In collaboration with Rita Kothari, HUF Director Rupert Snell has just published a new book on the phenomenon of Hinglish. Here’s how the authors describe Chutnefying English: the Phenomenon of Hinglish:
What is your bahaana this time?” Something has happened to English, and something has happened to Hindi. These being the two languages that India deals with most, we need to understand them anew through their coalescence in Hinglish — a mixture of Hindi and English that has begun to dominate every context from conversation to blogs, films, and advertisements. How has urban communication in India reached this point? Is this language, as some believe, a new and trendy idiom of a youth no longer competent in either English or Hindi? Or is it a product of Indian English and its variants, an Indianized version of a once-colonial language, claiming a place alongside India’s many bhashas? Do we owe this hybrid phenomenon to a moment when Rushdie and his followers made chutnefied English a virtue? Or to the yawning gap between bolchaal ki Hindi and sarkari Hindi? Is Hinglish to be spurned as the bastard offspring of its two parent languages, or welcomed as the natural and legitimate result of their long-term cohabitation?
Bringing together contributors from literature, linguistics, cultural studies, translation, new media, advertising, cinema, and radio, this book takes a serious look at the very real phenomenon of Hinglish and provides a new platform for discussion and heated debate.
Rita Kothari and Rupert Snell (eds.), Chutnefying English: the Phenomenon of Hinglish. Delhi, Penguin India, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-143-41639-5 Rs 299