Ramblings #7 - Lessons of a Language

Language is wine upon lips.

Remembering those poignant quotes by the illustrious Virginia Woolf (curious though about which wine she is speaking of, but I digress) and going through the pages of In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri recently made me revisit some of the choices made by me and some made for me across the years regarding language and its role in life.

When I was young, my parents wanted to equip me for the big wide world out there. And English was the gateway – as at an early age, I was exposed to books like Famous Five and Tintin before graduating to classics in the realm of Dickens and Wilde. I loved those exploits, visiting fragile worlds through their eyes. And soon enough, science fiction entered my life and inspired me to explore physics, but that is a tale for another day.

The victim in all this? My mother tongue Bengali. Or maybe I was the victim?

That I was neglecting one language in favour of the other didn’t escape my father’s watch. It was too late by then though – a child’s love is hard to understand but I had fallen head over heels for English. And Bengali would not gain favour of this stoic heart. I learnt Bengali, but I never fell in love with it. I loved English, but felt like I never had to learn it.

I remember one midterm result near the end of my school days as I stood solemnly as one of the few people to have failed in Bengali, and it took all my energy to suppress a grin. I can’t state now that I am ashamed of that impulse, for that would be dishonest, but its intriguing to look at now – especially contrasted with my results in English where I was always top of the class. I used Bengali often, especially with my friends and family – but for me, it was always a means to an end. My thoughts were in English, my dreams as well. I had begun writing in it, composing poems and short stories. Bengali was relegated to the shelves of my now dusty study books, a monument to the collective failure of my fellow beings’ efforts to inculcate any love for the language.

But I did try. One day long after my school days, I grew curious and picked up a Bengali book of our famous local detective for some light reading, only to find I could barely muster past the first page. My reading skills had been destroyed. Almost with a passive shrug of relief, I cast it back into the wilderness.

There were others though. Hindi came from Bollywood and late on, when I went out station to study through conversation of commonality with my fellow mates – but again, it suffered the same fate as Bengali. Relegated to just necessity of conversation, and never of creation. My interest in learning Japanese started with anime, and it has continued till this day. I understand it a little now, but the tragedy is that my enthusiasm for a foreign language has grown far more than the little I ever had for my mother tongue. It’s not Bengali’s fault, it never was. Rich and elegant, there are poems which still live in my heart – and I still naturally converse in Bengali with a fellow resident of the state. It’s my language after all, even if I don't dignify it with that title often.

I have often thought why it became so? One reason may have been due to my rebellion of the accident of roots. I strived to make myself more than just a refugee from a place, to be accepted across the world, a true cosmopolitan. In this vain attempt to become rootless, I may have sacrificed unwittingly a language that could have brought me so much joy. Or maybe it was just a child's irrational choice that grew into something far more in his adult years of cognition. I may never know.

As I start on a new journey down south, where Bengali has been utterly dispersed with and even Hindi is of scant use, new challenges await. Tamil is another rich language and one utterly difficult. For me, language was never just for communication, but also for understanding. Translated books are something I still try to avoid for it feels ingenuine – listening to a faint echo of what the author wanted to convey.

Maybe this time, I won’t shelf a new language thinking I can do without it’s touch – for to truly connect with someone, to know him or her, you need to speak in their language as Mandela once said. I have met people here I want to understand, chit chat with in a tongue still foreign to my ears. So, I think I will try.

Wouldn't that be an interesting journey to go on?