A language can be enjoyed even without understanding it

Mint

3 days ago

It looked and smelled like many other Indian markets. I could smell the jackfruit and guava, ripe and intoxicating. Women sold strands of white jasmine flowers and pink lotuses. A man was hawking a pile of multicoloured 'Jockey" briefs of questionable provenance. The orange-yellow mangoes, a little longer and more lissome than I was used to, looked like the genuine article however. A goat nibbled at flower garlands strung around the front of a three-wheeler till the irate owner delivered a kick to its rear end. It all felt very familiar, yet I felt a stranger in my own country.
I understood nothing anyone was saying around me. In the bustling marketplace of Trichy everyone seemed to speak Tamil. Even the signs were mostly in Tamil. The usual smattering of English that is part and parcel of Indian metropolises was largely missing, except for an occasional store sign. Vasanth and Company promising 'quality and trust" when it came to appliances, the mustachioed Mr Vasanth beaming at us from a billboard. Even the colas had different names from the ones I was used to. Now I could choose between Kalimark ice-cream sodas and Bovonto colas but I would have to choose blindly. The storekeeper was all smiles but could not understand my queries.
Having just visited the Rockfort temple, my forehead was smeared with sacred ash and I sported a tilak. I must have looked somewhat local. An elderly lady came up and asked me for help with something. I just smiled foolishly.
At first it felt a bit disconcerting as if cast out to sea without a life-jacket. As a writer I am used to eavesdropping on conversations around me wherever I am. I tape interviews and select the clips that would move my narrative forward. There is power in that.
Here I was flailing, understanding neither head nor tail of the conversations in the market, at restaurants, in bars.
In hindsight that should not be so unusual in a language soup like India. India recognises 22 official languages. But the People's Linguistic Survey of India estimated in 2012 that there were at least 780 languages in India, putting it in the top 5 countries of the world, alongside Papua and New Guinea and Nigeria, when it came to linguistic diversity.
Some Indian languages are mind-bogglingly ancient. The Great Andamanese, for example, are descended from the first migrants from Africa some 70,000 years ago. Their language still retains archaic structures long lost even in the mother continent. For example, they divide the body into seven parts and prefix nouns and words with monosyllables that indicate the relevant part. Linguist Anvita Abbi says for the rest of us, blood is blood. But the Great Andamanese need to know where the blood is coming from. Blood from the forehead is a different word than blood from inside from internal bleeding. Cultural activist Ganesh Devi talks about how Indian languages had a richer palette of colour terms which started disappearing after synthetic colours were created in the 19th century. Even today Gondi has more colour terms than Hindi, he says.
This linguistic diversity should fill us with pride; instead it often scares us. Some politicians think India would be more united as a country if everyone could rally around one official language like Hindi. States that don't speak Hindi resent any whiff of imposition of Hindi on them whether as first, second or third language, fearing it's really Hindi by the backdoor. Language has become a means to rouse passions and mobilise voters. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee hopes to do that, kicking off her 2026 election campaign earlier this week in Rabindranath Tagore's Bolpur, claiming that Bengali-speakers are facing discrimination in other parts of India. WhatsApp forwards are popping up, offering quick linguistic tests to tell Bangladeshis from Bengalis from this side of the border. Who calls water pani and who says jol? Who calls salt lobon and who calls it noon? Oddly as some linguists point out in the middle of these charged debates both pani and jol share Sanskrit roots. But the meanings of words, their antiquity, their etymology can all be used to divide people into 'them" and 'us".
Recently, a Bengali journalist for a Bengali publication asked Bengali superstar Prosenjit Chatterjee a question in Bengali at a press meet in Mumbai. Chatterjee, who knew the journalist well, wondered smilingly why she was asking the question in Bengali given that the event was happening in Mumbai. In these language-sensitive times, the clip went viral. Chatterjee was immediately pilloried for allegedly disrespecting his mother tongue. He had to issue an official statement to explain that he was just trying to be sensitive to the linguistic preferences of everyone around him, requesting people to not read anything more into it.
In Trichy, words for me were suddenly leached of meaning. At first I felt as if I needed an interpreter. But slowly as I got used to the noise around me I realised what a relief it was to just experience a city without trying to eavesdrop on its conversations. I didn't have to make sense of the words. I could just listen to the soundscape of the city.
At the Ranganathaswamy temple in Srirangam, as a flock of parrots suddenly took flight, I could listen to their squawks echoing around the candy colours of the gopuram. Lakshmi, the temple elephant, gently harrumphed as she took currency notes from devotees.
As I walked into the sanctum sanctorum of Andal, the only female saint of Tamil Vaishnavites, I came upon a group of elderly women singing together. They stood in a cluster, their white hair glowing, their saris, parrot green, teal blue, deep purple, almost iridescent in the lamp-lit darkness of the temple, their voices rising and falling hypnotically while the priest's little bell tinkled.
I could not understand a word they were singing but I could have listened for hours. Later my writer friend Sudha Tilak told me those were verses from the Tiruppavai by Andal, songs of love, devotion and food. In one, Tilak said, Andal writes about her akkara adisil, a porridge made of rice and ghee, describing it as having 'golden ghee that would melt and run down from the palms to the elbows." I understood none of this when I heard the women singing but it didn't matter. The sweetness still came through.
Instead of listening for the meaning I could just listen to the sound of the words the way one feels a piece of fabric, its texture, its colour, its sheen. It was oddly liberating to listen to a collage of sounds of a city without reaching for a dictionary to figure out its meaning. Raw sound has its own beauty.
Later on that same trip I walked into an old Danish fort museum in Tharangambadi or Tranquebar. It had a modest little museum. Danish weapons, documents and ancient Tamil sculptures were just piled haphazardly around. In one corner was a giant whalebone weathered white by the sun.
A man asked me what it was. He spoke no English or Hindi. I spoke no Tamil. Whale, I said hesitantly. He looked confused. Big fish, I said somewhat incorrectly. That was no help either. For a moment we were stuck on either side of the language divide. Suddenly I had a brainwave. I opened my notebook and drew a cartoonish whale.
Oh like with a spout of water, he pantomimed. I drew a spout as well. He chortled and brought over his wife and children to admire my creation. And we beamed at each other because somehow despite having no language in common we had managed to be on the same page.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.