Monday, November 19, 2012

Musings from a toilet seat: Read any Hinglish articles recently?

This afternoon I was going through this impressive interview with Anurag Kashyap where he was focusing on the issues pertaining to commercialization of the film industry, intelligent cinema and the gaping 'misdemeanour' of the I&B Ministry to appease the low-self-esteem-ridden sects of a secular country, and I found myself extremely irritated. No, I was not incensed by his views: On the contrary, I really appreciated his take on these issues and I adore the man for providing us with those one or two movies a year that help prevent the Indian film industry from being an utter joke. What did make me uneasy was the indiscriminate use of Hindi in a supposedly English piece from a reputed English daily and the consequent awful journalism and presentation. It got me thinking: Is this scenario really that atrocious? Or am I just being a purist? Isn't Hinglish the norm of the day? Doesn't the youth of our country use it day in and day out? What's the point in sticking to an archaic concept of 'pure language' when the writing serves the purpose: that of getting the idea across and that too, more effectively by leveraging the current trend? But, and that's a big one, does it?

The phenomena of mixing up different languages and one language borrowing aspects of another closely and culturally related language are not new. All the Indian languages borrow heavily from Sanskrit -- some in its pure form, some the adulterated version. Urdu, literally the 'military camp', was born from elements of Hindi and Persian in Nader Shah's camps when Indian and Persian military culturally mingled with each other. English, being the international language of science, economics and communication, is bound to influence Hindi, and India being such a gigantic nation of a billion people, English is also bound to be influenced by it. Hence the origin of Hinglish. And it's not a twenty-first century phenomenon; "it's probably been around since the first trader stepped off the ships of the British East India Company in the early 1600s..."(Paul J. J. Payack, A Million Words and Counting: How Global English Is Rewriting the World. Citadel, 2008), though it definitely has seeped from the uneducated banter into the mainstream in the last decade. I did a quick Google search to ascertain the prevalence and growth of the present avatar of Hinglish: More than 350 million people speak some or other form of Hinglish. So much so that it has been made mandatory for British diplomats to India to be proficient in this new form. And as a matter of fact, it's so in vogue that most of us don't even realize that we are mixing English and Hindi up, when we are uttering sentences like 'yeh dil maange more' or 'it's a pukka way to speak'. But then, if it's so prevalent and I'm supposed to be so accustomed to it, why did I cringe when I went through the article?

Is it because I absolutely detest the use of the Roman script for Hindi and the consequent dampening of the flow of reading? Or is it because I am more accustomed to using chunks of English while communicating in Hindi than using complete Hindi sentences while primarily conversing in English? - I don't think so, because like most other primates of my generation, I do tend to chat a lot and all of that is done in Roman script, with a completely random inclination towards the use of either language over the course of a conversation. In fact, Hindi not being my native-language, I am far more comfortable with the Roman script compared to the Devanagari. Then is it because I was expecting a better piece of article from a leading daily and was disappointed by their awful journalism? - May be, may be not. I say that, because we are talking about TOI here: if it were The Hindu, I would understand my disappointment right away. But I regularly read TOI, for its cheap 'masala' news ridden with senseless bickering riddled with a combination of vocabulary from different languages penned by reputed 'journalists' whose writing sense goes as far as sensationalizing the most recent upskirt. I have had consistently low expectations from the paper and such troughs in journalism/writing hardly ever bother me.

The more I think about these independent scenarios, the more I realize that perhaps I am not taking the best route to attacking this problem: may be it's just a combination of all these tiny inconsequential tit-bits that unnaturally leads to an inexplicable loathing that's more than the sum of its parts(hail Gestalt!). So, at the expense of elongating this unwelcome sally and estranging the unsuspecting spectator, let me venture into the psycho-linguistic domain.

One thing I distinctly remember is the incessant appearance of hurdles in my chain of thought; the cognitive load of switching from one language to the other, when you have a predisposition of thinking in one language thanks to the use of that language's script, is a bit too much to bear. Yet, as I have explained beforehand, I am accustomed to this switch and my cognition has had enough field-experience in sustaining such punches. So what changed? I was fumbling for a while before I happened upon this article on 'thinking in a language'. It talked of a scenario I am too painfully aware of: that of the effect of context on your language of choice. I have often noticed a peculiar inability to shift from my mother tongue Oriya to Hindi and vice-versa when I prolong my stay in either Kanpur or home. When I get back home during a vacation, I tend to intersperse Oriya with Hindi words for the first few days and the reverse happens when I get back to college after a long stay. (And it's not particular to this poor soul only: At least one other friend of mine faces the same inconvenience at times.) I guess that's because it takes me time to switch my contexts. And without going into a detailed analysis of the above phenomenon in this already long write-up, I would conjecture that this context-switch might be the culprit behind my detest for the article. True, I am accustomed to language switches during chats and also, in some other shady articles from the daily. But when I'm half-way through an elaborate compelling debate on the film industry, I am in no mood for non-sense: I am switched to the information-gathering fact-finding argument-dissecting reader-mode accustomed to a certain standard from a leading piece. I am not chatting away where, it being a conversation, I am amenable to frequent lapses and switches in my cognitive processing. It's like I am reading an essay, dissecting every other line for its purported merit, like I used to do in another life when I went through articles in The Hindu or The Frontline (before a hectic engineering-education schedule took that away from me), and I am expecting the same tempo and gusto till I am done going through the last line. And all of a sudden, I am hit by a gust of Roman-letter-laden unparsable strings. Gone are the days when respectable journalists would take the pain to translate the quotes, going into much effort to preserve the intention and tone of the speaker. This presentation hits you like the sound of nails scratching a blackboard. Consider the following sentence: "That's the way we see "Adult" content in our country - "haaw". Woh jo "haaw" wali sensibility hai - Adult manein kuch bohot dirty hai. " I can easily take in the first line, which uses only one Hindi word for dramatic effect; but then when the whole sentence switches to Hindi completely, there is definitely a breakage in the chain of thought, because I am now required to divide a part of my attention into actually converting the Roman script into a recognizable representation, and I am just not habitually and contextually prepared to seamlessly transition into that state. And there goes the reasoning that this presentation is smooth and effective. In my opinion, and I'm not forcing that on anyone, this is neither good English, nor good Hindi, and a far cry from any decent journalism: And I can only hope (though beyond reason) that we curb our propensity to indulge in such tomfoolery.