Travel – An American in Kerala

Inherited Scripts: Real Lessons from India, Part 3 of 3

This essay concludes a series on India Syndrome, Orientalism, and spirituality seeking in India. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Bigger Than Ourselves

I moved to India with zero expectations, no desires for spiritual awakenings or anything of that sort. And thirteen years later, I’m still here because this is where my child was born, where my neighbors know my name and my sense of humor, where the routines have become mine. I am not wandering from ashram to ashram or following any grand calling other than life itself. But I have changed nonetheless.

My transformation arrived in delivery rooms, crowded markets, long queues, and building a life far from the culture I grew up in. The miracle of India, I’ve learned, lives less in Himalayan peaks and more in the ordinary, in showing up day after day for the slog, but most of all, for people.

Still, from a distance, I can recognize the hunger that brings so many travelers to India. The ones who arrive with notebooks, Instagram reels, and expectations of sudden insight. In the U.S., where I grew up, so many of the places that once held people together have frayed. Church pews are emptying. Neighborhoods exist where people barely know each other. Even restaurants and parks feel quieter. Life often takes place inside private boxes: house, car, office, gym. Even leisure feels like something that is purchased. In that emptiness, it makes sense that people book yoga retreats or chase India as an idea. They want something communal and bigger than themselves. That longing isn’t wrong. It’s very much human.

Outward Journeys, Inward Work

And yet, longing can be deceiving. A retreat or a trek can feel like transformation…until you’re home again, facing the same routines you left behind. The truth is, you can’t import change. A trip might shake you awake, but the work of growth is slower and more ordinary.

For me, it came in small doses: learning patience when I didn’t understand what was happening, finding empathy in a language I couldn’t quite follow, and building a safety net out of friends, neighbors, and aunties. The lessons didn’t arrive in a clap of thunder; rather, they blended into the middle of things I didn’t choose, usually dragging me along, kicking and screaming because I didn’t want to change. I didn’t want to become more self-aware. I didn’t want to learn how selfish I had always been.

I began to notice something else as well: spirituality here is rarely spectacular. It’s not in ten-day vipassana retreats or sunrise yoga sessions on the Ganges. It’s in the way neighbors check on each other during hard times, in the ritual of quick poojas and prayers in the mornings and evenings, in hobbling together a community meal for a festival, in the patience demanded by long queues and traffic. It’s in the laughter of children playing outside, in the unspoken resilience of people tending to the small tasks of life, extraordinary for Westerners and the privileged, ordinary for many, many others. Living here, you begin to see that the sacred is woven into the everyday routines.

Connection Over Consumption

I’ve come to think the difference is this:

Consumption says, I’ll travel, I’ll pay, I’ll collect my transformation like a souvenir.

Connection says, I’ll keep showing up for people, traditions, and rituals, even when it’s ordinary, even when it’s inconvenient.

The first is exhilarating, but it rarely lasts. The second is much slower and harder to market, but it endures. It’s the work of presence, the steady accumulation of small acts and observations that shape who you become. Meaning is built, piece by piece, in showing up, paying attention, and participating in life as it unfolds.

What I’ve Come to See

So I don’t see myself in the seekers that arrive with plans to awaken some deep wisdom inside of themselves. I see them as people chasing a tale they were handed.

When I began writing about “India Syndrome,” I thought it was a story about travelers who lose themselves and the privilege of foreigners who come here seeking inner peace. But what I’ve come to see is that it isn’t really about India at all. It’s about the longings and aches we carry, the ones that tell us where to look for change. Transformation and finding meaning in life is not escaping into a myth, but staying long enough for your own story to deepen.

Closing Reflection

Edward Said warned in his 2003 preface to Orientalism that the world was hurtling toward a dangerous homogeneity, of differences being flattened by the media and the ways we represent each other. Two decades later, I see a different kind of flattening here, too, in the daily life shaped by global markets and lifestyles. The India that once seemed like a sanctuary for spirituality is not untouched by these. I walk into the mall where we do our shopping, and I am blasted with Starbucks, Burger King, KFC—the list goes on. The contrasts that once felt so stark, between “East” and “West,” between here and there, are becoming more and more blurred as the years go by.

Maybe that’s why I no longer notice as many differences between India and the U.S. Or maybe it’s because I’ve learned to adapt in both places. Either way, the search for “pure” spirituality was always chasing a mirage. The world is blending, converging. And it’s becoming harder to see where one culture ends and another begins.

So maybe what we’re losing isn’t India, or the West, or any particular culture at all. Maybe what’s slipping is our willingness to remain human together—to know our neighbors, to show patience in traffic, to practice rituals that take more than a swipe or a tap. The internet promises us infinite connection, but it mostly sells us distraction, performance, and more consumption. In that sense, India Syndrome isn’t about coming here at all; it’s about the ache we carry when we mistake capitalism for communion. And if there’s any cure, it won’t come from a plane ticket or a retreat. It will come from staying, from choosing presence, from resisting the long drift into sameness by living the small acts that make us human again.

If you do come to India, come to see it for what it is. You might take home some insights, but they most likely won’t last. For “finding yourself,” start at home with what’s in front of you and underneath your feet. Dig your soul deep into the soil. Water it. Tend to it. Let it grow into something truly meaningful. That’s where the real transformation lives.

This essay concludes a series on India Syndrome, Orientalism, and spirituality seeking in India. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Images from Pexels and LinkedIn.

Tadka: Learning to Name the World

Opening Note:
One of the first things I learned in Kerala was that food speaks to you. When mustard seeds splutter in hot oil, it’s a signal: add the curry leaves, the shallots, the chillies. Over time, I realized language works the same way. It teaches me when to pause, when to listen, and how to name the world with new words.

Tadka (To My Younger Self)

When the mustard seeds splutter,
that’s when you add the curry leaves, shallots, and chillies.
Call them by their names: kaduk, kariveppila, ulli, mulak.
Repeat them, ketto?
They will be your anchors later.

You will learn the names of vegetables, fruits, grains first,
by accident.
Your ears will be covered in scales until they aren’t,
and rice, fish, turmeric will become chor, meen, manjalpodi.

Hold on to the astonishment of learning them,
tracing the seas they’ve crossed,
the shores they’ve touched.
Remember, Babel wasn’t a punishment.
It was a gift:
a doubling, trebling of names
for tomato, onion, wheat.

You will want to tell someone about this wonder,
but you will feel alone.
In India, they will shrug,
we know these things only.
At home, eyes will glaze over.
You’re allowed to marvel anyway,
maanasilaayo?

You will still want to shrink into a corner,
fear and self-doubt strangling you.
But you’ll press forward anyway,
shoulders tight, breath shallow, heart pounding.

It’s the same acceptance of terror that gets you
through airports, onto planes
to your mother, father, and brother,
not to relive the old days, but to
build new ones–
good times, now,
with their granddaughter.
You learn to do what must be done.

On these visits, you will pass your grandparents’ house.
You’ll see black trash bags slumped on the porch,
weeds swallowing the yard.
Look away if you must.

When you walk inside for the last time,
you’ll search for their scent in the damp,
unheated walls of late winter.
It won’t be there.
You will realize:
loss doesn’t wait for your return.

And still, the seeds will pop
when oil meets flame.
The crackle is now, never then.
It will not pause for a house
that now belongs to someone else.

Fragrance will rise, sharp, insistent.
The present will announce itself
in smoke and spice.

So listen, mol:
you don’t need to live inside what is gone.
Stir the heat into what is here.
Add the zest.
Name things as they are.
Find beauty in words for what’s to come.
Eat while it’s hot.

Memory will cool soon enough
on your tongue.

Closing Note:
The crackle of mustard seeds hasn’t stopped surprising me. It’s a small sound, but it reminds me that life is always beginning again, in kitchens, in words, in the ways we honor our pasts.

Image from Pexels.

Inherited Scripts: Orientalism and Mystical India, Part 2 of 3

Always Searching

When Justin Shetler disappeared into the Parvati Valley with a sadhu, he was stepping into a story that had been written long before he was born.

The mythical “India” many Western seekers carry in their heads didn’t just appear out of thin air. It’s the result of centuries of writing, painting, sermonizing, and photographing by colonizers, missionaries, and scholars. People who arrived with their own agendas and left with narratives that served them more than the people they described.

From the late 18th century onward, British Orientalists studied Sanskrit texts, Hindu philosophy, and Indian epics, not only to understand them but also to frame them for Western consumption.

When Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784, he fell in love with Sanskrit texts like Shakuntala. But he translated them the only way he knew how—through the lens of Greek classics and the Bible. A few decades later, James Mill wrote his History of British India without ever setting foot there, describing Indian culture as backward and despotic.

Colonial ethnographers romanticized some aspects of Indian spirituality while dismissing others as superstition. William Carey, arriving in Bengal in 1793, translated the Bible even as he condemned Hindu practices, overlooking that Christianity had already existed in India for centuries.

In the mid-19th century, British photographer Samuel Bourne lugged his huge camera into the Himalayas and produced dreamy pictures of temples, sadhus, and misty peaks. Back in London, these images confirmed for readers that India was timeless and mystical, while the realities of famine and politics were conveniently cropped out.

Two stereotypes emerged from all this: India as timeless wisdom, and India as backward chaos. Both were useful to the British Empire and beyond: one justified the “civilizing missions,” the other sold India as a curiosity cabinet.

Spirituality as a Colonial Export

Ironically, many Indian spiritual traditions gained fame in the West through the very structures of colonialism. Texts were translated, performances staged, and lectures given in London or Paris. The most marketable elements—yoga, Vedanta, certain forms of meditation—were cut from their original contexts and pasted as universal philosophies.

By 1893, Swami Vivekananda was in Chicago, dazzling audiences at the Parliament of Religions with his vision of Vedanta as a universal philosophy. A generation later, Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi became a counterculture bible in California. Both men stressed the universality of their philosophies, but their Western audiences consumed them as spiritual “others.”

Meanwhile, at home, the British Raj often undermined or repressed living religious practices, such as closing temples, regulating pilgrimages, and policing gatherings, while happily exporting a purified, aestheticized version of Indian spirituality to the West.

Postcolonial but Not Post-Orientalist

Even after independence in 1947, the West’s appetite for the “mystical East” didn’t fade. It changed branding. The 1960s and 70s brought the Beatles to Rishikesh, hippies to Goa, and the counterculture’s embrace of gurus, ashrams, and psychedelic enlightenment.

The Beatles’ 1968 stay at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh turned meditation into a global craze, while hippies built whole enclaves in Goa. The empire was gone, but the Orientalist script survived, dressed in tie-dye instead of khaki.

Modern yoga studios, mindfulness apps, and wellness retreats are part of the same lineage. In 2014, the UN declared International Yoga Day, celebrating yoga as a gift from India to the world. But by then, yoga studios from Los Angeles to Berlin had already stripped away much of its religious and philosophical roots, selling it as a universal wellness fix. Another neat package, easy to consume.

The industry thrives on a spiritual shorthand: chakras, incense, sunrise chants. These aren’t inventions, but they’re often curated fragments of India, detached from the culture and society that gave them meaning.

It’s not that Western seekers shouldn’t learn from Indian traditions, but the relationship is rarely equal. When spiritual India is treated as a service economy, something to be visited, consumed, and left behind, it becomes harder to see its people as more than extras in someone else’s awakening story.

Why the Script Still Works

The old Orientalist fantasy persists because it answers a Western longing. For centuries, “the East” has been imagined as a place where modern life’s alienation can be cured, where there’s still authentic meaning to be found. India, with its visible spirituality and religions, complicated history, and contrast to Western cultures, fits the role perfectly.

That fantasy colors travel writing and Instagram posts, and it shapes the paths people take. It tells them what to look for, how to frame their experiences, and sometimes, tragically, how far they’re willing to go to live out the script.

On social media, this fantasy can swing both ways. Just as some travelers come chasing enlightenment, others build whole reels around India’s poverty, traffic, or chaos. The effect is the same: India is flattened into a caricature.

Imagine if someone filmed only Skid Row in Los Angeles and claimed it represented all of America. Every country has its shadows, yet India often gets held up as if those shadows are the whole picture. That, too, is a modern form of Orientalism: selecting what confirms a stereotype and ignoring the rest.

And that’s what makes “India Syndrome” such a slippery term. It goes beyond breakdowns in the Himalayas; it’s how the story of India, as inherited from colonialism, can seduce someone into abandoning their own reality.

Some, like Justin Shetler, vanish into that story entirely. Others return home with a few thousand photos and some harrowing stories to tell. Others collect what they believe are epiphanies, which slip into the ether after they slide back into their home’s routine. But even more don’t come at all, choosing instead to nibble on pieces of a 5,000-year-old culture that they feel will patch the void inside them. No matter how it’s done, the same script is still being performed.

The India so many Western travelers arrive seeking is rarely the India they actually encounter. Guidebooks, films, and memoirs have long trafficked in images of a timeless, mystical land—a place to be “discovered” rather than lived in. This is the shadow of Orientalism, the old habit of painting India as exotic, irrational, or spiritual in contrast to a supposedly practical, rational West.

And yet, the story isn’t that simple. Over time, many Indians themselves have adopted, adapted, and even marketed these same images. Yoga teacher training centers, curated “heritage villages,” or pricey retreats by the Ganges all cater to the longing of visitors who want to taste a certain kind of India. For some, these motifs have become a source of pride or income, often pragmatically so. For others, they remain frustrating distortions that compress the diversity and contradictions of the country.

The problem isn’t that seekers come; people have always traveled to India for learning, trade, or inspiration. The problem lies in the hunger for a single story: that India is here to provide spiritual rescue, that transformation is something to be consumed. That desire often blinds travelers to the ordinary ways people here live, worship, and endure.

Even my own experience here has been a constant negotiation with this script—resisting and repeating it, always aware it is much older than me.

Up Next: Part 3 – My time in India, and why so many white travelers chase meaning far away from home.

And if you haven’t read part 1, you can check it out here.

Note: All images from Pexels.

Inherited Scripts: the Search for “India Syndrome,” Part 1 of 3

What Is India Syndrome?

Why do some Western travelers come to India seeking spiritual transformation, only to vanish, sometimes without a trace?

Some say these disappearances are the result of “India Syndrome.”

Don’t be mistaken. “India Syndrome” isn’t a medical diagnosis. The phrase was coined by French psychiatrist Régis Airault, who worked with embassy staff treating foreigners in India suffering sudden psychological breakdowns. Symptoms are said to include disorientation, delusion, spiritual obsession, and the urge to detach from society, often triggered, Airault suggested, by travel in the subcontinent.

The phrase raises all kinds of red flags for me. It feels too vague, even too condescending. Is it a genuine phenomenon, or just an Orientalist label slapped onto culture shock and untreated mental illness in an unfamiliar culture?

The Disappearance of Justin Shetler

I had read about India Syndrome in a Guardian article titled ‘Travelers who were lost forever’: why tourists experience ‘India syndrome,’ but most of those written about made it out of their psychological breaks just fine. I didn’t realize how serious these experiences could be until I read about Justin Alexander Shetler.

He was an American adventurer, young and smart, who had traveled widely and documented his spiritual journey with real thoughtfulness. In 2016, he vanished in the Parvati Valley after setting off on a pilgrimage with a sadhu. His final Instagram post read:

If I don’t come back, don’t look for me.

He had come to India seeking something: transcendence, transformation, detachment from the self. And then he disappeared, leaving behind a swirl of grief and speculation. Was it a tragic accident? A spiritual quest gone too far? Or was he consumed by the story of India he was already writing?

Stories like his collide with a country already carrying centuries of other people’s projections. To talk about India Syndrome without talking about that projection, about Orientalism, is to miss the bigger picture.

The Shadow Of Orientalism

India Syndrome isn’t new. It’s the latest chapter in a story Edward Said called Orientalism: the West’s longstanding habit of casting “the East” as its mystical opposite. India, in this fantasy, is no longer a country; it’s a metaphor. A place to lose yourself, find yourself, or (in Shetler’s case) vanish trying.

And so the idea of India that travelers bring is often already mythic. It’s been passed down through yoga studios, self‑help books, and colonial literature: India as a spiritual testing ground, a mirror, a maze. But when reality refuses to match the fantasy, the fallout can be intense.

Book Cover of the First Edition of Orientalism by Edward Said. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49638266

A Certain Privilege

Who, exactly, gets to “lose themselves” in India?

More often than not, it’s white, educated Westerners with the freedom and the resources to wander. The ones who can afford to drop out for a few months, go on retreat, or disappear into the mountains. Choosing India as the backdrop for personal transformation is, in many ways, a consumer decision.

Of course, not every traveler arrives clutching a copy of Eat, Pray, Love, but it’s rare to meet a foreigner completely free of those expectations. The “spiritual East” is so deeply embedded in Western imagination that even those who reject the clichés still bring crumbs of it with them.

There’s a certain privilege in being able to fall apart and then be found. When travelers go missing, embassies get involved. Families launch global searches. Articles are written.

It’s clear to see: When a Western traveler vanishes, it’s a mystery. When an Indian pilgrim goes missing, it’s a statistic. The heartbreak is equal, but the news coverage is not.

Meanwhile, most local voices, such as guides, sadhus, neighbors, police, and even Indian spiritual seekers, rarely appear in the narrative except as background figures. India becomes a stage, not a speaking role.

That raises uncomfortable questions: Where’s the line between spiritual curiosity and exoticism? Between seeking meaning and expecting a place to hand it to you? And what does it mean that so many of these stories treat Indian traditions as if they exist solely for foreigners?

I don’t have neat answers. But I have crossed paths with travelers who seemed to be drifting far from reality.

Not a Mirror, Not a Maze, Just a Country

One early morning, at the front gate of the Dhikala zone in Jim Corbett National Park, Uttarakhand, I noticed a white man leaning against a tree.

At first, I thought he might be a tourist from a nearby resort. But the closer I looked, the less sense that made. His cycle was old and battered. A plastic jug of murky liquid hung from one handlebar. A grimy plastic bag swung from the other. He wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes.

He spoke to the guards for several minutes, then got his cycle and rode off toward town.
“What’s that about?” I asked my husband.
“That guy wants to ride his cycle through the park,” he said. “He’s riding it all the way to Rishikesh.”

The guards laughed. Not cruelly, but with the familiarity of people who had seen something like this before. I don’t know if he was a regular, a wanderer, or simply someone too deep in his own creation of India. The kind of figure whose story would be recounted as a quest, while a local doing the same might be dismissed as desperate or unwell.

But that’s the thing about India Syndrome: it’s never about the person who’s actually unwell. It’s about the stories we tell to explain them. A local man cycling barefoot through tiger territory would be called mad or poor. A white man doing the same becomes a seeker, a mystic, or a cautionary tale.

India itself doesn’t cause these breakdowns. But something else does: ages of Western fantasies that have whispered to generations of seekers:

Welcome to India: the cure for whatever you think is missing in your soul.

Up Next: Part 2 – Who wrote that mythical script, and why do we keep performing it?

Between Two Worlds: A Switch

Somewhere between arrival and departure, I’ve learned to speak in two voices and carry two selves. This is about what happens when neither feels entirely mine.

A Switch | സ്വിച്ച്

This plane window is a signaller.
Ready to help me
choose myself
before we fall to the earth.
I am sinking and floating at once, but
I look out the window anyway
to see
which personality to wear after landing.

Grey bypasses, skyscrapers, concrete
squares:
all holding their breath.
The switch flips to
America.

A quilt of coconut palms,
low white buildings,
the switch flips to
India.
My head wobbles before the plane
touches down.

Later, I learned there’s a word for this.
I protested: I don’t do this.
Not me.
And the man I spoke to replied,
“Oh, but I think you do.”

In India,
I’m more reserved,
yet I speak more.
Slowly. Enunciating.
I use words like:
lift – boot – lorry – brinjal – petrol.
I say Ruh-vi, not Raaah-vi.
I roll my Rs and
move na – nja – nna
through my tongue and lips.
I clench my fists in frustration
when the word is right there,
drifting, italicized, in my mind,
tucked under my tongue
when I try to speak.

And then in America,
when I’m with people
who knew me once,
but not quite.
When nostalgia rolls in
as thick as the fleece blanket
that keeps me warm in
stark Pennsylvania winds,
I’m more open,
but speak less.
I speak quickly, slurring my words:
“Didja eat yet?”
I smile hellos and how are yous to
perfect strangers, but
never pushing beneath:
“Friend, how is your heart?” or
“Is your father doing okay?”

“You kinda have an accent now,”
so I flatten my As again.
My voice shifts north
into my nose
and the words roll out:
elevator – trunk – truck – eggplant – gas.

I don’t have to worry
about chechis and chettans.
Americans like first names,
giving us a pretend closeness,
like a handshake without eye contact.

Here’s the thing:
neither one feels quite right.
In India,
I wear a mask.
I smile when I don’t want to;
swallow questions and
bite back criticisms
because my face marks me a visitor
even though I’ve rooted my hands
deep in the soil.
In America,
I wear a wool sweater
two sizes too small.
I tug at the sleeves,
sweating, itchy, chafed
but never take it off.

So, who am I?
Am I the words spoken to others,
what they see:
a woman in love,
a fool,
a brave soul?
Or am I
something deeper?
Or am I none of these?

Am I just a middle-aged woman
afraid she will always be brushing the edges,
never quite let inside?
Am I just afraid
that someday I’ll be a stranger
in a strange land
where I borrowed books
from the library
and licked ice cream
as I walked to the park?

Now, the only home
is my daughter’s voice
when she tells me
the song she and her friends made up;
when my husband and I walk
into the hovering emerald canopies.

If my skin were peeled away
and my chest cracked open:
The hush of the monsoon rain
washing through the ghats,
the whisper of the snow
covering the evergreens—

Would you recognize
the language of my pulse,

the accent
of my blood,

forever stuttering
switching tracks
until I break the lever.

The Mango and the Map of Language

In Kerala, mango season begins quietly. A lone vendor sets out a crate of glowing yellows and blushing oranges, sometimes tinted with stripes of green, by the roadside. Then another vendor appears. And another.

By May, mangoes seem to be everywhere: stacked in pyramids on rickety tables, carted down alleyways in woven baskets, filling the dining room with a pungent sweetness as they ripen.

We wait to buy from a vendor near our home, who snags the best variety, the best quality. He and his wife also make a mean mutton soup.

A non-exhaustive list of all the mangoes in India.

The journey of the mango through centuries.

It’s easy to take this fruit for granted. There’s mango season, and there’s the waiting season, like the steady ticking of a clock.

But too often, we separate ourselves from the journey our foods make, from the backbreaking farm labor and the heartbreak of a lost mango crop in a too-rainy summer season, to the post-workout smoothies of the privileged.

And if the fruit itself has such a fraught journey, then what about the word mango? Where did it come from? Which cultures first used it? How did it weave its way into English?

From Malayalam to the World

The English “mango” traces its roots to māṅṅa (മാങ്ങ) in Malayalam, the language of Kerala. But the journey of a word is rarely straightforward. Some scholars suggest the Portuguese first heard it from Malayalam speakers, while others argue it came from Tamil neighbors, who called the raw fruit māṅkāy (மாங்காய்) and the ripe fruit māmpaḻam (மாம்பழம்). Since Malayalam and Tamil are both part of the Dravidian language family, it’s difficult to pinpoint which word sailed west first.

Portuguese traders adopted it as manga during their 15th-century spice voyages. By the time they established a sea route to Europe, Arab traders had already been exporting Kerala’s spices, and words like naranga (orange), for centuries.

From Ostler’s book mentioned below. The Portuguese trading empire.

In 1498, Vasco da Gama succeeded where Columbus had failed: charting a direct sea route to India and landing on the Malabar Coast. This was likely when māṅṅa first touched a Western tongue.

Found on Reddit. Maps the rough journey of the word “mango” from both Proto-Southern-Dravidian and Sanskrit.
Found in the same thread on Reddit as the previous map. I just thought it was interesting!

As with most colonial encounters, da Gama’s arrival brought more than trade. It brought upheaval; an attempt to claim, exploit, and remake a culture the Portuguese barely understood. Like every empire, they left behind a tangled legacy: trade routes that changed more than cuisines, and violence that uprooted lives.

From 1498 onwards, manga traveled into French and Italian, then into English, with the first recorded use of “mango” appearing in 1582.

For a time, “to mango” was even a verb in colonial America, meaning “to pickle” (which is why some places still call green bell peppers “mango peppers”).

Today, we’ve untangled mangoes from pickles and peppers. But the legacy of colonialism is not so easily resolved.

But there’s a truth here worth admiring: a tiny word like māṅṅa can travel across oceans and centuries, weaving itself into English. Every time someone says “mango” in London or Philadelphia, they’re unknowingly speaking a fragment of Kerala’s language.

Language as a Recipe Book

But it isn’t just mango. Our English-speaking homes and kitchens are stocked with Indian words carried along trade routes and colonial corridors:

Chutney (from Hindi chaṭnī)
Curry (from Tamil kari)
Bungalow (from Hindi banglā, meaning “Bengal-style house”)
Shampoo (from Hindi chāmpo, “to knead”)

Each word is an artifact, if only we take a moment to wonder. They are small testaments to hands that stirred, chopped, hammered, and kneaded across centuries, reminders of the histories and people behind them.

The Journey Hidden in a Word

Now, when I bite into a mango here, I taste more than its layered sweetness. I hear the word’s journey too, spoken first by a Malayali vendor in Trivandrum, sailing across seas and empires, and scrawled on a supermarket sign in Pennsylvania.

Language carries more than meanings. It carries fragments of history and home, especially for those caught between roots.

For Further Reading (if you crave more about erstwhile empires and their legacies):

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World – Nicholas Ostler.
Inglorious Empire – Shashi Tharoor
The international swap trade in useful words, BBC Magazine (2014)
Arrival of Portuguese in India and its Role in Shaping India – Col. (Dr.) D. P. K. Pillay (2021)