Hinglish and Youth: A Campus Perspective
Soumik Pal and Siddharth Mishra

The authors bring an everyday and ethnographic perspective on Hinglish, based on their experiences at an elite Indian institution of higher learning. The views expressed are their responses to the conference on Hinglish which formed a strong basis for this book. The conference discussions as well as the journalistic discourse on Hinglish lean heavily towards a synonymy of Hinglish and the 'youth' of India, homogenizing the two in disturbing ways.

This essay interrogates this homogenization and elicits a very necessary debate. The authors are speakers of several languages, including a code-switched Hinglish. Their reflection is caught here in 'speaking' voices to provide a minimally edited and unmediated view on this subject.

The authors are also professionals in their early twenties. They studied communications management at Mudra Institute of Communications Ahmedabad (MICA), the institution that pioneered the discussion on Hinglish in an academics–practitioners forum. Its student profile embraces all the linguistic regions of India. The authors situate Hinglish in their learning at MICA and its relationship with the seductive power of brands and the interpellation of human subjects through brands. Through voices that suggest resistance as well as acknowledgment of the branded value of Hinglish, they provide profound insights and an 'on-ground' view of Hinglish.
Editors

Siddharth Mishra
English in modern India has always been associated with the middle class, from which have also emanated most modifications to the language. Belonging to that class myself, I have carried its genes since childhood. Born into a family totally into academics, the obsession with ‘purity’ of language has been of great significance in my life. Academics usually frown upon anything ‘adulteration’ in the mode of communication. In a state like Bihar, where speaking ‘good’ English has always been considered important, they try hard to maintain the purity of the language. My family was no exception.
Hailing from a small city, Patna, but having spent almost ten years of my life in other, diverse parts of the country, I can divide my experiences into three periods. The first, my childhood in my hometown; the second, the period spent studying engineering in Punjab, followed by a three-year stint in the corporate world; and the third, my life at MICA.
Although I was reared in an essentially Hindi-speaking place, my schooling was mainly in English— that too in a hardcore missionary school. Communication was usually in English, to the extent that it was a school rule to speak in that language even during the daily recess. It is a different matter that we usually gave this rule a pass and carried on most of our conversations in Hindi (sometimes featuring certain colloquial ‘adjectives’, ours being a boys’ school). Generally I find that missionary institutions try to maintain ‘purity’ in everything, including language. Even in elocution or poetry recitation contests, whether in Hindi or English, any language mixing was strongly discouraged. On one occasion in class VIII, I decided to recite a poem by the renowned satirist Ashok Chakradhar. His poems, very contemporary in nature, are written in common bolchaal ki bhaasha, the colloquial language that includes non-Hindi words. Despite tremendous response from the audience and even some teachers, the head of the panel announced that I did not win because the poem had many English words and did not qualify as a good piece of verse. I was taken aback but was too naive to understand the politics of language.
Despite all this, language mixing continued. My city had its own style: ‘Aap kyun nervousa rahe hain?’ (Why are you getting nervous?); ‘Aap hamko bahut taken for granted le rahe hain!’ (You are taking me too much for granted.); and so on. English has always been viewed as the language of the elite, well-educated, affluent class found in all parts of the country, but our part of India has a peculiarity. Lacking any one particular language, and with a variety of languages (or dialects) used across the state, language mixing happens frequently. When any language is spoken in its original form, it is considered elegant and worthy of respect, be it pure Hindi or pure English.
From childhood, my sister and I were encouraged to read English newspapers and magazines. Interestingly, the readership of English newspapers has always been significantly high despite the generally low levels of literacy in the language. Although we were never restricted from watching TV (essentially Doordarshan, the government channel, we were supposed to watch the 8 PM English news every day. The advertisements we saw in the late 1980s and early 1990s had a great influence on us. Until this time, most electronic media was controlled by the government or by a culture inspired or promoted by the government; and though I am not complaining, anything new or different came like a breath of fresh air. I was perhaps in class IV then, and was amazed to see the Pepsi campaign with its famous punch line ‘Yahi hai right choice baby…aha!’ The Remo Fernandes–Juhi Chawla campaign created a flutter among Indian audiences, especially teenagers. We used this punch line in day-to-day conversations, especially at school, just to show off. Such campaigns, I feel, had a tremendous impact on the behaviour and language of teenage Indians and urban audiences with easy access to TV.
At first sight, the population of small city like Patna seems socially and economically almost homogeneous, as most people work in either the government sector or small businesses. This is, however, deceptive. Even at school, we came from homes with varied lifestyles and living standards. For some of us, entertainment meant Chitrahaar (a film-songs-based TV show) and the evening Hindi film on TV on Sundays. Others had video recorders/players at home, giving them easy access not only to Hindi films but also the latest Hollywood flicks. This difference had a deep impact on the behaviours of our batchmates, influencing their conversation and vocabulary. It was Hinglish—a slightly high-class variety, which I was not quite comfortable with at that time, but nevertheless interesting. American and British lingo started making inroads into the vocabulary of our generation. Words like ‘baby’, ‘chap’, and ‘dude’ became part of everyday conversations, and ads like Pepsi’s reinforced this cultural change.
The most important phenomenon of the early 1990s was the advent of cable TV and the new liberal economic policies that brought events from across the world to Indian audiences. The good old days of Doordarshan faded away and people gradually started to emulate their neighbours by acquiring cable connections and discussing the latest number on Close-up Antakshari or the latest happenings in Campus. The phraseology of ‘Chitrahaar ke praayojak hain…’ was slowly replaced by ‘milte hain break ke baad’. Change was happening, slowly but steadily. With not many film theatres screening English (i.e. Hollywood) films and without a VCR at home, we had to wait for the cable TV revolution to start watching English films regularly. But by the time cable TV reached us, both my sister and I were leaving the city for higher education.
Alongside the changes in the market and the broadcasting system, another silent revolution, in an entirely different segment, would shape the destiny of this part of the world in the years to follow. This was the advent of the personal computer. Started in the mid-1980s by the Rajiv Gandhi government, the revolution gained momentum in the mid-1990s. In addition to technical advantages, computers also had a real impact on the language of Indians, affecting especially the middle class for whom they proved such a boon. The fact that they could be used only in English at that time encouraged the import of English words into Hindi and other Indian languages. I think mine was the first generation of Indians to be drawn into this revolution in a big way. Computer education had just begun and it was magic for us. Phrases like ‘data save kar lena’, ‘file ki location kya hai?’, ‘yeh file corrupt ho chuki hai’ were swiftly added to the vocabulary of Indian youth—understandably the most tech-savvy group. Such terms were not only used in computing but became the new lingo of educated Indian youth.
Next came the Internet revolution, which changed how people communicated in India and across the world, making letter-writing seem a waste of time and effort, reducing the status of post-offices to places for form-filling, pushing libraries into history, and making everything real seem ‘virtual’. It brought people closer to the rest of the world. But the Internet had the same limitation as computers—even when writing an e-mail in their own language, users had to transliterate everything into the Latin alphabet, and this accelerated the mixed language culture known as Hinglish. With the Internet came chatting, which (before mobile telephony and messaging) was the most popular and cheapest pastime of young India. I was to experience this drastic change when I embarked on the second important phase of my life, engineering.
Jalandhar, or for that matter Punjab, was a novel experience for me. The unique selling point of any regional engineering college (now rechristened as national institute of technology) in those days was the mix of students it attracted from almost all over the country. And though it gave you excellent exposure to people you might not have even dreamt of meeting, such as students from Lakshadweep, it was really very difficult to communicate with them. Initially, this was a serious problem for all of us, including the professors; and the only solution we could find for this was English. It was fascinating to hear different forms of English from different parts of India. There was Mallu English (‘Mallu’ being a generic, and mildly disparaging, term for Malayali, a Malayalam-speaker from Kerala), Bong English (from West Bengal), and Punjabi English. At the risk of grossly generalizing, I would say on the basis of my six years in Punjab that there is something unusual about Punjabis, especially the youth, when they speak English. It’s a common joke in Punjab that a Punjabi speaks different languages for different moods, especially while conversing with a non-Punjabi—English when he is happy or trying to show off, Hindi when he is just normal, Punjabi when he pissed off! English in Punjabi or Punjabi in English, they are so mingled with each other now that it is really difficult to filter them out. And the trend is quite understandable. With many of their relatives living in different parts of the world, there is a natural tendency in the younger generation to follow in their footsteps for easy and quick money, or for the sake of lifestyle; and English is considered to be the gateway to these.
MICA was different, albeit a difference I was prepared for. My experience was in a sense similar to that of Soumik’s (see below) except that my involvement in theatre and related activities gave me some surprising insights into the linguistic behaviour of some students. The ones I would have never imagined in my wildest dreams to speak even a sentence in proper Hindi did well in auditions and rehearsals, and with excellent diction. And yet, once out of the rehearsal room, they hardly seemed the same people. They felt comfortable in English, but their Hindi was much more grammatically correct than their English. When speaking English, they took linguistic liberties that come with confidence. This they usually avoided in Hindi which, for them, had become a ceremonial language to be used selectively and cautiously. This I assert only about the group I interacted with during various plays.
I have always tried to maintain a level of purity in my Hindi. Ample liberty is taken with Hindi in the parts where I belong. But somehow, since childhood, I had got it into my head that my Hindi had to be impeccable, and always took pride in this fact. At MICA, for the first time, I encountered a hotchpotch of a language being routinely used. It is not as if I always spoke chaste Hindi, but I was not accustomed to the degree of mixing of two different languages that I heard there. Such mixing and matching tickled Soumik and me deeply, and we often laughed over what we thought were examples of extreme ludicrousness.

Soumik Pal
I was born into a Bengali family, living in Bengal. Bengali was the only language I was exposed to in my early years, the only language I spoke before I could write. I do not recall particularly well the media influences on me at that time. So I must, at the outset, make it clear that both Hindi and English are alien languages to me—though the sense in and the extent to which I feel thus vary according to time and place.
Having established my Bengali identity, I must also point out that English was the language I learnt to read and write before I could read the Bangla script. This was because in my hometown, Durgapur, the most desired school for any infant (rather his parents) was St. Xavier’s, an English-medium convent. My kindergarten education was thus expended on preparing me for the ‘ultimate’ test—the admission test for St. Xavier’s School! But this did not, I believe, hamper my reading and writing skills in my mother tongue. Within just two months of being introduced to the Bengali alphabet, I (along with my classmates) was able to write small but complete and grammatically correct sentences in Bengali, much to my parents’ surprise. This is pertinent because it proves the extent to which the mother tongue had already become ‘natural’ for us. From then on, English was the medium of instruction in school—in the classroom and outside. We were encouraged to speak English at all times, on the school premises. But, at least for me, it remained the medium for communication in only the written form. When it came to speaking, the mother tongue always dominated.
My introduction to the other ‘alien’ language, Hindi, was through the popular media, TV being an important part of my growing up. There must have been an organic relationship between our TV set and me—both of us came into our home in 1984! Right from childhood, I was addicted to Hindi films and managed to pick up from that source enough of the language to enable me, as a kid, to speak a ‘make-do’ Hindi—something that my parents struggle with even now. The other (albeit very minor) influence was the cosmopolitan nature of Durgapur, an industrial township; from a young age, I had some non-Bengali friends, with whom I would converse in Hindi. For all this, my Hindi vocabulary was mostly limited to what I learnt from films. So although I acquired words such as pyaar, mohabbat, badla, khoon, khaandaan, rishta, kangna, dupatta, I did not know the Hindi names of fruit and vegetables.
This remained the status quo of my language skills from my schooldays (during which time three years of Hindi as a third language taught me its alphabet), right through to college and university in Kolkata. I majored in English literature but even there I had friends who were more into Bengali literature. That three-year stint actually brought me closer to literature in my own language. Interestingly, in my master’s in Jadavpur University, where I did postgraduation in film studies, the language of the classroom was mostly English and partly Bengali. Yet, film studies introduced me to cinema from all over the world. Subtitled cine-viewing became a part of my life. Suddenly my daily conversations were peppered with names such as Buñuel, Godard, Eisenstein and terms such as cinéma vérité and mise-en-scène.
This infused me with a typical Bengali bhadralok characteristic. The quintessential bhadralok is a colonial product; in the colonial era, this class of people developed refined European tastes, in turn influencing Bengali art and culture. This class would happily be Bengali and French or Bengali and English or German at the same time. Of course, the species did not disappear after the British left. Such a person would listen to Rabindrasangeet and Beethoven but probably not Urdu ghazals. He had his Jibanananda and Bankim along with Shelley and Keats, but Maithili Sharan Gupt or Hazari Prasad Dwivedi barely existed for him.
This influx of foreign auteurs suddenly brought to the surface the dormant colonial hangover within me. Anything French became classy; anything desi not quite so. Strangely, there was nothing in the academic environment of my university to foster such an attitude. I am yet to figure out the reasons for this sudden burst of elitism in me. It was not as extreme, though, as it may sound. The respect for a Munshi Premchand, a Sa’adat Hasan Manto, an M.S. Sathyu, or a Guru Dutt remained intact. But there was the Bengal high culture and then there was Europe! As for ‘the rest of India’, well, it might as well not have existed.
This state of affairs changed significantly when I left Bengal for the first time to study at MICA. But before I recount the language situation I faced there, I must bring in some points from my family background.
An important factor in my relationship with languages was the prevailing attitude towards them at home—my parents being the ultimate determinants. English was always considered important because of the firm belief that if I were to become a ‘real man’ and achieve something in life, I had to master the masters’ language. And since education in English came from school and not from TV or Hollywood or sitcoms, it was considered ‘safe’. As in any typical middle-class Bengali household, education was always given prominence, with the English medium being taken for granted as the obvious choice. Bengali, on the other hand, was never discouraged at my home—unlike in some households where ignorance of Bengali was a symbol of pride.
The attitude towards Hindi in my home was most interesting; it could almost be equated with the attitude towards Hindi films. Even though my father had been an avid follower of Hindi films in school and college, Hindi cinema was never considered to be serious entertainment. The image of Hindi cinema in my home was that of crass, cheap and sometimes even vulgar entertainment. Despite being Rafi, Kishore, and Dilip Kumar fans, my parents thought it unhealthy for their son to watch too many Hindi films. This probably also had to do with the fact that they abhorred the Hindi cinema and music of the 1990s, the period of my childhood. Listening to old Hindi film melodies was alright, even encouraged, but Hindi was never considered as sophisticated and ‘proper’ as English and Bengali. It was the language of Khotuas (a pejorative Bengali term for people from Bihar) and Marwaris. The attitude was not just disrespectful but also a tad racist.
Coming to MICA, I encountered—for the first time in my life—a group of people of whom pretty much none could speak my mother tongue. Initially, I was so starved of Bengali that whenever I called someone back in Bengal and couldn’t connect, the pre-recorded voice saying in Bengali, ‘the phone number you are trying to reach is currently not available’, was honey to my ears. Moreover, I found myself with people very different from my earlier friends. These people, it seemed to me then, had no literary or ideological passions. All they enjoyed was clubbing, ‘hanging out’, going for a movie/pepperoni (the two seemed interchangeable), and ‘chilling’. They were what I called the typical ‘B-school crowd’. I desperately tried to keep my distance from ‘them’ and, as a result, I was promptly branded as the ‘intellectual from Bengal’. All this disgusted me in the beginning. My initial judgement (admittedly flawed) was that they were frivolous. And this is also where I encountered, for the first time, the mix of Hindi and English as a normal mode of speech. It was my first real experience of Hinglish.
My being so judgemental of my peers may be improper but they did represent a break from the type of company to which I was accustomed. They were all there with the aim of landing plum jobs, to get everything easy in life. It was no different in the case of language. They were well-versed in English; those from Hindi-speaking areas were fluent in Hindi too. But there was a notable tendency to take the easy way out. Speaking proper English or Hindi was more trying than speaking Hinglish. The former required adherence to the rules of grammar and syntax, whereas in a hybrid language, syntax can be played with at will, making speech so much easier.
Gradually, I too took to Hinglish. Speaking chaste English all the time was in any case not my cup of tea. I just did not feel at home with that. Nor could I speak proper Hindi all the time. Therefore, the obvious advantages of a hybrid language readily appealed to me. Another factor was that I was ‘expected’ to speak in Hindi. It was considered impolite to talk to a fellow Bengali in our mother tongue when a non-Bengali was around. This irked me greatly. It still does. But people around were, after all, friends. I had to communicate. Perhaps this is what caused the influx of English, as a more neutral language, into my Hindi.
Another significant change in my life at MICA came when I first encountered the Internet. Whether by design or by chance, I had managed to evade it until then. I did not even have an e-mail ID. I had a phobia of computers. At MICA, I had to use a laptop, and this brought about a momentous change—I started to surf the Net and maintain my e-mail inbox but I also got addicted to chatting. I feel that chatting and SMS texting are two phenomena that go a long way in determining the use of Hinglish.
My style of written communication changed considerably with my adoption of chatting and texting. When I talk to someone face-to-face or over the telephone, there is a sense of immediacy. Anything spoken by either speaker evokes an immediate response that keeps the conversation going. When I write, however (as in examination papers, diary entries, academic notes), this immediacy is lost. Even with letters, the time lag between statement and response is long. Acquaintance with SMS, and more so with chatting, brought this sense of immediacy into my written communication. As in oral communication, each statement carried the implicit possibility of immediate response. This also brought its inherent casualness to my writing. Thus, my written expression began to acquire a Hinglish character.
The true nature of the debate here is not well served by the term ‘Hinglish’, which glosses over the regional specificities in the relationship between Indian languages and English. In discussing the interaction of the global/colonial and the local/colonized, Hindi tends to appropriate the whole of the ‘local side’ but the ‘Hindi versus Other Indian Languages’ debate is as important as the ‘Global versus Local’ debate. There have been several instances of transnational or multinational capital trying to connect with local/regional markets without Hindi entering the picture at all. In Bengal, for example, Coca -Cola has sought to play to local sentiments by associating itself with para (street) football). Bengali passion for football has a charm and nostalgia attached to it which is entirely Bengal’s. Hindi has no role there.
The common take that Siddharth and I have on Hinglish includes many things which, while they emerge from personal experiences, are in fact part of a more widespread phenomenon. But when I talk of my experiences, I talk not only of what I think but also of how I react. I mentioned my irritation with Hindi’s monopoly over the hybridization process. It wasn’t that my Bengali identity was being ignored or deliberately suppressed but that all regional specificities (including mine) got somewhat sidelined during daily conversations, without the participants actually intending it. My reaction was not merely about asserting identity but about exercising it. Being a Bengali (among other things) I kept up an image of being a typical Bengali, often playing into the stereotype I had despised earlier. But this playacting helped me maintain a balance. As an individual, what I enjoy the most is to sit back and observe. Even with Hinglish, this is what I did. Even though some things I have mentioned above drove me to action, most often I was just a detached observer, taking in what was happening with a touch of mirthful irony.

Conclusion
We do not claim to represent ‘youth’ at large. But we belong to that segment of society and are not just talking about it. Our observations are informed by the general trends, anxieties, and dilemmas that most youth face today.
In the last two decades, the world has seen a tremendous growth spurt of the animal called ‘brand’. Marketing and advertising have become more vital than ever before. To compete in the market amidst an avalanche of products and brands, it is not enough to address the customer only vis-à-vis the product. The brand must be built—and that is the role of marketing and advertising. The final effect of this branding exercise is not just increased sales and profit, because brands have now spilled over to constitute the culture of our age. Most brands identify youth as their primary target. Thus, youth culture has become the dominant culture.
This is probably a two-way process. Across the world, brands draw upon youth culture, and youth in turn derives its culture from brands. Major brands that seem to define global culture—Coke, Nike, McDonald’s, Viacom, etc.—are not all American. But they do share ideological commonalities, operating on some broad, basic common principles. They all propel us towards a certain ‘lifestyle’—a product of free-market capitalism. Lifestyle is today’s buzzword. Of course not all market activities pursue this goal single-mindedly. There are variations. But they generally reside at the level of the subtext.
But why are we, of all people, pondering on how marketing and advertising influences youth culture? And how is this seemingly global phenomenon related to Hinglish?
To answer the first question, this essay chronicles our personal experiences and opinions. Both of us are now marketing communication professionals and the way brands work lies within the purview of our work interests. More significantly, we have directly experienced the brand–culture nexus. Exercises in branding or case studies on different brands gave us an understanding of how this ‘animal’ works.
By way of discussing the connection of this to Hinglish, let us take the case of Pepsi’s Youngistaan drive—a very successful and influential advertising campaign of our times. It talks about a fictitious country of young people and people young at heart. It is characterized by youthfulness, living carefree, never giving up. What is particularly interesting is that community formation, once a role of religion or of ideologies (including that of the nation), is being appropriated by brands (this is not the first time, though; Malboro did something similar in the 1950s in the US). Youngistaan is a similar attempt. The concept has nothing to do with the product—sweetened, carbonated water. What keeps it going is not the flavour of the drink but the rhetoric, which includes other brands (MTV, Pizza Hut, PVR, as evident from the Youngistaan website). The medium of expression of this concept is Hinglish. To grab youth attention, Pepsi had to come up with something that could connect with them while retaining neutrality. Hinglish fulfilled this need.
The Youngistaan concept has been very popular since its launch. At MICA, a group of students called itself the Youngistaan Gang! These were new-age people, up-to-date with everything, always setting the bar for the ‘cool’ quotient, and also relating closely with Hinglish as characterized earlier. The notable point, however, is that these young people (and others who would qualify as Youngistaan Gang members) all came from affluent families and were comfortable with the concept of ‘commodity’. An array of commodities, powered by their affluence, defined their lives. To them, these were not mere commodities but brands—living, talking, moving things with which they engaged in a continual dialogue.

Brands are often conceptualized as human beings, possessing personalities and characteristics. Their assuming human roles is not uncommon. But young people can also don the roles of brands. A sports-oriented person would, thus, be a Nike/Adidas personality; a fashion-conscious person would be a L’Oréal type. It is not just dialogue but a fusion of brands and personalities.
Thus brands infuse their own attributes in youth. A multinational brand, for example, cannot ‘belong’ to a region. Any brand aspiring to go global has to have a ‘floating’ existence. It may try to connect with regions but can never ‘belong’ anywhere. Therefore brand lingo has to be neutral, similar to what is called ‘neutral accent’ at call centres. This is what young people also imbibe. Brands neutralize and homogenize them. To say this is not to suggest that all start to look and sound alike, but they start to differ less and less. These people have not lost their regional specificities, but they are starting to do so. What reinforces this ‘branded’ identity in India is Hinglish. It brings together two languages that can lay the largest claim to being pan-Indian. It glosses over a lot of regional specificities. What works for Hinglish is that it is not locale-specific. No wonder Pepsi chose such a Hinglish term as Youngistaan for its campaign. And no wonder it had to actually think of a fictitious land for its youth. It probably indicates that the ties of belonging of today’s youth have to be severed somewhat.
We do not, however, suggest that Hinglish is a rootless phenomenon that can only be used for the propagation of a global and (more important) branded culture. The Hinglish that we have talked about is mainly that of urban upper middle class youth. But there exist other youth who have their own brands of Hinglish. The reasons and mechanisms of their operation may be different.
As of now, we have identified Hinglish not just as a language but also a new lifestyle mantra. Our experiences, converging at MICA, have given us a limited but first-hand view of this. These, however, are not exhaustive experiences. We have elaborated on just one of the several modes that we identify of the existence of Hinglish among youth.