A Quote by Suhasini Maniratnam
We south Indians are clannish and comfortable about our languages.
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I am comfortable with all four South Indian languages.
We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.
I notice that Indians love to tweet about each other - will be like, yeah, go India, we're awesome, Indians are awesome, here is another example of an awesome Indian. That's a dangerous false nationalism that I am not interested in. There's a huge amount of diversity within our so-called communities; within the South Asian community, there are people who would never talk to each other.
We need to give out portrayal of ourselves. Every non-Indian writer writes about 1860 to 1890 pretty much, and there is no non-Indian writer that can write movies about contemporary Indians. Only Indians can. Indians are usually romanticized. Non-Indians are totally irrepsonsible with the appropriation of Indians, because any time tou have an Indian in a movie, it's political. They're not used as people, they're used as points.
Most of us in the media are, by and large, sentimental about our national identity, but comfortable enough in our skins as Indians, to be deeply self-critical. The problem arises when loyalty to India gets mixed up with loyalty to the government of the day.
When I hear myself speak French, I look at myself differently. Certain aspects will feel closer to the way I feel or the way I am and others won't. I like that - to tour different sides of yourself. I often find when looking at people who are comfortable in many languages, they're more comfortable talking about emotional stuff in a certain language or political stuff in another and that's really interesting, how people relate to those languages.
We can appreciate each other's languages. And the question of being uncomfortable about our languages would go away.
Writing in African languages became a topic of discussion in conferences, in schools, in classrooms; the issue is always being raised - so it's no longer "in the closet," as it were. It's part of the discussion going on about the future of African literature. The same questions are there in Native American languages, they're there in native Canadian languages, they're there is some marginalized European languages, like say, Irish. So what I thought was just an African problem or issue is actually a global phenomenon about relationships of power between languages and cultures.
I am South African and I am so aware, even as a white, privileged South African, that even within our community of privilege the idea of talking about sex or sexual preference or sexual identity or anything like that was just, nobody ever did that and nobody ever felt comfortable doing that.
You've got the whole civil rights movements emanating from the south, you've got the music that came out of the south that is the core of our current music, so for me that thinking comes out of having Dukes of Hazzard thrown in your face: that the south is a bunch of twangy people that I can't understand. So this is, hopefully, part of the movement to restore the south to its proper and rightful place in our nation... which is huge and pervasive. It's not about Texas - I'm not saying Texas doesn't have it's own unique history - but the south has this at its core.
Most educated Indians are bilingual. Amongst the urban elite though, there is a disdain for regional languages. That's unfortunate.
If you're black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. Long as you south of the Canadian border, you're south.
One of the prime backers of land bill was a Republican Congressman, a Paul Gosar. And when he was challenged by an Apache on this bill, he said, well, you know, Indians are wards of the federal government. This happened recently.That congressperson is obviously stuck in the 19th century when he thinks about Indians. How is that person going to legislate and treat Indians fairly and respect their rights when he has this sort of infantilized image of Indians as not being, you know, up to the same level of responsibility as everybody else?
I often find myself unsatisfied with books 'about' Indians because they are written from the viewpoint of non-Indians.
Where are the Black businesses? They're not here. The Koreans are here, the Chinese are here, the Arabs are here, the Indians are here. Everybody that wants to make a dollar is making a dollar on our lack of thought to do something for ourselves that was not present in that older generation that came from the South.
The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.
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