Chullikkad And An English Chill

A towering modern Malayalam poet recently expressed his disgust at how many young Malayalis are improficient in their mother tongue, and at the education system that enables this. 바카라�Let this generation, which doesn바카라�t know the language, forget me,바카라� proclaimed Balachandran Chullikkad, 60. A campus icon in his youth, he would now like his works to be removed from all educational curricula in order to keep them safe from the younger generation. It was a poetry reading session at a university that prompted this, when a student바카라�a postgraduate student of Sanskrit, no less바카라�handed him a note requesting a particular poem; the note was riddled with spelling errors, such as Aanantam instead of Aanandam 바카라�bliss바카라�.

Hearing about this made me introspect: am I one of the leading lights of this damnable generation? Certainly, I would never have made that particular mistake with Aanandam, but there are many other pitfalls I might have fallen into. I enjoy reading and listening to Malayalam poetry myself, but sometimes I find that I바카라�ve understood hardly half the words in a particularly Sanskritised poem. And I don바카라�t trust myself to compose even a sentence of prose without agonising over the possibility that there might be a mistake in there somewhere. This is the fate of an NRI who never stopped loving his mother tongue.

It all started on a cold November바카라�s day in 바카라�98, when my mother and I disembarked at London Heathrow Airport to join my father, who had been working in England for a few years. I was all of seven years old, my teeth wouldn바카라�t stop chattering, my jumper (sweater) was unbearably itchy and I was endlessly fascinated by the fact that I could now see my breath in the wintry air. I was less amused by how everything seemed so grey and perpetually overcast, and by how you couldn바카라�t see the stars at night바카라�a far cry from the clear skies of Kerala.

I found primary school in Hull a bit pathetic after St Thomas in Trivandrum. The other children, it seemed, could barely write anything in their own language바카라�whereas I could already spell 바카라�photosynthesis바카라�, and was inordinately proud of the fact. Mathematics in particular was a joke. But there was much I had to unlearn as well: I couldn바카라�t say four into five anymore; it had to be four times five. My thick accent was the biggest obstacle: nobody could deduce what I meant when I said 바카라�it바카라�s raining바카라�, which they heard as 바카라�it바카라�s laining바카라� (I바카라�d always struggled with my 바카라�r바카라�s in Malayalam as well, as my father still likes to remind me).

I began to lose whatever proficiency I바카라�d acquired in written Malayalam very quickly: a letter written to my grandmother soon after we바카라�d moved is full of ill-formed letters and other errors, and my mother바카라�s own attached note bemoans the fact. But somehow, I never entirely forgot how to read and write. Years later, after I바카라�d developed an interest in languages, I managed to regain the ability with a bit of practice, starting from a base that hadn바카라�t completely vanished. I can now read at a fairly normal pace (but I still can바카라�t speed-read, or skim a passage looking for something in particular, as I can in English), and write at an excruciatingly slow pace in letters that look like they바카라�ve been typed바카라�I can바카라�t read handwritten Malayalam to save my life.

When it came to the spoken language, I was fortunate. Many migrant parents like to speak English to their children at home바카라�either because they think speaking in their mother tongue will interfere with the children바카라�s ability to learn English, or due to some strange post-colonial inferiority complex. Thankfully, my father found (and still finds) the idea absurd, and we continued to speak in Malayalam. But it was a functional sort of Malayalam for domestic life, liberally peppered with English loanwords as and when required. I never acquired a higher vocabulary in the language.

My interest in languages only grew over the years, until I completed an MA in Linguistics, the scientific study of language. My dissertation was on the semantics of epistemic indefinites in Malayalam. I could tell you many interesting things about the language and its history, and relate constructions in modern Malayalam to their antecedents in Sangam Age Tamil. I바카라�ve spent a few years in India as an adult now, and grown more comfortable in Malayalam; I바카라�ve even tried my hand at writing poetry바카라�it came upon me in a fit of feverish inspiration as I gazed upon the moon in the middle of a cloudy sky in Kodaikanal. I went back home, 바카라�recollected in tranquility바카라� and wrote what I could, vaguely aping the style of Kumaran Asan without really adhering to the strict rules of metre.

Despite all this, it바카라�s still common for something basic to cause me to stumble (usually a Sanskrit-derived word, from that higher vocabulary I never learned at school). While reading a newspaper a few months ago, I had to stop and ask my father what bharanaghatana viruddham meant (바카라�unconstitutional바카라�).  My incomplete grasp of my mother tongue is still a painful subject, and admonitions such as the poet바카라�s still strike at the heart.  It probably wasn바카라�t aimed at people in my situation, I realise, but it still makes me question my place in all this바카라�what of those of us stuck in this isthmus of a middle state, perhaps more proficient in English but soothed only by the sounds of a Malayalam lullaby? In the end, I choose to base my stand on another poet바카라�s dictum; in the words of Vallathol Narayana Menon:

"Mattulla bhashakal kevalam dhatrimar; marthyannu pettamma tan bhasha than." (바카라�Other tongues are but foster mothers; a man바카라�s birth mother is his own language바카라�).

The writer is  a journalist with Outlook.