The Weight of Civilization

In Black Skin, White Masks political philosopher Frantz Fanon argues that to speak a language is to ‘assume a culture’ and ‘support the weight of a civilization’. In saying this, Fanon was referring to how black Antilleans adopt the French language to climb the social ladder, ultimately forcing them to internalise the colonial culture that devalues their own identity. However, Fanon’s statement also alludes to a broader burden: the weight of speaking or unspeaking a language. In my English degree, we often study how language operates as our most powerful force. It is what connects us, bonding us over words tied together like pearls on a thread. Yet when fractured and assaulted, language also draws lines in the sand. Perhaps that's why staccatos in speeches are always uncomfortable. 

Monkeys on the Roof

Last year, I lost my nanu to a terrible accident. A routine morning walk changed everything. Struck by a car, my nanu survived in a coma for more than a year before succumbing to his injuries. 2025 was the first time I went back to India after a long time. I had never imagined that I would be returning to Doon Valley for a funeral. Let alone the funeral of a man I love. I remember sitting in the car and watching monkeys have sex on the roof of the Buddhist monastery. As a child I would always laugh at the sight. But this absurdity could no longer amuse me. I could only think of my nanu who would drive me through these gullies on his scooty and tell me all about the stupa and the monastery, intentionally mixing Hindi with Garhwali like street vendors who would mix their spices. I found this flavour quite uncomfortable, but he wanted me to inherit the words which were dying out. The words which formed the vulnerable roots of the language my family belongs to. Back then I didn’t understand the lesson my nanu was trying to teach me: language is fragile.

Amnesic Alphabet 

I didn’t realise the fragility of language until after my nanu’s death. Statistically, there are 2.5 million speakers of Garhwali (an Indigenous Indian language spoken near the Himalaya). Nonetheless, UNESCO classifies the language as “vulnerable”. There are many reasons behind Garhwali’s vulnerability. Urbanisation, institutional absence, social stigma and a lack of intergenerational transmission means that Garhwali is predominantly spoken by elderly individuals. The younger generation hardly speaks the language. In my own family, my cousins who have been born and raised in the Garhwal region stumble over simple tenses when attempting to put together a decent sentence. They are hardly the only ones. My mother often notes how individuals from her own generation have lost touch with the language they were raised with. Migrating into urban centres, these individuals stop speaking the language until one day, what was once so natural to them becomes seemingly segmented. I like to think of this as a deliberate form of intergenerational amnesia. Sometimes, I want to denounce this intergenerational amnesia, but I can’t. I am also an amnesic patient. 

Memories 

Fortunately, my linguistic amnesia doesn’t erode my childhood memories of my nanu: Chow Mein at Asia Garden Cafe, walking through Clement Town Cantonment, a rickshaw ride through Mussoorie. However, now that he is gone, the memory that stands out most pertinently is the memory of his playful nagging. He would frequently nag me to speak Garhwali and learn Hindi despite knowing my English-dominant upbringing. Still, every year when I would visit him, he would always buy me a heap of Hindi language workbooks and sporadically endeavour to hold conversations in Garhwali. He wanted me to know these languages like I knew the back of my hand. It was a simple request coming from a man who could bridge the vast divides between English, Hindi, Tibetan, and Russian. I cannot say I completely failed him. I can speak Hindi fluently (in an albeit thick English accent) but cannot read or write it. I can fully understand Garhwali but struggle to stitch together my sentences. So, maybe my failure has only been only partial. 

Failed

Staccatos are uncomfortable because language is our anchor in the world. Therefore, my failure is not partial. My failure is a complete failure.

The Drawer of Scraps 

After nanu died I found scraps of his writing in the family library. For an organized man, he ironically wrote poetry in a very unorganized manner. My mother would always tell him to keep a dedicated diary or to collect his poetry in a folder. I believe he tried but those scraps would always end up somewhere. I found pages of his poetry inside the Oxford Dictionary and verses scribbled inside a short-story collection of Akbar and Birbal. Every now and then, my mausi frequently stumbles upon his poetry inside random drawers or tucked between random sheets. It reminds me of a trail. A trail of words he has left behind for us to discover. Unfortunately, I cannot discover the entirety of his trail. He wrote his poetry in Hindi and despite wanting to, I cannot read it. It is here that Fanon’s words make sense to me. To speak a language is to assume a culture but to lose a language is to lose access to it. I can touch and feel my nanu’s handwriting. However, my inability to read his handwriting is not just a simple gap in literacy—it is the residue of a cultural displacement I have inherited without choosing. 

A Non-Consensual Inheritance 

Language is a non-consensual inheritance. 

Many of my friends with a transnational identity struggle, through no fault of their own, to speak their native language. Some of them were raised with parents who intentionally chose to not pass down their mother tongue. Some of them found the labyrinth of bilingualism or multilingualism too hard to navigate. Some consciously abandoned their language because the last thing you want as a child is to stick out like a sore thumb. Some of them carry their language in broken fragments like I do.

But what is the politics behind unlearning a language? It is not loud and clamouring. It is not an intense soliloquy delivered before a madding crowd. It is quotidian and almost imperceptible. Consider a parent switching to English at a dinner table, a child embarrassed to speak with an accent, a school curriculum that discards regional and indigenous languages. Unlearning is not a single moment but a chain of slow erosions. It happens bit by bit. It happens through choices shaped by forces larger than us. The reason why I couldn’t learn to read and write Hindi is because I had to work strenuously to master English in a classroom where I was one of the only people of colour. The reason why I couldn’t learn to speak Garhwali fluently is because my parents tried to ensure that my Hindi-speaking skills were impeccable before the multilingualism confused me. I consented to none of this.

Ganges 

When my nanu lay on his coma-bed I made a pact. If he survived, I would commit myself to the cause of masterfully speaking Garhwali. I would practice day and night. I would walk around in an uncomfortable skin (English is the only language that brings me comfort) and trip over my alphabet before rising again. He is dead now. My mother took me to the River Ganges where they scattered his ashes. A little girl came up to me and begged me for money by the riverbed. I told her I didn’t have any.

“What country are you from?” she asked me as we stood by the water. 

“How do you know I’m not from here?” I asked her.

“Your language” she told me. “It sounds different. You sound different.”

Misdiagnosis

Maybe I am not an amnesic patient after all. Maybe I am just misdiagnosed. People often assume that forgetting is always deliberate. They treat it like a haphazard decision that is made lightly and enacted daily. And sometimes it is—Garhwali is full of deliberate forgetting. Parents ‘accidentally’ stop speaking the language to their children, believing they are protecting them from the inconvenience of slipping into a devalued tongue. And in their defense, Hindi certainly has greater cultural capital than Garhwali, though in practice it is the hybrid tongue of Hinglish that dominates. I have beef with Hinglish. It rewards assimilation more than preservation. Similarly, forgetting Garhwali to speak Hindi is also a form of assimilation by its own right. Accordingly, it is at this point of assimilating that the process of misdiagnosis slowly seeps in. When a language becomes socially inconvenient, marginalized, and delegitimized the child who grows up without it is blamed for a forgetting that was never theirs to choose. So maybe forgetting a language is a form of sociopolitical amnesia. We don’t choose to forget. We are raised in systems that imbue forgetting with medicinal value. Systems built on the erasure of Indigenous languages, the global hegemony of English, the Eurocentrism behind canonised texts, the hierarchy of accents, and the implications of a curriculum centred on systems of cultural authority. 

Can the Subaltern Speak?

 In her seminal essay “Can the subaltern speak?” literary theorist and feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak questions whether the subaltern can speak. But perhaps that’s the wrong question to ask. Perhaps it is more important to ask if we can learn to listen to those we have already silenced.

Evelyn Araluen’s poem “Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal” captures this dynamic beautifully. Fracturing into a bilingual collage, the poem draws attention to the hope and grief the speaker navigates as she reflects on the process of learning and reclaiming language as an adult.

 “And god, I don’t even know/if I’m saying it right,” Araluen's speaker says as they endeavour to learn their ancestral language (Bundjalung) while living on stolen land on Tharawal in Western Sydney. Written against a decolonial context, Araluen’s words speak to the burden vested in language. Her tribulations and uncertainty are not simply a series of linguistic hiccups. They accentuate how the subaltern isn’t silent because she lacks a voice. She is silent because the structures around her have delegitimized her speech and erased her language. Araluen speaks into a landscape that has assaulted and crushed her native tongue. But still, she speaks on.

I cannot claim the violence behind Araluen’s hesitation. Her struggles with language emerge from a colonial history far heavier and more violent than anything I have ever experienced but the logic is familiar: forgetting was never personal. It was never voluntary. It springs from a historical hierarchy of audibility which articulates which languages are heard and which dissolve into thin air. My own loss lingers within the architecture of this structure. I love my nanu, but language has always been a non-consensual inheritance.