Subscribe RSSChat on how India is remixing language tend to quite quickly devolve into lamentations about the dominance of English or about how jokes about people who don’t in a manner of speaking English well reveal how colonized Indian minds still are – all in English, of course.
Others worry about whether Hindi and other Indian languages are being irretrievably weakened by the renown of English.
That was the case, too, with a session on language at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Saturday afternoon. But, for a few brief moments, when Tehelka managing editor Tarun Tejpal wasn’t trying to conduct an impromptu reading from one of his novels, Rita Kothari , a professor of discernment and communications, tried to turn the conversation in a different direction.
“What kinds of words do people choose?” asked Professor Kothari, who teaches at the Ahmedabad-based Mudra Inaugurate of Communications and is the co-editor of “Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of Hinglish.” “I’m interested in that.”
