If you’re an Indian abroad, you just can’t win. You stand out in a foreign crowd, with the rolling native undertones that break through the veneer of neutrality to provide material for comedy hacks like Russell Peters and frustrated call-centre customers alike; but you still talk too posh, either by accident or by design, to please your cousins back home. What does it take?

Whatever it is, let’s hope Freida Pinto, the female protagonist of Slumdog Millionaire, has it. Her appearance on The Jay Leno Show – yes, that one – in late December created a fair stir, not least for her pretty frock and millionairess pumps. Within minutes of the interview going live on YouTube, the Internet was abuzz with point and counterpoint about her accent. Just where was it from? ‘...an American accent in such a short time?’ asked a commenter on popular desi blog Ultrabrown.com. ‘Very very wannabe.’ Others hastened to her defence. ‘Definitely not,’ came a reply. ‘Very Bombay, circa 2009.’

Did we have this problem before cable television? Of course we did. For generations, residents of the ‘native places’ in the hinterlands have laughed at the diluted accents with which city children speak their mother-tongues. English itself has been a weapon of class, community and urbanity for centuries on end. For Freida’s generation, the importance of Received Pronounciation, now entombed in the airless tones of newsreaders on All India Radio and in the Oxbridge cadences of Karan Thapar, paled in comparison to MTV and F.R.I.E.N.D.S, though. If Kajol’s character in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham complained of her transformation from ‘Ma’ to ‘Mummy’ in her London born-and-bred son’s speech, the mothers of the new century have had to cope with being ‘Ma,’ ‘Mummy’ and – even if our teachers at convent school tried to shame us out of saying it – ‘Mom.’

Pinto, saddled with the task of explaining her background to Leno, who wanted to know, among other things, if Christmas was celebrated in India, fielded her interrogation gamely. That she did so by saying, among other things, that impoverished children singing for money in trains was “beautiful,” is perhaps excusable under the circumstances. She managed to get a word in edgewise in spite of copious interruptions from her overbearing veteran interlocutors, including fellow guest Robin Williams, who bafflingly insisted on speaking to her in his own version of a comic Indian accent (“Merry Krishna!” he piped up at one point. Pinto couldn’t very well offend him by not laughing, one presumes.) She kept her end of the conversation up in a tone that held a little of the crispness of the Bombay English-medium schoolgirl, and some of the quick, snapping inflections of an émigrée to America’s East Coast. It might have baffled her more resentful compatriots, but Pinto can be comforted on one count, at least: no matter what influences other Indians detect in her personable tones, her American listeners could hardly have thought her anything but desi.

On the WWW:
The discussion on Ultrabrown: http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/the-os-have-it
Russell Peters’ accent mockery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw6RgIf6epQ
Freida Pinto’s website: http://www.freidapinto.com/

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