"Where are you from? I can't seem to place you."

"Oh, I'm Tamil.I grew up in Bangalore. So I speak Kannada too.”

I get this "I can't place you" reaction sometimes. It's seemingly innocuous, but it always catches me off guard.

Until some years ago, I secretly wore this ‘unplaceability’ like a badge of honor - I thought it made me seem like a real enigma.

More recently though, that misplaced pride has given way to an awkward confusion.

It turns out that I can't even place myself.

This struggle to be ‘placed’ hits at the core of a certain strangeness in the postcolonial identity. It’s a peculiar type of linguistic and cultural displacement.

I've wondered if my over-performance of English over the years has contributed to this. It has maybe a led to a type of affectedness in how I express myself. And maybe that affectedness has sunk deep into my bone marrow.

It is both me and not me at the same time.

Language has a way of getting under your skin. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, controversial as it is, is curious. It theorises that languages are paradigm-defining - the way a language conceptualises life can quite literally define how you view life.

Languages conceptualise life relatively differently.

• Take time, for instance. In English, we perceive time as a linear concept - past, present, and future neatly laid out on a timeline. But Mandarin Chinese for one lacks grammatical tenses. Instead, time is often indicated through context or specific time words.

• Or color. In Russian, there's no single word for "blue". Instead, they use "goluboy" for light blue and "siniy" for dark blue. These aren't just shades; they're distinct color categories. Studies have shown that Russian speakers can distinguish between these blues more quickly than English speakers.

• Gender in language adds another layer of complexity. In Hindi, even inanimate objects are gendered. A table is feminine, while a chair is masculine. German goes further, with three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. English, in contrast, is largely gender-neutral for objects.

• Then there's the matter of collective versus individualistic language structures. In Japanese, the word for 'I' changes based on your gender, age, and social status relative to who you're speaking to. The language is built around social relationships and hierarchy.

If we assume the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to be even partially true, it means that each language carves distinct neural pathways, shaping how we categorize experiences, perceive time, assign blame, or even see colors.

It's a dizzying thought. Especially if you speak and think in several languages.

*

My father took a lot of pride in my ability to be highly specific with my choice of words in English.

When I was not even five, he'd tell relatives who'd be confused by my overly anglicized demeanor, "She thinks in English".

My aunt, who was somewhat his sidekick, would agree and exaggerate. "Oh, she even dreams in English."

The unspoken, perhaps unintended lesson there was that my Tamil-ness was not as special.

As a full-grown adult, this tyranny of English continues to reign. Interactions with allegedly native English speakers (and in 2024, who is a native speaker of English anyway?) are sometimes an amusing, heady experience.

"Oh, Indians are so hyperbolic. They use such ornamental English."

You see, even after turning colonization on its head, the power structures are stubborn and don't give way. You have to express yourself in a very particular way. And the particularity is strikingly Western.

In generous moments, and yes I still have them, I sometimes wonder if matters of identity are so serious still. Can I transcend it all by simply being myself? By radically accepting history for how it transpired and taking reality now with a spirit of "everything is exactly as it should be"?

"Oh, but you don't have as much of an accent," someone said to me recently. My ears burnt up like asphalt.

Maybe I worked too hard at neutralizing it.

*

This post was inspired by Raju Tai’s frank and moving essay, Confessions of An English Teacher from some weeks ago, which I re-read many times.