Out came a thought and then another...

Ideally the post below should have gone here. But it is not ideally *...


Every time I come across a discussion on who is rightfully Thamizh, it leaves me bemused because if adeptness in the language were the filter, I wouldn't ever qualify.One of the downsides of studying in an Anglo-Indian convent is that it leaves you shaky in your mother tongue. As you get promoted class after class, the idea that English is sacred is firmly imprinted in your head while second language, Thamizh in my case, gets the same treatment that Needlework gets, barely any attention. Therefore I ended up growing with hardly any proficiency in both Thamizh and Needlework.

At home, my father, an ardent Thamizh enthusiast, tried his best to make me aware of the beauty of Thamizh. He would teach me a kural a week, explain its meaning and ask me to link it to an example. He would read aloud his verses and when I memorized them he would delight in describing them to me. Perhaps because of all that effort oral Thamizh is not as daunting to me as written Thamizh. Yet the truth is that I am very self-conscious when reading in my mother-tongue. Now, this is a disastrous condition because the quality of my reading worsens in direct proportion to the number of people who are listening to me read. Don't even ask me how I write in the language. Does this mean I am a lesser Thamizh than the ones who can quote at will? Or will I qualify because I have lived in Tamil Nadu all my life? But then so have many others, say Marwaris, who have lived in this state for generations and many purists seem to have trouble accepting them as part of this state. What if somebody came up and said the filter is that you have to have Thamizh features and appearance in order to qualify? I look more like a Malayali than a Tamilian and that would work against me too. Maybe then the filter will be Thamizh blood in your veins, which I might meet, if my parents make the standards of the purists.

Consider, for example, some of the readers of the metblog, who like to share views on Thamizh culture and tell us how awfully some of us writers stink at being Thamizhs. You can imagine how I must have reacted when one of them asked a non-Thamizh speaking blogger to go out of the state because he writes from the perspective of an outsider in Chennai. If that blogger had a Thamizh sounding name and hadn't admitted to being an outsider, no one would have ever known he wasn't Thamizh. Abuse, I guess, is the price he is paying for frankness of opinion and for willingness in making Chennai his own. Take the example of Thad.E.Ginathom, a regular reader, who plays the mridangam. Wouldn't some part of the Thamizhness of the experience have seeped into who he is today? Doesn't that make him also welcome in this city because he is open to soaking a part of its spirit? And because I cannot play the mridangam, doesn't that make me a bit of an outsider from the inside too?

Forever, I've considered myself Thamizh because that is the spirit that permeates me, because that is the spice of all of my life's memories, because that is the encompassing label that gives me a group to call my own. And I don't mind the fact that others in the group may not be carbon copies of me because if that were the case, no one would have anything fresh to teach anyone anymore. I am a Tamilian because the label is inclusive. If not, I'd be a foot-here, head-there, multi-labeled, fragmented spectacle. And so would you. Because if fragmentation were the aim, there are infinite ways to do it.

* as a friend of mine put it

Posted by Echo/Lavanya on Thursday, November 23, 2006 at 9:03 PM | Permalink