How to be Indian in India: In his new book, Manu Joseph tries to make sense of the ‘amateur Indian'

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2 days ago

What happens when we stop thinking in our mother tongue?
Meander a little with me before we come to 'the point'. This is, after all, about language. I used to think in Malayalam and Tamil, though I always hoped only in English.
I was born in Kerala and raised in Chennai, a cuckoo among the crows. Like many people, I could speak only one dominant tongue at a time. As a boy I spoke fluent Tamil, and a type of Malayalam that Malayalis said was not Malayalam, and a heavily accented English. However, I read English the best, and as I began reading books, which were almost entirely works from the West, I changed. By the age of 17, I was moving away from Tamil and Malayalam, and I was beginning to think entirely in English.
There were hundreds of thousands like me across India, going through the same phase. It was obvious to us then that a bright future was a time and place that thought in English. Are there serious consequences when this happens, or is the specialness of language overrated?
When I was around ten, during a monthly test in school, I was asked to write 'the opposite gender of ram'. I was baffled when I realised that most of the class had got the alleged answer 'ewe'. My answer was Sita. I still maintain that I was right. No one in Chennai had ever seen a ram, while Ram, or Rama as we used to call him, was everywhere. Everything else about English was like this – it was venerable at a distance but all wrong when it passed through me.
It was a medium of study and intellect but to use it in a casual conversation seemed comically arrogant. The act of speaking in English, in fact, was defamed as 'Putting Peter' in my circle. I was among the boys who carried out the defamation. My teachers were not fluent in English. When my parents spoke English, they, like all Malayalis, spoke English in Malayalam. The effect of not being fluent in English was that I was an insider in my home town. I belonged to my city and the place belonged to me. Not for a moment was I an amateur Indian. I could talk to thugs and policemen and slum dwellers and eunuchs. Also, come to think of it, even stray dogs didn't faze me. I never even noticed them, even though as a kid I began to run at dawn.
Being Tamil, or being Malayali, is a distinct behavioural system and only those who thought in either of those languages could play a part in it. Maybe it had nothing to do with Tamil or Malayalam but with the absence of a world framed in English. For instance, when a Tamil Brahmin wanted to convey an insult, he would hedge the risk by putting it across as an ambiguous joke. Also, Tamils of my childhood had the propensity to use glee to show contempt. They would laugh hard, in an exaggerated way, at the jokes of the people they despised, especially their teachers or bosses. This is nothing remarkable or even unique. But it's not an entirely insignificant thing either. All this I did not observe as a boy, when I used to think in Tamil. Observation is not the act of seeing; it is the act of remembering what has already been seen. Only when I stopped thinking in Tamil did I begin to actually see Chennai.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that the one word we will not find in the Quran is 'camel'. His implication was that ancient Arabs had no reason to mention what was very common in almost every frame of their existence, but an outsider sees what is too ordinary for the insider. (Borges was wrong; the Quran does mention 'camel'. But I accept what he implies.)
As a child, I made no special effort to learn to read and write in Tamil or Malayalam. I used them only to think and speak. I could write only in English and Hindi, both foreign to me, Hindi more than English. Then, in 1987, a film called Nayakan by Mani Ratnam was released. I was thirteen and I thought it was the greatest film on Earth. I still believe it is one of the greatest. I decided that apart from being a journalist, I would also become a Tamil filmmaker. I began to write scripts for many Tamil films that I hoped would find takers, but all of them in English.
When I was 16, I thought the best way to enter the movie business was as a low-level actor. So when I heard that a film audition was underway for some extras, I went. The queue was long and the men looked impoverished and depressing, and the line had not moved after two hours, so I left, abandoning the idea of acting. I wrote more stories. I co-wrote one with the milkman. Nothing ever came out of them. The Tamil sphere of creativity offered me no prospects. So I let myself be colonised by the English language, by which I also mean a strange condition.
Compared to Indian languages, English has names for so many abstract things, labels, even lies, that they can be misunderstood as truths, like hypnosis, secularism, sexism, liberty, human rights, and plain nonsense like 'quality time' and 'multitasking'. All these ideas might seem innocuous, even sensible. Some people might think these words capture innate human nature. They don't. They are a way of thinking. And not long ago in India, people who thought like this were not merely artists and writers. They were the people who ran the country – they were prime ministers, ministers, judges, bureaucrats, editors, all of them shaping the nation at a time when a few influential people could run the country. Yes, most of them liked their samosas and some of them sang in their mother tongue, but the West was inside their heads. The West gave them their aesthetic, intellectual, and moral direction. They had this perception that the West was the pinnacle of the human race. This class and this way of thinking has been properly killed in India. I think the West is being killed even in the West. The death of this class has resulted in the unification of classes.
The richest Indian, Mukesh Ambani, in how he perceives wealth, marriage, and family values, his religious piety, his surrender to the mystical, is very similar to a poor or lower-middle-class Indian in the way a Tata was not. The poor can pretty much identify with all their major public figures. The depth of this belonging is best understood from the orphanhood of the other Indian, the amateur Indian.
To ruin the chances of sleeping with them, rasp, 'Is the science of climate change beyond dispute?' They say things like 'asparagus' and 'edamame' and eat them, too. They used to love Aung San Suu Kyi, but not any more. They read very long articles in English that are called longform. They despise the word 'infrastructure' when uttered by a provincial man. But anything they hate they will consider forgiving if it is 'sustainable'. They know what an 'open' relationship means. Many of them, especially in Mumbai, have 'friends' among street urchins. They hated giving their biometrics to their government but routinely do that for an American or European visa. They wish for diversity in plants and animals even though they themselves are a monoculture of identical ethical organisms spread across the informed world whose president was Barack Obama. At times, they hold candles and go somewhere.
They were, for long, awkward in India, but they had their islands where they could escape the nation. Now there is nowhere to hide, not even in literature festivals. This is a government that is everywhere. So they feel uncertain in universities, think tanks, cultural bodies, journalism, theatre, art and mainstream cinema, activism, and in charitable works. They have lost beef too.
The worst truth of this new order is that they, who received the finest education and other opportunities, and who consider themselves the most intelligent and informed among Indians, have been shown as inaccurate, unreliable, and incompetent political analysts of their own nation. It appears that there is only one way left to use them as political forecasters. Listen carefully to what they have to say, for the outcome will be the very opposite. They are the amateur Indians.
They always were, since birth. The times when they strayed outside their safe houses, they did not know how to negotiate their own nation. What should they do when a government official asks for a bribe, what should they do when their car hits the bumper of another vehicle, how should they speak to a cop, what are the meanings of many words in their own mother tongues? But never before have state and society encroached into their islands so forcefully and decisively.
They are not alone anywhere any more. Nowhere in the malls, theatres, and restaurants can they be guaranteed a degree of refinement. In the theatres they must rise for the national anthem. And what should they do if a man is on the phone throughout the movie? They have heard stories of friends being punched just for objecting to the use of the phone in movie halls. Never before has the uncouth Indian been so empowered, and so affluent. There is no place he cannot afford, or be refused admittance to any more. In any case, some of the richest residential real estate in the country has for long been taken over by fanatic vegetarians. Now there are affluent residential colonies in all major cities where residents demand the construction of temples. What should the lofty people do?
Where should the amateur Indian go? They do consider themselves 'global', and everyone knows 'global' does not include Sudan or Mongolia. They will be able to obtain visas of the most advanced economies. But despite everything, all things considered, it is in India that life is the easiest; it is here that they are assured of good spots on the social mountain.
What must they do? How can they become as confident as the son of the soil, who has friends in the police commissioner's office and in other government places, who knows when to stand firm during a traffic dispute and when to flee, and how to game the system. How to be Indian in India?
Excerpted with permission from Why the Poor Don't Kill Us: The Psychology of Indians, Manu Joseph, Aleph Book Company.