Traveling from North to South India, one is acutely aware of the prejudices that exist of “South Indians” (always in general). Priding myself as one unshackled by such inanities, I arrived in Chennai with a vague idea of a language barrier that could be quickly overcome by the usage of English and friendly smiles. Naivety is fresh, but all too often speedily lost.
What I considered an isolated incident was deeply rooted in a tense historical past. Briefly, a couple of friends and I had fixed a fare with an auto and agreed to pay a slightly higher amount just because the auto driver appeared old and careworn. On arrival to three quarters the distance to our destination, he stopped the vehicle in a slightly darkened street corner and demanded his fare. Confused as to the sudden stoppage, we enquired as to where we were. To which he abused us, ordered us out of his auto and demanded full fare, and double the amount if we wanted to reach our destination. Slowly other auto drivers gathered around, each agreeing with the driver and making threatening gestures as the driver poured profanities in Tamil each time we asked to be dropped to our proper destination. A passerby, himself unable to converse in Tamil but frequenting the city, on trying to reason for us almost got beaten up. On being repeatedly physically threatened by the driver, and aware that it was a potentially violent situation, we paid the fare and quickly walked away as the man continued to hurl insults in the language we could not understand. Shaken, we walked the rest of our way, avoiding eye contact and walking towards a more lighted street as quickly as possible.
As I lay in bed that night my mind screamed unfair. What had we done to receive this? Why had he taken advantage of our vulnerability in a new city whose language we couldn’t understand? I vowed to hate Tamil autowalas forever. By the next morning, when the fever of first anger had simmered down, we discussed possible reasons for the incident. And suddenly the erstwhile “bad experience” gained some light.
In North and South India there is a great divide. Where I come from, “South Indians” are mocked a great deal. They are treated as one unified whole, no different despite their language and cultural differences unique to each state, teased for their “strange tongue” and stereotyped as oil-smothered, lungi-wearing dark skinned men keen on Rajnikanth films and a taste for “idli-dosa”.
In South India the story was no different. “North Indians” were crass Hindi-speaking, Bollywood-watching nincompoops, always posing a threat to what they called South India and attempting to take over their culture; a neo-enemy out to dominate them. So why not mock them, loot them and give them a taste of their own medicine before they get a chance to get you? To an outsider like me, Chennai appears like the same bully who, oppressed in the past, and threatened to be crushed, had decided to lash out so that the first blow was always his, in his own territory.
I have found the older the Tamilians I find here, the meaner they get. Was the auto driver a part of the ‘65 protests? Had he lived through the uncertainty of losing his own language and have his Dravidian culture crushed underneath a wave of Hindi-celebration that found him all too-vulnerable in a nation which valued an alien language over his own tongue? I have no answers for these, only conjectures and guesses towards the cause of a situation I will need to be continuously ready for. For the incident is not isolated, and neither is he alone. We must all live with our ugly past, and continue to see its ramifications on a needy present. ‘38, ‘48, ‘52, ‘65--these weren’t incidents of a past that had been ‘dealt with’ and now over. One should take care not to over generalize from these isolated incidents, but they do demonstrate that language conflict on a personal level is very real for Indians who are away from their own regions.
There is something in nature that doesn’t like walls…
Frost comes uncannily to mind at times like these, almost like a haunting melody that seems ridiculously disconnected with the present. We are all living through shadow lines we’ve created for ourselves, some created by our past that we refuse to break away from. We still converse through glass walls, always watching a slightly distorted figure of the other, filling in words to lip sync with the words we cannot hear and thus imagine. Wordsworth insistently forces his words from over a hundred years past, lamenting what man has made of man, as I every day walk through Chennai in hopes of causing some dent in a mental makeup--theirs and mine--that will take a long time to go away.
