home language, world language

an essay on kannada, english, language purity, Jhumpa Lahiri

Sunhere Sapne, Pushpamala N., 1998

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It is Manhattan in the 1980s, the Ed Koch years, a New York City ambitiously climbing its way out of a deep hollow debt. My father had moved to the city with his own father and brothers. He held many odd jobs while he went to school. One such job was in Curry Hill in a windowless back room, where he would fold and stack saris until the rare customer appeared, at which point he would don a salesman’s smile and unravel the whole nine yards, ensuring that what was visible was a gold-trimmed border, the embroidered body, the soon-to-be-removed fall. 

Along came a summer afternoon. His brother arrived with some news. There was something outside that reminded him of home in Mangalore. Two men loading a truck, speaking in a Kannada more cosmopolitan than their own Tulu-inflected language—but who was counting the differences from so far away?

They became friends, then more friends were made in this way. As each of us were born, a decision was made: before anything else, these Queens babies must remember that they are from Karnataka. So Kannada was the prosody, likely, of my first cry, the language of my first word, my heritage tongue in which my birth was reported, in a small Kannada paper that we had printed for New York Kannadigas (I was not important enough to make it to the paper of record, India Abroad). 

It is in Kannada that I first understood that all of us have noses that can skyscrape—a certain moogu. It is in Kannada that I learned that the same moogu could balance a quivering, possessive anger at its tip. A simpler story would concern itself with how children become adults, how the same language used to coax a widowed grandmother into speaking would later be used to hook up in bars. But maybe it is true that simple language stories of these sorts have been made obsolete.

In school, I learned that my moogu could also be a schnoz. In came a New York English, robust and like a meat grinder for ten percent of all global languages. As one theory has it, it used the same roads of syntax, grammar, and sentence structure developed by Kannada, entered its language system, criss-crossed, interacted, and competed with it.

In some ways, this New York English won. Replacing okra for lady finger, trash can for dustbin, bodega for angadi. Every man, from everywhere, calling each other boss. Kannada quickly re-arranging itself to meet English’s terms, snaana-ing for showering, hallu ooj-ing for tooth-brushing.

If the story were simpler, I might tell you that I lost my home language because of the U.S.’ byzantine bilingual language policies. That school and the need for success ironed it out of me. But language is not so docile, and neither are we. Kannada fought back. It was the language of several grandparents, hundreds of friends; of plays, dances, songs performed on stage. Its rules were so foundational that for a long time I’d write d’s like ದ that I had traced in my aunt’s Flushing apartment. And for a few initial months, I could be found shouting bitch shit fucker with the wrong syntax at my friends until someone’s older brother pulled me to the side and told me, please stop being so embarrassing, learn some proper English. 

I developed a mongrel’s idiolect, 99-cents-store quality, my English imprecise and nervous, my Kannada childlike and stunted. What else can you do but accept your shortcomings? My language is a piece of craft despite its inelegant scrambles, the greatest work I will likely ever produce.

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Flirting D-2A, Flirting D-17A, Pushpamala N. and Claire Arni, 2000s

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There is a photo at the start of this essay. It is by Pushpamala N,. a Bengaluru-based Kannada visual artist I found a few years ago at a book fair in Manhattan through Reliable Copy, an Indian press that had reprinted her English-language dissertation.

In an interview with the press’s founder Nihaal Faizal, Pushpamala mentions that her mother wanted to name her Rajyalakshmi, or “queen of the state,” because the doctors had predicted that she would be born on November 1, 1956. This was the day that a Kannada language state would be formed, cobbling together the various different languages and provinces under its aegis. Among them was my parents’ ancestral Tulu language, which has diminished rapidly in the past few decades.

Pushpamala would have been a little older than most of the women I’d grown up around, nearly all of whom had moved to the U.S., arranged to marry men with visas. I, too, moved in my 20s, but in the opposite direction, from New York to Bengaluru.

I fell in love and then out, and made the closest friendships of my life. My American passport should have made me an enemy, but my Kannada made me appear like one of the locals. I wasn’t one of those believed to be ruining the city of lakes, which had spent decades becoming traffic-ridden, expensive, polluted, its bodies of water foaming with dirty froth. It had been cosmopolitanized by Kannada-refusing Indians from all over, globalized by English speakers from the techie West, weaponized by a government hoping to turn the whole country over to Hindi.

And all of this had happened under the watch of a derisive Kannada slogan—swalpa adjust maadi. Adjust, just a little.

Kannadigas were not the ones getting wealthier, which made the language loss even more stark. Activism has tipped over into violence. Daily, billboards are torn down and various interlopers are attacked. There has been an ongoing battle over a sculpture of Thiruvalluvar, a Tamil philosopher saint, in a historic Tamil community of Bangalore. For decades, it was wrapped up  Pushpamala, in the essay Sthala Puranagalu, compares it to something the late artist Christo might have made.

Left, covered statue in Bangalore mid-to-late 2010s. Right, Christo and Jeann-Claude’s “Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet,” 1968-69

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Once, I spoke to someone at length in Kannada at a rooftop bar in Bengaluru. I was interrupted by an English-speaking friend. My original partner looked at me, shocked. He asked: how is your English so good? Do you work at one of the good call centers in town?

It is easier to deal with different language speakers when your language, like English, has been on a bull run of British colonization, Western capitalism, the internet. It is much harder when you appear to be losing, like Kannada. Not only to the more powerful, but to the myriad migrant workers coming in from different states to construct buildings, to those who say, why should we remember any historic language that carries the grooves of caste so deeply? 

What has been lost in all of this is that the language spoken in Bengaluru is far from pure. It is primarily a Kanglish, a Kannada plus English that has survived colonization and consumed global industrialization. Car-u, tiffin, swalpa move maadi, or move just a little, along with a medley of other languages; here and there, appear the Tamil macha, the Malayalam kutti. There are Sanskrit words, suspicions of Persian loanwords.

This language would be indecipherable to those who first spoke it 1,000 years ago. They might even believe that it was an enemy, come to plunder its wares.

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Writer Jhumpa Lahiri, in an essay titled Lingua/Language, discusses the difference between Italian lingua and lingue—singular and plural. Lingue, not lingua, is everyone’s point of origin. All languages steal, imitate, and plunder from those around them, especially because each language has “different and, at the same time, fundamentally equal meaning[s] to a pre-existing text.”

More importantly, “lingua can unite, contain, and even conquer a population, but lingue always has the upper hand. Lingue remain the backbone, the foundation, while lingua is labile (and according to Plato, ‘easier to fashion than wax.’” As in: the language that seeks to dominate is the one of control. It can create a swelling sense of unity. It can also erase, ignite sparks and violence. And it always draws from the many-voiced realm of lengue, the many-voiced realm that never disappears.

By this logic, I’ve never had a home language. What I spoke was a mongrel, even as a child: maybe the Kannada was more like a Tulu, a Konkani, a Beary, an Urdu. A Portuguese, perhaps, a British; a German, brought over by Ferdinand Kittel, the first to create a Kannada-English dictionary in 1894. Maybe it was inflected with a Guyanese Creole, a Dominican Spanish, drawn from my Queens neighbors.

Some years ago, I spoke to an aunt who was embarrassed and a bit saddened to tell me that her Kannada had been fading in purity. What else to do with four decades spent in the country, with nary more than a week or two every two years back home? I feel, finally, that I have an answer.

None of us were born Kannadigas. We were simply born human, creatures with the ability to babble, an ability that may have developed even before consciousness. If we seek to remain Kannadigas we must believe in our language, the existence of our homes. Not just as hollow symbolism or a frail, reactive lingua. We must engage with its philosophies, what U.R. Ananthamurthy describes in Ooru and the World as the ability “to smell the fragrant Mysore jasmines, eat the bananas of Nanjangud and read the great vachanas of Basavaeshwara and Allama Prabhu…when those who admire the wanderings of Joyce’s hero Daedalus also open their eyes to the rich Dalit world that Kuvempu’s character Nayigutti leads us into.”

It is the same with any beloved language. We must believe in its changing and evolving nature, love how it is mongrelesque. I have been searching for the trap door within my home language that will lead me to a windowless backroom, stacked high with saris and the lingue it draws from.

The Popular Series, Pushpamala N., 2000-04

special thanks to

Evelyn F

, my friend and bangalore roommate several times over, for reading this piece very carefully.