Mother Tongue-United: Why urban India may outgrow the language wars

My father would have turned 100 this year. He never met my father-in-law, having died over a decade before I met my future wife and her family. If the two men had been introduced, in which language would they have conversed? The answer is piquant and complicated. It calls for a process of explanation as well as elimination.

My father knew, and my father-in-law knows, multiple languages. Both emerged from distant corners and linguistic traditions of the subcontinent. My father was born in Rawalpindi, and the first language he heard and spoke in was Punjabi. It was the verbal language used at home in the middle-class mohalla, amid a bustling wholesale market, where the family lived.

When still a small child, my father was sent off to the madrasa attached to the local mosque. Here, the maulvi taught him Urdu, as he had taught my father's older brothers and sisters. Urdu became my father's primary textual language. He was to use it all his life in writing letters and notes to his brothers.

English came after a few years, when he entered school. It was the language of education and work. But it was decidedly a second language. My father's engagement with English was formalistic. As a child, it struck me that he was more comfortable typing in English - on his rusty Olivetti typewriter - than while putting pen to paper.

My father-in-law began life in a village in Dergaon, Upper Assam. His earliest language was Assamese, learnt in a local maktab school the headmaster of which was a Hindu Brahmin. English and Sanskrit arrived later, with 'proper' school. English evolved to become the language of higher education and office.

Both men came to Hindi in Delhi, through different routes and in different decades. For my father, Hindi was gingerly approached through Urdu - familiarity with which also allowed him a smattering of Pashto, and even the odd Persian line. For my father-in-law, Hindi was explored through the common root words that came from Sanskrit and significantly, but not entirely, contributed to the vocabulary of Assamese.

My father could have watched the film Pakeezah and understood every syllable and nuance. Doordarshan news left him confused. For my father- in-law, it's the opposite. Doordarshan news Hindi is about the only Hindi that makes sense; Pakeezah's screenplay is alien.

Both knew Hindi after a fashion. But their Hindis would have been mutually unintelligible. They could only have communicated in English - a second, even third language for both, and certainly not the language they instinctively counted, thought or dreamt in.

For me, it was still different. English is my first and natural language. I use it to form my innermost thoughts and talk to myself. Educationists define ' mother tongue' as the language the child most uses and hears around him or her in formative years. This need not be the same as one's ancestral language. That is a popular fallacy, frequently exploited in political rhetoric.

For a peculiar mix of reasons - growing up in a certain milieu in Calcutta, with school, neighbourhood, social and community influences - my 'mother tongue' is English.

It was the same for my sisters. We went to separate, but similar, educational institutions. To this day, my sisters and I talk to each other in English, but not necessarily to other members of the (extended) family. Response to this has been both puzzled and mirthful: 'You speak English even at home?'

English is my 'mother tongue', but not my ancestral language - which is Punjabi, a language I barely know. I am fluent in Bengali, but that's another story and should not detain us here. While my 'mother tongue' and ancestral language are distinct, it is not so for my wife. Assamese is both her 'mother tongue' and her ancestral language. For our children, born and raised in Delhi, it is a third experience altogether. Given their formative environment, they self-identify with Hindi as their 'mother tongue'. Their ancestral languages are Assamese and Punjabi.

All this led to an energetic argument at home when the census official visited in 2011 and asked what she thought was an innocuous question: 'Which is your 'mother tongue'?' It has also triggered perfectly normal and everyday episodes that, seen from another perspective, could appear strange.

As children, it was not uncommon for my son and daughter to speak to each other in Hindi and then translate what they had just discussed to English for their parents' benefit. This was not a slight or a dig, or a joke. It was just an understanding and consideration shown to two external individuals who happened to be their parents, and who the children realised were not as comfortable in Hindi as they (the children) were.

What does one make of a family of four that has, between its members, three different 'mother tongues'? As India rapidly urbanises, facilitates internal migration, and fosters an increasing number of inter-regional and inter-state marriages, examples of such families will only grow. Hopefully, this will make us Indians less uptight about language wars and 'mother tongue' obsessions. Plural families, after all, build a plural nation.

The writer is partner and chair of India Practice, The Asia Group.


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