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Journalism of Courage
We have to sooner or later concede the existence of a silent phenomenon that is sweeping the urban landscape. It began during the British Raj and the mindset of modern Indians has never been the same since.
Beneath the umbrella of English, a great-great-great-distant-relation of all modern Indian languages, a new civilization has sprung up. Like it or not, Indian English is no longer dialect or pidgin. It is not our language, so the argument goes. But then nobody owns language, something that Prince Charles forgot when he condemned the Americans outright a few years ago for contaminating the pure cadences of English English.
The culture of Indian English was the result of an irresistible consummation of the relation between syllabic native Indian languages and the stiff stress-timed Germanic tongue. Its a mulatto meeting of the East and West that we live through every day, without giving a thought to how a foreign tongue has made a schism in our roots. I, for one, am a rootless bedouin but in my very rootlessness I have found my wellspring. There is a whole tribe out there like me that belongs in this midway province of neither here nor there. Indian English is new wine in an old bottle. There is no grammar to it as yet, but we8217;re getting there. Peter Sellers makes me laugh in The Party but at the same time I am insulted, because if you think of it, the movie makes a mockery of a language that I speak every day. It is the international equivalent of the language snobbery going on in Britain and the US, where certain forms are a definite no-no.
My tongue is a multilingual entity. If ever I write the great Indian novel, it will never be either completely Indian or thoroughly English. It simply cannot be so. It will obviously reflect a reality that most people are yet to admit to. It is the reality of a life that has my parents speaking in Malayalam, their alienated child trying throughout childhood to belong somewhere and in the end, consciously electing to become a nowhere person. She gives up one day thinking: 8220;If this is what I am, then so be it.8221; Such is my lonely legacy. Thank you, Lord Macaulay.
What English teachers must realize quickly, before the confusion takes over, is that they are no longer teaching Received Pronunciation as we classically know it. The written language is still mostly indistinguishable from British English. But the spoken form had long ago found a niche for itself in the world language family. So what we mistakenly teach as the received form is actually very very Indian English only, yaar.
So that very same teacher, who had once lectured me on the ridiculous forms of Indian English usage, was unintentionally lecturing me in what was very obviously Indian English, and mind you that8217;s nothing to be ashamed of. The old Hamletian dilemma remains: which medium do we adopt, what is right? Stay with the familiar or go with change? To be or not to be, that is the question.
