In one of my recent sleepless nights, I couldn’t give rest to a thought. It has happened to me a lot of times that at my workplace people casually joked about me not picking up their mother language. The thought wasn’t so ridiculous, I had been working in Odisha for the last 2.5 years, technically I should have picked up the language. By now I should be conversing with people, but all I could manage to learn by now was some phrases. I could understand conversations between people in Odia, but I couldn’t make up a single line in the language. When I started here it was just a general suggestion to me to start learning the language, to which I did give in. I bought a book online to read, asked my fellow co-workers to teach me but nothing worked out in the long term. I always wondered how better I would be at my job if I had just learned Odia, but I just didn’t or couldn’t.

I wanted to come up with a solid reason to counter such questions and jokes. I wish I had a solid reason but then I started to ponder last night on why has it been such a difficult experience for me and I think I did found one. To people who know me and who would read my blog they are going to come up to me and they are gonna shout at me that not everything is suppressed childhood trauma. I agree with it, but we are made up of our experiences if not anything else. I don’t know how many people would be able to relate to my experiences on this but I hope you relate to my learnings from all of it. 

I’ll try to keep my childhood experiences a bit short and just put it all out. My family speaks Bengali and they have roots in Bangladesh from both my mother and father’s sides. These roots however are as shallow as those of mangroves of Sunderbans. Since the days when my grandfather and grandmother were kids, their families were based out of Uttar Pradesh. By the time my dad and mom were in school, our families had pretty much settled in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, which is also my hometown. Fun fact about Jabalpur, it’s pretty much like the chocolate Gems. It’s multi-colored and delicious, people from all over India have settled in here. From Marwaris, Gujaratis, Keralites, Tamil, Bengalis, and Punjabis I had people from all these communities in my neighborhood.

So even though my family is Bengali, for the last two-three generations they have stayed mostly in the north and central regions of India which is a predominantly Hindi belt. My grandmother can speak fluent Bengali and Hindi. When I and my brother were growing up we used to speak comfortably Bengali at home and Hindi at other places. We never felt it a burden to simultaneously learn three languages (our school being an English Medium School). I never felt my mother and father feel the burden of knowing a third language. Language never came off as a burden and that was what I grew up believing, until the other night.

You see, language is not an independent entity. Language is a part of your culture, it is a part of where you come from in India. Your language alone doesn’t mean anything, but your culture means everything. In India regions and cultures are known to every man, woman, and child. It’s like the basics. But what is being made aware to children through adults is not about the good part of cultures but the stereotypes. Among the worst stereotyped culture, being a Bengali definitely takes the top five places. From being literary geniuses to machchi bhaat eating people, this has been quite a quick road. 

School wasn’t difficult because I was a Bengali, but it certainly wasn’t easier. Even to my best friends, I had to convince them that I do not bring fish in my tiffin box. Sometimes when I was the only Bengali in my class my name would be temporarily – ‘Bengali’. Jabalpur has a predominant vegetarian culture because of a number of Marwadi and Jain families. I didn’t even like non-vegetarian food much while growing up, yet the only part of my identity that all my schoolmates knew was that I was definitely a non-vegetarian (which was looked down upon) and definitely liked eating fish. There were several other slang and comments that used to be very common for our Bengali culture and I definitely took some of them by heart. So much so that I tried disassociating with my Bengali identity for a long while. 

By the time I had reached high school, I would not say I was a Bengali at school until and unless the person asking me about it was one. The only time I would be proud about being a Bengali was when I got to talk about the grandeur of Durga Puja. 

Just to put it out, I have studied Bengali in summer school, one that runs during summer vacations. I could at one point read-write and fluently speak Bengali. However, I cannot do that anymore. I still do not recognize myself as a Bengali, I have never spent any time in the state of West Bengal nor do I have any family member there. I just do not know that culture, but I know the culture of Jabalpur and its people. I have tried to be a normal person in Jabalpur, one without having a distinct culture, and it’s hard to give away that now.

Being in Odisha for a lot of time now, I have seen the amazing culture of the state. The weight of its culture is too heavy for me. As much as I love it, I can’t take it forward with me. I have spent most of my life not being a part of the culture I was born in, to take up this as well is seemingly impossible. Odia is a beautiful language, it’s pleasant to listen to, and to the common ear can be felt similar to Bengali. I feel its beauty but it seems a burden to be identified into culture once again which I don’t think I am ready to take up now.