[lg policy] Fwd: How English Ruined Indian Literature

Mon Mar 23 21:14:08 UTC 2015

 Forwarded From: Fierman, William <wfierman at indiana.edu>
Date: Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 1:35 PM

How English Ruined Indian Literature

 *How English Ruined Indian Literature*

By AATISH TASEERMARCH 19, 2015

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/how-english-ruined-indian-literature.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article#story-continues-4>

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

*The illusion is comfort, stability*

*In truth every grain of Creation pulsates*

*The caravan of form never rests*

*Every instance a fresh manifestation of its glory*

*You think Life is the mystery; Life is but the rapture of flight.*

 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*.* 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.

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.”

Aatish Taseer is the author <http://www.aatishtaseer.com/> of the novels
“Noon” and the forthcoming “The Way Things Were.”

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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