What's my culture?
I don’t think that I am like most people. This thought came to me while reading
’s recent piece, “There are trips and trips”. “Now, I don’t want to diminish the complex feelings and dynamics associated with “individual multiculturalism”, which is also something I deeply identify with, being a Brazilian-Finn that’s lived in six different countries. But in El Chaltén I also had a strong sense of “these people are like me”, albeit not in a physical appearance sense”.I have never had this strong sense of “these people are like me”, with anyone, ever, maybe except my immediate family, but even then, I have always felt that I am very different from them. Perhaps it is because I was culturally quite far away from the culture that I grew up in—Odia in Delhi. In India, where you come from is usually not governed by where you were born and raised, it is largely governed by the culture of the household. I learnt to speak Hindi and Odia together (but out of the two, only learnt how to read and write in Hindi), and I had always known that I ought to speak Hindi outside and Odia at home. For the longest time, I thought that everyone did that—everyone had a different language at home but spoke Hindi when they stepped outside their homes. The Odia community in Delhi rarely organised cultural events like the Bengali or the Tamil communities did, so there wasn’t this sense of belonging with my Odia roots.
“Wait, so do you consider yourself North Indian now?”, a fellow Odia-Delhiite asked me at 14 years of age while we were discussing the great north-south cultural divide of India. “Aren’t we supposed to be Odia? We’re from the east!”
“Yeah but I was born here, I have lived my entire life here. I think that should be grounds for me to classify myself as North Indian too, right?”
“You sometimes speak as if you were from the 60s”, a local in Odisha (the East Indian state where I am supposed to be from) once told me.
I had moved to Odisha after school, for the first set of higher studies that I pursued, and my Odia speaking skills had to face a tough challenge. I had always spoken the language with my parents and grand-parents, so I had a tough time understanding the nuances of the young speech. It didn’t help that the dialects of the language were almost mutually unintelligible, at least for my “non-native” ears, as they would be described. Odia “natives” chose to speak in their broken Hindi with me because they assumed that I didn’t speak the language, or at least, didn’t speak it well.
I almost felt illiterate during my first few years living in Odisha. How could I have been Odia when I didn’t even know how to read and write in my language? I never had to learn it growing up in Delhi. (The fact that I learnt it later in life, and can now, at least read it, albeit like a toddler, is besides the point.)
“Are you from Delhi-Delhi or from somewhere else?”, a fellow Indian, Gujarati from Mumbai, asked me, here in Marseille, France. I understood the double-emphasis on Delhi almost instantly.
“No I am Odia but from Delhi”
“Ah that makes more sense!”
“And this is Piyush, from Marseille”, a fellow Marseillais introduced me to his friends from Paris, establishing the evergreen Paris-Marseille rivalry between us.
“Well, yeah, but I am actually from India”, I said, in my defence.
“We’ve adopted you now. You’re from Marseille, too.”
What I find particularly moving is your challenge of feeling almost 'illiterate' in your own culture! We've all, at some point or the other, found ourselves straddling different worlds. Thank you for sharing this story!