FUELLED BY MIGRATION FROM HINDI-SPEAKING STATES TO SOUTH OF VINDHYAS, NECESSITY IS DRIVING NATIONAL INTEGRATION THROUGH A MUTUAL LEARNING OF OTHER LANGUAGES.
A waiter at a restaurant in Kochi welcomes a customer, “Varu sir, bahut din ho gaye- (Welcome sir, it’s been many days).” The customer replies, “Ade, ade.. fever tha (Yes, yes.. I was down with fever).” Some 140 km away, in a village in Tirur in Malappuram district, an elderly woman asks a worker at home, “Pani khatam? Kitane thenga hein?” (Have you finished work? How many coconuts have you collected?) Wonder what language that is? An amalgamation of Hindi, Malayam, English — and a lot of gestures — it’s called Marunadan Thozhilali Hindi (Guest Worker’s Hindi).
With people from Hindi-speaking states crossing the Vindhyas to take up jobs at homes, shops, malls, eateries, construction sites and agricultural sites, and agricultural fields in the southern states, an organic mutual learning of ‘other languages’ is taking place far from the din of political debates over two-language and three-language formulas. When a guest worker in Tamil Nadu converses with the locals in Tamil, and his employer talks with him in Hindi, necessity draws national integration.
EMBRACING THE OTHER:
Taking the case of Ranjith Singh, who migrated from Rajsamand in Rajasthan to Hyderabad to start a retail shop. His local partner mostly dealt with customers, but when he was away Ranjith found it tough to do business. “I realized I cannot survive here without knowing Telugu, and so I learned the language.” Now my Telugu is good as a local’s.
Not every inspiration to learn the local language is pleasant. Yash Jain, an apparel marketing professional who moved from Uttar Pradesh to Bangaluru two hears decided to learn Kannada after a cab driver abused him in the local language. “I called the cops who, when they realized that I am an outsider, were of little help.” The first thing I did after that was to learn Kannada.
Then there are others like Jaswanth Singth, a Punjabi in Chennai, who has got ‘naturalized’ so much that he believes Tamil is the greatest language. “I grew up in a neighborhood that had Tamil scholars and teachers.”
“Thirukkural is the greatest book of all.” Though written in Tamil, none of the 1,330 couplets talks about Tamil. That should speak about the universality of the work, who has etched a figure of Thiruvalluvar on a tree. He has grown more than 800 plants and trees, including sandalwood, red sanders and stevia, around his house in the heart of Chennai.
TWO-WAY STREET:
It’s not always the immigrant who feels the need to learn the local language. Sompalli Ashok, an engineer from Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh, learned Hindi after he moved to Hyderabad to supervise workers who were mostly from Hindi-speaking states. “I knew only Telugu and English and I struggled for a year and a half trying to get work done by laborers from Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Ashok, who learned Hindi in a few months, says today he is confident of handling a workforce anywhere in the country.
Like migration, marriage, too has a catalyst for some Tamils to learn Hindi. Balakrishnan P, a banker in Coimbatore, is married to a Rajasthani. “My wife, who was born here, and I converse in Tamil and English. But when she talks to her parents or watches a Hindi web series, I feel left out.” And that’s good reason to learn the language. Coimbatore, with its MSMEs and proximity to the textile town of Tiruppur, attracts thousands of guest workers from across the country.
Benefeficiaries of this melting pot of languages are people like Tony Singh, 67, whose family moved from Punjab when he was five. Today, Tony is a polygot who speaks EIGHT languages, including Tamil and Malayalam. “A multilingual person always has an edge over others.” Such a person is usually good with lateral thinking and problem-solving. Spontaneous multilingualism is not new to Indians. “We have a long tradition of it.” Linguistic chauvinism, whether Hindi or Tamil, is against the spirit of languages. Marginalized migrants are learning local languages because they are forced to. If the Tamil Nadu govt is interested in promoting Tamil, it should provide linguistic support to these people. At the same time, not many professionals, including IT employees, are learning the local language.”
MADE OF MULTITUDES:
While the service industry attracts young graduates from the northern states to Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai, labor-intensive industries are getting less educated migrants in larger numbers from the north. Govt estimates show Kerala has more than 25 lakh guest workers who make up 7.5% of the state’s population of 3.34 crore.
Chennai attracted people from Rajasthan and Gujarat before the IT boom. Sowcarpet, now home to tens of thousands from Rajasthan and Gujarat, received families of pawnbrokers and moneylenders from the Marwar region in the 1950s.
When it comes to being cosmopolitan, however, even where language is concerned. Bangalore beats other southern cities. One count puts the number of languages spoken in the city, the most cosmopolitan metro in the south, at 100. Despite the occasional tiffs over language pride, only 45% of Bangalore residents speak Kannada.
Natives and migrants agree on one thing: Speaking the local language breaks the ice and helps make friends easily. And, while dealing with employee or a co-worker from a Hindi-speaking state, a native of a southern metro is making a statement: Hum kisi se kam nahin.
