Excerpt from a recorded book discussion (YouTube) with Dr. Shashi Tharoor about his book The Battle of Belonging. Tharoor recounts an anecdote about his father (a young Indian student in Paris) who was ignored when asking for directions in English but helped when he spoke Malayalam—used to illustrate French linguistic chauvinism, the limits of cosmopolitanism, and contrasts in assimilation between French colonial policy and British rule in India.
Chapters
Your dad had a really interesting adventure in Paris, right? Like trying to find his way. And you talk about it in the book. I had like 20 takeaways for it. But tell us why you included in the book and what is like, what as a child, when you were listening to the story, what did that, that made you think of India, France, UK and the journey back to India with your folks?
Well, first of all, I think the story was fun in its own right. Obviously, I was using it to illustrate this whole business of linguistic, national. The French are particularly proud of their language and indeed their culture. But here we're talking about language particularly. And when my father, 19 or 20 years old, fresh from India, studying in England, went over to Paris for a holiday, got lost and tried to ask the way in English, he was completely spurned by the French. It's just a couple of years after the war that the British had helped them win, for God's sake, liberated them from alongside the Americans. But the French apparently would just ignore him and walk past. So my father realized that the problem was not him. The problem was the language he was speaking. So what did he do? He stood on the street corner and with many gesticulations, asked people directions in Malayalam, which is his mother tongue. And when they realized he was speaking a language no one understood, but he was lost and he was moving his hands here and there and pointing to, I don't know, the name of the place had written down or whatever, people went out of their way to help him because they saw him as an outsider needing help. Whereas when he spoke English, they said, you know, if this guy can know one foreign language, why doesn't he know ours? What's he doing in our country? So that was the story. Now, as you said, there can be multiple takeaways from that, including about how the French were both linguistic chauvinists and at the same time very generous to, you know, authentic strangers. How cosmopolitanism has its limit because cosmopolitan is only welcome in some societies if it embraces their version. In other words, I know the warmth of the reception I get when I speak French in France or to French people because immediately, I mean, it sort of gives them an identification. So that kind of cosmopolitanism is fine. But a true Frenchman would not consider me cosmopolitan if I spoke to him in English. He'd consider me some sort of a backward person and somebody insufficiently civilized. So all of these things can come in. But that wasn't really the point of the story. There is another story about the French that doesn't involve my father, which is about assimilation, because during the French colonial period, they tried to teach little Africans and Vietnamese and so on that they were actually French. And these kids studied from textbooks, you know, our ancestors, the Gauls, which, of course, who were not the ancestors of the Vietnamese or the Senegalese, but whom these kids were taught to think of as the ancestors of their civilization. Now, no Indian under the British Raj ever felt empowered to say, I'm British. Not one. He might be extremely he might have studied English. He might have passed exams at Cambridge or Oxford. He might even have married a white woman. He was still an Indian. He was still a subject of the British Empire. Today, of course, there are brown Britons who can call themselves British. Not true in those days. And those are some of the issues of assimilation and nationhood that also came up during the imperial period.
