…Why not let me speak in

Any language I like? The language I speak

Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses

All mine, mine alone. It is half-English, half

Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,

It is as human as I am human, don’t

You see?...

                                                                         – Kamala Das, An Introduction

 

THE question of Indian writing in English and in the languages, I fear, has so far been posed from totally false premises, looking at them as oppositional categories rather than as two ways of articulating the same reality. It is time we accepted English as a legitimate language of literary expression in India, as relevant and significant as any other Indian language despite its ‘foreign’ origin, though one can hardly deny its kinship with Sanskrit and other languages of the Indo-Aryan group as they all come from a common stock of Indo-Germanic tongues. The proof of this kinship is not far to seek; it is evident at the morphological, lexical and semantic levels in these languages even in their present form as in the most ordinary words like father/pita or mother/mata as well as several shared grammatical features of Sanskrit, German and old English.

Even if we choose to ignore this common fact, we cannot write off the presence of English in India over the past two centuries. If it was the language of colonial domination, it was also the language of anti-colonial resistance; our national leaders including Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had employed it in the service of the freedom struggle arousing the nation to fight the Empire. We may also remember that it was our own decision to retain English as a link language and a language of intellectual, emotional and imaginative articulation even after the British had left the country.

Today India is the third largest English-using nation in the world; only the USA and UK have greater number of users of the language. It is used in India by close to five per cent of the population; some of the languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution have far fewer than the 35 million users English has. English is also the state language of some of the Indian states in the North East; it is our associate official language and the chief link language for not only international but even inter-regional communication. India has a large network of newspapers and journals in English besides several publishing houses that bring out books only in English. In fact India today is one of the three largest publishers of books in English. Salman Rushdie’s Aurora Zogoiby (The Moor’s Last Sigh) was not far wrong when she said:, ‘Only English brings us together.’

More importantly, English is getting absorbed into Indian languages even as it enriches itself by assimilating them in turn. It has acquired a specific cultural identity in India and has entered India’s linguistic and literary creativity, not to speak of its undeniable presence in the everyday speech of the educated Indian. Several English words have merged indistinguishably with Indian languages that have not even bothered to find indigenous equivalents for them, or even where there are, seldom care to use them. (Words like school, desk, bench, book, party, machine, factory, computer – and all its parts, wine, soap, box, trunk, bus, car, truck, stock, share, godown and scores of others have gone into common speech across classes in the country.

It is true that the ‘post-colonized’ can never retrieve the pristine purity of their languages, as Simon During observes. English has acquired new structures and tonalities in India in the process of adapting it to native use. At a time when we have ceased to speak of Queen’s English and speak instead of many Englishes, we need no longer be apologetic about Marathi/Gujarati/Bengali/Tamilian English that carry the tonalities and inflections of these mother tongues.

 

When Vikram Seth’s novel, A Suitable Boy was translated by Gopal Gandhi into Hindi as Ek Accha sa Ladka, the author saw it as an act of retrieval since the cultural subtext of the original really belonged to the Hindi milieu and some extracts from poems and songs were restored to their originals. Mulk Raj Anand once told me in a conversation that he would first think in Punjabi whatever he would later write in, or rather translate into English, and that is what gave a Punjabi flavour to his English. Jayanta Mahapatra’s claim that he is an Oriya poet writing in English can also be seen in this linguistic context, though later the poet began to actually write in Oriya also.

At a deeper level, Indian language writing and English writing share concepts, experiences, world views and belief systems as a comparison between say, U.R. Ananathamurthy’s Samskara and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura or Premchand’s Godan and Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie or O.V. Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Itihasam (The Legends of Khasak) and R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days might reveal. There is also a sharing of discoursal devices and indigenous genres. For example, R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura are sthalapuranas or local histories; Allan Sealy’s Trotternama is a nama like the Moghul chronicles; Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold is a kind of hagiography and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is an epic narrative in verse. Agha Shahid Ali and more recently, Jeet Thayil, have tried ghazals and qasidas in English, much like Lorca did in Spanish. V.S. Naipaul claims he was inspired by the Indian epics in the writing of A House for Mr. Biswas. Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel also takes off from Mahabharata in an ironic vein.

Raja Rao had this comment to make on the way Indian creative writers should handle English:

‘One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own… We cannot write like the English, we should not. We can write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs… and our paths are paths interminable… we tell one interminable tale. This was and still is the ordinary style of our story telling.’

 

Let us also remember that writings and translations in English have had a decisive impact on Indian writing. Many of our early novels were modelled on English novels, like O. Chandu Menon’s Indulekha (1889) that according to the author’s own confession followed Henrietta Temple, a popular British novel of the times written by Disraeli in 1837 while the historical romances in Malayalam, Tamil and Marathi were deeply impacted by the works of Walter Scott.

O. Chandu Menon sums up his reasons for writing Indulekha in a dedicatory letter to his translator, W. Dumergue:

‘First my wife’s oft-expressed desire to read in her own language a novel written after the English fashion, and secondly a desire on my part to try whether I should be able to create a taste amongst my Malayalee readers not conversant with English, for the class of literature represented in the English language by novels, of which at present they (accustomed as they are to read and admire works of fiction in Malayalam abounding in events and incidents foreign to nature and often absurd and impossible) have no idea, and… to illustrate to my Malayalee brethren the position, power and influence that our Nair women, who are noted for their natural intelligence and beauty, would attain in society, if they were given a good English education; and finally, to contribute my mite towards the improvement of Malayalam literature, which I regret to observe is fast dying out by disuse as well as by abuse.’

 

In fact Chandu Menon had first tried translating Henrietta Temple and abandoned it to go for a fresh novel that took after it. Here we find the supernatural in the earlier novels yielding place to the new manifesto of the Indian novel that was oriented towards literary innovation as well as social reform. Nand Shanker Mehta, in an introduction to his Gujarati novel, Karan Khelo (1866) also has similar things to say:

‘The former education inspector of our state Mr. Russell has expressed to me his desire to see Gujarati books written along the lines of English novels and romances. I have written the novel according to that plan.’

Samuel Pillai, the Tamil novelist of Piratapa Mutaliyar Charittiram (1879) tells us that his object was ‘to supply the want of prose books in Tamil’ and that he has ‘represented the principal personages as perfectly virtuous, in accordance with the opinion of the great English moralist, Dr. Johnson.’

 

Even later, western trends, movements and techniques like realism, surrealism, symbolism, imagism, modernism and post-modernism have profoundly influenced Indian language writing, though each language adopted these as suited to its own specific genius. To take the case of Malayalam, Robert Browning and Edwin Arnold had an impact on Kumaran Asan’s poetry; the British Romantics as well as the French Symbolists on the poetry of Changampuzha Krishna Pillai; poets like Yeats, T.S. Eliot and the European modernists on the modernists and the Black and Latin American writing on the radical poets of the 1970s. Western feminist writing, the stream of consciousness novel, the post-modernism of Rushdie, Beckett, Pynchon and others have all had their effects felt on Malayalam and certainly several other language literatures. This is not to deny their indigenous nature, but only to show that writing in English and received through English has not been without a positive impact on our language writing. This is also true of genres like the short story, sonnet, lyric, dramatic monologue, elegy, the sequence poem, burlesque, essay and so on.

The charge of ‘elitism’ against Indian writing in English is also hard to sustain as much of modern Indian writing in the languages too is considered ‘obscure’ and ‘inaccessible’ by some readers and critics. This is not in fact a question of the medium or class, but of the varying levels of sensibility. Some complain that the English writers cater only to the urban middle classes and hence deal only with the issues that concern them. Even if this was the case, we cannot neglect this twenty per cent of our population that has a major say in the affairs of the state. But this is not a true complaint either, as writers from Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and G.V. Desani to Shashi Deshpande, Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy have dealt with village life and the subaltern classes with great sympathy and understanding.

Many of the writers in the languages too deal with the problems of the middle class as they constitute the majority of Indian readership in either case and as it is an interestingly varied, struggling and mostly upwardly mobile class. Indian writers living in India, whatever the language they write in, live in the same milieu, undergo similar experiences, think and feel more or less in the same way and dream in the same way too. There is, no doubt, a difference in the writers who have spent most of their life abroad, a difference that is obvious in their concerns with issues like migration and their often outsiderish, exoticizing gaze that packages ‘Indian’ life for a largely foreign readership.

 

We may briefly examine the ways in which English is being indigenized by Indian writers. From 1960 onwards a distinct Indian English idiom has been taking shape in poetry. The new poets abandoned the high rhetorical flourishes and colourful overstatements of their predecessors like Sarojini Naidu and Toru Dutt. Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Adil Jussawallah, A.K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra and Arun Kolatkar helped this nativisation in various ways. In his Rough Passage, R. Parthasarathy wondered:

‘How long can foreign poets

Provide the staple of your lines?

Turn inward; scrape the bottom of your past.’

He stated later that his task was ‘one of acclimatizing the English language to an indigenous tradition’ and ‘to initiate a dialogue between myself and my Tamil past.’

A.K. Ramanujan began searching for his Tamil and Kannada roots and translating the saint poetry of both the languages at the same time. He declared:

‘I must seek and will find

my particular hell only in the Hindu mind.’

                                                    (‘Conventions of Despair’)

 

Ezekiel attempted to recreate Indian characters in their natural situations. He employed colloquial speech rhythms and conventional tones in poems like ‘The Professor’, ‘Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa. T.S.’, ‘Hangover’, ‘Healers’, etc. Here is a sample from his ‘Hangover’:

‘No Indian whisky sir all imported this is Taj.

Yes sir soda is Indian sir.

Midnight.

Taxi strike. George Fernandes...

Half the day hazy with the previous night.’

Three other samples:

‘Remember me? I am Professor Sheth

Once I taught you geography Now

I am retired though my health is good…

If you are coming again this side by chance,

Visit please my humble residence also

I am living just on opposite house’s backside.’

                                                           (‘The Professor’)

‘Come again

All are welcome whatever caste

If not satisfied tell us

Otherwise tell others

God is great.’

                                                           (‘Irani Restaurant Instruction’)

‘You are going?

But you will visit again

Any time, any day

I am not believing in ceremony

Always I am enjoying your company.’

                                                          (‘The Patriot’)

 

Several Indian words and expressions like goonda, guru, mantra, ashram, bhikshuks, chapati, pan, burkha, Indirabhen, Rama Rajya among others keep appearing in Ezekiel’s poems. They illustrate Ayyappa Paniker’s statement that national sensibilities are based on racial or cultural factors.

The fabric of A.K. Ramanujan’s poetry is woven out of myriad threads of Indian myth, history, culture, heritage, topography and environment. He remembers his mother when he sees a buxom woman beside a wreckage van in Hyde Park Street in London:

‘Something opened

in the past and I heard something shut in the future, quietly

like the heavy door

of my mother’s black-pillared nineteenth century

silent house, given on her marriage day

to my father, for a dowry.’

                                           (‘Still Another for Mother’)

‘Father when he passed on

left dust

on a table full of papers,

left debt and daughters,

a bewildering grandson

named by chance after him

a house that leans

slowly through our growing

years on a bent coconut

tree in the yard.

Being the burning type

he burned properly at the cremation

as before, easily

and at both ends.’

Then the son picks up the half-burnt spinal discs:

‘To pick gingerly and throw

facing east as the priest said where the three rivers

met near the railway station.’

                                                               (‘Obituary’)

 

Ramanujan’s poetry frequently recalls his aunts and uncles and his childhood in Karnataka. He has made an honest statement about the sources of the Indian poet writing in English in his personal context:

‘English and my disciplines give me my outer forms – linguistic, metrical, logical and other such ways of the shaping of experience, and my first thirty years in India, my frequent visits and field trips, my personal and professional preoccupations with Kannada, Tamil, the classics and folklore gave me my substance, my "inner" forms, images and symbols. They are continuous with each other, and I no longer can tell what comes from where.’

Jayanta Mahapatra is Indian by his closeness to Oriya reality, rather than tradition and his sympathetic understanding of the plight of his people. For example in ‘Death in Orissa’, he sees:

‘nothing but the paddy’s twisted throat

exposed on the crippled earth, nothing but

impotence in lowered eyes,…

nothing but the cries of shrivelled women

cracking against the bloodied altar of Man, nothing

but the moment of fear

when they need a God who can do them some good.’

Again, look at Kamala Das:

‘Bereft of soul

My body shall be bare

Bereft of my body

My soul shall be bare’

                                                     (‘The Suicide’)

‘You called me wife; I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and

To offer at the right moment the vitamins…I lost my will and reason.’

                                                     (‘The Old Playhouse’)

Here the Indian character comes from a philosophical approach to things as in the first quotation or from an awareness of the state of women as in the second.

 

One can go on multiplying examples. Arun Kolatkar’s poems like ‘Jejuri’, ‘Sarpa Satra’ and those in the Kala Ghoda Poems are Indian in so many ways – at the levels of myth, ritual and the modern urban reality as felt in a city like Bombay. Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s poetry is not only deeply Indian in the ways it confronts social and individual experience, but in the use of certain forms borrowed from Sanskrit like stuti or hymn too, as in her Ayodhya Cantos. Meena Alexander brings into her poetry memories of her early life in South Kerala. Several poets writing today – from Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Dilip Chitre to Ranjit Hoskote, Arundhati Subramaniam, Jeet Thayil, Vijay Nambisan, Anand Thakore and others – are deeply Indian in their themes, sensibility and their way of looking at things. Poets like Keki Daruwalla have an ironic relationship with Indian reality as seen in his satirical writings.

The Indian English novelists too, at least since the 1930s, have been self-assured and confident enough to bend the language to their will. Mulk Raj Anand was perhaps the first conscious experimenter followed by Raja Rao and Bhabani Bhattacharya. They, with G.V. Desani, took liberties with diction and syntax. They drew from the resources of Indian languages and infused English with their essence. Meenakshi Mukherjee in her Twice-born Fiction points to certain linguistic problems the Indian writers in English face: one, they have to write in English about people who do not normally speak or think in English; two, they have to write in an acquired language which is a situation very different from those of the American, Australian, Canadian or West Indian writer who can make use of living speech.

Look at Vic Reid using, in his New Day, Jamaican dialect for poetic effect, V.S. Naipaul using the West Indies Indian dialect in his A House for Mr. Biswas, or Derek Walcott bringing in special effects from the Creole dialect of St. Lucia. American novels like Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, or Herzog use slang and dialect with great effect. But Indians dealing with non-English people in non-English situations do not have this option. They have to convey through English a vast range of expressions, observations and experiences whose natural vehicle is an Indian language. This problem becomes especially acute in writing dialogue, and one reason for drama remaining the poorest genre in English in India, with very few exceptions like Asif Karimbhoy or Mahesh Dattani, maybe precisely this difficulty.

 

It is the sum of differences in attitudes, world views and responses what makes his/her novel ‘Indian’. Here again the word ‘Indian’ needs to be used with caution since writers in English too belong to specific geographical regions or languages but for some who are regular mavericks. This gives their works a local quality. As we have noted, Mulk Raj Anand conveys a Punjabi flavour and is not very successful when he writes about regions other than his own; Private Life of an Indian Prince is an example. In R.K. Narayan’s fiction one can easily perceive the presence of his region in the customs and manners he deals with and the language he employs that has Tamil overtones.

Raja Rao’s Kanthapura shows conspicuous use of the nuances of Kannada, Bhabani Bhattacharya’s fiction has something Bangla about it, Vikram Seth has Hindi beneath his English and Arundhati Roy’s first novel has the flavour of Malayalam. But as Meenakshi Mukherjee rightly notes, this regional dimension is missing in the ‘public school English’ of the novels of Shanta Rama Rau, Kamala Markandeya or Manohar Malgonkar who are not rooted in any specific Indian culture. This forces many writers to try exotic or Orientalist Indian themes or catchy phrases in order that their works look Indian on the surface.

 

Many Indian writers in English experiment with diction, literally translating idioms, or with syntax, transforming the structure of the sentence. The literal translations can be seen mostly in Mulk Raj Anand. Look at some examples: ‘Is this any talk?’ ‘Are you talking the true talk?’ ‘May I be your sacrifice.’ There are Punjabi-Hindi expressions like ‘counterfeit luck’, swear words and abuses used by the peasants in Punjab as also pro-verbs like ‘Your own calf’s teeth seem golden’ (The Road, p. 24); ‘A goat in hand is better than a buffalo in the distance’ (ibid, p. 22); ‘The camels are being swept away, the ants say, they float’ (The Big Heart, p. 206).

Khushwant Singh too has a similar flavour to his English: ‘Sardar Saheb, you are a big man and we are but small radishes from an unknown garden’ (I Shall not Hear the Nightingale Sing). Bhabani Bhattacharya translates a Bengali saying: ‘When an ant grows wings and starts flying in the air, it is not far from its doom’ (A Goddess Named Gold). He also uses expressions like ‘childling’, ‘wifeling’, ‘starveling’, ‘villagefuls of folk’, ‘joy-moments’, ‘picture-play’ (for cinema). He also uses Bengali idiom like the typical short sentences: ‘Why speak? What use? Trees and rocks have a heart. Not man. Why speak?’ (So Many Hungers, p. 76) Raja Rao also uses phrases like ‘that-house people’, ‘next-house woman’s kitchen’, ‘milk-infant’, ‘ten-eleven year old child’ etc. Sometimes , words in other languages are used directly as in Mulk Raj Anand: ‘angrez-log’, ‘yar’; there are created verbs like ‘burburred in his sleep’, ‘sisking with cold’, ‘thak-thakking at a cauldron’; at times the spellings indicate the speaker’s illiteracy: ‘yus’ (yes), ‘notus’ (notice), ‘Amrika’ (America) or ‘Girmany’ (Germany).

 

Raja Rao uses Kannada figures of speech unobtrusively: ‘Postman Subbayya, who had no fire in his stomach and was red with red and blue with blue.’ (Kanthapura, p. 154). ‘You are a Bhatta and your voice is not a sparrow voice in your village and you should speak with your people and organize a Brahmin party. Otherwise, Brahminism is as good as kitchen ashes.’ In The Serpent and the Rope, he tries changes in structure: ‘He is so tender and fine-limbed, is my brother’ (p. 12). ‘His Sona, one who is dead, was once tied to a tree and beaten’ (p. 149). Arundhati Roy in her God of Small Things uses Malayalam words directly, at times mixed with English words: ‘Poda, pattee’, ‘Valare thanks’, ‘Thanks, ketto’, ‘Naley’, ‘Chacko Saar vannu’, ‘Veluthe! Ividay! Veluthe’, ‘mon’, ‘mol’, ‘kochamma’, ‘paravan’, ‘pulayan’: She uses these Malayalam words in English script and does not care to give a glossary. Her descriptions invoke typical Ayemenem landscapes through their use of pepper vines, tapioca etc.

 

In Salman Rushdie, as it has often been said, English is in dialogue with Indian languages, especially so in Midnight’s Children, his best work so far. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August also at times uses a mixed language as in the expression ‘hazar-fucked’, a typical marriage of Urdu and American slang. Amitav Ghosh has used multi-lingualism most effectively in his Sea of Poppies, though the tendency is evident in his other works like The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace. In Sea of Poppies he uses the tonal music of Bhojpuri, the language of its woman protagonist, very effectively and even brings in Bhojpuri folk songs; he also uses Hindustani in many forms, at times mixed with English as in the slang used by the crew of the ship, Ibis.

There is a self-conscious questioning of the boundaries of language in many of the works I referred to; often they bring languages into comic collision, testing the limits if communication between them. They celebrate India’s linguistic diversity and take over the English language to meet the demands of the Indian context. In the process they also question the ‘purity’ of Indian culture and prove that it is a mixture, receiving influences from outside the subcontinent. English thus becomes part of the polyphony and its colonial authority is relativised when it enters the complexity it describes.

But English as a language has been associated with colonialism, modernity and the elite. The new writers are aware of this and hence refuse to privilege either tradition or modernity (Look at Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August or The Last Burden, Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace or Sea of Poppies or Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shame for example). The new writers after Rushdie are also more playful and confident; their abrogation of standard English is also seen as a sign of a certain cultural weightlessness, the deracinated insouciance of elite college boys, alienated from the natural community.

Altaf Tyrewala’s 170 page No God in Sight is a slap in the face to the tradition of ‘the Great Indian Novel’. He uses a plain-spoken and condensed language to capture the psychic inner-life of Mumbai. He deals with ordinary people, especially Mumbai’s Muslim middle class, struggling for survival and dignity within a political landscape transformed by the Shiv Sena. The novel gives voice to critical dissent in relation to the one-sided success story narrated through campaigns like ‘India Shining’. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is another novel of critical dissent where he pits the darkness of the rural world of India’s poor against the light of the new world of the rising upper middle class; here too he invents a language that is apparently light and full of fun, yet adequate to portray the horrors of Indian reality.

 

Several graphic novels from Saranath Banerjee’s Corridor to Amruta Patil’s Kari explore the genre to create new models of reality as well as fiction. Chetan Bhagat’s One Night@the Call Center set in the world of the call centre at Gurgaon is also critical of the new lifestyle which is seen as a re-colonisation of the city. Here again he uses colloquial English, the lingua franca of the urban middle class. The author is not concerned with literariness, but with the possibilities of identification. He freely mixes Mahabharata and James Bond, western pop and Indian fables. Novels like Samit Basu’s The Simogin Prophecies and Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled attain a new level of freedom by reflecting the new global space created by the market through their multiple locations. Their language reflects the new texture of life in India, a world where jazz and Bob Dylan are as popular as Bollywood film songs and ghazals. It is an openness that calls for interrogation as it traces the inner cartography of liberalized India that switches between cultures and is rooted nowhere. It also raises ethical questions like that of our behaviour toward immigrants and refugees.

 

Not only has the Empire been writing back through the English novels, but the nation too gets rewritten in the process. Anita Desai once said, ‘Rushdie showed English language novelists in India a way to be post-Colonial.’ The history of Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, a paradigmatic post-colonial novel, re-enacts the key moments in the nation’s history including Jallianwala Bagh and the Indo-Pak wars and reflects the salient debates and competing visions for an independent India mapped by Gandhi, Nehru et al. The novel also examines the values of modernity and tradition through Adam Aziz, Saleem’s progressive father and Tai, the Kashmiri boatman. Saleem represents the need and effort to contain all of India and the impossibility of doing so. He says: ‘There are as many versions of India as Indians.’

Shame shows Pakistan as the failure of a dreaming mind, an insufficiently imagined place. The nation here is narrated through a portrait of its corrupt and shameless ruling elite: a densely metaphoric meditation on the various embodiments of national shame in the public sphere of male power and the private sphere of women’s oppression and the management of their sexuality.

Satanic Verses was an attempt to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture and examine the metamorphosis of the immigrants, their divided selves resulting from negotiating two or three cultures simultaneously. It also examines the nature of revelation from a secular point of view and the conflict between religious faith and religious doubt that unfortunately led to a pubic controversy and almost cost the author his life. The Moor’s Last Sigh completed the cycle by revisiting Bombay: it is a celebration of hybridity, of mixtures and impurities. We see here many communities and cultures jostling with Saleem Sinai and Moraes Zogoiby. The saga of Vasco de Gama and Zogoiby families compares with the nation’s saga.

 

Now Rushdie has a whole generation that follows him, a generation that interrogates the nature of India’s unity and proposes several ways of imagining the nation. ‘India is cracking up like my multi-channelled mind,’ says the narrator of Rukun Advani’s Beethoven Among the Cows (1994). His novel deals with the loss of innocence of the narrator as well as the nation. The assured unity of the nation is questioned from the boundaries by Shama Futehally’s Tara Lane (1993), while the loss of the nationalist self is the chief concern in Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) and Afternoon Raag (1993). Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie and The Little Soldier examine the ironies of religious faiths and the destiny of communities; Amitav Ghosh in his novels from The Shadow Lines to Sea of Poppies looks at the continuing tradition of India’s cultural exchanges across the Indian ocean from an anti-colonial, subaltern point of view; Allan Sealy’s Trotternama is an example of post-colonial history writing as opposed to colonial historiography that leaves out everyday life; Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass uses photograph as a metaphor, suggesting that history can only provide a lens that frames and refracts and not a clear window to the real.

 

Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) networks history and myth and presents the idea of India as an endless narrative potential. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993) is an allegory of nationhood set in the 1950s. It asserts the inevitability of bourgeois life, subscribes to the idea of Indian history as progress towards the goal of a secular commercial society following a western model and exhorts the middle classes to come out of its nostalgia and its obstructive concern with traditional identities to pursue a secular liberal economic mode.

Shashi Deshpande is concerned with the fate of the urban middle class women in the new nation in her novels like The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980), Roots and Shadows (’83), That Long Silence (’88) and Small Remedies (2000). Urmi, the heroine of The Binding Vine, sums up her liberating vision as she discovers her mother-in-law’s trunk full of poems and diaries after she had been killed by her husband and also Sakuntala whose daughter had been beaten and raped. They bring Urmi out of the trauma of her daughter’s loss. Gita Hariharan’s A Thousand Faces of Night posits Indian women in relation to the Orientalist idea of woman and questions it and The Time of Siege exposes the dark forces behind the neo-fascist Hindutva ideology.

 

There are critics who tend to view Indian writing in English as a pan-Indian phenomenon born with the Bengal Renaissance of the 19th century since many of its first exponents like Raja Rammohun Roy, Henry Derozio, Radhakant Deb, Toru Dutt, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Sri Aurobindo and Vivekananda were products of that Renaissance. The constraints that Indian literature in English encounters have best been articulated by one of its living practitioners, Shashi Deshpande in an article she wrote in The Hindu. One is, of course, its lack of a long tradition and the assurance that comes from it. There is hardly any archive, cultural register or community memory that it can fall back upon for drawing its images, archetypes and cultural symbols. It tries to make good at times by drawing on the larger ‘Indian’ mythology and epics or Greek, Roman or Persian traditions thus making it difficult to locate it specifically: this is particularly evident in Indian poetry in English as poetry depends, more than fiction does, on cultural memory to achieve its vertical semantic and associational dimension.

The range of verbal associations available to the language poet is also unavailable to the poet writing in English. This may also be why poets like Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, Kamala Das and Jayanta Mahapatra chose to be bilingual, writing also in their mother tongues. English writing also suffers from the potential danger of standardization of experience as the language flattens regional, linguistic and dialectal differences and annihilates the local colour, tone and texture so prominent in language writing, especially, fiction.

English writing in India also, as pointed out by Shashi Deshpande, has a tendency to inflate itself and tends to exoticize, present or explain India and package it for a foreign audience as it happens mostly with the writers living outside the country. It does not have a close-knit community of readers as the language writing mostly has. This amorphous nature of the audience it addresses often leads to an ambivalence in English writing regarding what it can expect from the readers. This uncertainly of context is besides the ambiguity about its own historical positioning. One may well ask why there are no movements, like the dalit movement for example, in English, but for Touch a recent novel by Meena Kandasamy. The more intelligent of the writers in English are aware of these issues and are, as we have seen, trying to find the means to overcome them.

 

The task of the critic at this juncture is not to sensationalize the opposition but to look at the texts: their strategies of the absorption and nativisation of experience and the differences at thematic, emotive, signifying, ideological and structural levels with their Indian language counterparts in order to bring out the nuances of their linguistic and existential negotiation. If we need to fight English as a language of power and hegemony in India and a potential threat to the existence and development of Indian languages, it is not by opposing the creative use of English as a literary language where it is like any other Indian language-with the constraints outlined, but by reframing the priorities in our system of education, for example, by making the study of at least one Indian language compulsory up to a certain stage after which the students may exercise their option. As a literary language in India, English needs neither to be privileged nor de-privileged: it is just one of the several languages in which the multilingual Indian creativity chooses to express itself.

Indian critics of Indian writing in English like M.K. Naik, C.D. Narasimhaiah, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Makarand Paranjape, Shyamala Narayan, P.K. Rajan and Vinay Kirpal, besides scores of academics who have been contributing to anthologies, have tried to explore the field in varied and useful ways. It is clear that neither the old Sanskrit poetics nor the new western literary theories can adequately explain or interpret this genre of writing. Any meaningful criticism of this genre should necessarily take into account the multicultural milieu from which these writers emerge as they come from different regional cultures and linguistic backgrounds often woven into their texts.

A common ‘Indian’ paradigm may not do. It should be sensitive to the problems of language and style. It needs to look, especially in the case of fiction, at the history-fiction interface, the ways in which history is treated and transformed. It needs to do a symptomatic reading of the texts as there may be contradictions between the projected worldview and the actual content. It has also to read these texts in relation to regional writing as well as world writing. In short, it calls for a new comprehensive comparative critical method.

 

Let me conclude my observations with some relevant lessons from the African and Carribean encounters with English. They have fought the hegemony of English by creating their own English, infusing it with the tones, timbres, rhythms and expressions of native speech as has been done by Derek Walcott or Sam Selvon. There are writers like Ngugi who have chosen to shift their creative writing into heir own languages, in this case Gikuyu, and persuade others to write in pidgins, Creoles and other dialects of English rather than ‘standard’ English.

Zimunya of Zimbabwe too admits that English can be stifling and inflexible while translating from Shona, his mother tongue. (In his own words, ‘We only render the meaning, but not the feeling; the feeling is lost, the feeling!’). Gabriel Okara, the Nigerian poet, also speaks of the ‘untranslatability’ of Ijo experiences. Poets like Christopher Okigbo, Okot p’Bitek, Kofi Awoonor and Dennis Brutus bring into their writing the qualities of oral poetry thus collapsing orature with ecriture. Chinua Achebe considers English richer than his language, Igbo, though his expression is also impacted by native speech. Writers also engage in code-switching and code-mixing, just as G.V. Desani in India had allowed the intrusion of Sanskrit compounding in All About H. Hatterr.

 

While we ought to resist the cultural imperialism of English that might promote the enfeebling of other languages, and the erasure of language writing, we may also well remember that English itself has been used as a tool for subversion as in Derek Walcott’s Dream of the Monkey Mountain that inverts Shakespeare’s Tempest and tries Shakespeare for crimes against humanity; in Aime Cesaire’s Une Tempete where Creole and Kiswahili are employed to subvert Queen’s English; or in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe that turns the slave of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe into its protagonist, empowered by the knowledge of the master’s language. Let us not forget that every language carries in its armoury tools of introspection and weapons of self-subversion like satire, irony, parody and structural inversion, all of which it can turn upon itself.