It and I

The community I was born into speaks a dialect of Kannada called Havyaka. They say it is closer to Haleygannada, or Old Kannada, implying that it is purer. Purity is an obsession in current India, and in the pursuit of the perfectly pure, immense violence is justified. Even though Havyaka is my mother’s tongue, I only learned to speak it at university, in coastal Karnataka, at age twenty-one, under brute pressure from my seniors in class, under unvoiced threat of, How can you not know the tongue, who from the community will marry you, in other words, how can you serve the patriarchy if you don’t speak its oppression? Only much later did the absurdity of these expectations register: how a woman is burdened with the weight of relaying language, and therefore culture, from one generation to the next. For men, upholding patriarchy took up all their hours. At home, Mum and Granny spoke Havyaka in their occasional conversations, and I learned to understand them just fine. But because Dad didn’t speak it—and neither had Grandpa, it seems—it was only the language of the elder women of the household. The language of “its.”

In Havyaka, the pronoun for men is ಅವ / ava, the va slightly nasal in pronunciation. The formal, respectful ಅವ್ವು/ avvu for anyone older, of any gender. The pronoun for women is ಅದು / adu. It. I know of no other language that does this. How it came to be, I don’t know. I have asked community elders, again and again, rejecting the everyday insult of being reduced to a thing. As if we are lifeless and immovable, incapable of speech. But the male scholars, some of whom I even respect, have no idea why women are its; neither do they see why I care. They shrug. This is just how things are, they say, as if I’ve brought needless inconvenience and discomfort to their day.

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Years ago, I published an article, in English, in Himal Southasian, about the skewed sex ratio in the Havyaka community, and how this had led some elders to propose that Kashmiri Pandit women be brought in as brides for Havyaka men. I wrote about the sociocultural problems this would likely lead to. Troublingly, the rationale was that Kashmiri Pandits were pure Brahmins who had been displaced from the 1990s on by violence in the Kashmir Valley. By marrying Havyakas, the women would be “saved” without diluting the purity of the Havyaka blood. To give a broader picture of the community, I also wrote about the language of it. Many Havyaka men took offence to my noting this ugly side of the language. It is nearly a decade since the piece was published, and I continue to get emails and comments berating me for airing our community komana, the Indian loincloth, if you will, in public.

Some insist that no one respects women the way Havyaka men do. Others ask why I thought my outrage at being called an it ought to be advertised to the world. Other men, always men, remind me of bigger issues within the community: that there are real threats to the purity and longevity of the Havyakas, what with girls doing “love marriage,” that too, “out of caste,” and eligible brides demanding that prospective grooms have salaried jobs instead of freelancing as priests or managing farmland in remote villages. The subtext here being that many young girls of marriageable age are no longer following the playbook, and their opinions and choices are becoming inconvenient to the patriarchy.

Occasionally, a woman quietly leaves a message in support, expressing her irritation at being referred to as an it, her exhaustion from the sheer insult of being female in this world.

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I identify myself in my work as a long-lapsed Hindu. At a public event recently, someone on stage turned to me and said that he did not think I had really lapsed. That he did not agree with my statements about my own private life. That he did not believe me.

Elsewhere, a lapsed Kannada speaker came up after I spoke on the politics of language and language making, and told me authoritatively that I must favour the Hindi language because I am Hindu.

I laughed in the man’s face. But with the former, I didn’t have the remove needed to do so, the man too familiar to me, a cherished friend of the family, a retired professor, no less.

When are women believed? When are women not being schooled? When are women not reduced in language, by language? A language holds memories, emotions, ancestry— it is history, food, art, music, and architecture—it is politics and gender, society—it is how we process what makes us human. How how how can a human being be referred to as a thing? Surely a collective decision by the community must have allowed this violence? Didn’t anyone object? Dehumanising someone makes them easier to control, to tame. Classifying women as things makes them easier to idealize as pure objects, even as, in real life, they are insulted.

These questions are important because language(s) in India is where battles are fought. In the last decade alone, the present right-wing government has made innumerable aggressive attempts to impose Hindi, the language spoken in parts of central and northern India, on the rest of the country under the guise of it being a “national” language. I note here that Hindi is one of twenty-two official languages, apart from the 700-odd others spoken in the country.

Each time a government has attempted to impose a national language, it has met with strong resistance, especially from south Indian states. Historically, debates over Hindi imposition have led to riots, even deaths. I live in a country where language is a fuse always waiting to be lit. I think about this, too, when I think about my mother’s tongue.

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That said, I don’t have a poor relationship with Havyaka, perhaps because I don’t think about it or use it every day, or even often. I don’t live where the community predominates, in southwest coastal Karnataka. In recent decades, many Havyakas in the younger generations have moved either abroad, whether to America or elsewhere, or to the state capital of Bengaluru, after traditional professions in agriculture and the priesthood gave way to software engineering and such other businesses. There is a community of Havyakas in Malenadu in central Karnataka who speak the same dialect but with inflections varied enough to be almost mutually unintelligible. I don’t know if there, too, women are its.

I can only speak Havyaka with people I’ve met as an adult. With aunties and uncles and cousins and distant family I have known from childhood, a shyness comes in the way. My limited vocabulary prevents me from catching up on all the gossip with the aunties. With new acquaintances, the topics tend to be simpler and I can get by with what I have.

Havyaka, as a language and community, makes most sense to me in the culinary culture I know and love. Because the women from the coast married men from towns up in the Western Ghats, many Havyakas have, over generations, migrated to the hills for work, bringing their food-making traditions with them. The coconuts had to be from ooru, or “back home,” where one stocked up on breadfruit and jackfruit chips and certain mango pickles during biannual visits. The coconuts in the hill-town markets just didn’t have enough of the heat of the sun in them to make the best curries and chutneys.

The food made it up the hills, which is where I was born and raised, my mum being one of the women who married a man from “up the Ghatta.” And, after years away, I’m living here again. The staple dishes in mum’s kitchen, and now mine, have always included the tambuli and the majjige huli, the patrode, the bhuta kodilu, the menaskaayi, the kottige. The language didn’t quite make the same journey though.

A story from my small town illustrates this violent erasure best: Two women who grew up along the coast speaking Havyaka got married to two brothers in a family of great local standing. After the wedding, the wives were forbidden to speak to each other in Havyaka. The fear was that they would share secrets, that they would share a female language. Another: An older couple, both Havyaka speakers, have never spoken to each other in their shared language. Their odd reasoning being that neither wanted to adapt to the other’s slightly different version of Havyaka, and also, according to the man, “when in Rome . . .” They talk to each other in the local Kannada language, and in Havyaka only to others in the community.

Perhaps it is these stories—whispered hurriedly and with some embarrassment but always understood by the congregation of fellow its—that make me think of the potential of this language and the resistance it can hold space for.

Some parts of a language, whether the tongue is borrowed, learned, or cast aside, and even if it deems us less than human, we reserve for ourselves, for our secrets. Words or sounds whose extra meanings are intentionally not taught to sons and brothers and husbands. I like to think of it as a female language. For instance, a hmm or a very loaded okay. Regular words that, when spoken in a certain tone or particular context, take on deeper meaning. There’s also a paralanguage of gestures, a raised eyebrow here, a flick of the wrist there, an ever-so-slight nod, a certain widening or narrowing of the eyes. These coded words and gestures are designed to keep some things away from male attention and understanding. They might not be exactly the same, but every language has these. Havyaka too. In traditional households where joint family systems prevail, and even in more modern family settings where women rarely have a domestic space to themselves, it makes sense for us to use aspects of language, the very thing we are controlled by, to subvert, dissent, and resist.

When we name something, we bring it to life. We give it a position in the world. When we name something, we also assign it a value. What does it say about a community and its value system when its language views females as things? A language is a living, breathing being. It changes constantly, expanding and contracting in conversation with other linguistic cultures. Surely, then, a word can be replaced? A thing can be reclassified, newly understood? I have often wondered who could effect such changes to a language. How does any language discard words no longer wanted? I would not trust a cluster of men to care, when their larger concern is to maintain the supposed purity and superiority of the community. Who then will figure out how to leave behind this offensive pronoun and do better by our women?

To think, to care, about being an it is to navigate the liminal space between Havyaka and the culture it shapes and is shaped by. To embrace its food, to its generational relationships. To run far from the violence that it engenders when it reduces women to near nothing.

How does language change? Enough voices have to demand it, and force it to change. Perhaps that will happen when we normalise protesting against it just as we have normalised dehumanising. By refusing to answer to it,by rejecting the devaluation of my life, my sex, I hope to make my voice ring loud. We have all got to start somewhere.