I consider my experience at an expensive private school to be valuable in the sense that it taught me a lot within the classroom. All the lessons learnt outside the classroom were, frankly, unnecessary for a pre-teen to be learning. I would much rather have studied the complex life of the amoeba than have to sit through a lecture from my parents on why I can’t buy new books as my classmates did. I say this because, though being able to get such quality education in my formative years was a privilege, I was made very aware of the difference in class between my peers and me.
I grew up in a school where my peers were children of politicians, television stars, and established businesspeople from all over the city of Hyderabad. None of them were native to Hyderabad, though, except me. I spoke like a Hyderabadi or a Telanganite, while my classmates spoke the language of Coastal Andhra, frequently referring to their acres of farms back in their village. I would still be recovering from an uncomfortable and tense family road trip to rural Telangana while my classmates told stories about their summer in the Maldives. I learnt early on to keep quiet because my speech in the vernacular would only be comic relief to their adventurous tales.
I still remember the event that led to a selective silence in my mother tongue. Selective because I was careful to not speak in Telugu on purpose as much as possible. I was asking my Telugu teacher, “Idi etla rayali?” (“how do I write this?”) in fourth grade, when I was just learning to write.
We have all heard awful sounds that make your ears ring or leave a bad taste in your mouth, like nails on a blackboard. However, one of the worst sounds, in my experience, is one of malicious laughter directed at you. As soon as that mumble left my mouth from the first row, the entire class burst into hysterics, including the teacher. My face burned and I did nothing. I could barely let myself breathe. After a minute, or what seemed like an eternity, the laughter gave way to my teacher’s voice: “ ‘Etla’ kadu, ‘ela’ anu,” (“don’t say ‘etla’, say ‘ela’ ”). The hilarity of the half letter I added was lost on me.
The inflexion in my speech was added by my family’s Telangana dialect, a language long considered to be spoken by the poor and uneducated folk native to the Telangana region. This language evolved from Telugu with the influence of the Urdu language that came with the history of the Qutb Shahs and the Nizam regime in the Hyderabad state, now known as the state of Telangana. “Speaking ‘bad Telugu’ that was inflected with Urdu pronunciations and Urdu words became a shibboleth of being […] backwards, unmodern, and generally speaking, unfashionable in the many meanings of the word” (Narayanan 120). The more “pure” language of Telugu was seen as a more sophisticated language of educated and respectable society and was shown as such in the news, television, and cinema. Telangana, however, was not underrepresented in media, but it was misrepresented as the language of villains or cartoonish jokers. Not only was their outburst of laughter a xenophobic response to a word they were not used to, but also a ridicule of the people who were always represented negatively in the media. They found it funny because I talked like one of the cartoonish characters represented as lesser than the sophisticated, cultured, upper-class protagonists.
However, this was not the only prompt to their snarky laugh — I stuck out like a sore thumb in that class for other reasons as well. I was an avid reader, an interest I shared with others in my class, but was still seen as an outsider. This was probably because my parents would not buy me shiny new books like the ones my peers had. I would often borrow tattered copies from the library, which I enjoyed in my own way, as my classmates weren’t the kind to share. They wouldn’t say it outright, but there were always passive-aggressive digs at the state of the few books I owned. This kind of inequality did come to my notice back then, but I fully understand it after reading a study by Enrique Chaux in 2014, which found that wealth inequality and socio-economic status could be related to bullying, stating that students coming from families with better socio-economic conditions tend to be bullies and those who are worse off tend to become victims of bullying.
That day in Telugu class left me feeling like I was simply not good at Telugu, and that I shouldn’t speak it in public again. The less I practised it, the less I remembered the language. I felt discouraged from learning my mother tongue, something that was a part of my identity. I was distancing myself from it as much as I could because I didn’t want to face that embarrassment again. I was convinced that each time I talk in Telugu, I would be laughed at, and this seeped into my overall social skills and I spoke less in general. I kept to myself and threw myself into reading, entirely in English, and tried to hone my understanding of the language to near perfection. At the same time, I could never read any of the complex text prescribed for our Telugu classes, wasn’t able to master the script, and did poorly in my exams. This went on until college when I couldn’t even hold a conversation in Telugu, but I was able to score the highest in a competitive English Communication certification across the university.
That being said, times were changing. It had been about three years since Telangana became a separate state and the perception of the people of Telangana was being reclaimed and = normalised. The roles in which we saw Telanganites in media were changing as well: popular movie stars who once starred in offensive comedy sequences started adapting the Telangana accent and slang. Movies like Fidaa became extremely popular, featuring leads who spoke the Telangana dialect with a cool, lovable attitude. As a result, my perception of the language started to change and I began to accept my identity. Around the same time, my father bought me a copy of V Mallikarjun’s anthology, Kagitham Padavulu (“Paper Boats”). This was not the first Telugu book my father had bought for me, but it was the first I took an interest in. The book contained short, two-page narrations of moments of love in a simple, conversational tone. Here was a book I could understand and enjoy, and it was written in Telugu script. My interest grew in the language as I read the book cover to cover. I started to speak to my college mates in Telugu, sometimes reading out an interesting passage to them in my slow language. I was developing a closeness to my Telugu self and as a consequence of this new practice, I was able to speak and read a little better. I wanted to be able to speak in my mother tongue because I felt pride in it for the first time.
While I was learning to read and speak better, it was difficult for me to form sentences and carry a conversation in Telugu. This became a source of frustration as it was still a very embarrassing experience to not be able to speak to my friends in full sentences. I had forgotten the little bit of Telugu I knew and it was difficult getting it back. Perhaps I lost my prior understanding of the language, albeit limited, due to the shame and embarrassment that the incident in my Telugu classroom brought. Something along these lines has been corroborated by research, namely a report by Peter Ecke in 2004 who discusses some of the causes of language attrition or language forgetting, citing suppression due to traumatic events as a possible defence mechanism. He cited Freud to discuss how “unpleasant or traumatic memories are repressed deliberately and displaced from consciousness by the individual who intends to avoid recalling displeasing, negative, or traumatic experiences” (Ecke 324). Additionally, citing Golding & MacLeod in their 1988 report, Ecke also mentioned that “most [cognitive psychologists] agree that intentional suppression (also directed forgetting) exists as a commonly used, essential human defence mechanism (324). In other words, I subconsciously chose to forget the language altogether rather than remember the discomfort that experience brought back.
Despite this unfortunate setback, I am now on a trajectory of re-learning my language and the culture that comes with it. I now enjoy reading in Telugu for pleasure, watching movies, and talking to my friends in the same Telangana accent that was unpolished at school. This lesson from outside the classroom took me years to learn.
Chaux, Enrique, and Melisa Castellanos. “Money and age in schools: Bullying and power imbalances.” Aggressive behavior 41.3 (2015): 280-293.
Ecke, Peter. “Language Attrition And Theories Of Forgetting: A Cross-Disciplinary Review”. International Journal Of Bilingualism, vol 8, no. 3, 2004, pp. 321-354. SAGE Publications, doi:10.1177/13670069040080030901. Accessed 28 Nov 2021.
Narayanan, Sandhya Krittika. “One State, One People, Two Languages? Telugu, Urdu, and the Shift in Border Politics in India.” Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Symposium about Language and Society-Austin. 2015.
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