Foreword | K. Narayana Chandran

English arrived when new history was beginning. That history demanded a change of heart, a new language that signalled the change. And that language, in fairness, had to be neither Indian that seemed to know us too well nor one that knew too little. English seemed a perfect fit for Indian writers, for both those who knew the language and those who felt they knew just a little of it. Writers who loved English and those who resented its presence among their bhashas however realized that writing mattered more than other forms of creative expression. Indian communities found communication more basic and integral to their evolutionary sustenance. “Something there is,” begins a famous Robert Frost poem, “that doesn’t love a wall.” Very true, when there is more commerce across the walls of the world.

And so it was that the bhashas widened their reach by an English-sponsored literacy that helped build new communities. Imagining language became as crucial to literature as the imaginative efforts restricted to the bhashas. English was found good enough as an alternative when a bhasha seemed to stop short or run short. Our first writers in English then began to imagine India in another language. Another India was almost born. Just in time, that is, for the proverbial clock to strike the midnight hour, in English. That was the solemn beginning of India’s struggle for cultural, intellectual independence.

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Writers who first began with English (a distinguished lineage that includes Premchand of Urdu/ Hindi, and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer of Malayalam) but gave it up for their bhashas knew at least two things about India. They had to contend with more than the ‘literary’ and the ‘aesthetic’ when they used English. They also knew that they preferred English for the distance and longing another bhasha would perhaps give them when they wanted to be plainspoken, and fair to their social conscience. The hard cold Indian reality, it seemed, needed a hard cold English. Most Indian writers I sampled on the subject of English said as much one way or the other. The anthology I had planned to edit with their views on English is still in progress, samples of which you will read here. Some writers have avoided giving obvious reasons, while others have evaded answers that make English crucial for them. A language does not lie. But its speakers may, and do. No wonder, the Indian writers find English affording them opportunity and opportunism when the line between politics and fiction grows thinner with age and use.

Some of the finest among them still use English when they forget that they have buried a tribal voice within them. One example: “A Horse and Two Goats” by R. K. Narayan. And that tells an amazing English story in Tamil. When one character speaks to another character, the other ought to speak as well. He does. Monolingualism of the Other with farcical vengeance. Neither speaks the other(’s) language. But both listen keenly. They speak for long. Mistaking the other completely is made easier when Tamil speaks the American and the American speaks Tamil. Where, we ask, is the Indian freedom we have won in English servitude.  Such overwhelming questions break past the discipline of allegory.

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No one cares to ask Indians anymore why they write English, or write in English, as in the good old Writers Workshop days. That crucial distinction occurred only to K. V. Tirumalesh, a writer in Kannada and teacher of English. Probably, deep down his pedagogical unconscious lay a pertinent question regarding natural and cultural affiliations that only comparative linguists like him ponder.

None of the aggrandizing or rhetorical expansiveness ordinarily botches an Indian’s writing when their performing selves allow English to traverse in and out of their live cells. But then, only the Indians who have some English to express know what it means to escape from it. They have given us their best work, not necessarily English, and not always in English.

What they have indeed known at first hand, is “sounding” the language, English allowed to speak for itself, by itself, to itself, rather than be used to mean what its user wants it to. In playing words against one another, they find a greater energy in the local habitations of the ventriloquized word. Recall how Saadat Hasan Manto, G. V. Desani (and on rarer occasions, Sujata Bhatt) give us their English words so eaten by this bhasha or that, and proof of the pudding.

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It is very easy to tell our passionately genuine writers by their cultivation of English. In India, there are three major types whose English distinguishes not themselves but their work. To the first type belong those who write in one or more bhashas. For a writer like Krishna Baldev Vaid, for example, English was an auxiliary language for critical writing, interviews, teaching, and for the translation of his own Hindi/ Urdu/ Panjabi fiction. The second type comprises those who write within the larger circumambience of English and other non-Indian languages, but English affords them farther and faster reach of a world audience. The third, a small and not-yet-privileged, type of writers tries to make the most of two worlds: writing the bhashas they are happiest writing in, while keeping their ears close to the Anglo-American ground. They educate themselves in an English-driven humanities curriculum. All the three types tell oppressive tales, each according to their need and greed. (Translated, oppression brutalizes English beyond words.) They love the cast of English for the enabling difference it affords when they deal with caste issues that hurt the already-bruised socio-political egos. On the peripheries of logic English scores. It still keeps an aseptical distance from the abusive Indian streets. None of these types would nonetheless hide their own light under a bushel. English for them is what Western Civilization would be for Gandhi, a good idea. Of course the exceptions, few and far between, realize that English alone can develop new definitions of power for writers here, and proffer new patterns of relating across differences. If there is one passage that sums up the supple confusions of growing up among the bhashas and paribhashas from which a budding writer draws lifelong inspiration, here it is:

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 action¾say, Gandhi, Tagore and Bharati¾made 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. (A.K. Ramanujan, “Telling Tales.” Daedalus, 118. 4 (Fall 1989): 238-261)

For the Indian writer (although it wouldn’t make much difference if we were not writers), English may be servitude, English may be freedom. Still, rather than walking that thin line between chances, it is prudent for all of us to learn that life gives no one a second chance with their first language. There will always be, however, some ‘English,’ some colony, that lies beneath, plays around, our bhashas. And that makes all the difference.

K. Narayana Chandran

The University of Hyderabad

14 August 2022