No Garam Aloo in Tamil Nadu

Image Credits: Aarti Krishnakumar, Aarti’s Substack

This flash essay is part of a collaborative, constrained-writing challenge undertaken by some members of the Bangalore Substack Writers Group. This month, each of us examined the concept of ‘LANGUAGE’. At the bottom of this snippet, you’ll find links to other essays by fellow writers.

There was something about the way my Tamil boss spoke Kannada that I found odd. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. And yet every time she spoke, my brain would go ‘No, wrong, incorrect’, without a reason. Just sounded off, you know? It wasn’t a grammatical mistake because those are easy to spot. My mother’s Kannada had plenty and I had no difficulty in noticing them. While speaking Kannada, she had been known to give respect to dogs and none to the elderly. With my boss, it was something more subtle because the grammar was alright. I put it down to not being able to eye to eye with her most of the time and dropped it.

I left that job and a few years rolled by when I found some folk on language Twitter discussing something called the ‘Kutriyalugaram’. This is the short -u sound at the end of words in Tamil. Think of ‘Tamil Nadu’ for example. In Tamil, the -u at the end of Nadu is the short vowel so the word is pronounced something close to ‘Nad-uh’. This applies to a large number of words in the language like Oor-uh, the dravidian word for village. Kannada on the other hand is known for words that have long vowel endings and the words become Nadoo and Ooroo.

In that moment I remembered the Kannada my boss spoke and understood why it had sounded so different. My boss, born and raised in Tamil Nadu, had transplanted her Tamil substrate short -u into Kannada words which ended with the long vowel. Her hogoo – go in Kannada – became hog-uh and kotbidoo – give in Kannada – became kotbid-uh. And so on. If she wanted to tell the office boy to serve tea to the guests in that room she’d point and say hog-uh alli kotbid-uh instead of hogoo alli kotbidoo. Figuring this out felt a bit like finding the name of a lost song you had heard as a kid.

But I struggled to remember the name of the Tamil phonetic rule. After forgetting it a couple of times, my Hindi brain created a pneumonic to remember ‘Kutriyalugaram’. I first split it into three words – kutri, alu and garam. And then came up with ‘No garam aloo in Tamil Nadu’. Al-uh, maybe. I’m not proud of it, but it worked. And if, as for me, Aloo and Nadu create a rhyming rhythm for you in the sentence, it is because you’re not applying the Kutriyalugaram of Tamil to Nadu despite reading about it a few sentences back because your languages don’t have it.

So even if we can pronounce words according to a new language’s rules if we try, when we summon languages and allow them to flow, what’s in our bones will out. The fact that my boss’ Kutriyalugaram Kannada isn’t (yet) political also helped. It reinforced the fact that regardless of politics, even if we learn new languages well, our tongues will recognize older loyalties. And so these days when I talk to people born North of the Vindhyas who delete the shwa vowel at the end of Kannada and say Kannad, I no longer feel the urge to correct them.

Here’s a list of other flash essays by fellow Bangalore Substack writers:

• Loss of a language By Rakhi Anil, Rakhi’s Substack

• Beyond Words and Dialects by Aarti Krishnakumar, Aarti’s Substack

• In search of my lost mother tongue by Siddhesh Raut, Shana, Ded Shana

• The language question by Rahul Singh, Mehfil

• Geography & Language by Devayani Khare, Geosophy

• The Dance of Languages by Haridas Jayakumar, Harry

• Poetic Silence - From Anand Bhavan to 3039 and back by Amit Charles, @acnotes

• Lost in translation by Vikram, Vikram’s Substack

• I’ve been thinking a lot about tongues, again. by Ameya, (Always) Ameya

• The Language Beneath Words by Mihir Chate, Mihir's Substack

• What does this mean? by Nidhishree Venugopal, General in her Labyrinth

• I love the Language of, by Shruthi Iyer

• The Language of Murder by Gowri N Kishore | About Murder, She Wrote.

• I have no words by Richa Vadini Singh, Here’s What I Think

• Jal-Elephants, Thread-Navels, and Other Sanskrit Beasts by Rajat Gururaj, I came, I saw, I Floundered

• Of Language, Love and Longing: Politics, Mother Tongue and Loss by Aryan Kavan Gowda, Wonderings of a Wanderer

• The Bengaluru Blend by Avinash Shenoy, Off the walls

• An Ode to Languages, by Lavina G, The Nexus Terrain

I have also written personal essays on my relationship with Punjabi, Hindi, Hindi-Urdu and Kannada. Hope you like them.