Lingo Bhelpuri & Politics!
MANY years ago I was on a sponsored trip to Austria . My government-appointed driver was a youth doing MBA. During a conversation with him, he said, somewhat haughtily, that all Austrians know at least two languages. "That's nice," I said, and then gently punctured his hauteur.
I told him that in Mumbai (Bombay then), any ten-year-old is familiar with five or six languages. "What!" he said. So I gave him this account. "Consider a Bengali married to a Tamil and they reside in a Gujarati neighbourhood. Their child goes to an English-medium school where Marathi and Hindi are compulsory. Six languages? In high school the child may take up Sanskrit, German, French or some other foreign language." The young man was awed and said he'd like to visit India . After that he was deferential towards me.
That's one of the advantages of visiting unicultural countries. The locals display a sense of superiority towards the visitor from a developing country. So you tell them, subtly, about India 's cultural and linguistic diversity. They gasp in wonder.
India's diversity and globalisation of the Indian people are attracting foreign attention. It is very likely that in the near future Indians will be teaching French in France, German in Germany , Spanish in Argentina . What fun it is to imagine a Marathi or Malayalee from Mumbai's suburban Chembur teaching Portuguese to Brazilian children in Brasilia . Indians may also be invited to coach foreign bureaucracies and corporate executives in Indian languages and customs.
New York has got much publicity for its cultural and linguistic diversity. But it can’t match Mumbai's. It's not just Mumbai's educated who speak many languages; everyone does. Even beggar children are coached in foreign languages to target tourists. In many Mumbai homes, parents speak to the children in the mother-tongue, but the children answer in English or Hindi. In fact, it is difficult to identify Mumbaikars as Marathi, Gujarati, Malalayee, Kannadiga or whatever. They do not have distinct regional looks because of mixed marriages. Even when in groups, their conversation shifts casually from one language to another.
A Marathi girl and I exchange greetings in French. Then we converse in English or Marathi. The girl is fluent in French; I am not. But she and her close friends speak only French among themselves, as other Mumbaikars use English as a common language.
I do borrow French magazines from the Alliance Francaise library. I used to read German newspapers and magazines in the Max Mueller Bhavan's library, which is now closed. I occasionally SMS my son a Latin maxim which I have picked up from an English book. He replies in Latin. I have to struggle hard to decipher his message. I don't know Latin. The son knows Latin, Italian, Farsi, English and Hindi, but not Marathi.
Sometimes I buy Malayalam, Kannada, Urdu or Gujarati newspapers and read the Sanskrit 'Chandamama' magazine though I don't know these languages. But I can get the gist of the stories. Playing with languages is fun, especially because I own many dictionaries which I can consult – German, French, Spanish, Sanskrit, classical Greek, Urdu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi as well as books on the histories of various languages and scripts. Anyone who sees my bookshelves will not believe that I am a pukka ‘Marathi manus’ with a dehati upbringing. There must be many such dilettantes in Mumbai. Some are polyglots who speak many more languages than an ordinary Mumbaikar does. Others, like me, speak few languages, but are interested in language as a subject of study.
My most memorable moments in propagating English were in a school in Kerala. I took the English class and discovered that almost all the children, except those of transferable bureaucrats, were primitive in English. I scolded them for being so retarded in terms of their future prospects. The scoldings were interspersed with Malayalam gaalis, which a waiter in Mumbai's Press Club had taught me. I think I really shook them.
All this is about the past. What of the future? Interesting possibilities are ahead. Many foreigners are coming to India for jobs and studies. There will be a mingling of Indian-foreign cultures and languages on an accelerated scale. Imagine an Indian-educated youngster venting his anger with Indian gaalis in his hometown of Frankfurt, Marseille, Khartoum or Hanoi . And Indians borrowing from these foreigners to become globalised Munnabhais. What India , especially Mumbai, can expect is the formation of an Indo-global tapori language which, as it develops, may produce its own class of literature and films. The future of global language adventure is in India .
Politicians can't imagine the exciting times ahead. At the moment they are scared that they will lose their grip on vote-banks. Vote-banks must be kept at minimal levels of survival skills, and they must be conned into believing that their mother-tongue and regional identity are under threat. Politicians hope that these people will create ghettoes for themselves, dutifully line up to vote, and seek favours from political patrons in an approved obsequious way.
