Although Parvati's father had learned English in high school, her mother's education had ended in the fifth grade, when she was expected to prepare for marriage by mastering domestic skills. You wouldn't know it from educated middle-class circles in Delhi and Mumbai, but fewer than a third of Indians speak English. There are twenty-one other official languages in India, not to mentioned 844 officially recognized dialects and thousands of other unofficial ones.
English was, of course, the language of the British colonialists, but Indians English words to communicate with foreign traders as far back as seventeenth century. They spoke a pidgin dialect known as
Firangi, which was the same root as
feringhee. During the independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi called the English language a symbol of colonialism, even going so far as to say, "To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them." But when India's leaders proposed Hindi as an alternative, South India politicians denounced that, too, as "language imperialism". Because Hindi has never been spoken in South India, choosing India's official language was the single greatest controversy in the writing of the Indian constitution. Since no single tongue could satisfy India's heterogeneity, Hindi was named the "official language of the union" with English to be used for "official purposes of the union."
Today, English is spoken in the courts and financial markets. It is much more than bureaucratic babu-speak, though; it is the language of those who aspire to a better life. Like many lower-middle-class Indians, Parvati had spoken her local dialect at home and learned Hindi at school. English was her third language, and it was only with persistence that she became fluent. For many Indians, the effect of the fractured language policy is that they end up speaking multiple dialects badly.
Judging people's speech is a quick way to take a measure of their class and caste in India. If you can't tell their upbringing from their clothes or occupations, you can tell from how strongly accented their Hindi or English is. Both Radha and Maneesh spoke vernacular Hindi speckled with only the occasional word of English, though they both longed to be familiar with the tongue that they associated with well-paid jobs in the private sector. Of course, neither of my maids could afford to send their children to private schools, so they had resigned their children to the limits of the Hindi language.
The Hindi speaker's world may be one of smaller job horizons, but it is far from restrictive when it comes to culture: It's the tongue of politics, Bollywood, cricket, and religion. Parvati's mother lived a full life inside the language, avidly consuming Hindi news shows, magazines, and books. She was closed off from fully half of her daughter's experience, though, because Parvati worked for an English-language paper and spoke the sassy urban patois of Hinglish——delivering most of the information in English and the punch lines and curses in Hindi.
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Sideways on A Scooter, Life and Love in India, P65
Miranda Kennedy
ISBN 978-1-4000-6786-2
