In Ali's text, the demise of Muslim Delhi is a direct consequence of British colonial rule and the way his community reacts to that rule, whereas in Desai's post-partition tale, cultural ruptures have been made more strident by the realities of shifting borders and population exchanges. It is not the case that Indian modernity is captured solely or most ably in English but instead that English takes on a mediating role. It is this principle that may be abstracted from the novel. It is precisely the interlingual dialogue in each text that sheds light on the ways in which language politics has been central to the articulation of Indian modernity. In contrast to Hindi-Urdu's dismemberment, Desai's English prose becomes further solidified, as it offers a seemingly neutral and yet also authoritative rendering of the cultural aftermath of the split of Hindi and Urdu and the trauma of the politicization of religious identity inherent in that split.
A CINEMATIC INTERLUDE
The demise of Urdu as a story line arises not only in literature but also in popular Hindi film. In Manmohan Desai's classic film, Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), the audience witnesses how Urdu can also play a mediating role in the Indian landscape. And yet in this case the language is reduced to being the vehicle of expression for a single religious community. The film's conceit is that the three brothers named in the title are separated in their childhoods and go on to be raised in families of different religious backgrounds only to meet again as adults. Amar is Hindu, Akbar is Muslim, and Anthony is Christian; they are played by three titans of Hindi cinema: Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor, and Amitabh Bachchan, respectively. A pivotal moment occurs near the film's climax when Akbar is being held hostage by the villainous Robert and tries to send out a call for help to his brothers, Amar and Anthony. Robert allows Akbar to send a note to his tailor shop for more materials, which are required to alter the wedding dress of one of the heroines (who is also being held hostage and is about to be forced to marry her former bodyguard turned thug). Instead of writing down a list of supplies, Akbar pens a plea for help to his brothers. In a voice-over, Akbar explains that he writes the note in Urdu so no one will be able to read it except for the Muslim tailor at his shop. A close-up of the note is then shown on camera as having been written in the Perso-Arabic script. In the next scene, the tailor reads the note and then verbally relays the message for help to Akbar's brothers; a rescue ensues, eventually leading to a happy ending uniting all the brothers of differing faiths with their common mother. The message: religious diversity may exist side by side in a single, unified mother India.
What is not reunited is the language of Hindi and Urdu, a matter that brings us to the question of script. Before Hindi and Urdu were distinct languages with Sanskritized and Persianized vocabularies, respectively, they were commonly written in the same script, the Perso-Arabic or Urdu script as it is called. Part of the “collapsing bridge” between Hindi and Urdu occurs when Hindi began to be written in the Devanagari script.29 Harish Trivedi has called this switch to the “Nagari” script a “triumph” that “gave a tremendous boost to the morale of the users of Nagari and Hindi” and thereby “led rapidly to a reversal in the balance of power between Urdu and Hindi, resulting in a virtual rout of Urdu in the public domain of authorship and publishing.”30
It is precisely this loss of literate comprehension of the Urdu script that we see in the film. The change in script signifies a larger linguistic and, in this case, religious divide, cementing the idea that only Muslims read and write in the Perso-Arabic script and Hindus in Devanagari. And yet, in the film at least, Urdu literally mediates in an improbable yet telling way. It supports the premise of the film, that religious cultures are “separate but equal,” the hallmark of the Indian secular ideal. Urdu as a sign of difference enters mainstream Hindi cinema—an industry that is ironically made up mostly of Hindustani speakers. Even more telling perhaps is that in today's Mumbai cinema, the often ridiculed “filmy Hindi” screenplays and television scripts are written in Roman script, since many actors do not read Hindi anymore, whether in the Perso-Arabic or Nagari script.
A SHIFTING LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE
To return to the realm of the Indian English novel, what does it mean for Ali and then Desai to recount the demise of another language? And to do so, not as triumphalist accounts, but as mournful tales? By writing about Urdu in English in this satirical mode, Desai emphasizes her own complicity in Urdu's demise. Her satire is far from the world of Hindi comedy, yet creates its own measure of ironic distance. For lament has turned to satire on the very question of language itself, as Hindi is ridiculed and the desire for Urdu is doomed from the start. English meanwhile has become a normative narrative presence. It embodies a self-consciousness that becomes part of its very definition as an Indian language. In this sense, the novel tells the story of the relationship between English and the bhashas. English enables Indians to look out onto the world (the most common refrain of Indian cosmopolitanism), but in Desai's reckoning, it perhaps even more significantly allows them to reappraise their own linguistic backgrounds and struggles.
Thus, English in India is shaped by internal struggles over language as much as it has been by the colonizer-colonized relationship. This shaping of English goes beyond the interpretation of each text on its own. By reading the texts as a pair, it is possible to see the ways in which English has sparked the social and literary consciousness of modern Indians, of the work that English does on that consciousness, and the effect that English has on lives and livelihoods. Indians who write in English do so not merely because they have been educated in that language. The language has become part of the social fabric, and that fabric includes intersections with and relationships to other Indian languages. Both novels show that to live in a particular language is to inhabit a different cultural world, and what it means for English to “usurp” a place (to return to Gandhi) is really a story of how individual subjectivities change with the adoption of new linguistic sensibilities. In Delhi, and many other parts of north India, English changed the way Urdu and Hindi exist socially and politically. People sometimes speak of “Englishwallahs” and “Hindiwallahs” not to denote which language someone speaks—most people are at least bilingual—but instead to denote the relationship they have to that language, their world-view, the family they come from, the type of education they have had, the beliefs they hold and promote.
In the novels of Ali and Desai, the shifting linguistic landscape changes what people think, believe, and desire. It is this larger social and historical texture of English in Indian society and the meanings of the uses of English for Indians in everyday life that then becomes paramount.
CHAPTER 3
In Sujan Singh Park
In 1967 Nirad Chaudhuri issued a characteristically dire pronouncement on the place of Indian writers in the world. “It is essential,” he wrote, “from every point of view to secure the imprint of a London or New York publisher, and the higher the status of even these publishers the better for the writer.”1 For Indian writers of English, Chaudhuri seems to be saying, the only path to literary recognition is through the publishing apparatus of the Western world. Further along he continues in a slightly more ominous vein: “But one warning I must give. To be acceptable to Western publishers, an Indian must write English not only with competence, but with distinction. The competition with the natural writers of English is so severe that British and American publishers will not submit to the impact of any English from an Indian writer which is not quite out of the ordinary.”2
In Chaudhuri's mind, and in the minds of many of his generation and class, the intellectual center of the English-speaking world could only ever be located in the West. And, by implication, the traffic in ideas could only ever be directed by the demands of London-based