The city of Puna is the second biggest one after Mumbai in the western state of Maharashtra, where the Marathi language is mostly spoken along with Hindi. The city has the reputation of a cosmopolitan city with great academic institutions and a recently growing technological industry. I was visiting an educational program in the beginning of September. It happened to be during Ganesha Chaturthi, a ten-day festival celebrating the birth of the elephant-headed god and Shiva’s son. He is revered as the guardian of good fortune, giver of wisdom, remover of obstacles and protector against evil. Devotees all over India worship him before undertaking any new venture. Followers pray to him before performing rituals, organizers before commencing formal events, students before exams, businessmen before negotiating a deal, travelers before leaving on a journey, etc. According to a legend in the Shiva Purana, Parvati created Ganesha and asked him to guard the doors while she was bathing. Shiva was away at this time and when he came back, he was infuriated that the door keeper wouldn’t let him in and started a fight, in which he cut off Ganesha’s head. Parvati, however, was enraged and to avoid her destructive power, Shiva eventually replaced his head with one from the first animal encountered in the forest and to further appease her, he ordered that Ganesha be worshipped before all gods. His one tusk is usually missing, when depicted in art, because he needed it as a writing tool to put down in script the Mahabharata as told to him by the sage Vyasa. During the festival clay statues adorned with red silky fabric with golden borders are placed in all homes and temples. They are smeared with red sandal paste every day and are presented with offerings of milk, coconuts and besan laddu, Ganesha’s favorite sweets, made of chickpea flower, refined butter, brown sugar, nuts and dried fruits. Oil lamps around the altars are lit and incense sticks emit beautiful fragrance in the air. The very last day long rallies take the statues across the city to the banks of one of the four rivers flowing through it. They put the statues in a special boat and let them float down the waters.
One day I stopped in a book store, where by chance I met an acquaintance, whom I knew from the University of Minnesota while I was working on my Ph.D. She was dating an American boy then, who was one of my students in the Hindi class. We met at a few parties organized by our Department. We lost touch after I moved to New York. We recognized each other immediately. She could not stay for a long time to chat, so she asked me where I was staying and if I could visit her the next day and said that she would send a car for me the next morning to spend the day together at her place.
The weather was excellent. It was around 9 in the morning. We decided to hang outside for a while. We took a walk along the lanes in the big garden around their house. It was arranged like a park, beautiful landscaping, green grass and bushes cut in the shape of mushrooms and flowers along the borders. The monsoon rain was just over and the air was fresh and crisp. The house was a two story mansion surrounded by large terraces even had a roof patio.
“After I finished my MBA and came back from the states, I was employed in a big company as chief-financial officer. I really enjoyed it. My parents, however, wanted me to settle down. I was trying to postpone it, until one day people came with a boy that I had already met at my job and had noticed. I liked him, but had no idea that he would come with his parents… It was unbelievable! So, we got married and I stopped working.“
She was holding her four year-old son’s hand.
“Don’t you miss your job? Are you planning to return to work at all?”
“Well, not really. My husband and my parents-in-law never told me to quit. They are very liberal. Well, I don’t know how I would feel in ten years from now. But I have a kid, hopefully I will have another one soon. I am pretty busy anyway. I doubt it. Running to go on time to work or for a meeting with a client. Stressing out all the time. What is there to miss?! My family is very social. In our house we hold all kinds of events and receptions every week. I have to coordinate and organize these events. You know sometimes we have more than 100 guests.”
“But you guys have plenty of house keepers and servants.” I couldn’t understand.
“Yes, this is the case, but everything needs to be supervised and inspected. Also, you have no idea how happy my husband gets when I personally cook for him. He comes back in the evening exhausted and sometimes I do it for him. I like to see him happy, you know.”
“What about your mother-in-law? Doesn’t she take care of certain things?”
“Actually, she started writing some years ago and she left it all to me. She said, “This is your house now. Run it the way you like.” And she, actually, lets me do everything my way. Never interferes. She is always around if I need advice. But she really lets me be the mistress of the house. I like that. It’s a lot of work. You have no idea. I have to check what everyone is doing, or tell them what they need to be doing each day. I am on the phone all the time – technicians, drivers, gardeners, decorators, caterers, hotels, travel agents. We often fly our guests in. I often don’t have enough time for my son. I feel guilty sometimes.”
“Your life sounds pretty busy. Do you have any time for yourself?”
“Actually, that is the time when the three of us go to the bedroom in the evening and get ready to sleep.”
“The three of you?” I thought I didn’t follow. She was mixing Hindi and Marathi all the time.
“Yes, the three of us – my husband, my son and I.”
“Your son doesn’t have a separate room?”
She looked at me astonished.
“To learn that he has his own room, to be independent, so that you and your husband have some…” I stuttered, unsuccessfully searching for a word in Hindi that meant “privacy”, a concept, which originated in a foreign socio-cultural environment and although she spent several years in it, apparently, she had totally turned her back to that past. It actually never came up in the rest of our conversation.
Sometimes I feel uneasy, when I forget that I am in India, talking to an Indian. Where is my cultural sensitivity?! A language you can learn by studying its lexis and grammar. However, this is only one side of the coin. There are stereotypes, traditions, conventions, ideas and culture that language reflects and encodes, which makes it a dynamic, changing phenomenon that does not exist only in books. And it is really difficult to develop the packet of skills that are needed in order to turn it into a tool of mutual communication and understanding, to such an extent that the learner can become an insider in the community. It entails hard work and immersion in the target environment. It is a life-time effort and, actually, plenty is left for the next life as well.
“Let’s go inside. I have to check what’s up in the kitchen. My fufia sasur will be coming tonight.”
“Sure!” I agreed and followed her towards the house digging deep in my sleeping family-related vocabulary. It took me some time to figure out who was coming – fufia sasur was the ‘husband of her father-in-law’s sister’.
Well, I still have to think twice when I hear certain terms from the complicated tree of kinship terminology in Hindi. There is a variety of words defining relationships on the side of the mother, the father, the sister, or the brother, or the in-laws, or a relative’s older or younger siblings, etc., more than a hundred nouns that denote relatives and there are no short-cuts or substitutes. Undoubtedly, this linguistic feature conveys specific aspects of social behavior and attitudes among the speakers of Hindi and also, in fact, of many other languages in South Asia. Whether it is Bhutan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Shri Lanka, Nepal, or India, a large variety of such kinship terms are used in every day speech, which is a distinctive feature of the languages of the whole subcontinent. When born in a culture of joint family life, some of the first words a child needs to learn are how to call the people around and the ones who visit. Thus this part of the child’s vocabulary develops effortlessly and naturally, because it is relevant to everyday life and it is recycled frequently, unlike the tremendous efforts needed by the language learners to acquire these lexical items which are not personally relevant, because their life experiences are quite different.
Another interesting linguistic feature revealing a particular socio-cultural aspect of the Hindi speakers is the pronominal system. It encapsulates a typical phenomenon, namely that of rigid social stratification. Constant hierarchies based on age, gender, rank, or caste are at play in all kinds of communication. These vertical alignments define the relations between a child and a parent, a younger sibling and an older one, a wife and a husband, a woman and a man, an employee and a boss, in other words, in all familial, marital, professional and social interactions. Such reciprocal relationships are usually asymmetrical and this aspect of the culture is reflected by the variety of pronouns and their use. There are three second person pronouns – tuu, ‘you’, employed to address children or people of lower status, tum, ‘you’ for friends, or people of the same age or equal status, and aap, ‘you’ for those of older age or superior status. In some cases, tuu is used when interacting with mother or god, which expresses intimacy and inviolability of the relationship. In addition, a person of higher status is talked about in the third person plural ‘they’ to express respect. Also, in many cases, a speaker would refer to him/herself in the plural ‘we’ out of modesty and courtesy. There are corresponding characteristics of many languages of South Asia, directly related to the common features of the cultures.
South Asia constitutes a socio-linguistic area where a variety of ethnic and language groups have been in constant interaction and convergence on the basis of economic, administrative and cultural exchange. With time a large variety of languages and dialects, customs and norms have developed, however, they are all defined by plenty of commonalities, which exist due to shared historical processes, literary traditions, and philosophical and religious principles. Thus, two parallel phenomena emerged. On the one hand, is the similar grammar of the languages, i.e. similar sets of rules of language change and formation, and, one the other, similar grammar of the cultures, i.e. similar sets of attitudinal and behavioral rules25.
The linguistic situation in almost all of the countries in South Asia is complex. On the one hand, it is characterized by societal multilingualism and, on the other, by individual multilingualism. The linguistic situation in India is particularly unique. Many millions speak three or more languages on a daily basis. The constitution of India lists 22 official languages: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Metei, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. There are many other languages not given the status of official, however. According to the Central Institute of Indian Languages 62 languages belong to the Tibeto-Burmese family and are spoken by 0.96% of the population of India, 14 languages belong to the Austro-Asiatic family, spoken by 1.13%, 17 languages are from the Dravidian family, spoken by 22.5% and 20 languages from the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family, spoken by 75.29%.
Hindi and the rest of the Indo-Aryan languages evolved as dialects of the codified or perfected Sanskrit, one of the oldest Indo-European languages along with Hittite, Old Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Old Armenian and Old Iranian. They are believed to have evolved sometime in the fifth millennium BC from a common ancestor, a theoretically reconstructed proto-language. Its dialects were spoken by tribes living in the steppes between the Pontian and Caspian seas, along the basin of Volga River up to the Caucus Mountains, from where major migratory processes started26.
More than 370 million people speak Hindi as a first language, but many more, close to a half a billion speak it as a second language. With the exception of Sindhi, Nepali and Urdu, due to migration reasons and Sanskrit, which is not used for communication, the rest of the official languages are widely spoken in certain geographical areas by large ethno-linguistic groups with relatively distinctive history, literature, arts, rituals, customs, clothing and cuisine. This becomes clear when Bengalis and Gujaratis are compared or Rajasthanis and Tamils are. We observe plenty of variety and yet we also identify underlying commonalities. Similar conclusions are reached if we compare different communities in Europe, e.g. Finish and Spanish, or Romanian and French. Throughout several millennia India, like Europe, has been inhabited by groups that were diverse from a racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious perspective. Hence, it is a subcontinent characterized by a large scale diversity, and yet united by the commonalities of one civilization.
I remember in 2001 what the current Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpeyi, shared in the beginning of his inauguration speech at the World Sanskrit Congress in Delhi. He said that he had trouble deciding in which language to speak. He wondered whether to do it in English, but he rejected this idea, because all scholars were linguists specializing in Sanskrit and certainly knew another Indian languages. Then, he considered that Sanskrit might be the appropriate language for his opening remarks, but he needed to be realistic, because it was not a popular language of communication and it needed in order to become one, it needed its grammar simplified and to be a mandatory language in the higher education and in the school system. So he decided to speak in Hindi, and thus all guests and people across India would understand.
A colleague of mine joked afterwards that the reason why the Prime Minister didn’t consider Urdu, was not only political (his party, Bharatiya Janata Party, is known for its fundamental Hindu ideology and support of Sanskrit and Hindi), but also logistic, because once he started the speech in Urdu, he would have got carried away with recitation of classical Urdu poetry, which for educated scholars and orators is impossible to avoid; it would have turned into a poetry gathering instead of a conference day and we would have definitely missed both our lunch and dinner receptions.
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25 See for more Ferguson, Charles Albert. Sociolinguistic perspectives: papers on language in society, 1959-1994. Oxford University Press US, 1996. 84-96
26 See for more Mallory, J. P. and Douglas Q. Adams. The Oxford introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European world. Oxford University Press. 2006.