When it comes to languages, people always hold a special place for their mother tongues. It is after all a language you feel in.
Growing up as a Tamil girl in Mumbai, I believe I am attached to my roots, enough to know that they shaped me in more ways than I ever thought they could. But yet, I don’t know how to read or write my mother tongue.
I’m fluent in English, quite a badge of honor for me as a child. I’d pride myself on my good vocabulary and would especially enjoy when peers would consult me for grammatical advice. I was also fluent in Hindi because I was forced to learn it in school but I never bothered to be good at it. Infact, I was one among many snooty upper middle class teenagers in Mumbai who thought it’s hilarious when someone speaks better Hindi than English. I was also the first to mimic Tamil-accented English and jump at everyone’s throats if they misspelt an English word.
I told myself that I loved languages, though. I studied French for three years in school and even had a phase where I spent a major part of my weekends commuting three hours by train for a German class. It’s funny how in retrospect, for someone who enjoyed words, languages and wanted to spend time learning them, I never gave an Indian language a chance. Not even if it was my mother tongue!
I didn’t really think knowing how to read and write Tamil mattered or that it would be necessary in any measure. I didn’t grow up in Chennai where it was offered as a second language choice in school and I knew that my further education would be in English, so how did it matter really? Besides, where would being erudite in an Indian language get me? I could speak to my family and understand what they said, what else did I need?
It’s not like my family didn’t try. I remember my grandfather sitting down with me over a hot cup of filter coffee, showing my how to pick out the letters of my mother tongue. I remember him saying, ‘this is yours to know and honour’. I also remember being a brat and dodging him every chance I could, robbing myself of a chance to dive deep into one of the oldest languages in the world.
When I moved to Denmark in 2016, I attended my first Danish language lesson along with other international students. For every Danish word the teacher explained, my peers would immediately translate it into their native languages whereas I would translate the meanings into English and the phonetics in Hindi, neither of them being my mother tongue. I remember being put in pairs and being asked, ‘how do you say this in your mother tongue?’. To my utter embarrassment, I didn’t know! As much as I thought that I knew enough Tamil to sustain me, evidently the strain of only using it domestically showed. I struggled to explain my self-inflicted ignorance to my mother tongue, I struggled to defend my attachment to my roots when I seemingly was so adrift. I still do.
Today, when I’m complimented on my English, the twinge of pride I used to feel earlier is replaced by shame. Not because knowing English is a bad thing but because I mastered it at the expense of my mother tongue. I sometimes wonder if in my haste to find my wings, I forfeited my roots.
The good part in all of this though (and thank God there is a good part), is that being away from home these past years revealed a lot to me. On introspection, I yearned to be closer to my roots, and I indeed think I’m working my way towards that. I had the good fortune to find close Tamil friends in Copenhagen who introduced me to richer vocabulary in Tamil. Spotify afforded me a chance to explore Tamil music play lists and being a broke student forced me to try making South Indian food at home (still not quite there yet, I’m afraid). It’s still far from perfect. I haven’t yet begun trying to learn the Tamil script and I’m still in many ways living in that same bubble of ‘don’t need, don’t care’. But it’s better than before and that’s a good enough starting point for me.
