Writing in English in India, again

Does an Indian writing imaginatively inEnglish cater to an elite audience that constitutes less than two per cent of the population? How authentic can such writing be? RAJESWARI SUNDER RAJAN looks at issues surrounding this debate, in the first part of a two-part essay.

WRITERS in English in India no doubt heartily wish that the issue of their writing in an "other" tongue would go away, and cannot understand why it is resurrected periodically. That this should be happening at a time when Indian English fiction has "come of age" (to use a favourite journalistic cliche), when, as writers, they have made it in the English-speaking west and are even being viewed as intrepid anti-colonialists "writing back" to the empire, and when Salman Rushdie has announced their (and his) triumphant superiority to writers in all the other Indian languages put together in the post-Independence period - this must be annoying in the extreme. The bad blood between some (expatriate) Indian writers in English and their detractors, India-based critics, is turning out to be a literary quarrel of some seriousness. It covers a number of issues, some of which have been around for some time, but may nonetheless be worth rehearsing before I address the focal issue around "Indianness" - a term of some political import in the present.

The "original" issue is about English in India. Why writing in English, studying in English, studying English literature, using English in the courts and offices is an issue still is because it hasn't remained the same issue. In British India, English was the language of the colonialist. As the language of rule and one that, further, was introduced in native curriculums explicitly as a means of producing a babu class, as Macaulay in his 1835 Education Minute made no bones about asserting, it was a force to reckon with. It was opposed by the nationalists and embraced by the comprador professional class, though the actual picture was more complicated than that: "owning" the language of power also allowed the "native" to put it and the study of its literature to subversive ends, and many nationalists read Tom Paine and John Stuart Mill and Ruskin with profit and pleasure. In independent India, when language became a major and divisive issue in a multilingual nation, with the southern states in particular opposing the imposition of Hindi as an official language, English rationalised its position as co-official language because it is a pan-Indian and "link" language. Then, as earlier, it was a global language; today it is even more so (if something can be more global). Its influence can no longer be countered by nationalist or chauvinist demands for its removal from educational curricula or from other forums of official, commercial, or technological use. But "literature", as we shall see, is a different matter.

The considerable role and status of English in India are therefore indisputable. But despite its long colonial history and its current global significance, English is used by less than two per cent of the population. (Overall literacy in India stands at only 52 per cent). English is the (usually) second language of a small elite class - unlike, say, English in a former British colony like Trinidad or Jamaica in the West Indies, where it is the first, i. e. "native" language of the entire population of a region. This means (at least) two things: that, heterogeneous and numerically sizeable though an English-speaking population in India may be, they are broadly identifiable as a professional class, across regional differences. And two, the English they speak is less variable - less idiosyncratically "indigenous" - than the varieties of patois that one is likely to find among native English speakers. "Indianisms" can be found, of course, and now advertisers and television producers are giving currency to, even as they construct, a brand of Hindi-English, both class- marked as the usage of lower- and upper-class speakers, respectively. These have implications for the kind of writing that is produced in English by Indians.

The questions about doing creative or imaginative writing in English - using it "literarily" - pop up for several reasons. Let us grant that the colonial history of the language is a remote one now, and that the time for nationalist arguments is past. But there remain those potent articles of faith, less critical than sentimental, that maintain that the intimacy of creative writing is permitted only in the mother tongue, and that a foreign language can alienate one from one's lived reality. The most famous expression of this angst is to be found in a writer's work, not a critic's. This is Joyce's Stephen Daedalus, in Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, bemoaning the belatedness of the Irish writer:

The language in which we are speaking is his [the Englishman's] before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

This is a theory of language-as-identity that perhaps we should refrain from universalising, still less establish as a critical standard about "authenticity." It is, all the same, a pervasive and fraught issue for writers in colonial and postcolonial situations: the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiongo's passionate polemic, Decolonising the Mind, is a well-known document in this debate. Other writers, equally, have expressed their comfort and facility in trans-cultural, trans-linguistic literary production, and gone on to prove their ability in it - and the examples are not only Indian writers, but the famous ones of the Polish Conrad and the Russian Nabokov. Identities are both more fluid and more constitutively mixed than they are fixed. Further, some Indians have the ability to write only in English, which has become virtually a literary first language: this from Amit Chaudhuri's A Strange and Sublime Address:

Sandeep could hardly read Bengali. He could hardly write it. Brought up in Bombay, away from his own province, Bengal, he was one of the innumerable language-orphans of modern India. He was as illiterate in his language as . . . as Chhaya and Saraswati.

So the answer to the question: can Indian writers write in English? must be "yes", whether we mean by "can" the empirical fact, or their ability, or their freedom to do so. (I shall return to this last point, about the freedom to write in English, shortly).

The question of how (well) they write (about India) nevertheless remains an interesting and contentious critical issue, no more settled once and for all than the language issue. Does the disjuncture between the English language and a non-English reality impose certain kinds of constraints of subject-matter, style and fictional genre on the novelist? Meenakshi Mukherjee has suggested that it might produce in the contemporary writer a certain "anxiety", perhaps more correctly a self-consciousness, reflected in an overplus of markers of "Indian-ness" to establish their "authenticity" as well as the intimacy of their knowledge of Indian culture and geography, if not necessarily to assert nationalist sentiments ("The Anxiety of Indianness"). These would show up as defects: ornate or too-descriptive writing, exoticism, nostalgic evocation of sensuous details, glossing. Mukherjee contrasts this with the greater self-confidence or "naturalness" of writers in Indian languages.

Like many critical observations, this one is a generalisation rather than an unexceptionable fact. There is, however, another relevant consideration: Indian writers in English are positioned to look in two directions, towards their Indian English readers on one side, and their readers in the west in another, and in doing so, they could and sometimes do fail between explaining too much and explaining too little: hence the "anxiety". One of Salman Rushdie's great achievements in Midnight's Children, as readers in India were quick to notice and applaud, was how little of this anxiety he displayed. In other respects though, his text was craftily "double-coded for different audiences", as Kumkum Sangari has noted, with both costs and benefits from this strenuous "play".

The question of readership, then, becomes the crucial one. While it might be a mistake to argue that it absolutely determines what and how a novelist writes, to represent her solely as a spontaneous expressive artist - an artless koel pouring out her heart in song - is also a little thick. Writing with an audience in mind is one of the enduring characteristics of story telling, as Walter Benjamin pointed out. And writing is a social practice: it takes place in the context of history and politics, the public and the domestic, war and commerce and love. The "literary" is a space that includes a number of "ancillary", if you like, activities: publishing, media and publicity, reviews, prizes and awards, circulation, the critical industry, educational syllabi. It also has an economic dimension: writers sometimes depend on it for a living, and books are bought and sold.

It is on this ground - the literary space of Indo-Anglian writing - that the quarrels between critics and (some) novelists have sprung up, some of the more serious aspects of which I would like to subject to some reconsideration here.

Given the small rewards of the literary profession in India and, for those writing in English, further, the inconsiderable size of an English readership, a negligible publishing industry, and virtually no literary infrastructure, it is understandable that many Indo-Anglian writers have sought markets in Britain or the United States. And lately those markets have sought them. The advances in some recently much-publicised instances - Rushdie's, Vikram Seth's, Arundathi Roy's, Pankaj Mishra's - have been spectacular by any standards. The Indian media, mainly the English-language newspapers, magazines and a few television chat- shows, have celebrated these, after all, entirely newsworthy achievements. Critical Indian voices have been sour in contrast, mainly because writers in the other Indian languages ("regional" writers) have languished far behind such fame or monetary rewards, denied, seemingly, their just desserts.

This isn't, or should not be, a contest, and it certainly isn't a contest of virtue. But a contest and contestation is now very much in the air. Its spirit was raised and the challenge posed by Salman Rushdie's infamous New Yorker article and special issue in 1997, subsequently enshrined in his Vintage Book of Indian Writing, in which he announced the result of this contest: "prose writing - both fiction and non-fiction - created in this [post- Independence] period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 "official languages" of India, the so-called "vernacular languages", during the same time" (emphasis in original). He had no trouble admitting his own lack of access to most of this writing - he commands no Indian language, and translations into English are few and indifferent in quality. But he could bank on - correctly, as it has turned out - the importance of being Rushdie. His ignorance was worth more than anybody else's scholarship. Rushdie spectacularly made a virtue out of necessity. And in doing so, he (re)cast the English-"vernaculars" linguistic/literary situation in India as an opposition between a cosmopolitan against a parochial world view.

Almost no literate Indian takes Rushdie's valuation of regional language writing seriously. But his claims for English writing, which had long been amicably tolerated as a minor and minority literature, once again raised the questions about English-in- India with which I began.

Though Rushdie does not cite any Indian critic at length (he makes brief mention of Meenakshi Mukherjee and Pankaj Mishra), he does allude at length to "Indian critical assaults". Few of these, he complains, are "literary in the pure sense of the word". "Rather, they are about class, power and belief. There is a whiff of political correctness about them . . ." This hoary opposition between the "literary" and "the political" from the man who, in successive novels, attacked the Emergency in India, wrote a political fable about Pakistan, and drew upon himself the ire of the Ayotollah; and in his critical articles in the British press positively reeked of political self-righteousness on the subjects of racism, Empire and Thatcherism; who wrote the passionately polemical essay, "Inside the Whale", in which he not only opposed the idea that politics and literature didn't mix, but insisted that criticism too must be political: "it really is necessary to make a fuss about Raj fiction. . . If books and films could be made and consumed in the belly of the whale, it might be possible to consider them merely as entertainment, or even, on occasion, as art. But in our whaleless world, in this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss"; to whom the term "pure" was at one time anathema!

The opposition between the aesthetic and the political as rigidly separate categories is bound to be a futile and false one because it simply renders the category of the aesthetic empty, degrades literature to mere sensibility and frisson, and refuses to grant the density of the social, historical and material matrix of texts. Rushdie would prefer to praise Narayan (patronisingly, one cannot help thinking) in terms of his "art" - "gentle, lightly funny" - rather than for any aspect of gender, class, region or nationalism in his fiction, as some recent criticism is interested in doing. We must ask whether this is a service to Narayan's reputation or the only properly critical way of acknowledging his work's worth.

Rushdie's praise of Narayan goes on to perpetuate another cliche, again one that circulates when the writers in question are women or minorities: Narayan, writes Rushdie, goes "beyond" the "heart of the Indian condition" "into the human condition itself." This opposition too, between the particular and the universal, hides the enshrining of mainstream (western/white/male/bourgeois) literature as the norm against which others are measured by their degree of overcoming of their particularities. Here it is the national-Indian limitation of his fiction that Narayan is praised for transcending.

(To be continued)

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