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Deccan Herald
12-07-2025
- Politics
- Deccan Herald
A language for lost voices
Jean Paul Sartre in his foreword to The Wretched of the Earth, observes: 'To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation.'.India's Home Minister recently remarked that he was ashamed of speaking in English. The backlash was swift and predictable. He was accused of linguistic nationalism, cultural regression, and endangering India's cosmopolitanism. English remains our bridge to the world – a competitive advantage, and a neutral lingua franca in a multilingual subcontinent. Yet, behind the sharp political criticism lies an uncomfortable truth: the English language, a legacy of colonial rule, continues to dominate not merely our official discourse, but our imagination. In doing so, it estranges the vast majority of Indians from the highest institutions of law, learning, and policy – domains where their voices remain unheard and their intellect unacknowledged. This linguistic bifurcation – between those who command English and those who do not – has become one of the starkest class and power divides in contemporary India. After 78 years of independence, we still lack a national language that speaks to both our civilisational past and our democratic future. Instead, we battle endlessly over Hindi vs. regional is both voice and intellect. Language is not merely a medium of instruction or administration. Language is thought. If English remains the dominant language of our higher education, policymaking, courts, and elite discourse, it means that the civilisational logic embedded in English – its categories, metaphors, rhythms, and rationalities – continues to shape how we think. In effect, the coloniser took our language, and by doing so, took our voice – and with it, our intellectual sovereignty. This is not to demonise English. It is a rich and flexible language, and India has made remarkable contributions to it – from RK Narayan to Arundhati Roy, from Amartya Sen to Salman Rushdie. But English in India is not the language of the street, the kitchen, the workshop, or the panchayat. It is not the language in which most Indians dream, argue, joke, cry, or sing lullabies. It is the language of governance, aspiration, and exclusion. And therein lies the does it mean for a country to think in a language that most of its people do not understand? What happens when the very act of participating in civic life requires a linguistic passport that is inaccessible to the majority? We must move towards a civilisational reclamation. There is no going back to an imagined past where a single classical language held sway. Sanskrit, Persian, Prakrit, and Tamil – all have profound legacies, but none can serve as the common tongue of a modern, democratic, multilingual India. Instead, we must embrace the hybrid tongues already spoken in India's cities and popular culture – Hinglish, Tanglish, and Benglish – not as corruption but as the seedbed of a new, evolving national idiom. These creoles, born of necessity and innovation, already carry our metaphors, our idioms, our lived experiences. They represent a living, breathing negotiation between rootedness and modernity. What if we were to take these mixed languages seriously, not just in cinema and advertising, but in education, policymaking, and civic discourse? What if our textbooks, court judgements, and parliamentary debates spoke in a voice more legible to the majority?.This is not merely an administrative task – it is a civilisational project. It will require investment in translation across Indian languages, nurturing of literature in both vernacular and hybrid forms, and the development of digital tools such as natural language processing engines for Indian tongues. Reclaiming our languages is not anti-modern – it is how we modernise on our terms. Above all, this is an ethical and political imperative. A democracy that does not speak in the voice of its people cannot be truly participatory. The denial of linguistic dignity has cascading effects on education, opportunity, legal rights, and psychological Fanon warned that the colonised intellectual, uncritically adopting the coloniser's language and worldview, risks becoming 'a kind of mimic man'. For India, the decolonisation of language is not a nostalgic indulgence – it is the bedrock of self-respecting modernity. In reclaiming our languages, we do not reject English – we provincialise it. We make it one among many, not the only one. In doing so, we open the doors once more to the full range of Indian minds – to speak, to think, and to korish na, local-a-iruku, swalpa adjust maadi. Some jugaad might help not just express, but belong!
New York Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Literary ‘It' Girl Who Continues to Fascinate
'Childhood is an image, which we decorate,' Françoise Sagan wrote in her autobiography, 'Réponses.' Ms. Sagan, born Françoise Delphine Quoirez, was only 18 when her first novel, 'Bonjour Tristesse,' published in 1954, caused a sensation across the globe. But she was not just a literary wunderkind: The teenage author became an object of worldwide press fascination (Pope Paul VI denounced the novel as 'an example of irreligosity'), and the caricature of those years would haunt her. From the get-go, many recognized Ms. Sagan as a genuine talent, with critics likening her to the fellow literary enfant terrible Colette. In Le Figaro, the French novelist François Mauriac called her a 'charming monster,' but conceded that 'talent bursts on the first page. This book has all the ease, all the audacity of youth without having the slightest vulgarity.' The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre deemed her the real thing, and 'Bonjour Tristesse' went on to win the Prix des Critiques in 1954. While the author's own life encompassed the full spectrum of adult tragedies and pleasures — as well as 20 books — in the popular American imagination, her image seems curiously bound up with youth: 'it' girl; French girl. Today, we might add 'nepo baby' because of her parents' social connections — her father was a prosperous industrialist, her mother from an old landowning family. Naturally, this reputation conferred skepticism. (The fact that by age 21 her father had managed her earnings into a tidy fortune could not have helped.) There were those who were not shocked, yet unimpressed by what they regarded as a pampered daughter of the bourgeoisie, with middling talent and a great publicist. (This paper dismissed Ms. Sagan, calling 'Bonjour Tristesse' an 'immature little novel, mainly a catalogue of moods experienced under the strain of a father-complex by a fairly precocious French girl.' ) 'My feeling is that she represents something important in the French literary and cultural imagination,' said the novelist Tash Aw. 'There's also something about the setting of 'Bonjour Tristesse' that is so quintessentially French that it stays in the popular imagination even if people have never read the book.' The book is the story of a teenage girl and one eventful summer in the south of France, a coming-of-age novel that combines cleareyed insight with a vivid evocation of youth. The mixture of the well-educated bourgeois schoolgirl — Ms. Sagan took her pen name from Proust and her debut's title from Paul Valery — and frank discussion of adultery proved a potent combination. In a rapidly changing France, readers thrilled to a novel that expressed the ambivalence of generational shift; the rest of the world, long obsessed with a dynamic stereotype of French sophistication, was equally entranced by this prototypical, modern, politically engaged French girl. First adapted for the screen by Otto Preminger in 1958, the film starred David Niven and Jean Seberg, forever conflating the author in the public imagination with the artless allure — and iconic haircut — of Ms. Seberg. A new adaptation was released this month, helmed by Durga Chew-Bose in her directorial debut — with the blessing of the author's son, Denis. 'Some people told us we were adapting their national anthem,' Ms. Chew-Bose said. Throughout her career, Ms. Sagan was defiant, facing interviewers with a brittle sophistication. 'All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know,' she told an interviewer for The Transatlantic Review. 'The rest don't interest me.' These kinds of people would come to include louche luminaries like Truman Capote and Ava Gardner. Indeed, to her critics, the spigot of novels, plays, memoir, pop song lyrics and screenplays may have had more than a whiff of the dilettantish. 'I think that feeling of being very young and utterly world-weary is both a recipe for chic and, to use a word I hate, relatable,' said the writer and translator Leslie Cahmi. 'Of feeling one's way blindly and realizing that the adults are just as lost as you are. Sagan's postwar French prosperity is haunted by a faint perfume of existentialist desperation.' Ms. Sagan certainly seemed to capture something: the jaded French bourgeoisie, in love, surrounded by interiors and style. Her books paint a vivid picture of a milieu she knew intimately. And in a world before autofiction, her best writing had tight and disciplined plotting. 'Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called realist novels — they're nightmares,' she told The Paris Review. To the author Claire Messud, 'Bonjour Tristesse' — and the furor surrounding its young author — spoke to larger cultural tendencies: 'French culture's intense desire, tendency (at that time at least, in the '50s) to celebrate adolescent female brilliance, however briefly.' Car crashes, youthful divorces from playboys, multiple affairs of variable happiness and substance abuse took their toll. Ms. Sagan was, the critic Bertrand Poirot-Delpech commented with relish, 'a bird fallen from the nest on which modern cannibalism cut its teeth and won't give up.' She found contentment and stability with the fashion stylist Peggy Roche, but after Ms. Roche's death she once again struggled with substance abuse; she died at 69 from a pulmonary embolism. But somehow the timelessness of 'Bonjour Tristesse' — and perhaps, the legend of its author — endures, urgent and relevant. As Ms. Chew-Bose put it, 'I think any story told from the pod of a young woman trying to sort through the turmoil of coming-of-age will always feel modern to me.'
