Column

Have you ever been in a taxi in an alien city trying to reach your destination without the local language? That’s when the conversation with the taxi driver is restricted to encouraging smiles and emphatic repetitions of the name of your destination. You repeat the address slowly and loudly, as if the driver was not just Greek (or French or Tamil or Spanish or Oriya, anything but a speaker of your languages) but also deaf, and possibly memory-less. If you know a bit of the local lingo you try cheery monosyllables, ignoring his questions which you cannot understand, hoping that he will take you for a native and not rip you off. Or you pretend to be an undercover native who knows everything but is too busy to chit-chat with the driver.

All else failing, you lapse into sign language, especially when the fare is demanded in an alien tongue and soon you are desperately flashing various notes and coins to figure out how many of each he wishes to grab, and why. You always want to know why, because even while being ripped off you need to pretend that you are in control and the money being plucked from the grand display on your palms is your calculated contribution.

Now imagine that happening in your own city. The cabbie is incommunicado till you lapse into place names and sign language. But this time, you cut out the smiles. You growl and roar, for this is your home. The driver has no business being in the streets if he can’t even follow your language. You have a right to be understood at home. You have a right to be comfortable. These taxi drivers and other migrants are the aliens. And have no right to be here if they make youuncomfortable. Right?

Not really. It’s easy to feel alienated on your home turf when crowded by outsiders. That’s the way they feel in England about us, for example. But that doesn’t stop them from giving us equal opportunities or basic rights. Even though as economic migrants in the West we Indians are actually much worse than the Biharis and others who migrate from the poorer regions of India to our big metros in search of employment. We set up house in a foreign country, take all the social advantages offered to residents, refuse to learn the local language, disdain their customs, disrespect their culture, send our money back to India, bring our children back to get married and expect to be treated as equals in their country. Learning the language is left for the second generation, cultural integration for the third.

It hasn’t stopped the streets of New York or London from being flooded with Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani taxi drivers or shopkeepers who speak in broken English and animated gestures. For economic migrants have a right to earn their livelihood even if it makes others less comfortable. And you pick up the local language and customs on the job, because insulating yourself from the local culture is terrible for business.

So it is natural that taxi drivers in Mumbai will have a ‘working knowledge’ of Marathi and other local languages, as demanded by the state government. But to make it compulsory goes against the Constitution that grants every Indian a right to livelihood anywhere in India. The decision is of relevance only as a tool of language-based identity politics. Now taxi fleet owners will hire only Marathis just to be safe. Because who decides what is ‘working knowledge’? In the case of non-Marathis, even grammatical errors that all of us make in languages we have a ‘working knowledge’ of could justifiably disqualify them from the job. For this is not about communication, it is about identity politics and the inequalities of entitlements it breeds. It’s about being anti-Indian to be pro-Marathi.