English and a Translator’s Shame 

Recently, my “language-brother” prophesied the prospect of imminent shame to English speakers in India.

Amitbhai – bhai meaning brother in Gujarati – is my brother as we have a common mother-tongue, but he can be called my half-brother at best for as a bilingual poet-translator, I, apart from writing in Gujarati, write in English. English is a language which has become my mother-tongue. It is also a language that Shah has made it clear he does not want to speak.

But my experience of growing up in Gujarat tells a different story, one he might be interested in knowing. 

Thinking that it would be easy for his son to score well if he studied sciences in his mother-tongue, my father had chosen to enroll me in a school where the medium of instruction and expression was Gujarati. And thanks to the language policy of the state, I was introduced to English as a subject only after reaching secondary school. Thus, for the first 12 years of my life, my worldview was constituted just by Gujarati, or to be more accurate, by the shuddha Gujarati spoken in Ahmedabad. However, I remember having picked up the dialectical variation of Gujarati spoken at a school in Dharampur, a tribal area in South Gujarat where I had spent two years. I remember having been chided severely by my mother for speaking it. Anyway, a late exposure to English resulted in a substantial language handicap.

Growing up, I decided to graduate with a specialisation in English literature in what constituted a dashing of my father’s dreams. It was a soft career option because in the late 1990s, apparently, there was a scarcity of people with Masters’ degrees in English. When it came to enrolling in a college, I approached a prestigious Jesuit institution and was shooed away by some official with, “Gujarati-medium students are not admitted here, okay?” That was my first experience of language-based shame. I already knew about the compulsion in such institutions to converse only in English, even outside the classroom, failing which one was slapped, with a scorcher or a fine or both. I fled the place. There were other options in the city, but I heard on the grapevine that English was taught in Gujarati there.

So, I enrolled in a college that figured somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, a college where I first encountered cosmopolitan culture. Professors of various faiths who lectured in English, convent-educated girls who spoke in English and the green, gothic architecture made up my days in the colonial-era college.

Life couldn’t have been better. But hai ri kismat, the bliss was short-lived. My fellow Gujju students gave a representation to the principal requesting a bilingual mode of teaching and he split up the class into two with an instruction to the professors to teach us only in Gujarati. A mighty disappointment. The girls, remember? I wanted to be friends with them and get a peek into their world and complicate mine just as they probably wanted theirs to be mixed with a bit of mine. But I was also ashamed of what I knew would follow – being branded a second-class student, the pyjama chap, the xenophobic desi. Nobody cared about my shame then, just nobody. By that time, I had realised what Arun Kolatkar told Tukaram in one of his fabulous poems,

“You got to have some English Tuka
If you want to get ahead in the world”

That sparked off my long-haul battle with the English language which didn’t allow my Gujarati tongue to touch it. 

Initially, I felt like a linguistic untouchable and spent sleepless nights before judgment day when I was to make an oral presentation before the class. I would mug the whole thing up and yet the fear of being caught as an outlier or a plain liar, gave me nightmares. The taste of that shame seeks me out even today when European audiences find my pronunciation and accent difficult to understand. 

By the time I got out of the university with a postgraduate degree, the neoliberal state had stayed all recruitments in public-funded institutions. The stay was to be lifted in 2005 to make way for a scheme called Adhyapak Sahayak under which lecturers got tenured appointment for a fixed monthly pay of Rs 7500. If one felt that was shameful, one had the option of becoming a “cyber coolie” or a slave in a private institution – something which added precarity to daily doses of shame. During the brief period of unemployment, nobody came to hold my hand except English for it enabled me to give tuitions to school kids and manage the burden of shame. Things need to change.

But they won’t by transferring the shame from an Indian language to English. The whole premise of that project is faulty. During a brief professional stint in Delhi, I was made to feel small because of my Gujju Hindi. Mimicking the rural dialect of one’s own mother-tongue is a source of great mirth and mockery in urban households. The problem of language hierarchies in India is real and shaming and scapegoating English for it is anything but a solution. 

The truth is, no language should be a matter of shame, and its speakers shouldn’t be made to feel small for using it. And how to get people of a multilingual country to recognise that harsh truth is the headache of the government. As a bilingual poet and a translator, however, I have a few home-truths on the subject to offer and the offer ends soon, with the imminent end of bilingual individuals.

It took me several years of gruelling linguistic labour to attain a certain measure of command over English. But once there, the language opened up for me a thousand ways of seeing and experiencing the world. The one-eyed worldview I had grown up with seemed pathetically inadequate, even rabid in contexts when it was associated with a false cultural pride. English might be a curse to countries with colonial history, but in the 21st century the curse turns one, like Indra, into a sahasraksha, one with a thousand eyes. Bad metaphor, indeed! But it is good enough to pinpoint the pitfalls of cultural glaucoma and linguistic tunnel vision. Perhaps Tagore's description of Viswabharati as a place “where the whole world meets in a single nest” or Gandhi’s desire to have “the culture of all lands to be blown about my house” through open windows and doors better describe what I intend to say.

Of course, Gandhi advocated education in mother-tongue, so did Tagore, and who can have a quarrel with that? But neither of them associated English or any other language with shame. Gandhi edited and published Indian Opinion in four languages including English and learned languages like Tamil and Urdu, while doing time in prison or at sea. At the school he founded in South Africa, he didn’t shy away from introducing English as a subject. Do I even need to mention how impressive his command over the English language was? 

As a translator, I trace my genealogy to Bapuji who also translated between Gujarati and English, as also to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o who, at the peak of literary success, gave up writing in English to return to his native tongue for creative expression. However, Thiong'o never abjured the English language; in fact, he himself translated his Gikuyu novels in ways that morphed English into an African language. It was his way of resisting colonialism and neocolonialism.

What unites Thiong'o and Gandhi is not just the politics of using English to counter colonialism but also a commitment to languages, cultures and people. Yes, people for it’s the people ultimately who bear the burden of shame when a language is linked to caste, class, power, religion and ethnicity. Gandhi’s people-centric politics always drove him to fashion a happy medium of Hindustani between Hindi and Urdu or appeal the North Indians to learn Tamil. As a satyagrahi, he was a relentless seeker of truth and truth lay for him in the unity of humanity irrespective of their differences. 

The truth, the truth of what makes us human, is not the prerogative of one language. When it is not forthcoming in one language, a translator reaches out to another looking for it.

My quest for truth took me to Arun Kolatkar’s English poetry and drove me to translate it into Gujarati. In doing it, I realised that I was restoring his English poems to their Gujarati originals which had porous borders with ease of infiltration for English, Marathi and Hindi words. The quest for truth led me to translate Gujarati Dalit writers Dalpat Chauhan and Chandu Maheria’s works in English, but in a defamiliarised English at whose sight the white reader would baulk. 

Translation, which is bilingualism in action, can bestow only dignity on languages; it knows nothing of shame. Indians have lived in translation for millennia; it’s the existential reality of this country and English, stripped of its class character, is a key to its future, unity and prosperity. Umashankar Joshi said it so beautifully, “What kind of a Gujarati is one who is just a Gujarati and nothing else?”

I thus feel ashamed when languages fail to recognise the humanity of people or when they are wielded like scimitars against people. I feel ashamed when every hour a student dies by suicide or when Dalit women are tortured. I feel ashamed when literary institutions in Gujarat don’t promote translation of texts in and out of Gujarati. I feel ashamed when Dalit and tribal writers do not get rewards because of their languages. But I also feel that somewhere lies a language bereft of shame, a language which doesn’t dehumanise but recovers humanity, a language which stands for equality and strikes at the root of hierarchies. A language of truth, hidden in interstices. Yes, it’s there, just a forked tongue away. Let’s speak it. 

Hemang Ashwinkumar is a bilingual poet, translator, editor and cultural critic based out of Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

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