Summary

Vaishali Paliwal reflects on the significance of her mother tongues, Hindi and Pahadi, amidst her proficiency and deep connection with English, and the emotional impact of the potential loss of her ancestral language.

Abstract

Vaishali Paliwal articulates a personal narrative about her relationship with language, particularly English, which has been a pivotal tool for her global connections and cultural experiences. Despite her fluency, she acknowledges the 'different' accents and sounds that sometimes lead to subtle rejections due to her early exposure to 'Indian English'. A recent visit to India rekindled her appreciation for Hindi and Pahadi, the language of her mountain-dwelling ancestors. This visit highlighted the decline of Pahadi among her generation, who predominantly use Hindi and English. A poignant moment at a village event in Uttarakhand, where she could not understand Garhwali, a sister language to Pahadi, underscored the urgency to preserve her grandmother's language. Despite attempts to learn French and the allure of its poetry, she realizes the deeper need to reconnect with her roots through Pahadi, recognizing it as a sacred legacy that embodies the struggles and freedom of her people.

Opinions

English is deeply important to Vaishali, shaping her understanding of the world, her dreams, and her cultural consumption, yet her accent sometimes faces rejection.
Despite the occasional rejection, Vaishali's communication skills remain uncompromised and adaptable to different environments.
The visit to India strengthened her connection to Hindi and Pahadi, making her acutely aware of the generational loss of her ancestral language.
The inability to understand Garhwali at the village event was a turning point, prompting a commitment to learn Pahadi and prevent the loss of her cultural heritage.
Vaishali's desire to learn French and its poetry is juxtaposed with the more profound yearning to connect with her grandmother's language, which she views as a spiritual and cultural quest.
The author sees the preservation of Pahadi as a necessary and challenging journey, akin to a pilgrimage that will lead her back to her roots and the essence of her identity.

My Language

Pieces now of bequeathed words

Of colonialism

A global song with a common

Tongue

For well adjusted mutually profitable

Chains

My language now is the usual

Dance-

Exchange of comfort

Not accepted still are my stressed sounds

Forced push and pull of

What is not my grandmother’s lullaby

I keep looking for

In between strange pages of

Alien hymns.

Vaishali Paliwal

English is important to me. I have learnt the world and dreamt my past, present and future in it. I have enjoyed its fiction and poetry, its music, its global and established status to connect us all. Again it is very important to me.

But my accents and sounds are ‘different’ in many ways having spent my early forming years in the world of ‘Indian English’. So sometimes they face rejection in a subtle or a non subtle way. I do not mind it nor get frustrated since my communication skills were always uncompromised and smooth irrespective of the environment or the receiver.

Getting to spend some good time in India this year reintroduced me to the wholesomeness of my mother tongues Hindi and Pahadi(language of mountain people/my ancestors) in very alive experiences of conversations over chai, community get togethers, in folk songs of the land and poetry books of local writers, in the sounds of my aunts’ chanting mantras.

It also made me realize of the utter and heartbreaking loss of Pahadi language in my generation who never got to learn and practice it since Hindi and English were the active and functioning languages where we were raised, with a little bit of Gujarati (spoken in one of the western states of India) that I can still play with at the expense of bit of a fun made by friends.

I was in a remote village of Uttarakhand attending a family event of a friend. I joined the room where women of the village had gotten together. They were all speaking in Garhwali which is a bit different from Pahadi ( well not really; very different both speakers will claim) but same family for estranged children like me of these sister languages of the mountains.

My heart immediately dropped to the bottomless sea. I couldn’t understand one word of what they were saying. And granted it was Garhwali but I would have understood a bit of it if I knew my grandmother’s language. That’s when I knew I had to save this treasure no matter what.

I couldn’t possibly live with this unthinkable loss. This was my tribe and I couldn’t communicate with them; tell them about my roads and journeys and ask them of their homes preserving my history and culture. I took the pledge in front of friends and family to learn Pahadi this year.

I returned to Los Angeles and spent weeks pronouncing Victor Hugo’s Demain dès l’aube and trying to ‘get’ French with cheap online courses. I was burning in my desire for French, its other worldy poetry and pain, its tormenting and sweet pain of an inaccessibility to a tongue like mine, and magnificently failed in the chase. In the meantime I also lost again my grandmother’s language in between easy English and fantasy lands of French bliss.

Now I am without home again.

Sometimes in between online or otherwise pages of reading, I think I am seeing my grandmother’s written word and it turns out that I am just hallucinating.

I want to be found by her but I need to bleed more to reach her because my grandmother’s language is not easy. It is a prayer of many pilgrimages and battles, a saga of the mountains that witnessed my freedom and its struggle, a mystical saint-poetess sitting on the summit waiting for my return.

—

Vaishali Paliwal