Hinglish Vinglish
I was a transplant growing up. My parents were south indians, but my dad’s job was in North India, so we spent all of our growing up years in northern India. Now for someone from outside India, it may seem how different can it be and that’s where you would be wrong — the North and South of India are practically two completely different cultures, with a lot of micro-cultures belonging to each state.
For the most part growing up, we never really felt like a outsider. We ate South Indian food at home, my mom spoke to us in Telugu (our native language) but other than that our conversations both inside and outside were in hindi and we only watched hindi movies and TV. Infact we felt more like an outsider when we visited my grandparents, as we were not really fluent in in the language or the culture.
This comfort however did not carry over to one area and that was my Hindi lessons at school. So even though speaking in Hindi came very naturally to us, learning Hindi at school was a different ball game altogether. My mother tells me a story of when I was a 3 or 4 years old, I had a Hindi teacher who was very strict. I used to get nightmares about her and refused to go to school as I was pretty scared of her. My mom took it on herself to go have a conversation with the teacher. When my mom confronted the teacher, the teacher told my mom —
“Aap South Indian hain na, isliye aapki beti ko Hindi theek se nahin aa rahin hain”.
(Because you are South Indian your daughter is struggling at school, as you don’t have a good grasp on the language yourself. )
That sort of sums up the rest of my school years and my relationship with Hindi subject. I dreaded it. I would get top marks in all other classes but once it came to Hindi, it would drop my GPA drastically. I treated learning Hindi as a chore that I had to get done with. For the longest time I only remember waiting to be done with my 10th grade, as I knew that I could then stop sitting for Hindi exams. We were actually taught a lot of hindi literature at school — Ramayana and Mahabharata in Hindi, we also had some science lessons in Hindi, poetry, prose as well as biographies of famous Hindi poets and authors. I never appreciated any of it, I mostly took it on as a chore that needed to be done. I also felt like I never had a teacher that could inspire me towards that language. My parents never read Hindi literature at home — it was always English literature or Telugu( a language that I did not learn to read or write). Getting done with my 10th board Hindi exam was a high point in my life. I told myself I will never go back to this language ever again.
What this effectively meant was that my language of choice growing up ended up being English. I was a very avid reader. Given English was language of choice, I ended up reading mostly western literature. I was dreaming about having cookies and cold milk and not really a plate of warm khichdi and papad. (Indian version of lentil-rice and chips)
This has been the case until very recently, when I started to explore more of India culture, trying to understand in greater depth the roots of our culture and history. I got very interested in understanding the influence of colonization on our culture and history and realized that a lot of what we read and understood growing up was the Englishman’s view of our world or in some cases the view the Englishman wanted to tell us about our world vs. their world. I realized that there has been a degree of brainwashing or whitewashing of details that had gone into our education and world view growing up. That is when I started wondering if there was a different approach that would help me appreciate a more native view of India. It felt like if I could read literature written in our native languages then that would offer me a more unadulterated form of understanding about our culture. There is some great literature about India in English also but it has been a more recent discovery for me. Growing up all our libraries were full of western literature. Starting from Malory towers, Nancy drew to Harry potter to then later discovering classics like Ayn rand, Price and Prejudice, Gone with the wind and the list goes on. If I look back, I knew more about the state of blacks in America than I did about untouchables in my own country.
Having lived in America for so long, I realize that this is a challenge that every indigenous culture faces. As our world is getting more globalized and the lines between our cultures getting more blurred, the true knowledge that each indigenous culture built over 1000s of years is getting lost. Loosing native language literature and readers and writers for that, is a big part of that.
My attempts at reacquanting myself with Hindi
Recently two of my friends encouraged me to try and write poetry in Hindi. My friend made the argument that if I wrote poetry in a native language, then maybe I will be able to express myself in a more unadulterated form. I completely dismissed the idea as it took me back to school times and my struggles with Hindi in the academic world.
I cannot really follow or read academic Telugu and I had completely given up on Hindi for so long that it felt hard to pick it up again. Until recently, I decided to give Hindi poetry a chance. Thanks to the likes of Manoj Bajpayee, Ashutosh Rana, Zakir Khan and Pankaj Tripathi, I got reacquainted with the beauty of this language. I am making some small attempts to pause, listen and understand the poetry in our songs, in dialogues and in prose.
But what is life without challenging yourself and so I decided to give it a try. It is a very small humble attempt, but this is me acknowledging to myself that I had the opportunity to learn a beautiful language once and all is not lost, I still have time to go back and re-learn and re-build my relationship with language.
The complete poem and its translation is available here — https://medium.com/@akhilatadinada/jeena-na-bhool-jaana-mere-humsafar-f92e9357f332
