Abstract: This paper aims at highlighting the appropriation of languages by Islamic, Hindu and Sikh nationalisms before, during and after the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947 that signaled the end of the shared Punjabi ethnolinguistic memory by focusing on the displaced Hindu Punjabi experience. The fashioning of the Indian citizen subject through the national language causes a schizophrenic split in the Hindu Punjabi subject, with its ethnicity in conflict with language. The displaced Hindu Punjabi subject converts its multiple displacements from homeland, culture and language to construct itself in the new land through a hybrid language, which is neither Hindi nor Punjabi that adequately articulates its split location.

         I speak a language that is not mine.1 I don't speak a language that is mine. My mother tongue is Punjabi. But I don't speak it. To be more precise, I am not as fluent in it as I am in Hindi, the national language; in colonial English; or even in the local Bengali. But ever since I can remember, I have entered Punjabi in the column where one has to enter a mother tongue. I am not alone in making this contradictory claim for I discover it to be a disability I share with other 'displaced' Hindu Punjabis of my generation.2 How can one stake a claim to a mother tongue one speaks haltingly, softening its heavy consonants and lengthening its vowels? How can one demand the membership of a linguistic group without speaking its language? This paradoxical disengagement of language from ethnicity occurs at the 'displaced' sites of the Indian nation place. It foregrounds the language ethnicity elision in the pre-national Indian imaginary superscripted by print nationalism. I will trace the linguistic dislocations of Partition displacement to examine the problematic constitution of the Indian subject converging on a national language.

         The Indian national myth essentially aimed to overwrite, in a unifying national script, linguistic cultural identifications. The middle-aged nation's failure at national language implementation speaks volumes about tribal mothers' recalcitrance to learn the new patois. The strong resistance to Hindi language implementation, in the South as well as in non-Hindi speaking states, is rooted in the elision of language and ethnicity in the Bharavashiya imaginary3. The national language comes metonymically burdened with the homogeneity of the nation narrative in this interlocking of language with ethnicity. National language implementation is shot with a strong ambivalence that mirrors the Indian subject's problematic constitution. The 'one as many' slogan of the Indian nation, voiced in the national language, is greeted with a loud wail in the vernacular tongues, which apprehend the nation's unifying impulse as eroding their regional difference. The stubborn attachment to the mother tongue is a vociferous protest against the feared dissolution of the many into one. The transnational era has signaled the return of the 'tribes' following the tracks of these died with the last surviours? To which tribal songs may their descendants turn to claim tribal ancestry? Will the permanent loss of these dialects drum the birth of new idiolects? I shall attempt to explore these issues by tracing the linguistic habits of three generations of a displaced Hindu Punjabi family, which resettled in Kucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh in the Hindi heartland.4

         My analysis, grounded in a family narrative, is restricted to the experience of a micro community of displaced Hindu Punjabis dispersed after United Punjab's partition in 1947 to different parts of India. My arguments are based on my routine interactions and conversations with members of similar displaced Hindu Punjabi families in the Indian cities and towns I have moved from 1964 to 2003, covering Srinagar, Jammu, Jaipur, Lucknow, Delhi, Nainital, Chennai, Bombay, Kolkata and Bangalore. Stories have acquired legitimacy as an alternative research methodology in the humanities and social sciences in the recent years. I follow an intuitive method drawing from my readings in post-colonial theory, subaltern, diaspora and culture studies. I have grounded my explorations in a self-narrative in the hope that it will be corroborated by the narratives of other displaced Hindu Pujnabi families. I believe that such 'storytelling' can be substantiated and supplemented by empirical sociological methodologies. In my opinion, self-narratives like the ones used in this text could fill up the gaps that sociologizing and anthropologizing have not been able to account for. They can provide a close-up focus that zeroes in on the minutiae of everybody life and practices from which one can pan across to wider theoretical frames. Partition narratives, in particular, have been suppressed, distorted or homogenized through the elision of linguistic, regional, ethnic or sectarian differences undergirding them. These little self-narratives, as paradigmatic stories of displacement trauma, could be fruitfully utilized in the theorizing of displacement in the discourses ofnationalism, dispora and post-colonialism.5

         Until a couple of decades ago, the nationality column in all Indian government documents carried a footnote specifying the special category of the displaced distinguishing it from other citizenship qualifiers such as birth, descent, or domicile. The displaced Hindu Punjabi temporality invokes the nation's double time linguistically. Here is one community whose suffering the nation’s birth pangs literally entitles it to a particularly intimate kinship with the infant nation. Calendar time and dates of the nation compete with village event-time in the displaced Punjabi memory with the traumatic Partition experience forming the most significant temporal rupture. The secularized displaced Hindu Punjabi time traces its history to the birth of a secular nation carved out of an ancient communal core. Temporal breaks are marked here not by prophets' births but deaths in the name of gods. The double time of the displaced Hindu Punjabi history is the pre-historic time of the tribal past, Partition ton Pehlaan (before Partition) and the secular nation time, Partition ton Baad (After partition) 6. Partition ton Pehlaan was roughly the time of the spoken dialects; Partition ton Baad was the time of print languages, particularly the print language used in official documents7. How did the dialectal subject negotiate the vocabulary of citizenship? The Punjabi subject transformed into the national citizen by learning the rules and regulations governing the idiom of nationness. The bordercrossing translation ritual literally took place in the interstices of the nation marking many crossings - from the old to the new, from the sacral to the secular, from caste to class. Ramesh Sippy's telenovella Buniyaad captured this translational moment in the train the displaced family boards to India. Lajoji, whose gendered tale slants Sippy's Partition Narrative, chooses a Hindi, not a Punjabi, name for her newborn grand daughter. Her name - Bharati - ejects her from both her grandmothers' traditional Punjabi (Lajo, Veeranwali) and her mothers' modern Punjabi (Babli,) Narrative into the Hindi narrative of the modern Indian nation. By the time Bharati's daughter, Aditi, comes of age in the Indian English or Hinglish universe of millennial New Delhi in Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, Punjabi has become a vestigial trace emerging as slippage in moments of intimacy or emotion. But diasporic Punjabi filmmakers Deepa Mehta and Gurinder Chadha have joined hands with Nair in upgrading Punjabiness to an exoticized global vernacular.

Partition ton Pehlaan (Before Partition)

From Pujandi to Satya Kumari

Pujandi

          She was named Pujandi in her native dialect. Her progressive Arya Samaji husband made her enter the Great Indian Narrative by renaming her Satwanti. Her son changed it to Satya Kumari in tune with post Independence trends in Hindu women's names. The story of several losses - of home, language and community - underwrites my grandmother's inhabitation of her many names on which the nation's script is overwritten. Till her death in the mid nineties, she remained an alien in her won country, her foreignness accentuated by 'the foreignness of languages'. She spoke her singsong Miyaanwali that sounds alien even to East Punjabi speakers. Conversely, she never quite 'settled' in the Hindi heartland to which the family migrated. She located her home in a North Western Frontier Province, in a pind (village) called Bhakkhar. Fer her, the nation narrative was framed within a migrant narrative, first from the village to the city and then to another linguistic region. Her imagination translated the nation's alien geography as the loss of a home village and as the necessity of having to master a foreign language. Therefore, the first generation displaced Hindu Punjabi tenancy of the local dialect, a foreign tongue in the new land, problematiozes the clash of old imaginings of the nation with the new. The lost home and community, without the compensating 'myth of return', are recovered in the traces of the dialect. Dialects, unlike the print languages on which the nation is imagined, speak of and from small places of face-to-face speech communities. They also remain the last resistive spaces in the homogenizing movement of print nationalism.

          The pre-national Indian imagining of homeland was essentially a very small locality based in a region and on a dialect. The synonymy of home with a linguistic region in the Indian imaginary, invariably a small locality, becomes particularly problematic when the region turns overnight into a foreign country. The citizen subject reclaiming a home in another nation is a contradiction of the condition of compliance underwriting the formation of the national subject. Adrift in a nation that is not home, he zooms in so close on the homeland that macro boundaries go out of focus. Home for the displaced Hindu Punjabi is a Punjabi suba frequently interchangeable with the mulk/watan or nation. The homeland, located in a narrowly defined Punjabi region with its particularized dialect, is a geographically bounded neighbourhood (river, mountain range, and climate.) Take, for example, the case of Miyaanwali's geographical constituency. Miyaanwali binds the district lying between Jhelum and Sindhu river on the North West Frontier Province, now in Pakistan, Across the Sindhu are other dialect regions, for instance, Derewaali in Dera Ghazi and Ismail Khan and Bannuwaali in Bannu.

Satwanti

        Besides, the proposed national language had to write the new nation on the traces of the Moghul scribal lingua. It must be noted that the communicational languages of old empires did not ever encroach on the cultural territories of speech. The switch from Urdu top Hindi as the official language heralds the emergence of the nation from the remains of the Empire. Courtly Urdu marks the graphocentric phase in the gap separating phonocentric dialects from print languages. Pre-partition educational practices reflect this transitional moment in a linguistic split between the Hindiwallahs and the Urduwallahs.8 As the nation's birth becomes imminent, the nation making process is expedited by the sharp switchover to Hindi from Urdu.

         The dialect and language divide splits the private and public spaces of modern civil society. The citizen subject is born in the separation of the dialect or private speech from language or public discourse. Pujandi's offspring, ill at ease in the face-to-face intimacy of Miyaanwali, articulate their aspirations to Standard Punjabi's urbane inflections. Dialect has a strange meeting with language in the domestic space where Pujandi's rustic Miyaanwaali utterances are greeted with Standard Punjabi responses. Instead of resisting it, the dialect gives in to Punjabi's unifying space in the construction of modernity. The erasure of dialectal differences in Standard Punjabi enables the imagining of a unified Punjabi community. Standard Punjabi's modernity writes its difference from the closed spaced of local dialects, which circumstances identity in rigid kinship structures of belonging.

          Anderson's point about the homogenizing impact of print languages on speech communities is illustrated by dialect's natural death in the evolution of modern Indian print languages. The development of modern Punjabi opens up new identity routes on which the nation myth might be engraved. But the inscription of the nation in modern Indian languages, be it Punjabi or Bengali, reveals a marked divergence from the unifying script the Indian nation sought to inscribe itself in. The adoption of modern Punjabi by educated speakers in Lahore and Lyallpur is a move away from small dialect based identifications towards the beginnings of a modern Punjabi kaum. Speakers of different dialects congregate in the public sphere of a standardized Punjabi to construct a unified linguistic space, which will be seen to reveal a deep communal cleavage.

          The imagining of the nation in the Punjabi language produces slippages of religion translating into separatist demands for two pure lands, Pakistan and Khalistan. Though the latter is also couched as a linguistic demand, the Hindu Punjabi's linguistic nationalism is a disjuncture in the sacral pre-national communities. The convergence of Arya Samaaj's Hindu reformist programme with the Indian nationalist project offers the Hindu Punjabi a politically right path out of prospective minority location.9 Hindu Punabis allegedly enter Hindi as their mother tongue in the plebiscite for Khalistan and are dubbed traitors by the Akaali Dal. Punjabi enters the grand Indian masternarrative as the namesake of the Mahabharata queen Satwanti, as the Arya Samaaj movement sweeps over Punjab dissolving tribal names, gods and dialects in a 'return to Vedas' Hinduism.