MLA:
Chandran, K. Narayana. “English in India: An Overview.” Indian Writing In English Online, 05 Apr 2022, www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/english-in-india/.
Chicago:
Chandran, K. Narayana. “English in India: An Overview.” Indian Writing In English Online. April 5, 2022. www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/english-in-india/.
There are at least two major narrative strands of English India. The first, sponsored by the historians of British India, both Indian and western, is the better-known story of English missionary schools and Macaulay’s Minute (the bell-book-and-candle fame) that now forms a subplot to the larger record of colonial transactions. The post-independent Indian story however revolves around the universities that the Minute on Indian Education helped found in 1857. Since then the political question of our national language has incited cockfights occasionally among the modern Indian languages, the bhāshas. Informed debates on this question cast a dismal gloom upon an uneven terrain where English has evolved into a middle-class privilege and preserve, a most invidious system of socio-cultural exclusion of less fortunate classes and castes. If the two narratives cannot but suggest prospective and retrospective linkages, it is because like most countries sharing a colonial past, India has not quite decided what knowledge English still brings it from afar, and what knowledge the Indians profess in English that shares a peculiar relationship to their bhāshas. By strange historical logic, these tales of continuity and change are at once ‘ours’ and ‘theirs;’ of their English and our bhāshas as well.
It is perhaps here that the English in India story slides past the strict borders of irony. In its life among the bhāshas, English seldom figures as their rival. Nor does it sound or look ‘foreign’ anymore to regional Indian sensibilities. As a matter of fact, a bhāsha is not unlike that postmodern lover who cannot say I love you madly, unless he adds “as Barbara Cartland would put it.” When Umberto Eco cited this ridiculous scenario (67- 68) as possible in an age of lost innocence, he added that the two lovers cannot help knowing that the other knows the Barbara Cartland fiction, a knowledge they blithely if embarrassingly share. The bhāshas likewise ‘know’ English, its canon and the classics withal, almost to the reciprocal extent as English ‘knows’ its Indian linguistic peers. What is perhaps lost in such translation is some gain that the new literatures of India appreciate. The point is that English has become so de rigueur to the educated Indian consciousness that it has begun to see the English circumambience pretty much like an educated reader recognizing a master quote from a classic, or nodding in pleasant surprise to classical allusions, in casual conversations.
For all this, the larger India has not yet come to reasonable political and intellectual terms with English. Its legacy is at once priced and discounted by the very Indians who nonetheless recognize English to be their sole medium and message for determining where they stand in such crucial matters as trade and business, education and culture, national and international relations. Yet another dimension to this irony is the freedom the Indians seem to have gained by their continuing servitude to English. For a country that is given to gloating over its demographic dividend, it is hardly surprising that English is certainly aspirational for the Indian youth. Those in the business of English (and Business English) in India never tire of emphasizing the affinities of English with exemplary business practices, centres of sophisticated work and global outreach. And yet, the Indian youth are probably the most neglected among the sections of this country in terms of educational opportunities, employment, social welfare, health-care, self-help orientation and training. Most ironically, such questions are still ‘academic’ and debated in the public media and classrooms across the country largely in English.
As early as 1909, M. K. Gandhi realized that the worst effects of British colonial rule would be seen, in the long run, when Indians unproblematically conflate ‘modern’ with ‘English’ and vice versa. All this modernity will “make India English,” he said, or lead to an “English rule without the English man” (28). The demand for more and more western institutions and the ideas that underpin them ― dress, food, entertainment, pedagogics, health/ hygiene and medical practices, railways, public policies and projects, the law and parliamentary system…― signalled for Gandhi the collocation of English and colonial modernity in the Indian mind. When we see the persistence of neo-Macaulayism in India, we ought to concede somehow that Gandhi’s fears were not wholly unfounded. The Report of the University Education Committee of 1949 endorsed Gandhi’s fear by observing that “The use of English divides the people into two nations, the few who govern and the many who are governed, the one unable to talk the language of the other, and mutually uncomprehending [sic]” (316). Put differently, English has some strange way of distancing Indians from themselves and making way for unfair discrimination and stigmatization, for engineering and sustaining democratically untenable schisms between and among workers, institutions, and communities. More perniciously, all these divisions and differences are hard to trace directly to a language or a culture, a source called English, an authority that seems to emanate from some unknown centre outside India, a supervening power to which none of the privileged classes in India is able to meaningfully respond, let alone offer self-determined resistance. In absenting itself from the immediate scene of political action, English has succeeded nonetheless in promising to new India ‘modernity’ other societies are unlikely to acquire without it, or in offering multiple projects and prospects under its aegis that are bound to remain unfinished.
The crucial question English raises now is whether the Indian élite wants the modernity that still remains an unfinished project even in their own understanding of it. Certainly this grim vindication of the Gandhian scenario of “English rule without the English man” needs no further debate. The grand narratives of modernity (with an enormous English underpin) have repeatedly echoed Gandhi’s critique of English modernity by worrying about the servitude it imposes on pre-modern societies, their cultural ‘otherness’ interpreted to be a lack only western modernity could somewhat mitigate. Now this is a crucial detail the reformist agenda of English India has not yet quite registered. If one casts English as an effulgent centre and relegates all non-English thought to an eternally dismal Indian periphery, English surely will proffer an illusion of progressive freedom. Modernity contradicts itself when English practically pre-empts all national debates by depriving the Indians of native options and avenues for self-sustained social wellbeing.
Among the most eloquent thinkers of English India used to be A. K. Ramanujan (1929 ─ 1993) whose academic work spans anthropological linguistics; Classical Tamil literatures; South Asian folklore, poetics, and history. Perhaps the most distinguished Indian poet and translator in English of his generation, Ramanujan was willing to look into those corners of Indian culture most writers would avert their gaze from. He was fond of a South Indian folktale about an old woman looking for her lost keys in the street all evening. Asked where she thought she had lost them, she says they were perhaps mislaid at home. Then why look for them in the street? Her answer: “Because it is dark in there. I don’t have oil in my lamps. I can see much better here under the streetlights.”
Told in the context of English, the bhāshas, the Enlightenment and modernity, the folktale immediately situates the élite Indian schools and their English learners on the well-lit streets of global business and trade where they might prosper. But returning home, feeling themselves at home in the folkways and mores that shaped their languages and cultural ethos, the Indian learners “may not find the keys [they] are looking for and may have to make new ones, but [they] will find all sorts of other things [they] never knew [they] had lost, or ever even had” (Ramanujan xiv).
It is unlikely that the principal ghosts of colonization will be laid. For the Indians, nothing suits the sense of English more aptly than medium─ both the language and the agency that allows communication between the dead and the living. I discovered this while offering an advanced course on “The Politics of English India.” It is one thing for students to read Macaulay’s Minute in this course, and another to read it in a course called “Victorian Literature and Thought.” To my class reading Victorian writers, the Minute seems to swell a cultural debate resonant with discriminations and devolutions that characterized élite British minds of the 1830s, bracketed now with other select and abridged texts in The Norton Anthology (such as W. H. Russell’s Diary in India, J. A. Froude’s “The English in the West Indies,” T. N. Mukharji’s “A Visit to Europe” ) deterministically framed as specimens of prose reflections upon “Empire and National Identity.” As the editors of the Norton Volume E The Victorian Age point out, the Minute breathed the air of noblesse oblige, “the assumption that Britain [ought to] bestow the benefits of its culturally and morally superior civilization upon a lesser people” (Christ p. 1608).While England’s burden of trusteeship, its benevolent zeal in extending cultivation to alien shores, makes some sense in studying Victorian England, the postcolonial Indian classroom sees the political ramifications of reading India in the light of the same Minute. The students wonder why the Minute continues to be magnified out of proportions and nearly all postcolonial readings invest it with a power which indeed it did not have, then or now. For the Minute hardly recommended the abolition of education in Indian languages or sought to deprive the Indians of their native linguistic agency. The Orientalist and Vernacularist bids on the Indian educational scene post-Macaulay were weak; they were down but certainly not out.
These considerations sometimes make us wonder what sound logic of curricular politics enjoins the English departments and Higher Education across India to routinely hold Macaulay’s Minute in continued deference. It is difficult to tell whether their deference is mock or earnest, whether they view the Minute as historical contingency, or as the bedrock of their self-reassurance and raison d’être. Perhaps this is not unlike Ali A. Mazrui’s very shrewd observation that the language of colonial oppression tends to speak with a forked tongue. Now you hear the oppressor, now the oppressed; both saying much the same thing with seemingly contradictory aims and intentions. Mazrui’s example is that of a Kenyan political leader reciting Rudyard Kipling’s “If” before a Nairobi crowd on the eve of public elections there (Mazrui 209). Inspirational democratic values matter more to the colonized rather than the language in which they are dressed or the notoriously imperialistic author who wrote the poem. I sometimes wonder whether any English department in India has a more convincing argument than Macaulay’s in teaching English. 1
It is indeed a sad state of affairs when no linguistic group within India can freely communicate with another group unless English (and to a very small measure, Hindi) mediates as an interpreter or translator. Now the Utilitarian provenance of English is well known. English, it would appear, charges a handsome fee for any such mediation when native goods and services are delivered at academic or administrative doors, and the Indian languages have all along been willy-nilly paying the tithe unmindful of the loss of their vast and varied cultural produce in the bargain.
The dominance of English is nowhere more directly palpable than in the near-monopolistic English translation of Indian literatures. During the annual literary festivals across India we are treated to the routine debates (in English!) about the greatness of the bhāshas and the alleged favours English receives from official and private agencies. The celebrated Indian English writer is often an Atticus, so goes the bhāsha-writers’ rant, who can “Bear… no brother near the throne.” English sets non-negotiable terms of literary production and standards for the market; the Indian languages have merely to comply. More crudely but truly, nothing that English cannot ‘receive,’ or can take in linguistically and disseminate on its culturally resolute terms, will ever reach other parts of India, let alone abroad.
When the Master rules, Indians had better master the language of the Master. Protocols of an English Club of the colonial era are clearly in force when English translations cross borders and close gaps within India. This invisible repression, abridgement, or downright abrogation of linguistic rights of less fortunate Indian regions, ethnic groups and minority dialects hardly ever figures in any document of India’s official literary cultures. It is anyone’s guess how the Indians who do not know any English feel estranged and helpless at once when they must confront the State that speaks to them in no other language of law or governance. Larger and larger sections of the public, among them even those who know English somewhat but not the language of legal redress and appellate bodies, have begun to feel that India at present is another country and they do things differently there, even before they grow old and savvy to appreciate the logic of L. P. Hartley’s famous saying.
A perverted notion of correctness and propriety among some Indians seems to court a synecdochic fallacy where English erroneously stands for everything that is universally desirable and conducive to modernity in India: ascendant corporatism, sophisticated life-style, smart-city infrastructure, advanced developmental models, super-specialty healthcare, Wi-Fi media/ communication, global reach/power, educational cultural values/clout, economic liberalization, global trade, geopolitics and business, etc. Ironically, much the same synecdochic fallacy imputes to English all evil motives of the colonial era, especially the colonial master’s language trying to dismantle Indian identity by false promises and cunning inveiglement. In times of social unrest and controversial abrogation of the civil rights by the central or state governments, the net-savvy Indian public are deluded with hyper-active social media campaigns and conferences in English. The unsuspecting young and a small section of bigoted population are always the target of indoctrination and coercion. The hate-mongers of all religious persuasions purvey highly contentious misinformation such as ancient India’s purchase on plastic surgery, stem cell and aeronautic sciences, immunology, sexology and eugenics, etc. The point is that English is routinely harnessed by a section of Indians toward impressively radical as well as deplorably conservative ends. The fundamentalist right and the progressive left are sometimes equally reminiscent of the adversaries they decry; sometimes they become mirror-images of each other. Neither can see the modern as anything but English for all its colonial provenance. The colonial masking of English is at its functionally best when it successfully masks oppressive power.
The persistence of “Macaulayism” has occasionally drawn controversial attention in India. Oddly, both its loud critics and mute adherents see the distance of English typical of a colonialist strategy that is admittedly not without benefits for those who have enough English resources, or are smartly served by English-enabled goods and services. (Observe how suddenly official, formal, serious, even minatory, our exchanges become when intimate friends and family folk use English when they choose to be aloof, or to keep themselves away from brewing trouble, or gainsay ethical commitment. As every Indian schoolchild knows, a teacher’s scolding in English is more scalding than her yelling in a bhāsha.) The political class are particularly drawn to ‘English’ that barricades them from those they see as riffraff. Their official and private habitations are modelled on the old Cantonments and Civil Lines of British military and civilian officers. Almost on a yearly basis the civil servants in our government secretariats across the country need to be reminded of their commitment to the ordinary people they are meant to serve and be mindful of the appropriate use of the bhāshas of their respective regions. The politico-ideological distance imperial English had kept between the British officers and their tropical subjects was no less physical as Balachandra Rajan shrewdly observes in the following passage:
English was introduced as a conduit of reform, a means of keeping India in step with (although respectfully behind) the continuing advancement of the West. Ironically, it also became a gesture of removal, increasing the distance between government and the governed and establishing an Olympian bureaucracy within a steel frame of self-righteousness. It has been pointed out that entrenching English simply meant that India’s lingua franca would be the language of its rulers and that this had always been so, regardless of who ruled India. Their cultures were carried with their languages into the fabric of India’s multivocality. The British stayed aloof, physically in the segregated world of their cantonments and psychologically on the protective heights of Western superiority and on the platform of racist theories erected later on those heights. (193)
Perhaps it is no coincidence, observes Alok Rai in a recent column for The Times of India, that “the genteel exclusivity of the former Civil Lines― whites only― is reborn in the emergent phenomenon of the gated community. … Of course the colonial bungalow and the gated community are both mutations of the one apartheid model” (11).2
We see clearly the mendacity of rival claims that conflate English, Modernity, and the West when the claimants hate whoever refuses to see these concepts synecdochically. Writing on the complete dissociation between civility and social sense in contemporary India, Dipesh Chakrabarty instances the extreme reactions of the illiberal left and the disingenuous right in Indian politics for whom the West/English is perhaps a deliberately misunderstood concept:
The West is no longer a question of civilization but of certain kind of aggressive pursuit of freedom in consumption and lifestyle, focused on the freedom of the individual to express him or herself and not be oriented to a community except in seeking protection in public life from violence and oppression that could be directed towards such an expression-seeking individuals. On the other side stands a very violent, oppressive, and patriarchal construction of ‘tradition’, mortally opposed to this figure of the individual that it construes the ‘Western’ as ‘foreign’ and a threat to ‘tradition’ and which therefore subjects the allegedly Westernized women to patriarchal and undemocratic violence. (150)
In short, among those who prefer to keep English away from the underprivileged Indians are, sadly, those who refuse to see English as resurgent subjectivity, subjectivity still evolving and open to process, invention, and growth in a society where English must co-exist and engage with the social reality of Indian languages.
Freed of linguistic bondage to colonial pedagogics and ideological structures, English certainly ought to pose other challenges to those who profess it in India, challenges far more conducive to social change beneficial to young learners than ever imagined by colonial communities and regimes. Drawing upon Michel Foucault, and mindful of the subtleties of power exercised in unequal socio-political domains, Bill Ashcroft puts it this way:
The discursive power of language, that is, its function within the ensemble of relations which constitute the power of imperial discourse, is demonstrated precisely in Prospero teaching Caliban how to “name the bigger light and how the less”. His language “produces” reality and in the colonial situation becomes a key agent in the ‘production’ of Caliban himself. The immediate power of Prospero’s language lies in his role as ‘teacher’ and is enabled, in turn, by his physical enslavement of Caliban. This power is not contained as an inherent property of language […]; rather it is a social practice; it becomes intelligible in the techniques through which language is used (abuse, control, racialization, marginalization). (44)
English in a free country, among a free people of multi-ethnic and multilingual backgrounds, cannot be the same English of a colonial classroom, as suggested by the Shakespearean archetype to which Ashcroft alludes. As I see it, the significance of his parabolic allusion is this: no matter what the teachers insist as their lesson (the contrast between the bigger and smaller light), their pupils will learn only what is most appropriate to them in the contrastive light the lesson affords. One cannot but smile at the ironic turn the Enlightenment trope takes in such splendid thought. Simply put, the Lesson of the Master is hardly the lesson of the pupil. Furthermore, in matters of linguistic pedagogy, it would be prudent not to exercise too much control over the imagination of the pupils, or to restrict the meanings of a world which are infinitely rich and resourceful, given that it is the language after all that imagines such a world. (Children are most imaginative when they learn things they love to learn. Sometimes they beat their PTAs in simple imaginative manoeuvres.) Take away this power from English, it wouldn’t be the language it is for the millions of Indians who are now able to harness its power in shaping a new world and new politics where the small-minded élite will have little power. Both when the Indians use English for writing imaginative literature, or its strength realized in creative pedagogies across the curriculum in schools and colleges in the country, we see its new generative and resistant power. And much of this power English owes to the bhāshas among which it has grown steadily through two centuries.
And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche …
– Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales
Anyone who has been to an Indian school knows that English is certainly among the rare socio-cultural privileges selectively enjoyed by certain sections of Indians. Good school-education is unequally distributed among Indian children. Most regrettably, it is even denied to the children of poor classes located in our country’s most backward regions, forest and tribal areas. News reports of schools without decent buildings and rest rooms; schools without regular teachers paid by the governments and business classes; and the complete neglect of schooling for the children of immigrant labour in towns and cities are not uncommon even in the states and union territories of the Indian Union with respectable literacy records. In most urban-industrial areas, the crucial distinction in access and preference in education has only to do with English.3 One might say, regrettably adapting Marshall McLuhan’s proverbial saying, that the medium is the message, as far as Indian schooling is concerned. India is probably the only country in the world where we have poor health and educational infrastructure proportional to the large numbers of children it is supposed to serve, probably the highest school-dropout rates, and the largest number and variety of poor to mediocre teachers of English at the school level. The reasons are too well-known and complicated to list here, but like most political and ideological hypocrisies, the one that makes English ours and theirs by turns is by far the simple explanation.
I have found the pedagogical imperatives of recasting postcolonial subjectivities of learners more challenging than any other, given the still rancorous and unsettling debates about English in India, English among the bhāshas; the unresolved tension that English continues to create when the Indians across castes and classes see its power as liberating and enslaving at once. For the best teachers of English, the designing of courses for young learners is still a creative challenge. When possible and where feasible, they are trying to see how English will act less minatory and hortatory in a given regional setting, especially when studied within and across our linguistic cultural spectra and emergent creative forms, sometimes helpfully mediated by English. In one sense, without making much conscious effort or deliberate realignment of regional priorities, English acts and enacts comparative roles in Indian schools where it has survived institutional challenges. English continues to fascinate (and perplex) some of the best Indian students. I have even marvelled at the way English reaches out to students of social, natural, physical, medical, and engineering sciences by other means, by proving time and again that there is hardly anything at all in India that succeeds like English success when our best professional minds engage this language creatively here or abroad. In short, our teachers are well aware of the worldliness of English summed up by Alastair Pennycook at his equivocal best: “English is in the world and the world is in English” (78).
Most Indian students sign up for advanced courses in English with not so much English in them as somewhat complex and varied histories of reading in their respective non-English worlds. And this reading is not necessarily of print but of ideas and things as yet, even, unrecorded in print, or uncaptured in mud or mould or metal, plaster or film. If we are trying to ‘teach’ such students English, we shall be wary of administering a pre-set syllabus for them, of courses designed in advance, ones that are unlikely to excite whole classes of readers with phenomenally diverse and richly uneven histories of private reading in the cultures and languages of our country. Our preset syllabi are rather outmoded if completely inflexible and unsuited for such a community, albeit small, of students whose profiles are fast changing in this century. Students I have known over the last 40 years or so expect English to be less naturalized and periodized for the sake of administering eligibility and fellowship tests whose ‘multiple choices’ offer them no meaningful choices at all. To cut short long and complicated arguments, I hope our teachers will begin to ask this: When shall we remake our Norton anthologies of English Literature for the Indian classrooms? And when will such initiatives involving students be tied directly to our classroom narratives?
When honestly confronted, teachers not only in India but elsewhere as well are seriously concerned about the fate of reading in the worldwide English scenario of electronic technology. Of course we need to see the fatality of such things in a contextual, correlated manner— by considering also, how badly our students write when they are left with no multiple-choice questions. The point is that the electronic media have made two mutually incompatible selves of our young readers: one self mindlessly devoted to the digital; and the other, perhaps extra-mindfully, to the printed material. The digital versus print-oriented styles of reading seldom go unproblematically together in the Indian world of learning, which is still largely reliant of scripts, paper, print, notebooks, and written examinations. The quest for such readers seems to be rather misguided because most young readers (and the young faculty deputed to mentor them) scouring websites for instant and immediate help are driven straight toward the Wikipedia entries and e-caskets of widely shared glosses and skimpy annotations that circulate relentlessly among the less gifted and indifferent reading crowds. Our young readers are either too impatient or too easily distracted on the www, or too lazily disposed to turning the onion-skin pages of their Norton and other standardized anthologies. Either way, they really do not get beyond the bromides and platitudes with which they may work to complete a ‘take home’ assignment.
What, on the other hand, would make them readers with discernment, thinkers suspicious of pre-set agendas, speakers ready for tolerant and sharp exchanges in dialogue, and finally, writers whose scholarship and style earn them legitimate credit among their peers? The Indian classroom and the professional class responsible for training readers have a long way to go shaping such a future. What, to me, appears as irreparable damage to sensitive reading and astute analysis of anything worth reading in an Indian English class is the total indifference student-readers show towards address (that is, the particular sense of who is speaking, and to whom, under what material circumstances…) that an addiction to web-browsing and scanning cannot but create in all readers anywhere in the world. “I do not know how to answer the question of how a text is addressed,” admits Anthony Appiah whose essay “Cosmopolitan Reading” (2009) virtually sums up the worries that beset much postcolonial reading and most readership, but insists nevertheless that it greatly helps to know “how productive it is to read [a text] as addressed to one reader rather than to another, how assuming different readers opens up ways of understanding it” (212, emphasis mine). If our young readers appreciate Appiah’s point, they will surely regret not having asked this simple question before they finalized and sought approval for their research themes.
The English learners in India of my generation or the next grew up reading a series of short titles called “Tales Retold.” They were not “comics” but richly illustrated pages for reading. In fact, our reading English began with them, giving us the impression early on that English always retells/ retails stories. And so we used to build a small collection since middle school: Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles. . . Unsurprisingly, the reminiscences of Salman Rushdie (born 1947) are not only bibliocentric but strikingly allusive to stories that recall other stories, his own and other. He tells us that the thing he fears most is a world without stories to which he might be consigned on some evil day, the walls collapsing around dreamers like him who haven’t yet finished dreaming. The two texts I cannot do without in teaching New Literatures in English are not always Rushdie’s fiction for which he is justly famous, but two of his essays: “Is Nothing Sacred?” (1990) and “Step Across This Line” (2002). In both, he has no new stories to tell us. So he not only retells an old story from time to time but mythologizes it if only to show us that a story so remembered and retold becomes a morality tale. Rushdie has an amazingly shrewd way of circumventing preachiness when he remakes stories. Synoptically told in another context, a tale marks one’s presence, often by transferring its ethical gist to the present. What’s more, reading an English story in India is to find another meaning in/for it, crossing borders and closing gaps, like Kipling’s “If,” suggesting a meaning quite different from what its first reciters and listeners have had. Among my favourite passages in The Practice of Everyday Life (1988) is the following, a passage I would love to see printed on the flyleaf of every course-booklet of the humanities: “An initial, indeed initiatory, experience: to read is to be elsewhere, where they are not, in another world; it is to constitute a secret scene, a place one can enter and leave when one wishes; to create dark corners into which no one can see…” (De Certeau 173).
The following long passage from Rushdie’s “Is Nothing Sacred?” (1991) always prefaces my discussion of the texts I list for a course on New Literatures in English:
Imagine this. You wake up one morning and find yourself in a large, rambling house. As you wander through it you realize it is so enormous that you will never know it all. In the house are people you know, family members, friends, lovers, colleagues; also many strangers. The house is full of activity: conflicts and seductions, celebrations and wakes. At some point you understand that there is no way out. You find that you can accept this. The house is not what you’d have chosen, it’s in fairly bad condition, the corridors are often full of bullies, but it will have to do. Then one day you enter an unimportant-looking little room. The room is empty, but there are voices in it, voices that seem to be whispering just to you. You recognize some of the voices, others are completely unknown to you. The voices are talking about the house, about everyone in it, about everything that is happening and has happened and should happen. Some of them speak exclusively in obscenities. Some are bitchy. Some are loving. Some are funny. Some are sad. The most interesting voices are all these things at once. You begin to go to the room more and more often. Slowly you learn that most of the people in the house use such rooms sometimes. Yet the rooms are all discreetly positioned and unimportant-looking.
Now imagine that you wake up one morning and you are still in the large house, but all the voice-rooms have disappeared. It is as if they have been wiped out. Now there is nowhere in the whole house where you can go to hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. There is nowhere to go for the voices that can be funny one minute and sad the next, that can sound raucous and melodic in the course of the same sentence. Now you remember: there is no way out of this house. Now this fact begins to seem unbearable. You look into the eyes of the people in the corridors― family, lovers, friends, colleagues, strangers, bullies, priests. You see the same thing in everybody’s eyes. How do we get out of here? It becomes clear that the house is a prison. People begin to scream, and pound the walls. Men arrive with guns. The house begins to shake. You do not wake up. You are already awake. (Rushdie, 1991. 428.)
The fright is real, the magic of words. The dreamy allegory it evokes is for anyone whose love for liberal arts and literature matches Rushdie’s ardour. For at least some students and their teachers, this scene is apt to resemble pretty much their own schools of English. In any case, the ‘reality’ of this scenario is bound to make at least subliminal sense for many of us. The passage concludes with the following: “Wherever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or later the walls have come tumbling down” (429). That the little room is not real we know; we also know that it was never meant to be of brick and mortar. But our access to its unreality is a right, a right we call the right to dream. English in India is that little room that gives us (many of us who profess English without being professorial) hope for dreaming in another language. As if seeking “a second opinion,” “another chance,” or “a possible alternative,” for the Indians who think they have languages of their own, English is that other language in which to conceptualize, speculate, realize, or dream, differently. The italicized phrase only suggests that we rethink what we have as ‘our’ language. No one owns a language. There is, in other words, no own language. Nothing can be sillier than the supposition that when you own a language, others should follow you (punningly). On the contrary, we share a linguistic universe, or we don’t. Rushdie’s allegory is superb when it tests our comprehension, whether we follow what he is saying about the rights and freedom we enjoy when we think we are using language.
At the very least, writers and readers ought to claim the right to entertain the supreme reality of this house― in the twin senses of entertain which would be: first, our right to hold it in between our deep slumber and wide wakefulness; and second, our right to be so regaled and indulged by such telling of synoptic tales.
“Indian writers working in English” is Salman Rushdie’s description of those whom we generally call Indian writers in English (Mirrorwork, viii). If we know Rushdie at all, he is not likely to have erred especially when he italicizes a phrase to distinguish the work of English writers from India rather than that of the bhāsha writers. It is amusing again to think whether he meant his own as laboriously composed, or works of art; or English writing by Indians, still unfinished and ongoing, work in progress. Perhaps we are reading too much into Rushdie’s italicized care. In any case, Indian Writing in English (IWE) is large and laborious business, if we are reading it with sheer academic motives (such as collecting texts for college reading, writing essays on them for marks and grades, reviewing them for academic journals, interviewing writers for research publications, or writing doctoral dissertations on them). It is a small subject indeed for the writers themselves and others however when we just think of their English as no more than their right or choice, rather a right of linguistic choice, most suited to them both professionally and personally. (My writing, my language!) Many Indian writers have stopped worrying about both English and writing in it because they believe that they are writers in a world to which India belongs, and the language they choose to write in does not really matter, if readers accept and love their work.4
That granted, students will certainly be interested in looking through what some Indian writers, both of English and the bhāshas, used to say and indeed had said, one time or the other, when called upon to respond to such loaded questions on their colonial education under the British, their knowledge and experience of the bhāshas, or what they would think to be “legitimate” for an Indian to create in a language that they may not quite claim to be their own.5
Contemporary writers in English, either writing in India or writing from abroad, show an increased awareness of the “peculiarities” of their English, and at least the best of them are conscious of differences that discursively mark them out from their fellow-writers in India or across the English-writing world. This consciousness of Indian writers who have made their homes abroad is shaped by their flexible, rather adaptable identities; their local, regional, national, cosmopolitan or some such identitarian hybridity. Their circumstantial commitments of belonging and difference within or outside India show in the language they use. Such identitarian alignments and realignments are the languages (their English among other languages) they use. Although they do not openly theorize such complexities like research students of IWE, writers of English all over the world know that the history of a literature with colonial origins is involuntarily written by the language, not just in it. Writing fiction rather than documents, they are conscious that English for them is not so much an instrument, a “tool,” as a desire to intervene in the language in which history is made. English of Indian literature, especially of the post-Economic Liberalization decades, has been that language of varied and creatively nuanced evolution for a sizable number of writers across the world today who participate in the cultures of mobility their art makes possible.
When IWE is no longer regarded as an autonomous canon but as involved in a continuing dialogue with (and informing) New Literatures in English, Indian writers of English will be seen as participating in an international English literary world. And in that large world, routine questions of dominance and authority of English hardly figure. If anything, this world, in Alastair Pennycook’s description once again, is English in the World /the World in English. What this in effect means is that IWE today joins and participates in a much larger discourse of writers and readers in the world. It is determined to interrupt the securities and containment of an Eng. Lit. world of standard classics and the canon. As Pennycook remarks, “the concept of [English as] discourse allows for the construction of counter-discourses in English and may offer remarkable potential for change” (84). When IWE thus moves toward discourse, it then begins to see how strong its chosen medium is, or will be, for their India in the world. Like Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin before the new Indian writers, IWE will begin to engage actively in, as Pennycook suggests, “a political struggle over meaning” (84) rather than seek concessional accommodation and acceptance of political meanings English allows/ extends IWE. The political largesse of English will now be a world of meanings into which, and from which, Indian writers contribute, imbibe, and share. In short, they remain members of, if you will, an International Literary Fund.
The cultural logic of English in the World/ the World in English will be easy to comprehend when we see how IWE sheds its shibboleths and begins to shape a global discourse and, if need be, contribute towards a counter-discourse in times of global crises and political struggles.6 One big block on which IWE discussions have stumbled so often, mostly through the mid-Nineteen Sixties and most of the ’Seventies, is the writer’s mother tongue. Pointless debates have often vitiated the critical scene by asking whether English is or is not a writer’s “primary”/ “first” language or mother tongue.7 In contrast, how contemporary Indian writers see English now is the subject of Rashmi Sadana’s chapter “Across the Yamuna” in her English Heart, Hindi Heartland. She comments so lucidly on the socio-political transformations that have realigned our linguistic spheres for newer readers and writers of the bhāshas (especially Hindi) and IWE, located here or elsewhere. Unsettled and itinerant writers welcome and even revel in their respective states of linguistic exile. Virtually unknown to them are singular notions of linguistic identity and belonging to specific and stable regions and nations that a mother tongue putatively affords those who have one such. Most Indian writers of the new generation are more used to multiple, often periodically varying, transit identities and occupational contingencies, so much so that they know nothing of the sentimental attachment to a language they would call “mother tongue” or a first language. If Sadana sees the English-educated, intellectual, career-driven writers relegating their mother tongues to the domestic sphere as “an elite class of cultural producers” (118), she also offers a notable example of a Hindi writer called Geetanjali Shree whose Mai (1993) addresses quite radically what one’s mother tongue purports to be when its contestation with English is part of a young woman’s growth mediated through English and Hindi, mostly on an Indian metropolitan periphery. Of further interest to us is the correspondent transformation that is evident in the English-proficient bhāsha writers like Geetanjali Shree throughout India who, as Sadana notes, are “part of both the intellectual world of English and the creative world of [their respective bhāshas], a common phenomenon for bhāsha writer[s]” (133).
Languages live and grow among the human beings who use them all day, every day. They are therefore found to be most organic and procreative in contact zones, among people who need not even know or use the same language. As a matter of fact, the languages that evolve richer and faster are those that most benefit from their brushes with languages so unlike themselves. It is naïve to believe therefore that English in current use, for all our sanitized care in the departments of English, will stay insulated against the bhāshas. Even within the four walls of the classroom or college, English hardly remains ‘standard’ or ‘pure.’ Since no language always has its meanings alone, English again has lived and grown in multiple live zones of the bhāshas, whether or not it explicitly translates, interprets, lends words or phrases, modifies expressions, corrects terminological errors and closes audibility or intelligibility gaps for the nonce, as and when such needs arise. English, on its part, equally benefits from all bhāshas when human users allow its free movement within this zone. What all this means is that we need to enlarge and revise our textbook-definition of translation as pure and simple transference of words and ideas, of one language carried over to another language. Languages are not chattels. They still do not go from one place to another in U-Haul trucks or are served by Agarwal Packers and Movers. It is very likely that IWE looks and sounds like an English translation from a bhāsha, or a translated work from a bhāsha looks and sounds like IWE. The reason is that the transport of ideas and expressions is seldom hierarchical (primary/secondary, source/target) or unidirectionally straight, singular or coherent in English when Indians use it most creatively within their respective bhāsha worlds. Our best writers let their English imagine itself. As a matter of fact, the best IWE we have is one where we see English imagining itself in a bhāsha, or a bhāsha imagining itself in English.9
The evidence for this strange but truly daring phenomenon is not unavailable in IWE though scarce. If we turn to poets who lie less about their writing than the artful dodgers of fiction, it will be easy to collect enough samples, although a good many contemporary writers of prose since G. V. Desani, who often set themselves tasks beyond what they can do but hope their multilingualist English can, have made no bones about it. For someone who knows no Indian language at all, let alone Marathi and Hindi spoken by the Mumbaites, Arun Kolatkar’s poetry sounds English in most of its English parts. But his peculiar bilingualism, as reflected clearly in poems like Jejuri, is the main subject of Anjali Nerlekar’s Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (2016). In this fascinatingly rich book of bilingual readings of bilingual textual fragments, Nerlekar quotes the following passage from A. K. Ramanujan, who like Kolatkar, writes an English beside, between, and beneath several bhāshas and folkloric patois:
When I write in Kannada, I’d like all my English, Tamil. etc. to be at the back of it; and when I write in English [,] I hope my Tamil and Kannada, like my linguistics and anthropology, what I know about America and India, are at the back of it. It’s of course a hope and not a claim. I’m less and less embarrassed of keeping these doors open even when it’s dark outside and it’s 3 a.m. inside. (Quoted in Nerlekar 211)
A better way to give it the focus it deserves will be to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s “Minor Literature” of Kafka, and notice that some Indian writers deterritorialize imperial (Anglo-American) English for “minority” uses (as Joyce and Beckett did within their precincts of Gaelic and Irish). That is to say, they do not try hard at all to subserve an imperial rhetorical diktat but work English their way, minoritize it within a larger English world, pretty much like Kafka had done with his Prague German.10 The attention to the granular texture of a writer’s medium begins here.
Among the most celebrated “Indian writers working in English,” to borrow Rushdie’s phrase once again, is Arundhati Roy whose language has received very insightful attention in Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien’s book called Weird English (2004). Roy, among many other Indians who write only in English, does not believe that any one language, least of all English, is superior to other languages here or elsewhere; that for certain kinds of writing or situations involving South Asian/ Indian lives, this one language is better suited than any other, etc. As a matter of fact, she believes in the creative potential that the anarchy of bhāshas affords a writer of her political ambition and persuasion. Rather than feeling hamstrung, therefore, she is excited and encouraged by the little worlds of communication such anarchy makes for, despite the vast differences and disparities of socio-economic-educational levels of Indians, the resultant discursive styles, the literary and folk traditions that still sustain these little worlds against the big worlds of English corporations and global business. Ch’ien reads in Roy’s non-fictional prose the clearest political statement it makes, leaving us in little doubt how Roy’s language matches the subject she chooses to write on:
Roy champions weird English as the antidote to the dominance of bigness. In her essays, big words are often used to shore up big values, values that scare the small into submission: words like “globalization,” “corporate,” and “nuclear,” which can lead to the commission of evil against the powerless. The form of her writing encourages allowing small, often visually dismissed, marginalized entities into our field of vision. (156)
Roy’s vote, as we find out thanks to Ch’ien, is for that Imaginary English, on the analogy of Benedict Anderson’s Imaginary Communities and Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, all such ‘imaginaries’ urging us to reflect on differences and distances differently. And so must, the argument seems to proceed, the First World English. Ideally, that is. Anglo-American Englishes will now (ideally) respect and receive (heartily) into its politics, English Writing from the Indian subcontinent in their ‘imaginary,’ if they mean to do business with our smaller polylingual reading and writing worlds. As has been noted by translation theorists and commentators such as Marilyn Booth and Emily Apter, if the Centre-Periphery logic persists in intellectual transactions, a Third-World story in “Weird English” can reflect either its lowness and poverty of cultural resources, or boldly flaunt its cussedness as an ideological mark of its unassimilable and aggressive stance. That is to say, IWE could command due respect for its difference from Anglo-American readers, or evoke pathetically scornful otherness from them. Translation always runs this terrible risk― it shows too much or too little; it depends on how readers at the other end construe cultural surpluses or deficits.
Of course writers like Roy and Rushdie today couldn’t care less how they are received, after having arrived. That Roy in particular has a very considered (shrewd) sense of the scale and range of linguistic choices is further evident when she contrasts the ways her English works, or is rather made to work, in The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. She tells Avni Sejpal:
The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness are different kinds of novels…. In both, the language evolved organically as I wrote them…. In The God of Small Things, I felt my way toward a language that would contain both English and Malayalam—it was the only way to tell that story of that place and those people. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was a much riskier venture. To write it, I had to nudge the language of The God of Small Things off the roof of a very tall building, then rush down and gather up the shards. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is written in English but imagined in many languages—Hindi, Urdu, English… (“How to Think about Empire”).
This is not to deny that all is, or will be, quite well for the bhāshas because in all unequal business transactions, some loss is inevitable, and that loss will be borne usually by the “weaker” party. Rather than quibbling about who in this transaction is really weak, it will be useful to remember that when speakers are at a loss for words and phrases (and replace them with those in another tongue) they are unaware that a significant part of living in their language is lost for ever. While the Roys and Rushdies have seldom known that life in which they grew up (or do not care to have noticed that growth as carefully as they have, the larger politics of lives and languages), it is good to be reminded by someone whose growth as a writer cannot be distinguished from his nurturing language. Iain Crichton Smith tells us that “for the islander to lose his [sic] language … would be to lose to a great extent the meaning of his life and to become a member of a sordid colony on the edge of an imperialist world” (Quoted in Patterson 11). But Smith who died in 1998 wrote Gaelic and English, and never reconciled himself to the contradictions of the colony, unlike many contemporary Indian writers of English whose other losses in terms of the bhāshas are nugatory.
Certainly the Indian writer’s advantages of writing in English are not quite different from those of the World-of-English authors. The luckiest of all share the same periodical venues of English creative and critical prose and verse like Granta, Grand Street, The New Yorker, or Virginia Quarterly Review. They are not only good writers of fiction but are quite knowledgeable about, even well versed in, the current political idioms and pedagogic thought in Anglo-American universities. A quick look at the reading prescribed for graduate students in North America will include at least some writers whose English tends to sound and look “odd” beside the writing of their Anglo-American contemporaries. The possibility that the ethnic stamp on the exploitative lives in the Third World, the quirky language of such narratives, will excite curiosity or ensure the acceptance of Indian writers more readily than the neutral-toned and linguistically conformist writing of the old-generation IWE writers (R. K. Narayan, Nirad Chaudhuri, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Kamala Das, A. K. Ramanujan and others) in the US schools is not quite fanciful. As Aarthi Vadde remarks, “the minority appropriations” of English by writers like Rushdie, Roy and others have unfairly drawn the attention of academics to “the vernacular Englishes” which in turn “has perpetuated the exclusion of works that are not spectacularly hybrid or culturally syncretic from the American postcolonial canon. The classic example of this principle of selection has been Salman Rushdie’s secure place in American English departments and R. K. Narayan’s continual neglect, even though he is widely taught in English departments within India” (17).
Certain kinds, subgenres of literature in English sometimes seem completely off limits or inaccessible to writers, although many Indian writers in English have tried them with moderate or little success. One such is the growing-up-in-English story, because Indian children grow up among the many bhāshas in their vicinity and English (if they are lucky enough to be in English schools, and their parents/ siblings know English). In any case, after Roy’s twins in The God of Small Things we cannot easily recall such “growing up English” in a regional world. The difficulty of negotiating such themes in English is never far in the minds of contemporary story-tellers from India, now living abroad. Megha Majumdar’s A Burning has one such character called Lovely, about whom she says the following:
Lovely’s English sounds like it had to come out of her character, and she is somebody who is learning English. There is an element of struggle and aspiration in that, because English is of course the language of the elite, the language of privilege in India. I think Lovely is trying to get to that place. And so I wanted her English to be nonstandard and to hold this spirit of struggle and aspiration within it. I also hoped that, as the reader stays with the book and stays with Lovely, they might find her language to be a magnificent hybrid: Lovely’s own English. She has a realization that I also experienced when I was a kid and struggled to learn English. I was told that I needed to learn English, and we were punished in school for speaking Bengali or Hindi. At the same time, it was really powerful to realize that English could belong to my life even though the picture books I was reading had blond kids making sandcastles on the beach. English could belong to my life when I went with my mother to the fish market. So that realization of where English can settle into was one that I wanted to bring to the book.
When Indians write English, it is perhaps too much to assume that they are completely in charge of their linguistic destiny. All if them do ask, at one time or the other, whether they are writing English or writing in English. It is another matter if they do not see any difference between the two. But some readers do. (See K. V. Tirumalesh in Appendix II.)
It is only fair that we read C. D. Narasimhaiah’s “Centenary Tribute” to Macaulay (1990) if only to see that few Macaulay-baiting postcolonial critics sound either earnest or convincing in their arguments to dismantle “the imperishable empire,” given that they still seek teaching jobs in departments of English here and abroad. None of them will volunteer to teach a bhāsha of their choice for equal wages. Of course Narasimhaiah never minded being old-fashioned in writing the “Tribute” he did and teaching English within and across the subcultures he loved as his own.
The reflection of English culture in architectural ambience has caught the coincidental attention of two teachers of university English. Rajan and Rai are both professors of English, albeit of different generations. It is again only fair to add that other ironies in attitudes, of degree and kind, have also been noticed. Ania Loomba, for one, sees it ironic that the radical teachers of English wanting to rid their syllabus of all colonial character and orientation should be on the same side as “the Hindu right, the champions of what they call the ‘study of culture’, which would cheerfully outlaw English studies appropriating many of our own anticolonial arguments” (222).
In none of the official publications of the state or the central government is the truth of the “English-Vernacular Divide” (the titular phrase I borrow from Vaidehi Ramanathan’s outstanding work on the policies accentuating English/bhāshas divide in India) openly stated. The Unified District Information System for Education (2019-20) is an official report of the Central government admits to this divide rather unguardedly when it says “More than a quarter of all schoolchildren in India now study in English-medium schools though Hindi remains by far the biggest medium of instruction …. Anecdotal evidence suggests that in many so-called English-medium schools, instruction is often imparted in the local language, but the rise in enrolment in such schools nevertheless indicates an aspirational urge” (The Times of India, Hyderabad ed., July 3, 2021, p.1).
Perhaps it is too early to write off the shibboleths of IWE critical debate, particularly those of the 1960s and ’70s such as “Indianness,” “authenticity,” and the implied readership of IWE. Rimi B. Chatterjee leaves “the debate over authenticity” half way through in a recent article hoping for more interesting work in “Indish writing,” which in her view “is still a genre-in-progress” (58).
See Appendix I for short edited samples. Copyright restrictions make this inevitable on a freely accessible website.
Pennycook explains this logic: “Discourses and languages can both facilitate and restrict the production of meanings. When we look at the history and present conjunction of English and many discourses of global power, it seems certain that these discourses have been facilitative of the spread of English and that the spread of English has facilitated the spread of these discourses. It is in this sense that the world is in English. The potential meanings that can be articulated in English are interlinked with the discourses of development, democracy, capitalism, modernization, and so on” (85).
Perhaps Sujata Bhatt’s “Search for My Tongue” is an exasperated response to these debates:
You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.
I have found Emily Apter’s “translation zone” appropriate for characterizing the work area of IWE because I believe that the best of our writers in this tradition have always accessed some bhāsha or the other in their writing. This is so, despite wholly abjuring or downplaying their Indian nationality and/ or regional affiliations for valid political reasons. Apter’s zone applies to conceptual territories, “sites that are ‘in-translation’ … belonging to no single, discrete language or single medium of communication” (6). No matter where writing takes place, Indian writers take with them some part of their first-hand cultural/ linguistic repertoire that creates this “zone” for them. Several examples of the bhāshas playing beneath a writer’s consciousness, and within what specific translation zone this occurs, may be cited but I have examined this phenomenon at length, at once, in IWE and translation in my essay, “The Cat and Shakespeare… A Tale of Modern Indian Translation” (2010).
Readers will immediately think of their own favourite examples of this phenomenon, but my first example is of course R. K. Narayan’s “A Horse and Two Goats.” For a detailed reading of this story, see the second section of my “To the Indian Manner Born: How English tells its Stories” in Hermēneus (2018).
Cf. Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritizing logic: “How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language?” (169)
Appiah, K. Anthony. (2001). “Cosmopolitan Reading.” In Vinay Dharwadker (Ed.), Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge. 197-227.
Apter, Emily. (2006) The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton UP.
Ashcroft, Bill. (2009). Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge.
Bhatt, Sujata. “Search for My Tongue.” https://librarynewstuff.wordpress.com/search-for-my-tongue-sujata-bhatt/
Booth, Marilyn. (2003) “On Translation and Madness.” Translation Review, 65. 47 ‒53.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. (2012) “From Civilization to Globalization: The ‘West’ as a Shifting Signifier in Indian Modernity.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 13 (2), 138 ‒ 152.
Chandran, K. Narayana (2010). “The Cat and Shakespeare and pooccayum shakespearum: A Tale of Modern Indian Translation.” Comparative Critical Studies, 7. 1. 69 ‒ 81.
_________. (2018) “To the Indian Manner Born: How English tells its Stories.” Hermēneus: Revista de traducción e interpretación, 20. 87-104.
Chatterjee, Rimi B. (2009) “The Debate over Authenticity: How Indian is Indian Writing in English and How Much Does This matter?” Anxieties, Influences and After: Critical Responses to Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism. (Ed.) Kaustav Bakshi, Samrat Sengupta, and Subhadeep Paul. Kolkata: Worldview. 43- 60.
Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. (2004) Weird English. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.
Christ, Carol T. & Catherine Robson. (Ed.) (2005) Volume E. The Victorian Age. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. (8th Edition). New York: W. W. Norton.
De Certeau, Michel. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Stevan Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. (1975/ 1994) “What is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David Richter. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s. 166-172.
Eco, Umberto. (1994) Reflections on The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. London: Minerva.
Gandhi, M. K. (1997) Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Ed. Anthony J. Parel. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press.
Loomba, Ania. (1999) “Fundamentals and English Studies.” Textual Practice, 13 (2): 221‒ 225.
Mazrui, Ali A. (1975) The Political Sociology of the English language. The Hague/ Paris: Mouton.
Narasimhaiah, C. D. (1990) “Thomas Babington Macaulay: A Centenary Tribute.” The Indian Critical Scene: Controversial Essays. Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corp. 1‒ 12.
Pandian, Anand. (2021) “Ethnographic Fictions: Talking with Megha Majumdar.” Public Books, 26 April.
Patterson, J. R. “Speaking in Tongues.” (2021) World Literature Today, 95. 2. 10-12.
Pennycook, Alastair. (2001) “English in the World/ the World in English.” In Analysing English in a Global Context: A Reader. Ed. Anne Burns and Caroline Coffin. London: Routledge. 78-89.
Rai, Alok. “Is the Modern Gated Community Turning Us into Brown Sahibs?” (2021) The Sunday Times of India, Hyderabad edition. September 26. 11.
Rajan, Balachandra. (1999) “Macaulay: The Moment and the Minute.” Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay. Durham: Duke UP.174- 197.
Ramanathan, Vaidehi. (2005) The English-Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice. Hyderabad, Orient Longman.
Ramanujan, A. K. (1991) Folktales from India (xiii- xxxv). London: Penguin.
Report of the University Education Committee. (1949) New Delhi: Government of India Press.
Roy, Arundhati and Avni Sejpal. (2019) “How to Think about Empire.” Boston Review, January3, 2019. https://bostonreview.net/global-justice/arundhati-roy-thinking-about-empire Accessed July 10, 2021.
Rushdie, Salman. (1991) “Is Nothing Sacred?” Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta/ Penguin. 415-429.
Rushdie, Salman and Elizabeth West, eds. (1997). Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing 1947‒ 1997. New York: Henry Holt.
_________. (2002) Step across this line: collected non-fiction 1992- 2002. New York: Penguin.
Vadde, Aarthi. (2013) “Putting Foreignness to the Test: Rabindranath Tagore’s Babu English. Comparative Literature, 65. 1. 15-25.
The following edited excerpts from books and essays are mostly on what our writers think about their use of English and what IWE means for them. Owing to copyright restrictions and, in some cases, the difficulty in tracing them to their authentic sources, the texts are short. Where a context, or immediate provocation, for an excerpt needed to be supplied, I have done so in a line or indicative phrase. KNC
______________
Anita Desai
Fortunately I began to write at an age when I was not conscious of the different elements of my life being elements of different cultures: to me they were one and indivisible. I did not feel I was confronted with a choice but with a heritage. When I was considered ready to go to school, at the age of six, my parents chose the nearest school, the one most convenient for me to attend, which happened to be a Christian mission school. There the first language I was taught to read and write was English (incidentally not the first language of either of my parents), and it became therefore my literary language, the language of books and writing. I learned the alphabet and I began to write and I did not encounter any problem—it was adequate for my purposes and I could do with it what I liked; I found it flexible, elastic, resilient, capable of taking on whatever tones, rhythms, and colors I chose. Of course I was taught Hindi as well, but I never used it for any creative purpose. I can explain this only by recalling that the Hindi texts we were given to study were, in contrast to the English ones, dry, pedantic, unimaginative, and unrelated to the simplicities of everyday life. They were also unattractively printed and published, a not unimportant factor to a child who, at that age, judges by the feel, the touch, and the taste of things. I read and owned many beautifully published books in English, not one in Hindi. Years later, when I was searching for attractive Hindi books for my children so that they should not grow up with the same instinctive antipathy, the only ones I could find were printed by the Soviet Union. I do blame this in part for an early lack of interest in Hindi literature. Later I found that knowing English opened for me the world of Russian, French, Latin American literature, the literature of the whole world. I have always considered this the most wonderfully good fortune; I would not want to be circumscribed to one language. I cannot imagine what it would mean for a writer to be restricted to one language. Again, I have to admit that I do not belong to a part of the world or to a time when one culture or one language is the norm. Am I wrong to think this an enrichment, not an impoverishment?
______________
Raja Rao
And as long as the English language is universal, it will always remain Indian. And the most remarkable books published in the English language in India, in the last hundred and fifty years and the most original are the works, not of poets and novelists, but of philosophers and sages¾Raja Rammohun Roy, Keshub Chandra Sen, Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, J. Krishna Murti, and Sri Krishna Menon (Sri Atmananda Guru of Travancore).
It would then be correct to say as long as we are Indian¾that is, not nationalists, but truly Indians of the Indian psyche¾we shall have the English language with us and amongst us, and not as guest or friend, but as one of our own, of our caste, our creed, our sect and of our tradition.
What caste will English have then? Like that pioneer Raja Rammohun Roy, we too may make singular changes in English syntax, make its grammar suit our philosophical predilections; we may make use of long Indian words from Sanskrit or Malayalam (say like ‘brahmacharya’ or ‘harikathākālakshēpam’,); we may offend the ears of the good Englishman by our inability to use the letter V. and W. as though they came from the same posture of tongue and labial disposition; we may still think Charles Dickens the greatest writer of fiction, and wonder that no Englishman quotes Tennyson anymore; we may know by heart and recite like Sanskrit verse, with rhythm, hand-clap and foot-beat, passages from John Stuart Mill with the firm conviction that never was philosophy more at home with us than with this great Englishman on our tongues; we may even now read Marie Corelli and regard her outlook on love as the very English of English, and the most eternal of eternal; we may hear Mr. Stephen Spender recite his melodramatic poetry, and say to each other, “And, Kitta, but that is not as good as Coventry Patmore;” we may write editorials in our papers reminding ourselves that C.P. Scott wrote such and such an editorial during the Boer War that made Queen Victoria ask Disraeli, who it was that dare write such impertinence about the realm (our English History may be wrong, but we are earnest); and our young men still know little of T.S. Eliot or Dylan Thomas nor understand what the Logical Positivists in England have discovered, but we shall continue to read and speak English. It has settled in India, and I repeat, we will not let her go.
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Nirad Chaudhuri
[The following edited excerpts from The Continent of Circe (1965), pp. 24, 28 are among the most forthright passages, especially on the novelists who ring false when they try to capture the plain lives and characters of India. Chaudhuri’s sense of our writers’ English and native sensibilities is unerring, although his critics never tire of faulting him precisely for this sense. Unflattering but candid, Chaudhuri is among our first writers to win world recognition.]
Unfortunately, even those Indians who write novels about themselves in English try to do no better. They take their cue from the foreign dabblers with India. They themselves are not very well posted about their own country, and most of their information is raw material gathered ad hoc. They belong to the Anglicized upper middle-class. Moreover, just to acquire the desire to write novels in English they have to de-Indianize themselves substantially.
Over and above, in order to be novelists in English, these Indian writers are faced by a problem of writing for tackling which they have neither the knowledge nor the strength of mind. The life, the mind, and the behaviour of Indians are so strange for the people of the West that if these are described in ordinary English the books would be unintelligible to English-speaking readers, and unacceptable to British or American publishers. Most Indian writers solve this problem, not by choosing a genuine Indian subject and creating an adequate western idiom to express it, but by selecting wholly artificial themes which the Western world takes to be Indian, and by dealing with them in the manner of contemporary Western writers. To put it briefly, they try to see their country and society in the way Englishmen or Americans do and write about India in te jargon of the same masters. The result is an insufficient imitation of the novels about India written by Western novelists. India is far too big a subject for such frippery. […]
No true insight into the Indian mind can be gained without a thorough knowledge of […] at least one Indian language. A very large number of us are indeed glib in English, but glibness and expressiveness are not synonymous. The number of Indians who have a personal expression in English is not large, and it is soon found that the majority of speakers of English employ a conventional diction for putting across conventional ideas.
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It has been pointed out in different ways by Behramji M. Malabari in 1893 and Raja Rao in 1938 that we do not― cannot― relate to English the way the English, or for that matter the Scots or Irish, do In India, English― without doubt an Indian language today― exists along with other major languages, many of which have long literate traditions and precolonial histories, and most of which have a different relationship to English than they have with one another. […] The question, then, is not whether English is an Indian language. There is not much sense either defending or dismissing English in India today. But any Indian who writes in English has to write with a full awareness of the position […] occupied by English in India, and the relationship of English to other languages in Indian spaces. For, English in India presents some pitfalls and some possibilities that are unique to our historical and cultural situation. A writer of Indian origin in England or Jamaica need not take this into account. But Indian Writing in English can turn a blind eye toit only at the risk of becoming something else.
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Jeet Thayil
Those who write in English—a small, Westernized, middle-class minority—are divided by more than language from other Indian writers. Where a Malayalam poet has a distinct readership, English language poets do not. They are known only unto themselves. This has led to crises of identity, to a few inelegant labels for the writing— “Indo-English,” “Indo-Anglian,” “Indian-English”—and to a charged debate that has carried on for at least eight decades.
In this exchange, writers who work in English are held accountable for nothing less than a failure of national conscience. The harshest criticism comes from writers in regional languages who preface their comments with assurances that jealousy has little to do with the intensity of their opinions. It is instructive to hear what they have to say, but it isn’t illuminating. The only illuminating point about the controversy is that it is conducted entirely in English. And it’s worth revisiting for an idea of the context against which Indian poetry has, against all expectation, grown into itself.
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Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Barring a few, most Indian English writers acquire the language they write in and seldom lick it off their mothers’ teats. Everyone equally inherits the tradition which is “very much of this subcontinent,” and everyone has access toits “deposits” in the Indo-aryan and Dravidian languages. If sometimes the poet skips the ritual of offering a prayer to Lord Murugan or his collaterals, it does not follow that he stands disinherited. This whole question of multilingualism should be looked at less jingoistically if it is to have any meaning, as I think it does. […] Most Indian English poets are bilingual and, though it is too early to say how or where, the other language is the torsional force in their work in the same way that Russian presses on ‘Nabokese’ and non-native French, German, and English glow beneath Borges’ Spanish. Indian English Literature belongs with the work of these new ‘esperantists.’
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Amit Chaudhuri
One of the reasons for the good health of the vernaculars in pre-Independence India had been the spread of good education and, paradoxically, the teaching of good English in even some of the remotest areas. Those dreaded figures, the missionaries, were often responsible for this – people like E. J. Thompson, who went and taught in small towns and villages (in his case, in Bankura in Bengal) and were conversant with the local language. Thus, Indians from a variety of backgrounds learnt English as a second language and acquired a deep feeling for it; English represented to them social mobility and choice. Many of the greatest and most interesting writers and poets in the vernacular languages were, or are, students or teachers of English literature: Jibanananda Das, Buddhadev Bose, Harivanshrai Bachchan, U. R. Anantha Murthy, Mahasweta Devi. After Partition, the best English education has been restricted to a tiny minority in the major cities and towns. This has meant the constriction of choice and access for the less privileged, and, with this constriction, the depletion of the power of the vernacular in whose name the teaching of English has often been abolished.
The position of English, in India, is both inescapable and ambiguous, an ambiguity that is perhaps insufficiently mapped in its fiction and criticism. It is a unique ambiguity; for it is misleading to compare the way English is used in India, by a small but substantial group, not all of its members by any means well-to-do or privileged, with the space of that the language occupies in, for instance, Africa or America. Moreover, to say that English is now an Indian language – while that may be true – requires all kinds of qualifications and a careful re-examination of that claim; for English is not an Indian language in the way it is an American language; nor is it an Indian language in the way that Bengali or Urdu, for instance, is one. The position and meaning of English in India is still on the verge of becoming clear; it is still part of a process that is far from being complete. But to understand fully, the story of the English language and its most profound impact and extraordinary outcome in India in the past 150 years, one has to turn, paradoxically, from English and the issue of colonialism to the vernacular languages and indigenous history.
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V. S. Naipaul
Delight cannot be taught and measured; scholarship can; and my reaction was irrational. But it seemed to me scholarship of such a potted order. A literature was not being explored; it had been codified and reduced to a few pages of “text,” some volumes of “background” and more of “criticism”; and to this mixture a mathematical intelligence might have been applied. There were discoveries, of course: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Restoration comedy. But my distaste for the study of literature led to a sense of being more removed than ever from the literature itself.
The language remained mine, and it was to the study of its development that I turned with pleasure. Here was enough to satisfy my love of language; here was unexpected adventure. It might not have been easy to see Chaucer as a great imaginative writer or to find in the Prologue more than a limited piece of observation which had been exceeded a thousand times; but Chaucer as a handler of a new, developing language was exciting. And my pleasure in Shakespeare was doubled. In Trinidad English writing had been for me a starting-point for fantasy. Now, after some time in England, it was possible to isolate the word, to separate the literature from the language.
Language can be so deceptive. It has taken me much time to realize how bad I am at interpreting the conventions and modes of English speech. This speech has never been better dissected than in the early stories of Angus Wilson. This is the judgement of today; my first responses to these stories were as blundering and imperfect as the responses of Professor Pforzheim to the stern courtesies of his English colleagues in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. But while knowledge of England has made English writing more truly accessible, it has made participation more difficult; it has made impossible the exercise of fantasy, the reader’s complementary response. I am inspecting an alien society, which I yet know, and I am looking for particular social comment. And to re-read now the books which lent themselves to fantastic interpretation in Trinidad is to see, almost with dismay, how English they are. The illustrations to Dickens cannot now be dismissed. And so, with knowledge, the books have ceased to be mine.
It is the English literary vice, this looking for social comment; and it is difficult to resist. The preoccupation of the novelists reflects a society ruled by convention and manners in the fullest sense, an ordered society of the self-aware who read not so much for adventure as to compare, to find what they know or think they know. A writer is to be judged by what he reports on; the working-class writer is a working-class writer and no more. So writing develops into the private language of a particular society. There are new reports, new discoveries: they are rapidly absorbed. And with each discovery the society’s image of itself becomes more fixed and the society looks further inward. It has too many points of reference; it has been written about too often; it has read too much. Angus Wilson’s characters, for instance, are great readers; they are steeped in Dickens and Jane Austen. Soon there will be characters steeped in Angus Wilson; the process is endless. Sensibility will overlie sensibility: the grossness of experience will be refined away by self-awareness. Writing will become Arthur Miller’s definition of a newspaper: a nation talking to itself. And even those who have the key will be able only to witness, not to participate.
All literatures are regional; perhaps it is only the placelessness of a Shakespeare or the blunt communication of “gross” experience as in Dickens that makes them appear less so. Or perhaps it is a lack of knowledge in the reader. Even in this period of “internationalism” in letters we have seen literatures turning more and more inward, developing languages that are more and more private. Perhaps in the end literature will write itself out, and all its pleasures will be those of the word.
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A K Ramanujan
Our very literate father never told us fairy tales, though he too knew them and had heard them in his childhood. But if he talked to us at all, he talked about astronomy, astrology, or Chaucer and Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Dumas, or anything he happened to be reading. My father once told the whole story of Macbeth to my mother in the kitchen, in Tamil, with all of us listening in. It was a rare occasion and we knew it. As we grew up, Sanskrit and English were our father-tongues, and Tamil and Kannada our mother-tongues. The father-tongues distanced us from our mothers, from our own childhoods, and from our villages and many of our neighbours in the cowherd colony next door. And the mother-tongues united us with them. It now seems quite appropriate that our house had three levels, a downstairs for the Tamil world, an upstairs for the English and the Sanskrit, and a terrace on top that was open to the sky where our father could show us the stars and tell us their English and Sanskrit names. From up there on the terrace, we could also look down on the cowherd colony, and run down noisily and breathlessly for a closer look if we saw the beginnings of a festival, a wedding, or a ‘hair to hair’ fight between two women (with the choicest obscenities pouring from them), or a magnificent vilayti, or foreign bull, brought specially to service the local cows.
We ran up and down all these levels. Sanskrit, English, and Tamil and Kannada (my two childhood languages, literally my mother’s tongues, since she too had become bilingual in our childhood) stood for three different interconnected worlds. Sanskrit stood for the Indian past; English for colonial India and the West, which also served as a disruptive creative other that both alienated us from and revealed us (in its terms) to ourselves; and the mother-tongues, the most comfortable and least conscious of all, for the world of women, playmates, children and servants. Ideas, tales, significant alliances, conflicts elders and peers were reflected in each of these languages. Each had a literature that was unlike the others’. Each was an other to the others, and it became the business of a lifetime for some of us to keep the dialogues and quarrels alive among these three and to make something of them. Our writers, thinkers, and men of action¾ say, Gandhi, Tagore and Bharati¾ made creative use of these triangulations, these dialogues and quarrels. For those of us who were shaped in that ‘triple stream’, our translations, poems, lives in and out of India, searches (which we often disguised as research, analysis, even psychoanalysis), and all such explorations, including essays such as these, are witnesses to this lifelong enterprise. Though I shall use the first person singular often in this essay, I believe that neither the things I am talking about nor most of the recognitions are peculiarly mine.
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Salman Rushdie
[Excerpt from his review of Hobson-Jobson, 1985.]
Did you know, for example, that the word tank has Gujarati and Marathi origins? Or that cash was originally the Sanskrit karsha, ‘a weight of silver or gold equal to 1/400th of a Tula’? Or that a shampoo was a massage, nothing to do with the hair at all, deriving from the imperative form—champo! —of the Hindi verb champna, ‘to knead and press the muscles with the view of relieving fatigue, etc.’? Every column of this book contains revelations like these, writtenup in a pleasingly idiosyncratic, not to say cranky, style. The authors, Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, are not averse to ticking off an untrustworthy source, witness their entry under muddle, meaning a double, or secretary, or interpreter: ‘This word is only known to us from the clever—perhaps too clever—little book quoted below…probably a misapprehension of budlee.’
The chief interest of Hobson-Jobson, though, lies not so much in its etymologies for words still in use, but in the richnesses of what one must call the Anglo-Indian language whose memorial it is, that language which was in regular use just forty years ago and which is now as dead as a dodo. In Anglo-Indian a jam was a Gujarati chief, a sneaker was ‘a large cup (a small basin) with a saucer and cover’, a guinea-pig was a midshipman on an Indian-bound boat, an owl was a disease, Macheen was not a spelling mistake but a name, abbreviated from ‘Maha-Cheen’, for ‘great-China’. Even a commonplace word like cheese was transformed. The Hindi chiz, meaning a thing, gave the English word a new, slangy sense of ‘anything good, first-rate in quality, genuine, pleasant or advantageous’ as, we are told, in the phrase, ‘these cheroots are the real cheese.’
Some of the distortions of Indian words— ‘perhaps by vulgar lips’—have moved a long way from their sources. It takes an effort of the will to see, in the Anglo-Indian snow-rupee, meaning ‘authority’, the Telugu word tsnauvu. The dictionary’s own title, chosen, we are told, to help it sell, is of this type. It originates in the cries of Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain! Uttered by Shia Muslims during the Muharram processions. I don’t see how the colonial British managed to hear this as Hobson! Jobson!, but this is clearly a failure of imagination on my part.
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R. K. Narayan
[The Indian Constituent Assembly debates (1946 to 1950) finally settled for accepting Hindi as India’s ‘national’ language while granting English the status of an ‘associate’ official language for at least 15 years.]
But the language has a siren-like charm and a lot of persistence, and (if we may personify it) comes up again and again and demands, ‘What have I done that you hate me so much?’ The judge does not lift up his head for fear that he might weaken. He assumes the gruffest tone possible and says, ‘You are the language of our oppressors. It is through you that the people were divided, so that those who were masters of English could rule others who didn’t know the language. Your insidious influence wrought a cleavage in our own midst…’
‘You speak very good English.’
‘Well, well, I won’t be flattered by it,’ says the judge. ‘All of us are masters of English, but that proves nothing. You are the language of those who were our political oppressors. We don’t want you any more in our midst. Please, begone.’
‘Where shall I go?’
‘To your own country…’
‘I am afraid this is my country. I fear I will stay here, whatever may be the rank and status you may assign me—as the first language or the second language or the thousandth. You may banish me from the classrooms, but I can always find other places where I can stay. I love this country where:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.’
‘That is a beautiful Shakespeare passage. However, I cannot allow the court’s time to be wasted in this manner. You have a knack of beguiling the mind with quotations. I forbid you to quote anything from English literature.’
‘Why are you dead set against me, sir? I have a fundamental right to know why you are throwing me out, under the Indian Constitution…’
‘But it doesn’t apply to you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you are not an Indian.’
‘I am more Indian than you can ever be. You are probably fifty, sixty or seventy years of age but I’ve actually been in this and for two hundred years.’
‘When we said, “Quit India,” we meant it to apply to Englishmen as well as their language. And there doesn’t seem to be much point in tolerating you in our midst. You are the language of the imperialist, the red-tapist, the diabolical legalist, the language which always means two things at the same time.’
‘I am sorry, but red tape, parliament and courts have a practical purpose in having a language which can convey shades of meaning and not something outright. This reminds me: have you got the criminal and civil procedure codes in the language of the country now? And have you standardized this language of the country? I remember the case of humble author who got his English works translated into Hindi but later had to put away the manuscripts in cold storage.’
‘Why?’
‘He had the translations done by a pundit who appeared to him very good. Not being very proficient in the language, the author accepted what the pundit said as gospel truth and thought that the translations were unimpeachable. But when he showed the manuscript to others, one set of persons condemned it for being too full of Sanskrit words, and another set condemned it for being full of Urdu words. Not being able to decide the issue himself the author put the manuscript out of sight. The moral of this story is…’
‘You need not concern yourself with this problem. We want you to go.’
‘You probably picture me as a trident-bearing Rule Britannia, but actually I am a devotee of Goddess Saraswati. I have been her most steadfast handmaid.’
‘All that is beside the point. Even if you come in a sari with kumkum on your forehead we are going to see that you are deported. The utmost we shall allow you will be another fifteen years…’
‘Fifteen years from what time?’ asked the English language, at which the judge felt so confused that he ordered, ‘I will not allow any more discussion on this subject,’ and rose for the day.
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Pico Iyer
The problems are most acute, in fact, when both parties think they’re speaking the same language: Shaw’s famous crack about England and America being “two countries separated by the same language” is thirty times truer now that sixty countries claim English as their mother—or at least their stepmother—tongue. An Australian will invite you to a hotel and you may be shocked if you don’t know that it’s what you know as a bar. An Indian will “prepone” a meeting, and only if you’re quick enough to calculate “postpone” in reverse have you any chance of showing up on time. Above all, as English has become a kind of prized commodity—and a status symbol—in many corners of the world, those of us born in possession of it are apt to feel as vulnerable as a bejewelled dowager on a dark back alleyway. There’s always someone waiting to jump out and mug us with his English—before we can try out our Bahasa Indonesia on him.
And yet, and yet, there is to all this another dimension. For in speaking a foreign language, we tend to lose years, as well as other kinds of time, to become gentler, more innocent, more courteous versions of ourselves. We find ourselves reduced to basic adjectives, like “happy” and “sad,” and erring on the side of including our “Monisieur”s; and we are obliged to grow more resourceful and imaginative in conveying our most complex needs and feelings in the few terms we remember (like a child rebuilding Charters out of Lego blocks). Think of how English sounds as spoken by Marcello Mastroianni—romantic, suggestive, helplessly endearing. Might not the same be true in reverse? Peter Falk appearing in a German movie (Wings of Desire) seems as exotic as Isabelle Adjani in an American one.
Speaking a foreign language, we cannot so easily speak our minds; but we do, willy-nilly, speak our hearts. We grow more direct in another tongue, and say the things we would not say at home—as if, you might say, we were under a foreign influence. Inhibitions are the first thing to get lost in translation: je t’aime comes much more easily than “I love you.” Small wonder, perhaps, that spies are gifted linguists by nature as well as by training (John le Carre was one of the most brilliant language students of his day); entering another tongue, we steal into another self.
And even when we’re not speaking Spanish, but only English that a Spaniard will understand, the effect is just as rejuvenating. Reducing our own language to its basic elements, we find, of a sudden, that it becomes new to us, and wondrous. How vivid the cliché “over the hill” sounds when we’re explaining it to an Osaka businessman! How rich the idiom “raining cats and dogs”! Speaking English as a second language, we find ourselves rethinking ourselves, simplifying ourselves, committed, for once, not to making impressive sentences, but just to making sense. English is the official language of the European Free Trade Association, none of whose six members has English as its mother tongue. Why? Well, says the secretary-general disarmingly, “using English means we don’t talk too much, since none of us knows the nuances.”
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Khushwant Singh
Of course, we Angreziwallas derive solace from the conviction that no matter how much the Desi Bhashawallas scream in protest, English has come to stay in India and will remain the chief link language between the different States of our Union and the only means of communication with the world outside.
The great thing about the English language is its adaptability to different climes and communities. When it has gone out to non-English people it has taken on local linguistic habiliments. Thus America has evolved an English distinctly American; the blacks living amongst them have a patois of their own. A good example is the novel, A Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding. It is a dialogue between a young white Southerner and a black prostitute. You can hardly recognise the black girl’s speech as English.
The West Indians, the people of the Caribbeans, the Australians (Let’s Speak Strine) have likewise an English of their own. India had started creating its own vocabulary of English known as Hobson-Jobson. Pucca Sahibs having the chota hazri in the verandahs of their bungalows spoke this language with their Memsahibs, Babalogs, Khidmutgars and the Koi Hais. It was as rich and picturesque as the Yiddish evolved by the diaspora Jews of Russia, Poland and Germany. It might have developed to a full-fledged language if the English had stayed longer. The base of Hobson-Jobson was English¾as it was in the case of other varieties of the language. Once the base was gone Hobson-Jobson ceased to grow and is now virtually dead.
What about the English spoken by the yaar-dost of our English medium schools? This language, which is for some reason known as Indish, is basically Hindustani in construction with an accretion of mutilated English words.
Indish may survive and even flourish because English is incredibly promiscuous and fecund. English breeds n the most unlikely of places. In England itself the Army and the Air Force have their own vocabularies; English gaol-birds while away their hours in manufacturing a speech of their own. Hippies, homosexuals, pimps, ponces, prostitutes, pushers, fairies, queens¾all have their private languages. It is difficult to keep pace with the new vocabularies; you have to go on learning it all the time. Maybe the Indish of St. Stephen’s (Delhi), Elphinstone (Bombay) Presidency (Calcutta) and Madras Christian may nurture a virile bastard language¾ bastards are always more virile than pure-breds.
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Arundhati Roy
So many kinds of entrenched and unrecognized colonialisms still exist. Aren’t we letting them off the hook? Even “Indian English fiction” is, on the face of it, a pretty obvious category. But what does it really mean? The boundaries of the country we call India were arbitrarily drawn by the British. What is “Indian English”? Is it different from Pakistani English or Bangladeshi English? Kashmiri English? There are 780 languages in India, 22 of them formally “recognized.” Most of our Englishes are informed by our familiarity with one or more of those languages. Hindi, Telugu, and Malayalam speakers, for example, speak English differently. The characters in my books speak in various languages, and translate for and to each other. Translation, in my writing, is a primary act of creation. They, as well as the author, virtually live in the language of translation. Truly, I don’t think of myself as a writer of “Indian English fiction,” but as a writer whose work and whose characters live in several languages. The original is in itself part translation. I feel that my fiction comes from a place that is more ancient, as well as more modern and certainly less shallow, than the concept of nations.
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Shashi Deshpande
The hostility English often seems to attract has less to do with the fact that it is the language of our ex-rulers and colonizers than that it has become the language of a certain class of Indian that is the privileged the elite, the ambitious. More important in the context of literature, it is not the emotive language of most readers. Generally, English does not gel under the skin as our own languages do. This is perhaps why English writing can never get the kind of response that writing in the indigenous language does. English creates a space between the user and the reader/ listener. It rules out that special kind of intimacy possible only with the language one has learnt as an infant. I see the very intimate connection between a language and a people in the response of indigenous language writers to their society, its issues and concerns. I rarely find English language writers taking up issues in this way. And when they do, I wonder if they have the same sense of frustration and futility I have when, deeply disturbed about something, I write about it and know that my polite little piece will reach out to only a few English-speaking readers― most of whom will be thinking the way I do, anyway. This feeling is at its strongest when I write about women’s issues and know that the language keeps out that mass of women whom I really want to involve.
English differs from the other Indian languages in this, too, that it was not born upon this soil, it has not grown through having been used daily by all classes of people, it has not developed layers, like a pearl, through years of association with the history and culture of a particular people. A language, which does all this, encodes a whole culture, and there is, as the writer Shama Futehally says, ‘a shared suggestion between reader and writer’. Each detail does not have to be spelled out or explained. This does not happen in English, which is why footnotes, parentheses, glossaries, are often necessary. A related point is that those of us who write in English are, in a sense, translators, even if not conscious ones. I became aware of what this involves when I was translating a piece in Kannada from my father’s autobiography. A certain phrase halted me in my tracks. How should I translate it? Since a word is embedded in the culture of the people who speak it, it always carries a load of more than what it literally means and says. How do you transfer all this into a language that is alien to that culture? How do you get in all the connections and associations the word or phrase carries? I realized then that we have to resort to some of the negotiations between languages that translators do. Do we lose out in this process? What would I, as a creative writer, have done with the phrase in my own writing if it had been necessary? Would I have omitted it? Simplified it? Or would I have circumvented the problem by using some other word, losing thereby many of the nuances of the original? Either way, some kind of self-censorship would have been at work.
The following checklist is annotated. It is intended to deflect the attention of students from the more familiar and well-rehearsed accounts of IWE and potted histories of writers and their works. It is advantageous to read the following mainly for the contrary, if contrarian, views of those who are not always teachers of English, or those who think differently. Accordingly, they have adopted a consciously unacademic approach to this subject. Only a dozen items are listed here. Of course there are more. Omissions are not accidents. KNC
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Desai, Anita. “Indian Fiction Today.” Daedalus (Another India Special Number.) 118. 4 Fall, 1989. 206‒ 231.
An attempt to answer the question: What does Indian Literature evoke? especially for the North-American reader. In this rapid but fairly comprehensive survey of old and new literatures, Desai covers considerable ground in terms of contemporary IE authors, themes and their subtle ideological biases. Affords us some access to Desai’s own ideas about tradition and modernity as refracted through an English prism.
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Gopal, Sarvepalli. “The English Language in India since Independence, and its Future Role. Nehru Memorial Lecture, XII. 1988.” Nehru Memorial lectures, 1966 ‒ 1991. Ed. John Grigg. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1992. 197‒ 212.
A fine survey of politico-cultural implications of English discussed under heads: “Nehru’s First Language Policy,” “But English Stands its Ground,” “New Policy Guarantees Status of English,” “Language of the Elite,” “The Indianization of English,” “But Not as Language for the Masses.” Sections of this survey are valuable for their facts. Moreover, the author is an academic who is a writer of fine prose. He is neither a literary critic nor professor of English.
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Ilaiah, Kancha. “Dalits and English.” Deccan Herald, 14 February, 2014. https://www.deccanherald.com/content/137777/dalits-english.html
A short article by a teacher of sociological politics that critiques the institutional segregation of poor Dalit students. It demands “total abolition of the gap between the private English medium schools and the government schools in terms of both infrastructure and teaching methods.”
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Kanaganayakam, Chelva. “Pedagogy and Postcolonial Literature; or, Do We Need a Centre for Postcolonial Studies?” University of Toronto Quarterly, 73. 2 (Spring 2004). 725‒ 738.
An essay that asks too many, far too complicated, questions for the English teacher anywhere to consider, let alone answer, in the space of a single essay. Its value is more in the questions it raises (especially about the rapidly changing profiles of students of English, pedagogy and praxis), and its unblinkered view of Indian/ Commonwealth/ Postcolonial English Literature than in its uncertain move toward addressing its major worry: “an inherent paradox in teaching postcolonial or world literature within the framework of English departments” (731). Also, some interesting, unusual, bibliographical references in its Works Cited.
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Merchant, Hoshang. “My Parsi English.” 2007. Unpublished typescript.
This piece was written to oblige an editor who was then collecting notes and short essays on Indian Writers and English, a project that died aborning. For anyone interested in finding out what happens to twice-minoritized English of minority communities in India, this unpublished note of about 5 typed pages will be at once fascinating and revelatory. Merchant is a well-known gay poet. He studied and taught English in Bombay, Los Angeles, Purdue, Pune, and Hyderabad.
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Mitra, Ashok. “Unaware of Gold, 29 October 2007.” The Nowhere Nation. New Delhi: Penguin/Viking, 2011. 200-202.
A perceptive note on the post-Rushdie generation of Indian writers in English. Mitra wonders what the global acclaim means to this new generation when most of them seem to be rather unacquainted with India’s distinguished writers like Saadat Hasan Manto and Manik Bandopadhyay. A strong leftist bias is evident when the author inveighs against global capitalism and the western publishing houses that promote meretricious standards in the culture of reading.
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Nayar, Pramod K. Colonial Education in India 1781–1945. London & New York: Routledge, 2020.
This is by far the richest and most accessible source for researchers at all levels interested in the history and politics of education on the Indian subcontinent. In five volumes it collects reliably authentic documents (rather than interpretive material) that are deployed with sensitive care and order. This makes for comparative and corroborative studies in disciplines as wide-ranging and inter-related as public culture and education, pedagogical praxis, sociology, jurisprudence, parliamentary deliberations, moral sciences, and mutually beneficial colonial transactions on several fronts. Students of Indian English will find here all the major documents of colonial history of a century and a half. They may draw upon these documents to establish or discredit any theory in wide circulation about English, including the one that says that English was imposed on Indian colonial subjects.
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Omvedt, Gail. “Why Dalits Want English?” The Times of India, November 9, 2006, p. 11.
A strong argument for English education that would help weaken and eventually destroy caste discrimination, and contribute towards the empowerment of Dalit children. Adopting Macaulay’s ideas for strengthening the bhāshas while rejecting Sanskrit studies that promote Brahmanical values, Omvedt sees a bright future for Dalits who will, in time, harness English strength to augment their learning in local languages and the sciences. She cites the examples of the Black community in the US and Savitribai Phule who urged the underprivileged to earn their right to individual freedom and social justice by learning English.
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Paniker, K. Ayyappa, Syd Harrex and Jane Harrex. “Second Language Fiction: A Dialogue. The Humanities Review: A Journal of Contemporary Ideas, 1.2 (October-December 1979). 7‒ 14.
A very unusual approach to English fiction as “second language fiction” that opens up the field for quite complex negotiations between multilingual writers and readers; dialogue in translation; bilingualism and biculturalism; comparisons with African, Australian and Canadian fiction; speech rhythms, etc. Half way through the discussion, the interlocutors from India and Australia bring up issues related to writing dialogues, reading characters in fiction that deals with people who live in different cultural and linguistic worlds, and how English fiction is received in different worlds within the so-called “Commonwealth.”
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Reddy, Sheela. “Midnight’s Orphans.” Outlook, 42. 7 (February 25, 2002). 54 ‒ 62.
Widely known and sometimes discussed in open forums during literary festivals is the hostility between Indian writers in English and the bhāsha writers. These pages feature a report on, and short interviews with, leading Indian writers on the Indian in writing; who would, in their view, authentically represent India directly to the world outside; and who among them knows their India more. This discussion followed the controversial publication edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West called Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing, 1947‒ 1997.
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Sahgal, Nayantara. “The Schizophrenic Imagination.” From Commonwealth to Postcolonial. Ed. Anna Rutherford. New South Wales: Dangaroo Press, 1992. 30‒ 36.
An unusually brilliant and forthright essay on English education and politics of the novel by a distinguished novelist of the first generation. A dissident voice within the Nehru fold, Sahgal pleads for a fiction sensitive to its history, both political and literary. Few writers of today will be able to equal Sahgal’s cosmopolitan vision and elegant English style. This essay ought to be on the reading list of any IWE course.
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Tirumalesh, K. V. “Writing-English versus Writing-in-English: New Notes on an Old Theme.” Creative Aspects of Indian English. Ed. Shantinath Desai. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995. 57‒ 62.
No on ever seems to have wanted the question Tirumalesh boldly asks anyway. It is as simple as its answer, but Indian writers in English never ask this for fear of confronting its simple truth. This short essay, arrayed neatly in 11 pithy sections, asks us to consider what English urges us to do, and when we begin to do what we are bidden, English further puts us on a course that leads to its creative uses. This unusually candid view hardly belongs to an Indian Writer of English. Tirumalesh is a well-known Kannada writer who has taught English Linguistics and Philosophy for close to 40 years.
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Vaid, Krishna Baldev. “The Burden of Ambivalence and dialogue with the West.” Bahuvachan: An Occasional of Arts & Ideas. Ed. K. B. Vaid, J. Swaminathan, and Ashok Vajpaeyi. Bhopal: Bharat Bhavan, 1988. 87‒ 94.
An extremely sensitive and introspective exercise undertaken by one of our very distinguished Hindi/ Urdu writers who taught English in the US (Brandeis University, SUNY- Potsdam) for about 30 years. Vaid believes that his knowledge of English affecting his writing is easier to comprehend than his ambivalence towards English that resists resolution with continued writing and struggle to disabuse himself of it. Puzzlingly, he adds: “I do not altogether regret this burden of ambivalence” (91). At least some major Indian writers in English seem to speak the same language although they do not agree to be as “ambivalent” towards English.
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