Mother’s Tongue Mutilated

Instructor Introduction

Neel is an extraordinary student who has a keen taste for the original. Everything he writes and creates is uniquely his. His fresh take and eye for beauty make him a writer to watch. This essay demonstrates an awareness of self and an autobiographical history in a new form. Through third person, pain is both distanced and enhanced as we watch Neel grapple with questions about language and evolution. When I first read this piece, I was nearly moved to tears.

— Olivia Cheng

Mother’s Tongue Mutilated

A fresh preschooler on one of his first days of state-funded learning goes up to a poster with the ABC’s on it. He points to B, and says, ‘hey look Mom, a model bird! We have one just like it at ho-’ He realizes that no, his mother is not there to acknowledge him. He is alone here. Nobody is looking at him. All the other kids are playing their own way. He also notices that they wouldn’t have understood if they paid attention, either. He had said the sentence in Marathi.

(The kid in question would forgive you if you haven’t heard of the language. Local to the state of Maharashtra, it is the third most spoken of the official languages of India.)

When his mother told the story of his early days of education in America, his family having moved when he was two, she’d say it took no more than two months for him to come home speaking exclusively in English. To this day, the kid’s proficiency in Marathi has never surpassed his understanding of the language from when he was that preschooler. She noted that he picked up English quicker than other immigrant kids, and also surpassed the level of understanding of his peers who had already grown up speaking English. He’d recall for his parents lessons where he was the first to understand that “I’d” really meant “I would” rather than “I did”, or the moment he’d successfully sounded out the word “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” seen on a poster in the lunchroom, until then only seen as a jumble of letters.

(The kid in question, now a meek silhouette of a supposed adult, would like to inform the reader that he does not intend to gloat, for his modern understanding of English is only ordinary among his peers. He won the school spelling bee at one point, but failed in only the second round at the county level.)

While our kid’s parents were happy that he was able to perform well in school given this early advantage, they couldn’t help but feel saddened that he no longer held a grasp on his mother tongue. Fortunately, they were part of a large existing cultural organization for the preservation and advancement of the Marathi language—Bharat Marathi Mandal, or BMM. In many an immigrant-heavy American city, Marathi Shalas (schools) were established to (re)teach kids how to speak the language. The Detroit one took place at a temple only 20 minutes from where they lived.

For years, our kid would go at the irrefutable command of his parents to this familiar place with friends in a similar boat. Inexperienced volunteer teachers struggled to follow the curricula published by the global organization, and students struggled to learn in a teaching environment unfamiliar to them. It is not true that the students did not learn anything—they certainly did make progress in restoring their knowledge of the language, and showcased it to their parents in the occasional short skit or singing performance orchestrated by the painfully musically inexperienced volunteer teachers. However, they did not value their education in this respect nearly as much as they did their formal schooling. Why were they learning a dying language, they thought, when they had no intent to return to live in their parents’ home state?

As the students progressed into middle school and high school, they dropped out one by one from Marathi Shala. Our kid was among the earliest to do so. School-based language requirements arose, and to pick from were only European languages. He chose French and excelled in learning it. Thenceforth, his education in Marathi was only through regular listening in the house and on the bi-yearly visits to his family in the modern metropolis of Mumbai, a hour one-way journey apart. Occasionally, his mother would try to give him an impromptu lesson. “See what I’ve written here? What does it say?” He’d begrudgingly participate. She would remark her disappointment in his lack of enthusiasm.

To him, it is an unimaginable pain to observe as their own language diminishes in importance so visibly as in the form of their son’s misdirected efforts. He’d try to rectify on occasion, saying a sentence or two in Marathi to his parents that he would’ve otherwise said in English, just to remind them that he’s not a complete buffoon, but he knew it wouldn’t count for much. What, after all, would they imagine would happen to the language.

The truth is that Marathi is far from a dying language. It has 84 million native speakers in the world (UChicago), comparable to about 86 million Vietnamese native speakers (Ethnologue). However, when one looks at distributions of immigrant speakers, numbers assume a mildly precarious quality. Twice as many Vietnamese speakers exist in just the state of Texas, 207,000, than do Marathi speakers in the whole of the US—about 100,000 (Ethnologue). Obviously, this points to the complex trends in immigration, and the comparative populations of ethnic groups easily vary from place to place, but perhaps the view of first-generation Marathi immigrant families becomes more understandable. Without attempting to perpetuate the language base, the isolated communities can be feared to possibly die out quickly over a few generations.

Today, BMM North America hosts bi-annual conventions in various cities, and has participated in state-level policy by supporting the adoption of Marathi as a candidate language for the seal of biliteracy in places like Illinois (BMM). The organization is indeed an international one, run not only by immigrants themselves, but by people based in Maharashtra as well. They continue to provide cultural services as a non-profit in the same capacity year after year. It is neither the case that Indian immigration into the US has slowed; in fact, it has increased over the past decade. The number of Asian-Indians living in the US has increased from 2.3 million in 2005 to over 4 million in 2020 (Clifford).

To return to the case of our kid in question, do these numbers invalidate the fears of his parents? Do they prove that attempting to keep up with the language would be futile for him? These are only personal questions, to which a Boolean “yes” or “no” may not be the appropriate answer. Language is a tool; it has utility in connecting people and in educating people, and when more than one language is taught to an individual, one is exposed to so much more vocabulary with which to simply think. To our kid, it’s unthinkable to be limited in thought by being monolingual; there would be so much pseudo-vocabulary that he’d have to trim out. He still thinks in Marathi sometimes, for when the limitations of English prohibit him from expressing even completely privately what he wishes to think or say. It is fair to claim that Marathi has its usefulness for him in an unconventional way. He can still communicate well enough in the language with his family, but the real use of it was to grow smarter. He recognizes what his mother tongue has done for him.

Given this, does he owe anything to the language? To its creators, thousands of years ago? To his immigrant group? To his parents? In the same way that you don’t bless the creator of the Allen wrench every time you come across a hexagonal screw, he would argue, you do not owe the creators and preservers of a language anything. Language doesn’t come in a 10-pack at the hardware store, either; it’s a gift of the many individual strains of human culture. Each language has its utility to its speakers, and to those linguistic historians who study them for what secrets they can offer to the uniquely human art of higher communication. Yes, they shall be preserved—but our kid needn’t be the most attuned linguist to take what lessons he can. His story with Marathi is far from over.

Works Cited

“BMM.” Bruhan Maharashtra Mandal, https://bmmonline.org/about-us/. Accessed 8 September 2023.

“Marathi.” Ethnologue, https://www.ethnologue.com/language/mar/. Accessed 8 September 2023.

“Marathi | South Asian Languages and Civilizations.” South Asian Languages and Civilizations, https://salc.uchicago.edu/language-study/marathi. Accessed 8 September 2023.

Pereira, Clifford. “Indian Americans.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Americans#Statistics. Accessed 8 September 2023. “Vietnamese.” Ethnologue, https://www.ethnologue.com/language/vie/. Accessed 8 September 2023.