Essay: Our multilingual home – Hindustan Times

In India our homes are made of the many languages we inhabit. They define how we see the world. My own living room is made of two interconnected halls, Hindi-Urdu. Each painted over in the varying shades of Nagari and Nastaliq, but really speaking the same language to me. Here, I live and love.

My study is made using the bricks of English. Since Macaulay’s Minute, it became the Indian go-to building block for most material success. And yet all of us reshape it in our own image. We revert to each other, yaar, our original or reinvented types, mucha. I write ghazals in English. Giving English the lilt of Urdu and Persian meters.

Persian and Sanskrit are two more rooms in my house. They are mostly locked up, used as kotharis. They house my mythic, cultural, and thought archives. I go to either as per need. Not long ago, I went to the Persian storehouse and recuperated Mirza Ghalib’s Persian masnavi, Chiragh-e-Dair, on the holy city of Banaras, that I brought into my English study, and then sent into the world as Temple Lamp (2022). I hope Ghalib is lighting the way anew for many, by the Ganga or wherever they be.

Chhata Daya as The Sixth River was my previous translation from the Urdu of the Punjabi writer, Fikr Taunsvi, born Ram Lal Bhatia. It is a tale of the Partition of his beloved Punjab, his watan. My father was Punjabi too. And has left me an antechamber made of tappe, kaafi and great bonhomie. I have been unable to paint it in Gurmukhi, but I can understand the make-up of this room well, and explore it deeply, albeit rarely, in Nastaliq. Paash’s grass grows next to it, for of course, it will grow everywhere.

My mother has her prayer chamber built in Arabic. She enjoys the living room better, her mother tongue is Urdu after all, but her piety affected us all this Ramzan. It reminds us, that “Hindi”, “Munshi” of Premchand fame all come to us from Arabic.

Different labourers, friends, and visitors have also infused my home with the fragrance of Bangla. And I can appreciate its perfume. My nursery which still stands somewhere, and has been reused by my nephew, is Gujarati, after my school in Delhi, Sardar Patel Vidyalaya.

I also invested in a basic Spanish bike at one point that stays parked here. It’s wearing down without much attention and use, although I install it with a few stray German spare parts from Stuttgart where I am presently based on a fellowship in writing. But in our Indian home we have this long tradition of international linguistic tech bolstering our language scaffoldings. So it is not just English, Persian, Arabic, but also Portuguese with its delicious susegad, batata, pao, and the camiso we all wear, to take to all our rooms, the câmaras. Tippoo’s Tiger was gifted to him by the French!

And I am certainly not unique. Others have homes with open windows too, where the cool breezes of Khasi, Assamese, Bangla, English, Hindi, Persian, and Sanskrit freely flow upon our Indian summers. Or others still whose music is attuned to a Rahman singing Sufi and Bhakti in Tamil, Malayalam, Tullu, Kannada, Telugu, English or Hindi.

So, when narrow nationalism asks for you to choose only one room and to trap and imprison yourself in it, tell it you are rich beyond its poor conceptions. Invite it into your mansion of tongues and let it feast at your banquet.

Maaz is a poet and translator from Urdu, Hindi and Persian into English and is a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany

The views expressed are personal

In 2019, I published my collection of poems Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu. I was very clear that just as Delhi and Belfast were cities I had lived in, perhaps even more significantly I lived in multiple languages and cultures. English and Urdu being two primary ones for me. Wherever we go, we carry our cultures with us, and inhabit them. And so I wrote poems such as Biryani in Belfast on my culinary experiments with food and comparative politics in that troubled city. And this hybridity is what makes our lives worth living.

In India our homes are made of the many languages we inhabit. They define how we see the world. My own living room is made of two interconnected halls, Hindi-Urdu. Each painted over in the varying shades of Nagari and Nastaliq, but really speaking the same language to me. Here, I live and love.

My study is made using the bricks of English. Since Macaulay’s Minute, it became the Indian go-to building block for most material success. And yet all of us reshape it in our own image. We revert to each other, yaar, our original or reinvented types, mucha. I write ghazals in English. Giving English the lilt of Urdu and Persian meters.

Persian and Sanskrit are two more rooms in my house. They are mostly locked up, used as kotharis. They house my mythic, cultural, and thought archives. I go to either as per need. Not long ago, I went to the Persian storehouse and recuperated Mirza Ghalib’s Persian masnavi, Chiragh-e-Dair, on the holy city of Banaras, that I brought into my English study, and then sent into the world as Temple Lamp (2022). I hope Ghalib is lighting the way anew for many, by the Ganga or wherever they be.

Chhata Daya as The Sixth River was my previous translation from the Urdu of the Punjabi writer, Fikr Taunsvi, born Ram Lal Bhatia. It is a tale of the Partition of his beloved Punjab, his watan. My father was Punjabi too. And has left me an antechamber made of tappe, kaafi and great bonhomie. I have been unable to paint it in Gurmukhi, but I can understand the make-up of this room well, and explore it deeply, albeit rarely, in Nastaliq. Paash’s grass grows next to it, for of course, it will grow everywhere.

My mother has her prayer chamber built in Arabic. She enjoys the living room better, her mother tongue is Urdu after all, but her piety affected us all this Ramzan. It reminds us, that “Hindi”, “Munshi” of Premchand fame all come to us from Arabic.

Different labourers, friends, and visitors have also infused my home with the fragrance of Bangla. And I can appreciate its perfume. My nursery which still stands somewhere, and has been reused by my nephew, is Gujarati, after my school in Delhi, Sardar Patel Vidyalaya.

I also invested in a basic Spanish bike at one point that stays parked here. It’s wearing down without much attention and use, although I install it with a few stray German spare parts from Stuttgart where I am presently based on a fellowship in writing. But in our Indian home we have this long tradition of international linguistic tech bolstering our language scaffoldings. So it is not just English, Persian, Arabic, but also Portuguese with its delicious susegad, batata, pao, and the camiso we all wear, to take to all our rooms, the câmaras. Tippoo’s Tiger was gifted to him by the French!

And I am certainly not unique. Others have homes with open windows too, where the cool breezes of Khasi, Assamese, Bangla, English, Hindi, Persian, and Sanskrit freely flow upon our Indian summers. Or others still whose music is attuned to a Rahman singing Sufi and Bhakti in Tamil, Malayalam, Tullu, Kannada, Telugu, English or Hindi.

So, when narrow nationalism asks for you to choose only one room and to trap and imprison yourself in it, tell it you are rich beyond its poor conceptions. Invite it into your mansion of tongues and let it feast at your banquet.

Maaz is a poet and translator from Urdu, Hindi and Persian into English and is a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany

The views expressed are personal