Re: The question of language
I’m fluent two languages: Hindi and English. Like many other multi-lingual writers, I’ve often struggled with the question of what language I want to use to express myself when I write.
Wrestling with the same dilemma, Ratika Deshpande, one of my favorite bloggers on the IndieWeb, asks herself a series of questions about language in her blog post The question of language.
In this post, I’ve attempted to answer some of Ratika’s questions for myself. My answers are entirely subjective, as they must be. There can be no right or wrong answers in matters of self-expression. These are the right answers for me, but they might be entirely wrong for Ratika and anybody else reading this blog post.
Here goes.
What is the best language to write in, as a multi-lingual person on the internet who blogs daily?
This one is easy: English.
I live in Bangalore. As a city populated mostly by immigrants from the rest of the country, it’s one of the most diverse places in India. Just off the top of my head, these are the languages some of my friends speak: Hindi, English, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Konkani, Dogri, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Assamese.
The only language we all share in common? English.
I’ve always wanted to blog in Hindi, but doing that would render my work inaccessible to pretty much all my closest friends. If the people I love the most in the world can’t understand my words, I don’t see much of a point to writing at all.
Is it better to write in Hindi or Marathi, given how little internet writing exists in these languages, how little is record of the people who speak these languages?
This is a more difficult question to answer.
There is a large amount of content in Indian languages on the Internet. The problem is that most of that content is:
- locked inside Big Tech platforms like YouTube or Instagram, and
- primarily in audio or video form
Me writing in Hindi will not solve either of those problems.
Tanvi and I are trying to fix the first problem by starting an IndieWeb Club in Bangalore. Our goal is to encourage people to post their work on their personal websites rather than social media.
But the second problem has deep historical and cultural roots that are beyond any single individual’s ability to fix. India has only recently had high literacy rates, computers and phones have only recently started to fully support Indic languages, and many Indians are not yet used to writing in their native languages in the digital realm. Our local traditions have historically been transmitted orally. Things might change in another decade or two, but for now the primary medium for Indian languages on the internet seems to be audio and video.
If my goal was to reach a wide audience on the internet, I wouldn’t use writing as a medium at all. I would record podcasts or videos in Hindi. That would be a more effective way to have a record of people who speak Indic languages.
Or is it better to write in English as an Indian because that would mean that those who can’t read Hindi or Marathi won’t be excluded?
But then, what is more important—not excluding the latter or including those who don’t know English?
I’m primarily writing for myself, my loved ones, my communities, and the global community of people who make up the IndieWeb. Everyone I want to communicate with understands English, so it makes sense for me to write in English.
That said, I’m not opposed to writing fiction or poetry in Hindi and posting them to my website, something I’ve been considering seriously in recent weeks.
Should I write everything in all three languages?
That sounds like a fun experiment. Translation requires a very different muscle from writing, a muscle I’ve always wanted to flex.
If I had unlimited time to write, I would love to try this some day. But I’m currently trying to publish more writing more often, and translating everything I write into multiple languages would just slow me down.
Or are certain thoughts and ideas expressed better in one language than another?
What does “better” mean when talking about the expression of an idea?
Does it mean “clearer” or “more cogent”? Because I believe you can use any of the major Indian languages to express any idea you want. You might have to introduce some foreign vocabulary here and there, but our languages are expressive enough to represent any idea you might want to put in writing.
But if “better” means “more beautiful” or “more elegant” or “more poetic”, then I’m inclined to agree with the assertion that some thoughts an ideas can’t be translated from one language to another without losing something in the process. When Agha Shahid Ali translated Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s work into English, he didn’t translate it line-by-line, word-by-word. He rewrote the poems entirely. He had to. There was no other way to capture the essence of what Faiz was trying to express.
How does one choose a tongue?
I didn’t choose a tongue. The tongue chose me.
If I hadn’t watched so much American television as a teenager, if I hadn’t fallen in love with computers at an early age, if I hadn’t decided to work in tech, if I hadn’t moved to Bangalore, if my found family in Bangalore hadn’t been so diverse, if any of my romantic partners had been Hindi speakers—in other words, if my life had taken a completely different trajectory—then I might not be writing this blog post in English today.
I used to feel upset about not being able to read, write, and speak Hindi more often, about not being able to express myself better in Hindi. But I’ve made peace with the fact that my primary mode of expression is English. Choosing to read, write, or speak Hindi would cut me off from many of the people I love dearly in this world, as well as from the global community of readers and writers I’m connected to via the internet.
It’s not like I’ve completely lost touch with Hindi. I still speak it with my family and a few of my friends. I sometimes read fiction in Hindi, whenever I’m able to. I love desi hip-hop, far more than the American hip-hop I grew up on.
However, coming back to Hindi often feels like visiting my parents’ house in Delhi. It’s a safe place, full of comfort and joy and happy memories of a childhood spent in a large, loving, giving family. But it’s just not my home anymore.