Bilingual Creativity

Red Coconut Chutney

A lighter post today, after the three not-so-light ones on changing Indian identity.

Multilingualism was a way of life growing up in South India. We grew up simultaneously learning the language(s) our parents spoke, Hindi, and whatever other Indian languages various other people around us spoke…Telugu spoken by the vegetable vendor who came selling fresh produce everyday, Malayalam, because some neighbors and friends spoke it….you get the gist. And as I have mentioned in previous posts, I grew up speaking both Tamil and Kannada because my parents spoke them, Telugu because of various shop keepers in addition to the young lady my parents employed to help with housework, and Hindi, because I heard a lot of it around me. Malayalam was spoken by our downstairs neighbors, but this is a language I didn’t have the good fortune of acquiring naturally. Really too bad, I have often thought in the last few years of living in the Middle East. The Malayalee population here is huge, and had I known the language, life could have been…er…easier in many ways.

And part of being multilingual is a largely unconscious facility not only to switch between languages with ease, but also to mix languages as needed within an utterance – code-mixing. I think the first time I truly appreciated the degree to which multilingualism and code mixing are part and parcel of life in South India was when I was collecting data for my dissertation – in early 2000. It was during a trip to India, where I recorded naturally-occurring language in every setting I could: conversations with family, service encounters at various shops or markets (which, in India, quickly gravitate toward conversations), restaurants, news from different TV channels…you name it. I always had a tape recorder on, much to the chagrin of my friends and relatives. But said friends and relatives, perhaps hesitant at first, quickly forgot about the recording device. And I got the richest data that I later transcribed and analyzed.

And writing my dissertation (and many times since) I wrote about what Kachru termed “bilingual’s creativity” – what he explained as the linguistic processes employed as a result of competence in two or more languages; processes sometimes employed simply because one needs linguistic features from more than one language to make oneself understood, or in other cases, a purposeful exploitation of linguistic features – at the sentence level, at the word-level, even within words - from more than one language in the design of a text to serve a certain purpose. Er…a word chutney, if you will. No, don’t grimace…yet.  I have, in a past post, provided you with a few examples of the latter. Remember the Facebhook ad? Where the restaurant owner played with the phonological similarities between “book” in English and “bhook,” which means “hunger” in Hindi? Bilingual creativity.

And such bilingual creativity has been greatly utilized by a certain advertising campaign in India over the past almost 5 decades. The Amul Butter advertising campaign. I came across a great Amul Butter ad during my last trip to India, and it was this ad that prompted this post.

I don’t remember when it was that I first came upon an Amul advertisement – either in print or on TV. But I do remember a slogan – Utterly Butterly Delicious, Amul! This was probably when I was 13 or 14, home at my aunt’s from boarding school, watching morning TV. That jingle hasn’t changed, nor has their main ad strategy: The use of combinations of Hindi and English, or even of different registers or dialects of English, to achieve a certain effect. Bilingual/bidialectal creativity at its best, really.

The ads are visually pretty simple, and most feature the Amul Butter girl, who supposedly first made her appearance in 1966, and has since been the face of the company. One of their main slogans is “Amul: Taste of India” – this was possibly because of wanting to suggest that a breakfast of bread and butter were not just a staple of a British breakfast anymore, but now also an Indian one.  The company is in the Guiness Book of World Records for the longest-running advertising campaign.

And what, I think, makes the ad campaign so effective and long lasting is that it prides itself on staying current, with witty one-liners that are topical, with very humorous takes on various national or international issues, in addition to the creative manipulation of Hindi and English to its advantage. The colorful ads have been running for over 52 years now.

Here’s the ad I saw recently which prompted this post:

So this ad was released on Twitter after Elon Musk’s whopping $44 billion purchase of Twitter. Clearly taking a dig at Musk, the ad features him instead of the girl feeding a bird a spoonful of butter. The first sentence translates to “This is a big deal, Musk, Musk”  with the play here coming from “Musk” for “musth,”  a word used in many different ways in Hindi, and here, roughly translatable as “awesome” or “something else” (very positively). The second line takes the dig on Musk further by asking him to “share it, don’t have it,” alone…er Elon. The ad clearly makes a statement on an individual’s takeover of the social media platform by manipulating the vowels in the word “alone” to sound like “Elon.” And to a person with some familiarity with the phonology of Hindi, this is perfectly plausible. Pretty smart.

And here’s another ad, one that was released when Biden and Harris won the election, and this time, featuring the Amul Butter girl declaring Biden and Harris the winners in a “nail-Biden victory.”

The second line of the ad is another great example of bilingual creativity. The Hindi word “jo” translates to the relative pronoun “which.” The ad plays with “Joe” versus “jo” to give you the line “Joe makes the bread tasty” instead of “which makes the bread tasty.”

While these two ads exploit a combination of Hindi and English at the lexical level, here are a couple of others that have creative word play in English. Both utterly brilliant. And pretty self-explanatory.

With the last one I have here, I mean… they couldn’t not, could they?? And Orange…well…he does have a dialect of his own…

Now I promised to keep this light. And I have. But I will leave you with a couple of thoughts…. Amul has supposedly made it big, and has had the longevity it has in India because the company caters to everyone. The company claims that it is the voice of the public - speaking for Indians all over, all religions, castes, communities, social classes. Yet I can’t help but wonder….how many people in the country have sufficient proficiency in both languages, or sufficient proficiency in English, to understand the nuances  of the advertisements? The play on words, sounds, ideas?

And now…from word chutneys to real chutneys. Yes, you can grimace now. I did.

This week, I thought I’d give you a recipe for a dish that, in India, has numerous variations, but in other contexts, I’d wager, is much more limited because of people’s limited perceptions about Indian food in general, and this one in particular. Chutney. If I were to ask non-Indians what a chutney is, I’m pretty sure I’d get one of two answers: a) the light green (usually) stuff served at Indian restaurants with the papadums; and b) a sweet and sour concoction made with a fruit like mango. And yes, these two are definitely chutneys. But in India, chutneys are far, far more diverse. You can make a chutney with almost anything – and most Indian households do. Growing up, I ate coconut chutneys, mint chutneys, cilantro chutneys, peanut chutneys, mango chutneys…the list goes on and on. And note my pluralization of chutney in all these phrases – because there are many different versions of each kind of chutney. We even make chutneys with vegetable peels – a chayote peel chutney, or a ridge gourd peel chutney. Absolutely delicious. And why throw out vegetable peel if you can make a great chutney out of it?

So today, I’m going to give you a simple recipe for a coconut chutney, not the green or white chutney those of you familiar with idlies and dosas would know, but a chutney that is reddish-brown because of the tamarind and dried red chillies in it. This chutney can be eaten with really anything – hot rice and a dollop of ghee, on a sandwich with slices of cucumber, or accompanying a hot samosa or bajji. Or really, even plain! By the spoonful.

Red Coconut Chutney

Ingredients (makes about 2 cups of chutney)

1.     1 Tbsp coconut oil

2.     1 Tbsp urad dhal

3.     5-6 dry red chillies (or more if you prefer - a bit of heat is lovely in this chutney)

4.     1 tsp coriander seeds

5.     ½ tsp fenugreek seeds

6.     ¼ tsp asafoetida

7.     2 cups fresh grated coconut. If you have none, and have unsweetened desiccated coconut, you can absolutely use it.

8.     1 Tbsp tamarind paste

9.     1 ½  tsp salt (reduce it to 1 tsp if your tamarind paste has salt in it)

10.  ½ to 1 cup water

Method

1.     Heat the coconut oil in a heavy-bottomed small skillet.

2.     When the oil is warm, add the urad dhal and cook on low for 3-4 minutes. You want the dhal to slowly cook through without browning too quickly.

3.     When the dhal just starts to turn a pretty color, add the chillies, fenugreek, coriander seed, and asafoetida. Cook for an additional 1-2 minutes, also on low. You want all the ingredients to toast slowly. The chillies should turn a dark red, but not black, and for the dhal to be a golden brown. The mixture of ingredients should smell incredibly fragrant.

4.     Allow the mixture to cool. Blend together with the coconut, tamarind paste, salt, and water. You want a thick chutney, not a watery one, so add just as much water as you need for your blender.

5.     Enjoy with hot rice and a dollop of fresh ghee! The chutney needs refrigeration, and should last a 3-4 days in the fridge.