Meditating on Hindi
When I watched Hindi Medium earlier this year, I was able to relate to it. Generally, because I know how non-English speakers are persecuted in India. Personally, because I was the central character in the movie. Except my story would’ve been called English Medium.
I remember staring down at the essay prompts on the Hindi paper. It was one of the 3 admissions exams I had to get past, to join this new school in this new country my family had just moved to. As my eyes scanned the bullet list, my 8-year old brain picked up one particular topic: Meri ma (my mother). My Bengali brain went into a state of puzzled indecision. Meri ma? But I’m not female, why would I write about “meri” ma? So I confidently went on to write a badly planned, plot-less essay about mera ma instead. For those of you more familiar with Western European languages, this is the same as writing an essay on mon mère or mein Mutter.
You see, Bengali is a gender-neutral language. While Hindi assigns genders (male and female) to even inanimate objects, Bengali doesn’t do so even with people. So how would an unexposed, fledgling me know that possessive adjectives in Hindi (as with French and German too) take on the gender of the object, and not the subject? When I got home, I told my mother about the essay I had written on her, and she — having been raised in the Hindi speaking town of Jamshedpur — had a hearty laugh. My confidence in my Hindi took a giant leap out the window.
Back then I wasn’t even fluent in English. In fact, Bengali was the only language I could speak properly, until at some point my brother and I unconsciously started speaking in English with each other. That probably marked the point when English started taking over as my primary language, and eventually went on to become my language of thought. But Hindi? It had no space in my life except during the dreary hours of Hindi lessons at school. I was living in Muscat, an ocean across from the places where this language was home, and I didn’t need any space for Hindi anywhere in my life. (I cursed the subject throughout the years that I had to study it.)
So when I finished high school and left Muscat for Singapore, I went in confident, without even thinking about language as a barrier until I met my Indian cohort mates. To me the Gulf kid, Indians my age spoke English, and occasionally Malayalam, but never Hindi. Hindi speaking friends wasn’t even a concept to my 17-year old brain. Except, my fellow Indian students at NUS weren’t Gulf kids. To many of them, Hindi was their mother tongue, it was what they used to talk to their family, it was their language of thought. It belonged to them. The introverted me suddenly found myself amidst people whose language made my introversion only more justifiable.
I sneaked my way to the South Indian group, majorly Tamilian, speaking a language that made far more sense to my brain that had grown for 4 years in Chennai. My Tamil speaking skills were by no means any match for my Hindi speaking skills, but once upon a time — about 10 years ago — my Tamil used to be more fluent than even my Bengali, and perhaps that or something else just made me more comfortable being around people who spoke the language. Plus, there was no judgement on me for replying in English to the Tamil speaking group, whereas with the Northies, my English replies were subjected to judgmental curiosities of “Tujhe Hindi nahi aati kya?” (Do you not know Hindi?).
Bengali as a language has long taken a backseat in my life (compared to English), but I was never judged for it (well ok, maybe except by my grandad). Tamil as a language has long evaporated from my vocabulary but I was never judged for it. So why was I judged for my Hindi? Back then, it felt almost as if being North Indian (an imposed label in itself that I have never accepted) implied fluent knowledge of Hindi. Luckily for me, I found home at NUS in a group of Indians who were ‘Northies’ as well as ‘Southies’ as well as TCKs like me and spoke (thankfully) in my language of comfort.
Move forward 6 years, and the 23-year old me deciding to shift base to Mumbai. One of the biggest questions on my mind was of language — what were people going to think of my Hindi? I’d heard that Mumbai was far more welcoming of non-Hindi speakers than Delhi (where my parents have now settled), but Imposter Syndrome loomed large over my head. I decided to go ahead anyway, for many reasons, and not get worked up about the language I had to use. That is, until I had my first call with a prospect —while working from home in Delhi in January this year — and the conversation jumped to Hindi after English introductions. I was taken aback by a situation I had stupidly not prepared for, but my introversion had left me many years ago and I managed to roll with the situation. When I moved to Mumbai in April, I discovered that at work too, Hindi was a common language of communication, more so than English. On my first day itself, I was greeted with “Tujhe Hindi dhang se aati nahi, hai na?” (You don’t really speak Hindi that well do you?), which I laughed off externally while subduing ancient insecurities internally.
What got me inspired to write this article, though, was something I never expected. Just two days ago, I was leaving home for work and had — as usual — a thousand thoughts racing through my head, when I realized something extraordinary. Some of them were in Hindi. I literally stopped in my tracks for a second, to digest the reality of my situation. I have actually begun thinking — albeit very very slightly and rarely — in Hindi. I still find it difficult to correctly gender objects and my colleagues still say things like “Lol Shibanshu sounds funny when he speaks Hindi”, but all those fall short of my actualization — that Hindi has penetrated my language of thought. I don’t care about the judgement that I get from people for not speaking Hindi well (like most other judgement I don’t care for). But this feeling of knowing that my brain speaks to itself in Hindi is just very satisfying to the boy who once wrote an essay titled Mera ma.
