I, Me and That One Alien Language by Victor Ghoshe
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For a painter adopting a tribal art form; for a musician learning an indigenous instrument; for writer learning to write in a language other than his mother tongue or a school taught one – all of these are adventures.
Every language of this world has roots. Roots those bind them to some geographical areas. A language can migrate, it can go far. But usually it’s tied to a specific territory or a country.
Bengali (language) belongs mainly to Bengal (Eastern India) and Bangladesh, and I have been living in New Delhi for almost 18 years; a good 1400 kilometers away from Kolkata, Bengal – which was almost an other land. Where you have a Chittaranjan Park cluster of Bengali families but you somehow cannot connect with the stereo typical ‘Bengali’ spoken there. You do not readily encounter the finesse of the language and humour that easily comes along with the flow of it.
As a film enthusiast I always appreciated the group of Bengali people who almost had constructed the pillars and had built the empire of the Hindi Film Industry in Bombay – everything they did was in a language that was not their mother tongue.
On the other hand I also think of myself, out of Bengal for over 20 years and been missing the fine Bengali humour around.
My mother tongue, Bengali, was almost a strange language in Delhi. When you live in a place where your own language is considered strange, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. In offices people would ask you to not to speak in Bengali; some Senior Officer would even say – ‘in my office Bengali language is banned’. As if you speak Bengali only to conspire or to discuss a sinful secret.
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Lack of any correspondence to the environment made me sick; I was depressed in my initial years. The absence of conversations in the language that makes me – ‘me’, created a distance within my self. And I started believing that a language can migrate, it can go far – but its charm would be lost. As it is somehow tied to a specific region.
I remember through my initial days in Delhi, in absence of the kind of fine humour I have brought up with – I tried cracking jokes in the North Indian way and I had struggled for over a couple of years to crack a perfect north Indian joke that made people laugh. The content, the sudden twist, the peak, the free fall, the timing nothing was coming right.
Then one day I understood the problem was with me. The lack of respect in my mind for the language of the region I was living in. The false ego of coming from an intellectual land had stopped me to listen to the sounds, the nuances and the ornaments of the language sensibly.
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I changed the way of my thinking.
Today after spending almost eighteen years in Delhi I have over 30 songs under my belt which are written in Hindi – (most of which are used and engaged in different social programs of various international agencies), and one published and successful music album (now raising fund for a development program) in which I sang songs that tell the story of the land once I had labelled as a strange place and almost refused to live in.
These reactions don’t surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening. I am from a family where I saw my grandfather never shifted to trousers from dhoti even when all of his friends did. I am the son of a mother who would never change her lifestyle or the way she cooked even with strange vegetables and stranger ingredients. Even in New Delhi, she continued, as far as possible, to dress, cook, eat, think, live as if she had never left Kolkata. The refusal to change her habits and her attitudes was her strategy to resist the other culture.
I am somehow different and a little more liberal. While the refusal to change was my mother’s way to fight, the perseverance on transforming myself was mine. ‘There was a person busting with creative ideas, who left Calcutta in 1996. So for me it was about this person inside my mind who always wanted to learn new things – and how time had helped him evolve’.
It was neither a pre-conceived idea that I would start writing in Hindi – a language which I never studied, nor an accident. But it happened quite automatically when I started becoming a more observing and listening person with some respect for the language of the land.
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‘The Song for Rehman,’ the first song I wrote in Hindi, begins with a line that mentions a certain traffic signal of Delhi. This was a traffic signal that mattered in my life. The only signal which would decide whether I would be late in office or will arrive on time. The first physical thing I connected well with, in the city was this traffic signal – the one which gave me my first friend Rehman and eventually gave me my first successful song in Hindi. I had to write in Hindi because I wanted to tell a story of the city which speaks in Hindi; because I wanted to narrate my conversations with the city through my friend Rehman’s voice. And because I wanted to paint an empty canvas with colours that show the true spirit of the city.
Some people say that the process of metamorphosis is the only thing of life that never changes. Some people say there is actually no process of metamorphosis in life – CHANGE itself is life.
I believe the journey of each one of us, the evolution of every nation, the change through every historical period—of this universe and all it contains—is a series of changes, sometimes low, sometimes high, like a wave, without which we would be static. The moments of transition, in which something changes its form or its philosophy, constitute the core of all of us. It can be Nirvana or it can be nothing but these are the moments that we automatically remember. They provide a framework to our existence. Almost all the rest is void.
I think that the power of art and aesthetics is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we look at a painting, read a novel, see a film, and listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us that we weren’t aware of before. We want to transform ourselves; just the way that one traffic signal had transformed me.
A total metamorphosis wasn’t possible in my case. I can write in Hindi, but I can’t become a Hindi writer. I can write my songs in Hindi but I possibly cannot become a Hindi lyricist. I had read about Fernando Pessoa, a writer who invented four versions of himself: four separate, distinct writers, thanks to which he was able to go beyond the confines of himself. Maybe what I’m doing, by means of Hindi, resembles his tactic. It’s not possible to become another writer, but it might be possible to become two or three.
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Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Hindi, because I know my work has a pan-India audience now. It’s true that after a point it’s the language which possesses you not that you possess the language. But somehow with my Hindi speaking audience I’m freer as a song writer or as a writer who has no baggage of his own culture and its humongous weight on his shoulders. I am sleeker a person who can anytime slip into any another language without any hassle – without any extra baggage. Because now I know the secret key to slip oneself inside the skin of any language or any culture…… is nothing but a little respect for that language and that culture – which demands a sensible listening and a little bit of careful observation to pick up a few insights.
Victor Ghoshe
The author is a Senior Adviser with BBC India
and works for international development
