How Indian is my English?

One of the questions that should bother (It doesn’t. At least, not strongly enough.)  those of us who speak English in India  is: What to do about Indian English? Pretend that we don’t speak it? Banish it as non-standard English? Study it the way one would a specimen in a zoology lab, or as a curiosity, taking care to immunize one’s own speech and writing from it?

An American friend once observed that he was amazed at the range and variety of English he encounters in India. It’s as if every person speaks a different dialect.  In fact, every state in India has its own variety of Indian English, which can be quite taxing for a foreigner! And the variation is not just in accent, but also in sentence structure, vocabulary,  and idiom, the vernacular of each state forging its own distinctive flavour of Indian English.  

In academia, Indian English is definitely non-standard; our entire English education is aimed at erasing it and inflicting “the standard” upon us.  But what is this “standard”? More often than not it’s Standard British English as seen or heard in British Literature, the BBC or textbooks published by British-based publishing houses.  In corporate India, of course, American English (as seen/heard in Hollywood and American media) rules.

But shouldn’t it trouble us - that the standard for our most important link language comes from abroad? Don’t we speak enough English to be able to devise our own standard? Isn’t it time we standardized Indian English, instead of forcing a foreign variety down our throats? 

The lack of a homegrown standard is perhaps one major cause of the alarming levels of linguistic profiling (using speech characteristics, or dialect, to identify a speaker’s race, religion or social class; a term coined by John Baugh) - easily one of the biggest forms of discrimination in India.

Gross variation in English is a source of much mirth (as it is anywhere in the world of course) but the mirth is often derisive. Consider, for instance, the very Indian poems in Indian English by Nissim Ezekiel, one of the founding fathers of modern Indian poetry in English.  Here’s the most well-known example:

Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.

Friends,
our dear sister
is departing for foreign
in two three days,
and
we are meeting today
to wish her bon voyage.

You are all knowing, friends,
what sweetness is in Miss Pushpa.
I don’t mean only external sweetness
but internal sweetness.
Miss Pushpa is smiling and smiling
even for no reason
but simply because she is feeling.

Miss Pushpa is coming
from very high family.
Her father was renowned advocate
in Bulsar or Surat,
I am not remembering now
which place.

Surat? Ah, yes,
once only I stayed in Surat
with family members
of my uncle’s very old friend,
his wife was cooking nicely . . .
that was long time ago.
Coming back to Miss Pushpa
she is most popular lady
with men also and ladies also.

Whenever I asked her to do anything,
she was saying, ‘Just now only
I will do it.’ That is showing
good spirit. I am always
appreciating the good spirit.
Pushpa Miss is never saying no.
Whatever I or anybody is asking
she is always saying yes,
and today she is going
to improve her prospect,
and we are wishing her bon voyage.

Now I ask other speakers to speak,
and afterwards Miss Pushpa
will do summing up.

 The use of Indian English here is deliberate, meant to evoke laughter and not to exploit any expressive possibilities that the variety might offer. Contrast this with what African and Caribbean poets have shown is possible with pidgins, creoles, patois, and dialects. Here’s an example -  Kaumau Braithwaite’s 1967 chant about tourism, “Wings of a Dove”:

So beat dem drums
dem, spread

dem wings dem
watch dem fly 

dem, soar dem
high dem…

full o’ silk dem
full o’ food dem…

full o’ flash dem
full o’ cash dem..

So beat dem burn
dem, learn

dem that dem
got nothin’….

 This piece is from Rotten English: A Literary Anthology, an anthology of two centuries of world literature, edited by  Dohra Ahmad (professor of post-colonial literature at St. John’s University in New York). What makes this anthology special is that it consists entirely of vernacular, non-standard writing (fiction, poetry, essays) in English from around the world - Jamaican English, African-American, Dominican, Chicano-American and “Spanglish”, Irish,  Scottish,  Brooklyn English, Nigerian English and Pakistani-Londoner English.  As one reviewer of the book puts it, when you finish, you feel like a world traveler.

Reading and understanding so many different varieties is not easy, and sometimes you’re all at sea. (Ahmad acknowledges this by providing a useful glossary. ) But the anthology helps break the hold that the notion of a standard has on literary language.  For, clearly, the stilted, standard form simply cannot capture the cadences, flavours and rhythms of life that these “non-standard” varieties do.

 

 

The tyrnny of tim and txt

Last Wednesday I bid farewell to another year of my life, letting it slip through memory into the confines of history. My history. And, reluctantly, I welcome the grey hair, wrinkles, surprises, pleasures, crises, wisdom, experience, deja vu of another year of my life.  With the hope that the  year will be different from the previous ones, but not so different that I struggle to make sense of it. 

More than anything else, I wish life would slow down so I could keep pace with it. One day at a time. One hour. One moment. So I could live, truly live, each moment, and not rush willy-nilly from one moment to the next, one day to the next, one year to the next. Having the experience and missing the meaning. 

Time is  a precious commodity today, isn’t it? No one seems to have enough of it.  Specially not readers who want their authors to write tight. Today’s readers have perilously short attention spans and very little time for verbose communicators. Words compete today with the television remote and the computer mouse. One click or one press of a button and you can go back and forth, skip something, replay it or remain frozen at a particular point. Who says time travel is science fiction?!  

We have more and more and want less and less.

And yet, as William Brohaugh points out in his book, Write Tight, Hemingway wasn’t competing with Nintendo and ESPN when he wrote his admirably crisp and clear prose.

I belong to the generation that still remembers the pleasures of letter-writing but has made the smooth transition to e-mailing. And now I listen, bewildered, as people tell me they have no patience for e-mails. It’s Orkut scraps, Facebook pokes, or texting and sms-ing. Instantaneous and telegraphic communication. 

We live in an age where the diminutive, the brief and the simple are highly prized in communication, said Umberto Eco. And text-messaging embodies this zeitgeist perfectly.

Generation Txt. Everyone is jmping on the bndwgn. (Source) Text messaging is growing up.  So much so that if you do not possess a mobile or cannot txt, you are, effectively, a non-person. 

Cellphone novels are all the rage, I’m told, in Japan. Seventeen-something young girls text away the ‘profound insights’ of their life into their cellphones, on their way to college or a part-time job. Not a moment of their life wasted. Theirs not the  life of simply standing and staring. 

The truncated messages of texting are just words sans vowels, the assumption being that the words can easily be guessed from the consonants alone. Which is funny considering that vowels are often sounded differently in different words! 

What springs to my mind when I think of texting is the bonsai - small, compact, exotic; reality miniaturized. But can the bonsai match the grandeur of a tree?

Anyone who has known the pleasures of sitting in the shade of the spreading branches of a tree, climbing and exploring its secrets, sitting atop, reading, sheltered in its foliage on a  hot summer day,  will know what I mean.

The bonsai has its beauty - the beauty of the hothouse - but I’d rather go climb a tree!! 

Mother language, slang, grammar, and other driftwood

February 18. That’s when I last posted. And much water has passed under the bridge since then. Mother Language Day, for one, which passed by on 22 February. Not uneventfully, for I got my kid to promise early that morning that he would henceforth speak only his mother language at home.

So I waited eagerly for him after school that day, hallucinating fondly about how he would say “Hi Mom! I’m back!” in his mother language.  I held my breath as he kicked the door open in his usual filmy style. And this is what he said:  “Do you know the opposite of ‘It rocks’?”  My breath froze.  He continued relentlessly, “It’s ‘It sucks’” The breath went into rigor mortis. (The kid often puts me in a spot with his questions, which I’ve written about before, here.)

Quite dispassionately he proceeded to illustrate the expressions (got teaching blood in his veins, does the little man) by listing out things that rock and things that suck (according to him). My breath thawed as I heard me mentioned in  his list of things that rock. As for what else figured on that list, well suffice it to say I wasn’t in very good company. The good company was all in his list of things that suck. The breath vaporized.   

I’m not against slang. In fact, I’m aware that ’sucks’ is not even considered a swear word in the US where it’s used even by children. 

When Electroluux first marketed their vacuum cleaners in the US, their slogan was, “Nothing sucks like an Electroluux!” Apparently, the Swedish-speaking people who created that slogan didn’t know that in American slang, “suck” also means “to be bad”. (Source) Or maybe they did know, and it was meant to be a joke!!

The origin of this slang use of ’sucks’ is imitative in nature, according to the OED, and I’m sure it’s obvious what it ‘imitates’, so I won’t mention it. I really don’t think it’s possible to use the word without evoking the reference; even my son giggles when he uses it, though he doesn’t know the actual reference. I hope!

More driftwood that floated by was National Grammar Day in the US on March 4. An occasion that most self-respecting language blogs chose to treat with disdain.  There’s actually a Society for the Protection of Good Grammar (SPOGG); check it out here. Their blog is good fun: http://spogg.org/

My own attitude to grammar is ambivalent; I’m sometimes punctilious and sometimes not.  Nathan  Bierma puts it better than I can in the Chicago Tribune :

I confess: I’m one of those people who cares about the difference between a gerund and a participle, between a restrictive and non-restrictive relative clause. This puts me in a tiny minority of deranged grammatical eccentrics — people you should generally try to avoid.
But most of the time — when we’re among friends, family, or anyone we feel comfortable with — we should simply let our hair down and allow our unpolished emissions of language to burst out of us in all their untidy splendor.

A little schizophrenic  perhaps? Speaking grammar with yourself and English with friends and family. (Read the entire piece here.)

Grammar is not dead in India; perhaps it’s the only thing that’s alive in English classrooms.  Last week a friend called to ask me how I teach my kid the Future Tense. (Apparently this monstrosity was being forced upon his 7-year-old kid in school!) I don’t, I told him. My kid knows how to tell me that he’s going to watch the cricket match on TV tomorrow instead of going to school. That’s all that matters, right?

And the final piece of driftwood before I sail out of this blog - another punctuation mark, the interrobang. Unfortunately, WordPress does not allow me to type it out, so here  it is on Wikipedia; it’s a combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark, with the one superimposed on the other. Similar in function to ?!

What the  . . . ?! I’ll continue to use this, thank you. Don’t we have enough trouble with existing punctuation marks ?! 

Spoofreading

 A friend sent me this link: The Impotence of Proofreading. Delightful piece. Thanks PK. The blog on which this was posted is also well worth browsing.

Proofreading - that handmaiden of writing - reminds me  of some household chores, like putting the clothes out to dry, bringing them in and putting them away in wardrobes; drying the dishes and storing them.  Tiresome but unavoidable; if neglected, then all the effort put into the big chores comes to nought!

Ergo, proofread proofread proofread. Yes, even that shopping list.

No, Microsoft Word is not a good spellchecker, as this letter from a teacher to her students proves:

Deer stew dents 

To questions four you. Do you know how too use the spell checker on the computer? Can you sea sum spelling mistakes inn this? The spellchecker on my computer could knot fine any problems - awl my words were correct. The grammar checker all so said my grandma was perfect. 
Cheese 
Karen

The spellchecker on WordPress did not indicate any errors in the letter, either! So you see, there are things that machines simply cannot do.

 Thanks PK for this one, too.

And I do solemnly swear that I will henceforth proofread my mails to you carefully.

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

(Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticsm, 1711)

I’m not the greatest fan of Pope. And of course critics have decidedly shown him his place in the general scheme of things literary. But his well-worn aphorism  about a little learning does seem frighteningly relevant today, when learning is instantaneous thanks to the Internet.

Everyone seems to know a little of everything; and if they don’t, they can find out very quickly. Take pop psychology. Suddenly everyone seems to know exactly what personality problems everybody else suffers from.  It’s a great comfort to see how enlightened (and verbose) even the kitchen-sink seems to be. 

However.

Are we seeing disorders rather than humanity in everyone? Or are we just too lazy to find out exactly what the words that roll so easily off the tongue really mean? 

Here’s what I think is a case in point.

 A neighbour lost the bag she keeps outside her door for the milkman to deposit milk packets in. And she’s quite sure that the culprit is the woman who works as domestic help in several neighbouring apartments.

Now, the episode itself, my neighbour’s suspicions and the woman’s guilt do not interest me.  What does is the word my neighbour used to describe the poor woman: Kleptomaniac.  Because, apparently, the woman was accused of stealing earlier too, although nothing was ever proved.

I wonder if my neighbour knows what the word means. It’s not too difficult to find out, thanks again to the Internet.

A kleptomaniac is someone who has a persistent, neurotic impulse to steal, especially without economic motive. (Merriam Webster )  Or someone with an irresistible tendency to theft; persons who are not tempted to it by necessitous circumstances; supposed by some to be a form of insanity. (OED)

And to take precision and accuracy to dizzying heights, the DSM IV Code (the most impressive Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychological Association, which you can access here or here) defines kleptomania as 

the failure to resist impulses to steal things that are not needed for either personal use or for their monetary value.

(Emphasis mine.)

In all three definitions the act is defined as not being prompted by economic motives or actual need. Now, you don’t need Nobel-prize winning intelligence to deduce that the poor woman must have stolen out of sheer need. Not because she was insane.

I’m sure it must be a disorder in itself to be labelling poverty and wretchedness kleptomania. And no, I don’t know the name of the disorder! 

I wonder how much more of another person’s humanity we’d be able to see if we were not so eager to label.

Wikipedia notes, in its entry on the Pope aphorism (in my title) that this line is often misquoted as “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” thus reinforcing the aptness of this very admonition, as the misquote betrays a certain want of learning.

Considering that Wikipedia itself is knowledge/learning of a dubious nature,  this is irony of the Chinese boxes variety!