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Muddied Language

Over the years, I have often questioned what it is to be Bengali and Indian when the colonial debris is removed from those concepts. It seems quite an impossible task as all the history of my family that I am aware of spans a period of time when we were a colonized people. Whatever it meant to be Bengali and Indian was already distorted by that overbearing influence. From that time on, its layer upon layer of foreign ideas grafted upon the core of what might have been my people's actual identity. Reading these lines from Asif Manan Ahmed's The Loss of Hindustan gives words to what I had been struggling to express for the longest time: 

Colonization refuses the colonized access to their own past. By imposing a colonial language, it retards the capacity of indigenous languages to represent reality. It claims that the languages of the colonized lack “technical” or “scientific” vocabulary. It removes the archives, renders history as lack, blurs faces and names.14 Thus, the colonized face a diminished capacity to represent their past in categories other than those given to them in a European language, or provided to them in an imperial archive.

I grew up in a household where the rules of intermingling languages was very strict. If I started in English I had to complete in English and the same for Bengali. At no point was I allowed to switch. Both my parents agreed that switching languages within the same conversation would make me illiterate in both. I had no choice but to comply but some adaptations came about. If there was point I needed to argue and win with them on "data" and "merits" I used English. If the matter was more relaxed, mundane, fun or funny I would use Bengali. Reading what Ahmed has to say about the impact to the language of the colonized by colonialists imposing their language as the one possessed of scientific and technical vocabulary, the way I made my language choices at home starts to make more sense - I had never viewed the issue in such light.

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