Soundscapes

A recent news report says that India has lost 20 percent of its languages. Is it our collective apathy or a pregiven in a globalised world? Yet this very world is throwing up new dimensions of communication, interpersonal engagements and self expression. A walk through transience.

4^th February, 2010 saw most newspapers in India carry a small anchor story… the death of an 85 year old woman. People die everyday and with them die a part of their histories, secrets, desires, memories. But this death was absolute because with it died a way of life, a race, an entire language. Boa Senior, the last surviving member of the Bo tribe which had inhabited the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for 65000 years. Today she lives on only through the museum of recordings made by linguist, Anvita Abbi. In one such recording, Boa in her child like voice sings, the translation of which reads prosaically:

The earth is shaking

As the tree falls

With a great thud

65000 years of loves, trades, births, deaths, passions reduced to a few recordings frozen for posterity. Who can fill the fissures, the slippages, the losses in translation? And what about the authenticity of a lived reality? For, authenticity in this context is not the “authentic Chinese food” or the “authentic Lebanese cuisine” that the mushrooming cafes and restaurants offer, that bring in the international dining experience for you.

Throw in a few gilded frames and sell Salade Verte and you have the Parisian experience a few blocks away from the garish temple, dot the city with shawarma counters and you get Lebanon in every bite or eat scones in a room decked with paintings of Enid Blytonesque characters and you have the quaint English village right next door beside the slimming centre and the jewellery store. And these country tour capsules become the new must visit sites for both the city dwellers as well as tourists till the next dining experience seduces you to a ‘new country’. Some manage to hold on in the market, some others adjust the menu (say, introducing paneer or making a sauce more spicy) while others languish and shut shop. The tourists keep flitting from one capsule to the next. Marc Augé in his luminous Non Places: An Introduction To Super Modernity coined the phrase “non place” by which he meant those places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be referred to as places. These homogenized places of “circulation, consumption and communication” that reside outside of class, history and identity where travellers come, collide into each other and then walk into their respective worlds or possibilities of worlds. For instance, the international hotel chains, airports, super markets that offer you a Utopian bubble of development and economic growth. To extend this theory, aren’t these new cafes, eateries non places too? As I walk into these new restaurants, order a crepe and soft jazz plays in the background with loud conversations about mean machinations of the mother in law in the foreground (at the next table) and then later as I walk back into my century old decrepit home that may not survive beyond a decade, I wonder about these multiple worlds we inhabit… the local, the global, the glocal that feed into and off each other.

Why is it that the word chumu sounds endearing to me and kiss corny? Yet my love letters are in English and hence ironically, inspite of my political orientation and all the class literature that I engage with, by default I would expect my lover to understand English. But on the other hand, the language of affection is always Bengali for me. My 4 year old niece will vouch for that.

So what happens to emotions in these transitory worlds? Can they thrive amid the entry-exit rigmarole? Think Lost in Translation where Bob and Charlotte forge a bond precisely because of such a setting. The American Bob, the actor feeling lost when he fails to grasp the instructions of his Japanese director while his marriage back home is going downhill and the young Charlotte feeling lost in her hotel room while her husband is on assignment. And they meet, strike up conversations through karaoke bars, sushi joints and their bond grows through a series of cardboard cut outs (somewhat like our international eateries) of Japan and then they depart whispering into each other’s ears. Perhaps they will again meet back home in new circumstances, perhaps the changed circumstances will not revive their magic and hence they will never meet. But a journey of emotions will be preserved in their museum of memories.

And this romance brings me to the word that spews potion and poison in equal measure, Love. Just as we flit from one world to the next, we also glide from one language to the next, sometimes we mix languages and create our own hybrid lingo. So as we glide among languages, do the tonality, intensity and feel of our emotions change too? Aveek Sen writes in Café Dissensus:

“Is bilingualism a kind of bisexuality as well? Are our English-speaking erotic personalities different from our vernacular ones? To what extent are sexual identities linguistically inflected? Is sex in English different from sex in Bengali? Do these linguistically different personalities attract or repel different kinds of people, in different ways? How consciously do we make use of linguistic range in our erotic play? Are you the same person, the same sexual-emotional-romantic creature, when you are thinking of someone while listening to Tagore’s Shudhu tomar bani noy go, when you copy out a Shakespeare sonnet for someone, send someone the YouTube link to Raat akeli hai, or dance with a stranger after a couple of martinis? And what are the larger cultural and historical meanings of these different selves in a single person?”

Why is it that the word chumu sounds endearing to me and kiss corny? Yet my love letters are in English and hence ironically, inspite of my political orientation and all the class literature that I engage with, by default I would expect my lover to understand English. But on the other hand, the language of affection is always Bengali for me. My 4 year old niece will vouch for that. The genuineness and sincerity of emotions keep varying depending on the language I use. But I don’t know, whether it is my class privilege that allows me to communicate using a broad range of registers or is it that I am truly a product of an increasingly flat world? And I don’t expect neat answers either. The twilight zone is, for once, a place to cherish because it allows you room for play.

However it is not only about the use of multiple languages to express a myriad emotions. Sometimes the same language, perhaps the same words express 2 pole apart ideologies. The early 90s saw the feminists and the Right Wing on the same side because of one song Choli ke peechey, in the filmKhalnayak. While the feminists decried the song as commodification of women, the Hindu Right deemed it unfit for Indian culture. Both groups called for a ban. And this brings us to the problematic of the language of protests, how easy it is get coopted into the larger workings of the state and hence easy to lose the subversive potential of protest itself. Shohini Ghosh writes in her essay The Troubled Existence of Sex and Sexuality: Feminists engage with Censorship:

“The feminist argument here does not seem very different from that of the right wing, especially as sexism ends up being equated with sexual explicitness. This collapse of sexuality and sexism only invites dangerous appropriations of the feminist critique by those who are inimical to feminist interests. Feminists against censorship feel that there is a need to insist that sexism is not exclusively located within sexually explicit representations. The problem with pornography is not that it is sexually arousing because ‘stimulating desire is as worthy as an artistic goal as stimulating social anger or aesthetic admiration’, but because it is sexist. It cannot be assumed that this varied and diverse genre is uniformly sexist.”

And that’s the daily battle that protestors have to wage – formulating a language of dissent that cannot be collapsed into partisan, mainstream or Statist frameworks.

Finally to conclude, a battle of a micro nature. A battle of trying to build bridges between chasms, failing each time, trying some more, again failing and then making new discoveries on the way. Sometime back, a teacher called me midnight. She wanted an english synonym for the Bengali wordabhiman. Lamely, I tried churlish, huff, tiff but soon gave up. Which single english word could encompass the whole range of conflicting emotions you feel for a near one? Not purely pain, resentment or jealousy, neither entirely ego (as demonstrated by the Amitabh Jaya classic). As I kept searching for words in vain, it struck me I could not locate bengali substitutes for the words limbo and ennui…