Invasion of culture: Indian psychology and English language

       There is a large class of people in India, who tend to speak few words or sentences especially in English. We will try to identify those words and also try to find out the reason behind it.

       Let us look closely into the matter and consider a scenario where someone is speaking in Hindi in front of a formal type aggregation (of Hindi speaking people who also know English). He suddenly finds himself in a situation where he needs to utter some explicit words (related to carnal desire). In most of the cases that person will prefer to use English to express his feelings. Why is so?

       You can find so many examples like these. Also, there are also few words which aren’t in explicit words category and are frequently substituted for their Hindi counterparts. We will discuss them later in this series. We will also discuss about what can prevent this.

       So, coming to the above example, why people tend to use English version of those words? Why aren’t they comfortable in their Hindi versions? Is it true that in our society, we are not habitual of talking about these terms and we don’t feel comfortable in uttering them? So we either talk around them or use English to lessen our guilt, shame etc. I think that this is because of our society and culture where very rarely people talk about these things openly, which makes us little uncomfortable, when we need to talk about them. Also most of the common Hindi terms for these words are either slang or now have become part of ancient Hindi and only have places in text books and sophisticated literature. When the common man needs to express such feelings, he goes for English version and frees himself from guilt. Also, in contrast with this, we always find some words in English which are very frequently used in western society. We influenced by western culture, even feel light and casual while speaking these words in English. Also in the current scenario we have such a big rift in terms of education. This is promoting the feeling that English is the language of elite and if we try to use more and more words of English in our sentences we are being more and more sophisticated.

       So, this difference between societies is promoting the current hybrid Hinglish culture where we can pick up few words of English words or say that sentence in English when we are not comfortable of expressing our feeling in Hindi. This somehow also promotes the tendency to adopt English as primary language.   We are not realizing that modern ideas and culture could be best imbibed by integrating them into Indian culture, not by aping them.

      Since you are aware of this too, the topic is open for discussion. You are welcome to have your comments on it.