The Songs of the North
I live in a small town on the east coast of India. If I close my eyes and sit quietly around 5am, I will hear the songs of birds, the sound of water falling from taps, vehicle engine sounds from the road nearby, and perhaps the voices of those who have woken up and are starting their day.
But soon after, it all vanishes from the soundscape and is replaced by sounds from Noida. These new sounds originate in noisy TV studios, reels, and YouTube videos. They emanate from TV sets and mobile devices and blare on throughout the day, drowning my entire local soundscape.
These Delhi voices speak, joke, rage, and complain in Hindi. They talk of Delhi concerns but dress them up as national concerns. These voices spread the priorities of the North, its cultural values, and its attitudes wherever they are heard. I grew up hearing these voices and having them shape my understanding of India.
When I stepped into the real Delhi as an adult, most of it wasn’t alien to me — definitely not as alien as Chennai or Bengaluru had been. I could live and laugh with the people I met there. Unlike my countrymen from the North-East, I have the privilege of looking like someone who can belong in any part of this country. I also speak Hindi fluently, so most people I met in the streets of Delhi never knew me well enough to treat me as anything other than one of them. The ones that did simply chalked me up as a Bengali (which I am not) and went about their day.
If culture is only a set of shared values that is communicated and maintained by a population, then what is the culture of the multitudes who live in a soundscape dominated by a language they hear all day but nobody around them speaks? What does a lifetime of exposure to an alien culture do to one? How much does it disconnect one from their material locality? What values and priorities do they share with those with whom they share space?
The reason Hindi swallows other linguistic cultures is not because of something inherently predatory about the language. It is because North India exerts an inordinately large amount of cultural power over the rest of India. When people from non Hindi-speaking backgrounds push back against Hindi, it is so they may continue to have some semblance of a local understanding of their locality. It is far more easily lost than you might think.
