English over Bengali?

My good friend recently questioned me for not writing in Bengali as often as I should. He’s been a constructive critic (I don’t know many of them!) of all the crap I write, and I know he’ll continue to support my insanity. Anyone who writes should have a friend like him. He brought up an important point when he noticed that I was ignoring Bengali as a medium of expression for my thoughts. It called for an introspection. Let me decipher.

I went to Netaji Subhash Vidyaniketan for my high school degree. It, in those days, perhaps was the best school in my state of Tripura. I would often as a school kid regret not studying in an English medium school. Some of my friends who I played with in the afternoon in our colony went to schools where they learnt history, geography, science and math in English. And here I was, reading and writing everything in Bengali! I would sometimes think my life could be glossier if I went to an English medium school. I must have been very young then! Gradually I understood my father’s point of view. While he was particular his children should go to Bengali medium schools to remain close to their ‘roots’ – mind you, Bengali schools back in the day were not as out of fashion as they today are – he would make exceptional arrangements at home to teach English vocabulary and grammar. He himself was an ardent lover of literature, and soon I realized I’d inherited that from him. He would teach me English for hours, give me homework in the form of ‘tense tables’ and ‘sentence making’. After a hard day at work he’d sit with me to go through my homework. In addition to my instinctive love for Bengali as well as English language, this trick by him worked wonders. I learned about the basics of English grammar at an age when my Bengali school mates would struggle with more elementary concepts of the language. I had a big English to Bengali dictionary that I was in love with. It was like an encyclopedia for me that knew everything!

That wouldn’t necessarily make me a good English speaker or writer. I would write poems, short stories, plays and even novels in Bengali. I loved doing that. Since I couldn’t practice English with anyone in school, I devised a mechanism to master the art of speaking. Nobody, not even my father, taught me this. It was my method to respond to the hunger in me to beat my surrounding odds to speak the language I loved so much. I’d pick up a topic of my interest, varying from ‘my school’ to ‘cricket’ to ‘books’, and start delivering a speech to an imaginary audience. I’d do it in bathroom, so I had to ensure I had the required buffer time for those speeches in addition to bathing. I’d speak for long minutes, pretending to be facing a crowd in my bathroom! While my Bengali poems and short stories were being published in some newspapers and magazines, the Shakespeare in me was still being conceived. I tried my hand at English poems; I thoroughly disappointed myself. I just couldn’t play with English words to get them to the rhyme or the rhythm I envisioned. I could however write essays and articles in English with reasonable flair. When I look back now, I understand how naïve I was.

My first big academic ecstasy with the language began after my class ten board exams when I started referring physics and mathematics books written in English. I was immensely thrilled to read Newton’s laws in English; I’d known the laws for long but hadn’t felt that moved. While I had great love and respect for Bengali, I could feel an emergence of crave for getting better with English in all its forms. I’d read newspapers (The Statesman was my father’s choice) and magazines (Frontline, India Today and so on). My father, who had battled a lot of adversities in his life starting from losing his father when he was in high school, had a two-pronged vision for my future. He wanted me to become either a professor of English language and earn a doctorate degree, or write the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) exam and become a government officer who could make a difference to the society through administrative reforms. I became none of the above; I chose to pursue a future in engineering.

That marked a huge turning point in my life as I got increasingly closer to English and naturally distanced from Bengali. I would still write poems in Bengali, for I didn’t know how to do that in English. But most part of my hobby reading would be consumed by English. I could talk to people, participate in discussions and debates; all in English. I’d be admired by friends for the way I wrote. Many would ask me to help them write project briefs, articles, and even love letters for them! Gradually my shelf space was replaced by English books.

Rabindranath Tagore still remains the most influential literary presence in my otherwise English life. His songs to me are still the most melodious music creation of all. But I find myself alienated today from my mother-tongue in many ways. I don’t remember the last Bengali book I read, I hardly watch Bengali films, I haven’t followed a Bengali news debate in years. Bengali has sadly been reduced to a language I use to speak to fellow Bengalis. English has penetrated so deep into my everyday life, it comes as the natural language of choice when I feel like writing to express something. It’s true that I can reach a larger spectrum of readership if I write in the international language, but that’s not why I hardly write in Bengali anymore. I don’t want to call it a state of natural dormancy, because I’m sure I’ve inflicted this upon myself to a good extent. 

It’s ironic I’m writing this post in English. Does it mean I’ll make conscious efforts to write more in my own language? I should. My mother taught me Bengali; how can any other language be dearer to me? It was through Bengali that I was introduced to this beautiful world of infinite possibilities. I could learn English because I knew Bengali!