by Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi
Losing one’s mother tongue to a foreign language is Love’s labour lost, opines Amitabh Vikram, presenting his thoughts through a poem.
Nothing was abrupt and sudden;
It was planned instead.
Like a clever magician,
You crawled my nimble mind from top to bottom,
And filled my books with arcane words,
And replaced my sounds with foreign accent.
I loved my mother tongue once.
But, you deprived me of my language.
Alas! Love’s Labour Lost.
I gradually lost my speech,
As all the time I just mimicked you.
I have no link to my community.
You gave me a death,
By simply making my language extinct.
Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi is university faculty and assistant professor of linguistics at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, India; and author of two books on lesser known Indian languages: A Grammar of Hadoti and A Grammar of Bhadarwahi. As a poet, he has published around 50 poems in different anthologies, journals, and magazines worldwide. Until recently, his poem “Mother” was included as a prologue to Motherhood and War: International Perspectives (Eds.), Palgrave Macmillan Press. 2014.
