Languages in Mumbai

A journey into Indian literature in English

Elephanta caves

From Athens to Mumbai

When I approached her with my project Arundhati Roy’s agent forwarded the questions to her. My questions were along the lines of  “ How does it feel to write in English living in India ---even as a part time resident? How many languages do you speak? Are you disconnected from UK culture when you use English as your writing tongue? Does writing in English inform or influence who you are as a person? And other questions along the same vein.
She answers some of my questions in an interview 
here

Roy’s first novel The God Of Small Things had been a revelation. Roy had impressed her way with words on me, creating vivid witty compound expressions and giving new flavour to ideas, as I had never experienced before, as with the description of the History House: “ ‘But we can’t go in,’ Chacko explained, ‘because we’ve been locked out. And when we look through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them.”

Therefore I went on researching ‘language and identity’ and collected thoughts and ideas from Indian writers in English language. Rushdie spoke of a ‘stereoscopic vision’ describing his double perspective. Moreover he construed the overlapping/interweaving of Indian languages as ‘cross pollination’ the most pertinent metaphor summing up much of what I had read, from Homi Bhabha’s ‘transculture’ to Gayatri Spivak’s ‘subaltern’ and thus I was inspired to find more. So I decided to go investigate the mindscapes of the literati in situ and I landed in Mumbai. Why Mumbai rather than Delhi or Kolkata? Because beyond the classics, of Anita (mother) and Kiran (daughter) Desai, or even Aravindh Adiga, who won the 40^th Booker prize in 2008, I wanted to cross the Rubicon of the Western facade of the most widely read contemporary Indian writers and find the less paramount Indian writers who wrote in English and dwelled in India. I asked my circle of Greek acquaintances. Sudha Nair, Publisher of Athens Insider recommended the work of Suketu Mehta, ‘Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.’ As the title intimates it is a firework of colorful strips of life in dizzying Mumbai that coined the diversity and heterogeneity of the language acrobatics I was reflecting on.

When I got there I did not feel short-changed by Mehta’s description! His novel is a memoir of his voyage from NYC where he was raised and lived with his affluent family of diamond traders to his return to his Indian roots. He settled in his homeland megalopolis, a newlywed and a father. The ‘adjustment’ is pure delight. Metha’s detailed account of his homecoming is meticulous and his disconcerting honesty is oftentimes hilarious, as when he counts 8000 direct Neighbours around his upper-class apartment in a residential area of Mumbai. “Going to pick him up [his son], my heart swells with gladness; I can’t recognize my son. I can’t make him out from the whole crowd of brown-skinned kids in white uniforms. For the first time in his life, he’s just like all the others.”

So Mehta directed me to Mumbai. It resonated with my NYC birthplace in its out-of-proportion dimension, and then word of mouth on the Internet did the rest. Prithvi Theatre (http://www.prithvitheatre.org). A cutting-edge English language-loving space held a Caferati with an Open Mic, where emerging authors came to try their poetry out with a select audience. They also have a most adorable bookshop on the premises with nothing to envy Paris’ ‘Shakespeare’s books’ on the Quai de la Seine, and with much more affordable prices. So, I contacted Peter Griffin, of the Hindu Times, the active soul of that Open Mic scene, and came to perform with my own neophyte poetry. In Athens I run a Poetry Society -A Poets’ Agora www.apoetsagora.com, to promote the poetry of Greek and Pan-Hellenic writers. So I was all the more enthusiastic to hear the poetic stage of the Prithvi Theatre to compare the poetry and get some insight on another poetic scene, and maybe tips on how to appreciate and select specific authors for our event back in Athens.

That night at my dinner table –because in Mumbai most of the time we share space- there were some IT geeks from west coast USA on their Christmas holiday and a group of young professionals who had visiting friends from Thailand, their host related to the French Consulate in Mumbai, because yes, it was December 25^th, 2017, in the Gregorian Calendar. Obviously the Indian Vikram Samvat calendar doesn’t have Christmas: in the Indian calendar we are in 2074 and the new year started last Diwali, so at the Caferati we were a little out of sync with India at large. This is a place for the English-educated crowd, a huge crowd in Mumbai and actually in most of urban India. The poetry was read in local languages or English and the audience would snap their fingers in encouragement at the readers. Christmas and New Year’s Eve is a strange occurrence in India, or at least from what I had imagined. Its overwhelming commercialization is penetrating the fabric of society. Red bearded white Santa is all over the streets, on billboards, in shops, at bus stations….at times the snowy picturesque winter scenes, groomed with Indian colorful enhancing seemed totally out of touch with the traffic jam and the friendly local mish-mash of pollution, humidity and pale sun.  But never mind, that’s the secret of Mumbai; an heteroclite diversity all interwoven in a greater buzz, the Hindu man asking for alms outside the Mosque just after Friday prayer…..the rickshaw carrying hefty animals for a family meal, or to their safety!……the San Francisco Bay Area singers and dancers performing in Pune, acclaimed by an audience of women with the most elaborate saris ever gathered in one same room….The Mumbai Mosaic is one of the impossibles, right there, happening under one’s very eye!

Mumbai University

Subsequently I met with the Parsee community in Mumbai, a group who still practices their ancestral Zoroastrian religion. They are a prosperous close-knit community from Behram Baug who stick together at parties and cultural events. I took part in a birthday party in an exclusive Mumbai club and all were proud to recite the Poem 'An Ode,' by Sir Ernest Joseph Flanagan. My all-time reference, Harvard professor, Homi Bhabha, whom I frequently refer to in my academic research, was a Parsee Indian too, so I was specifically keen to investigate the literary situation of this community. Again, Sudha Nair from Athens, had introduced me to the works of Rohinton Mistry, a renowned Parsee novelist who writes in tender and colourful English on ‘Family Matters’ the title of his 2002 book, “It was the best part of going back to school after the May vacation. Jehangir loved the fresh gloss of brown paper, the smell of new books, the thrill of his name flowing from the nib of Daddy’s fountain pen. And he could tell that Daddy enjoyed it too from the important look on his face. Sometimes Daddy joked that the process of learning couldn’t begin until the books bore the student’s name, for the knowledge wouldn’t know whose brain to travel into.”  I obviously didn’t meet Mistry because he has emigrated to Toronto, Canada since 1975, but I enjoyed the tone of his novels. ‘A Fine Balance’ is prized by his Indian audience as my interlocutors attested. In the hereby excerpts both Roy and Mistry, and Metha to a lesser extent, overuse ‘and’ to create a never-ending flow, an impression in their story corroborating perpetual movement, here and there, and the liminality of the Indian language space and the impossibility to draw clear lines of divide between the languages or a Canon for each language.

Film Institute of Pune

The American writer Ranbir Sindhu (who just published a vitriolic pamphlet on Trump https://ranbirsidhu.com ) introduced me to Paul Knox a playwright and theatre director who led me from Mumbai, three hours away, to Pune, the Oxford of India with the idea of interviewing academics and film directors who would broaden the lens on language and identity. Pune is also the home of the highly reputable Film and Television Institute of India (http://www.ftiindia.com) and diverse film schools who provide the professionals for Hollywood. The FTII staff took me on a professional visit around the campus; this educational institution provides Bollywood with most of its technical staff and actors.

 

On the recommendation of Alexandros Georgiou, a Greek artist living in New York, https://www.saatchiart.com/al.georgiou within the film industry I met the independent art film director, Pushpendra Singh, whose film ‘Ashwatthma’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvsiLhpaXcw) was touring in festivals and being discussed by cinema critics in passionate ways.  A few critics were allergic to his creative and original revisiting of the sacred Mahabharata epic, the legend of the fallen hero (Eponymous title of the film) whereas many others were overly enthusiast with the magic realism and the prevalence of the visual over the message. The Mahabharata and Ramayana are the founding texts of India as a whole; it is the unique reference that all religions and cultures refer to, as their genesis manuscript. Singh uses black and white monochrome with sparks of colour to blur and simultaneously highlight the in-between of myth and reality.  ‘The language of the film [Brij dialect] is organic’ he argues because Singh wants to deviate from the Bollywood linguistic Hindi uniformity. Actually most people I have discussed the ‘language and identity’ issue with say that they have learned Hindi as a second language from television, sometimes from schooling and they understand it and speak it to communicate when needed but would rather not use it in their personal life, except when they are of the Hindi culture. Hindi is timorously the ‘cement’ language of India, although Norendra Modi would rather make it the Lingua Franca of the country. It is the language of a segment of society and the television language (like American English is in Greece and other countries, an oral and idiomatic type of language used for communication with scarce use of literary conventions) via the Bollywood effect and sustained by deliberate Government policies in education.

Professor Sanjay Ranade

Growing more familiar with India, I then met with Professor Sanjay Ranade, who teaches Language and Communication at the University of Mumbai and who clarified the curious idea, of no “canon’ in the Indian multicultural gamut of languages. He maintained that there is no standardization of languages in India. Whether in Tamil Nadu, Gujarati or Marathi, etc. all the languages have different forms of higher expression or dialectal forms, according to the location, the caste, the age and the gender of the speaker. The language is determined its speaker rather than by an Academia, this concept is difficult to cohere with India being the oldest written tradition in the world. Sanskrit originally first appeared as a script in 2000 BCE before Greek 1500 BCE. Sanskrit, the primary liturgical language of India, the language of the Vedas, is a language on its own as well as being a form of sophistication in every language, sankriti. The identifiable most erudite form of literature in India is poetry, the genre POETRY, reigns over drama, storytelling and prose, so Gujarati or Malayalam can be ‘sankriti,’ i.e. sanskritised or refined but poetry and its figures of style determine the degree of finesse of a language, thus its eloquence within the pantheon of Indian languages, but never a prominence, over Tamil Nadu, or Bengoli… In Hindi Sanskriti means culture. After this background information, Professor Ranade stopped, became silent, and then remarked ‘silence is actually the goal of communication, but silence is not enough so we have languages.’

 

On the other hand “Prakriti was an inferior form of language reserved for women” theorizes Professor Lalwani who was in charge of the publications at the research Center for Women Studies at Mumbai University for women (https://sndt.ac.in). Wikipedia writes: “It is a key concept in Hinduism, formulated by its Samkhya school, and refers to the primal matter with three different innate qualities (Guṇas) whose equilibrium is the basis of all observed empirical reality. Prakriti, in this school, contrasts with Purusha which is pure awareness and metaphysical consciousness.” With these colliding, though not exactly contentious definitions, I had come to realise the ‘graspable reality’ or subtlety of Indian cultural nuances, as Ms. Lalwany had phrased it. Progressively, concepts nowhere written, like the specificity of a feminine language, transpire through the musings of the thinkers I have met, often echoing their identity and place in society, rather than evidencing information gathered from the books or research.

The alphabet of Indian writing systems is Devanagari, derived from Sanskrit, used for all Indian languages, expounded Usha Lalwany: " Devanagari is a compound word with two roots: deva means "deity”, and nagari means "city"”.  Other Indian languages like Penjabi or Urdu do not use Devanagari but Shahmukhi with letters closer to the Arabic/Persian characters. Again in spite of using a similar alphabet, the calligraphy developed in multiple ways, frequently out of joint, again identifying the personal culture of the person writing. Language policies, from the failure of Hindustani –mix of Hindi and Urdu- that was meant to be the common language for all Indians post-partition, have not been able to circumscribe a neutral ‘national’ language. Hindi is next in line to the throne—nonetheless, most readers and speakers of this language say it is poetically interpreted in individual ways by the great majority of its speakers, namely shopkeepers, the advertisement industry and generally, by the emerging consumer society. So beyond Bollywood and the news, Hindi hasn’t penetrated the 1.4 billion people’s mind homogeneously, and understanding each other on the streets of Mumbai is always a bit of a guessing game with much body movements to fill in the equivocal spaces.

The growth of the nation is faster than the capacity to administrater new forms of communication and the standardization of languages. A non-formalized polymorphic language is evidently less tedious than the translating that took place in the academia decades ago, when the post-colonial political framework demanded some equilibrium and quotas, as in University publications. Now during seminars students speak in their own tongues, says Professor Vatsala Shoukla from the Women Studies research Center, cementing the topic with various amounts of Hindi. Academic papers are often written in English for the benefit of the Indian scholarly community around the world. Juggling with words on paper, or along the oral tradition has given India its colourful kaleidoscopic hues. The rich creativity of its many cultures/nations evolves in a vortex rather than on a linear path. Amongst intellectuals the necessity to re-appreciate the vernacular languages, before they disappear altogether, like film director Pushpendra Singh, using the 'Brij' dialect for his film, is the answer to the rapid bullying globalization and commercial uniformisation naturally rejected by the individual meditative Indian psyche.