On wanting to learn Marathi

For most of my life, Marathi was the symbol of the bad and the boring. It was the language of the annoying relative who gave unwanted advice, and spoke long after I felt the need to listen. It was the language of the never-ending religious ceremony, where one had to pretend to be solemn and serious and sit in uncomfortable positions with no back rest as coils of smoke made a sweltering room hotter. It was the language an incredibly strict tutor would come home to teach me for four hours a week, in the evening, which meant my precious playtime hours were taken away from me.

Things have changed over the last few years. I find myself frequently having fond memories of Marathi, of speaking it, of talking to people I liked in it, and I want to return to it. Part of it has to do with the fact that all my connections with my childhood and my past — my parents and all four grandparents — are no more and I find myself feeling more deeply in Marathi than I ever felt in English. In the language of our colonialists, I am a cold, hard, logician always looking for the rational solution to every problem. In Marathi I find myself think differently, reveal a side of myself I didn’t know existed.

The smallest things set me off. An interview of a Marathi speaking person who is speaking in English with the obvious accent of someone translating directly from their mother tongue into English. Watching Marathi recipe videos starring middle-aged Maharashtrian women. Cooking diwali chiwda successfully after multiple failed attempts. Reading a phrase I last heard sometime in my childhood. And it feels good to hear it, because English often doesn’t provoke a visceral reaction inside my body. And I guess I want to explore this emotional part of myself more and sort of sink deep into it.

Increasingly also, as I attempt to write some fiction, I am realising that in India if you write without engaging with literature in multiple languages, it shows in your writing. When I finally began reading Marathi novels like Tya Varshi and Cobalt Blue, I discovered that even novelists in India are telling stories of people like me or of experiences that I had or wanted to read about, something I did not find in Indian Writing in English.

But my Marathi skills are not very good. I can speak it, listen to it and watch movies and plays in it, but my grasp is very basic. I certainly cannot read entire novels in the language. I finished the above two novels by having their English translations side by side and it’s not a fun way to read, especially if you don’t know a lot of words and are doing more checking meaning than actual reading. I bought a couple of audio books from Snovel and got into them and was listening to them on walks, before sleeping, on long drives, on the pot but I am not into audio books and fell of the wagon. Both times I discovered that my vocabulary was not upto the mark. I don’t have the patience to go to Marathi classes and I don’t think there are classes to better your Marathi to a point where you can read, or if there are, I don’t have an interest in joining them. I like self-directed learning. I briefly considered joining a Masters in Marathi at Mumbai University but that would be placing too much optimism in the Indian education system.

So as the New Year begins, I have armed myself with a few very basic children’s books in Marathi and a translation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. I want to work my way up from the bottom where Marathi reaches the level I have when it comes to reading English, and then perhaps move on to Hindi, or try my hand at translation. One of my dreams is to do a Marathi translation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (if it hasn’t already been done) because my Marathi-reading and speaking relatives could do with a sense of humour. Based on my limited interactions with Maharashtrians, most of them could.

That’s more or less the reason to write this blog, to discuss the books I read, and to have some motivation to continue learning Marathi. Onward and upward.