In my approach, literature and novels in particular are significant both as works of the imagination and as cultural emblems that travel across regional and national borders carrying an array of meanings and significations.14 These meanings and significations reveal the moral uses and dimensions of language. Thus, my engagement with English in India is also an engagement with English in the world, that is to say, how English mediates a set of social and linguistic hierarchies not only in India but also globally. This project is, in many respects, a response to the phenomenon of Indian fiction in English that has swept the English-reading public and its marketplace around the globe since the 1980s. This phenomenon has been mostly celebrated outside India; within India the response has been more ambivalent and varied, largely because of the homegrown politics of language that frame this international attention. The broadest aim of this book is to understand how this debate looks from the Indian side and to delve into the social factors and historical circumstances that have shaped it.
Literary fiction is a modern artistic and cultural form, replete with social values and symbolic meanings. I contend that these values and meanings created in turn generate their own social reality and that this reality has become central to debates about what is deemed culturally and linguistically authentic. I present different aspects of the authenticity question in the chapters that follow, showing it to be an elastic, ever changing set of principles, one that drives debate and action forward in unlikely ways. A principal aim of this book is to show how the idea of cultural authenticity is a political variable—rather than a cultural truth—that comes into play depending on particular social and literary circumstances. These circumstances most often hinge on issues of caste, class, and gender—that is to say, markers of identity formation that have been central to the shifting, unstable articulation of modern Indian selves. English, and the way it is positioned among the other Indian languages, does not represent a fixed pole but rather serves to change political and literary alliances among classes and castes, often in surprising ways.
WRITING IN ENGLISH
Many Indian novelists who write in English about Indian social realities have written or spoken about how in one way or another they cross the linguistic divides of society by literally translating conversations in their heads as they write dialogue. This is not to say that they regret writing in English or believe they are less Indian or lesser writers for doing so. Yet the seeds of cultural debate—essentially about the relationship between literature and society—are planted here. It is not, however, that authors writing in other Indian languages represent monolingual worlds in their novels either. Where there is Hindi, for instance, and its numerous dialects, there might be Punjabi and Bengali too. Yet the literary divide among these languages—social, cultural, and linguistic—would certainly be smaller. There are more similarities between Bengali and Hindi or Hindi and Punjabi than there are between English and any of these languages. North Indian languages share Sanskrit and Persian based vocabularies, a fact that distinguishes them as a whole from English. And even though the north Indian languages are also “modern” languages in that their grammatical and lexical standardizations were formalized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they have been existing in dialect form alongside one another for much longer; there is a shared social history among and between these languages to which English is a latecomer. English exists in a distinct temporal reality in the Indian context, as well as a distinct spatial reality, as it belongs neither to any particular region nor to any “indigenous” Indian cultural tradition. As in much of the world, literary culture—a record of society's practices, histories, and ways of being—has been part and parcel of defining particular nations and the cultures therein. For English, which has long symbolized modernity, its shifting lines of exclusivity create a situation whereby it commands popular recognition as a sign and symbol while largely being an instrument of the elite.
The Indian-English writer Shashi Deshpande, who comes from a Kannada-speaking background and has lived in various multilingual settings in India, puts it this way: “The truth is, that while a great number of people do speak English, it is yet a language that many of the characters we write of will not only not be speaking, it is one they will not be able to speak.”15
Deshpande's comment captures a central paradox of writing about India in English: the question of the linguistic authenticity of fictional characters themselves. All writing and art for that matter is a representation of reality, even when the language of the text matches the language of the street. English is certainly part of India's social reality; it has filtered in to the most common and basic level of everyday communication, often in the form of phrases, slogans, idiomatic expressions, and advertisements. Yet English is not a sustained presence in most people's lives, and even those for whom it is are surrounded by non-English worlds. As a result, English can at times seem like it is everywhere and nowhere.16
Deshpande, who has grappled with incessant querying by others as to not just why she works in English, but how she can, writes: “The point is, that, not only was English not born in this soil, it has not grown through the daily use of all classes of people or developed layers like a pearl through years of its association with a particular people.”17
However, this is only the beginning of the story. Despite Deshpande's assessment of linguistic authenticity, or perhaps because of it, she eloquently defends her use of English in the making of her literary prose and resents being marginalized for it, as she and others often are by the regional literary establishments. In an essay in which she both defines and rejects the notion of being a marginal writer, she writes of the circumscribed quality of her English, of its place in her life but also in the lives of her readers: “I began writing in English, not because I ‘chose' to, but because it was the only language I could express myself in, the only language I really read. Yet, I had two other languages at home, languages I spoke and lived my daily life in. Living in a small town in a middle-class family, life was, in fact, lived mainly in Kannada; English came into the picture only for certain purposes and at certain times.…My readers were people who read English, but lived their personal and emotional lives, like I did, in their own languages.”18
Although she writes in English, Deshpande draws on different linguistic realities to create her literary world. She is also informed by the thought worlds of those languages and that knowledge, and those realities become part of her literary fiction. What is also significant for Deshpande is that her audience is chiefly based in India. Hers is not a Western based readership but one composed of fellow Indians who have a relationship to the English language similar to hers. Some would say she is less successful because she is not known abroad, while others claim she has a more organic and grounded relationship to things Indian, even though she writes in English.
It is often these gradations of alleged insider- and outsider-ness that animate Indian cultural debates. An Indian author may write in English, but then, what is her perceived proximity to other languages, and by implication, to other social worlds and ways of thinking? Whether a writer has a “foreign” audience often becomes yet another part of the debate over a text's—and often an author's—cultural authenticity. If one has a non-Indian audience, there is sometimes an assumption that one must be writing “further away” from Indian social worlds and concerns. When is one an “Indian” writer, and when does one become an NRI (nonresident Indian) or “foreigner”? The latter term, in popular parlance, connotes someone whose interests, and not only geographic location, may no longer “favor” India.
It should come as no surprise in a world of grossly uneven development that there is a moral dimension and sensitivity to how “India” is portrayed.19 It is in these circumstances where the English language is at once seen as the language of the world literary stage and as a language that has over time come to represent complex, multilingual social worlds. It is no longer a question whether English is an Indian language; what is at issue is the moral dimension of its use and position.
THE REALITY OF FICTION
In fall 2008 I attended a book club