So, I am reflecting on language. This is prompted by the rash of Spotify shares that everyone is doing on Insta stories. Essentially, Spotify is updating everyone with metrics on the top artistes and songs they spent the most time on through the year. I don’t use Spotify, so I did my own stock taking of what I had listened to. But, that apart, a friend’s Spotify list is what prompted this reflection. She had a list of artistes and songs I had never heard of – they were all foreign singers and English songs and for a brief moment I went back to my teens when the pressure to be cool and fit in necessarily meant being up to date with English pop music. In high school, this pressure was mostly over Mysterious Girl and that song caused me a lot of grief one summer because I was on the periphery of this group of girls from St Mary’s and they were such snobs about this music.
It took me many years to become comfortable and own the music that I liked – which was mostly Hindi film music/South Asian music. I owe a lot to academic scholarship on Hindi cinema that allowed me to see that aesthetics that were dismissive of non-English art were oppressive hierarchies in their own way. While teenhood is rarely smooth for anyone, that I would feel shy about owning my tastes in public even in early adulthood was a little problematic because I was not fully aware about the politics of culture and more so popular culture. Reading scholarship helped me not only understand this, but also see how tremendous an art form the average Hindi film song is and why it is celebrated and continues to this day.
How deeply remembered this sense of uncoolness is, was bought home to me when I felt momentarily judged as I wondered what this friend must think of the kind of music I share on Instagram. I quickly took a screenshot of her list and have been exploring the songs she listened to and didn’t really take to any of them. For one, I did not understand anything they were singing. This is also the problem I face with Tamil film music, where I have to labor and work to understand the lyrics and their meanings. I know that the more I do it, the easier it will become, but given that I am working and writing while listening, I cannot break focus to chase down the meanings of words and songs and so my Tamil music listening suffers. Which is not the case with Marathi songs even because while I don’t understand every word in Marathi, I understand it more and it also has shared similarities with Hindi and words from Persian that find place in Urdu and Marathi.
Now all of my preferences for songs and their language soundscapes is interesting because when it comes to reading, all my reading is in English. I wouldn’t read in Hindi or Marathi. I tried reading Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s Rashmi Rathi that narrates Mahabharatha from the point of view of Karna and is considered a canonical classic in Hindi literature and made poor progress on it. So, English is the language I am most comfortable reading in even when it is about things closest to my heart about Indian and South Asian subjects. The same applies to writing. I will never be able to write with even half the eloquence in Hindi no matter how much Hindi based media I consume. My personal expression will always be best rendered in English.
However, when it comes to hearing, I prefer native languages. It is the language of my heart and soul. What I feel best captures my sense of being. Now to express that sense of being, the language that I personally can do best in is English. It is a quite tripolar, this sense of consumption and expression with linguistic differences in hearing, reading, and writing. What works well in one language does not work very well in the same language for other purposes. I do listen to the occasional English pop culture song and have a particular liking for country music because I enjoy the instruments they use there. But, my very edgy friend who is uber cool and does uber cool things momentarily took me back with the feeling of English music = cool and the rest is uncool.
Anyway, I pulled back from this sense of uncoolness and feeling judged although nobody made me feel uncool or judged me. It is just a deeply ingrained memory from childhood and also general colonial hangover well that translates into different ways in post colonial cultural consumption.
I have taken off on a old Hindi film songs trip this morning. The lines playing as I wrote this:
In zulfon main gundhenge hum phool mohabbat ke Zulfon ko jhatak kar ham ye phool gira de to Lyrics: Sahir Ludhianvi Music: S.D. Burman Singers: Geeta Dutt and Mohammed Rafi