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Talking love
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When cupid strikes, language and cultural barriers take a backseat. All that matters is the language of the heart.
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Love's tongue is in the eyes
- Phineas Fletcher
"Je t'aime," said Ashwini to Vijay as soon as she had returned from her French class. In the 10 years of their marriage, Ashwini had always managed to bewilder Vijay with her penchant for the exotic. "New recipe?" asked Vijay, not to be let down. His retort had Ashwini rolling with laughter. "I just told you `I love you' in French," she said.
You can dismiss the above narrative as the author's fib. However, when Cupid strikes, the "language of the eyes" more than makes up for the spoken word. Love takes deep roots, defying the societal fabric.
But when communication descends to a more practical plain, the situation can still be intriguing and hilarious, and culture acquires new dimensions, more so when intercultural relationships leading up to marriages are no longer a rarity in these times.
"Language and cultural differences take a beating when love and mutual respect are the bonding factors in a relationship," say Geetha and Krishnakumar, who had to weather great opposition from their families before they tied the knot.
"I knew Krishnakumar was the only person whom I could trust my life with. So it did not matter whether we spoke different languages or that we had totally different family backgrounds," says Geetha, who works with the Population Research Centre, Thiruvananthapuram.
"We met at the university campus in Kariyavattom. Geetha, a Tamil Brahmin, was doing her Masters in Sociology, while I doing my research in Political Science," says Krishnakumar, who was a Senate member during his campus days.
"Language does create its share of confusion even after five years of marriage," he says. As a case in point, he narrates an incident: "When our little daughter used to laugh, I always used to say azhaathey, azhaathey (asking her not to laugh too much), just to show off that I had picked up Tamil. My wife and her relatives would break into laughter on hearing this. Only after a number of such instances did I realise that azhaathey means don't cry. Geetha still pulls my leg about this."
Things are not very different in the case of Suchitra and Sreekumar Bhaskar, a Bengali-Malayali couple. "I am always the butt of jokes among my in-laws," says Sreekumar Bhaskar, a manager of a private firm in the city. "During the early days of our marriage, the words maashi and bandhu always used to throw me off track," says Sreekumar.
"Maashi is how elderly women are addressed with respect in Bengali. And as a Malayali, I could not think beyond `ink' whenever I heard this word. And as for bandhu, I still get confused as to who is a relative and who is a friend, for bandhu means friend in Bengali," adds Sreekumar.
Suchitra too has couple of words with which her knowledge of Malayalam comes to a dead end. "I can comprehend achan and amma, but not appachan and ammachi," she says. "Another word that confounded her was aliya (brother-in-law in local parlance)," Sreekumar says.
For Prakash Menon and Surekha, married for 20 years now, language and family never came in the way of their walk up the nuptial aisle. They were family friends, so it was just waiting to happen.
"Surekha, a Marathi, blended quite well into my family. It was quite fun to watch her communicate with my grandmother in sign language," says Prakash Menon who runs his own business. "Moreover, Surekha is excellent at cooking sambar and fish curry," says Prakash giving full credit to his wife's culinary skills.
"One way you can win a Bengali's heart is by lavishing fish on him or her," Sreekumar lets you on to his secret.
"It is only here I have a grouse," says Krishnakumar. "During our campus days, Geetha never used to bother about my having non-vegetarian food. But now she is dead against it."
That the sense of love and bonding flourish beyond the disparities of language and culture has not escaped the eyes of communication experts.
Communication expert Ingrid Piller, who has conducted a study on `Language choice in bilingual, cross-cultural interpersonal communication', says that studies on intercultural communication have often taken misunderstandings as their central topic.
"This is particularly true where cross-cultural communication is at the same time intimate communication. While use of a common language does not guarantee mutual understanding, its absence does not necessarily prevent it either," he notes in his study.
The blossoming of love cutting across language barrier was the central theme in Max Frisch's play, `After the End of the War'. A Russian officer in 1945 Berlin falls in love with a local woman. Neither speaks the other's language, and they have no lingua franca.
Nevertheless, the lovers feel that their understanding is perfect because they can never tell each other a lie. The officer feels that Agnes is the only individual who understands him. He values their conversations without a common language much more highly than those with other Russian speakers.
Closer home, the theme has fascinated filmmakers enough to create movies of the `Ek Dujey Ke Liye' ilk.
K. SASIKUMAR
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