My Indian Babel Multilingualism and Memory

As a five-year-old living in Madras (now Chennai) in the early eighties, I was told that the tongue, which we spoke at home and called Tamil, wasn't going to be intelligible to the world outside, which also spoke … Tamil! Because what we spoke was called Tamil, but used way too many Malayalam words for it to be intelligible to the average Tamilian. So, I was the Tamilian who actually wasn't! There were historical reasons for this peculiar linguistic situation. And there were issues at growing up speaking this tongue. I eventually moved on to learning Kannada (when we moved to Bangalore when I was seven), Hindi and convent-school English. On the streets of Bangalore's Muslim-dominated Shivajinagar where I lived till the age of 16, I also heard Dakhani. When I moved to Delhi as a young man, the Hindi of my textbook had to be put to use in the streets. Later when I spent a decade in Punjab, I added Punjabi to my repertoire. I associate each of these tongues with times in my life. They constitute an important component of the memories in my head. I relate to these languages accordingly. This paper seeks to articulate that relationship. How does language connect to our personal memories? What does this mean? What does it evoke? I will seek to mine my own personal memories to elucidate upon this and draw upon language histories, memoirs and biographies and autobiographies to paint what I hope will be a picture of the deep-rooted connection of memory and language.