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 state of Uttar Pradesh, which borders Delhi and is the most populous state in India. In the state of Bihar, it is the city of Patna where Hindi books are sold en masse. And in Madhya Pradesh, it is the city of Bhopal that is a cultural center for many Hindi novelists and poets. These other places, not Delhi, are commonly referred to as the “Hindi heartland.” However, the “Hindi heartland” does not only refer to geography; it is also an idea about the place and role of Hindi. In this sense, the Hindi poet and literary administrator Ashok Vajpeyi told me, “Most small towns can't contain Hindi writers.” It is precisely the institutional and cultural offerings of Delhi that have made it a center for Hindi writers and a place where their own ideas have come into contact with those of writers in many other Indian languages, including English.
AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF LITERATURE
The process of English becoming an Indian language, alongside Hindi and vis à vis other Indian languages, is the story that I tell from the perspective of various individuals and institutions in Delhi. My reading of Delhi, my conversations with publishers, writers, and others, and my analysis of texts is meant to suggest how the meanings of a language, from the everyday to the ideological, emerge from the places in which it is located and lived through. In this sense, the individual's feeling for language is a prism through which I analyze contemporary society.
In the chapters that follow I document subjective relationships people have to language and their own linguistic histories. I locate them in particular places and in different paradigms, including the local, national, regional, and global. This book is not a survey of all I saw and everyone I met but instead is organized around key figures and places in the literary landscape that I believe encapsulate the most important features, moments, and problems that have defined Indian literary life since the early 1970s. In this respect the chapters offer three interlinked narratives: the cultural history of English vis à vis Hindi and the bhashas, debates about cultural and linguistic authenticity, and the city of Delhi as a postcolonial and now increasingly globalized literary space. Each chapter moves across the literary field, from text to institution to publisher to author or translator, highlighting and expanding on key ethnographic moments and milieus. My approach is not only a method but also a vision of how to understand English in India and the relationship between literature and politics in the world more generally.
In terms of my day-to-day methodology, I began by visiting publishing houses and bookshops and going to events at the Sahitya Akademi, the Habitat Centre, the India International Centre, and other cultural venues in the city. At first I relied on newspaper listings for cultural events, crunched in extra small type at the bottom of pages in newspapers such as the Times of India, Hindustan Times (in Hindi and English), and The Hindu. Then, as I got to know people, I was invited to events or often just had a sense of where to show up or whom to call. As the writer Pankaj Mishra told me in one of my first interviews in 2001, there was no real literary “scene” to speak of in Delhi. He was right in terms of—and this is what Mishra emphasized—the quality and standards of writing, editing, reviewing, and publishing that one found elsewhere and were essential to creating an informed reading public leading to that somewhat elusive scene. Yet my sense was that there was something to be found and discerned, even if it might not look the same, or feel the same, as it did elsewhere. I started to see English in relation to the bhashas, especially when listening to writers who inhabited multiple worlds, such as Gagan Gill, Nirmal Verma, K. Satchidanandan, Kiran Nagarkar, and Geetanjali Shree. And when I had conversations with publishers such as Ashok Maheshwari and Ravi Dayal, who offered their own linguistic ethnographies of the city, a map of the literary field began to emerge. As I connected my knowledge of texts to places and people, I began not only to read differently but also to see how a variety of literary practitioners were connected to each other and to recurring notions, realities, and moralities of place. Most of all, I started to see how different languages stood for different things to different people and what was being created emotionally, intellectually, and politically—on the page, in their lives, and in society—because of it.
The more research I did, the more my methods adapted to what I was seeing and listening to and the more I saw how language ideologies exist not only in political realms but in everyday life as well. For this reason, I propose the “ethnographic study of literature” as a way to link the practices of literary production to the politics of language in discrete and overlapping literary fields of actors and institutions. Literature reflects and represents, but it is also produced and consumed under particular social and political conditions. An ethnographic approach emphasizes the connection between literary analysis and the meaning of everyday life, even as it interrogates and unravels it. However, the point is not merely to juxtapose the methods of ethnography and literary analysis for some kind of layering effect, interpretation upon interpretation. Instead my method is to intercut between ethnography and the study of literary texts. I use the insights gleaned from one practice or realm to question and inform the analysis of another. It is this intercutting, a practice that emerged from my own experience of research, that is central to the critical perspective I introduce in the pages that follow.
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