current cut.
now, i don’t know how you refer to the (hopefully) temporary absence of electricity in your local tongue - and by local tongue i mean your dialect of English, but this is how we call it here. for the purposes of this discussion, let’s keep ‘here’ as the Tamizh-speaking southern part of India.
but how many of you have come across this phrase in a book? or an essay? or any untranslated published work, really?
this is a problem peculiar to places and people that have English, or at least English phrases, so intertwined with their lives that it’s almost a native tongue to them. India, obviously, is one such place; and yet, when an Indian writer writes dialogue in English between two Indians, ‘current cut’ somehow becomes ‘power outage’.i don’t know about you posh peepals, but my mom would definitely laugh me to death if i ever said ‘power outage’ to her.
i’m not saying all Indian writing in English is along the veins of ‘power outage’. i’m asking why there aren’t more ‘current cuts’ in our books. there are actually plenty of Indian books written in English which do incorporate Hindi/ local languages in their narration, but these tend to take themselves..less seriously? literary fiction, or more to be more exact, books that take themselves seriously, somehow are still shy of tipping their toes in Indianese.
why?
i can think of some answers- one being the otherification of self (or some such high falutin’ academese) - perhaps when you write a book, you look at your characters from a point up above, sort of like an overlord, and that overlord disapproves if your characters talk like how you do in real life?
other possible, sadder, answers include an attempt to pander to a non-indian audience by making it ‘easy’, or that somehow, you yourself are ashamed of your indianisms.
i remember how an indian author (i genuinely forget who this was - chitra banerjee divakaruni? jhumpa lahiri? tell me if you know) once said she had refused to italicise the vernacular words in her novel. i remember thinking how sweetly that tasted of rebellion, like monsoon showers bringing in mangoes.(sorry, couldn’t resist).
if our #OwnVoices aren’t really what are our voices sound like, it’s kind of sad, no?
related reading
this excellent piece which talks about how #ownvoices narratives romance novels are forced to adhere to western stereotypes about indian lives
The First Witch of Damansura - the first in Zen Cho’s collection of short stories has people talking in English the way they would IRL, in addition to one kick-ass grandma.
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I absolutely agree, had read the romance article yesterday. We must embrace our Indianisims.