I don’t think there’s a better time to write this than now. I have wanted to talk about this for a long time now and the recent trend has proven to be a good segue for this. Videos of people fighting over Marathi have been circulating a lot on the internet in the past few days. I will talk more about this towards the end, but first let me present my views on language.
I think whoever called language ‘just a medium to convey information’ never appreciated a poem, never felt relieved when an unknown tongue in an unknown land produced the same sequence of sounds that echoed through the walls of their own home throughout their life and never could tell apart one flavour from another. Language is a lot more than a medium to carry information. And the reason is solely because language is inherent to the human experience (I can’t speak for other animals simply because I don’t know how their language works, but I’ll take Matt Haig’s word when he says, ‘You are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. You are not even the most intelligent creature on your planet. The tonal language in the song of a humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare. It is not a competition. Well, it is. But don’t worry about it.’) because only the speakers of the language will feel for the language the way they do for their favourite song, which might seem forgettable to the average listener, but only you who had listened to the song at a critical point in your life and have core memories associated with it can appreciate it.
Language is identity. Language is culture. Language is history. You lose your language, you lose who you are and who you were. You can’t be the same person in some other language. This is not just hand-wavy talk, but what I have seen my entire life. I never felt the life I had outside my house reflected my mother tongue.
Hindi had gobbled up visual media by the time I was born. The default excuse to go to the theatres was to watch the new Bollywood movie (seldom do I remember Marathi movies being given the same treatment — Sairat, Natasamrat and few others did change that for a while, but those are buried under one full decade of nonchalance now). The cartoons were all Hindi. All the hot daily soaps were Hindi. Unofficially the default language of primary school was Hindi, even though all of our ancestors prided themselves in their pronunciation of ‘ळ’. This was because there was an unwritten rule that Marathi would just make things awkward. It’d be easier if we just pretended our mother tongue didn’t exist. After all, all the flashy stuff like cartoons and the latest mainstream songs were in the glamorous Lingua Franca of the country. What else could one possibly want?
Colonies don’t just go back to being the independent sovereignties they were when some hapless general signs a piece of paper in resignation. They don’t even disappear completely even if you give them years. They still live in the succumbed egos of the subjects, the ones who pride themselves in mimicking the old ways of the colonialists and deriving a sense of superiority from them without applying rationale and the ones who stand to profit from these insecurities.
‘dOn’T tAlK In mArAtHi!!’ is what the principal of our school would shout at the top of their voice when kids would pass short, near-inaudible whispers to each other in the language they knew the best. Imagine being made to feel guilty of speaking your own mother tongue in a 21st century independent India. Sounds dystopian when you word it rightly. I have written 100x and read 50x more English than I have my own mother tongue. All the textbooks I had were in the Language of Progress. My parents wanted me to dream in the Language of Progress. This is how you know language is identity. When I spoke English my parents saw a kid with nicely trimmed hair, washed, ironed, well-fitting formals and shiny black boots. They saw progress, social acceptance, stature, a green-card holder and I don’t know whatnot. But when I spoke in my mother tongue, they saw someone they had seen all their lives. Someone they had known quite well for years in the form of different people. Someone whose abilities were quite limited and imaginable. Someone who could never grow beyond a very well-known threshold.
Now I am a gen-Z who’s triple-sandwiched between the Lingua Franca, the Language of Progress and the mother tongue. The former two complement each other in a yin yang. Many a times it’s just convenient to stick to English or Hindi while dealing with people. The formula is: the more mainstream the less awkward. These languages are just alluringly utilitarian. But I on the other hand always try to make it a point to use my mother tongue as much as and wherever possible. But I still think I am doing far less than I should be doing. The fastest way for me to type Marathi is throught GBoard, which converts Romanised phonetics to Devanagari/Baalbodh.
If a language can’t survive in its birthplace, won’t the speakers be refugees in their own land?
All languages are beautiful solely because they carry the identity of their speakers. They are the culture and the community. English spread like wildfire through the use of gunpowder, is inevitably going to consume most of the world’s literary resources eventually but is still a beautiful language in its own right and made so by the billions who speak it and write in it. Most of the world thinks in this language and it is the de facto mode of communication like it or not.
Hindi, though a relatively young language (is it really Hindi when you say it’s Hindi?) has been blessed with great literature and an evergrowing population of speakers.
The Family Man was lauded for its beautiful efforts in representing regional languages. It perfectly captured the nuances between Sri-Lankan and Tamil Nadu Tamils, let the Malayalam speakers speak on ends in their native tongue, essentially forcing all viewers to grow the habit of reading subtitles at some point, yet the same show used Marathi, the language of the city where the characters in the show are based out of, only for comic relief. The Marathi speakers abuse in Marathi, then go back to speaking in Hindi for the viewers’ comfort. This is the reason I am pissed off.
As the saying goes, “language changes every 5 kilometres here”, India is a HUGE af blackboard that stretches on thousands of kilometres. Everyone who can write on that board has written their own reflection onto it.
I have been a first-hand witness to the slow bleedings out of regional languages at the hand of bigger languages. The region I come from, Northern Maharashtra or more specifically Khandesh, is a very small region but is home to many beautiful languages like Ahirani and Tavdi, but neither the speakers nor the government are very keen on preserving them. Thus, my parents spoke Marathi and I speak Marathi and can only appreciate the beauty of the language of my birthplace as an outsider.
Closing thoughts: I don’t condone any sort of hooliganism/politics going on in the name of language, but these have unknowingly made people think and talk about their identity, culture and history at least.