A troll running on Facebook the past week invited the reader to translate the title of the hit series "How I Met Your Mother" into Bhojpuri before proceeding to do it on its own. The result "Kaisan mile tohaar amma se" is adroitly hilarious, in a goofy sort of way. However, one of my friends was not amused.
"No, I don't see why a childishly photoshopped picture is hilarious," he wrote on Facebook. "I don't understand how everything is instantly funny in Bhojpuri. Mutilation of a language, invoking half-baked socio-cultural stereotypes associated with its speakers, doesn't strike me as particularly funny, especially when there's no substance to what is being said."
During the writing of Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh revealed how he had to re-familiarise himself with languages such as Bhojpuri because a lot of the argot of the indentured labour that the novel was about was a mashup of several languages. As a Bengali comfortable with Oriya and Assamese, Ghosh found as much pleasure in researching for the novel as in its actual writing.
Ghosh's response to Bhojpuri echoes the righteous anguish of my friend, who happens to be a student of literature. Indeed, for the anglicised among us, there is a natural tendency to mock expressions in native tongues. While humour has many progenitors - and it would be churlish to play party-pooper - it is important to understand that our preference for one language over another decides what, and indeed how, we come to think.
Let me explain. I have been reading Iris Murdoch's Booker-winning The Sea, The Sea. It's a movingly written work, if a tad upsetting. About a former director in the London theatre, the book is an obsessive tale of passion and intrigue. Charles Arrowby retires to a bungalow by the sea. He has had a full life, though not one that has called for any substantial emotional involvement on his part. He has manipulated his many loves and has left a trail of broken marriages in his wake.
The distance induced by Murdoch, both physical (the novel is set by the sea) and metaphysical (the man has come to await the end of his days), brings out a certain nous that this reader, at least, found deeply satisfying. It is not an intimate gaze, mind you, but it is no less uplifting for that. Indeed, reading the book, one feels a certain foreignness such as when Murdoch depicts the flora and fauna of the landscape. But perhaps it is this foreignness that also keeps the narrative "clean". It lets us indulge the drama without getting mixed up in the addenda.
I am sure writers such as Ghosh brood over the question of what language to write in. For many middle-class Indians such as myself, a familiarity with English is a marked pointer of status. I grew up in a house where English was spoken, along with Hindi, but of course, such is the insidious training one picks up from school and beyond that I came to feel more articulate in English.
But as I think more about it, the articulacy that came with English was also an articulacy that sought to impress. If I wrote a story there was always an elf that sat on my shoulder checking for errors of grammar and style. For a time in my life when the question of language was tied to more complex issues of patriotism, I wondered if I could truly capture experience in English since I was invariably worried about getting things "right". Perhaps this worry stemmed from a colonial hangover, but saying so would be simplistic.
It is likelier, I now believe, that the worry is merely a byproduct of trying to dissociate oneself from one's writing. Writing, as it is such an intimate experience, has the potential to drown oneself. Writing in a foreign tongue allows one to bring a distance that enables one to outrun oneself in capturing the truth.
For in writing in Hindi, I would not be careful about the provenance and sequence of words. When writing in English, however, I would be more faithful - since it is hard work - to the task of translating my thoughts into words. With English, I might go one step further and capture that ineffable quality that makes a piece of writing great. Something which cannot be pointed out by the writer himself, but plays itself out in the wordless space between art and its medium. Words in a non-native tongue, then, might fashion something the native consciousness cannot.
If I were to write my version of The Sea, The Sea, I would capture not a foreign landscape but the intimate knowledge of my own backyard. If I chose to write in English, I would merely be putting that knowledge to work. I could write about it without the anxiety of creating an impression, since in the process of that conversion I would be creating art, not artifice.
