A Language Remembered

(This post was sent to us by Aarabi Veeraraghavan. Aarabi is a dancer who lives in Madras and raises a fur child and a human child with her husband. She also drinks ridiculous amounts of tea. Visit her blog or follow her on Instagram.)

One of my most enduring memories of childhood is of summer night power cuts and gathering

around taatha to hear stories. Stores of Gods, demons, fantastical creatures and times long gone.

Stories from his childhood that became a part of ours. Stories that asked questions and stories that

provided answers. There was a story for everything and not all were stories we wanted to hear. I

remember being particularly upset about one where wasted food goes back to the earth goddess

to sob. 

Then, there were the terrible tales that the children told each other. About ‘mandiravaadis’ and

‘bhoochandis’. Words and memories that I haven’t revisited or heard in a long time. Words that

remind me of a magical childhood and a world that I hope to share with my toddler in some way. As

parents we spend a lot of time trying to create a ‘magical’ childhood for our children. The magic,

however, is in doing nothing, it is in listening and sharing. It is in keeping things simple. When was

the last time we spent an entire afternoon just sitting around and sharing stories with our children

with no planned ‘activity’? 

As with a lot of things, these stories and words from our childhood are also not easily translatable.

While it is essential to be able to communicate in your mother language, it is in the telling of stories

that you discover the poetry and rich imagery inherent in the language. Remembering a story in my

grandfathers voice with it’s vast and descriptive vocabulary brings back memories of playing dress

up in my grandmothers nine yard silk sarees and cuddling up with Amma (and more stories) for

bedtime. A magician and a ‘mandiravadhi’, though technically the same, are not quite the same.

They practice different styles of magic, as a five year old me was very convinced. One lived in the

world of Arthurian Legends and the other in a little thicket on the banks of the Cauvery. A fair lot is

definitely lost in translation. 

Language, memories and personal histories are, to me, too intricately woven together to separate.

I had no idea that I was inheriting my grandfathers love for language and literature while I sat on

his lap listening to him. On the contrary, i thought i hated the language. I presumed that reading my

Enid Blyton’s and wanting to eat a scone for tea were the beginnings of my creative process. All

those hours I sat in Tamil class at school, listening to a particularly brilliant teacher and struggling

with the grammar of the language, thinking I cannot wait to be done with having to study the

language, what I was doing was to begin to fall in love with the language without quite realising it. It

took me many decades to understand that the beginnings of my creative process indeed lay in

those stories and Tamil classes. 

Today, as a Dancer, I find myself using my mother language as a medium to engage with my

practice. Every time I read a stunning piece of poetry or an evocative line of prose, it inspires and

touches my choreographic process. I think that my ability to access the imaginative scope of my

mother language has been the beginning of my own artistic practice. For, language brings with it

memories, context, cultural references and history.