Language and dress can be highly interlinked. This came home to me many years ago when I took the short flight from Chennai to Coimbatore. I was wearing a dhoti because my trousers were all unwearable, being dirty because I had been travelling for nearly 10 days. My plan was to get the trousers dry cleaned in Coimbatore. So to tide over the problem, I bought a dhoti. I could have worn one of my pajamas but they, too, were dirty. Anyway, there I was in a dhoti and bush shirt, and everyone I met was speaking to me either in Hindi or Tamil. Hindi, because of my face and Tamil, because of my appearance. But there was a problem: no one could understand either my Tamil or my Hindi. I had grown up entirely in the North, in Madhya Pradesh and Delhi, so my Tamil, though quite all right, was stuck in the 1950s. I spoke it very differently from the way people in Tamil Nadu do. Their language had been evolving. As to Hindi, they simply didn’t know it, not adequately anyway. But we all knew English which they assumed I didn’t know. It wasn’t till the next day when I got my trousers back that life and language reverted to normal.
This was the opposite of what happened to me in Bihar once, and the only time I have been there half a century ago. I got off a train at 6am and went looking for a rickshaw to take me to my uncle’s house. All the rickshaw wallahs were asleep and refused to take me. Finally, one guy showed up looking for customers and agreed to take me. But he insisted on speaking in English, of which he had absolutely no knowledge. But he thought he was speaking it. It was the strangest experience I have ever had. I still wonder, after 50 years, what was going on in his head.
Then there was my super-nationalist, ultra- chauvinist uncle. He would never wear Western clothes but spoke impeccable English, in what is called a pucca accent. When we asked him about this, he said he was a follower of Gandhiji who could speak English perfectly — except when talking to the Viceroy. Then it was always Hindi. This infuriated some of the Burra Sahibs but Gandhiji was adamant. That was one reason why that serial violator of human rights, Winston Churchill, called him a ‘naked faqir’.
Language and dress seem entwined via some peculiar trick played by the brain. My wife also discovered that in, of all places, Korea in the late 1970s. A true pioneer, she had gone there to study, and found that whenever the locals saw her in a sari, they would break out into English, which they didn’t know at all. This happened even when she was speaking to them in Korean. Foreigners were rare in Korea those days and the few who were there were white and in Western clothes. A brown woman in a sari was completely out of their experience.
This led to some hilarious situations, including one when a couple of schoolboys on a bus started speculating about her. She heard them jabbering away for several minutes and then when her stop came, she turned around and told them in Korean that she was from India and they should look it up in their geography textbook when they got home. Those boys nearly died of shock.
The reverse also happens. My parents were travelling by train and on the opposite berth there was a pugree-wearing man in traditional Pathan clothes. From time-to-time, my mother would say something about him in Tamil to my father. Several hours later, as he was getting off the train, he bade my parents goodbye and told them to visit him if they were ever in that town. Unforgettably, he spoke in chaste Tamil.