I am Proud of My Broken Englizh and You Should Be Too
Words by Ravista Mehra, edited by Evar Hussayni
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her Ted talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, that ‘the single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story’. The collection of stories I accumulated are an effort to get stories from people whose story may never have been told before, either because they didn’t think it was important to tell or because others didn’t think it important to listen or read. I believe it is the smaller, personal, seemingly insignificant stories that have the power to humanise, empower and repair the broken dignity of a larger people or place. The project Broken Englizh started off as a personal enquiry into what it meant to ‘decolonize’ in one’s own life during my final year at the Royal College of Art in 2019. Having an academic understanding of ‘decolonisation’ wasn’t enough, I needed to be able to apply it in my daily life to be able to make sense of the magnitude of it. That set the premise for an analytical look into my socio-cultural upbringing. How had coming from a country that was colonised affecting my identity, and those of the people around me? What racial prejudices and social responsive patterns was I stuck in without knowing? I needed to make myself inwardly and outwardly accountable, before asking others to join me in doing so.
To begin, I tried writing my story. It took several attempts to be able to iterate the dichotomy and irony I grew up in. This false sense of ‘Indian-ness as existing opposite to the idea of Pakistan’ being ingrained in me since childhood because my grandparents came to India during the Partition. Having seen carnage during the mass displacement of 1947, my grandparents carry with them the trauma such violence brings. Having lost family and friends to the fight for ‘home’, they were forced to abandon their lives in the land they were born and brought up in, leaving an awfully bitter taste in their hearts. That bitter aftertaste is what was passed on to my parents, and then me. As an adult that Indian-ness got questioned in Trumps’ America and the apparent diverse Great Britain. I questioned what it meant to be Indian when I think in English, but feel in Hindi. This exercise helped me come to terms with the racial prejudices I grew up with and so begin to dismantle them. Pretending I am ‘woke’, because I have gone to art schools, and have a fair knowledge of the outside world was doing me no good when I was confronted with situations where I was subconsciously enacting my prejudices. If we do not confront the past of our ancestors, we risk the chance of repeating it.
What I asked from the participants of Broken Englizh was similar; tell me your story, the absolute raw controversial truth of it. Look back at your life through the lenses of ethnicity, race, disability, heterosexist rhetoric, or perceived representations, and try to explain to yourself and the reader, where it is that you fit in the world, or don’t. The participants were not only from a lineage of the colonised, but also from the coloniser. This gave the stories power to be a conversation rather than just a ‘one sided recount’ - a quality that has endeared narratives of the West for far too long. Expression comes to us best in our mother tongue and so I encouraged people to write in their language of choice. They also submitted a list of racial misconceptions / ignorant remarks that people made at them, about their culture or identity. When the audience engages with the narrative, the ‘stereotypes’ are the first thing they encounter, which are to be shattered once the story is read.
The phrase ‘broken englizh’ according to me is ‘the expectation that there is a correct form of Englizh for the non-native to express themselves in’. It is usually used in a derogatory sense. However, this initiative celebrates the breaking of such tyrannical ideas and the stuck-up English grammar. Broken Englizh is an attempt to demystify decolonisation through the power of first-person narrative. It takes the form of a blog containing 26 stories in 5 different languages out of which 11 stories were published by Sold Out Publishing as a physical unbound book in 2020. Each story has a broken plate to go with it, which are illustrated by Paridhi Mundra. The broken plates are inspired by the collection of memorabilia in the West. The plate being broken symbolises how there is no one narrative that deserves to be the token story for any place or people. Each story deserves its own plate, and each misunderstood assumption deserves to be shattered.
Backtracking for a minute from the birth, to the conception of this project, is my relationship to the term ‘decolonisation’, which I had not heard until I saw a flyer that read ‘Decolonising the Institution #3 Community’ in October of 2018 at the Royal College of Art’s White City Campus. I did not know what the term meant besides its vague reference to a period of colonisation, which too I had never studied at the British School, New Delhi. Nor come across during my four years in Providence, Rhode Island. When I googled ‘decolonisation’, the definition was describing the act of retracting armed forces from occupied countries, leaving them independent. It didn’t fully add up to the promised event on the flyer, thus I went to enlighten myself. The event was happening at Huckletree White City Place. A space that tries to enact a sense of utopia but somehow just reflects frivolous naivety. The panel consisted of three white members out of four, with only one person from the BIPOC community. I point this out because this was supposed to be a discussion around the community affected by colonisation. The audience was majority multi-cultural and multi-ethnic. The discussion turned out to unfortunately be the same uncomfortable jargon at most events dealing with ‘diversity’; being told by someone non-BIPOC, how BIPOC folks (probably/should) feel. How they are disadvantaged; while simultaneously enacting that injustice with the tokenistic participation, and hierarchical performance structure. How we should do better to help dismantle this ‘white supremacist and patriarchal societal prejudice’; invoking a complex discussion on who the ‘we’ who are fighting, and the ‘we’ who are being fought for, is.
It is truly admirable that this effort, of rehumanising the previously colonised subjects, is a fight also of people not of colour. But a panel discussing these hardships and frustrations should ideally consist of people who have been through those cruelties, not analytic onlookers. It was the moment I realised the difference in narratives of the East and the West. It is not that they are told by the residents of those respective places, ironically somehow both sides of the narratives are told by the West, it’s just that one is written with empathy and experience and the other with sympathy (if that) and ‘observation’. Recently having read ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison, I heard her sitting next to me, roll her eyes and whisper ‘Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined my dear and right now you are being defined’.
‘We’ - individuals of varying and complicated backgrounds from around the world (yes even the mystical and oversimplified Eastern part of it), clustered together, are trying and failing to understand each other. Maybe because ‘We’ feels like an enforced sense of togetherness, like between cousins, who may or may not have anything in common. Before we can become ‘We’, we need to be you and I. We need to listen to another’s story, ask questions where we don’t understand, do this many times over, with many different people, and then maybe we can generate the right to be a ‘We’. Who I am is my definition of myself, and only I have the right to articulate it. This verbose ramble on ‘we’ is my understanding of decolonising for the first-person use. And without putting this framework of questioning, dismantling and rebuilding human narratives to use, ‘decolonisation’ will remain an empty homage and metaphor to utopic diversity.
To synthesise, decolonisation to me is the process of accepting that the view of the coloniser is only one perspective of a story and the other perspective, which is that of the colonised, is equally (if not more) important in telling the whole story.
Keeping the experience I had at White City Place, my general walk-through life as a mislabelled brown girl, and my definition of decolonisation that was born from the latter in mind, I decided to start the initiative of Broken Englizh. English was (/is) widely used to enforce submission to colonialism, but unintended by its owner it has spread, grown and transformed into various different species. Take Hinglish for example, a mixture of Hindi and English. It is what most people in Northern India speak, including myself. Englizh is the mistress to most nations, producing bastards wherever it lays its head. But I am proud of my broken Englizh and you should be too.
We cannot ask literature, history, institutions, syllabi, nor work places to ‘decolonise’ themselves when firstly we do not fully comprehend what we are asking. Moreover, those larger units are formed of individuals. Who need to pause, reflect and analyse their place in the world. How they need it to change for a more diverse and inclusive experience of being alive, in all aspects of life, and then enforce that implementation in their day-to-day. This is not a one-time task. This is an everyday rinse-the-prejudice and repeat formula.
To read more about Ravista’s project you can visit: