By Words

By Words
Shama Fatehally

These queer words, all ours, ours alone
A few evenings ago I was listening to an eminent Bangladeshi poet who was visiting the city. He read from poems written during the war of liberation in l972, and those who listened were reminded that this war was, primarily, a struggle for language. In one of the poems a young man promises his mother that he will return safe from the fighting, and bring her back a ``basketful of words''.

I thought to myself then that this was the kind of struggle which we, as a nation, had never experienced. But on my way home I heard a young executive calling out to another across the road, ``Zara yaad dila dena usko (please remind him), we need a bank statement tomorrow.'' And it struck me that, in a very different way, perhaps we too have had to wait to acquire our `own' language.

Thirty years ago, no one would have dared to combine Hindi and English with such casual confidence. To speak English was, essentially, a public act. Like all public acts it was extra careful,extra correct, extra conscious: it was directed at an invisible (Western) listener, and it aimed to suppress the real personality. The pathetic formalism of babu English reminds us of an era when this language was used not to unlock the self, but to defend that self from the world.

There were times, of course, when the desi self had to be allowed entry into a sentence, and a desi word crept in respectfully and stood in its place, which was within quotation marks. It took a Kamala Das to insist that she would speak in....

any language I like. The language I speak
becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
all mine, mine alone. It is half English, half
Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is human as I am human, don't
you see?

But now there is no need for such insistence. The distortions, the queernesses are all ours, ours alone, and we are speaking the language we want to speak, not the language that has to be heard. Any half-English, half-Hindi sentence, like that of myyoung executives on the road, shows that the balance of power between the languages has changed, and reflects our truly bilingual selves, kyonki dono barabar hain (because both are equal).

This healthy new equation was summed up for me by the Indian participant in a TV discussion about what else? the first of January 2000. Amid doomsday prophecies of failed electricity and grounded flights, he suggested that everyone plan to spend the day today, that is in India, because we are so used to things going wrong. This large-hearted invitation to participate in Indian chalta hai surely represents the reverse of what used to be called the colonial attitude. It doesn't mean, I trust, that we shouldn't be ashamed of things going wrong -- only that if we do apologise, it will be to ourselves and to no-one else; and -- in the new millennium -- it will be in words taken from our very own basket.

Shama Futehally is the author of `Tara Lane' and `In the Dark of the Heart -- Songs of Meera'