Nov 2, 2010
I heard my wife screaming “Svetlana, read the paragraph!” I was just back from the office and slowly opened the door expecting the outburst of my wife turning the barrel on me to ease her frustration of teaching my daughter English - KG2.
She yelled at me “Arun, it's all because of you that she is not able to read English well. You keep talking in Konkani, and now she will fall way behind other students in English.”
"But dear," I explain to her, "we never spoke English at home, yet I scored very high in English and moreover my grammar marks were better than many of the Manglo-Indians who were studying with me in College in Bangalore."
"Now who are these Manglo-Indians?" she demanded. "Well dear," I said, "this was jointly coined by my Dad and me and we own the copyright."
Well, now lets get to the Manglo-Indians story.
Way back in the 80’s when I was in the Middle School, we in Bangalore had a multicultural set of students. There was a sizeable number of Manglorean kids as it was a Jesuit institution. The surname clearly suggested they were Konkani Catholics. This made me feel at home and when I tried to converse with a few of them they ignored my approach saying they can’t understand a bit of the language (Konkani) which I spoke. I was a bit surprised and a little amused as to how these kids with roots back in Mangalore can deny knowing even a bit of Konkani.
Confused and a little dazed I came back home and took up the issue at dinnertime. My dad, as witty as ever, asked me if I knew who Anglo-Indians were. I said, “Yes, descendants of the British.” "Not exactly," he said “but partly.” He explained at length how the Anglo-Indian community came to India and mingled with the natives.
Now to the main issue of Manglo-Indians. He said these are not descendants but actual Konkani Christians, who do not know Konkani as their parents had forgotten the language due to a peculiar case of lingua-amnesia and spoke only in Engish.
This lingua-amnesia is a strange, phenomenal sickness which occurs in some parts of the world and was said to have originated in Mangalore, a person affected with this disease has a tendency to forget one's mother tongue. In another version of the disease, some suffer from locato-Amnesia (pertaining to forgetting a certain style, behaviour along with a change in the location or area). So it goes this way, a person travelling by airplane prior to the flight converses well in Konkani and the moment the flight lands in Bangalore airport, the locato-amnesia strikes and he forgets Konkani. This is not his fault, but the fault of his poor fate.
Now after this explanation I developed a sense of immense pity to this new breed of Manglo-Indians. Now I knew it's not their fault but this wretched sickness which is taking a toll on our language.
These thoughts kept lingering on my mind and as I entered college I felt that there was nothing like 'lingua-amnesia' and 'locato-amnesia.' It was more to do with self-esteem and inferiority complex. Speaking Konkani makes some people feel inferior. I remember last year in Dubai, I was invited to a house party and of course it was for only us Manglorean crowd. All of a sudden I heard a small girl screaming at her mother and pointing towards my daughter "Mom, she is speaking in Konkani!!!” I remembered Archimedes screaming Eureka, Eureka!!!
Anyway I wasn’t perturbed, but we got all the limelight, because my daughter was the only one speaking in Konkani! My wife Loveline was a bit worried and annoyed. I explained to her that it was not practical to question someone's choice of language. But we could make a small change. I also keep explaining to her that speaking Konkani at home will not affect our daughter's ability to speak English. I have shattered this myth. I did better in English grammar than all my classmates who spoke English at home. I write poems, articles in English and have won many certificates of appreciation in school and college. My daughter is studying in a good school and will soon excel in English.
Thoughts creep on in my mind, we are a small community and one fine day may be after 100 years, none of the Mangloreans will know or speak Konkani and we might land up in a situation akin to Sanskrit today.
Not long ago we were poked as ones with a language with no script; one day we may be known as ones with no language - a parasite community speaking someone else’s language.
It's time we are known as Konkani speaking Manglorean Commnity and not Manglo-Indians.