The school I attended was a Municipal Corporation school – during the rains, roof tiles often leaked and that would become a reason for a holiday. English was seen as taboo and the language of elites, hence not much stress was laid on teaching it to students.



After school, I lost almost five to six years of my life, working for money, dropping out of one course after another. But my fascination with English only grew throughout this time.

I eventually decided to study English literature, fully knowing that it might never offer me a career. Yet I was satisfied as the course offered me readings and references that would help me in learning the language.

But until I started my master's in 2013, I was unaware of the fact that I was just reading and learning about stories of people in English and not the language itself. I read my first English novel in 2010 – Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. I read it thrice, back to back, for the simple reason that I didn’t understand a bit of it in my first reading.

For two years, a Brahmin professor taught me English literature. On one not-so-fine day, I shared my experience with her of reading a novel, in English. Uninterested in what I spoke, she corrected me on a grammatical mistake from my conversation in an authoritative voice.

I felt belittled. My understanding had been reduced to errors in grammar.

After this incident, I read more and more, voraciously, and I would read anything and everything that was available to me in English. This was also the time when I started to write poems in English.

For a long period of time, however, I was brooding over that incident, thinking about the connection between language and knowledge, and whether language is for man or man is for language.

It was only after reading the poems of Thomas that I was so intelligently, if not poetically, introduced to the elements of power and hegemony in the game of language and knowledge.

Thomas was a Welsh nationalist who hated the anglicisation of his language. But he wrote in English. Often, I could see his anxiety and subtle dislike for English in his poems. His poems described how disastrous English has proved to Welsh history and how he had always longed to write in Welsh but couldn’t.

I felt close to his anxiety.



And I also felt his dilemma of having written in English throughout his life.