South Asian Accents: Bhashas, Bodies, Borders

Introduction

In her autobiography Antasphot (trans. Outburst), Kumud Pawde (née Somkuvar) tells the story of her Sanskrit. She writes poignantly about the praise heaped on her for “her ability” (Pawde 2013, 72) to learn and teach the language. Had no one ever learned Sanskrit, Pawde satirically asks. Indeed, she reminds the reader that what impressed (read, disquieted) people was the gulf between this language of gods and her status as a Dalit woman. In a system where her “ancestors should consider themselves guilty of a crime if they even heard the sound of this language” (Pawde 2013, 74), Pawde presumed to speak it and speak it well. She takes the reader through the suspicion, disgust, and hostility her proficiency in Sanskrit elicited among savarna institutions. For years, despite graduating with a distinction in her Masters’ program—the first of her caste to do so—she did not find employment as a lecturer. Things only changed when Kumud Somkuvar married a Maratha Kunbi caste man named Motiram Pawde and changed her name to Kumud Pawde. “But one thought still pricks me,” she writes, “the credit for Kumud Somkuvar’s job is not hers, but that of Kumud Pawde. I hear that a woman’s surname changes to match her husband—and so does her caste … the credit of being a professor of Sanskrit is that of the presumed higher caste of Mrs. Kumud Pawde. The caste of her maiden status remains deprived” (Pawde 2013, 83).

Pawde’s story of Sanskrit is as much about the body as it is about language and as much about institutions as it is about the body. The scenes of speaking, listening, and not listening show that no matter what Kumud Somkuvar spoke or how well, her upper-caste interlocutors only heard her caste-oppressed female body. Sometimes, it astonished them. Always, it humiliated them. One could argue that Pawde’s caste made her perfect Sanskrit sound “polluting” and “criminal” (Pawde 2013, 72). Her presumed ascension in the caste hierarchy by marriage neutralized that accent.

Sanskrit’s sight, sound, and story in Antasphot—its accent—depend on who we hear: Kumud Pawde or Kumud Somkuvar. The two accents tell two rather different stories. The difference between them illuminates the racialized, gendered, and languaged body that mediates Sanskrit as a language. Pawde’s story raises the question of how a South Asian language—and South Asia itself, by extension—becomes available as an object of scholarly inquiry. What do we hear when we hear South Asia? Who do we hear when we hear South Asia?

This dossier of five essays (including this introduction) uses “accent” as a keyword to reflect on such questions of language, sound cultures, region, and representation. Colloquially, accent names a geographically and socially grounded manner of speaking. It is understood as an utterance that tells the hearer something about the speaker, though accents can also be visual, textual, typographical, sartorial, or otherwise signal. Accent is a familiar index of knowledge to scholars of South Asia. Accents can potentially reveal where someone is from, what other languages they speak, how educated they are, their caste, class, community, and so on. They can be mobilized as much in hate speech as in affirmations of national diversity, as much in respectability politics as in discourses of gendered propriety, and as much in jingoistic nationalism as in transnational solidarities.¹ These myriad recognitions and misrecognitions of how people speak or sound situate them in a hierarchical society. A wide range of scholarship has shown how an Anglophone, urban, or cosmopolitan accent can promise greater reach and global visibility. In a richly diverse and vastly unequal part of the world, accent is hope and scandal. It is humor and humiliation. For it is true that while everybody speaks with an accent, everyone is not heard as speaking with an accent, nor are all accents equal.

Thus, perhaps the most interesting thing about accent is not that someone has one but what it means to hear it, what an accent does, and how it constructs the speaker’s and listener’s identities. This is the case Pooja Rangan, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Pavitra Sundar, and I make in our co-edited volume Thinking With An Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice. Along with thirteen other contributors, we explore accent as a “key feature of languaging in the era of neoliberal global capital” (Rangan et al. 2023, 3). We examine accents heard, performed, and policed in wiretapping, literary comparison, voice synthesizing software, transcription algorithms, accent reduction programs, and sign languages. We argue that perceiving an accent is not simply a result of hearing difference but an exertion of power that seeks to place the speaker. The difference that an accent marks only emerges through comparison. Accent is often confused with racial or ethnic differences or class and linguistic identity. This fact reminds us that hearing an accent takes more than just the faculty of audition. Thus, if an accent indexes anything, it is the eminently embodied and mediated character of a communicative encounter shaped by desire and economic power relations.

So, we propose examining accent for how it registers the listener’s situated knowledge and convictions. As we write, “accent is produced as much in the movement of tongues, mouths, and hands, as in the embodied acts of reading, watching, performing, and listening” (Rangan et al. 2023, 14). An accent does not exclusively belong to the speaker but happens as a mark of difference in the interaction of bodies and media. Adopting the lens of perception—and not just expression—re-describes accent as an object of study. It makes accent available as a method that calls out modes of relation, laying bare the very logics of representation, identity, and interpretation. In this new light, accent is not merely a defect or stigma but also skill, currency, or expertise. It need not simply be a racializing identitarian marker but can also be a form of desire and an expression of affinity. In other words, accent becomes an event and a mode of perception that expands to include looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking as accented practices.

Bhashas, Bodies, Borders²

So, how can attention to accent sharpen the study of South Asia? To respond to this question, I invited four scholars of literature, film, and media working on accents at various career stages and locations in the US academia: Iqra Shagufta Cheema, Darshana Sreedhar Mini, Constantine V. Nakassis, and Samhita Sunya. Their short essays use accent to enter discussions of language, race, caste, and scholarly institutions as they regulate and inflect our understanding of South Asia. Together, they emphasize three interlocking axes along which thinking with an accent animates the study of South Asia. These are bhashas, bodies, and borders.

A scholar of feminist politics, Iqra Shagufta Cheema, writes that the perception of an accent can determine whose choices get dubbed feminist and whose choices are caricatured as regressive. Her essay for this dossier, “Paindoo: Punjabi as an Accent,” specifically tells the gendered and accented story of the Punjabi language in Pakistan. Cheema shows how the stereotype of “paindoo,” a derogatory reference to a rural Punjabi speaker, marginalizes Punjabi in an Urdu-Anglophile libidinal economy in contemporary Pakistan. Cheema takes a comparative and historical approach that situates the life of Punjabi in relation to Bengali in erstwhile East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. She argues that Punjabi predominantly circulates in Pakistan as a language of everyday communication or visual and aural cultural production such as songs, TV shows, and films. In these scenes of speaking and listening, a Punjabi accent constructs a male subject who “is crude, illiterate, unsophisticated, and presumably socioeconomically underprivileged.” These laughable Punjabi accents diminish a rich linguistic culture to respectability politics and a matter of undesirable style associated with working-class Punjabis.

Linguistic anthropologist Constantine V. Nakassis offers another instance of how accents happen and how they imbue languages with prestige by drawing on his fieldwork for Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India in Madurai and Chennai in India. Nakassis introduces the idea of “accenting” as a supple way to name the contextual nature of the event of accent. He writes that he learned Tamil from middle-aged (upper-)middle-class women who were highly educated in Tamil literature. Due to his fluency and familiarity with literary Tamil, at the all-male hostels of historically elite colleges where he was researching, Nakassis was often recognized as a “veḷḷai Tamila̱n,” “white Tamilian.” His “non-native Tamil” was met with “surprise, curiosity, happiness, and even pride that [he] spoke Tamil in the way [he] did.” He is, of course, a particular kind of racially and institutionally privileged speaker of Tamil from the Global North. Nakassis shows how these personal and political “histories of accenting” gave his Tamil a specific accent in his listeners’ view and proved its value against the English typically associated with whiteness.

Film scholar Darshana Sreedhar Mini’s essay “Sounding Out Accent: Field Notes on Otherness” begins with a story of accent discrimination to briefly untether accent from language and develop its relation with the body. In her search for a rental accommodation in New Delhi, Mini finds that her meat-eating dietary habits, along with her “dark-complexion, amply oiled hair, salwar kameez, and Malayalam-inflected Hindi” accent her as “Madrasi” in her landlady’s imagination. The same pejorative word “Madrasi,” she learns, is also used to characterize soft-porn films “a priori, as ‘Madrasi films,’ and a general suspicion of South Indian film practices as carriers of sex and obscenity.” Mini asks: “Can we consider accent as a sign of otherness without language?”. The rest of her essay responds to this question by examining accent as labor in networks of internal migration. Mini writes about the Kerala state government’s Literacy Mission Program called the Changati (Companion) initiative. This program teaches migrants (mainly from Assam, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, and Bihar) Malayalam by using Hindi as a bridge language in a textbook titled Hamara Malayalam (trans. “Our Malayalam”). Speaking Malayalam through Hindi aids in their cultural assimilation, which in turn offers “proof of innocence” in the face of xenophobia and the criminalization of migrants.

In the final essay “Chinaman’s South Asian Inflections for Game Studies,” film scholar Samhita Sunya builds on these arguments about linguistic and cultural value to offer a provocation on the accent of scholarly fields of game studies and area studies. Sunya draws on her scholarship of cross-border media histories that focus on how, why, and where popular genres and objects travel to ask how scholarly objects are valued and marginalized in the first place. To think with an accent, Sunya writes, is “to pay attention to the historical and epistemological conditions by which certain bodies and their associated milieus accrue privilege at the expense of others that are either devalued, overlooked, or stigmatized in comparison” and concludes her essay with an appeal to “ask questions that allow us to apprehend the conditions in which objects of scholarship have come into focus, while others have remained out of view.”

An Accented Approach to South Asia

Across these four essays, accent happens variously as style, stereotype, race, ethnicity, labor, and Eurocentrism. It is rarely an inherent quality of the speaker subject. Instead, (hi)stories of exclusion and inclusion contest and claim the political meanings of a region, its languages, and its rightful speakers. The event of accent brings into view economies of power and desire that negotiate the linguistic, corporeal, and geopolitical landscapes of South Asia. To think with this accent is to pursue a method of situated and embodied inquiry into the bhashas, bodies, and borders of South Asia. It invites us to listen carefully to the accents—to sounds that stick out, that strike us as odd, different, impure, and wrong—for what they tell us about our relations to them and our frameworks of listening. Thinking with an accent, first and foremost, situates the listening and interpreting self: Who is the I that hears the difference? What social, political, disciplinary, and linguistic knowledges do I bring to hear the speaking subject?³

As such an object of inquiry and a method, accent attunes us to languages as living traveling cultures rather than fixed racializing and disciplining markers of national or regional identity. South Asia is not just a region of enormous linguistic diversity, but of diversity that traverses horrific Partitions and passionate language movements, where the same languages are spoken across long historical and dramatic class, caste, geographical, and gender divides. To pay attention to accent is to pay attention to these divides and to the violence and longing of shared cultures as the very conditions of languaging. As Cheema and Nakassis show in their essays, accent highlights the material and polysemic lives of a language especially as it lives inflected by other languages. To think language with accents would, thus, reorient our attention to more commonly researched linguistic cultures of English, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and ask how they relate to Sinhala and Tamil in Sri Lanka, Bengali in Bangladesh, or Punjabi and Pashto in Pakistan. Listening to accents can make audible past, present, and future worlds of contestations and solidarity, of division and affinity, and retrace the national borders that divide the region.

Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy offers a vivid example of how listening to accents as what Lawrence Abu Hamdan calls “biographies of migration” (2014, 73) can remap the borders of South Asia away from colonial and postcolonial cartography.⁴ In another instance, in his hybrid memoir Antiman, Guyanese-American poet Rajiv Mohabir charts the linguistic inheritances of the South Asian diaspora through his deep love for the Bhojpuri language spoken by his grandmother. Brought to Guyana as an indentured laborer, Mohabir’s grandmother would have been the last of her family’s Bhojpuri speakers. Her children reject the language, finding it unsophisticated, embarrassing, and useless for assimilating as immigrants to North America. Still, despite his father’s Anglophilic inclinations, Mohabir yearns for the sounds of her grandmother’s Bhojpuri, mixed as it is with English and Guyanese Creole. “I wanted to keep her voice forever,” he writes (Mohabir 2021, 11), “I wanted to plant our language back in my mouth—the language that had been stripped from us through indenture. I wanted to live in a world of Aji’s music” (Mohabir 2021, 26).

So, Mohabir arrives at the South Asian Summer Language Institute for Hindi at Madison in Wisconsin to learn the language closest to Bhojpuri. He finds that his generational journey to Hindi and the brown of his skin trap him in a “double-bind of expertise and nativism” (Rangan et al. 2023, 16), variously coloring his speech and accenting him as a “real” Indian to his white peers and a “not real Indian” to his Hindi teacher. But Mohabir’s relationship with his grandmother’s Bhojpuri accented English and his accented Hindi is important because it rejects the discourse of authenticity and binaries of native and foreign accents. Speaking with an accent, listening with an accent, and listening to accent are deeply anxious and loving acts in the memoir that restage the story of Hindi from its current Hindu nationalist capture in India and the diaspora. Accent opens Mohabir and his readers to a kaleidoscopic linguistic world that restlessly reimagines the borders of South Asia made coercively by colonialism, indenture, and sugar servitude.

The region of South Asia refers to a part of the world that includes India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, and the Maldives. But as Mohabir and Pawde show, South Asia is arguably more and less than the sum of its parts. In the orientalist colonialist and US expansionist legacies of the history of South Asia as a region, the name is itself the accent. The mark of difference distinguishes unmarked fields of scholarly inquiry, markets, foreign policy, and geography alike. At the same time, as a self-identification for a regional bloc in global geopolitics, South Asia is riven with distrust and hard borders, lopsided by the relative dominance of India and Pakistan and the growing influence of China (Jacob, 2024). In all these instances, South Asia operates by a metonymic logic whereby a part of the region comes to stand for knowledge about its entirety.

A growing body of comparative scholarship across disciplines has challenged the neutrality of these accents. They have re-sounded and reimagined the region by reading not through colonial and neo/postcolonial frameworks, but in their defiance across national borders and in relation to other Asian cultures and other parts of the Global South.⁵ In the same spirit, scholars have also interrogated the global accents of South Asia—its caricatured and distinctive sounds in film, social media, call centers, world music, literature, English-speaking courses, spelling bee contests.⁶ These sounds shape the daily lived experiences of people in the region and the diaspora while reducing its diversity and complexity to a singular esthetic and identity.⁷

But, as it became clear in the research for this dossier, studies of South Asia also have their accent. Knowledge production about South Asia as a field of study is shaped profoundly by the specifics of nationality, caste, gender, language, race, and disciplinary and geographical locations. How often, for instance, has South Asia meant just mainland India and South Asian Studies the knowledge produced about it in the United States and Europe to the exclusion of scholars from South Asia? There is a growing reckoning with the caste politics of the field and the exploitation of research assistants on the ground by scholars in the Global North. Much, of course, has been written about the dominance of English, but how often have South Asian languages meant a handful of major languages like Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali? Writing about English literature in Nepal, Bishupal Limbu (2011) also notes a postcolonial accent to discussions of “South Asia” and its diaspora.⁸ Thus, to ask whether “South Asian Studies” as a field has an accent is to highlight its representational logic: Who speaks South Asia? What do we hear when we hear South Asia? Who do we hear when we hear South Asia?

Thinking with an accent—leveraging accent as a conceptual keyword—would invite scrutiny of power relations that sustain the neutral and native accents of the study of South Asia. For instance, in their “conversation on positionality,” Isabel Huacuja Alonso and Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi offer a response to these questions by asking, “Is our idea of who a South Asianist is defined more by social in-groups than scholarship?” (Alonso and Bandeh-Ahmadi 2022, 36). Their dialogue focuses on their experiences as Chicana/Mexican and Iranian-American scholars of South Asia to reflect on race’s role in producing knowledge about the region. As scholars who chose to study cultures not “their own,” both ran up against “deep-seated expectations” of “who is, who can be, and who should be a scholar of South Asia” (Alonso and Bandeh-Ahmadi 2022, 23). Alonso and Bandeh-Ahmadi argue that “knowledge of the region continues to be imagined as stemming from two kinds of scholars: unmarked white (usually male) scholar and a “native” scholar. In this imagination, whereas the white scholar’s authority derives from his supposed objectivity from being unmarked, the “native” scholar’s authority derives from his proximity and intimate relationship to the region” (Alonso and Bandeh-Ahmadi 2022, 36).

While Alonso and Bandeh-Ahmadi focus on their experiences as “non-white and non-native” scholars, we can further open up the questions of “who is, who can be, and who should be a scholar of South Asia” by assessing the marginalization of caste-oppressed and Adivasi scholars or the overrepresentation of a few languages, regions, communities. We can extend their arguments about institutional and political privileges by noting the ways international relations, hard borders, citizenship, and passport privileges determine the nature of scholarship in and about the region. While comparative studies have much to teach us about the shared history and cultures of South Asia, obtaining a visa to travel across borders is often challenging, if not impossible, for citizens of South Asian countries.

The resultant privileging of certain voices limits scholarly knowledge of South Asia and can give the field discernible caste-marked, classed, and regional accents. It is important to remain cognizant of these accents. It is also important to know that in these neutral and native accents lies another mode of knowing, a counterepistemology, that interrogates the conditions of our scholarly knowledge. How do we know what we know about South Asia? How do we know what we know about language, region, caste, and ethnicity? Asking these questions continually holds the potential to map South Asia outside the logic of settler states and borders, attentive to bodies historically invisibilized, listening to cultures deemed impure—toward new anticolonial, anti-caste, queer-feminist, and border-crossing horizons.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Akshya Saxena

Akshya Saxena is Associate Professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in the Asian Studies and Cinema and Media Arts departments at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton University Press 2022) and a coeditor of Thinking With an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (University of California Press 2023).

Notes

1 See Praseeda Gopinath’s “Narendra Modi Speaks the Nation: Masculinity, Radio, and Voice” in Laura Brueck, Jacob Smith, and Neil Verma ed. Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship (University of Michigan Press, 2020). See also Adil Hossain’s “How the “Bangladeshi” Dog Whistle Helps Justify Violence Against Bengali Muslims” (Scroll.in, April 23, 2022) for an example of how, in India in a xenophobic climate resulting from the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act, hearing someone speak Urdu or certain Bengali dialects can conflate Bengali Muslim Indian citizens with Bangladeshi immigrants.

2 Bhasha literally means language. It is a term often used for modern Indian languages. I have used it to refer to languages more broadly.

3 For more on accented listening and listening with an accent, see Pooja Rangan’s “From Handicap to Crip Curb Cut: Thinking Accent with Disability” and Pavitra Sundar’s “Listening With an Accent—Or How to Leoribari” in Thinking With an Accent (Rangan et al. 2023).

4 For more on accents in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy and reading accents in literature, see Akshya Saxena’s “Stereo Accent: Reading, Writing and Xenophilic Attunement” in Thinking With an Accent (Rangan et al. 2023).

5 An incomplete list of the most recent comparative scholarship that expands the borders of South Asia includes Kareem Khubchandani’s Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Night Life in India (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Adhira Mangalgiri’s States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relations in the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2023), Gal Gvili’s Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895-1962 (Columbia University Press, 2022), Roanne Kantor’s South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Samhita Sunya’s Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay (University of California Press, 2022), Isabel Huacuja Alonso’s Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (Columbia University Press, 2023), and Salma Siddique’s Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). See also comparative works that focus on the linguistic and literary diversity within national contexts, such as Bhavya Tiwari’s Beyond English: World Literature and India (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Preetha Mani’s The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method (Northwestern University Press, 2022).

6 See Shilpa Dave’s Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film (University of Illinois Press, 2013), A. Aneesh’s Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global (Duke University Press, 2015), and Shalini Shankar’s Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z’s New Path to Success (Basic Books, 2019).

7 For a discussion of the reception of South Asian literature in English as global anglophone or world literature, see Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan’s “Is There a Call Center Literature?” in Thinking With an Accent (Rangan et al. 2023).

8 Limbu argues that the dominance of India and Pakistan in discussions of “South Asia” and its diaspora has meant that “cultural production of countries that were not former colonies of Europe has been either neglected or erroneously categorized as fitting, with perhaps minor adjustments, under the postcolonial banner” (86).