We were recently hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains when it started raining. I handed out ponchos to the members of our party. As my friend struggled to get it on, she asked:
“Where’s my head?”
Good question! But let us try not to get too clever here. She was asking about the opening in the poncho to poke one's head through. We had a good laugh at her choice of words. Which reminded me, she got away with botched expression because she was in America. Back in India, we wouldn’t have let her off the hook that easily. She risked being labeled as wanting on English grammar and vocabulary and kicked out of the “in” group.
We all have reasons why we love this country. One of mine is the American preference for what works and what gets done as opposed to the protocols and procedures of how. In the realm of communication, this translates to a remarkable tolerance for a range of speaking styles. Americans prefer immigrants learn and speak English, but that’s about it. As long as you are able to communicate your ideas and follow what’s being said, the rest is business as usual. How often have you heard Americans make fun of your grammar or fluency? Accent maybe, in sitcoms or stand-ups. But grammer? Hardly.
Take Bob, our kitchen remodeler. At 6 feet 6 with a generous helping of lean muscle mass, he cuts an imposing figure. He could have rolled over laughing at my Malayalee English or Minglish without fear of reprisal once the contract was signed. But it was as if he didn’t notice. We had long conversations over the six-week period he worked on our kitchen. Aside from an occasional, “what’s that?” or “say that again,” we had uneventful communication.
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| Bob redoing the kitchen |
I'd be a fool, though, to think he wasn't aware of the vagaries of my Minglish. Surely, he must have noticed my “vindho,” and “coundertop,” not to mention “I am vanding to move the refrigarater,” but he accepted that as normal part of doing business with an immigrant. I know this because, he told me with some amusement about his painting crew.
Bob didn’t paint. Instead he outsourced that to a Korean contractor named Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee presented a far bigger linguistic problem to Bob than I did. The little English that Mr. Lee spoke, he mumbled, barely opening his mouth. But what made matters worse was this: Mr. Lee’s workers were three Hondurans, only one of whom spoke what can be loosely qualified as English. It was quite a theater when Bob, Mr. Lee, and the three Hondurans got together to discuss the modalities of painting our kitchen. Throw a Minglish speaker into the mix and you have all the ingredients for the experience of a lifetime. We instinctively fell back on the adage that “actions speak louder than words.”
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| After Bob's magic |
You see, for a Malayalee—and by that I mean native Malayalam speakers, not the ABCD Mayyayees, or the television anchor wanna-be-ABCD Mayyayees—good spoken English is an elusive dream, destined to remain for ever out of reach. Such is the hold growing up speaking Malayalam has on your tongue.1 The words won’t flow, the grammar fails, and the accent never goes away. Yet, the aspiration remains.
Takes movies or television, the guardians and propagators of our culture; yeah, I agree, we are in safe hands. Their rise or fall at the box office or at the ratings game depends on how much English they can squeeze into the dialogue. The more an anchor feigns ignorance of Malayalam by interspersing her inane narration with English words, the higher the program rating climb. The more she anglicizes the Malayalam words, the larger her fan club gets. In the movies, the hero stands apart from his shinkidis (acolytes) by his command of English. He always narrates his കിഡിലന് (fiery) dialogue to the villain first in English, and then, after a comic moment where the villain looks stupid failing to understand what was said, he repeats the dialogue in Malayalam. The latter action is necessary not just to put the villain in his place but to help the audience along. You may argue that there are no more such heros in the “new generation” movies. Granted. But these paeans to plagiarism prove my point—they are the epitome of Minglish run riot.
In college as in movies, few things set people apart as their command of spoken English. This made social life difficult for some. If you wanted to befriend one of the “ashposh” city girls, you had to pass some hurdles. It helped if you wore jeans and could master some basic facts about western music. But two requirement were non negotiable: play cricket and speak English. These hurdles proved insurmountable to most. Things came to a head for Bhaskaran from our junior batch. Three years of life in the college and hostel had done little to erase the village imprint on his attire, attitude, and articulation. Yet, the poor fellow threw caution to wind and went after one of city girls. For months on end did he pursue the fine lass with every trick in the book. Finally, exasperated, we seniors read him the rule book. Bhaskaran fell to his knees, threw up his hands, and spoke thus:
“Friends, I can round up some rupees and buy a jeans, hang out with the town folks and memorize some things about western music. I can even put on the pads and hit the wicket. But speak English? No way!”
The expectations and scrutiny must have been a heavy burden to our college professors. We judged them not by their command of the subject matter but by their ability to lecture in impeccable English. This turned several of the good ones from lecturers into readers, unwilling to step outside of their written notes. The tables turned when I became a graduate assistant and was assigned a teaching stint at a university in the South. Suddenly, I faced all the fears at once: vocabulary, fluency, grammar,spelling, and yes, the most dreaded one, accent.
I groped my way through the first few lectures, relaying on charts, symbols etc., to keep attention away from my Minglish. And then the realization hit me. These American kids didn’t care. Those who were paying attention were too focused on the material, microeconomics, to care about speaking style. Those who who weren’t paying attention were too focused on other priorities like sleeping and didn’t care either. And finally, a third group didn’t care at all because they were pursuing activities outside the classroom. A few gentlemen from this third group did change their tune when they got an F; they complained to the department head about the TA’s poor accent. The head asked them to enumerate the areas they had most difficulty with: was it indifference curves, marginal rate of substitution, or the law of diminishing returns? Upon seeing baffled looks and silence, he invited them to repeat the course and showed them the door.
That was a liberating realization. All you had to do was get your ideas across in a reasonably comprehensible way and you could transact business without being ridiculed. I gave up any pretensions about an American accent then and there. No more rolling my tongue or twisting the ‘r’ in vain attempts to mask my Minglish.
But making a similar transition in written prose, I admit, has been harder. You see, we come from a ബുദ്ധി ജീവി (intellectual) tradition that equates abstruse prose with scholarship, flowery writing with style, archaic British expressions with depth. The keepers of this tradition came down hard on me in high school. In 11th grade, we are asked to speak on our career choice. As any good son would, I spoke about my aspiration to become a doctor. I said my goal was to pursue a medical career. Lordy lordy! This triggered the ire of the English overlords. “Medical career?” they seethed. “You mean you want to become a compounder, a medical store clerk?” “No,” I said, “although there is nothing wrong with those occupations. I want to become a doctor.” “Oh, you mean you want to pursue a career in medicine?”
Medical career = componder, Career in medicine = physician. What style! How deep!
This hounded me until I came to America to study economics and joined the American Economic Association. This wasn’t an association of penny-pinchers or retail clerks, although there is nothing wrong with these pursuits. This is an association of professional economists, mostly with a doctorate. And soon enough, I came to know about the American Medical Association and the American Physical Society. Too bad physicians and physicists, I am afraid our colonialist friends won’t recognize your memberships in these outfits. You will be dismissed as compounders and body builders.
If you are a Malayalee, you couldn’t have escaped noticing the artful use of dense-sounding prose by our underemployed party theoreticians. They were among the first to latch on to Minglish’s potential. Though staunch anti-colonialists and defenders of Malayalam, they quickly realized that casually throwing in a few English words in their discourses on dialectical materialism worked wonders in keeping the worker bees hooked to the party line. Suddenly, corruption looks like compassion, murder, an act of mercy.
Somehow, I suspect one of our അനുഭാവി (party sympathizer) is behind the following episode. Jack Valenti, special assistant to Lyndon Johnson and longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America, talks about a frightening experience when he attended a film festival in India. At one of the seminars, an expert rose up (stroking his beard I suppose) and spoke about the meaning of fascination with movies:
The theory that there exists a Cartesian polarity between arbitrary aesthetic signs and total realism necessarily led to quantitative conclusions and meaningless oppositions: the proliferation of detail as against metaphysical truth, where quality cannot be seized, the fluidity of mise-en-scene as against against meter montage, the existential tension of suspense in Hitchcock, as against the tragic release from pity and fear.
Now this, an American would object. Mr. Valenti was polite and didn’t say it, but I will.
What the &%*$@ are you talkin’ about? Get with the program, dude.
1 In Names, I talk about what happened when I attempted a social introduction by extending my hand to a graduate student saying "I am Jay." From then on he went about addressing me as MJ! Eventually, I mustered enough courage to take this atrocity head on. At a reunion, I reintroduced myself more forcefully in a Bond-like manner: "I am Variyam. Jay Variyam." That did the trick.↩
