A few weeks ago, my friend AB called me from Europe. He’s Bengali, from Calcutta, but he was spending a number of months in London, Paris, etc. All of the sudden, in the midst of our phone call, he exclaimed, “You speak like an American!” I immediately knew what he meant, although he went on to explain that, having been in Europe, he now knew what American English sounds like as opposed to other groups. Now, I’d be lying if I said that while he and I were in India, we spoke only in Bengali. In fact, I spoke a lot of English around him and his friends, because their English is so very good. But I had taken on their Indian English accent and idioms, and I’m sure that none of them had ever heard me speak in my own, unaffected speech. I think that my friend believed that it was simply a situation in which I had (intentionally or not) taken to mimicking the speech I heard around me. That’s partially true, perhaps in the same way that too much time around my North Carolinian cousins will affect my accent. But, as I’ve thought about it, it’s much more than that.
I remember an odd moment in Calcutta, in the studio of a Bangla-language TV channel. I was part of a number of episodes in a series about West Bengal folkart. I was, oddly, supposed to be the starry-eyed white girl who couldn’t speak Bengali, which, by that point in my stay in Calcutta, was a bit difficult. For the first (and only) time in the episodes, I had a fixed script, in which I was speaking with two other ‘characters’ (the wife of the then-consulate general of Calcutta and a Bengali actor who was later featured in The Namesake). I’m no actress, and I forgot my lines halfway through. In this strange situation–me acting like me, even though it wasn’t really me–I got a bit aggravated and suddenly spit out, “Shit! Can we start again?” It startled me perhaps as much as it startled all the people around me. But it was perhaps the most ‘authentic’ that I had been in months.
Speaking in another language, at least for me, is not just about language. It affects my whole personality, my whole way of being in the world. Bengali made me, simultaneously both more mousy and more bossy. And even when I was speaking English in Calcutta (or Dhaka or Delhi), it wasn’t the same person who speaks English in the U.S. I spoke in an affected Indian English because that’s who I was. To have spoken to my friends–a few are close friends–in my American English would have seemed out-of-place and startling..perhaps even vulgar? Not to mention that people would have a harder time understanding me. One of the young boys who used to stay in the orphanage was quite annoyed with me when he realized that he could understand the English of the orphanage director, but not mine. Guess I’ll have to work on my Bholai English!
The TV channel crew
