The languages of linking

India has no single uniting language and, for decades, political forces have proposed filling this gap with Hindi. But what would we stand to lose if we gained a 'link' language? Rega Jha examines how Indians traverse linguistic chasms in borrowed words, token gestures, and mixed vocabularies and charmingly, find our way home.

Illustration by Vinayak Varma

First I have to tell you one love story.

When Aarti first arrived in Chennai, where a cousin had found her a job cooking at a girl’s hostel, she spoke only her native Pahari dialect. One of her new colleagues in the kitchen was a nice-looking Tamilian man who, at his previous job, had happened to learn some Hindi. Something beyond language compelled the two to speak. Over many months, his broken Hindi bent out of shape to reach towards her, and she kneaded and wrung her Pahari to reach him. Eventually, Aarti became fluent in Hindi purely from flirting with a Tamilian man. They’ve now been married long enough that she’s learned Tamil too, though she insists it’s TV serials, not love or marriage, which ultimately provided the best tutelage.

I’m telling Aarti’s story as a reminder: we aren’t a people made too anxious by the linguistic chasms between us. Even while coordinated political forces try busily to generate this anxiety among us, with rhetoric about our needing a single language so we may feel like a single nation, many of us happily bridge our own distances. And we do it in all sorts of sweet and surprising ways.

I’d introduce those worried rhetoricians, if I could, to a man named Abhijeet, whom I meet one evening in the aisle of a grocery store.

“May I help you?,” he asks, while I’m in search of vinegar but staring dazedly at a rack of soy sauce. Faster than conscious cognition can catch, my linguistic mind assesses it to be a Hindi speaker’s MayIHelpYou and responds, “Haan bhaiya, vinegar chahiye thha.” He shows me to the vinegar.

Abhijeet moved from Calcutta to Chennai a month ago and can’t understand much Tamil yet, which is making life slightly difficult, he admits. Does he think a ‘link language’ would help him after all, I wonder. I look both ways for a clear coast, lower my voice, and ask: does he wish more people in Madras spoke Hindi? “Nahi nahi, kya hai,” he swats the blasphemous question away. “Ek saal mein toh seekh loonga Tamil.” No no, what’s there? I’ll learn Tamil in a year. I’m struck by his confidence. How, I ask, does he plan to learn? “Bas sun ke, bol ke.” Just hearing it, speaking it.

Abhijeet seems to live by that classic and timeless linguistic policy once brought to us by a Tamil then Hindi smash hit which retained, in both languages, its Arabic opening word and English refrain—the “take it easy policy.”

On my way home, I think about a French man named Jacques Ranciére who wrote a book about teachers, students and intellectual liberation. Specifically, I think about one of Ranciére’s earliest examples, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, of ‘emancipated’ learning. “What all human children learn best is what no master can explain: the mother tongue,” Ranciére writes. “We speak to them and we speak around them. They hear and retain, imitate and repeat, make mistakes and correct themselves, succeed by chance and begin again methodically and, at too young an age for explicators to begin instructing them, they are almost all able to understand and speak the language of their parents.” 

I wonder if Ranciére might identify Abhijeet as an ‘emancipated learner,’ for nonchalantly embarking on this trial-and-error process of lingual auto-didactism so long past infancy.

On the Shatabdi from Mysore to Chennai one afternoon, I meet a child who, at 3 years old, is already hearing and retaining, imitating and repeating, making mistakes and correcting himself in two mother tongues, Dakhni and Kannada. His parents have recently moved to Pondicherry for their medical residencies so the child also hears his parents fumbling and figuring, as adults, towards a language newly necessary to them, Tamil. As his parents and I speak in English, the child tracks us with his eyes, repeating some of the words we say. He enjoys the shape of ‘taxi’ on his tongue and teeth, and says it again and again as our train slides east through dusk. Long after he’s lost interest in listening to us, he’s lining up small rubber dinosaurs on the rocking tray table in front of me, and the dinosaurs are christened taxi, taxi, taxi.

It reminds me of a story my family has told often. When I was 2 years old, they say, I briefly developed the fantastic habit of announcing, to all who’d listen, that my daughter-in-law speaks Maithili very well. I didn’t and don’t have a daughter-in-law. What had happened was this: my dada and dadi had hosted a dinner at which, among the guests was some sort of government official whose son had recently committed the great familial betrayal of falling in love with and marrying a non-Maithil woman. To regain his own perceived loss in social standing, this man had made it a point to keep repeating, through the evening, that his new daughter-in-law now speaks Maithili very well. While the adults of my family likely did their best to respond with grace, I, an absorbent and tactless toddler, betrayed their hospitality and simply latched on to the opportunity to learn a new sentence. Hamar putao badh badhiya Maithili bajai chhai, the important guest said one by one to everybody and, to all their mortification, a baby laughed and clapped and crawled around after him, parroting, Hamar putao badh badhiya Maithili bajai chhai. 

We all learned the first sentence we’d know in Tamil two years later, when my father’s job moved us to Madras: “Tamil theriyadhu,” meaning, “I don’t know Tamil.” A couple of years into fumbling and faltering, parroting and tweaking, we edited our position to, “Tamil konja-konja theriyum,” meaning, “I know little-little Tamil.” Many people I know grew up this way too. A Kannadiga who grew up in Andheri and knows thodese-thodese Marathi, a Punjabi who grew up in Bangalore and knows swalpa-swalpa Kannada, a Gujarati who grew up in Calcutta and knows ektu-ektu Bangla.

While back in Chennai, I have the great pleasure of fumbling and faltering some baby steps beyond konja-konja proficiency. I know its frustrations well. But there’s also a type of beauty I’ve occasionally glimpsed, visible only from this particular vantage. It’s only from this full-grown half-knowing that one can admire, maybe, the poetically difficult adjacencies of marundu and marandu—medicine and forgetting—or of ezhunthu, ezhuthu, and eranthu—get up, write, and die. How grimly I’ve misstated, to the sweet elderly cook, my plans for many weekday mornings.

There are other pleasures too. I play a game when I watch Tamil films. I test how long I can go without looking down at the subtitles. If I can go a full five minutes, I win. I only ever come tantalisingly close. 

In the film Natchathiram Nagargiradhu, when the protagonist admits to feeling, “oru maari,” which translates literally to ‘one type,’ Netflix subtitles the phrase to “a little lost.” With my barely-there Tamil, I sense this subtitle to be both wholly inaccurate and completely correct. Through the half-second of dissonance, a memory surfaces of a long-past Bombay afternoon, when a friend had told me she was feeling onthara. Onthara, she’d explained, literally translates from Kannada to, “one type”—but it is also a feeling. One can be onthara sad or onthara happy or onthara whatever-one-is, she continued (see this Tweet in which a person is “onthara bereft of something”), but one can also just be onthara. Phonetically, I’d linked Kannada’s onthara with Hindi’s ek tarah but, as far as meaning was concerned, no phrase in any language I knew could do what onthara could. In the years since, I frequently found myself admitting to feeling onthara to myself in internal chatter, despite not speaking a lick of Kannada out loud.

Now, watching Rene feel “a little lost” by the Pondicherry seaside, my mental museum of words and phrases expands, placing oru maari beside the gleaming and formerly lone jewel, onthara. It strikes me, also, that the lack of such a phrase in English—one that conveys a healthily resigned uncertainty about the makeup of one’s own emotional state—must’ve been keenly felt by its young Black speakers, who filled it this past decade by mainstreaming the AAVE phrase “feeling some type of way.”

This is what it’s like to wander curiously through the dim rooms of new languages, turning lights on one by one, placing new sounds next to definitions written in other scripts. One can trip over a tiny phrase and end up traveling far through memory and reference, visiting quite a few friends, then returning before the minute-long scene is done. One day, I play the subtitles game with Gamak Ghar, a Maithili film. I catch myself bored by how easy it is, missing more partial comprehension and its tickets for internal travel.

A teeming plurality can really only produce joy or anxiety. I’m tallying instances of the former because the latter is loud around us. It is in the long, arduous and aggressive political project of Hindi imposition. And between ordinary citizens in everyday encounters, it is in the instinct to dominate, most potently via ridicule. Consider the ubiquitous and relentless mockery of second-language English by more privileged and fluent speakers; or the Bollywood trope of finding punchlines in South Indians’ Hindi accents; or even more granularly, as researcher Mohini Gupta wrote about in a chapter I enjoyed reading recently, the mockery of Hindi-leaning Hinglish by those who speak English-leaning Hinglish. (Mohini examines how this plays out on Indian reality TV in particular—for instance when MTV Roadies judge Raghu tells MTV Roadies contestant Tamanna, during her audition, that “she puts on her ‘gandi wali accent’ only to sound ‘cool.’”) “A lot of people shy away from learning or engaging with languages for fear of being ridiculed,” Mohini tells me later when we speak. 

In the comments section of a gardening video, I note happily, a few viewers have made fun of the anchor’s English, but have been promptly and thoroughly shouted down by tenfold defense and appreciation for his efforts to make his coriander growing method accessible to viewers around the world. Later, I’m caught off guard by how moving I find it to watch Rahul Gandhi practice multiple variations before proudly shouting, straight into the camera, his hard-won correct pronunciation of the word thayyir. 

All this effort is just human nature, according to Mohanraj. “We all do our best to understand any person talking to us,” he tells me, while I’m in the back of his auto rickshaw, “And we do our best to express our true self to any person we talk to.” This, he says, is the reason he can now speak 7 languages. Mohanraj has driven in Chennai since 1988 and, in the process, has encountered people of enough different native tongues that he can now converse in Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, English, and, of course, in Tamil—all in addition to his own mother tongue, Saurashtra. I learn this in Royapettah, when I give him directions in my nervous Tamil, and he asks amusedly, in breezy English, “Will some other language be easier for you?” It takes me halfway to Adyar to recover from amazement when he lists the options.

I’m telling these stories as reminders. While imposition occupies airwaves and has cruel real-world envoys, our stores and streets and kitchens and schools are equally bustling orchestras of ‘emancipated learners,’ a la Ranciére—a bolder type of person, just clumsily, curiously, courageously blundering towards whichever words and grammars life’s love or work delivered them to, tongue-twisting in pursuit of connection, not domination. We hear and retain, imitate and repeat, make mistakes and correct ourselves, succeed by chance and begin again methodically and, without any links imposed on us, are able to create our own.

For instance—Madhuri is Tamilian and her husband is Malayali and, when a mutual friend first introduced them to one another, they couldn’t communicate without that friend translating between them. This soon became very awkward because it quickly became clear that they were falling madly in love. Madhuri got Thursdays off from the parlour she worked at so every Thursday, they’d rent a scooter and zip around Madras till dark. Thursday by Thursday, their courtship doubled as Tamil class.

Now, fifteen years later, he only breaks into Malayalam when they’re fighting. Madhuri thinks this is a good system because she’s spared full comprehension of the most unkind things he says to her. When they’ve both calmed down, they make up in Tamil. They say “I love you,” in English, though, and their 6-year-old son has made a habit of parroting it. He says it to his teachers at school as he waves them bye at the end of each school day, which Madhuri and her husband and the teachers all find very funny. The teachers say, “I love you too, da,” happily, as they send him home.

Rega is a freelance writer, editor, and whatever you call a person who's worked an assortment of big and small roles behind the scenes on all sorts of creative missions (shows, podcasts, children's books, meme teams). Read more of her writing at regajha.com.