Dadi and Punjabi

A personal essay on losing a language

My Dada died before my parents were married. I was three years old when my Dadi died. The only memory she figures in is my earliest one. My parents had decided that I would sleep with my grandmother in the spare bedroom of our apartment. I refused to put up with it. I would make my way back to their bedroom and knock once, gently, on the locked door. This was to ensure I didn’t wake my father up while counting on my mother to hear me and open the door. She always did. Dadi had become miffed that her grandson refused to sleep next to her. She would sleep between me and the only side I could use to get off the bed. I would tiptoe over her and go anyway. One time after I had tiptoed over her and knocked on my parent’s bedroom door I heard a bone chilling ‘Ayuuush!’ from Dadi that left me frozen in my tracks. I remember how dark it was and how my eyes had adjusted to it. But I can’t see her in the memory, I can only hear her. The memory ends at that moment when I was caught in the dark, surrounded by the familiar silhouettes of my house, afraid.

Over the years, my mother has rekindled the relationship. She told me that my grandmother’s love for me was firm and abundant. She tells me stories and gives me examples but I don’t remember any of it. Nothing helps sear something onto our brains like fear. Other than my earliest memory, everything else to do with her is gone. This was the early 90s, so while there are photos of us in which I can see snippets of what my mother describes, there are no videos. The only video of my grandmother is my parent’s wedding casette. It is a grainy video with bad audio but I can see her talk, laugh and sing.

It is the first ceremony where, after a short puja, singing and dancing begins. Dadi is surrounded by the women of her family and they start singing Punjabi folk songs. In between and during the songs they tease and chide each other in Punjabi. There are some famous songs like ‘Kala Shah Kala’ that I recognise. My Dadi gets up, laughing she tries to encourage others to join in the fun. My mother once watched this scene and remarked, “Look at that. Your Dadi was so Punjabi she never knew where her pallu was going”. My brother and I laughed at my mother’s belief that the way Punjabi women drape their sarees betrays their preference for salwar kurtas. After giving her pallu some belated attention, my grandmother encourages one of the elders to begin her act. The performance is called Swang/Sang where a short skit is performed related to marriages, their joys and problems. From the way others join in to encourage her, it is clear that she is a veteran of many weddings. She soon has everyone in splits as she draws them into the act, encouraging them to ask her questions to which she gives outrageous answers.

Most of the women in that video have either died or drifted away from our family. The death of my Dadi three years after this video is what led to it as she was a large-hearted woman who kept in touch with everyone. Her death, my father’s death a few years later and our home in faraway Bangalore meant the collapse of a web of relatives. We didn’t know it at the time, but it also meant a final break with Punjabi.

Hindus of Punjab appear to have a tenuous relationship with their mother tongue. Someone once told me that as soon as they leave Punjab, Hindus begin to lose Punjabi. The generation that leaves can understand and speak the language because they grew up in Punjab; children born to them can understand Punjabi as they’ve heard their parents but don’t speak it much; the grandchildren though can neither speak nor understand the language. By this time Hindi would’ve replaced it. When I heard this for the first time, I was surprised by how accurately it fit what had happened in my family. In my case it was hastened by the fact that my mother is from UP. It is only now, with more exposure to Punjabi music, that things are changing for me.

A similar process appears to be underway among Punjabi Muslims and Urdu. Sikhs on the other hand are able to preserve their language for longer. It was their struggle that led to the formation of Indian Punjab, the only state in North India which functions in a language that isn’t Hindi. The demographic changes that partition led to meant that Sikhs were finally a majority in some contiguous districts of Punjab. With Potti Sriramalu starving himself to death, Nehru had relented on the linguistic reorganisation of states. Sikhs had agitated for a Punjabi Suba in the 50s and 60s which resulted in the formation of the state in 1966. During that time, most Punjabi Hindus, afraid of becoming a minority community in the new state reacted with insecurity. They distanced themselves from Punjabi and were encouraged by Hindu groups to return Hindi as their mother tongues in linguistic censuses.  In the 1961 census, many Punjabi Hindus who lived in the Sikh majority districts of what was then PEPSU (Patiala and East Punjab States Union) said that their mother tongue was Hindi, not Punjabi. They did this to maintain the Hindu majority they enjoyed as a part of PEPSU which included modern day Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.  

To me, the insecurity with which Punjabi Hindus had reacted at the prospect of becoming a minority in Indian Punjab was similar to how Indian Muslims reacted at the prospect of a Hindu majority in united India only a few years back. In both cases, this translated to all other layers of identity becoming less important than faith in the political sphere despite the mainstream majority insisting on the secular nature of their demand. In both cases we need to ask whether the majorities did enough to de-hyphenate their nationalisms from their faiths; whether they could have done more to assuage minority fears. The presence of a broader right-wing nationalism that linked Hinduism to Hindi and Hindustan meant that when Punjabi Hindus felt threatened, many were willing to betray Punjabi for Hindi. Hindu opposition involved a refusal to learn the language in schools because that was a demand of the Sikh-led Punjabi Suba movement.

Things were different in the pre-partition Punjab that my grandparents were born in. Although the social forces that led to partition were growing, boys in schools across Punjab learnt Urdu in the Nastaliq script. For men of my great grandfather’s generation who grew up in pre-partition Amritsar, Nastaliq was often the only script that they could read and write in. Girls were a different story. Dadi had told my mother that she had learnt Gurmukhi in her school in Gurdaspur and not Nastaliq. I was always surprised by this. Why was it that men learnt Nastaliq and Dadi ended up learning Gurmukhi? It didn’t make sense until I read Peggy Mohan’s book on Indian languages. In it she explained that in pre-partition Punjab, men regardless of religion learnt Urdu because it was the language of administration and was needed for jobs whereas Hindu and Sikh women, who had no need for jobs, learnt Gurmukhi because it was helpful in reading scripture. The burden of jobs fell on men and the burden of faith fell on women. While many men of Punjab like Mohammed Iqbal, Krishan Chander, Sahir Ludhianvi right up to Gulzar became poets and writers in Urdu, generations of pre-partition women had only Punjabi.  

In the last few years, I have tried to look for those Punjabi songs I heard the women sing in my parent’s wedding cassette. I found versions by artists like Neha Bhasin on YouTube and began learning some of them. Since they were wedding songs, they were from a woman’s perspective and I found myself singing about my nagging mother in-law, how I’d prefer a dark groom who was good to a fair one who drank and gambled and telling my friend who is wearing a sky-blue dupatta that a guy is crazy about her. As my repertoire grew to include other folk songs from channels like Coke Studio Pakistan, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one singing from a woman’s perspective. Ali Sethi was singing as a woman standing on tiptoes waiting for her beloved; Moazzam Ali Khan was also singing as a woman waiting by the river for her loved one; Noori brothers sang as Sohni talking to the clay pot she used in her doomed crossing of the Chenab river to meet her lover; the men of the Chakwal group sing as women in Wah Wah Jhulara and Ishq Aap Bhe Awalla. Ditto the famous ones like Sanu Ek Pal and Laung Gawacha.

Not to mention all the songs that women sing in Punjabi for Coke Studio Pakistan. Seen this way it made sense that in songs that are a mashup of Urdu and Punjabi like ‘Latthey di Chadar’, Farhan Saeed sings the Urdu part while Qurratulain Baloch is called upon to sing in Punjabi. I looked for folk songs on love in Punjabi from a man’s perspective and struggled to find them. The ones that exist are more recent creations. Some of the folk songs on God were from a male perspective but love songs usually weren’t. I wondered whether this had anything to do with the women getting together and singing at Punjabi weddings. Did that space across centuries also create a genre of women centric love songs that emerged from wedding folk music? Was it about a time when it wasn’t considered manly to sing about love? Did men also contribute in writing these songs to express themselves? Did access to other languages for men create a different outlet for expression through poetry that wasn’t available to women who used folk music instead?

You can’t mourn what you don’t know. Even if you believe it to be a loss. I have felt that way about both Dadi and Punjabi. But when Hindi replaces Punjabi, it offers a window. The languages are so close that seeing Punjabi through Hindi is like looking at scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. A lot is familiar yet out of place. You can see a nose here, an eye there but they cannot be put together outside Punjab. When I started learning Punjabi folk songs, I had thought of it as a way to reconnect with a world I should have inherited. But I now realize that was never possible; there is no reconnecting without the people. I was learning the songs so that once that world was on my fingertips, I could begin to experience its loss.