Kamayani

There are some things that are destroyed that will never come back and one of them is culture. I mourn it and that’s what I can do as I see the mongrel cultural hyperreality functioning at its place. Culture like all things evolved and the mongrel hyperreality too is a culture but it can’t replace the refinement of the culture that I saw and lived in in the 90s. It is quite late that I realised that deletion of refinement which includes cultural refinement in the lower and middle classes is intentional. I had no idea that English as a linguistic privilege is a base tenet of the deep machine of this country until I ended up realising it. The so called upper class of this nation, and I’m talking about the actual upper class, those who have achieved irreversible edge in power dynamic, speak in English and so they employ individuals to gatekeep English from the common folk. Imagine being so low in self-esteem that you have to gatekeep a foreign language from the common folk. English was just a language for me, but it is a language that I love because it is one of the most spoken and most travelled language and if you have to transmit your ideas to more number of people you have to know English. English has words and concepts to name and counter oppression, manipulation and exploitation which you have to express in long sentences in common Hindi which is mostly devoid of terms and concepts to counter oppression, manipulation and exploitation which are present in Shudh Hindi or Sanskritised Hindi. However Hindi is not that bad either but in the past decade I have seen literary Hindi getting crushed and deleted from the national narrative and popular culture and official Hindi is just for government communication in North Indian states and it is obviously not literary Hindi. The colloquial and common Hindi speaking individuals end up making fun of standard and shudh forms of Hindi but anyone who has listened to All India Radio broadcasts in the 90s know how beautiful and dignified the standard Hindi actually is. Like I ask people to read early 20^th century English literature from Europe and North America, the same way I would I ask people to read early and mid 20^th century Hindi literature from India. If you don’t decide which culture to follow, the country would choose it for you and, as far as my experience goes, it wouldn’t choose something good and dignified. One has to get acquainted to Jaishankar Prasad, Premchand and Ramdhari Singh Dinkar and countless others that left dignified literature for people to know how their standard language actually sounds like. I write in English only because it has the capacity to reach more people and given the suppression of Hindi literature which was made to look like a side-effect of modernity there are no takers for it anymore and Hindi literary aesthetics are almost dead by now. When I realised the total inauthenticity of the culture we live in I ended up making modules of my cultures, the colloquial as I knew it from my villages, the Hindi literary from 90s Hindi magazines and literary writings of 19^th and 20^th century and English from the early 20^th century and the contemporary narrative. Folk cultures have been destroyed and every person is an island of their social media algorithm and there is not much that can be done except salvaging some dignity.