Murukku, Pulisatham & Karaboondhi 🍲
A Yummy ‘Case’ Study 😋
09 July 1994 💛
#memoriesfromdiaries
Foregrounding Postcolonial Strategies from Diaries Past!
The words I’ve highlighted in yellow, for this particular day’s diary jottings, are either errors in jotting, or nativized idioms as the case may be!
Today morning is an error in usage!
The right form would be,
This morning,
This afternoon,
This evening,
Tonight!
Rounded the hostel is yet another error in usage!
The correct form should be,
We walked around the hostel!
The words murukku, pulisatham, karaboondhi, here, are examples of nativisations!
Or to be precise, Structural nativisations!
[Words that I’ve used quite innocently and innocuously back then as a teenager without being aware of its implications to the ‘liberating’ field of Postcolonial Studies!]
Structural nativization, then, could be defined as, ‘The emergence of locally characteristic linguistic patterns and thus the genesis of a new variety of English’ (Schneider).
Now arises the intriguing question!
Who fixes the spelling for our words?
Who fixes the
pronunciation for our words?
Who fixes the norms of
correct usage for our English words?
Since English is the tongue of the colonisers, it is mostly the colonisers who fix them all for us!
That’s hence we have the likes of the British phonetician Daniel Jones and his ilk giving us the normatives for all of academia, as regards the English language and its usage are concerned!
Postcolonial Studies is very critical of this ‘normative’ variety, which Peter Barry would call, ‘the basic givens’ of our existence!
“But why-o-why, Sir”, asks a kovapetta reader to a pavapetta me! 🤔
“It’s good and pleasant to have a normative, a standard variety of English alley?” they add!
Valid doubts, I’d gladly say! 🤗
So here, let me very strongly recommend that you read Ashcroft, Bill Ashcroft’s lovely primer titled, The Empire Writes Back, that discusses in detail all your pertinent doubts and more, on the subject!
Coming back,
To Ashcroft, Bill Ashcroft and his ilk, ‘abrogation’ is a refusal and a rejection of the imperial culture, its aesthetic, its illusory standard of normative or ‘correct’ usage, and its assumption of a traditional and fixed meaning ‘inscribed’ in the words.
One reason why, abrogation is considered a vital moment in the de-colonizing of the language and the writing of ‘english’!
And the next word, ‘appropriation’ refers to the process by which the language is taken and made to ‘bear the burden’ of one’s own cultural experience, or, as Raja Rao puts it, to ‘convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own’, opines Ashcroft.
That means, however much-o-much I try hard at translating the word murukku to arrive at its English equivalent, chances are quite high-o-high that I would fail quite miserably!
In like fashion, however hard-o-hard I try to translate the word ‘karaboondhi’ to try and catch its English equivalent, the translated word can never carry the spirit of the word for me! 🙃
Same with the word, pulisatham, one of my favourite sathams of all time, for travel mode!
Konjam pulisatham, with urulai poriyal and thuvaiyal, (add a boiled egg please, if you wish to) what a combo! la? 😋
Chancey illa!
Even the mother of all web-knowledge, ‘Wikipedia’ doesn’t have an English equivalent to our native murukku!
Ashcroft calls them, untranslated words!
The technique of selective lexical fidelity which leaves some words untranslated in the text is a more widely used device for conveying the sense of cultural distinctiveness, he says!
Ashcroft adds,
Such a device not only acts to signify the difference between cultures, but also illustrates the importance of discourse in interpreting cultural concepts. Australian writer Randolph Stow’s novel Visitants, set in Papua New Guinea, uses Biga-Kiriwini words throughout the english text.
The use here of untranslated words is a clear signifier of the fact that the language which actually informs the novel is an/Other language.
‘They will bring food perhaps? Dimdim food?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘They might eat
chicken,’ Naibusi said, wondering. ‘I do not know. The dimdim yams are
finished.’
‘Chance-y illa’ is an example of what Ashcroft and his scholarly bevy would call, interlanguage!
The use of untranslated words as interface signs seems a successful way to foreground cultural distinctions, so it would appear even more profitable to attempt to generate an ‘interculture’ by the fusion of the linguistic structures of two languages, says he!
All these are common ways of installing cultural distinctiveness in the writing, opine scholars who specialise in Postcolonial Studies!
Romba lovely la? 😍
[PS: Thanks to Dr. Anjana, Head, Department of English, NSS College, Pandalam, you may want to listen to a lecture on the subject by this pavapetta blogger, titled, ‘The Politics of Language in Postcolonial Literature’, on 13 June 2020, HERE]
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