A working knowledge of Hindi has become an essential ingredient in the Malayali’s survival kit in his homeland, thanks to a cosmopolitan population and a growing number of migrant workers
Kochi’s cosmopolitanism is throwing up a new challenge to its citizens--the need to learn Hindi or better their Hindi speaking skills. In addition to the floating population of North Indians, there is a burgeoning number of migrant labourers from the Hindi heartland and the North East. Gardeners, house helps, drivers, waiters, mechanics, salon staff, shop assistants and watchmen are invariably non Malayalis and the need to speak Hindi has never been greater for local denizens.
Earlier it was in the Naval establishments in the city where Hindi was spoken regularly, but now it is heard commonly in public spaces. Hindi signage appearing on buses and stores is another example of how the use of the language has spread. Angrezi davakhana, (English medicines); atta chakki (flour mill) have come to be used in common parlance.
For someone like Prithi Sinha, a North Indian who works in the city, however, this is working in the reverse. “I have been trying to learn Malayalam and now, I don’t really think it is necessary. Everyone is beginning to speak Hindi,” she says.
On New Year’s eve the police were heard talking to visitors in Hindi, offering directions. “However, Fort Kochi is a special case. Tour guides know more than one language; earlier it was Italian and French, but now everyone is brushing up their Hindi because of a huge inflow of tourists from North India,” says a cafe owner in Fort Kochi. She has noticed the change in lingo and accents as well. This is linguistic anthropology at its best and a transition stage in cosmopolitanism. When societies grow and blend this is bound to happen, she adds.
The Patna-Bihar Express, a chain of small hotels that caters to the Hindiwallas, who work in the city, is an example of how the city’s demographic has changed. “I used to get special mithai made from a halwai in Bihar, now that is available here, made by a migrant sweet maker,” Preethi says.
Not that Hindi was alien to the Malayali, in fact, he speaks the language much better than his Southern neighbours, but of late a working knowledge of Hindi has become an essential ingredient in the Malayali’s survival kit in his homeland.
Police and traders have begun to take Hindi lessons to communicate better with the nearly 25 lakh migrant workers spread across the State. Homemakers too have taken to learning the language to make communication easier with the help or the gardener. Retail traders and grocery shop owners in small towns and villages have started to display their price list in Hindi.
It is usual to hear the owner of a small hotel in Tripunithura shout out instructions or customer orders to his staff, most of them from Bengal and Orissa, in Hindi. “I know that I’m not really speaking Hindi. But what I have found is that you need to only augment your Malayalam with a few Hindi-sounding words and they seem to understand you. That way things go on much smoothly than struggling to communicate through gestures and sounds,” says Raman (name changed).
“What I have realised is that Malayalam is not an easy language to learn for some one from the North. I have eight men from Bihar and in all these years they have not been able to speak or understand Malayalam properly. My main job is to act as an interpreter for the tailor, the cutter and the customer. Some of the customers speak a smattering of Hindi all mixed up with Malayalam and English which makes matters worse leading to some really funny situations and weird results. The other staff is slowly getting a hang of Hindi. Surprisingly, my gardener who comes from Bengal, speaks flawless Malayalam with words that we have long stopped using,” says Mini Jayan of Kiara.
It is in the construction sector that we see the huge presence of migrant labourers. More than 80 per cent of the State’s workforce in this sector is drawn from States like Bengal, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Bengal and Rajasthan. Ramakrishnan, Managing Partner, Build Tech Constructions, is in charge of more than 200 migrant workers. He finds communicating with these workers the biggest challenge for a supervisor or site engineer. “When we recruit engineers, one thing that we insist on is a working knowledge of Hindi. In the present scenario, a site engineer or supervisor cannot survive without Hindi. We have workers who have been with us for more than seven years. While some of them have picked up Malayalam very well there are many who still understand only Hindi and some only their mother tongue. And our staff members speak a sort of hybrid language that has words from all these languages but in a typical Malayali intonation.”
Malayalam is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn, let alone master, so for a Malayali, kitna mushkil hein Hindi seekhna ?
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The samosas at Vyttila junction are a favourite. From office to the snack shop is a short walk, which is put to good use by frantic brushing up of Hindi along the lines of “ ye kya hai ? (what is this?) kitna hein ? (How much does this cost?). Abominably basic, you may wonder, but I assure you, it is not so easy for someone born and brought up in Kerala, happily insulated from the rest of the Hindi-speaking world. The said snack shop is handled by Hindi speakers, and I always drag my friend and colleague along, who speaks Hindi as if it were music, and thanks to her, I’ve been saved quite a few moments of embarrassment. Except the Hindi taught at school, Doordarshan’s Chitrahar and later, “mass movements” such as Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Hindi was never used for transactional purposes.Today, I need it to converse with my babysitter-cum-help. I’m not sure who is linguistically more challenged, as neither of us has picked up the other’s language. However, over days of invoking my Hindi textbooks and dialogues from the Bollywood films I have seen, I guess, today, mera Hindi badiya hein . Or is it meri ?
