Most poems about a mother tongue sound warm and nostalgic, full of lullabies and kitchen voices. Debarshi Mitra's "Mother Tongue" begins in whispers and ends in a scream, and that distance is the poem's real subject. It presents language as something lodged in the body rather than a tool for speaking, and it suggests that we may carry more than one of them.
The first stanza describes a language that "pulsates / underneath my skin." The verb makes it a heartbeat or a pulse in the blood, something that goes on whether or not the speaker says a word. It is also a language "in which / I await a dream, / a death wish." The pairing is unsettling. Dreams and death wishes sit side by side as if they were the same kind of longing, and the speaker only waits for them. The language appears to shape what he is able to want. Then comes the word "bequeathed," a formal, almost legal term for a will or an inheritance. It is set against the most private scene imaginable: "a night of / hushed love-making." The line break leaves "a night of" hanging before the intimate detail arrives. The mother tongue is passed on at the moment of conception, quietly, before anyone could choose it.
The second stanza turns on "another language." Where the first one pulsates, this one "waits" and "makes its presence / felt among the shadows." The poem says felt, not heard, so this language is sensed before it is spoken. It echoes the "await" of the first stanza, so both languages are patient and both are lying in wait inside the speaker. The difference is what draws each one out. The first arrives through love, and the second through violence: "when the axe pierces my body / and my guts spill out." The vocabulary here is blunt and physical. There is no metaphor to soften the image, and the verbs "pierces" and "spill" are plain and brutal.
The poem is built in two stanzas of eight lines each, and the symmetry makes the contrast sharper. Each stanza has a night. The first language comes "in a night of / hushed love-making," and the second surfaces "Deep into the night." The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre, and its short lines work like held breaths. "A death wish" sits alone as a quiet, chilling fragment. Later, "I shriek" is isolated on its own line, so the reader has to stop and take in the cry before the final line ends the poem. Sound also carries meaning. "Hushed," "shadows" and "shriek" share the same sh sound, so the whisper of the first stanza seems to turn into the cry of the second. The "p" sounds of "pulsates," "skin" and "pierces" link the two stanzas in a similar way.
The title is the poem's puzzle. It promises a mother tongue, yet the poem offers two languages and never names either. Which one is the mother tongue? One reading is that it is the first, inherited through the parents' intimacy. Another is that the second is the more truly native one, the language underneath the language, which only emerges when everything polite and learned has been torn away. The poem leaves both readings open. It names no place, event or community for the axe, so the violence stays unattributed. It can be read as a wound that is personal, political or imagined, and that openness makes it more disturbing. The final phrase, "that language," points to something distant and unnamed, and the poem stops on language itself, not on the pain.
The poem matters because it questions a comfortable assumption, that the language we speak every day is the language we are. Mitra suggests that identity is layered, and that the voice that comes out under extreme pressure may not be the one we were taught to use. In sixteen short lines he joins love, inheritance, fear and the body, and he leaves the reader with an uneasy question. If you were hurt badly enough, which language would you scream in, and what would that say about who you are?