The Phonetic Uterus: A Journey through Language and Identity

The first word I ever spoke was not recorded in any baby book, captured on video, or celebrated with fanfare. It emerged, as all first words do, from that primordial soup of breath and need, somewhere between a cry and a name. My mother tells me it was amma—the Malayalam word for mother—but I suspect that like all origin stories, this one has been polished smooth by repetition, its rough edges worn away by the desire for meaning.

What I know for certain is that language came to me the way skin comes to a newborn—inevitable, intimate, and inherited. Malayalam wrapped itself around my consciousness before I understood what consciousness was, shaping not just how I would speak but how I would think, dream, and navigate the world. It was my first home, built not of brick and mortar but of vowels and consonants, tonal shifts, and grammatical structures that felt as natural as breathing.

But homes, I would learn, are not permanent structures.

The Erosion Begins

The slow dissolution of the mother tongue is rarely dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself with ceremony or trauma—though these can certainly accelerate the process. Instead, it seeps away like water through limestone, carving invisible caverns in the bedrock of identity until one day you reach for a word that should be there, has always been there, and find only empty space.

For me, the erosion began in a classroom in Kozhikode, where I first encountered English not as a foreign language but as a ladder—a golden staircase leading toward what my teachers called “opportunities.” The colonial mathematics was simple enough: English equaled advancement, Malayalam equaled limitation. The equation was never stated so baldly, of course. It hid behind more palatable rhetoric about “global citizenship” and “competitive advantage,” but the message was clear.

I watched classmates abandon Malayalam midsentence, switching to English not because they lacked the Malayalam words but because the English ones carried more weight, more prestige. We became linguistic code-switchers, our conversations a patchwork of two tongues, neither fully native nor fully foreign. The Malayalam that remained was domestic, relegated to conversations with grandparents and auto-rickshaw drivers, while English claimed the domains of ambition and intellect.

I watched classmates abandon Malayalam midsentence. . . . We became linguistic code-switchers, our conversations a patchwork of two tongues.

My grandmother, who spoke no English but wielded Malayalam like a master craftsperson, watched this transformation with the resigned sadness of someone witnessing the demolition of a beloved building. “Language is not just words,” she would tell me in Malayalam, her voice carrying the weight of something being lost in translation. “It is the shape of your thoughts, the rhythm of your heart.”

I was too young then to understand what she meant, too seduced by the promise of linguistic mobility to mourn what was being left behind.

The Artist’s Exile

By the time I entered art school, I had learned to inhabit multiple linguistic territories with the fluid ease of a cultural chameleon. In critique sessions, I discussed Rothko and Basquiat in art-speak English, peppered with theoretical jargon that felt both powerful and slightly foreign on my tongue. In the evenings, I would return to my small rented room and write poetry in Malayalam, the words flowing with a different kind of authenticity, a different relationship to meaning.

This dual existence revealed itself as more than mere bilingualism—it was a fundamental split in how I understood the relationship between language and creativity. In the art world, dominated by Western aesthetic theory and English-language discourse, visual work was expected to carry its own weight, to communicate through pure form and concept. Words, when they appeared, were supplementary—artist statements, exhibition texts, theoretical frameworks that provided context but were not considered integral to the work itself.

But in my Malayalam poetry, language was not supplementary to anything. It was the primary medium, the birthplace of meaning, the space where thought and emotion crystallized into form. The division felt artificial, even violent—as if I were being asked to divide myself into neat categories: artist here, poet there, English speaker in public, Malayalam dreamer in private.

The institutional art world, with its galleries and biennials and international exhibitions, offered a certain kind of legitimacy. But it was a legitimacy that came at a cost—the gradual erasure of linguistic specificity, the flattening of cultural particularity into globally digestible forms. I found myself translating not just words but entire ways of being, ways of seeing, ways of understanding the relationship between maker and made.

The Fertile Fracture

It was during this period of linguistic displacement that I began to understand something crucial about the nature of creative work: the most interesting art often emerges not from wholeness but from fracture, not from belonging but from the space between belongings. The tension between my Malayalam-thinking self and my English-speaking self was not a problem to be solved but a generative force to be explored.

The most interesting art often emerges not from wholeness but from fracture, not from belonging but from the space between belongings.

I started making work that refused to choose sides, that insisted on existing in the liminal space between languages, between art and poetry, between the visual and the verbal. These pieces were not quite paintings and not quite poems, not entirely Malayalam and not fully English. They were something else—hybrid forms that carried the DNA of both parents but resembled neither completely.

The gallery visitors didn’t always know what to make of these works. Traditional art viewers approached them visually, seeking meaning in color and composition, while poetry readers looked for narrative and metaphor. Both groups often left partially satisfied, having encountered something that spoke to them but in a language they couldn’t entirely decipher.

This was exactly the effect I was hoping for.

The Body of Language

The deeper I moved into this hybrid practice, the more I began to understand that the division between visual and verbal art was itself a kind of colonial imposition—a way of organizing creative expression that reflected Western academic categories more than any universal truth about how meaning is made.

In the classical Indian tradition I had grown up with, though incompletely, the boundaries between art forms were far more porous. Malayalam poetry was inseparable from the visual culture that surrounded it—the typography of palm leaf manuscripts, the decorative borders of traditional books, the way words were performed rather than simply read. Similarly, traditional visual arts carried narrative and linguistic elements as integral components, not supplementary additions.

What I was attempting in my hybrid work was not innovation but return—a movement back toward a more holistic understanding of creative expression, one that recognized language as a fundamentally embodied practice. Words, I came to understand, are not abstract symbols floating in conceptual space but physical gestures, breath made visible, the body’s attempt to bridge the gap between inner experience and shared meaning.

This realization led to what I began calling “phonetic uterus”—a space where language is born not from the rational mind but from the body’s deepest intelligence, the place where seeing and speaking, writing and dreaming collapse into one instinctive utterance.

Found Moods and Migratory Identity

Working in this space between languages, between art forms, I discovered that my identity as a creator was not fixed but migratory—shaped less by permanent territories than by what I came to think of as “found moods.” These were moments of unexpected encounter: a particular quality of afternoon light filtering through a window, a fragment of overheard conversation in a language I didn’t recognize, the way shadows fell across a page of handwritten Malayalam text.

These chance encounters became the seeds of new work, pieces that emerged not from deliberate intention but from a kind of receptive attention to the world’s constant offering of meaning. I learned to trust these accidents of perception, to follow them into unknown territory without demanding that they resolve into clear concepts or finished statements.

I became more like a translator of experiences that were already meaningful, a midwife helping to birth forms that wanted to exist.

This approach required a fundamental shift in how I understood the role of the artist. Instead of being the authoritative creator of meaning, I became more like a translator of experiences that were already meaningful, a midwife helping to birth forms that wanted to exist. The work that emerged from this practice was often surprising, even to me—as if it had been waiting somewhere in the space between languages for someone to notice it and give it form.

The Breathing Archive

What I eventually came to understand about the phonetic uterus was that it was not a place but a process—not a destination but a way of moving through the world with openness to the constant birth of language. Every conversation, every visual encounter, every moment of recognition or confusion became part of an ongoing archive of linguistic possibility.

This archive was not static but breathing, constantly expanding and contracting like a living organism. Old words fell away as new ones emerged, familiar concepts shape-shifted into unfamiliar forms, and the boundaries between self and world, maker and made, became increasingly permeable.

Working within this breathing archive meant accepting that meaning was never fixed, never final. Each piece I made was not a statement but a question, not an answer but an opening into further dialogue. The work existed not to communicate predetermined ideas but to create spaces where new forms of communication might become possible.

The Return

Years into this practice, I found myself returning to my grandmother’s words with new understanding. Language, she had said, was not just words but the shape of thoughts, the rhythm of the heart. What she had recognized, and what I had taken years to rediscover, was that language is not a tool we use but a way of being we inhabit.

The phonetic uterus, I realized, was nothing more or less than this recognition made manifest—an acknowledgment that creativity emerges not from the rational manipulation of symbols but from the body’s deepest wisdom, the place where all our languages converge into one original utterance.

This understanding changed everything about how I approached both my visual art and my writing. Instead of trying to bridge the gap between these practices, I began to recognize that there had never been a gap—only a culturally imposed division that had obscured their fundamental unity. Both emerged from the same source, the same deep well of embodied experience, the same urgent need to transform inner reality into shareable form.

The work I make now refuses the old categories, existing in the fertile space where seeing and speaking, making and meaning, collapse into one instinctive gesture. It is not finished work but work that is constantly finishing itself, not exhibition but constant exhibition, not archive but breathing record of the moment when language remembers its first heartbeat.

In this space, the mother tongue and the colonial tongue dance together in new configurations, neither dominant nor submissive but engaged in ongoing conversation. The erosion I once mourned has revealed itself as transformation, the loss as opening, the fracture as the place where new forms of wholeness become possible.

This is the phonetic uterus: not a place of arrival but of constant departure, not a home but a way of being homeless that transforms exile into exploration, displacement into discovery, the loss of one language into the birth of another that has no name but recognizes itself in every gesture of genuine expression.

University of Calicut, Kerala