Why do so few immigrants bother to learn Kannada in Bangalore? I know North Indians who have lived here for 30 years. Ask them if they speak Kannada and they shake their heads. Some try to explain their choice by saying that they haven’t found the need; after all, everyone in Bangalore speaks Hindi. The same logic applies for Telegu and Tamil people who settle and thrive in Bangalore for decades without having to learn Kannada.
Compare this to Chennai where I grew up. It was unthinkable for anyone to speak anything other than Tamil on the streets. Cab and auto drivers would only speak Tamil and turn snarky, rude or disparaging if you spoke anything else. Shopkeepers would openly mock you if you didn’t speak the language and then proceed to take you for a ride since they knew you were not a local.
Hyderabad was different. Both Hindi and Telegu ruled the street. As for Kerala, the fourth southern state, it not only spoke Malayalam, but also spoke the language with a thick accent that was barely understandable to anyone from outside. Why then did Bangalore not own its tongue?
My own experience bolstered this argument. I live in a Tamil-dominated area. Ulsoor is the place where Karunanidhi ceremoniously unveiled the Tamil poet, Tiruvalluvar’s statue in 2009. In exchange, the Kannada poet, Sarvajna’s statue was unveiled by Yediyurappa in Chennai’s Ayanavaram. Living in Ulsoor was like living in mini-Madras. For years, I didn’t have to learn Kannada because everyone on the streets spoke Tamil. (ALSO READ: Government continues to give ‘unfair’ advantage to Hindi, says Stalin)
Something changed in 2010. I decided that I wanted to learn Kannada. Tamilians joked that the language was very easy (not true). “You just put the ‘ha’ sound where there is a ‘pa’ sound,” said my uncle in Chennai and laughed uproariously at his own joke.
{{/usCountry}}Something changed in 2010. I decided that I wanted to learn Kannada. Tamilians joked that the language was very easy (not true). “You just put the ‘ha’ sound where there is a ‘pa’ sound,” said my uncle in Chennai and laughed uproariously at his own joke.
{{/usCountry}}“The script is like a jilebi. Why are you bothering?” asked my aunt.
This attitude typifies the linguistic jingoism rampant in a diverse country like India. We are each so rooted in our mother tongue that it becomes easy to disparage other languages.
I decided to learn the language for the same reason that most people do things that they have long thought about, whether it is fitness or changing jobs. A confluence of factors came together and made it easy for me to learn the language. I found a tutor, I found people who I could converse in Kannada with, and I found an app that helped me learn Kannada.
The benefits I have reaped after forcing myself to learn this language have been immense. For one thing, I develop an instant rapport with every person I interact with ranging from the plumber to the police man. Although they guess that I am not a Kannadiga because my language is not as fluent as my mother tongue, Tamil, they appreciate that I make the effort. There are really two reasons to learn any language: to connect with the people and the land. This happened to me after I learned Kannada. Suddenly, I understood its movies, music, milieu and multiculturalism.
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Are Kannada people jingoistic about their language? It depends on who you ask. Go on a state transport bus and you will hear the Kannada people curse the fact that people from other states have come and taken their jobs. Worse than that, they don’t learn the language. Go to interior Karnataka and you will see Kannadigas who are a far cry from the polite people that you associate with Bangalore. In the heartland, people speak in the “rough-and-tough” fashion that reeks of jingoism. And shouldn’t they? As far as they are concerned, their language is better than other languages, their state, food and lifestyle is better than everyone else’s. This attitude is no different from people in the other states.
Linguistic jingoism only happened after the states were reorganised by language. Before that, the borders were much more porous. Take Karnataka for instance. Historically, this region was a linguistic salad-bowl.
The second oldest mention of the city’s name is visible in a Someshwara temple in Madivala, dating back to 1248 CE. Guess the language of these inscriptions: Tamil. The script calls the city Vengalur. The third mention of the city’s name is in Kannada literature around 1300 CE. The fourth is in– again, surprise, surprise– Telegu literature in the 1400s. “Bangalore has always been multilingual and multicultural,” says Udayakumar PL, a historian. “Natively, people speak three or four languages at home. The father may speak Tamil, the mother, Marathi and the aunts Telegu. They all speak Kannada but they also speak other languages fluently. And this is not recent. This has been the case for centuries.”
Maybe what outsiders view as linguistic tolerance is really about being so linguistically adept for centuries. Maybe this is the reason why Bangalore has prospered. Multilingual people are mentally and emotionally nimble. They adapt and change as they speak different tongues. They are open to new ideas because each language exposes them to diverse concepts. All of this helps the average Bangalorean embrace new ideas, businesses and cultures. It helps them– in other words– to prosper.
So, learn Kannada, not just because you live in Bangalore but also because it will open up this state for you in ways that you cannot imagine.