Babel No More

by Michael Erard

  If India was the place to catch a glimpse of a more expansive way to live with many languages, that’s where I wanted to go. I decided to go south to Hyderabad, a former Muslim stronghold with a large Urdu-speaking population, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where Telugu was spoken. Which language would I learn a bit of before going? I had a little Hindi in my head from shadowing with Alexander, garam garam hai. But Hindi isn’t a good choice in south India, where the Dravidian languages are proudly spoken and Hindi has in the past been openly resisted.* South India has four main Dravidian languages, two of which, Kannada and Telugu, were spoken in two of the Indian states I was going to visit. Don’t worry about it, my friend said. Everybody speaks English. Which wasn’t exactly true. But there was a lot of English, which benefited me tremendously.

  On that first morning in Secunderabad, once I finished sketching my book project for my hosts, Sri told me that I had to meet his cousin’s brother, a former ambassador of India, who speaks lots of languages, including non-Indian ones such as Chinese. Soon he was on his cell phone, setting up our visit in another city. I was amazed. In a family where many languages are spoken; in a city where, depending on where you are, the signs are printed in Urdu and English, or Hindi and English, or Hindi and Telugu; in a country with uncountable hundreds of millions of people speaking two, three, or more languages, the polyglot was still powerful—it wasn’t just in my own monoglot country. Over and over I would present the case of Mezzofanti, and people would shake their heads. Incredible.

  One of the first things to understand was how people knew what language to speak to whom. Where I’ve lived in the American Southwest, choosing to speak in English or Spanish based on how someone looks is risky. If you try English and they don’t speak it, you can switch to Spanish if you know it. But if you start with Spanish, you might offend: You don’t think I speak English? This can be the case if you’re Anglo, even if you speak Spanish very well and had just heard the other person speaking Spanish. When I described such a scenario to Indians, they couldn’t relate—to them, choosing the wrong language wasn’t embarrassing or politically charged. Or so they said.

  “Doesn’t anyone get offended?” I asked a doctor whom Sri had brought us to meet.

  “No, why should we be offended?” She seemed baffled by the question.

  Sri, who had heard me ask this question several times, cut in, a little exasperated. “No, you just say, I’m sorry, I cannot speak your language, please speak in English.”

  One day we took a bus tour of Hyderabad’s popular sites: a white marble temple to Vishnu, a gaudy, fluorescent-lit museum filled with the vast collections of a rich official, a palace of a Muslim ruler, and the zoo. Aside from one other foreign couple on the bus, everyone was Indian. As we drove from place to place, the tour guide, a young man, hung on to the luggage racks as the bus jolted, rattling off descriptions and instructions in English. I was intrigued that by the end of the day he’d added Hindi to his narrations. When the tour ended at a pearl jewelry store (Hyderabad is famous for its pearl trade), I pulled him aside to ask why he had switched.

  He gestured to the women, older, dressed in saris, who were looking at pearl necklaces at a counter. He knew from the start of the tour that they’d want Hindi at some point.

  “How did you know?” I asked him.

  Based on how someone walks, from their clothes, and from their appearance, he can tell what their mother tongue is. He himself also spoke Kannada, Telugu, and some Marathi. Others told me they judged (or guessed) based on skin color: people from the south tend to be darker than those from the north. (These are problematic stereotypes, though; it may well be that talking about skin color is code for other attitudes.) You might also choose a language if you can hear the influence of their mother tongue in their Hindi. If one person can hear Kannada in another’s Hindi, they say, Let’s speak in Kannada. As their mother tongue, it’s what people want to speak anyway. In this vast country riven with differences, you grasp any connection you can.

  One afternoon Kala and Sri took us to a Hyderabad fairground where textile merchants had set up booths: Kashmiris with wool shawls, Rajasthanis displaying skirts sewn with tiny mirrors, fine chikan embroidery from Lucknow. Throngs of women (about half of them covered by black chadors, the other half dressed in vivid salwar kameez and scarves) circulated, checking out the cotton prints, silk saris, and lustrous brocades. We stopped in one booth so my wife could look at a blouse, where the clerk, a young man, let slip to Sri that he’s from Bangalore. Sri perked up, then spoke Kannada. After some back-and-forth, the salesman said to us in English, “Since you can speak Kannada, I’ll give you a discount.” Everyone laughed: a safe harbor.

  “See how that works?” Sri said to me as we walked away. “Language builds closeness. We started speaking Kannada, and we felt some closeness.”

  In the days that followed, we met many members of this family, each of whom spoke multiple languages—even the four-year-old grand-niece knew Hindi, English, and Telugu. Some languages were reserved for certain settings and people, and new languages seemed to follow jobs, not the other way around. The four-year-old’s mother, in her early thirties, said she speaks Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Punjabi, Bengali, and English. How well? One presumes she could use them as she needed them. I was tempted to say that it’s hardly an environment where saying you have more languages means higher status, as it might in the West. Here, too, mentioning foreign languages is a power play; so is including Sanskrit as a language you speak, because Sanskrit is no longer a spoken language. Even her recital of a list of languages was an expression of identity of class and caste. The four-year-old’s uncle, Ramu, also in his thirties, is a salesman for a company that builds textile looms—he grew up with Tamil at home and in elementary school, lived for a while in Bombay, where he learned Marathi, and knows Hindi, English, and Sanskrit. In college he studied German and later picked up Japanese to communicate with visiting Japanese engineers. Fortunately, his teacher was a native Japanese speaker who also knew Hindi, a convenience since he not only taught in Hindi but could highlight its grammatical similarities with Japanese.

  As an aside, Ramu remembered, he can understand Telugu. “There are so many languages,” he said, laughing, “you forget.” He picked it up for business because local CEOs want to speak it. “It doesn’t matter if it’s perfect,” Ramu said. “If you’re an outsider, they’re happy that you’re trying.” Most of his office is run in Hindi, though official email is always in English. Yet, once in a while in business meetings, when all the attendees realize they know Telugu, they switch.

  In Mysore, we met Sri’s cousin’s brother, a slim, bald ninety-two-year-old man with great fronds of eyebrows who’d been born and educated largely abroad. I’ll call him Siddhartha. “I don’t speak English.” He sniffed grandly. “I speak Shakespeare and Milton and George Shaw. I’m a plagiarist. I’m a pariah dog who speaks whatever he can pick up and carry off.” It was much like meeting George Bernard Shaw must have been, if Shaw had worn a dhoti and ran a preschool on the second floor of his house. It was hard to pin down exactly how many languages he’d known over his lifetime or how well; he dismissed other language accumulators as fantasists, including a civil servant he knew who claimed sixteen languages yet knew only a few words in most of them. It didn’t matter, though. I hadn’t really come to find another hyperpolyglot. I appreciated him more for his seasoned dismissal of a unified thing called “English.” That sensibility about language would prove valuable.

  One morning we drove with Siddhartha about ten kilometers outside Mysore, to an elementary school he founded. As we walked toward the assembly grounds, we could hear children’s voices singing prayers from the Vedas, a beautiful sound that grew louder as we approached. After the prayers, he addressed the orderly rows of uniformed students about developments in Israel and Pakistan, and the recent financial news. Global in his outlook, he also promotes Sanskrit in the school, which is controversial because it’s a
classical language more associated with the elite; in the West, the equivalent would be teaching Ancient Greek to schoolchildren. “They connect me with being an ambassador of India,” he told me later, “so they think it’s not their cup of tea.”

  After the assembly, he had to meet with some teachers, so my wife and I waited in the school library—stocked with his personal English literature collection—where we met a female student, Ananya, who said that her father knew ten languages, all Indian ones. She herself knew three and was learning Sanskrit, too.

  As our ability to access foreign languages with a mouse click has exploded, our sense of the world as a place where many languages are spoken—and that we might speak, too—has expanded. Is India the way we’re all headed?

  Taking a trick from Siddhartha, I’ll leave aside the idea of a unified India to focus on south India. There, multilingualism in at least some of its forms arose out of circumstances that evolved over millennia, after migrations, the rise and fall of empires, and invasions. All this turmoil helped to create a unique language phenomenon called a Sprachbund, in which people speaking many languages are all learning what everyone else speaks.* Existing side by side for centuries, the languages have melded and merged—not just in the words people use but in the grammars that structure them.

  If you live in a place where the people who speak languages A and B never confuse A with B, it may be hard to appreciate the fluidity of this situation. So it’s helpful to review three of the events that were so important for India’s linguistic history—and that couldn’t have been duplicated anywhere else.

  One was an extended southward migration by Indo-European peoples, which began around 1500 BCE. They brought with them Indo-Aryan languages such as Sanskrit, which they imposed on speakers of Dravidian languages in the south. Embedded in Dravidian languages (the largest groups now are Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam speakers) is the story of how these people learned, though imperfectly, the Indo-Aryan languages of the arriving conquerors, and changed those languages, too. Over the next three thousand years, the languages of the two families gradually fused. Trading and borrowing between them became more complex, going as it did in all directions, and far beyond nouns to the deeply patterned stuff that’s invisible to a language’s speaker. The languages borrowed each other’s sound patterns: most of the Indian languages, whether Dravidian or Indo-Aryan, have consonants a speaker makes with the tongue against the teeth that contrast with consonants a speaker makes with the tongue curled back. Word forms, word types, and grammatical patterns—all of which take a long time to migrate among languages—were borrowed, too. For instance, Sanskrit, though it’s an Indo-European language, eventually acquired very un-Indo-European grammatical features that clearly come from the Dravidian group.

  What you see and hear is a situation in which languages are less like apples—neat and discrete—and more like oatmeal. It’s always been oatmeal in India, and all the varieties of oatmeal continue to merge, despite political pressures to name them as if they were marbles. The languages that people speak to each other do have sharply etched borders within regional varieties of the same language (such as Hindi), the dialects of different castes, and the pidgin languages born where speakers of different languages come in contact.

  The evolution of the Sprachbund is so glacially slow and massive that it’s basically invisible; because it moves so slowly, people can still give a separate name to each of the linguistic varieties they use. This produces an odd situation: people speak five languages, but they’re not really five languages. To put it another way, the cultural reality has five languages, but the cognitive reality doesn’t. As with the hyperpolyglot, the number of languages can’t be the relevant unit of measure here. The relevant unit is the whole of the linguistic “something and something” that someone knows. As Vivian Cook suggested, “It’s their multicompetence.”

  South India’s second significant invasion was its slow conquest by Persian-speaking Muslims, starting around 700 CE. Crossed with the military jargon of the invaders, Sanskrit birthed a language called Hindustani. For complicated political reasons in the mid-twentieth-century, Hindustani split into Hindi and Urdu.

  Added to this mix was the third invasion, the arrival of the English. First introduced in 1583, when Queen Elizabeth sent the first exploratory mission to India, English became institutionalized with the rise of British political influence in 1757. In the ensuing 250 years, English became something other than merely a foreign language, though how many Indians speak English is disputed—figures range from 5 to 50 percent of the population. Upper castes such as Brahmins were historically incorporated into the British imperial structure and given access to English educations; later, they inherited the power structure along with independence.

  Both Muslims and the British found a cultural landscape that was already thick with languages. British official George Grierson surveyed the colony’s languages in the late nineteenth century and found that “there are parts of India that recall the confusion in the Land of Shinar where the tower of old [that is, Babel] was built, in which almost each petty group of tribal villages has its own separate language.” He also found “great plains,” thousands and thousands of miles square, “over which one language is spoken from end to end.”

  Then as now, counting Indian languages completely and accurately is a task that would craze a generation of survey takers. But there are some statistics that give form to the linguistic landscape. In 2005, the language with the most speakers was Hindi, with 180 million mother-tongue speakers and 120 million second-language speakers—rivaling the number of native English speakers worldwide (328 million). The next most populous Indian languages are Bengali, with 70 million speakers, and Telugu, with 69 million. Ninety-five percent of the population speaks one of twenty-two languages; it’s not exactly known how many speak more than one.

  According to the 1991 census, India had 20 million bilinguals and 7 million trilinguals, a very low number that will probably increase in the next full national survey. But you don’t need a survey. Just flip through the cable channels or visit the newsstand to see the modern version of what Grierson encountered: newspapers are published in at least 34 languages and radio and television broadcasts in 104.

  I sat in my hotel room and watched Hindi television, where English words and whole sentences mixed with Hindi. The mixing of languages apparently has had a very long history in Indian literature, but all of it was lost to me; I longed to know enough Kannada and Telugu and Hindi to be able to identify their fusions, too.

  The Hindu cultures have been pluralistic for millennia, celebrating tensions and moving fluidly among them. Plurilingualism seems to be a natural extension of this. One metaphor for Hinduism that seemed to capture this quality comes from religion scholar Wendy Doniger, who called it “one house with many mansions,” which also captures the linguistic life of the south Indians I met. In the West, a person with multiple identities and affiliations seems obliged to struggle or feel confusion. Here, the more the merrier.

  This expansiveness was on display in what I could piece together of Sri and Kala’s family history. About three hundred years ago, Sri’s ancestors left the southern kingdom of Madras (now the state of Tamil Nadu) and migrated north to Bangalore, bringing Tamil with them. Rather than dropping Tamil for Kannada, the language of Bangalore, they simply added Kannada to the mix. Around two hundred years later, in 1911, his father moved to Hyderabad, and instead of dropping Tamil and Kannada, family members broadened their repertoire, again, by adding Telugu. Meanwhile, formal education and professional work brought together Hindi and English. By the time Sri and Kala’s sons were born, in the early 1970s, the family had accumulated so many languages, they didn’t have a single “mother tongue.”

  “We speak Hindi a lot,” said one of Sri’s nieces. “All of us speak Telugu, but when more of us are together, we speak Tamil. Then, when we get even more together, we speak Kannada.” They are exposed to so many languages fro
m a very young age, they don’t really know how many there are, she added. By the time she was five, she had five languages (Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, and English) and now she can understand three others (Malayalam, Gujarati, and Marathi). For her, each language presumably has its own resonances. Speaking them all is a reenactment of family history, a way to transport the accumulated past into the present.

  India is no multilingual utopia, however. Neither is it a model for how to build a peaceful society with multiple languages. People’s feelings about language spark conflict and violence all over the world; why should India be any different? Deep discontents about languages roil, and the history of the country is checkered with intolerance and violence.

  You only need a few examples to get the flavor of the problem. In 1999, language police in the state of Karnataka objected to a sign that was written in three languages and three scripts: English, Hindi, and Kannada, in that order, with the words running from top to bottom. Then the police began to bicker: Shouldn’t Kannada be on the left, a place of honor, since it would be read first? Or should Kannada be in the center, a place of respect, since it would be flanked by the other two? Just the fact that “language police” monitor signage reflects deeper tensions. Or perhaps they’re just thugs, like the ones who beat up shopkeepers in Mumbai who use English, not Marathi, on their signs.

  In Hyderabad, Kala said that in the 1960s, her stepmother never sanctioned Kala’s sister’s marriage to a man who, though he was from the same caste, spoke Kannada. Fifteen years later, when Kala’s other sister married a Telugu speaker, the stepmother was forced to accept the husband. Why should people be open about language differences, when they are such a convenient index of other attitudes? (I learned later that the language difference would be taken as a sign that the marriage wasn’t a traditional arranged marriage but a more controversial love marriage.) In the weeks we were in India, Hindu fundamentalists attacked Indian women dressed in Western clothes (in one case, dragging women out of a Mangalore bar and beating them), accusing the women of being untraditional and of not being able to speak Kannada. In another incident, one girl, the daughter of a member of Parliament, was dragged from a bus and beaten for talking to a Muslim teenage boy; one news report I read suggested she’d been unable to extricate herself because she didn’t know Kannada.