The problem

IT is somewhat ironic that English, once the language of our colonial masters, has today been so successfully appropriated by the Indians. Far from a blind adherence to Queen’s English, we now confront a bewildering range of Indian Englishes, as words from other Indian languages increasingly become an integral part of both spoken and written English in India. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the sphere of literary production. Not only is Indian writing in English winning new adherents worldwide, Indian writers, whether based at home or abroad, are regularly featuring in the shortlists of prestigious literary awards. In just the last decade, three Indian writers – Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga – have won the Booker, adding to the earlier list of winners like Salman Rushdie. And while, post Rabindranath Tagore, no Indian has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, there are today dozens of writers both held in high esteem and commanding considerable market presence.

What holds true for original writing in English has increasingly been extended to works in translation. Today Kannada writers like U.R. Ananthamurthy or Bengali litterateurs like Mahasweta Devi, just to name a few, are avidly read in literature courses across the world, and their writings are subject matter of sophisticated critical enquiry.

Accompanying this heightened presence at the literary high table is the rapid expansion of readership for English books in India. True, the print runs of even our best known writers appear minuscule in comparison to the sales enjoyed by their compatriots abroad. Yet, the increasing visibility of publishers, both new and old, a larger number of bookshops, particularly in urban centres, the growing popularity of literary festivals and newly instituted literary awards, even the routinization of ‘meet the author’ events – all testify to a new and growing vitality of our literary markets.

The critical reader will still complain about the fact that so much of our writing in English remains derivative, relying for themes and style on emerging fashions in the Anglophone world, an obsessive focus on popular fiction, as also the slim support to poetry, short stories or plays. But one simultaneously needs to recognize the growing readership for nonfiction, be it travel writing, memoirs, biographies or critical commentary. Few could have imagined even some years back that the Indian market would see sales in multiples of ten thousand for a collection of essays by an Amartya Sen or an Arundhati Roy.

And yet, there is something intriguing, even disturbing, about the manner in which the production of knowledge (in the sciences, social sciences and the humanities) and literature in the English language has so come to overshadow, if not dominate and debilitate, the creative and cognitive endeavours in all other Indian languages. The fact that we have a formidable literary tradition in many Indian languages, tracing back to early medieval times if not antiquity (think of Sanskrit or Tamil), or that many of our languages enjoy a numeric advantage over English, seems unable to decentre such assessments. English, by contrast, is not only a relatively recent entrant in our linguistic landscape, it is spoken, read and written by far fewer Indians, even if we include all those with only a fleeting familiarity with it.

Clearly numbers and legacy, both of which veer heavily on the side of the non-English Indian vernaculars, cannot by themselves explain the iniquitous distribution of prestige, market valuation and brand equity. It is a matter of some disquiet that so many educated Indians routinely refer to Kalidas as our own Shakespeare or to Kautilya, the author of Arthashastra, as the native Machiavelli. Nothing captures this inversion better than the attention showered on awards for works in English, be they international like the Nobel, Booker or Pulitzer or national like the Crossword-Vodafone, than for instance the Gnanpith or the Sahitya Akademi awards. Bhasha writers, even award-winning ones, are rarely interviewed by the national media except, of course, when their work in translation wins awards. Similarly, on the rare occasion that they feature in literary festivals, it is usually as a poor cousin or as a nod to political correctness. Equally, sad as it is to admit, both libraries and bookshops, particularly prestigious urban stores, increasingly prefer to stock and market books in English.

Why should this be so? One popular explanation traces this state of affairs to the lasting effects of the colonial encounter, seen as systematically downgrading and denigrating anything produced in the bhashas. Equally, and crudely, the world of English continues to be equated with all that is modern, scientific and progressive – remember the infamous Minute on Education penned by Thomas Macaulay – and, therefore, worth emulating and promoting. Knowledge and writing in the vernacular, by contrast, is seen as a relic of the past, possibly of some worth in yesteryears, but unsuitable for responding to the demands of the modern age. Little surprise that our emerging elites have adopted English, particularly in the professions, as the favoured vehicle for upward mobility and advancement.

Despite the national movement making a concerted effort to develop and enrich Indian languages and knowledges, including by encouraging translations, all as part of the larger project of constructing a composite cultural nationalism, developments post-Independence have done little to alter the relative balance of power between English and in part Hindi (both promoted as national link languages), and knowledges and literatures produced in other Indian languages, often dismissed as regional. Even as the growth of democracy and regional/linguistic nationalism has partly altered the equation in linguistically cohesive regions, a combination of short-sighted state policy and market responses has ensured that the relative status of the two ‘national’ languages, in particular English, remains unchallenged, a tendency that has only strengthened as the country increasingly integrates into the global market.

Relying only on the colonial encounter, and the consequent creation of a colonized mindset, what some have called a ‘crippled mind’ may, however, be erroneous. Note for instance the spectacular growth of vernacular markets, particularly in the media. Publications in Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi access and serve a far larger market than is available to English. Yet, if we shift the bar from merely serving a functional need to creating a cultural confidence in the use of Indian languages – content, narrative style, and so on – the situation in most language regions remains bleak. A look at the politicking and petty fights in the official promotion bodies in most of the bhashas says it all.

Equally futile are the efforts by the ‘ideologues’ of different languages to sanitise their mother tongues of all ‘foreign’ influences, unmindful of the fact that languages grow best in an environment of healthy interaction, involving both absorption from and contribution to other languages. The elusive search for ‘purity’ only results in stultification. Nor does it help to over-glorify an imagined classical past, most evident in the hagiography accompanying Sanskrit and Sanskritic texts and traditions as the fount of all knowledge. Such attempts at revivalism may help compensate for the feeling of cultural inadequacy when facing the challenge of the West, but they also freeze our intellectual life and blind us to our substantial internal inadequacies – the refusal to allow subaltern and marginal classes any access to classical knowledge traditions, as also a blindness to the vitality of folk culture, traditions and life.

One side effect of these developments has been the veritable demise of bilingualism/multilingualism – an effective familiarity with and confidence in more than one’s mother tongue. Though many educated Indians do have some knowledge of Hindi (promoted through state policy and the workings of everyday commerce and the Hindi film industry) and English (the language of aspiration, mobility and power) in addition to their mother tongues, functional familiarity rarely translates into meaningful reading and writing skills. This has resulted in most modern Indians, particularly the young, growing up unaware of their own history, culture, traditions and source of knowledge – particularly from sources other than their native linguistic zones. The most deprived in many ways are the monolingual English language elites, for even as they can theoretically access global knowledges and literatures, they remain cut off from the rich sources originating in their own land, except the few in translation. And these, given the state of our translation industry, are usually a pale shadow of the originals.

Making sense of our evolving literary landscapes, with different language traditions displaying different degrees of vitality (or decline) is not easy. Clearly a simplistic binary of native or foreign, or the imposition of Hindi over other Indian languages (a favourite bogey of the past) fails to account for the complex ways in which literacy and school enrolments, textbook production and translation policies, the growth and character of our publishing industry, the politics of awards and recognition, income levels and leisure, aspirations and demands of mobility, all come together into the making of a literary culture and tradition.

This issue of Seminar explores some of the above and other concerns in an effort to unravel the forces impacting the growth of our literatures and help us regain cultural confidence.