Amol K Patil, Black Masks on Roller Skates - II, 2022. Collection: Tate. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88.
My mother tongue is Marathi.1 But I grew up with the Bambaiya language, a mixture of Hindi and Marathi commonly spoken by the people of Bombay (now called Mumbai). In Maharashtra, the second-largest state in India, Marathi is the official language. It is spoken by over eighty-four million people.2 If you travel from one region of Maharashtra to another, and even if you go just a few kilometers between areas, you will hear different intonations of the Marathi language spoken by an ever-changing mixture of locals. Sometimes people from one area who hear the language as it is spoken elsewhere—even nearby—find it funny.
