It’s an oddly heartbreaking experience – reaching for English in the middle of a sentence, while I watch my grandmother, who raised me on fish curry and Tamil poetry, visibly withdraw from herself. We were in her kitchen, the ceiling fan clicking on its slowest speed, stirring the smell of tempered mustard seeds. She tells me about her wedding, about walking into the temple, wearing her mother’s sari and I’m trying to ask her if she was nervous. The Tamil word for it is bhayam, but while I’m lost in a cycle of translation, I say something clumsy, like “Were you feeling bad?”. That’s not the same question at all. She never corrects me; she just goes somewhere behind her eyes, for a moment or two and returns less herself. I have no idea what to say to my grandmother every time this happens, in part because the language needed to express what has happened is precisely the language that has escaped me.
We were given a bargain. Fluency for opportunity, accent for legitimacy, inheritance for admission. An English-medium school to open multiple doors and strict English at home to practice, until our mother tongue turned into a language only our grandparents and the gods spoke, and inwards to the one place English hadn’t totally taken over: inside your chest at 3am.
Our conversations in the kitchen may be private but the same performance plays out in classrooms, offices, restaurants, job interviews, dating apps or anywhere where English becomes as much a measure of worth as a language. English has become more of a social signal rather than a linguistic tool for ease of communication. It becomes a behavioural package: “A marker of intellect, sophistication and class,” like Jyoti Jha, an award-winning author and TEDx speaker puts it.
In English Vinglish, Sreedevi’s character, Shashi is not mocked for her inability to communicate, considering she could run a business and raise her family. In the eyes of her husband and daughter, her lack of fluency in English erases everything else that she is. Nobody else in the house is mocked for a word mispronounced in Hindi or Marathi. A fumble in English becomes a humiliation ritual in the way a fumble in an Indian language never does, because English in urban India is not treated as one language among many. It is treated as the litmus test of intelligence, refinement and modernity; a person excelling in every other part of their life can still be filed as inadequate the moment their English falters.
We are now quasi-adult English writers who can create perfect cover letters yet can’t assign a name to our own loss in our own language. The linguist Aneta Pavlenko has spent two decades studying bilingual emotion and her research says that a first language carries more emotional weight than any language learned after it and that emotions do not always translate – some feelings exist as words in one language and simply have no equivalent in another. These emotions continue to exist in us as feral and wordless animals locked in a room whose key was traded away for a neutral accent.
It would be easy to peg the loss of the native tongue on nostalgia and move on. Dr Shivali Tukdeo, associate professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, who researches the sociology of language and education policy in India, doesn’t let me off that easily. In her words the real harm lies in the belief that vernacular languages are merely cultural and English is the language of knowledge.