I became convinced that I would not find the answers only by reading and analyzing Indian English texts or by comparing them to other bodies of literature. The texts mattered, but so, I started to believe, did the place from which the writing emerged. For one, I needed more tools that would enable me to see—literally—the ground of literature. As a result, I turned to anthropology as a way to question the role of language in colonial discourse, the relationship between history and ethnography, and eventually between language and textual production.2 I realized that rather than only study literature, I needed to immerse myself in the larger world of the production of literature in India.
CHAPTER 1
Reading Delhi and Beyond
THE PAVEMENT BOOKSELLER
I ask a pavement bookseller what he has for sale, and he replies, “Only best-sellers.” I have little interest in best-sellers, but that is about to change. “What makes a book a best-seller?” I ask matter-of-factly. He points to Difficult Daughters, the first novel by the Delhi based writer Manju Kapur. To me this novel is serious literary fiction, and I am happy to hear that it is also selling well. A paperback copy of the book is lying face up on the ground with other novels, magazines, travel guides, and histories about India. Whether for tourists or locals, in Delhi the roadside compulsion to define India is strong.
We are in Kamla Nagar market in north Delhi, near Delhi University. The bookshops here on Bungalow Road mostly sell English language textbooks. Students appear with lists and leave with books, the ones they have to have, the ones they can't get online. One shop in the row sells spiritual texts and guides; it has the most floor space and the fewest customers. The pavements are reserved for best-sellers. Some are re-bound photocopies selling for half the price of the published versions. The print is faded, but you can still read it.
The pavement bookseller explains to me in Hindi that when Amitabh Bachchan asked who the author of Difficult Daughters was, as a trivia question on Kaun Banega Crorepati? (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), the novel started to sell.1 What became a best-seller certainly also had to do with the perennial best-seller status of the Bachchan brand. If the “Big B” was mentioning the novel and asking who its author was, surely it was worth knowing who she was and perhaps even buying what she had written.
A few years later when I told Kapur about my encounter, she smiled incredulously and said, “Really?” At that time the paperback version of her fourth novel, Home (2006), was just coming out, and she was a bit dismayed by the cover. It was being published by Random House India, one of the new MNCs (multinational corporations) on the block that had launched its Indian venture with Kapur's novel. The hardcover features a curtained window on the facade of a house with a telephone wire crossing the foreground, all overlaid in mustard hues. I told Kapur how I thought the image perfectly captured the essence of the novel, since the reader gets to pull aside that curtain and witness the intimate lives of a joint family in an everyday Delhi milieu, the old neighborhood of Karol Bagh. She smiled and nodded and said, “But Rashmi, you're an academic so you see that.”
Now it was my turn to be dismayed. I said, “But I'm a reader first! It appealed to me naturally!”
She then sighed and explained that she wanted her novel to be seen as serious literature but that her editor thought the book could be both serious and more popular, that is, reach a wider audience. The paperback version had a shinier look: its cover featured a blurred figure of a woman in a colorful sari with a large bunch of keys tied to her waist, as is the custom of the female head of household in the kind of joint family being depicted in the novel; another woman looms in the background, suggesting intrigue and potential conflict. Kapur was happy to have more readers, but she was also hoping the new cover would not diminish the seriousness of the work.
We returned to Amitabh Bachchan, and Kapur told me she had been at home watching the show with her family the night the question was asked. She seemed amused by it, even if reluctant to associate her works with a distinctly nonliterary media hype.
Star TV's Kaun Banega Crorepati? was the most popular Hindi television show at the time and became the vehicle by which Amitabh Bachchan reclaimed his number one superstar status. That the show was in Hindi but also offered up elements of Indian-English culture was no surprise, as the worlds of Hindi and English constantly overlap. Moreover, print and electronic media worlds, especially in the nation's “metros,” or urban centers, have become increasingly multilingual; Hindi newspapers feature advertisements in Hindi and English;Hindi radio, especially stations geared to younger audiences, is peppered with English phrases and words; and popular Hindi romantic comedies feature titles such as Jab We Met (When We Met) and Love Aaj Kal (Love These Days), with Hindi dialogue spliced with English to match.
However, this “mixing” (Hinglish, as it is sometimes called) is evidence not merely of greater linguistic facility among India's cultural consumers; many, in fact, argue that the quality of spoken English in India is becoming worse, not better, as the number of people who know English increases. On the one hand, the urban middle classes have come to define their own identities partly through their association with the English language; English has become more integral to middle-lass identity in the past few decades and has led to the rise of a sizable middle-class readership for English language publications. On the other hand, the desire for the language is greatly expanding as more people further down the class and caste hierarchies see the possibility of adding it, in some form, to their social profiles. What has changed for everyone is that the things people feel they should or have to know—cultural information, trends, and trivia—are crossing the linguistic divide like never before.
On another pavement, in south Delhi, the drama heightens as younger “booksellers” step down onto the asphalt, selling their wares to the calibrated interludes of stop-and-go traffic. They sell paperbacks and glossy magazines, as well as balloons, roses, tissue boxes, and kitchen towels. The scene is replayed throughout the day and into the evening at any major “cutting,” or intersection. An insistent boy carrying a stack of books will try to sell you a copy of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss as you sit in an auto rickshaw or car (as opposed to if you're riding a bicycle or on the bus).2 He will also have Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian on offer, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies, and perhaps Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan.3 These are some of the emblems of Indian-English culture, sold alongside international best-sellers by authors such as John Grisham, Paulo Coelho, and Dan Brown.
The boy, it turns out, gives most of his money to his parents, and with the encouragement of a local nongovernmental organization is learning the Hindi alphabet on some afternoons under the flyover. It is sometimes hard to know what the “serious” literature is in this scenario: the boy's life circumstance or the book in his hand?
In Delhi, as elsewhere, the two continually go together, but here what separates the boy from the book and the motorized world of Indian-English cultural production and consumption it represents is not merely the money to buy the book, but a private English medium education that makes his chances of gaining fluency in English and entrance to the jobs and access to the cultural emblems of that world practically nonexistent. The legendary social divides in Indian society—of caste, class, gender, religion, and, perhaps most significant, urban versus rural belonging—work in tandem with linguistic divides. To speak of urban elites is to refer to the class of people (the rich, the upper middle class, and many sectors of the middle classes, who also tend to be upper caste) who are educated from primary school onward with English as their medium of instruction. The rest of India, about 80 percent of Indians have, until recently, tended to be educated in government schools that may teach English as a subj ect but whose medium of instruction is