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Is Kannada COOL?
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What happens to Kannada when English determines if one is with the times or not, asks BAGESHREE S. on the eve of Rajyotsava
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We are increasingly hearing less and less of Kannada in all kinds of spaces in Bangalore
YOU'RE PICKING up a pair of Nikes in a showroom on Commercial Street. And you overhear someone asking the shop assistant: "Esht guru idu?" You double over, as if someone just landed a blow on your solar plexus. The three little words ring blasphemous in the well-lit, carpeted interiors of a shop where nothing comes for less than a couple of thousands. That's the "punch" the local lingo carries in some spaces in namma Bengaluru! You may be a Basavangudi lad who knows enough mathru bhashe to sing high praises of Ajji's nucchin unde. The shop assistant, who changes two buses from Nagarabhavi to reach his workplace, may not have missed a single Rajkumar starrer. Still, the two of you will never dream of talking to each other in Kannada.
Is the language of the State dying a slow death in its capital? This question has been bandied about many times over with varied emotional intensity: with concern, anger, or mad fury that leads to a riot or two... The easy victim, in extreme situations, is always a hapless migrant labourer from a neighbouring State.
But even those of us not inclined to paranoia would concede that we are increasingly hearing less and less of Kannada in all kinds of spaces in Bangalore. OK, we don't speak English when we ask for holiges in Subbammana Angadi off D.V.G. Road or mutton chops in a military hotel in Majestic. But even traditional Kannada bastions, such as Gandhi Bazar, now have a Health and Glow or a Food World outlet, where the lingua franca is, invariably, English.
As the complexion of the economy and the notion of upward mobility change, the Pensioner's Paradise gets drunk on its own "happening" (whatever that means!) Pub City image and the Garden City turns into Silicon Valley. So, look at it figuratively or literally, the language we choose to speak in is fast changing.
It follows that those who can make the language (and with it lifestyle)-switch survive and those who can't are left behind. So, as Jnanpith Award-winning writer U.R. Ananthamurthy once pointed out, rather ironically, our local cultures and languages survive because of people who missed the bus to progress. (This statement generated a small storm with Chandrashekhar Patil asking if he meant to say that people should remain illiterate and backward if Kannada has to be protected.) English and the power package that comes with it speak a ruthless language of inclusion and exclusion. Simply put, firebrand Kannada activists can't learn the latest computer software or land a call centre job.
V.B. Tharakeshwar, lecturer, Department of Translation Studies, Hampi University, says the question is not of saving Kannada but of addressing the inequalities that exist between the "English haves" and the "English have-nots". He wonders if we have a right to quarrel if these "have-nots" abandon Kannada and pursue English in search of better opportunities. Ananthamurthy himself admits elsewhere: "In these cruel times of colonial inferiority, a person who does not know English would not get a job that fetches him more than Rs. 500 a month."
So, where does Kannada find a nestling place in a metropolis like Bangalore, as the English juggernaut rolls on, fuelled by economic, social, and political power? It's often been argued that one's mother tongue is the "hiding place" that provides spiritual and emotional sustenance in an increasingly globalised, consumerist era. But does anything in life work in watertight compartments?
S. Sriranga, a young lawyer, talks about how English has a tendency to slowly creep into all spheres of activity. It's in English that we teach our toddlers to count and recognise colours, speak to our friends, interact at workplace, and gossip as we chill out at a pub on weekends. The language defines the lifestyle of a crowd that, in turn, defines the city as "happening". And Kannada then becomes an odd word inserted in a Spice ad for special (or jejune) effects. So, unlike a generation that "thought and felt" in its own mother tongue and translated it into English for interactions outside, Gen X seems to sleep, eat, and drink only English. Come to think of it, that passionate argument with your spouse over unsold stacks of old newspapers or those confessions of undying love happen increasingly in English these days. And without much self-conscious effort at that. Singer and actor Sunil Raoh says: "Some youngsters may speak English because it's cool, but it's simply a way of life for others."
A.K. Ramanujan, that wonderful poet, translator, and scholar, once called himself a "hyphen" human being, who lived simultaneously in many language worlds — English in the office upstairs with his father, Tamil in the kitchen where his mother and aunts spent time, and Kannada on the streets where he played with friends. That leaves us with a question to ponder over on the eve of Kannada Rajyotsava: Are we ceasing to be even hyphenated as we move towards a world ruled by one, non-hyphenated word — English?
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