How do language and the loss of language affect the melancholic migrant? What trouble does Rajiv face in learning a standardised Hindi?
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For the melancholic migrant, language serves as a measure of identity. On one hand, Mohabir’s grandmother knew no ‘proper’ English and only spoke ‘broken’ Hindi. Whether it be the people she encountered in Toronto or the missionaries her family faced in the past, white society had convinced her that she was as ‘broken’ as her ability to speak in her ancestral tongue and treated her as such (Mohabir 17). On the other hand, through the Hindi teacher’s declaration of “Oh, so you’re not a real Indian” (29), we see that South Asians use language to appraise one’s legitimacy. That being so, the keys to the western Indo-Guyanese community’s acceptance into either group they are part of are held by other parties. Their communal fate and sense of belonging are permanently shaped by the other. Just as Mohabir’s Aji “must feel like Sita, exiled from her own home” (18), this reality exacerbates the Indo-Caribbean’s isolation.
Thus, language plays a deeply personal role in the melancholic migrant’s life. The hopes and imagined dreams of Mohabir and others like him were formed on the basis of an idealized world where they never lost their language and were allowed “to be colorful, too.” (26) For them, the stakes of learning their mother tongue are higher than the average student. The purpose of going to India and learning Hindi would be to mend the histories broken by indenture, to keep alive to memory of all “the things that everyone said were worthless,” (34) to tell the stories of the ancestors, pass them down, and add our own voice to the mix. At the Rang Collective’s conference on memories of Partition, Aanchal Malhotra spoke of her driving urge to collect stories untold as the generation of storytellers passed on. Similarly, it devastated the author to “think that these songs and stories would be lost for good” (34), an added weight that Rajiv’s peers did not have to carry over their six-week intensive program, let alone their lifetime.