My mother nags me every day about how I cannot stand up for myself. This time, she made it clear to me that she would not call the clinic and book my appointment for a vaccination dose. After 16 short, comfortable years of hiding behind my mother’s back and pulling on my father’s sleeve to avoid answering questions and holding conversations, I was on my own.

 

I called the number, and tried to navigate a jumbled set of thoughts— is a “good morning” too casual, is a “hello” disrespectfully informal? A woman picked up and started talking in Nepali. As I try to answer her questions and decode a series of numbers– vocabulary from a language I did not care to revise after my years in India– I find myself grossly under-equipped to converse in Nepali. 

 

My Nepali tries, falters, and eventually collapses. I flutter from Nepali to English, from English to Nepali. It felt like I was balancing on the precipice of slumber when, suddenly, my laptop loudly reminds me of a movie I promised to finish that night. My wiser and shier inner voice tells me to conclude the call– ‘I’m wasting her time trying and failing to understand simple Nepali!” This was the first time it occurred to me that my mother tongue was slipping through my fingers. My tongue had begun to lose its form– the form that I had sculpted over years, by reciting Nepali kavitas in front of the mirror, my mother, my grandparents, and the glaring audiences in morning assemblies. Like an idle brain’s wrinkles softening, my tongue was forgetting the words it once confidently articulated, slipping into the monotone gait of English. 

 

Can languages co-exist? Can I truly be bilingual without compromising on my understanding of both languages? Or, like empires, does one conquer the other? Do they emerge only to fall? Civilizations competent and aged have fallen. Their intricate designs of culture and society have been simplified to an incomplete tale sporting large, gaping holes. If something as mammoth as an entire civilization can fall like monarch butterflies in pelting rain, what is language in comparison? With the force-feeding of English words to children, anxious linguists and historians note a problem graver than a child’s future employability. The obsoletion of a language is a modest issue in comparison to entire civilizations dramatically collapsing because the ones who feel the greatest loss are those with whom these languages disappear, leaving nobody but language experts in grief. 

 

I remember, with odd clarity, the exact number of languages that exist in Nepal. In social studies classes, our school attempted to tattoo rudimentary knowledge about our country and culture onto our brains. One hundred and twenty three: the exact number of languages in Nepal—a country that requires intensely close inspection of a globe to find. Today, I repeat the number like a parrot with little understanding of how giant the number a hundred and twenty-three and the struggle of speakers and linguists to sustain this number is. 

 

Just as the borders of empires caved in and spread out, so did the borders of language in Nepal. When the Rana dynasty carried out a bloody coup d’état on the Shah monarchy in 1846, the trajectory of Nepal’s future was plagued by the family’s tyranny but also escaped brutal subjugation by the British Empire. The Ranas maintained close but inferior relations with the British and were the sole reason the boundaries of the British colony in India respected the timid Nepali state’s sovereignty. Jung Bahadur Rana, who engineered the violent coup and raised his bloodline to political prominence, held a deep admiration for British culture and believed it superior to Nepali culture. Rana and his successors aligned themselves with the British, facilitating cultural whitewashing with little to no intervention from the British themselves. The idea of prestige derived from acting more British led the Ranas to tinge Nepali culture with English hues. 

 

The Ranas rule of Nepal resembled Great Britain’s rule over its colonies. The Ranas lived lavishly from the taxes of the Nepali peasantry, reflecting in the grimy Nepali landscape dotted with Rana tusk-white palaces that closely resemble British aristocratic abodes. To reinforce their elevated status and appease the British consul in Kathmandu, the Ranas welcomed their neighbor’s tongue into the country. The establishment of the English medium ‘Durbar High School’ in 1854 and multiple other campuses for higher studies first integrated the English language into Nepali education. 

 

The Rana rule not only bred English speakers in Nepal but gradually suppressed local languages in favor of their own tongue, Nepali. The Newari artisans of the Kathmandu valley, who once spread across three kingdoms, were pushed back into three city centers in Kathmandu, while the rest of the land was populated with immigrants. The melting bowl of languages, coupled with the emerging enthusiasm for the English language, diluted the rich, local linguistic diversity of Nepal. 

 

Within five years of the 1947 collapse of the British Raj in India and the emergence of an Indian government unsympathetic to the British’s autocratic kin, the Rana dynasty crumbled in 1951. The Shahs, who had been ousted a century prior, reclaimed power over a transformed Nepal. While the Ranas' mainstream political prominence dissolved as new leaders took the stage, their values of English as a status symbol and the suppression of local dialects continued to spread vigorously after the fall of the regime. 

 

The Shahs inherited the Ranas' intimate relations with the British. They entertained the members of the royal family on state visits to Kathmandu and even visited Buckingham palace themselves. The Nepali crowds cheered gaily at the sight of the British Royal couple as loudly, or perhaps louder, than they would at their own rulers. The adoration of the English persisted, and even deepened, in the turbulent years after the fall of the British empire and of the Ranas.  

 

With cultural elements like books, radio shows, and movies penetrating a rigid Nepali cultural system, Western ideas spread furiously. The youth of the 1970s and 1980s, living in a politically unstable yet deeply traditional Nepal, were drawn to these democratic ideas. They spoke, learned, sang, and recited English in an attempt to carve their own place in Nepali culture. English, from this generation on, became a language only second to Nepali. 

 

Today, no matter how my foundations were in Nepali, I have moved away from my roots. While I still am connected to Nepal, my language and my growth has distanced me far enough that I cannot simply look down to find my roots below me. English is the language I think in, speak in, and the one I will likely pass on to further generations. My Newari is fractured, limited to a few monosyllabic responses. My knowledge of the language that my ancestors— chased into the far ends of the Kathmandu valley— spoke is estranged from my tongue and the future of my bloodline. If somebody asks me to speak my language, I speak Nepali—the language the Ranas perpetuated— not Newari. 

​

Mahakavi Laxmi Prasad Devkota, whose poems constitute every Nepali child’s initiation to Nepali poetry, graduated from Durbar High School—the same school first opened by the Ranas, which took incredible pride in speaking English, and at having lacked funds for further education, began to peddle across the valley to tutor Rana children. 

 

In his essay Oh! English, Devkota  writes, “we seem to think that the pinnacle of education for a member of the Aryan race is to speak English and shake hands with the White Man.” He later comes to terms with the grave mistake of submitting to a culture that was not his. Devkota writes of the high post a man who can speak English achieves and lives with, until later confronted by the loss of his identity. He expresses in the same essay, “we called education anything that shook up our beliefs… We were losing our independence as if servitude was our nature.” The loss of Nepal’s indigenous language to a more dominant one is inevitable, especially when we have been subject to such incohesion and the idea of British superiority throughout history. As I author this article in English, I am only aiding the conquest of the English language.

 

Excavating the far corners of my memory, I remember a man we called dadaji, who studied in the same rooms as Mahakavi Laxmi Prasad Devkota in Durbar High school, delivering a kavita wachan in our primary school classroom. After releasing a deep “hmph,” he would settle into his chair and then, into his story. His voice, wading through age, was punctuated with the knowledge of a time only he knew and one we could only imagine. He recited poems interlaced with laya, which I can still recall the words to, despite my degrading competence in Nepali:

 

banu satya badi padhu nitya bidhya,

hatau sabai chitta dekhin abidhya.

 

 In English: 

Be truthful, read regularly,  

Get rid of the bad feelings to ignorance.

​

​

Written by Pradnya Pradhan

Edited by Anushka Roy

Designed By Alima Shala