Grandmother Tongue

by Suchitra Ramachandran

I spent the summer of 2004 with my maternal grandmother. I was fifteen years old, it was barely a year after my grandfather had passed away, and I was supposed to keep her company in the afternoons. I was not very close to my grandmother, my only memories of her being that of a stern matriarch of a huge family with a sharp tongue who did not tolerate any lapses from anybody. Formidable and unapproachable to us children, she was not one to cuddle or coax or wheedle like other grandmothers. She used to sit by the window next to the betel leaf vine, a dark, robust woman with skin like neem bark, her gnarled hands curled around an open book. The book was my first connect with my grandmother; I had had no idea that she read. One day, I piped up the courage to ask her, ‘Paati, what are you reading?’

That summer, my Paati and I talked about books, about her life, the times she had seen. She knew English but read and spoke in Tamil. She had a sense of history; all her personal stories were steeped in historical context. She was a fantastic story-teller, who could bring alive landscapes and temple festivals and human quirks in a few colourful words. She narrated stories from all the books she had ever read. Some I knew – The Scarlet Pimpernel, Great Expectations; but some I didn’t, like Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan, that filled my dreams with flamboyant warriors, top-knotted spies and feisty women. Before I left that summer, she got her brother to haul down dusty, forgotten copies of her mother’s books; like many families of those days, my great-grandmother had cut out the pages of serialised novels by Kalki, Thi.Janakiraman and others every week and bound them together. ‘Read it for yourself,’ she said. I flicked through the crackled brown pages and gave it back to her. ‘It’s in Tamil, I can’t,’ I said. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, crisply. ‘Ennalamo padikkara? This is nothing.’ I eyed the books apprehensively. I could read billboards and bus-stops in Tamil, stringing letters and sounds together, but that was the extent to which I could read my mother tongue.

I took the five volumes of Ponniyin Selvan with me and started reading the first page on the train back home. It took me half-an-hour to read a page, six months to read the first volume and a year to read all five. But the exciting plot, fresh language, and the familiarly unfamiliar names and places kept me going. In a year, I was a slow but sure Tamil reader. I was reading Bharati and Bharatidasan. Even if I didn’t understand half the words, the music was enough for me. I read them aloud to friends and bonded over them. I read Ashokamitran’s Padhinettaavadhu Atchakkodu, which was unlike anything I had read in English until then. I marvelled over Si.Su.Chellappa’s Vaadivaasal, and exasperatedly threw Jayakanthan’s Sila Nerangalil Sila Manidhargal across the room. I spoke to my grandmother excitedly about the books I was reading. I was still a very slow Tamil reader, but I kept going ahead. For this was not my mother tongue, but my grandmother tongue, I told her.

Tamil had been only a spoken language for me till I was fifteen. My parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents spoke Tamil at home. English was incidental, an unconscious garnishing, but I was mostly encouraged to speak Tamil, adhering to its provincial, caste-specific nuances. But this was not the Tamil you spoke in school; you learned pretty early to switch registers in public. Tamil was the language you got scolded in, and the language with the only cuss-words we knew as children, so a language to laugh in and fight with and make up in. When the school started penalising students who spoke in Tamil, speaking it became a forbidden delight. It was an intimate language, a language you spoke in your dreams, a language with the cheery, rebellious ‘Ei!’, a language with which you negotiated the tricky terrains of schoolyard friendship.

But thanks to moving all over the country, I did not learn Tamil as a subject in school. Neither did most of my cousins or friends. It was not a language we read in, not the language in which we wrote down our secret thoughts in our secret diaries, not the language we wrote our letters in. That honour belonged to English, which, though foreign, had been sufficiently beaten, flattened and tamed to cater to our needs.

Like many children of my generation, I read in English, formed my ideas in English and communicated them in English. While I rode sedately on the stately pony that was English, I sometimes heard the crash and canter of wild hooves outside. It was a periodic reminder that the world around me was not an ‘English’ one, and I would know nothing of it till I faced those wild horses. The many Tamils I heard around me as a teen, new words, sometimes harsh to my ear, sometimes infinitely sweet, sometimes dirty, were like words of magic. My bachelor uncle in Madurai spoke a different Tamil from my married aunt in Mayavaram. My friend’s aunt from Aruppukkottai always called me kani. I nagged my more worldly friends to understand what exactly was the meaning of the swearword that the fellow on the bus threw at me; why the shopkeepers in Tirunelveli guffawed when I asked them for sakkarai instead of seeni. As I grew up, the language grew into me, one tendril at a time; as the language grew in me, I grew into the world around me. But I still felt like an outsider, navigating a tricky terrain. It was only when I started reading Tamil, did I start feeling like I belonged, because I had started thinking in a culturally different way.

I realised that reading regional work exposes us much more dramatically to the richness of the languages including the one we speak at home and in the street. Personally, reading Tamil has changed my inner linguistic landscape; my thoughts now arise from the field where my grandmother’s tongue is sown. Reading Tamil connects me to the land and beliefs, as well as the biases and prejudices, that I have come from. From Tamil I learned the notions of self-respect and honour; the joys of wry humour; to live in harmony with nature. When I think of all the trees that filled my childhood, I become the girl from the Sangam poem who calls her favourite tree her older sister. I dream in Andal’s Tamil. Indeed, to negotiate with a culture, to enter into dialogue with it, to bring modern ideas into it, to learn from it, it is imperative to immerse ourselves into the language and learn its linguistic tradition, for the two are inseparable.

As Indians, I would argue, we should all read and write and explore literature in our regional languages in addition to English, either in the original, or in the form of translations. However, this should not be with the spirit of doing a favour to the vernacular; I don’t think any vernacular language needs such a favour from English readers. For the last few years, I have been reading mostly Indian writing in regional languages, and the wealth of literature we have in regional languages in India, I have come to realise, is brilliant, even world-class. These books are simply not known outside of the regional spheres. They are not translated, read, reviewed and discussed with the same push that writing in English gets. So, if we do read vernacular writing, it should be in a spirit of enquiry and exploration, filled with the wide-eyed pleasure of the joy of reading, and not with a sense of performing a dreary duty. Reading and writing are not, and should not be, acts of morality. For where else will we get to read stories such as Phoo, about an aunt who would face the sun and spit out a stream of water to produce rainbows from her mouth? Let’s read the regional for one reason: because it is that good. If we don’t read them, we are the ones missing out.

Even a hundred years ago, people with access to English education had equal, if not superior, fluency in their mother tongue. That ensured that while they could learn from the whole world, they could still converse with their own people. The concerns and celebrations of the disenfranchised are best heard in their own voices and their own tongues; to be able to listen to it, we need to be able to read and speak our common language. The power of the vernacular is why the assassins of Gauri Lankesh and those that hound Perumal Murugan find them threatening; we need to be able to use the same language to strike back.

In fact, this was one of the biggest learnings when I started reading in Tamil. It opened me up to entirely new worlds, people and ways of thinking, which was often challenging, but character building. It yanked me out of my comfortable bubble. It also made me more aware of the social and political baggage languages carry, the violence inflicted upon languages, the subconscious prejudices we have against our own roots. Our discourse space is divided into English-speaking and Tamil-speaking worlds with a clear hierarchy. Sometimes, the language is the discourse. Simply reading the vernacular makes us sensitive to many such ingrained attitudes of bias and violence. I have friends and family look askance when they see me read in Tamil, when I tell them I translate from Tamil. ‘Why associate with the lowbrow when you have English?’ their raised eyebrows seem to ask, though they may consume Tamil films and Tamil memes with alacrity. Reading and writing in Tamil also invites provocative questions comparing Tamil and Sanskrit, almost as if reading in a certain language is an act of announcing one’s political orientations in these charged times. There is also the perception among the English-educated classes that writing in the vernacular is not as deep or read as widely as writing in English. I now know that nothing is farther from the truth.

These days, it is usual to see people share their lists of regional language books or translations that they read that year as a badge of honour – like reading black literature or women’s writing, it is meant to represent the underrepresented. We read the same few books (this year, it was Ghachar Ghochar, last year it was One Part Woman), exalt them, make them our token ‘vernacular’ reads for the year, but our vernacular reading seldom ventures beyond these few books. We don’t take the effort to swim in the waters of the vernacular and make the language our own.  On the other hand, these half-hearted efforts sequester vernacular writing as its own little category, away from the mainstream, which might end up being condescending.

Above all, let us read in our vernacular languages because they are the languages of our grandmothers. For a language is not just a language, it is an entire culture itself. As long as the tongues of our grandmothers speak in us, we are still bonded to it. They may be stern and forbidding and difficult, but let’s try to make an effort to relate to them. It takes one generation of being divorced from one’s own language to forget it; two generations to forget the culture it is steeped in. With that kind of a linguistic disconnect, we become outsiders. Not only does the land lose us and our children, but we lose our roots and turn adrift.

A few years ago, a perceptive elderly relative drew up our family tree, going back to ten generations, to the early 1800s. It has names of ancestors and ancestresses (‘Venkatasubbu’, ‘Pichai’, ‘Bhagirathi’), their fates (‘fell into a well at the age of six’, ‘went to Kashi and died there’, ‘died in a fire’), and the places they lived in. Once can trace through the generations the upheavals – famines and epidemics and political changes – that uprooted them from one place to another; families moved from the dry lands of Ramanathapuram to the black soil of Kovilpatti to the fertile western foothills of Theni from where they migrated to Madras, where my grandmother was born. The books I read now tell these stories, and more: stories about people like me, people who could have been me, people who I could have been. My grandmother’s tongue binds me to my history, going back into misty time; her stories connect me to the world around me, and I know as I read it and speak it, that they are the stories that I will bequeath to my grandchildren.

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