Many Tongues, One Fare

The strapline of Translator magazine is “The world overheard”, and today’s story is a short but brilliant example of what they do so well. Set in the back of a Bangalore taxi in the small hours of the morning, it uses languages to give a vivid sense of the place and the people who find themselves there: “In these cases, language here is not love. It is a demonstration of leverage: who says what to whom, and how.” The magazine itself is full of marginalia, giving more detail on the meaning and significance of individual words, and we’ve done our best to replicate that here. Make sure you scroll to the bottom of the post to see notes on the italicised words below…

By night, Bangalore’s first-world dreams flicker out, and in their place rises the familiar roar of the third world – endless construction, half-finished roads, dust in the headlights, a city forever being built but never quite becoming. 

It’s three in the morning on the Airport Road when Bangalore fully drops the act. The rising tech city seems to have disappeared entirely. There’s no trace of TED Talk optimism or latte foam now. Just headlights, fatigue, and men who know the city better than Google Maps ever will. This is cab-driver time. 

A cab is not a vehicle here. It’s a confession booth on wheels, filled with the cadence of different languages. Kannada spills out first perhaps – North Karnatak Kannada, clipped and percussive, like a temple-chant. Then one might catch the chatter of Hindi, stitched together from North Indian techie passengers. Dakhni Urdu picked up over chai and cigarettes. Then something softer: the lilt of Bengali on a phone call with a fellow cab driver; Bhojpuri for when the mood loosens; Odia, when someone asks about home. English occasionally limps into the mix, apologetically but usefully – less a language than a tool, pulled out when the city demands efficiency.

Languages don’t coexist politely. They elbow each other for space. The driver doesn’t care what language should be spoken in Bangalore. He speaks what works. He speaks what pays. He speaks what keeps him out of trouble. 

Around the airport – in the neighbourhoods of Doddajala, Shettigere, Hunachur – the city is raw and sleepless. This is not Bangalore as the brand it has become; this is Bangalore backstage. Charging stations hum like tired insects. Electric cabs line up, plugged in to the electricity supply while the drivers inside are stretched out, discarded coats on human hangers. Puncture-repair shops glow under naked bulbs. Mechanics here operate with a sixth sense of what the problem might be – listening to engines the way doctors listen to lungs. 

Tea shops never close. They cannot afford to. The food being produced tells the real story. Jowar roti and ennegayi for the man from Kalaburagi. Rice and dalma for the Odia driver who misses green vegetables that taste like memory. Litti-chokha materializes out of nowhere at 4.30 in the morning, because enough men asked for it often enough. Someone’s aunt has started cooking. Someone’s cousin has found a shed to sell pan masala, cigarettes and cool drinks. Capitalism, yes – but intimate, desperate capitalism. Survival economics. 

PGs sprout like weeds. Thin walls. Shared toilets. Beds rented by the day, by shift, by level of exhaustion. Devotional frames of gods and goddesses interspersed with pictures of loved ones, all stacked next to pressure cookers. White uniforms drying on optimism alone. These rooms hold men who belong everywhere and nowhere at once. Region becomes identity. Language becomes a kind of armour for these men. Home becomes a voice note played on repeat. 

And then there is Kannada chauvinism – loud, brittle, performative – demanding purity in a city that has never been pure. It insists on linguistic loyalty while depending entirely on linguistic migrants. The contradiction is not subtle. It is structural. Bangalore runs on borrowed tongues, but demands one language as proof of belonging. Kannada becomes both shelter and weapon – something to live in, and something to be beaten with – and the migrant is always the easiest target: audible before he is visible, marked by his accent, never quite allowed to arrive. 

Bangalore was always a melting pot – not as a matter of virtue, still less marketing – but simply by accident, the result of other forces. Being an imperial cantonment did that. Railways did that. Scientific and educational institutions did that. Textile mills did that. IT just made it visible and unbearable. The cab driver is the inheritor of all those migrations, carrying their ghosts between terminals and toll booths. 

He is yelled at in English by men who cannot locate Karnataka on a map. Corrected in Kannada by men who arrived ten years ago and discovered chauvinistic pride last week. Spoken to in Hindi as if by default. He absorbs it all. He learns when to nod. When to stay silent. When to switch tongues like gears. 

In these cases, language here is not love. It is demonstration of leverage: who says what to whom, and how.  

And yet – something softer also survives. At a tea stall near Shettigere: Kannada owner, Hindi and Urdu banter, Telugu jokes, Tamil and Malayalam songs blasting from a phone with a cracked screen. No manifesto. No outrage. Just caffeine and coexistence. This is cosmopolitanism without self-awareness. Ugly, functional, alive. 

Bangalore is not special. That’s the point. It is not uniquely tolerant or uniquely cruel. It is merely honest about its fractures. The cab driver knows this. He drives through it. Over it. Around it. He listens to the city argue with itself, one fare at a time. 

By dawn, planes take off and land. The urban elite wakes up pretending the city is legible according to the brand Bangalore script. The driver orders the ginger chai that reminds him of his grandmother and cool mornings with a silvery sun breaking the fog over the fields in his village. He eats food from somewhere else. He waits for the next ping. 

The city moves because he does – multilingual, underpaid, irreplaceable, driving through a Bangalore that has never spoken in one tongue, and never will.

Jowar roti
A flatbread made with jowar flour.

Ennegayi
Stuffed eggplant.

Litti-chokha
Stuffed doughballs served with mashed roasted vegetables.

Pan masala
A chewable digestif made with betel nut and various seeds such as fennel and anise.

PGs
Paying Guest – a popular form of rental accommodation where individuals pay to stay in someone else’s property, often sharing rooms, facilities, food, electricity, and housekeeping, especially near tech parks and universities. A more affordable alternative to flats, with varying levels of freedom and services.

Translator is new magazine of translated journalism and reportage from around the world, for the open-minded and the language-curious. They are a community open to everyone interested in reading the world differently. Issue #3 is out now, available in select stores and online. 

Vivek N.D. is a Bangalore-based writer and researcher. He teaches Political Science at Vidyashilp University and loves cats, music, meat, police procedurals and to travel; not necessarily in that order.

Hugh Hadfield is an editorial illustrator working with visual journalism and representational caricature. He uses drawing to explore people, power and the narratives that shape them.