English Heart, Hindi Heartland. Rashmi Sadana

publishers not willing to submit to “the impact of English that is not quite out of the ordinary,” it is almost as if the Indians have the upper hand, wielding their wanton prose through the streets of London. Chaudhuri's advice to other writers details a classic center-periphery dynamic: how to turn the colonizer's gaze to one's own advantage, to “write back” and get published. And yet if postcolonial writing was meant to be about the reappropriation of the colonizer's language, would not the place of publication also have to be refigured?

      The last chapter detailed how English mediated the linguistic realms of Hindi and Urdu, emphasizing key shifts from the colonial to postcolonial periods. This chapter argues for English as mediator in the realm of elite intellectual life, specifically in the decades after independence. It is a story of a particular upper-caste background and upper-middle-class sensibility, one in which secular and liberal values become defined and associated with cultural production in English. It is a set of values that I identify as emerging from a dual sense and experience of one's own place in society. From the 1970s onward Delhi was the major hub of this intellectual life, largely because the academic and then literary publishing outfits in English moved there and, along with other institutions, became the center for the exchange of ideas in English, ideas that would ultimately inform the larger multilingual intellectual and literary spheres in the city and beyond.

      POSTCOLONIAL PUBLISHING