Loving my language

by POOJA GURUNG

FROM ISSUE # 151 (July 2008) | IN THIS ISSUE
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I recently visited my school Brihaspati Vidya Sadan for their annual fete with four of my batch mates. As nostalgia knocked on our classrooms which were now turned into murky storage facilities we couldn't help churning out anecdotes about assembly lines, teachers, mischief and the size of handkerchiefs. On one of the new erected buildings we saw a placard that said "Please speak in English because everybody can speak Nepali".

My friend Bhumi Ghimire, visiting Nepal after five years in Paris, shrieked in disagreement. "It is this kind of attitude that makes us undermine our own mother tongue," she said stomping her foot. She's been very contagious to the French Connection that stubbornly uses its mother tongue and refuses to blend with any global language; it's been an effective way to secure cultural heritage. I remember Bhumi and I, struggling to get good grades in Nepali; we took tuitions, read notes and practiced writing swift essays and letters. On several occasions we even wrote letters to each other in Nepali even though we were three benches away. I still treasure those scribbled notes.

Back then we were traumatised by our Nepali teachers' bland methods to drill the syllabus into our heads. I vividly remember a tight slap across my face when I failed to mug up a poem. These incidents have scarred me for life and even today I feel a tingling below my ear lobe everytime I stutter Nepali verses. Speaking Nepali as a mother tongue and learning it as a language are two different things. There are specific grammatical rules that must be imbibed in order to write a sentence whereas conversing in loose Nepali parlance gives us convenient eloquence. Our mother tongue is forked to suit the senses of sound, sight and smell like no other language. Years after passing out of school, I am only just discovering the delicious dialect of Nepali and its cousin languages. True, everybody can speak in Nepali but the good news is that everybody can speak in broken English and at this juncture of time we can not afford to break or even put a chink into our mother tongue.

Reading the visionary works of literary giants like Laxmi Prasad Devkota, Bhupi Serchan, Shankar Lamichhane, Saru Bhakta, Bijay Malla and Parijat, I bubble up with joy. There is something uniquely special about that generation of writers, they were open to the art and articulation of the English language yet wrote effortlessly in Nepali. Even decades after their death, the essence of their work hasn't lost a decimal. These individuals brewed ideas and stories together, not only did they write together but they brainstormed and even got drunk, staggering the streets of Ason, screaming blasphemies and poetry in the same breath. I ache for the same kind of camaraderie with the new lot of contemporary writers who love the pattern and design of our language without any farce or embarrassment. I want to write and wreath with words that sound like birds chirping or wind chimes. I want to discover the taste buds of my mother tongue, not to prove anything to the English speaking world outside, but I merely want to learn it like I am befriending my mother.

(Pooja Gurung is an actor, a television personality and a music video director)