Chandrabhan Prasad has been most associated with the promotion of English for Dalits in his column, “Dalit Diary,” which appears in the Pioneer, a national English-language newspaper. His method of instilling this desire and what he frames as a right to the language has come in the curious form of proposing English as a “Dalit Goddess.” Prasad's immediate aim is not historical revisionism but instead to instill the desire for English, a desire that he hopes will turn into a serious demand for the language among Dalits themselves. He wonders why in the past six decades of Indian independence the demand for government sponsored education in the language has not flourished. In line with this cause is what many see as his audacious valorization of Thomas B. Macaulay as a kind of saint for the oppressed Dalits.47 Since 2006 Prasad has made headlines for hosting parties each year in Delhi to celebrate the anniversary of Macaulay's birth.48 What is unclear at this point is how much of an effect this kind of valorization—to what extent it is a real movement or a gimmick—will have in the actual education of Dalits or even the creation of Dalit literature in English. It is clear, however, that the idea of English education as being the sole provenance of the elite is changing.
For these reasons and others, thinking about English solely as a postcolonial language fails to capture the complexity of the distinctions associated with language in India today. The term postcolonial has come to flatten our sense of a variety of social and cultural changes in over sixty years of post-independence cultural politics, mostly because it relies on the colonizer/colonized model of power and cultural interaction, and it sidelines competing nationalisms and regionalisms and their ideologies. Even in Delhi, where the architectural and governmental remnants of the British Raj are most obvious, English is no longer a postcolonial language. Instead, as I argue throughout, it is a mediator in a variety of cultural and political realms.
THE CITY AS A LITERARY FIELD
This mediation is, perhaps, most apparent in Delhi, a city that is not only the political and bureaucratic capital of India but also the center of English and Hindi publishing as well as home to the country's preeminent universities and a wide array of cultural institutions representing local, regional, national, and international concerns. Recognizing Delhi as the site of the major publishing houses in English and Hindi first enabled me to see the city as a literary field. There would certainly be other places in which to study Indian literary fields, in Mumbai, Kolkata, or Chennai, to name just three important sites of cultural production; however, to understand the nature of Hindi and English as competing national languages in the cultural and political arenas, there is no more significant site than Delhi. In addition, Delhi's role as the cultural capital of north India and as the bureaucratic center of the nation makes it a clearinghouse for a range of cultural production; hence I also contend that seeing literary production through Delhi allows one to understand the relationship not only between English and Hindi but also between those two languages and the bhashas as a whole, thereby allowing an understanding of the most important cultural debates of the past few decades. While my research took me to other places and people in those places, it always brought me back to Delhi. At the same time, this book is not a case study of literary production in Delhi; rather it views questions through Delhi and its institutions.
My inquiry began by focusing on the city as the publishing center for Hindi and English, the two most published languages in India. On the roadside the connection between publishers, distributors, and consumers seemed very direct. I would see the small publishing houses on Ansari Road just within the walls of Old Delhi and often buy books directly from them. This exploration led me to the Hindi publishers Raj kamal Prakashan and Vani Prakashan, with informal chats leading to longer interviews. It was the artisanal bent of these publishers, and also of the English publisher Ravi Dayal, that I found most interesting. They were small operations, yet pioneering ones that had become major cultural institutions. The life histories of the publishers themselves—how they came to publishing, how they related to the various languages they spoke, how the publishing endeavor itself was a way of imagining postcolonial India—said much about Hindi and English from the decades just after Indian independence to the cultural changes that economic liberalization brought from the 1990s onward. I saw that there was a larger significance to Delhi being the center of publishing of these two languages in particular since they are competing national languages. Furthermore, as I soon discovered, other languages—Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, for instance—figure prominently in the story of both Hindi and English. These interests in literary publishing dovetailed with the historic and contemporary site of the city as the bureaucratic center of the nation's cultural institutions and policy making, where discourses around nation and region but also around gender, caste, class, and religion are continually being made and remade. It was in this sense that I started to see certain literary discourses and the multilingual literary field itself as moving through Delhi and its institutions. In this latter case the relationship between Hindi and the other Indian languages and English and the other Indian languages comes into sharp relief. In part, my argument is that what is produced (not only books but also ideas, policies, attitudes, experiences, and discourses) in Delhi, by virtue of its position as the former colonial capital and current, increasingly globalizing cultural capital of India, frames and influences debates regarding other Indian languages in their respective regions. However, rather than merely finding a hegemonic Delhi centric discourse, what I came to see were its obstinacies, fissures, and inconsistencies, spurring me on to unravel what I saw as the decentering politics of identity, language, nationhood, regionalism, and globalization.
Delhi is the place where many writers from regional centers come to work and live, so the interaction between region and nation also plays out in the everyday life of the city and its institutions. Several of the figures I engage with throughout this book come from language backgrounds other than Hindi (e.g., Malayalam, Bengali, and Marathi); yet they are individuals who here in some way contribute to the construction of the regional, national, or global via the prism of Delhi's bureaucratic and cultural worlds. Delhi has, not surprisingly, played a dominant role in defining the parameters of national culture, yet these definitions are more often than not contested in regional milieus. This book explores what is at stake in some of these contestations by positing Delhi not only as a site of literary production but also as a producer of cultural meaning.
People like to say that Delhi has no literary culture of its own. This perception is due in part to the migration of Punjabis (and their language) to the city at the time of partition, in 1947. The language on the street changed forever, as, to the chagrin of many, you now hear a mix of Hindi and Punjabi. Yet the city has the largest concentration of Hindi writers and publishers. Though Delhi is the geographic center of the Hindi belt, where many Hindi writers, publishers, academics, and other elites live, it is not the only cultural center of Hindi. Centers of Hindi culture are also to be found in other places in the Hindi belt, places where Hindi is spoken without as much English (or Punjabi), where fewer people speak English fluently, and where the daily culture is saturated with Hindi rather than a mix of Hindi and English. Most of these Hindi centers—such as Allahabad and Varanasi—are in the