you’re a purist, this might make you sad. Tough cookies but Bollywood really doesn’t care. It has accurately reflected the way Indians speak for 80 years now and that’s something that is not going to change.

Heh. Literally!

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This is, literally, one of the coolest concepts for a blog I have come across. “Literally” is an English language grammar blog tracking abuse of the word “literally”. Sadly, it hasn’t been updated in a year and a half but even so, what an idea, sir ji.

Here's the blog: Literally

Johnson, over at the Economist, has a nice little post up on this which explains why you shouldn't get all that angry the next time a friend exclaims, "it was literally raining cats and dogs" or some such thing.

Diss

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I’m usually not the nimblest of people when it comes to keeping up with slang but there is one word, apparently originating from Black rap, that I really like: diss. The word is rather usefull in a number of situations and, conveniently, conveys a shade of meaning that is a bit different from its mother word, disrespectful. Its rise, incidently, has been precipitous. I don’t remember it even existing, at least in an Indian context, five or so years back; today everyone’s using it. In fact it even made it to the Guardian today, in an article by Pankaj Mishra no less:

“….even dissing their murderous Hindu nationalism as opportunistic, a mere “talking point”

Good stuff.

English? #Fail

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For all our chest-beating about how important English has been to our economic rise, a recent survey ranks India 29th out off 44 countries in fluency of speaking English. To put that in perspective, China, a country against whom our trump card is supposed to be our knowledge of English, ranks just a place below us at 30.In fact, the Chinese people of Taiwan beat us by ranking four places ahead of us.

The Johnson blog at the Economist blames the elitism inherent in India’s approach towards English:

“Finally, one surprising result is that China and India are next to each other (29th and 30th of 44) in the rankings, despite India’s reputation as more Anglophone. Mr Hult says that the Chinese have made a broad push for English (they're "practically obsessed with it”). But efforts like this take time to marinade through entire economies, and so may have avoided notice by outsiders. India, by contrast, has long had well-known Anglophone elites, but this is a narrow slice of the population in a country considerably poorer and less educated than China. English has helped India out-compete China in services, while China has excelled in manufacturing. But if China keeps up the push for English, the subcontinental neighbour's advantage may not last.”

If language/linguistics interests you, the blog is highly recommended, by the way.

And since Gandhi’s methods and thoughts seem to be the flavour of the season—so influential has been Hazare’s fast that even Pappu Yadav, the Bihar strongman and convicted murderer, has gone on a bhook hartal against corruption—here’s an excerpt from a speech given by the Mahatma in 1916:

“I am hoping that this University (he was speaking at the Benares Hindu University) will see to it that the youths who come to it will receive their instruction through the medium of their vernaculars. Our languages the reflection of ourselves, and if you tell me that our languages are too poor to express the best thought, then say that the sooner we are wiped out of existence the better for us. Is there a man who dreams that English can ever become the national language of India? Why this handicap on the nation? Just consider for one moment what an equal race our lads have to run with every English lad.

I had the privilege of a close conversation with some Poona professors. They assured me that every Indian youth, because he reached his knowledge through the English language, lost at least six precious years of life. Multiply that by the numbers of students turned out by our schools and colleges, and find out for yourselves how many thousand years have been lost to the nation.”

Sour Grapes and Sweet Mangos

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Mary Roy explains how the craze for an English-medium education in a country that is not an English-speaking one is killing, well, education in that country:

Watching these children being taught is to be amazed, and horrified. In an English recitation class in lower primary, for example, you will hear 40 children chanting in unison, with accompanying actions, “The fox jumped and jumped and jumped. The grapes were too high. The fox said, ‘The grapes are sour’.” The intonation must be just right—but understanding what you are saying is not a requirement.

Indeed, the grapes are too high—India, a country which has consistently failed in providing even the basics to its people, would never be able to get enough of its people to speak the English language well enough—a fact that is at odds with the status that we accord to English. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we have to lie about the grapes being sour; nope. We just have to realise that the fruits that we have are good enough and we don’t need no grapes.

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An earlier write-up on this topic: Talk English, Walk English

Talk English, Walk English

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The Samajwadi Party manifesto is not exactly bestseller material (strictly speaking other than ‘guide books’ for IIT-JEE, nothing in our country is). In spite of that, however, the manifesto had achieved a considerable amount of infamy for the single sin of calling for the abolition of English in our schools. Newspapers went apoplectic, lengthy editorials were written and English news channels interviewed people who, with some passion, compared the SP to the Taliban. Now without resorting to any tactics of Reductio ad Hitlerum, let me try and state why the concept is, here at least, not totally in the wrong (although, it must be said that since the point is being made by Mulayam Singh’s party, it does reek ,somewhat, of hypocrisy).

But before that I must introduce you to the concept of the Rooster Coop—an excellent paradigm from Arvind Adiga’s otherwise unremarkable book, The White Tiger.

“Go to Old Delhi ...and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly coloured roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages...They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.”

And the English Language is, unfortunately, one of the components of that coop.

In India, English is, without a doubt, the pre-eminent language. As a rule of thumb, anybody who is somebody will try and express himself in English as opposed to his native language. Which is not remarkable considering most avenues to success in our country require knowledge of English. Which in India, a country that has a minuscule minority who speak the language, is odd to say the least. After all there’s only one thing worse than discrimination against a minority and that’s discrimination against the majority.

This fascination of ours with the language leads to some odd consequences, sometimes. You could for example, write your higher secondary examination in, say, Bengali. Not only that, you might be a bright young lad with an affinity towards the sciences and, by extension, engineering. But unless you know a certain language, you would never be ‘good enough’ to study in, say, the IITs.

Now there are a few arguments invariably put forward towards maintaining this status quo.

The first is the English-is-a-global-language one. Classical Rooster Coop, of course. How many Indians, as a percentage, would ever be in a position to interact with the world? So in any case this line of reasoning would, at best help a small minority. Secondly, I’d say there are quite a few countries that, without adopting English as a Holy Grail, have done remarkable well for themselves, globally. We could, maybe, present the Japanese as an example? Language is only a means of communication—the world respects ideas not the medium, and I can think of no better way for ideas to be nurtured than to educate a person in his mother tongue.

The second is the Hobson’s choice one—which single language in a diverse, multilingual country like India would work other than English? So in other words, a person must give up his claim to being educated in mother tongue and learn a foreign one (prohibitively expensive for most Indians) to keep the country going. Shouldn’t the Union of India actually help its citizens rather than burdening them with so high a cost of having to abandon their native languages if they would want to advance in life?

So what’s the alternative? Should Hindi be imposed instead of English? Hardly. In my opinion, no one single language should be imposed. India, for better or for worse, just isn’t a single language country. Maybe we could learn something from the EU. Some people would want the EU to become a federation in the near future. Then would one language be imposed through Europe? Would students of History in Germany be forced to study the history of WW2 in English? I hardly think so. So why impose that burden on India, whose people are many times poorer than those in the EU and, therefore, much less suited to take on the burden of learning a foreign tongue?

English’s charmed status, on the other hand, does incalculable harm by strengthening the Coop and making social mobility doubly difficult. In any “middle-class” job, knowledge of the language is de rigeur . So, now not only will a person from an economically disadvantaged background have to struggle to acquire the skills needed for the job, he will also have to spend considerable time and money to acquire a functioning knowledge of the English language. Most Indians, of course, can hardly do the former, much less attempt to accomplish the latter. And so we have an automatic contraction of the list of eligible candidates for the job, irrespective of the actual skills needed for the job. Only people whose parents were rich enough to get them tutored in English need apply.

And so the Coop remains intact and the chickens remain confined in their cages to faithfully await the butcher’s next sale.

Pitha Versus Papa

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This is a Yahoo! Answers page which asks a fairly innocuous question: How should one address family members in Hindi or Bengali? Fairly simple question, you'd say, and I'd agree. However, there is a twist in the tale:



So 'Sa' thinks that nani is Hindi for maternal grandmother but she also opines that papa and mummy are the Hindi translation for father and mother, respectively!

Weird, isn't it? Well actually, it's not. You might think that Sa's a bit soft in the head (and she might be for all you know) but this answer is, in an Indian urban context at least, spot on.

There is a particularly Indian mindset that we have, or maybe we're just misinformed, that language is something that's ossified in time and place. Which is absurd. The vocabulary of any language is an entity which, like the culture of a people, is in a constant state of flux. It changes; and one of the principle ways it does that is by borrowing from other languages.

For example, today the word 'jungle' is a pukka English one. Of course, the word has its roots firmly in India where it's still used. But that doesn't make 'jungle' any less of an English word. At some point in time, enough people calling themselves English speakers, started using the word 'jungle' as a synonym for 'forest' and voila! you have a new word. Why follow different standards for the reverse?

Anyone studying Hindi in school would, I'm sure, have noticed the rather vast difference between what's written and what we speak. It's like the recomended writers (Premchand is the only exception I can recall) are writing in this make believe language—one of the things that made me hate studying Hindi in school. Back in primary school (which we used to call junior school) a Hindi teacher of ours had expressly forbidden us from using the word paani for water. Paani, she said, was an Urdu word and we were studying Hindi (ironically, there's a fairly popular band by the name 'Jal' in a country that does claim Urdu as its National Langauge).

Now, without getting into the Hindi/Urdu thing, this is plain stupid. Most Hindi speakers would, almost exclusively, use the word paani for water. Just picture yourself saying, 'Ek glass jal dena'. Uh huh! Not happening. If just on the basis of origins (paani is of course, a Persian word) words were to to be kicked out of languages then English, for example, would lose more than 60% of its vocabulary (OED stats here).

Sometime in in the past, enough Hindi speakers decided to use the word paani and therefore today it is a Hindi word no matter what ma'am might say. And if today enough Hindi speakers use the word 'papa' to mean father (and I think they do, even going so far as to suffix a ji, as in papaji) then it becomes a Hindi word. This is how languages (and the mind of the great Sa for that matter), work. It's as democratic as you can get.

Normal Born Brother-in-Law

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Rabri is apparently in a bit of a spot because she used the word saala in a campaign speech. This is what the sister of Jalebi had to say:

"Who is Lallan Singh? He is Nitish Kumar's saala. Everyone knows this. I say this openly. This is why Nitish Kumar holds Lallan Singh's hand all the time whether they are in a meeting or a rally"

Which brings us to Hindi's most popular gaali—saala. Although I've always known what saala literally means (wife's brother and not, as it's often translated, brother-in-law) I never really did explicitly connect it to the expletive. That was until I read (the brilliant) Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh where he translates the word as 'I would like to fuck your sister'. It was then that the beauty of my mother tongue(s) dawned on me in their full glory. I mean, which other language would convert the name of a family relationship into a vile verbal abuse used casually in normal conversation (the book also mentions sasur as a gaali but I've never actually heard anyone use it as such).

Of course, most people hardly give a though to what saala actually means, using it as a sort of catch-all gaali. Incredibly, most would consider saala to be less offensive than, say, chutiya, which is absurd. I mean, god damn it we're all chutiyas—almost. How it is a term of ridicule is beyond me. What next? Two legged guy?

However, this precise meaning of saala makes some uses of the word rather absurd. For example, when women use it. What does it mean when a girl uses saala? Or the much used saali, for that matter? They're completely meaningless.

Of course, it is a bit unfair for the ladies. Most expletives, Indian or firangi, are extremely gender biased. Dissing female members of the family is the way to go. I mean, guys would call another guy a 'son of a bitch'—that's four syllables—but not call him a dog. Go figure.

What's in name?

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A long time back Max Mueller had said:

“If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts I should point to India.”

The existence of a mohalla called “Chutia” in the town of Ranchi more than proves him correct.

[Click on picture to enlarge. Image courtesy The AD Zone ]

The locality even has its own Police station: Chutia Police Thana.

I remember the local edition of The Telegraph coming up with the following headline: “Chutia police at wits end after crime wave”. Or something to that effect. Remember, exaggeration isn’t a crime.

For some unknown reason, Hindi cuss words are banned there.