Kobhi Kobhi

Native speakers of the Assamese language have always struggled with pronouncing the Hindi words in the correct way. Like me, most of my fellow Assamese speakers have a tendency to round off all words with an extended ‘ao’ where it should be ‘aa’ so that ‘Kabhi kabhi’ sounds like ‘Kobhi kobhi’. The sharp crisp overtones of the Hindi words are chiselled off by our tongues, more used to speaking a language suiting our temperament of being somewhat laid back and easy going. As such, we faced monumental struggle when confronted by the arduous task of speaking the national language, Hindi.
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While at school, we were required to learn Hindi and this added a new dimension to our already existing struggle against all things academic. The only positive that we could think of was that learning Hindi will help us understand Hindi movies better ( this was in the days before subtitles). It did not matter that the dialogues in the hindi movies of the 80s were largely the same, the plots identical and simple enough to be understood by our nearly-10year old brain, but the prospect of not having to ask an elder what the characters were saying, was alluring enough to make us attend the Hindi classes.

And what an onslaught it was. We grappled to understand the concept of the gender of inanimate objects, the ‘ka’ and the ‘ki’, the ‘badi ei’ or the ‘choti ei’ and slowly but surely our collective enthusiasm was beaten to submission, just in time when were were allowed to forgo our lessons any longer. We thus emerged from the classes, able to understand simple dialogues of the hindi movie villains, but unable to make sentences requiring complicated gender bending rules.

So we emerged as a generation of Hindi speaking Assamese-as-mother tonguers, mutilating the language with our half baked knowledge of the same.

But what about our parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts ? What about the generation who were acquainted with Hindi quite late in their lives, when the tongues refuses to bend to any foreign sound ? What happened when time or geographical movement demanded that they move over and break away from their comfort zone of Assamese only ?

They all faced the challenge head on. A simple, but effective counter strategy was to just tweak the Assamese words to sound like Hindi, add a few common Hindi words sounding similar to assamese and fill the gaps with various sounds to confuse the listener and lo and behold, there was a working hindi sentence. So if the Hindi sentence would be ‘Naala saaf kar do’, the Assamese tongue would twist it as ‘Ai, noola thu safa kori deu’. Message conveyed. Mission accomplished. In various regions of the NE, different mutating techniques appeared. One of them is a strategy, which I alluded to in the example above, is the use of qualifying everything with a ‘thu’. For eg, ‘shirt-thu’, ‘joota-thu’, etc. I cringe to recall how my father would request the sales person in a shop in Delhi to show him a shirt – ‘ O shirt-thu dekhai dio’ (dekhai = Assamese for ‘show’, dio = bastardized form of the word diya, meaning ‘give’ in Assamese).

The titles of Ekta Kapoor’s K serials were all mutated to suit her Assamese speaking fan base. Kohani Ghor Ghor ki, Kyunki saas bhi kobhi bohu ti, etc. And yes, it was ‘Kun bonega cororpoti’ for us back home.

Going back to our generation who at least learnt to read and write some Hindi and were thereby more open to the growing influence of media, a new challenge was presented to the ‘I don’t know Hindi’ generation. Some friends started naming their children after some distinctly North Indian sounding names. The resultant mutation at the hands of the older generation can be deduced from the example of my cousin naming her new born son ‘Paarv’ who gets called ‘Paap’(meaning Sin) by my Aunt. Most times, my mother and her likes, camouflage their diability behind words of endearments while confronted with the prospect of calling out such names. Paarv will be called ‘Baba’ more often than not, I am sure.

Hindi spoken the Assamese way –
Danger – 440 ‘bholts’…make whatever sense you want of it !