Languages Matter: My Subjective Postcolonial Struggle

Abstract

I am an Indian, who migrated to Australia a few years ago with a young family. I grew up in India, during the postindependence era, free from the clutches of colonialism with the fire of being a “resistant colonized subject” still fuelled and kept alive with ideologies of anticolonialism. My history books talked about my “Indianness” as being complex—historically, culturally, linguistically, religiously, and economically and the ways in which the colonizer (vellaikaran— white man in Tamizh) repeatedly tried to unify us in the name of civilizing the natives, especially with a Western language and a Western system of education. As a resistant colonized subject, I considered that being affiliated to any colonial identity would mean succumbing to the colonizer’s dominance. I negotiated my interactions with Australian colonial whiteness with deliberate consciousness of my subjectivity, as I carried the guilt of being the “resistant subject,” with a predisposition to suspiciously challenge or depose anything identified as colonial. Therefore, I resorted to silencing myself to suppress any feelings of retaliation. When I was asked whether I spoke Indian at home with my children or what curry I cooked for dinner, I angrily thought there is no language that is Indian, nor is there an Indian dish called curry. I blamed such thoughts on my resistant subjectivity surfacing to question vellaikaran’s innocent curiosity and began to silence myself guiltily.

Furthermore, the colonized’s mother tongue, that which is sustained by his feelings, emotions and dreams, that in which his tenderness and wonder are expressed, thus that which holds the greatest emotional impact, is precisely one which is least valued. It has no stature in the country or in the concert of peoples. (Memmi, 1967, p. 107)