Shyamla, who was born to a Tamil father and Fijian-Indian mother, was only taught English as a child. Now, she feels like she has been locked out of her culture.
It came as a shock for Ravi Chand when he realised that he could not converse in the language of his grandmother.
Shyamla Eswaran was born in Australia to a Tamil father and Fiji-Indian mother. A professional dancer Shyamla spoke only English while growing up.“My parents say it was because my dad was a Tamil speaker, and my mother is a Hindi speaker, and they did not have a common language. Therefore they just chose to teach us English,” Shyamla explains, adding that the other reason was that her parents thought that would help her fit in more.
"And sometimes that left them a little bit out of the loop from family members who are still living in India.” We are living in a country where before colonisation there were some 250 languages spoken around 800 dialects by the indigenous people. That was actively suppressed by government policies as recently as the 1970s.
“The moment there is a fracture in your cultural connection, it distances you from the people who might be connected to you through blood.” There have been increases in the proportion of the population speaking Hindi from 0.5% to 0.7% and over 160,000 people speak Hindi at home. Ravi and Shyamla both emphasise that their children would be learning the languages. Ravi says his three-year-old son deserves to learn the language of his mother and father.
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