Talking City Signs
“Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going”… — Rita Mae Brown
Language, spoken and written, holds a significant place in understanding the culture of a place, becomes an identity of the geographic region. India alone has over 400 languages, and respecting this diversity, the country doesn’t have one single national language. The local language, along with ‘official languages’ Hindi and English, is used for official purposes. However, it is the local language that is intricately linked to the local culture with dialects adding to the individuality of the place and the people.
Thanks to urban migration and globalisation, Indian cities have become melting pots of cultures, becoming home to people from all across the country and around the world. Yet, the regional language roots the identity of the place and its culture.
Cities, the ones that have existed for years, are sites of multi-culturalism which have organically developed into socio-spatial geographical environments directly shaped by the people living there and their histories. Both the language and the city evolve with a perpetual exchange between people, history, migration, architecture, urban landscapes, and linguistic sources.
Our built environment, is an intentional/unintentional reflection of the local culture- craftsmanship, materiality, weather and even language. You’d wonder how is language displayed in a city and its urban spaces?
Apart from the spoken language, the written language most commonly finds its place in the public domain in the form of signage, the ones installed by the state and those by the people. Our streets are lined with shops that display their names on a bare board which has become a very important visual character of the street and the urban environment. These sign boards, on individual shops and commercial complexes are the most basic marketing tool by the owners, containing advertisement and information of the service and products. Yet, they play another role on a larger scale.
Signage on the façade of the shop, like the footpath, falls on the public domain and constitutes public art, regardless of whether it is designed by a professional or not. These rectangular boards become visual reflections of a society’s creativity and sensitivity, helping people with everyday navigation, becoming mini-landmarks and orientation points, and thus quintessential urban markers of business and trade in a city.
A usual drive to the old core city area of Surat (the organically developed area), I suddenly noticed a board to the public toilet that read ‘Pay and Use Toilet’ in Gujarati Script which is used to write Gujarati (the regional language). The error did not register at first.
That’s the thing with these signage in various colours, fonts, and languages is that we are extremely oblivious to them in our everyday life, we sure don’t not see them, but they often go unnoticed. You ‘see’ them, but you don’t give them a second thought.
While these signages form a very important visual element of a streetscape, there remains some information that usually misses the privileged eye, as it had kept missing mine until recently. Once I ‘noticed’ it, I started observing a similar pattern in the surrounding areas.
People, shop owners mostly, preferred to use English words on their names and boards but chose to write it in the regional script Gujarati, choosing to use their regional language to aid those who cannot read English but not aiding those who cannot understand the sound of English words.
So while the semiotics (visual sign) of the written information is in Gujarati (the regional language), the semantics (language) of the spoken word is English. Hence, the two languages were in constant tension with each other, much like the state of the Indian culture when it comes to English as a spoken language.
What this case highlights is a reluctance to use the regional language and taking pride in the foreign one, which is the current state of a post-colonial India. The new modern India, is keen on using English as our primary language, so much that it has become a preferred language of education and communication.
Now, before going any further and pointing fingers, I realise that I too am a product of this system as well as continue to contribute to this practice by using English as my language to communicate and express. However, I am also of the belief that noticing and voicing these disparities is equally important, regardless of the language I express it in.
My issue with this tension between languages is it a display of a hierarchy between the English speaking and the regional language speaking people. It highlights the individual’s attempt to match the ‘English speaking’ trend or rather be ‘included’ in the cool gang. Perhaps, it’s an unconscious error however at the heart of the relationship between language and social inequality is the idea that some expressions of language are valued more than others in a way that is associated with some people being more valued than others and some ideas expressed by people through language being more valued than others.
As material objects of visual culture, shop signs carry business identities as well as individual perceptions. They are a reflection of an unconscious thought that saw years of conditioning and neglect. However, the tension between the two languages was not only observed in private shops but also public infrastructures like public vegetable market and public toilets, which are built by the local governing authority to facilitate all, regardless of their social, economic and linguistic status.
The public toilet (that started this chain of thought) happens to be located in the old city area of Surat, with a large informal settlement in its vicinity. The primary users of this facility are low-income families, rickshaw drivers, vegetable vendors and daily wage workers who speak very little English. Similarly, the vegetable market, which reads that in Gujarati scripture, invites the educated-English speaking people shopping for their vegetables, but not for the vendors and the shoppers who do not speak or understand the language.
Do such practices or rather errors, by the governing authority, not marginalise the non-English speaking people of the city? When such open paradox is visible on public infrastructures, it makes one question whether our cities are built only for the ‘English’ speaking crowd, elevating language to a social class and not only a medium of communication.
The problem is that those in authoritarian positions who actually design and commission these projects, are capable of reading both these languages just fine, and have little time to actually narrow down such errors, which go unnoticed. However, these errors in detail highlight our cities’ top-down planning, where those who do not meet the ‘standards’ are marginialsed in the urban environment.
Again, the trend has more to do with the growing globalisation and the colonial mindset that even after 74 years of Independence, the zest to modernise leads us to ‘westernisation’, enforcing English as a primary and elite language. We, are still suffering from what Times of India reporter Pratigyan Das calls- a ‘colonial hangover’, as narrated through the signage in the public domain.
Our cities are beautiful breathing entities that are a reflection of our practices, as I just displayed above. But, cities are built for everyone, regardless of their social and economic status. However, such displays highlight the stigma associated with language and the citizens.
Perhaps, the first step towards a smart city should be an inclusive city that doesn’t paradoxically attempt to provide those at the lower step of the social ladder by unconsciously marginalising them. Maybe, the idea of humanising cities can start from being language inclusive!
