Translanguaging as a Clarion Call and a War Cry From The Global South

Translinguagem como toque de clarim e grito de guerra do Sul Global

Resumo

This paper seeks to point to the role of the phenomenon called ‘translanguaging’ as a wake-up call, as well as a call to action against the hegemony of the Global North in the way it has traditionally disparaged the Global South, undercutting the latter’s bona fide aspirations to a place on a level playing field. In undertaking this task, it explores the potentially subversive aspect of translanguaging and also ignores the reclaimings of equal action fields to all that work there. It is argued that it is all too easy to miss the wood for the trees here by those who would rather look at the phenomenon as fundamentally a question of switching between different languages – so-called ‘code-switching’ – with great abandon and true spirit of laissez faire. In this paper, I shall turn my attention instead to what I call the ‘politics of translanguaging’. By that, what I intend to mean to press home is that people, especially in postcolonial settings, have used translanguaging as an effective means to challenge the last vestiges of colonial power that persist thanks to the lingering effects of coloniality by deliberately ‘muddying the communicative waters’ through their translanguaging practices – a process that will be analysed in closer detail through examination of postcolonial literary works. Postcolonial writers of the likes of Arundhati Roy are past masters at this.

KEYWORDS:
politics of translanguaging; coloniality; Global South; Arundhati Roy

Abstract

Este trabalho procura atentar para o papel do fenômeno chamado “translinguagem” como um despertador e, ao mesmo tempo, um grito de guerra contra a hegemonia do Norte Global, no que diz respeito à forma com ele tradicionalmente vem desdenhando o Sul Global, desmerecendo as aspirações deste, que são inteiramente procedentes, de reivindicar um campo de atuação com condições equitativas para todos que nele atuam – aproveitando-se de características subversivas da transliguagem. Aponta-se que é fácil perder de vista o que realmente está em jogo, perigo este que corremos principalmente quando lançamos os olhos para o fenômeno de translinguagem como sendo, meramente, uma questão de transitar entre diferentes línguas livremente, sem quaisquer restrições. Neste trabalho, pretendo focar numa dimensão importante do fenômeno que chamarei de “a política de translinguagem”. Com o uso deste termo, pretendo sustentar que as pessoas, notadamente em contextos pós-coloniais, têm recorrido à translinguagem como um meio bastante efetivo de desafiar os últimos vestígios do poder colonial que persistem entre elas, graças aos efeitos da colonialidade. Elas o fazem por intermédio de um esforço de turvar as águas, utilizando a translinguagem – um processo que será examinado em maiores detalhes com referência a obras literárias pós-coloniais. Escritores pós-coloniais como Arundhati Roy são mestres dessa tática.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
política de translinguagem; colonialidade; Sul Global; Arundhati Roy

1 Getting started

The term ‘Global South’ started off its nomenclatural life as a euphemism or a self-ascribed label with an unmistakably positive spin. In many ways, it still is just that. Its confrontational or status quo-defying dimension only shows up when one takes full cognizance of the fact that it unabashedly pits itself against its polar opposite, the North. Let us not forget that its antecedents included the now-despised ‘the Third World’, ‘developing world’, ‘peripheral states’ and a few other masterpieces of verbal acrobatics that were all cast aside one by one because of the unsavoury connotations that they inevitably evoked – the first, that of a waste bin, while the second, what could best be described as ‘always struggling, but never quite making it all the way’ and the third, well, that of summarily dismissing the undesirables to the sidelines. Not that the new term that was ushered in manages to divest itself of all that penumbra of such brazen prejudice – given the associations it evokes of the North Star, for centuries used by mariners around the world and fondly – nay, almost reverentially – called by them Loadstar, Pole Star, Stella Polaris and so forth (the prejudice in question here arising from what the term thus implicitly denies by dint of exclusion!).

But, leave that as it may, today the so-called Global South does have at its disposal effective ways of facing up to the rather step-motherly treatment it has been meted out for long. In what follows, I would like to close in on one of these tools that are already there and up for grabs and, as I hope to show, can effectively be employed to take the sting out of the iniquities of which we have been the victims for far too long and, if push comes to shove, pay our erstwhile oppressors back in the same coin.

The means of what I described as confronting our past persecutors with the effect (and some pardonable vengeance!) that I alluded to is translanguaging. The arguments that I shall mobilize in the body of this paper will all fall under the rubric of what I would designate ‘the politics of translanguaging’. Now, the term translanguaging has been around for quite some time, thanks to the pioneering work of scholars like Ofélia García, Li Wei, Ricardo Otheguy, Suresh Canagarajah, Gerardo Mazzafero, and many others. It is widely believed to have sprung up from the work of a group of researchers led by Cen Williams based in Bangor, Wales, and centred around François Grosien’s important and timely caveat that a bilingual is, contrary to what many researches were given to thinking at that time, not simply two monolinguals fused into one, but keeping their separate identities intact (and, more importantly, having no qualms about it!).

That account of the term’s ancestral lineage may well be true with respect to the European context, but, conceptually, I have found it much more rewarding and enlightening to view translanguaging as a sequel to or a byproduct of the notion of ‘languaging’ (simpliciter, with no prefixal hemming or hawing) put forward by the late Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana in the 1960s. Among other exciting prospects, it opens up an entire range of theoretically earth-shattering ideas such as calling the bluff of the very idea of languages being separated from one another on purely language-internal, structural grounds – and, not, say, geopolitical factors, as the old age that says “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” rather embarrassingly insists on reminding us all the time (for more on this, see RAJAGOPALAN, 2022)! But we will leave matters at that for fear of distracting ourselves from the main course we have set for ourselves in this paper.

2 Politics of translanguaging

Most researchers in the area of translanguaging have tended to concentrate on the pedagogical implications of translanguaging. A quick glance at the enormous quantity of literature already produced reveals the following randomly selected tell-tale titles: “A pedagogy of translanguaging” (HAMMMAN; BECK; DONALDSON, 2018), Effectively enabling translanguaging in the classroom ( MILLER, 2020), “The role of translanguaging in improving Thai learners’ interactional competence in dyadic English as a foreign language tutorial sessions” ( KAMPITTAYAKUL, 2018), “The impact of translanguaging approach on teaching Arabic reading in a multilingual classroom” ( BIN-TAHIR et al., 2020), “‘Teacher, ¿Puedo Hablar en Español?’ A Reflection on Plurilingualism and Translanguaging Practices in EFL” ( ORTEGA, 2019), The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning ( GARCÍA, JOHNSON; SELTZER, 2016), Translanguaging in EFL Contexts: A call for change ( RABBIDGE, 2020). Still, this long list of books and journal articles is only a tiny fraction of the plethora of publications being churned out in different parts of our globe.

What has not been paid adequate attention to is the enormous potential of translanguaging as a tool at the service of the marginalised and the downtrodden peoples all around the world. People right across the world are only now waking up to this aspect of translanguaging and how it can be mobilised to further safeguard their interests, to uplift themselves. This is the one aspect of translanguaging I would like to single out and zero in on in what remains of this paper. Needless to point out, this issue falls squarely within the scope of what I am referring to as the ‘politics of translanguaging’. Briefly put, the politics of translanguaging covers the whys and wherefores of translanguaging and how it can be commandeered to serve the interests of language users who have long suffered marginalisation at the hands of a tightly-knit coterie among them who claim for themselves special rights and privileges over the fixation of norms of a given language for reasons of blood, ancestry, racial identification or whatever.

3 The colonial context as the breeding ground of nativism

Colonialism provides the ideal backdrop to any discussion of the politics of translanguaging. Colonialism’s complicity with language-related discrimination has been discussed at length by many scholars. Heller and McElhinny ( 2017, p. 4) state bluntly right at the outset of their book that “capitalism and colonialism, working together as an uneven and shifting world system, have made possible and salient particular ways of mobilizing language in the production of inequality and social differences that legitimize it” and go on to speak of “discursive struggle, resistance, and change” on the horizon. For those on the seamy side of the colonial divide, translanguaging can turn out to be a powerful weapon in their “discursive struggle” and “resistance”, in their endeavour to “change”.

3.1 The role of translanguaging as a myth-buster in the logic of colonialism

From a political point of view, translanguaging helps throw into total disarray the logic of colonialism that originally worked its way through the imposition of colonisers’ language on the subjugated people, by insisting all the time that the colonial master alone had the last word in relations to the norms of usage. The colonised were, in other words, destined to be eternally at the mercy of their colonisers in matters related to the norms of usage. The latter backed their claims by invoking “inviolable” rights of nativism and holding on to their supposed birth-right (at bottom, racially tinged – but leave that for the time being!) that stipulated that, as ‘native speakers’ of the coveted language, it was their exclusive privilege to have the last word on what is and what is not an acceptable way to say something in their language.

Born in a country that was then a colony of Great Britain and having spent my formative years there, the present writer recalls regularly consulting a bedside handbook titled Indian Errors in English that was an obligatory read at the primary school I attended. The only thing supposed to be wrong about the words and turns of phrase targeted for proscription had to do with the fact that they had all sprouted on colonial soil and often made little sense to an English ear. For that reason alone, all of them were summarily blacklisted. Many of these expressions are today part and parcel of what is recognized as Indian English. Back in those days, however, it never crossed anyone’s mind that there is nothing to be scandalised about when languages take root in alien environments and start developing their own distinctive local ‘flavours’. After all, that’s how other equally standard varieties of English, to wit American English, Canadian English, Australian English came about, to begin with – they didn’t drop from the heavens one fine morning – and slowly develop their own idiosyncrasies to suit local circumstances and peculiarities ( MUFWENE, 2008, 2014).

3.2 Nativism as the elixir of colonialism and the alleged toxic influence of ‘alien’ cultures

From the colonialist perspective, the spawning and proliferation of ‘other Englishes’ was simply outrageous and a threat to its very integrity and future survival. The guiding principle behind the growing concern was that language maintenance depended on zealously safeguarding language purity at any cost, which in turn meant keeping a permanent vigil on all manner of alien influences, lest contact with other cultures and languages should undermine a language’s claims to its putative purity and authenticity. This is particularly the case with English – since it has long ceased to be just another language but a veritable commodity in high demand all over the world. If I may be pardoned for citing my own words from a paper I wrote more than a decade and a half ago (cf. RAJAGOPALAN, 2007, p. 197), here is an excerpt that goes straight to the point:

[...] until relatively recently, it was not unusual for one to come across calls to rein in the formation of new varieties of English world-wide in what can only be interpreted as a latter day version of the nostalgic mourning over the divine malediction of the Tower of Babel. Thus, half a century ago, the journal English Language Teaching, precursor to the ELT Journal, carried an article wherein the author expressed alarm over the way East African English was breaking away from standard British English. The passage is worth quoting in full if only for the reason that its central thrust will most certainly make us squirm with unease at the implied suggestion that the new variety of English could only be regarded as an aberration from the normal course of things (witness, for instance, the scare quotes around the expression East African English):

So far little attempt has been made to deal with the phonetic origin of errors in spoken English in either training colleges or schools. There is a danger that an ‘East African English’– characterized by its own pronunciation, intonation and sentence patterns – may become normal among educated Africans. This danger appears more acute when it is realized that more and more teaching of English will be done at all levels by African teachers who are themselves subject to these errors, and who have received little or no training in how to overcome them. ( PERREN, 1956, p. 3 apud RAJAGOPALAN, 2007, p. 197)

If only to dispel any face-saving caveat from an unrepentant supporter of the nativity-myth to the effect that Perren’s ( 1956) unfortunate faux pas is a one-off and is not worth making much of a fuss about, I hasten to remind the reader that his remark does indeed follow a pattern. Among its antecedents is the following brash, cocky, and arrogant observation by someone of the calibre of Robert Bridges, who was crowned the Poet Laureate of Britain shortly after the turn of the last century and, alongside a group of like-minded friends, founded a society called, well, hold your breath, the ‘Society for Pure English’. Here’s how Perren rounds off his confident assertion.

Th[e] danger is much increased by the widespread and haphazard distribution of English speakers all over the world exposed to all manner of unrelated environments. It would seem that no other language can ever have had its central force so dissipated – and even this does not exhaust the description of our special peril, because there is furthermore this most obnoxious condition, namely, that wherever our countrymen are settled abroad there are alongside of them communities of other-speaking races, who, maintaining among themselves their native speech, learn yet enough of ours to mutilate it, and establishing among themselves all kinds of blundering corruptions, through habitual intercourse infect therewith the neighbouring English (PERREN, 1956, p. 3 apud RAJAGOPALAN, 2007, p. 197).

What makes Bridges’ remark all the more bizarre and bordering on the preposterous is the fact that he singles out American English as a convincing and incontrovertible example of what he has in mind. Here is Bridges in his own words immediately after the passage just quoted: “We can see this menace without any guess as to what may come of it, and in the United States, where it is more evident [...]” (PERREN, 1956, p. 3 apud RAJAGOPALAN, 2007, p. 197)

In so disparaging the role of the ‘other-speaking races’ (racism, once again!) in the way a given language evolves, Bridges was taking his cue from the likes of David Hume, who, according to Bailey ( 1985, p. 3), spoke of the “inundation of Barbarians”, from which the Scottish philosopher vainly thought that the United States was exempt thanks to its geography – little realising that history was to belie them all by letting communicative channels triumph over geographical barriers!

What interests us more here though is that, as English became a prised commodity worldwide, the idea of the native speaker was hastily hoisted to the position of revered totem, with the inevitable jostling amongst those who considered themselves most eligible to the coveted status, as to who does and who does not qualify as out and out native. As we saw, Bridges (PERREN, 1956, p. 3 apud RAJAGOPALAN, 2007, p. 197) had no qualms about dismissing the claims of the citizens of the United States, if only for the reason that they lived in “all manner of unrelated environments” and co-habited with “communities of other-speaking races”, resulting in their command of English having “its central force so dissipated” and being subjected to “all kinds of blundering corruptions”.

Straying away a bit from the main thrust of this paper, it is worth commenting here that there is enormous irony in the way the term ‘native’ was thus rehabilitated as the cynosure of all eyes on the English as a foreign language market. Believe it or not, the term ‘native’ originally had pejorative connotations. Thus, witness what Singh ( 2012, p. i) had to say:

The Indo-European connection of the c. 1374 expression ‘native’ leads us to the old French which meant ‘innate, produced by birth’, which itself was derived from – if we were to believe the etymologists – from natus, the past participle of nasci – gnasi meaning ‘be born’ [...]. However, the terms ‘nativity’ or nativité (c. 1122) had been in use in Old French since still earlier times. The contempt with which the term was used is clear from its subsequent journey, during which it acquired the meaning of ‘person born in bondage’ (c. 1450), later a person who has always lived in a place (c. 1535), and from 1652 it was used to point out the original inhabitants of non-European nations where Europeans held political power. This sense of ‘locals’ was exploited rather contemptuously during the last two hundred years. ( SINGH, 2012, p. i)

The observation made in the last sentence of this passage is spot on. The expression ‘the natives are getting restless’ was a familiar piece of colonial jargon during the days of the Raj in India and was typically used whenever it became clear that the population under the colonial yoke was increasingly getting impatient with their rulers. But all that changed, as we have noted, when the term started being used to refer to those who claimed to be uniquely bona fide speakers of a prestige language like English. For all we know, Noam Chomsky’s meteoric rise to prominence as a paradigm maker in theoretical Linguistics in the latter half of the 20 ^th century might have helped prop up the special status of the native speaker, because the figure of the native speaker was the centrepiece of his theorisation about language – language for him was what the native speaker had in his head, tucked away from untrained public gaze! It was thus that a pretentiously linguistic construct such as the figure of the native speaker could lay a claim to be uniquely entitled to rule the roost, meticulously concealing its neo-colonial and highly racialised overtones. Every time someone sensed an imminent threat to that order of things, it would set alarm bells ringing, as evidenced by references to comments by David Hume, Robert Bridges, and of course, George Perren. I rounded off the passage quoted earlier ( RAJAGOPALAN, 2007, p. 204) with the following remark:

The postcolonial response to such cries of alarm is contained in the words of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe:

For me there is no other choice. I have been given this language and I intend to use it [...] I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings (ACHEBE 1975, p. 103 apud LOOMBA, 1998, p. 91) (Emphasis added).

I wish to expand on Achebe’s point which I believe has, after nearly half a century since it was written, become even more relevant and irrefutable. The truth of the matter is that, thanks to colonial expansion of the Anglophone world, mainly in Asia and Africa, the English language has taken roots in each of these erstwhile colonies, where the language continues to play a significant role even after the colonial hold on them collapsed like a house of cards. Naturally, these roots sprouted new saplings, well-adapted to the local soil and local climatic conditions.

3.3 Language ecology as a way out of the stalemate

The idea that a given language’s integrity must be safeguarded at any cost and all external influences threatening it must be combatted with all efforts is fueled by and in turn feeds on the age-old conception of language as an individual organism that can be subjected to scientific scrutiny as an object prised off from its attendant circumstances – a conception of language that found its fullest expression in structuralism, in both its Saussurean version and Chomskian refurbishing. As such a way of conceptualising language started developing fissures when asked to tackle issues of language contact in cases of societal multilingualism, mass migrations, and so on, the idea of language ecology came to the rescue by coming up with a breath of fresh air. Haugen’s ( 1972) book was ground-breaking and laid the basic framework for an entirely new paradigm of research, better suited to handling the reality one witnesses on the ground. In Mühlhäusler’s ( 1996, p. 28) oft-quoted words,

The ecological metaphor in my view is action oriented. It shifts the attention from linguists being players of academic language games to becoming shop stewards for linguistic diversity, and to addressing moral, economic and other ‘non-linguistic’ issues. ( MÜHLHÄUSLER, 1996, p.28)

Mühlhäusler hit the nail on the head when he recognised in the ecological framework a call to action. In so doing, he was pleading for the need to take a stand on the issue of language diversity, for the language researcher to bring their weight to bear on the way things are, and not simply remain contented with describing and cataloguing how things were.

In what remains of this paper, I propose to hone in on the phenomenon of translanguaging which I strongly believe can be mobilised to attend to an exemplarily interventionist role.

4 Translanguaging and its potential to wreak havoc in the discourse of language purity

4.1 The inglorious demise of the monolinguistic idyll

As pointed out by Edwards ( 2004, p. 3), from the 19 ^th century onwards, the so-called “monolingual mindset” began to take hold of the political imagination of European nations which they quickly exported to nations all over the world, especially the ones under their colonial yoke. In fact, the idea of monolingualism was transformed into a hallmark of the integrity and robustness of a nation and, as Romaine put in at the very outset of her 1995 book Bilingualism, the concept of monolingualism was elevated to the status of default, and any departure from it, a clear sign of the nation’s possible future disintegration.

Diehard devotees of monolingualism and those who think half the social problems that plague a nation can be solved by the promotion of one and only one language as their only means of ideas’ exchange and thrashing out their differences, the notion of translanguaging is anathema. As Hackert ( 2012, p. 31-32) observes:

[...] the linguistic literature of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is obsessed with natives. [...] What this scenario – a few isolated occurrences of native speaker plus plenty of attestations of related terms – suggests is that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period in which people started to think differently about language. As a new term characterizing particular language users and setting them off from other groups, the native speaker provided an important way of conceptualizing and labeling a particular linguistic identity and drawing boundaries between some speakers and others. (HACKERT, 2012, p. 31-32).

The fact that the latter half of the nineteenth-century also bore witness to the beginning of the withering of Great Britain as a colonial power, with its prised colonies falling off one by one and the empire collapsing like packs of cards, simply cannot have been a matter of coincidence. The colonisers clung to the myth of the sanctity of their language and themselves as the guardians of that sanctity like a drowning man clutching at a straw.

The very mention of the word will give them the jitters! And they are quite right about their fears. Translanguaging throws a spanner into their linguistic dreamland where what Jack says is readily understood by Jill and vice versa. It is therefore likely to be looked askance at as boding ill for free and unfettered communication amongst the members of a community. Many would see it as nothing short of a huge boulder suddenly thrust into the placid waters of a lake, with all the predictable aftereffects thereof.

It turns out, though, that actual data gathered by the UNESCO give the lie to the belief in the virtues of monolingualism entertained by many, as well as the morbid fear of anything suspected of posing a danger to it. To begin with, it is no longer a closely guarded secret that multilinguals by far outnumber their monolingual counterparts. Elaborating on an observation made my Suzzane Romaine ( 1995) in the context referred to above, Auer and Wei ( 2007, p. 1) wrote in their book Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication:

Would it not make more sense to look at monolingualism as a problem that is real and consequential, but which can be ‘cured’? Isn’t the very presupposition of a handbook of applied linguistics on multilingualism prejudiced by monolingual thinking in a world which is de facto multilingual? Aren’t we turning something into a problem which is the most natural thing in the world? And isn’t the only reason for not editing a handbook on monolingualism linguists’ remarkable lack of interest in the most natural thing in the world? ( AUER; WEI, 2007, p. 1)

It seems safe to conclude that monolingualism today has not only become passé, but clearly a handicap in our globalised world where communication across what were otherwise considered insurmountable linguistic and cultural barriers up until very recently have become routine practice.

4.2 Multilingualism as the breeding ground of translanguaging

Pioneering researchers on the topic of translanguaging (e.g. GARCÍA, 2009; GARCÍA; JOHNSON; SELTZER, 2016; GARCÍA; FLORES; SPOTTI, 2021; WEI, 2014) have all highlighted the importance of multilingual environments as conducive to the emergence and flourishing of translingual practices. People unfamiliar with settings where translanguaging runs riot freely often fail to size up what exactly transpires in these environments. From a strictly monolingual perspective, multilingualism occurs when a speaker switches from one language to another on a whim and does it with ease and no further ado. Many are hard put to find a plausible explanation as to why at all anyone should take the trouble to change horses in midstream with no apparent rhyme or reason.

From the point of view of someone who translanguages routinely and is, more normally than not, unaware of the fact that they are doing it, it is a whole new ballgame. Switching from one language is often done for a reason, though, as just noted, the speakers themselves may not be making decisions consciously or deliberately at every step of the way. I will try to explain this by conjuring up a conversational sequence in, say, the campus of the University of Delhi, India, where I studied some half a century or so ago (the passage of time since then could only have made things even more complex, I should imagine!). The setting is a late afternoon in one of the many cafeterias located in the sprawling campus, where a motley crowd of students is seated around a table enjoying a snack, some in anticipation of their evening classes scheduled to begin a little later, others getting ready to call it a day, after having been around during the whole day, attending classes or spending some time in the library. The students hail from different parts of the country and they all have their different home languages that they may or may not share with the bloke seated next to them. The conversational exchange that takes place in such circumstances is constantly shifting gears, both subject-wise and in the language used to do so.

To an outsider, all this may sound like an ideal recipe for a linguistic bedlam. But believe it or not, there is invariably some method in all this madness. All small talk – and this includes initial compliments and greetings – proffered to newcomers is almost always in Hindi. It is the national language of the country and has associated with it all the aura of national pride, the feeling of being pukka deshi. The use of English would be considered totally out of place. Speaking it with even the lightest touch of what may strike the listener as British accent would meet with outright reprobation for being considered base affectation “You’re showing bhav, no?” (“Why are you showing off?” – or, to paraphrase it in a more context-sensitive fashion, “What makes you think that you can impress people with your lousy stock-phrase?”) would most likely have been the reprimand one received in my days for anyone found guilty of a breach. This is because English is just not the language of social intimacy and camaraderie.

For many Indians of my generation, English still carried the sour taste of its colonial past, though we knew that, after nearly two hundred years of history that couldn’t just be wished away, all one could do with it was grin and bear it. While Hindi (or Urdu or Punjabi – the other languages that partake in the linguistic potpourri on offer) serves its purpose in fostering the balmy mood socialising ritual, the participants in the ongoing dialogic exchange unwittingly move between languages in tune with the nature of the topic that comes up. It has been observed that English takes over the conversational flow every time the conversation threatens to slide into an argumentative mode. English does this for a simple reason: in a multilingual nation like India, it is the preferred language of instruction, especially at the tertiary level.

The random remarks rolled out in the paragraph above should give the reader a rough idea of how multilingualism in a city like Delhi may look either chaotic or, contrariwise, seamless from the outside. But, in fact, it is complex and those who engage in it often find themselves on tricky turf. The smattering of what would strike many readers as unfamiliar phraseology (words in italics such as pukka, deshi, bhav) that bedecked the imaginary scenario was deliberately chosen to impart a sense of outlandishness to anyone not privy to the specific socialization ritual. As a matter of fact, what the present writer had in mind while putting together the passage was to present a foretaste of Hinglish, a language hotchpotch that crept its way into the mainstream of India’s cultural life in and today boasts upwards of 350 million speakers in India and elsewhere in the world where there are sizeable populations of Indian emigres ( CRYSTAL, 2004, 2005).

4.3 The rise of Hinglish and how the impulse to translanguage helped shape it

Hinglish is frequently catalogued along with a growing number of mixed languages around the world over and rightly so. At first glimpse at least, it is akin to Spanglish, Fringlish, Portuñol, and so many so-called ‘mixed languages’ in that they all unceremoniously borrow, or rather plunder, to their hearts’ content, words and expressions from their source languages. Apparently (or, probably, in virtue of the absence of adequate research on this vital question) why some turns of phrase are specifically targeted for appropriation rather than others is still a mystery. But there seems to be wide consensus that this is a matter of personal waywardness, rather than anything that smacks of a rule-governed behaviour. Be that as it may, it is most probably the case that not every instance is simply or straightforwardly free-for-all, as it is often made out to be. Where the source languages in question have had a past besmirched with colonial memories, the impulse behind the mixing of the languages is markedly different. Those who engage in it do it with great pleasure and, might one add, making use of the full force of the pun, with a vengeance. It is as if they can find great delight in watching their former colonisers’ prised language writhe in pain in response to constant and relentless maulings from those upon whom it was ruthlessly imposed.

It was this long pent-up longing for self-assertion and ardent desire to pay their former colonisers back in the same coin that prepared the ground for the emergence of Hinglish and its analogues in other former colonies like Nigeria, Kenya, and so forth. In the case of Hinglish, over and above the need to adapt the originally alien tongue to local circumstances, one also notices a deliberate attempt to wrench the reins of the language in question from those who would not let go of their tight grip on them. In the first of these categories, is the headline that appeared in The Times (18/04/2022 ¹), as I was working on this paper that said, “Delhi dhobi men are all washed up by modernity”. For those readers who wonder who on earth they are talking about, the following definition extracted from Collins English dictionary ² should be of some help:

dhobi in British English

(ˈdəʊbɪ)

NOUN

Word forms: plural -bis

(in India, Malaya, East Africa, etc. – especially formerly) a washerman ( DHOBI, 2023)

If only to get the records straight, it might be instructive here to compare the case we just looked at with a headline that appeared in The Times of India in its edition on April 17, 2022 ³: “Varun Dhawn violates traffic rule, gets challan by Kanpur police after video of him riding bike without helmet goes viral.” ( DHILLON, 2022)

The expression ‘gets challan’ is sure to stump any speaker of English unfamiliar with the Indian milieu. There is, in fact, a Wikipedia entry ⁴ on ‘challan’ that says:

Challan is an official form or other kind of document, piece of paperwork, citation, etc. It is a way of crediting the money to one’s bank account through a form, generally used in India and Pakistan as a receipt for payment or delivery. ( CHALLAN, 2023)

And it goes on:

An example of a challan would be a spot traffic ticket issued by the traffic police for a violation. This challan would then have to be paid directly by cash, at an e-seva center, or by any other payment mode as specified on the challan. ( CHALLAN, 2023)

The expression ‘spot traffic ticket’ is the closest approximation a gloss can get to this glaring example of a lexeme from Indian English. This is so for the simple reason that the word is common currency only in the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent and nowhere else, as the Wikipedia rightly points out. It is, in other words, a coin minted and put into circulation in India and Pakistan, for strictly local use. Furthermore, it is language produced for local consumption, not for people who are lien to the cultural context. The best explanation for what is going on here may be found in Frantz Fanon, who had a different colonial context in mind when he wrote the words:

While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or denouncing him through ethical or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people. ( FANON, 1963, p. 212).

The terms ‘Indian English’ and ‘Hinglish’ are often used slovenly in an interchangeable manner. But a case can be made for distinguishing the two terms along the following lines: in the case of the former, it is the good old English language being reshaped and refurbished to make it better suit with local demands. In the latter, however, it is a different story. Hinglish is the outcome of a deliberate desire to translanguage, to play Old Harry with all the hype about English in its supposedly pristine and portentously priggish ‘purity’. Those who engage in the former do so out of sheer necessity or a force of habit; those who opt to revel in the latter, do it out of an impish desire to upset the applecart and, in the process, make it clear, it is they who are in total control of what they do.

But, to backtrack a little and ponder the use of ‘dhobi’ by a London-based newspaper whose primary readers are all British and most certainly not all that familiar with Indianisms, the question that still insists on lingering is: why not use the word ‘washerman’ that should do the job just as well? Here it is important to pay attention to the caveat that the dictionary entry inserts in the explanation through the use of “formerly”. The question to ask then is: why at all should the English broadsheet of the reputation of The Times think of resuscitating a disused word right in the headline of a news item? The answer is right there for everyone to see: the editors somehow deemed it fit to evoke the dormant memories of the Raj, along with rusty old customs and mores.

But this is only one side of the story. When Indians justify their own ever-increasing use of Indianisms, there is generally a touch of smugness about it – as if they were remonstrating along the line of “All right, we acknowledge it is not native to our soil. But it has been in our midst for over two hundred years and we have every right to claim it as one of our own, alongside all our languages and their dialects.” And, more to the point, “Let no one question our right to do what we want to do with it.” To the best of my knowledge, no one has succeeded in giving vent to this sentiment more forcefully and eloquently than Kushwant Singh ( 2001), a prolific writer, universally hailed as the doyen of Indian journalism. Here is what he wrote:

I am entirely in favour of making English an Indian language on our terms. Maul it, misuse it, mangle it out of shape but make it our own bhasha. The English may not recognise it as their language; they can stew in their own juice. It is not their baap ki jaidaad — ancestral property. ( SINGH, 2001)

To round off the discussion in this sub-section of the paper, let us put it this way. Hinglish (and other nonchalantly and defiantly “mongrelised” languages like it around the world) are emblematic of a deep desire to muddy the waters of all talk of purity and nibble away at one symbol of what their long-gone colonial masters held so close to their hearts. If this end gets served as a byproduct of what happens naturally to all languages – viz., adapting themselves to suit local needs and circumstances – all the better! On their website, Oxford English Dictionary ⁵ highlights five different routes to word-formation in Indian English:

There are five major types of words in Indian English that are distinct from words seen across other varieties of English: borrowings from Indian languages; novel constructions through processes of affixation and compounding; hybrid constructions which bring together English and Indian languages; loan translations or calques; and, finally, words that are used with different meanings from those one finds in other varieties. ( SAILAJA, 2022).

The more this tendency steams ahead, the more the language in question begins to display its local colouring.

4.4 Translanguaging – the last laugh of the erstwhile downtrodden at their colonial oppressors’ expense

As already noted earlier on in this paper, a speaker who opts to translanguage ‘doesn’t care two hoots’ about language purity and norms of decorum or what others may take to be the inviolable ground rules for good conversational conduct. Rather, they do so with a galumphing sense of abandon, ‘getting a kick out of’ their rule-breaking spree. But we run the risk of getting it all hopelessly wrong if we confine all our attention to the happy-go-lucky side of translanguaging and the sense of euphoria it may give rise to the idea of no longer being under the vigilant eye of self-styled linguistic watchdogs. There is a lot more to translanguaging than the simple pleasure its practitioners derive from upsetting the applecart of rules and regulations laid down by someone else to satisfy their personal whims.

Side by side with the sense of liberation from oppressive rules and regulations that only held them back when it came to freely expressing their thoughts and feelings, there is also the sense of ‘calling the shots’ for a change. Translanguagers are in full control of the flow of thoughts. And a chance for the presence of a third party in the conversational exchange is simply shunned or brushed aside, for being considered not belonging to the ‘in-group’ or an unwelcome outsider. This is neither fortuitous nor one-off. As a matter of fact, an entire psychology is brought into play on conversational gambits like this. It is as if the person who insists on translanguaging in the presence of the outsider were reminding them that they do not form part of the group and if they are allowed to be there at all, it is out of a charitable gesture and for no reason of obligation, whether legal or moral. All this might sound a bit offbeat to persons unfamiliar with the sour taste that the colonial experience leaves in the mouths of especially the colonised peoples and takes an inordinately long time to disappear, although, it is probably true, many on the other side of the colonial divide do, in retrospect, come one day to rue the day they embarked on the adventure.

In other words, in most postcolonial contexts, translanguaging is a whole new story. For those who blithely opt to translanguage, there is the inevitable air of settling old scores – only that it is done this time around by wrenching the role of the ones who call the shots: a role they zealously safeguarded and over which they claimed exclusive monopoly. They are proclaiming loud and clear who will run the show from now on. They do this by ‘cocking a snook at’ the ones who had, up until then, taken things for granted – by invoking birthright, bloodline or whatever.

This is precisely where one begins to get a sense of what should be appropriately referred to as the ‘politics of language’. By engaging in translanguaging, those who enthusiastically do so are not just revelling in their newly found linguistic laissez-faire, they are also making an important political point. And the political point they so adroitly convey and proclaim to one and all is that it is they who are in full control of their linguistic destiny and that, in relation to the language that is the bone of contention, they are all too glad, following the advice of Khushwant Singh cited above, to “maul it, misuse it, mangle it out of shape but make it our own bhasha” . If those who claim exclusive ownership of the language in question have a hard time figuring out what is being said when people ‘translanguage away’ to their heart’s content, then all the better. In a way then, habitual translanguagers are implicitly taunting these self-styled guardians of a language’s integrity. And to be sure, they thoroughly enjoy this guerilla warfare and the forays they systematically make into the territory, making irritating dents to armoury of the adversary.

4.5 Translanguaging practices as an effective trope in postcolonial literary writing

The potential of translanguaging to poke fun at the coloniser’s language and the way it was unceremoniously shoved down the gullet of the colonised peoples is fully exploited by postcolonial literary writers. In this sub-section of the paper, I shall briefly illustrate this with the aid of a few examples I have discussed elsewhere ( RAJAGOPALAN, 2009, 2017). But before I do it, it is perhaps important to show what Salman Rushdie ( 1992) had to say apropos of this issue in his book Imaginary Homelands. Here is Rushdie in his own words:

One of the changes [that make Anglophone writers of Indian descent stand out from the rest] has to do with attitudes to the use of English. Many have referred to the argument about the appropriateness of the use of this language to Indian themes. And I hope all of us share the opinion that we simply cannot use the language the way the British did; that it needs remaking for our own purposes. Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, or perhaps we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free. ( RUSHIDIE, 1992, p. 17).

Incidentally, it is noteworthy that the last sentence in the quote above smacks of cannibalising the conquerors’ language in what may seem a phantasmagoric ritual of ablution – which is precisely what many, who share a partially common life-history with Rushdie, in fact feel. The fact that it reminds one of the famous outburst of battle cry of 1922 that reverberated through Brazilian cultural/intellectual circles exactly a century ago, at once brings out its universal appeal and also the fact that, when all is said and done, the phenomenon may not be unique to Indian citizens and expatriates of what Rushdie himself would call the ‘midnight children’s generation’!

In Arundhati Roy’s Booker prize-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997), there is a passage that clearly brings out the tensions that the British colonial rule left in India, after full independence was granted to the country. Families found themselves divided on several crucial issues, not the least important of which was the one as to what to do with the language that the British left behind them. The fault lines were exposed every now and then between children who had no idea what it was like to live under foreign rule and the older ones who had carved out a niche for themselves under those harsh conditions and were somehow better off than the vast majority of their fellow countrymen. Here’s a passage that captures with exemplary vividness the distance that still needed to be traversed as well as the precarious ‘détente’ that often got cobbled up:

Ammu said that Pappachi was incurable British-CCP, which was short for chhi-chhi poach and in Hindi meant shit-wiper. Chacko said the correct word for people like Papachi was Anglophile. He made Rahel and Esther look up Anglophile in the Reader’s Digest great Encyclopoedic Dictionary. It said Person well-disposed to the English. Then Esther and Rahel had to look up dispose.

It said

(1) Place suitably in particular order

(2) Bring mind into a certain state

(3) Do what will with, get off one’s bands, stow away, demolish, re-settle, consume (food), kill, sell

Chacko said that in Papppachi’s case it meant (2) Bring mind into certain state. Which, Chacko said, meant that Pappachi’s mind had been brought into a certain state which made him like the English ( ROY, 1997, p. 25).

Rahel and Esther, post-independence Indians, are seen slowly perfecting an English language of their own, more in tune with the changing times and changing loyalties. ‘Shit-wiper’ may be the sort of English that makes sense to the English themselves, but Rahel and Esther, young and linguistically thoroughly immature as they are, can feel in their guts that the word doesn’t do full justice to the punch that the expletive is designed to pack, nor the sense of derision it is required to carry. In other words, they have no substitute for ‘ chhi-chhi poach’. If that word belongs to Hindi, then, so be it. Who is to tell them that they had to find an equivalent in ’unadulterated’ English, and if the word-for-word translation equivalent of Anglo-Saxon lineage turns out to be improper for polite companies, they had better look for a more decent and passable euphemism?

The tensions between the two generations, between two world-views, is once again broached with great perspicacity in the following passage:

Chacko said that going to see The Sound of Music was an extended exercise in Anglophilia.

Ammu said, “Oh, come on, the whole world goes to see The sound of Music. It is a World Hit.”

“Nevertheless, my dear,” Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice, “Never. The. Less”

Mammachi said that Chacko was easily one of the cleverest men in India.

“According to whom?” Ammu would say. “On what basis?” Mammachi loved to tell the story (Chacko’s story) of how one of the Dons at Oxford had said in his opinion Chacko was brilliant, and made prime ministerial material.

To this Ammu always said “Ha! Ha! Ha! Like people in the comics” ( ROY, 1997, p. 27).

Amidst all the banter and lightheartedness, a careful reader is also able to detect clear signs of tensions brewing between two mindsets on a collision course – between, on the one side, that miniscule subset of the colonised population who are best described as downright quislings, but who take refuge under more palatable characterisations like ‘Anglophile’ and, as noted earlier, their offspring, born in a free nation, no longer under weight of the sour memories of a colonial past. Translanguaging comes to those in this latter group spontaneously, and they relish taking a jab or two occasionally at those with whom they have hardly any first-hand contact, but still know of as self-styled taskmasters who once used to have their way in dictating to their forebears how they should go about speaking their language. And, to be sure, they do so with a vengeance!

5 Wrapping up

Translanguaging is a multi-faceted phenomenon. At first glimpse, it may be no more than a linguistic free-for-all – insofar as it helps its practitioners break free of oppressive norms and conventions that have stood in the way of smooth and unimpeded expression of thoughts and feelings, it must be hailed as a welcome trend if for no other reason. But then, as we scratch the surface, we begin to discover that there is a lot more to translanguaging than what meets the eye. There is enormous amount of jocosity, of playfulness associated with it. Those who translanguage do it for a reason. They do it to declare to one and all that it is they who hold the reins in the conversational arena. Whereas a number of researchers have drawn attention to this sense of wild abandon as a prise that comes along with translanguaging, not many have paid sufficient attention to the political underpinnings of translanguaging. In light of our discussion in the foregoing paragraphs, there may be an urgent need to foreground what we may designate the ‘politics of translanguaging’ as a topic worth further exploration.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the CNPq for funding my research through grant no. 300991/2019-3.

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• ¹
  Available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/from-our-correspondent-why-indias-dhobi-men-are-all-washed-up-3tl2nhrx5.
• ²
  Available at: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/dhobi.
• ³
  Available at: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/kanpur-traffic-police-issues-challan-for-varun-dhawan-post-videos-of-him-riding-bike-without-helmet-goes-viral/articleshow/90883905.cms.
• ⁴
  Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challan.
• ⁵
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• I am grateful to the CNPq for funding my research through grant no. 300991/2019-3.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 Oct 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  16 May 2022
• Accepted
  13 Jan 2023