 "Scenes from Chickpet where Kannada-speaking Marwaris thrive. Photo: Saggere Radhakrishna")
At last year’s edition of Bengaluru Poetry Festival, one of the attractions for the event was a session with city-based writer Prathibha Nandakumar. Primarily a Kannada poet and playwright, Nandakumar has been writing for four decades, so she found it patronising when a few people told her, “You write very well, keep it up.”
“They thought I was some old lady who had suddenly started writing, despite the introduction that came before the event,” says Nandakumar. Incidents such as these, she feels, bear testimony to how “outsiders” have not acquainted themselves with the culture of their adopted city.
Many Kannada activists echo Nandakumar’s sentiment.
So when Hindi appeared on the signboards of Bengaluru’s Namma Metro, many labelled it as a political move, with a section of pro-Kannada activists considering it to be an assault on the language. In the last days of July, members of Karnataka Rakshana Vedike went on to blacken Hindi signage.
This act left many nonplussed because Hindi, and by extension north Indian culture, has long been a part of Bengaluru’s cosmopolitan identity.
Bengaluru’s darshinis, the city’s version of fast-food joints, offer rava and ragi dosa alongside roti and paneer butter masala, and many bakeries stock kachoris besides the usual batch of egg puffs. And, at pubs like Glocal in upmarket Indiranagar, patrons request for Bollywood numbers such as Kala chasma and a remix of Humma Humma well after midnight.
When Glocal’s manager, Amit Singh Rawat, moved to Bengaluru a year ago during the pub’s opening, he came to the city loaded with apprehensions. “I was under the impression that no one speaks Hindi here but I’ve rarely faced any problems,” says Rawat, originally from Uttarakhand.
In Chickpet, Rajasthan Patrika sells as much as the Kannada daily Vijaya Karnataka.
The only time he has felt out of his comfort zone, says Rawat, is when a guest has had too much to drink or when an auto-wallah overcharges. (Kannada speakers too have dreary tales about negotiating with auto-wallahs, so that’s oddly comforting in this scenario.)
At Kannada weddings in towns and cities, it is not uncommon to see the groom and his father in sherwanis, and be served chaat, paneer and naan alongside traditional cuisine. The Kannada remakes of Ekta Kapoor’s television serials have also made elements of north Indian family culture familiar to Kannada households over the past 10 to 15 years. At Northern Route, a restaurant on St Mark’s Road, techies often queue up for rajma-chawal and Punjabi-styled paranthas served with butter and curd.
“It’s fascinating to see how much of an outside thing is now seen as part of one’s own. This isn’t seen as indulging in the exotic; it’s accepted and is not considered intrusive,” says Chandan Gowda, professor of sociology at Azim Premji University.
However, when one speaks of the cosmopolitan nature of a city, the onus is usually on the host society to reassure and welcome migrants, says Gowda. “But as we see in the case of Bengaluru, hosts are feeling vulnerable in the face of ‘outsiders’, so we need to take a closer look at what cosmopolitan means, and we need to ask the question of how we relate to the places we live in,” says Gowda.
Decades ago, when communities from Rajasthan, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and others established their businesses in the city, they did so by learning the local language.
“You didn’t have any Kannadiga trading communities. People came from other states and Kannada was secure on the streets as these communities learnt the language as they settled in,” says Gowda, citing the example of all the petes like Chickpete (pete is Kannada for market) where these communities continue to balance the languages of their ancestors alongside Kannada.
Northern Route Punjabi restaurant on St Mark’s Road. Photos: Saggere Radhakrishna
Today, in the corridors of plush malls, and on the streets, conversations overheard are in Bengali, Oriya, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi — and then some more Hindi. Kannada is no longer the language you commonly hear, unless a cop pulls you over.
When Raghu Dixit of the multi-lingual music band Raghu Dixit Project played in the city some time ago, a few from the audience approached him after the event to thank him for singing in Kannada in Karnataka’s capital! “This happens a lot at our concerts around the world and is not an isolated incident anymore,” notes Dixit.
The 2001 Census data recorded that after Kannada speakers (41.54 per cent), the percentage of Tamil (18.43) and Telugu (15.47) speakers were the highest, while those with Hindi as a mother tongue was 3.41 per cent. But then came the dotcom boom at the turn of the millennium followed by a flurry of start-up dreams. The 2011 Census showed a significant increase in Karnataka’s migrant population since 2001: from 16.6 million to 25 million.
As TJS George writes in Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore (Aleph), “If the pre-IT immigrants made an effort to merge into Bangalore, the new combatants were too disparate to try. They remained Punjabis, Rajasthanis, Gujaratis and UP-Biharis....”
Even those who don’t come from the Hindi heartland, like migrants from the Northeast, West Bengal, Odisha and Nepal, use Hindi to get by in their adopted city.
Many Kannadigas feel there are open expressions of contempt for everything “local” says theatre actor and activist Prakash Belawadi. “This feeling is not new. There have been peevish and violent outbursts of resentment for as long as I can remember: riots against Tamils in 1991, riots against Urdu news on DD Bangalore, attempts to curb big releases of other language cinema, and so on,” says Belawadi, adding how Kannada outfits are as old as Karnataka.
Kannada activists, says Gowda, have a sense of disbelief. “How can a person stay in a place for over a decade and not know the language? This entire discussion is about a pre-linguistic gesture, a moral gesture: it doesn’t matter if you don’t know the language, the question is if you are attempting to make an effort,” says Gowda.
The best example of this attempt is seen in areas around Bengaluru’s central business districts. In the Nagarapeth market, silver-haired Govind Bhai, while making a bill for rolls of handmade paper sheets, explains to a customer in fluent Kannada why there’s no discount on the bill. After the customer leaves, Govind Bhai switches over to Marwari and asks his colleague to restock the shelves.
From stationery outlets to garment shops, similar scenes play out across the surrounding area in Chickpete: the switch between Kannada and Marwari is seamless.
“Really, how much time does it take to learn a language?” asks Govind Bhai who has been here for 50 years. “I learnt Tamil in two to three months in Ooty. When I was in Mumbai, I picked up Marathi. Kannada also took about two months,” says the 67-year-old who was born in Ahmedabad.
As he prepares to send off another customer, he rolls up the handmade sheets inside two sheets of Rajasthan Patrika, a Hindi daily. In this business hub, Rajasthan Patrika sells as much as the Kannada daily Vijaya Karnataka, says a newspaper vendor in the area.
In fact, some feel if Rajasthan Patrika goes beyond covering the pravasi Rajasthani in Bengaluru, it’ll be printing more than the 55,000 copies it usually does. (The publication set up its own printing press in the city only in December 2014.)
The issue of blackening of Hindi signage, feels Nandakumar, is being mistaken for something it really isn’t. “We speak Hindi, we watch Hindi films. We are not against Hindi, only against its political and forceful imposition by the central government,” she clarifies.
Language activist Vallish Kumar S talks of how the special privilege given to Hindi is causing the elimination of other Indian languages. “In the north, 49 languages like Bhojpuri, Santhali and Awadhi have been reduced to dialects of Hindi and have lost their individual identities to a government-sponsored imposition.”
The move of giving an elevated status to Hindi (which is not our rashtriya bhasha), gives an unfair advantage to those who call it their mother tongue, adds Kumar. “It might sound like using Hindi on a signboard isn’t a big deal, but it reflects the special privileges certain people benefit from. And this category is far smaller than the other communities who live in Bengaluru,” he says.
Over the last two years, when Kumar and other language activists ran Twitter campaigns (#StopHindiImposition), they found that a large number of Hindi speakers were actually in favour of language equality.
“Unlike in the past, when English language theatre was almost as important as Kannada’s in the city’s imagination, for every English language play today, there are 20 or 25 Kannada ones. There is more Kannada in print, radio and television,” says Belawadi, who also feels that there are more Kannadigas in Bengaluru than ever before (intra-state migration). Kannada, he adds, has become politically important in Bengaluru like ever before. It’s a sign of the times.
Chief Minister Siddaramaiah’s government has also picked up on the Centre’s move to fan linguistic politics: senior officials have been asked to learn Kannada in the next six months, and the state government has directed its officers to give Kannada patronage.
Over the last few years, house owners have noticed how their tax papers and other government documents are in Kannada. Till about a decade ago, these were available in English, too.
So when the Kannada Saahithya Parishath, a body that promotes Kannada, approached the Sarjapur Residents’ Welfare Association for Kannada classes, the association thought it was worth a shot.
“We were expecting 20 to 25 takers but 200 people signed up within two weeks,” says Joy V R, secretary of the association. The oldest student here is well over 70.
“This pro-Kannada movement may appear scary and I do wonder how this affects the image of my city. But when cultural integration happens like it is happening in Sarjapur, that approach makes all the difference,” says Joy. As they get requests for similar classes from other areas like HAL, Indira Nagar and Whitefield, Joy is surprised at the sheer number of people who want to learn Kannada.
All it takes is a closer look to see that no Hindi speaker in Bengaluru is demanding Hindi signage, says Nandakumar. “Why does the Metro need it when it isn’t going to any Hindi-majority place? We’ve had the public buses running for so long without any Hindi and there have been no protests,” she adds.
What’s happening in Bengaluru isn’t unique to this city, says Gowda. “Several Indian cities are undergoing a similar churning as sub-identities emerge. This is just a symbolic battle intended to encourage gestures of belonging,” he says. The only way to preserve the city’s cosmopolitan identity is to ensure that while outsiders are welcomed, locals aren’t made to feel alien in their own city.
Bengaluru’s spirit is best summarised by the phrase “swalpa adjust maadi”, which literally means “adjust a little”. It also spells out the need of the times.
