<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote"> Forwarded From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Fierman, William</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:wfierman@indiana.edu">wfierman@indiana.edu</a>></span><br>Date: Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 1:35 PM<br><br>How English Ruined Indian Literature<br><br><br><br><br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:24.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">How English Ruined Indian Literature<u></u><u></u></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">By AATISH TASEERMARCH 19, 2015
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">NEW DELHI — A BOATMAN I met in Varanasi last year, while covering the general election that made Narendra Modi
prime minister of India, said, “When Modi comes to power, we will send this government of the English packing.”<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The government of the English! The boatman naturally did not mean the British Raj; that had ended nearly 70
years before. What he meant was its extension through the English-speaking classes in India. He meant me, and he could tell at a glance — these things have almost the force of racial differences in India — that I was not just a member of that class, but a
beneficiary of the tremendous power it exerted over Indian life.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">“English is not a language in India,” a friend once told me. “It is a class.” This friend, an aspiring Bollywood
actor, knew firsthand what it meant to be from the wrong class. Absurd as it must sound, he was frequently denied work in the Hindi film industry for not knowing English. “They want you to walk in the door speaking English. Then if you switch to Hindi, they
like it. Otherwise they say, ‘the look doesn’t fit.’ ” My friend, who comes from a small town in the Hindi-speaking north, knew very well why his look didn’t fit. He knew, too, from the example of dozens of upper-middle class, English-speaking actors, that
the industry would rather teach someone with no Hindi the language from scratch than hire someone like him.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">India has had languages of the elite in the past — Sanskrit was one, Persian another. They were needed to unite
an entity more linguistically diverse than Europe. But there was perhaps never one that bore such an uneasy relationship to the languages operating beneath it, a relationship the Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock has described as “a scorched-earth policy,”
as English.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">India, if it is to speak to itself, will always need a lingua franca. But English, which re-enacts the colonial
relationship, placing certain Indians in a position the British once occupied, does more than that. It has created a linguistic line as unbreachable as the color line once was in the United States.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Two students I met in Varanasi encapsulated India’s tortured relationship with English. Both attended Benares
Hindu University, which was founded in the early 20th century to unite traditional Indian learning with modern education from the West. Both students were symbols of the failure of this enterprise.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">One of them, Vishal Singh, was a popular basketball player, devoted to Michael Jordan and Enfield motorbikes.
He was two-thirds of the way through a degree in social sciences — some mixture of psychology, sociology and history. All of his classes were in English, but, over the course of a six-week friendship, I discovered to my horror that he couldn’t string together
a sentence in the language. He was the first to admit that his education was a sham, but English was power. And if, in three years, he learned no more than a handful of basic sentences in English, he was still in a better position than the other student I
came to know.<u></u><u></u></span></p><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/how-english-ruined-indian-literature.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article#story-continues-4" target="_blank"><span style="color:blue"></span></a> </span>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">That student, Sheshamuni Shukla, studied classical grammar in the Sanskrit department. He had spent over a decade
mastering rules of grammar set down by the ancient Indian grammarians some 2,000 years before. He spoke pure and beautiful Hindi; in another country, a number of careers might have been open to him. But in India, without English, he was powerless. Despite
his grand education, he would be lucky to end up as a teacher or a clerk in a government office. He felt himself a prisoner of language. “Without English, there is no self-confidence,” he said.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">In my own world — the world of English writing and publishing in India — the language has wrought neuroses of
its own. India, over the past three decades, has produced many excellent writers in English, such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy. The problem is that none of these writers can credit India alone for their success; they all came
to India via the West, via its publishing deals and prizes.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">India, when left to its own devices, throws up a very different kind of writer, a man such as Chetan Bhagat,
who, though he writes in English about things that are urgent and important — like life on campuses and in call centers — writes books of such poor literary quality that no one outside India can be expected to read them. India produces a number of such writers,
and some justly speculate that perhaps this is the authentic voice of modern India. But this is not the voice of a confident country. It sounds rather like a country whose painful relationship with language has left it voiceless.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky felt in the 19th century that the slavish imitation of European culture
had created “a sort of duality in Russian life, consequently a lack of moral unity.” The Indian situation is worse; the Russians at least had Russian.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">In the past, there were many successful Indian writers who were bi- and trilingual. Rabindranath Tagore, the
winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in English and Bengali; Premchand, the short story writer and novelist, wrote in Hindi and Urdu; and Allama Iqbal wrote English prose and Persian and Urdu poetry, with lines like:<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The illusion is comfort, stability</span></i><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">In truth every grain of Creation pulsates</span></i><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The caravan of form never rests</span></i><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Every instance a fresh manifestation of its glory</span></i><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">You think Life is the mystery; Life is but the rapture of flight.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br><i><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""></span></i><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">But around the time of my parents’ generation, a break began to occur. Middle-class parents started sending
their children in ever greater numbers to convent and private schools, where they lost the deep bilingualism of their parents, and came away with English alone. The Indian languages never recovered<i>.</i> Growing up in Delhi in the 1980s, I spoke Hindi and
Urdu, but had to self-consciously relearn them as an adult. Many of my background didn’t bother.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">This meant that it was not really possible for writers like myself to pursue a serious career in an Indian language.
We were forced instead to make a roundabout journey back to India. We could write about our country, but we always had to keep an eye out for what worked in the West. It is a shameful experience; it produces feelings of irrelevance and inauthenticity. V. S.
Naipaul called it “the riddle of the two civilizations.” He felt it stood in the way of “identity and strength and intellectual growth.”<u></u><u></u></span></p><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""></span>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Aatish Taseer is
<a href="http://www.aatishtaseer.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color:blue">the author</span></a> of the novels “Noon” and the forthcoming “The Way Things Were.”<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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</div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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