Bilingualism Inspires Us To Look Beyond The Limits Of Our Own Cosy Worlds

It doesn’t help if that one language is English. Everyone speaks it, or understands the necessity of the ‘lingua franca’. So it is no one’s language of fraternity. The Bihari outside Bihar or the Keralite in the Gulf will excitedly lapse into Bhojpuri or Malayalam once they run into a fellow countryman. That countryman need not look like them, or be from the same class, caste or area. But if they speak your tongue, a brother is found.

Being monolingual is fine, I suppose. But being monolingual in a country which has over 500 dialects has the weird effect of making one an outsider in one’s own land. Especially when the one tongue you speak is not a native tongue. It’s a great irony. English is probably the most commonly spoken language across the country, far more of a uniting bond than Hindi is, yet nowhere does it assign you an insider status.?
That doesn’t bother you, though. In this country, English is put on a pedestal. Even though you notice that you are excluded by virtue of language, there's a sense of superiority that can and often continue to exist. You’re excluded, but the colonial hangover is still around. So you’re okay with speaking just English.
But there’s always that uneasy sense that hits you one day. That you are missing out, that there are different worlds you aren’t a part of. I am trying to remember when this began to happen to me. It’s hard to discern in memory’s fog the points where one became aware of the different worlds one had walked through unknowingly, worlds that co-habit but don't participate.

Having a mother tongue is existing in a safe world. At 45, the writer Jhumpa Lahiri decided to start writing in Italian. Many found her choice eccentric. Fewer could understand why Italian and not a language closer to home. After all, her home nation boasted of hundreds of languages.

But Lahiri persisted, and now translates works into Italian. Her reasoning is clear -- her whole point was to step out of the comfort zone of her mother tongue, so that, in turn, she could begin to step out of the mechanical chains of thought it imposes upon us. I understand her completely. Like anyone who steps into a new language, Lahiri said she had to ‘pay her dues’. Nothing came to her naturally, and she had to work for it.

That part is where I begin to relate. I began to learn Hindi at a public university. With no formal education, nothing came naturally to me either. The leader of Korean boy band BTS, Kim Nam-joon says he learnt English from the TV series Friends. I don’t know how much of that is true, given that Nam-Joon is a flawless speaker of the language, delivering an emotional address at the United Nations in it in 2018.

I can’t claim to be anywhere close to Nam-joon in my proficiency in Hindi, but like him, I learnt Hindi simply through conversations I heard around me. When streaming services began to include subtitles with programmes, it was a godsend. I picked up all of my gaalis from the subtitles of Gangs of Wasseypur.
I listened to every conversation around me, the ones I had never paid attention to earlier, and began to pick up the language. It took forever and was painful. I mispronounced everything and sent my friends into splits, whenever I rambled on in incoherent sentences.

The first thing that came naturally though, by dint of the exertions, were the changes in my thinking. I always found the assertion that being monolingual limits a worldview, hilarious. I thought my logic was rock-solid. Hey, we have translations of everything. God bless subtitles. You still get the best of other cultures. War and Peace and The Count of Monte Cristo are two of our great classics, and they were both translated. I enjoyed them all the same, being the monolingual oaf I am.

Lahiri spoke about how she began to find more artistic freedom once she persisted with Italian. The limits of one’s language become the limits of one’s world, as Wittgenstein said, and I began to realise that this was a truth one could read about but not understand without experiencing it.

One day, about a year or two after I had started seriously picking up Hindi, I was at a paan shop. I didn’t have a way to pay and wanted to cut a deal with him. He spoke English, so there wasn’t a barrier there. But I couldn’t find quite the right word in English to explain what I had in mind. To ask if I could keep a tab felt ridiculous. To ask him to let me go without paying felt pitiful. To suggest cutting a deal felt like I had binge-watched The Godfather the night before. Eventually, the right term arrived on my tongue, just in time, “Bhaiya, thoda jugaad kar sakte?”.

It perfectly encompassed everything I wanted to convey to him, just one word that would have been a long monologue had I tried to explain it in English. A lot has been written about how the word ‘jugaad’ is unique, but it was a spur-of-the-moment reaction for me. I realised how I had started to think more expressively simply because I now had new terms to expand the horizons of my world.

I’m still on the fence about being monolingual. If someone were to ask me, whether it limits one’s worldview, I’d agree.

Nothing compares to the original. But at the same time, I think it’s perfectly okay if someone wants to stay within a safe zone. The world is still accessible. Often, what gets lost in heated arguments over the politics of translation is the point that it’s not simply about taking pride in one’s tongue or co-opting someone’s work, but about crossing cultural boundaries and making available whole new worlds to those who are within safe zones. Beat-down versions, for sure.

The bilingual bard of Bombay, Kiran Nagarkar, found it funny that he found more recognition in English than in his native Marathi. But what we don’t account for is that one person, who had picked up a Nagarkar novel in English, liked it, and was convinced to look further into the Marathi literary pantheon.
Those are the real wins. The inspiration to look beyond the limits of your own world.
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