The Archive I Inherited: On Losing Punjabi

I have never been 100% comfortable saying that I speak Punjabi fluently. I speak it but unevenly, hesitantly, with the strange confidence of someone who knows a language partly through memory instead of mastery. I speak Indian English comfortably. I speak Hindi much more easily, but Punjabi lives somewhere else for me: in fragments, family phrases, overheard conversations, and words that now arrive with a little ache.

My mother did not speak Punjabi with us. My father spoke it with his parents and parents-in-law, but with us. This was not unusual. In postcolonial urban India, English had become a language of aspiration, education, mobility, and professional possibility. Hindi could connect us across regions and institutions. Punjabi belonged to another register: family, elders, home, memory. So my parents made a decision that many immigrants to Delhi and upwardly mobile families make: they prioritized the languages they believed would give their children access to the future.

I understand that decision. I also live with its consequences.

Now my father and grandparents are gone. And with them, something has become much harder to recover. It is not that Punjabi has disappeared entirely from my life. It has not. But the people who carried my version of Punjabi as in the particular vocabulary, cadence, jokes, kinship terms, pronunciations, and stories that made it ours are no longer here to correct me, teach me, or simply speak. This is what I mean when I call language an archive.

English did not simply become important in India by accident. Colonial education reorganized relationships between language, class, employment, and authority. After independence, English remained deeply embedded in institutions and continued to signal educational and professional mobility. In urban families, choosing English could therefore feel less like abandoning a mother tongue than investing in a child's future.

And yet the colonial hierarchy of languages does not vanish simply because the colonial administrator leaves.

I see this in my own family. My parents did not speak Punjabi to us as consistently as they might have because it was perhaps imagined as offering something different from what English could offer the new generation. English offered credentials, confidence in school, professional fluency, and mobility. Hindi remained useful and widely shared. Punjabi became increasingly associated with grandparents and an older generation.

Now I live as an immigrant from India in the United States, and the language question has changed again. Here, I encounter a familiar diasporic paradox: I can be read as Indian while being linguistically separated from parts of the Indian world that produced me. Sometimes people assume that because I am Indian, I should effortlessly speak every language associated with my family. But diaspora does not preserve culture automatically.

My relationship to Punjabi is therefore not simply one of deficiency. It is also an archive of historical choices. I remember the feeling of listening to older relatives switch into Punjabi and realizing that the room had changed. They were not merely changing vocabulary. I felt like they were changing relationships. A phrase could signal respect, intimacy, irritation, or humor before I had consciously processed its literal meaning. That is why language loss feels different from forgetting a list of words. I am losing access to a social world. That distinction matters to me as a writing scholar and someone interested in archival studies. Writing studies teaches us that literacy is never merely an individual skill. It is social, institutional, historical, and material. Archival studies similarly reminds us that preservation is never neutral. What gets saved, cataloged, digitized, taught, and remembered depends on structures of power.

Languages work the same way.

A language can survive officially while disappearing intimately. Punjabi can have millions of speakers and still become fragile inside one family. A language does not need to disappear from a nation to disappear from a household, and when it disappears from a household, what vanishes is not only vocabulary. It is a way of organizing memory. We, as writing teachers, often talk about students' linguistic repertoires as resources, but institutions can still quietly tell them which parts of those repertoires belong in serious academic spaces. Students learn to translate themselves. They learn which accents to soften, which languages to hide, which family stories require explanation, and which forms of English will be rewarded. Not everything can be preserved. I do not romanticize some imaginary pure Punjabi that my family should have maintained. Languages change. Families change. Migration changes us. My parents made choices under real historical conditions, and I benefit enormously from the education and mobility those choices helped make possible. But I wish we had understood that preservation requires practice. This is true for family language, and it is true for institutional archives, community histories, oral traditions, and writing centers. What looks permanent can depend on generations of invisible labor. Someone has to record the interview. Someone has to teach the language. Someone has to save the photograph, annotate the document, tell the story again, ask the elder one more question.

Otherwise, the archive becomes silence. The archive survives, but increasingly only in fragments of memory.

So I am learning Punjabi differently now, not as a test I need to pass, but as an archive I want to approach with humility. I am learning through fragments. Through recordings. Through family memories. Through the words that survived. But I can refuse to pretend that what was lost did not matter, and perhaps that is one purpose of archival work: not to recover everything, but to make visible what disappearance costs.

The language I do not speak fluently is still speaking to me. It tells me where I came from, what my family chose, what colonialism made possible and impossible, and how easily intimate histories can vanish. An archive does not always disappear because someone destroys it.

Sometimes, it disappears because no one knew they were supposed to keep speaking.