Opinion In Mumbai, the privileged rarely get slapped for not knowing Marathi. Does that mean we shouldn’t learn it?

In recent weeks, a brace of government resolutions issued by the ruling dispensation in Maharashtra has caused much political discontent. The first resolution, proposing Hindi as a mandatory third language in primary schools, was condemned by the opposition and branded as a nefarious “imposition of Hindi”. The government first reacted by nixing the word “mandatory” to make the study of Hindi optional, but later, revoked both resolutions altogether.

While making these announcements, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra was at pains to clarify that his government “had always given the highest priority to Marathi”. These words did little to assuage his critics. Protests were planned, demonstrations held, and, in what has become a hallmark of political activism in our country, civilians suffered as strongmen flexed. In the latest incident in Mumbai, a group of men affiliated to the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) were caught on camera assaulting a shopkeeper, allegedly after demanding that he speak in Marathi. The attack made headlines and further roiled troubled waters. Even a former commando, Praveen Teotia, waded in to warn against using language to “divide the nation”. The warning is nothing new. In India’s cosmopolitan centre of film and finance, getting slapped over the language you (cannot) speak is not uncommon. Unless you’re protected by your bubble of elite privilege.

Zealous party workers who seek to establish regional dominance through physical force find it easy to punch down. The target of their ire is almost always the watchman, the delivery guy, the shopkeeper. A working-class migrant is twice condemned: First, as the interloper who usurps jobs, and second, as the rogue who disrespects the local language, if only by not knowing it.

In truth, you can live and work in Mumbai for years and have little engagement with Marathi. When your days are spent in glass-and-steel corporate parks, high-rise condominiums, and chic cafes, Marathi rarely intrudes into your life. You know it exists around you but you only catch glimpses of it, like looking at cars speeding in the opposite direction. On the rare occasion that someone speaks to you in Marathi – a bank employee, say – and you politely ask them to switch languages, they comply without demur. Annoyance, if any, finds expression in a frown, nothing more. You are, after all, a valuable customer with a dizzyingly high limit on your credit card. It would not do to upset you; slapping you for refusing to speak Marathi would be out of the question.

Every time I see reports of Mumbaikars being beaten for not knowing Marathi, I wonder if it is my privilege that has protected me during my 15 years in this city – or just the fact that I’ve not yet run into an ardent local politician. This thought is chased by another: Do migrants, like me, have a duty to learn the local language? This question has troubled me for years, though evidently not enough for me to learn Marathi and put it to bed. I tell myself that when I was growing up in Kolkata, I knew many people whose Bangla was rudimentary at best. I never demanded they learn my mother tongue, so why should the same latitude not be offered to me now?

But it’s not just about language. If you strip off the machismo, the coercive demand to learn the local tongue mutates to the more reasonable expectation that new settlers should respect local culture. That is a valid ask, no doubt. Marathi – like every other regional language in India – needs to be recognised and feted. Our linguistic and cultural diversity should not be subsumed by a monolithic identity. But if the fight is truly against the imposition of a single language upon thousands of local bhashas, then being unfamiliar with any one bhasha can never tantamount to disrespect. In fact, given our linguistic richness, even the bhasha you consider to be your own may begin to sound foreign in a neighbouring village.

In the New Yorker article about Devy, Subramanian presents an endearing example to show the kaleidoscopic nature of Marathi, and indeed, all Indian languages: “Kolhapur was just an hour north of where Surekha had grown up, but her version of Marathi was so different from Devy’s that when he first visited her family, he told me, ‘I made them laugh.’ … The papaya has a feminine gender in Devy’s Marathi and a masculine gender in Surekha’s. ‘Even today, when we go to the market to buy fruit, we try to correct each other’, he said.”

Languages, even when they’re different, can happily coexist. As long as one doesn’t seek supremacy over another.

Banerjee is a Mumbai-based lawyer and writer