Genius Of Language Fifteen Writers Reflect On Their Mother Tongue

The Way Back By Bharati Mukherjee There is a reason why the language we inherit at birth is called our mother tongue. It is our mother, forgiving, embracing, naming the world and all its emotions. Though I have lived for the last forty years in cities where English or French is the language of the majority, it's Bangla that exercises motherly restraint over my provisional, immigrant identity. Mother-Bangla is fixed; I haven't learned a new word nor had new thought or feeling in Bangla for nearly half a century. I don't need to. According to group-norms, as a native-born speaker, I have automatic membership in the world's most articulate, most imaginative and most intelligent club. With its brazen appeals to love and vanity, enforced with coercive guilt, the language sabotages irony towards the community's billowing self-esteem. Like a child whose mother might tipple or stray, I look for excuses, cannot condemn. To my inner Bengali I remain constant, as it does for me. How exclusive can a club of nearly a quarter-billion members be? Bangla is the language of Bangladesh, the eighth most populous nation in the world, and of the Indian state of West Bengal, the second-largest linguistic group in India. Millions more, documented or not, have settled abroad. Impressive numbers aside, every Bengali, to her at least, is a majority of one. We harbor the faith, implanted by myth and history, of our exalted place in the hierarchy of breeding and culture. To international relief agency workers, Bangla is the mother tongue of esurient poverty, but to the heirs of shonar bangla, golden Bengal of harvest-ready paddyfields and fish-filled rivers, it is the mother tongue of poetry, passion and abundance. It is also the language of nostalgia and of tentative hope: nostalgia for the Hindu-Muslim harmony that existed in undivided Bengal before its vindictive partition by the fleeing British; and hope for the shared mother tongue, devotion to the possible tomorrow that will transcend the religious furies exploited by today's politicians. I think a shared language is stronger than divisive religions. (Based on my travels in Bangladesh, I think Hindu and Muslim Bengalis could cross the abyss between them. It's the national politics of India and corrupt fiefdoms in Bangladesh that get in the way.) Up to age eight, I lived exclusively in Bangla. My father was the sole support of forty to fifty relatives, who lived with us crowded together in the ground-floor apartment of a two-storied house in a homogenously Hindu, Bangla-speaking, middle-class neighborhood of Kolkata (until recently mispronounced and misspelled as Calcutta by colonialists). All the adults in our large household had been born in villages or towns in the Dhaka (then "Dacca") district of East Bengal (now Bangladesh); all their children, my sisters and cousins, in the thriving capital, Kolkata, in West Bengal. Among themselves, the adults spoke the dialect of Dhaka, the children the Bangla of Kolkata. I had no idea as a child that linguists considered the Dhaka dialect "deviant," and Kolkata the standard. In our home the Dhaka dialect, bangal, was the language of authenticity. You are what dialect your forefathers spoke even if you yourself have lost fluency in it be- cause of successive migrations. We were east Bengalis or bangal first, then Bengali. We distanced ourselves from west Bengalis or ghoti who surrounded us and considered us interlopers. We conducted ourselves as bangal, exiled permanently from our ancestral homeland. To be born a displaced bangal was to inherit loss of, and longing for, one's true home. Identity had to do with mother tongue, but home was the piece of land that our forefathers had owned, the soil that they had slept and walked on. To be cast out of your janma bhumi or ancestral birth-soilLesser, Wendy is the author of 'Genius Of Language Fifteen Writers Reflect On Their Mother Tongue', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400033232 and ISBN 1400033233.