What's in a name?

As soon as the obits for M F Husain started coming in, I knew that the cringe-making moment when we’d have to read that he was “India’s Picasso” would not be far behind.

Why do we do it? Belittle ourselves and all that we have achieved by this culture of derivative nomenclature?

We call our film industry, one of the most vibrant and productive in the world, Bollywood (if you want to experience Amitabh Bachchan at his most withering, hear his views on this); we happily anoint one of our most talented musicians A R Rahman “The Mozart of Madras”, even though both nouns are passé and he is not; and when one of the Indian diaspora’s most talented literary voices bursts on the scene, as we saw in the early Eighties when Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight’s Children, we trip over ourselves with comparisons to Marquez.

Language and how we use it is one of the richest indicators of our values and biases. Advocates of political correctness, though they have often gone to absurd lengths, have recognised this and tried to redress the aberrations.

Hence we use “Native American” in place of “Indian”, “African American” in place of “Black”, “mentally challenged” in place of “retarded”, “Caucasian” in place of “White”, “visually challenged” in place of “blind” and “hearing impaired” in place of “deaf”.

Our generation’s sensitivity to sexual politics has also resulted in a wealth of gender-neutral terms such as “firefighter” in place of “fireman” and “single woman” in place of “spinster”.

In today’s world, where political correctness is used as a pejorative term and irony is considered hip and cool, it would do well to recognise how a subtle shift in language can make a world of difference to people and how they deal with situations.

Invited to address a convocation of psychiatrists in Mumbai recently, and to talk about the media’s role in communicating the right message about the mental health, I was struck by what a paradigm-shift a simple thing like saying “ he has schizophrenia” rather than “he is schizophrenic” could make to a person and our perceptions of him.

So why can’t we sensitise our language in this department too?

When the entire world is looking to India as the next superpower, when Indians have been acknowledged as world leaders in all kinds of fields from sports to science to literature and industry, and when there is a resurgence of confidence and growth, isn’t it time we consciously assign what is perhaps one of the last vestiges of our cultural cringe to the dust heap?

I recall experiencing an epiphany a few years ago, when peering from backstage at the front row big-ticket audience of a literary event held in the Capital, I saw a line of pale white people, seated uneasily and (pretty precariously) on their self-assumed perches of importance. “This is the beginning of the end of their dominance” I recall thinking as around them a sea of bright, vibrant Indian authors, critics and publishers swilled.

No sir, there is absolutely no reason at all to employ the benchmarks of the West any more to describe our successes. Tendulkar is not the Bradman of India, Shobhaa De not the Jackie Collins, neither are Kishore Biyani and Vijay Mallya the Sam Walton and Richard Branson, respectively. And the Gandhis are not the Kennedys by a long shot.

I think it’s time we realised that the tables have turned.

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer