It seems appropriate in a sense that what I am about to convey in this post comes soon after my post on Chava Rosenfarb. In it I referred to Chava’s urge to translate her Yiddish works into English, which had stemmed from a painful realization that the language she was born into and grew up with was slowly dying. Professor Goldie Morgentaler mentioned in her lecture that Chava has always been a very forceful and impressive speaker. Her public lectures in Yiddish had always ensured packed halls and auditoriums. Yet, sometime in the 1970s, Chava’s lectures in Yiddish started attracting a way smaller group of audience than ever before. The reason behind this was simple. Yiddish language speakers in Canada and in the United States had dwindled in numbers. They were now speaking in the language of the land that they had adopted…or should it be the countries that had adopted them? Many of them were, in any case, second-generation Jews. Painful as it must have been for Chava, it was a truth that she would have to learn to deal with. And she did, although the sadness at the loss has not left her nor will it ever.
What is it with language, one’s ‘culture’, to put it broadly, I wonder, that makes so many of us want to preserve it zealously? And then again what is it with certain languages that completely subsume us, devour us even? But it cannot be the fault of any particular language. People, notions of identity, varying perceptions, market-driven economy and cultures, the language of pop culture, hegemony and discourse up the cool quotient of certain languages even as it dismisses the power of and the poetry in certain others.
Growing up in a middle-class Bengali family (all my references begin there), the first hegemonic onslaught that I was affected by as a four-year old was being admitted into an English medium school where for the next fourteen years I would know that English was the language my parents have paid for, for me to learn. Therefore, it was my solemn duty to learn to speak and write it as ‘propahly’ as I could. Mind you, this was not fed into my soul by my non-English speaking parents although it did become increasingly apparent that since my mother, like so many middle-class Bengali mothers at that time, suffered from a deep-seated inferiority complex because of a lack of proficiency in English, she did insist that I grow up to graduate in English. I have done that and much more, summa cum laude at that. Herein, I must add that this has in no way affected my love, respect and admiration, if I may say so, for Bangla, my mother’s tongue. I am aware of and extremely proud of my Bengali roots. In India, I would, in another life, insist on being born a Bengali again. However, I have seen so many in my own generation suffer as a result of an English education. A postcolonial hangover as it is, it has also come to mean a fear of the ‘juktakhhor’ at the school level, heebie-jeebies in the stomach before the Board results because poor grades in Bangla can ruin the aggregate, graduating to the development of the same inferiority complex, but inversely, that speaking too much Bangla instead of the preferred English makes one downmarket, and finally to a complete disregard for a language and legacy that Bangalis cannot escape. But then English education is not the only factor we can blame. With globalisation came ‘Star Plus’ and ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’. Being Anglicized was no longer enough. It was the beginning of American imperialism in India and so, Americans we would now become—with a vengeance, ‘gonna’ and ‘wanna’ soon being internalized by the new Benglish-speaking adolescents. And here, I connot help but thank Sumon Chattopadhyay, the Bangla music bands, and Rituporno Ghosh for bringing back to the urban Bengali, a sense of pride in all things 'Bangali', a sense that Bangla was as much a language of the urban Benglish elite as it was of the rural or small town Prasenjit-Rituparna-loving populace.
The next hegemonic onslaught that Bengalis in West Bengal came to suffer, was thrust upon us by Hindi. Media and money determined the rightness of things. Punjabis began being known as the only kind of Indians to the world. Karwa chauth became the in-thing to celebrate. Bollywood became synonymous with the only kind of cinema that India churned. Speaking and answering in Hindi (I am very respectful of the fact that it is my national language but there are 14 others that we forget) became the fad. Don’t get me wrong. All of these represent India. However, they alone are not representative of India. And my language of love and longing bled. From being the fifth most spoken language in the world (don’t forget the Bangladeshis), it has become the seventh most spoken language in the world. I still don’t feel threatened, though.
Now, more than ever, in a country that has been fed the same half-truths about India, I feel the urge to proclaim that I am ‘Bangali’ first, Indian later. I find it funny when Bengalis are called parochial because so many Bengalis I know, feel a sense of pride in their ‘un-Bengali’-ness. How I wish it were the other way around!...because what we have is so good, that it will be a pity to callously lose it all. What we need perhaps as Bengalis is the smartening up of our image, not by just going pub-hopping and disco-hopping, or by spending precious hours in metal-and-glass shopping malls, sporting brands but by shedding our legendary ‘aloshyo’, and ‘nyakamo’, by not trying desperately to become what we are not, by rediscovering beauty and significance in our liberal Bengali culture, by speaking and using the language and every time with immense pride, in reading more and showing off less and, by realizing and accepting humbly that there is no greater knowledge than the one which tells us that we are, ultimately,where we come from.
