This poem or rather extract from a long poem explores a familiar ambiguity in English - "tongue" refers both to the physical organ we use for speech, and the language we speak with it. Saying "tongue" for "speech" is an example of metonymy. In the poem Sujata Bhatt writes about the "tongue" in both ways at once. To lose your tongue normally means not knowing what to say, but Ms. Bhatt suggests that one can lose one"s tongue in another sense. The speaker in this poem is obviously the poet herself, but she speaks for many who fear...
poet demonstrates her problem by showing both "mother tongue" Gujerati and "foreign tongue" English, knowing that for most readers these will be the other way around, while some, like her, will understand both. The poem will speak differently to different generations - for parents, Gujerati may also be the "mother tongue", while their children, born in the UK, may speak English as their first language. The poem is written both for the page, where we see the possibly exotic effect of the Gujerati text and for reading aloud, as we have a guide for speaking the Gujerati lines.