It’s been an adjustment, to experience this website’s growth and witness our readership change. People leave, others join, many lurk. While I miss some of our now-absent personalities who were prolific with their pondering (Punjabi Boy, Jai Singh, DesiDancer and Espressa come to mind), I’m thrilled about our new commenters, who are expanding our discussion and bringing their unique points of view to our cacophonous, rowdy, online adda. I’m especially looking at our first-gen contributors, like Runa and Malathi, because for stories like the one I’m trying to blog, I think their perspective is invaluable, for helping us find nuance and context. What I’m trying to say is, HELP.
Al Mujahid for Debauchery left this on our news tab:
Unbelievable. Pakistani actor Moin Akhtar (a muhajir/Indian origin himself) plays Hyderabadis from India in blackface in this ‘comedy’ show.
Wait, WHAT? And here is where the DBDs come in, because I don’t understand the clip below or know who these actors are, and as I’ve stated before, I like to get as much information as possible before I get my outrage on– and believe me, I could rage about actors in blackface.
What on earth is going on? And would someone who watches desi tv please tell me that this an uncommon practice? I fast forwarded through the clip, but I don’t get the greasy, huge-black-glasses-equipped, buck-toothed character, and by “don’t get”, I mean my spider sense is tingling. What, if anything, do all of you know?
“moisture evaporator language.”
That’s true. I was thinking of Bocce (or Bacce) but owen was looking for moisture evap language too. Ok, that is all.
god, im a dork…
Most of these ‘successful’ nations you have in mind, have reached this success through less than stellar means: genocide, slavery, and colonization. Having a unified language comes up, say a distant 7th place
Personally, I like having a regional identity. I don’t see why embracing diversity is often put aside as Balkanization. Why can’t I speak Punjabi, love bhangra, appreciate BN, read Tagore, and listen to classical Carnatic music? And, as the offspring of family from a “divided state,” oftentimes being “Indian” does not sum up our experience adequately.
I think it’s disingenuous to pretend that English fluency among African Americans and Native Americans is not somehow tied to the imperialist and genocidal policies of the U.S. government and its settler population. If that is how India wants to go about forcing “Hindi” on the rest of the population, then no wonder there is resistance. The fact of the matter is that India has a different formative history. In my opinion, it is more like Europe (if Europe were a single country) than it is like the U.S. Similarly, I don’t think we should be taking our “nation-building” cues from the U.S.’s exploits in the 1500-1800s (+ Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the 1900s). I think it’s possible to balance regional identity with a national civic identity. Isn’t that what we theoretically strive for, at any rate? I understand the call for a language that can be commonly spoken, but perhaps Hindi is not that language.
Sarah, With all due respect, if we count that way, India probably has more than a 1000. The 18 langugages referred above are languages with script and literary tradition that goes back about a millenium if not more.
India is like Europe, where every small country has their language. French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese etc. This is EXACTLY like Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil languages spoken in areas of India that are equivalent to their European counterparts. They are comparable in geographic area as well as population.
Another thing to chew on, on the eve of India’s 60th birthday, that sqare mile area of India is bigger than all countries of Western Europe. Need I say anything about population 🙂 It is a historical anomaly that India is one nation. (Infact its more to the political vision of its founders that is unique, anywhere in the world)
Shodhan # 434
Does that mean you do not like being called a Western Ghat?
🙂
Absolutely – even when I was in undergrad there was a lot of interest in Marathi theater with Pune hosting 2 or 3 big inter collegiate theater competitions that I used to attend….
esperanto.
I just wanted to gloat over the fact that I am not the only one who conceptualizes India as I would a “United States of Europe” 🙂
Puli, I think it might be moisture evaporation language.
😉
grls that know starwars…ive only met one of those…
440 milli
it’s irritating that they take our common indian-ness as an invitation to converse with me (usually asking all sorts of inappropriate personal questions), but by wildly attempting to coax hindi out of me, they are implicitly communicating that indian = hindi-speaking.
–> Well put.
I am bad at languages(I have made my peace with tamil after generally murdering it while growing up. Hindi is purely a survival tool for me. I dont feel as comfortable with it but I treat it at arm’s length which is a far cry from my book burning days) so I have had to keep my language learning at a minimum.
This matter might have been addressed earlier on this site but does the name milli stand for measure of alcohol or something else ?
Have not read all the comments so I am not sure how the tamil-anti-hindi thing started…but my family is definitely not anti-hindi. We are tam brams who have been living in Bombay for two and a half generations. My cousins know bambaiyya hindi and marathi better than tamil. Hell, as a little kid I didn’t know that my particular brand of tamil actually mixed in a lot of hindi words, I thought that was the way everyone spoke. It wasn’t until later I found out that there are parts of TN where they don’t.
Milli/Camille, I kind of went through the same thing. I would say my parents still (or at least my dad) have an affinity for mumbaikars, especially southies from there. It’s wierd but just scanning some of the comments I wonder what my tamilian parents went through going to hindi/english schools in the city back in the day. i wonder if they were ridiculed for the typical ‘madraasi’ stereotypes. But I have to say I have heard random comments made by them about their friends who actually grew up in madras…although most of them are made in complete jest, after all that is where we come from originally.
This matter might have been addressed earlier on this site but does the name milli stand for measure of alcohol or something else ?
oh … well, the very first time i commented on this site, i had no intention of ever being a regular commenter or anything (nor did i understand that once i picked a handle, i’d pretty much have to stick with it). i was watching VH1 at the time, and they were playing a documentary about milli vanilli. soooo … the rest is history! i have been dreaming up a “milli fka ____” eventually transitiong to “_____” for awhile, but i just don’t know how to fill in the blank yet. 🙂
simple. And when a half-white commenter responds with an “ouch”, it’s time to step in. I am not trying to have a fight with you or take your words out of context, nor am I accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to make sure that this conversation can continue, the way it should– in a civil fashion.
SM Intern: Okay. But I wasn’t hating on half-whites. I was suggesting that some of the caste-pure would have that reaction to an intermarriage. And honestly, amongst the orthodox, a half-white would most clearly not be accepted as a Brahmin – as varna and jati are both based on birth. Anyone who suggests otherwise is lying. Some of the comments here, about starting “pan-brown” and moving to caste particularism, feeling “uncomfortable” of associating with others not one’s own (jati) –is casteism in action, imo. There is a dark side to the “wee to be Jat/Iyengar me.”
I think you also got mad about me using the word “authentic,” but I clearly stated amongst Hindus South Indian expressions of Hinduism are considered more authentic to many Northerners. I didn’t state non-Hindu Indians are inauthentic. Re, epithets: many Southerners do call North Indian Hindus, particularly Punjabis, “half-Muslims,” and unfortunately, it is meant as an insult.
quoting myself: my “issue” with hindi is the assumption made on the part of strangers that i speak hindi.
and just in case it wasn’t clear, i have never once been approached by anyone but hindi speakers in this manner. never has someone tried to figuratively beat telegu, bengali, or any other language out of me. what gives?
It’s this attitude:
and she asked, “Do you know Hindi?” I said no, then she said, “If you study here, you should take Hindi, you can’t really know anything about India without Hindi”
also, i think north indians are highly represented in the US. I didnt see very many south indians around growing up.
PindaUSA: but are those n. indians hindi speakers? or are they hindi speakers to the point where they give it primacy in their linguistic catalog?
i think most north indian groups in the US speak hindi, so that people can speak to the other brown people around. therefore, people assume that brown = hindi speaker.
speaking of northern imports in the south indian film industry, someone forgot the hugely popular(pun intended) starlet of Vijaykanth and Sarathkumar movies ‘Namitha‘….
I know tons. Where did you grow up? There are enough Telugus alone around here (NY Tri-state area) for people to actually pay attention to caste and district distinctions, e.g. Telugus from Telangana have a separate unofficial group with their own activities, etc. Ridiculous, no? And there are enough Telugus in North America for there to have been about 15,000 people at a recent convention for Telugu people in D.C. That’s probably not even 25% of the Telugu population in North America.
But I think the reason it seems like there are fewer south indians is because the community doesn’t have as strong a sense of identity because they tend not live in ethnic enclaves like Jackson Heights or Richmond Hill (and also because of aforementioned dumbass ABDs who don’t know shit about their own history, and so south indian stuff just doesn’t come across as fun/cool to them, which it really isn’t, BUT only the hyper-type fun/cool stuff doesn’t make up an entire culture)–it’s the desi-American and Asian-American settlement pattern on a smaller scale. There are areas where there are tons and tons of all types of Indians spread out (Edison; Nassau County), and it is possible to have communities, but often they are not along the lines of what you will find in ethnic enclaves dominated by African-Americans or Latin American / West Indian immigrants.
upstate ny. was considered upstate when i was growing up (high shcool in the mid-late 90’s). now kind of a far out nyc suburb. there were only a few desi families when i was growing up. now there are hordes of desis.
Oh, that’s not to dispute that immigrants from northern India simply make up a larger percentage of desi immigrants in the U.S. (and no doubt the UK) though. But the rest of us definitely do exist.
Smaller cities just have an indian association. When numbers grow, they form tamil sangams, gujju associations, telugu asso etc… As number keep increasing you have telangana asso, tam bram asso etc…. It’s just that smaller groups are easier to keep in touch with!
I just say asi es la vida in my Marathi accent 😛
I also like the fact that it has moved well beyond uppity Pune/Mumbai circles to explore diverse subjects and linguistic rhythms. For instance, Dr. Narendra Jadhav’s illiterate father’s narrative (Untouchables) is entirely in regional dialect (Nasik).
I’m aware of that, but the question was how other nation/states have negotiated having multilingual populations.
What’s with all the Mexico-hating on these boards lately? Again, just wanted to throw out the question of how the first and second most linguistically diverse countries in the world differ on their handling on linguistic politics. Yeesh.
Amen.
yeah, we rock. 🙂
Me too, problem was, she was a big fan of the crying game also.
is that a euphamism for her being a dude, or was it a grl that liked the movie “the crying game”?
add Waheeda Rehman to that list. She is known for both acting and looks.
A little of both.
By the way nala, I agree with this. Most Indians in the US hail from the north, but not all. I wonder what the educational/degree breakdown is however.
It’s
telUgu, not telEgu telUgu, not telEgu telUgu, not telEgu telUgu, not telEgu telUgu, not telEgu telUgu, not telEgu telUgu, not telEgu
is that a euphamism for her being a dude, or was it a grl that liked the movie “the crying game”? A little of both.
Must have been an interesting experience HMF.
What I meant simply was, if you ask an average person in Delhi/Mumbai/Bangalore/ (insert any other Indian city) what country would they like India to become, the answer would be one of the developed countries (US/Australia/Japan/… ). Not Mexico.
As a DBD in desh, the only thing I knew about Mexico was the “Mexican wave”.
my plan ot sell mexican fast food to desis hits a snag…
And you conveniently skirt around the fact that these countries achieved their ‘developed’ status out of the colonization, enslavement, and murder of lots of other human beings.
Hell, let’s go one step further. My college had an Asian association. The Asian association was supposedly inclusive of all people whose origin lay in the entire continent of Asia. But it didn’t prove to be very practical to come up with common interests. Any common interests the two groups(Indians and the other Asians such as Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) had could be indulged in the regular student associations.
read an interesting book on the subject called “Creating Modern Capitalism”. I think the claim that “thats how these countries achieved their ‘developed’ status. is a bit far reaching. Yes, these countries did horrible things, but horrible things dont lead to development. The process of development just doesnt stop you from doing horrible things. Yes there were benefits to these horrible things, but the US isnt developed because we had slavery. A lot of places had slavery that are still backwards. The cause of development were many fold.
causes
Reminds me of the college professor who discovered a theorem so general that it could not be applied to anything.
A developed India will be more like what European Union wants to be in the future, single currency, single defence force, single political entity with multiple and flourishing cultures / languages / food habits etc.. etc..
India should be compared with Europe and not a mono ethnic / mono lingual state.
I had to go back and check my post. Phew. I didn’t make that mistake. 😉
Is that yet another euphemism? 😉
Does it matter when one is transliterating from a language that does not use a Roman alphabet?
471 · Puliogre in da USA upstate ny. was considered upstate when i was growing up (high shcool in the mid-late 90’s). now kind of a far out nyc suburb. there were only a few desi families when i was growing up. now there are hordes of desis.
Poughkeepsie!
I actually hope not! Judging by the attitudes of Europe towards Turkey and to a lesser extent towards Slavic countries, it sometimes seems to me like the EU is trying to be some sort of exclusivist club. I do agree with your larger point that India should not be compared with homogeneous countries.
we have a winner….
Correction: should read “the attitudes of the EU towards Turkey”.
u from up there?
the rich have always looked down on the poor…thats nothing new.
milli, I like your sense of humor there. Made me laugh! 🙂
Phonemes are independent of the script used by the source language.