English and the Indian Everyday | Nandana Dutta

Review: Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India by Akshya Saxena. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2022.

Concern with English in India has expressed itself in three clearly discernible areas – the teaching of, or often, the place of the English language in Indian higher education, the social life of English (literature and language) and the development of the discipline of English Studies (a term increasingly used to embrace the study of language and the teaching and research into Anglophone writing, mostly at BA and MA in universities, colleges and institutions like the IITs). This book Vernacular English is positioned in a zone surrounded by all of these. At the same time by orienting it through a prefatory gesture at two very different users of English – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Rohith Vemula (Dalit PhD scholar who committed suicide): “Modi turns to English to uphold a neoliberal and casteist Hindu state, whereas Vemula used English precisely to resist this vision” (xiii) – the author, Akshya Saxena, creates a rationale for the book that takes it out of the tired reiterations of English in Indian education/higher education and places it squarely in the middle of the chaotic post-independence everyday of India. She looks for its use among those who know or do not know English, among those who read, hear and see English – an “economy of literary, sonic and visual English across languages and media”, in order to “retell[s] the story of English in India as the story of a people’s vernacular in a postcolonial democracy” which is made up of the “political vernacular” of the postcolonial state and the “popular vernacular that emerges amid varying degrees of literacy” (6). By shifting the terms of the narrative of English in India out of the academy to a sensual perception of the language (memorably expressed in the ‘talk, walk, laugh, run English’ speech from the 1982 Amitabh Bachchan movie, Namak Halaal), in everyday life, Saxena achieves something that is likely to influence the way English is understood even within its disciplinary limits. She opens up what has always been tacitly accepted, that English sits alongside the vernacular in India; and whether this is acknowledged or not, when teachers of English and its elite users crib about poor English speech and writing in classrooms or in public, it is really the ghostly presence of the vernacular that troubles them.

Saxena argues that the “vernacular [is] a useful framework for the study of the English language” (7), and points to its subversive and transgressive potential in “gathering the bodies that read, write, speak and hear English, whether they are supposed to or not, whether they can or not, whether or not we as scholars recognize them as literate in English” (8). The five chapters accordingly “consider English as a law, a touch, a sight, and a sound” (26). The first chapter studies the “democratic promise” of English by setting two kinds of discourses against one another, using a collection of ‘pro-English essays’ by political leaders, India Demands English Language (1960), and three satirical novels – Srilal Sukla’s Raag Darbari (1968), Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August (1988), and Mammaries of the Welfare State (2004). The three novels collectively and singly demonstrate the distance of English from the people even as they are swamped by the English of documents, circulars and the officers who try to mediate them, with “English becom[ing]s a fetishized object whose power does not always conjure the authority of the state” (56). The second and third chapters feature caste in two closely related sites – the significance of the Dalit writer writing in English and the representation of caste in Anglophone literature. The chapter titled ‘Touch’ is a nuanced reading of the practice of English in the context of untouchability that is evocatively stated: “Hands that write not only define the individual, they also reach out to intentionally touch the other. Against the bodily regulation in the caste system, the physicality of writing in a shared language produces new modalities of seeing and touching the figure of the Dalit as the literary subject” (64). The politics suggested here through a set of Hindi and English Dalit texts reiterates the argument about English as a language of empowerment but understands it distinctly through this novel reading of ‘touch’. The next chapter, ‘Text’ reads Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as featuring two kinds of English, one the medium of the novel, and the other, that attributed to the low caste character to reflect on the desire for English as “a caste-marked desire,” while also gesturing at the connotations of sound or hearing in the word ‘Anglophone’ (123). How English is heard is one of the key tropes examined in the book. The next chapter titled ‘Sound’ explores the ‘oral and aural experience of English’ through an event (the naked protest of the Manipuri mothers in 2004) and the literature of protest of Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy, as well as the English ‘literature of Northeast India’ (specifically one story by Yumlembam Ibomcha and two by Temsula Ao) to make the not-so-original point that “English carries the sounds of a traumatized landscape and offers mediations of a counterhistory” (147). This chapter does not have what I would like to call the ‘inwardness’ or conviction of the earlier ones, as the readings are less substantial and the oral-aural argument not entirely convincing. The final chapter, ‘Sight’ tracks sites where “English . . . achieves visible form in mundane objects” (151), and where its script is visibly manifested as ‘images’ – in books being sold on the sidewalk, on billboards, storefronts, advertisements, etc., and in films like Slumdog Millionaire and Gully Boy which stage different kinds of encounters with English in the slums of Mumbai. Saxena also briefly notes the roles played by English in the Hindi-Urdu cinema of Bollywood, the reception of Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra, and the Censor Board chairman’s estimation of audience reception for English and Hindi films. This last offers a tantalizing glimpse of a hitherto unexplored site, with the English of ‘English’ films (usually from Hollywood) serving as vehicle for an entirely different culture and ethos that is heard, read, and seen with very different results.

Reviews of the book (Rosinka Chaudhuri [TLS, July 15, 2022], N.S. Gundur [The Hindu, Sept 10, 2022], Soni Wadhwa [Asian Review of Books, May 18, 2022]) have noted its unexpected vantage points and associations, its use of political and popular cultural contexts and its rejection of the Indian language-foreign language binary. The new material incorporated into the discussion is worth mentioning as is the author’s often charming takes on this material primarily because of the sensory perspectives she adopts in each chapter.

By virtue of its design the book transgresses boundaries between different domains, which, while fascinating, leaves the reader with a sense of randomness in the choice of events, episodes and sites. Is such randomness inevitable in the study of English in the unmeasurable, varied, and crowded cultural, political, regional, colonial-historical realities of India? As more books of this kind that are intensely interesting and intensely selective appear, perhaps we will begin to find comfort in the idea of randomness itself as a premise for the study of “English in India” and no longer seek the comprehensive study of the field that always leaves one unsatisfied.

Nandana Dutta teaches English at Gauhati University. Her current area of interest is English Studies in India.