Harping on English in India: Pitfalls and Possibilities | Tabish Khair

I have written in a number of places about the special relationship that English has with India, and vice versa (2001/2005; 2003). I do not intend to make a case of ‘Indian exceptionalism’, a trend that critics in large and complex nations — such as India or USA — often find hard to resist. But I do intend to reiterate that English in India does not exist as it does in the Caribbean or Australia. And it need hardly be added, for it was 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[i], do. In India, English — without doubt an Indian language today — exists along with other major languages, many of which have long literate traditions and pre-colonial histories, and most of which have a different relationship to English than they have with one another.

This is partly the case in some other parts of Africa and Asia, but it is not the case in places like Australia and the Caribbean. This, if nothing else, ought to make us conscious of the special status of English in India — even within the rubric of ‘postcolonial literatures’ — and resist an appropriation of Indian Englishes by other colonial and post-colonial traditions (including that of cosmopolitan Rushdie English, ‘Londonstani’ etc) just as much as we have, finally, come to resist a dismissal of English as an Indian language. No, English is an Indian language, but it not only has a peculiar relationship to India and the world as seen from India, it also has a particular relationship to other Indian languages and social classes within India.

Some of this can be seen, if only in outline, in a poem by the first serious Indian poet to write in English. It is interesting how much this poem, ‘The Harp Of India’ by Henry L. Derozio (1809-1831), says and does not say — and how much of both what is spoken and what is silent remains valid today[ii].

Derozio starts his sonnet by addressing, with a degree of apotheosis, ‘the harp of India’:

“Why hang’st thou lonely on yon withered bough? Unstrung for ever, must thou there remain;

Thy music once was sweet — who hears it now? Why doth the breeze sigh over thee in vain?”

Forget about the ‘Romantic’ diction of the poem: it would be as anachronistic to blame Derozio for it as it would be to rap the ghost of Lord Byron, who was alive when Derozio started writing, on the knuckle for poems like The Giaour and The Corsair. What is interesting is the fact that Derozio laments the silencing of the ‘harp’ of India. This lament fits into a growing Orientalist tendency in the l9th century to posit a glorious ancient past for India, and contrast it to the degraded present. This was in keeping with 19^th century theories of civilisation and degeneration and, later, social evolution, and it could cut both ways: it could be used to defend British colonisers (as restorers of India’s ancient vigour) and it could be used to critique British colonisation [iii].

As such, if Derozio’s sonnet, written in English, is a fragment of the ‘new’ culture of colonised India, it is also — despite being written in English — a critique of present circumstances and, hence, at least potentially a critique of colonisation. This aspect is under-girded by the imagery of the second stanza, where the ‘harp’ of India is presented as having been bound by ‘Silence’ in “her fatal chain”, portrayed as “neglected” and compared, perhaps with echoes of P. B. Shelley’s ‘ozymandias’[iv], with a “ruined monument on desert plain.” If the ‘ruined monument’ is a partly Orientalist construct of the Indian past, the ‘desert’ plain is a potentially nationalist critique of colonisation.

The sonnet proceeds. The poet humbly acknowledges his inferiority to the great poets of the past (“many a hand more worthy far than mine”), notes that “those hands are cold”, and concludes:

“…but if thy notes divine

May be by mortal wakened once again,

Harp of my country, let me strike the strain!”

Note again: “harp of my country”, not harp of, say, the Muses. In the 18° century, the Black Caribbean poet, Francis Williams, wrote a Latin Ode to welcome a new British Governor. In itself, an act of colonial ‘mimicry’, the Ode however assumed a radical, independent perspective — the voice of the subaltern — not only in its direct critique of colour-based racism but also in the fact that it was addressed to a “black Muse.” (Burnett, p. 101) Similarly, Derozio’s poem in English cannot be seen only or even primarily in the light of colonial ‘mimicry’. The poem speaks in a voice that has not been derived simply from the discourses of the colonisers.

And yet, it remains a voice in English, and that returns us to the position of English in India. For the ‘harp’ of India was by no means ‘silent’ in the 1820s and 30s: many Indian languages were undergoing a blossoming because of diverse reasons. The greatest age of Urdu poetry was taking place in Delhi, and poets like Zauq and Ghalib were still alive. Could it be that if Derozio had been writing in a language other than English, he might have heard other harps playing more loudly than he seems to have?

And would these have been ‘harps’? However, Derozio’s choice of ‘harp’ is not only a vestige of the classical imagery of Romanticism or the consequence of his choice of language. If one thinks about the reasons why Derozio might have preferred ‘harp’ over the more obviously classical equivalent, ‘lyre’, one opens up a rich field of political possibilities. The choice of ‘harp’ carries another echo, and one that — for all we know — Derozio might well have retained consciously.

Let us try and place this choice in the political context of the early 19th century, a context that Derozio, writing and reading in English, would have some inkling of(and, say, Zauq, writing in Urdu, would not have been able to employ or use). The ‘harp without crown’ was the symbol of the Society of United Irishmen, founded in the 18° century as a liberal organisation working for parliamentary reform in Ireland, but greatly radicalised by the end of the century.

In 1798, the Society of United Irishmen, allied with the republicans of revolutionary France, launched a major rebellion with the aim of ending British rule over Ireland.

This rebellion sent echoes all over the British Empire and remained a force in the “international revolutionary circuit” for decades (Foster, p. 285) — perhaps also reflected, even after the chimes of the 1798 Uprising had grown inaudible, in the presence of Indian nationalist squads during St Patrick Day parades in USA as late as the 20′^h century. In Calcutta, the capital of British India, Derozio could hardly have been unaware of it in the 1820s. Or of the other major symbol of the Society of United Irishmen: the Phrygian or Liberty cap, wom by emancipated slaves during the Roman Empire, associated with the Magi (‘lost Eastern glory and wisdom’, so to say), and adopted in the 18th century by radical movements in America as well as France.

So here we are: an Indian writer, employing English. With this combination come a set of problems, and a set of possibilities. Perhaps Derozio cannot always hear the music of other Indian harps — as was perhaps the case with Salman Rushdie in the 20^th century, when he edited and introduced his anthology of the best Indian writing from 1947 to 1997, and managed to leave out all except two or three texts written in languages other than English. But Derozio does not simply mimic the master’s voice. He sets his own political agenda, shaped by his own relationship to English, to time and space. And he can employ his chosen or imposed language, English, to do things — for instance, consciously or unconsciously, suggest an international radical politics – that would not have been possible, or not in the same way, in Urdu or Hindi or Tamil. lt is this that, I believe Indians writing in English have to bear in mind.

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 — historically and at present — 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 to it only at the risk of becoming something else.

 

Main texts cited

1. Paula Bumett, The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse. London: Penguin, 1986.
2. F. Forster, Modem Ireland, 1600 — 1972. London: Penguin Books, 1988 (1989).
3. K. Gokak, The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1970 (1985).
4. Tabish Khair, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001 (2005).
5. Tabish Khair, ‘Indian English Poetry: Problems of Language and Prosody’, in Klaus Martens, Paul Morris and Arlette Warken, , A World of Local Voices: Poetry in English Today. Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann Gmbh, 2003, p. 55-63.
6. Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, Travelo [1804/5], Translated into English by Charles Stewart in Delhi: Sona Publications, 1972.
7. M. Malabari. The Indian Eye on English Life. London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1893.
8. Raja Rao, Kanthapufy [1938]• Madras: Oxford University Press.
9. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, , The Vinta e Book of Indian Writing. London: Vintage, 1997.

 

 

[i] There are obvious differences between the way the English and the Irish relate to the English language. This difference was acutely observed by an Indian, Mirza Abu Taleb, as long ago as the fag end of the 18 the century, who noted that the Irish made much more of a generous effort to understand his broken and accented English than the English ever did.

 

[ii] Poem quoted from Gokak’s The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, p. 53.

 

[iii] As an aside, it should be pointed out that this constructed colonialist tradition is the backbone of much of Hindutva nationalism today, and it also explains the overlap between brands of that nationalism and Nazi theories of ‘Aryan’ dominance.

 

[iv] Derozio was 13 or 14 when Shelley died.

 

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Previously unpublished.