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Two Tales of a City
On family visits to Delhi in the 1970 s, South Extension was a sleepy place. It was always summer, and we spent the afternoons under the fan. My cousins and I would quiz each other over world geography, they with their British-inflected accents and spellings, me with my wide American syllables. By early evening one of my uncles would show up with a bag of warm samosas and a few bottles of sweet, sizzling Thums Up. Later, another uncle would whiz me around on his scooter to the market. He would get a paan, and I would stand next to him and invariably be approached by street children for a rupee coin.
Once on the outskirts of the city where partition-era refugees bought government-subsidized plots of land, today South Extension is a congested, central, and upscale residential area and shopping hub. Over the years I have watched as the area has become emblematic of the new New Delhi, surrounded by flyovers, jammed with cars, and home to an array of Indian and multinational shops. Land prices have skyrocketed, and today the horseshoe-shaped market looks like a car dealership, its mass of metal gleaming under the sun. My grandmother's small pink bungalow on B-block, with its open courtyard, has long since been sold and its flowering tree replaced by an imposing multistory house built to the edge of the road. I still visit the market to eat gol gappas standing outside Bengali Sweets, admire the costly fabrics at Heritage, and visit Tekson's Bookshop, but I lament the passing of time and people more than the place itself.
This chapter unearths a cultural history of English, one whose origins I locate in the realm of colonial-era political discourse and in Delhi's Urdu, sublimely poetic past. In the post-independence era, it has become a truism to say, “English is an Indian language.” And yet its path to becoming one, especially in the literary realm, has been contested at every step along the way. I reflect on the “authenticity” of English by providing a genealogy of it from the political to the literary realm. I argue that it is precisely how English becomes indigenized and compromised in specific instances and discrete contexts that will come to characterize the language and its eventual role as mediator. On the one hand, the back story of any understanding of English as an Indian literary language necessarily involves its role as a language in the nationalist movement and, more specifically, as being integral to India's political modernity. English was accepted, by necessity, in the political realm because it allowed a pan-Indian movement, one that was at first merely critical of British rule and then eventually anti-British, to take shape. On the other hand, it is not that English came to represent a national consciousness in any holistic sense but rather that the language created a new set of compromises, both emotional and ideological.
A VERY SHORT STORY ABOUT ENGLISH BECOMING INDIAN
As Indians became increasingly critical of colonial rule in the last half of the nineteenth century, the British started to monitor Indian-language publications; in the aftermath of the 1857 Revolt in particular, they were naturally worried about seditious ideas that could reach the masses in their own languages.1 Amrita Bazar Patrika, a Bengali newspaper launched in 1868, was one such publication; the periodical was known for its support and promotion of Indian nationalist causes. In 1878 the British colonial government in India passed the Vernacular Press Act, which allowed legal censorship of the Indian press. Amrita Bazar Patrika responded by switching to publishing in English overnight, effectively evading a law meant for “vernacular” languages.
English, of course, was not a vernacular language, and, in this case, publishing in English turned out to be a safe zone for Indians. The British were not willing to censor the English-language press, among which Amrita Bazar Patrika could now be counted, since doing so would go against their own notions of free speech. In line with their liberal values, freedom of the English-language press was paramount. Freedom of speech for Indians in their own languages—the bhashas—was not. That the editors of Amrita Bazar Patrika switched from publishing in Bengali to publishing in English suggested an attempt to alter the language-knowledge-power equation to their advantage.
For Partha Chatterjee, the story of the Vernacular Press Act reveals the true nature of British liberalism and what he calls “the rule of colonial difference.”2 He argues that the universal claims of British liberalism were in fact undermined and curtailed by its own racism, since there was one rule for the British and another for Indians.3 In another way, we may also read this event as symbolic of the myriad ways in which the English language, by necessity, ingenuity, and compromise, has become Indian. There was a social and political cost to the Indian editors, who in a move to retain their right to publish, had to turn their Bengali newspaper into an English-language one. There was also a cost to the newspaper's Bengali readers, many of whom were not able to read English. Their “rights”—access to information and ideas in their own language—were surely diminished in the process. It is this kind of process that created a wedge between Indian English-speaking elites and Indians who did not have English, a wedge that would create its own set of problems for the subsequent nationalist movement. And yet if English was seen as the language of whites alone, this was beginning to change.
GANDHI'S PLEA
A year before Indian independence nationalist leaders were necessarily reckoning with what would stay and what would go. In a column that appeared in English on August 25, 1946, in the consciousness-raising journal Harijan, Mohandas K. Gandhi wrote, “I love the English tongue in its own place, but I am its inveterate opponent, if it usurps a place which does not belong to it.”4
In Gandhi's view, the English language had come with the English, had become rooted in elite Indian society, and had gone on to become a contributing factor to what divided elite Indian interests from the masses. Gandhi's diatribe against English was part of his larger critique of modernity, most cogently presented in Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) in 1909. In that book, written as a polemic, Gandhi emphasized that self-government (the rule of one's self by the self) was a precursor to home rule and that for Indians to rule themselves they would have to draw on Indian, not Western, civilization. This line of reasoning, of course, required a definition of what constituted Indian civilization. It did not matter to Gandhi that he himself had been educated in London, an experience that enabled his work as a civil rights lawyer in South Africa and his ultimate return to lead the anticolonial movement in India. Gandhi saw his critique of English in India as a critique of the class of people (in India and those abroad, such as the Indian expats in London whom he had met) who spoke English and claimed to represent the nation.
Despite the fact that English may have been one of the factors leading to the very creation of the first pan-Indian national organization, in the form of the Indian National Congress, established in 1885, Gandhi saw English as another example of what divided Indians and argued that it obstructed real freedom, or swaraj (self-rule). The seeming contradiction of what English allowed and prevented fit perfectly with Gandhi's larger critique of the nationalist movement—that it was elitist and out of touch with the masses. In Hind Swaraj, written originally in Gujarati as a dialogue between a newspaper editor and a reader (and then translated into English by Gandhi himself), he writes:
Reader: Do I then understand that you do not consider English education necessary for obtaining Home Rule?
Editor: My answer is yes and no. To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them. The foundation that Macaulay laid of education has enslaved us. I do not suggest that he had any such intention, but that has been the result. Is it not a sad commentary that we should have to speak of Home Rule in a foreign tongue? …
Is it not a most painful thing that, if I want to go to a court of justice, I must employ the English language as a medium; that, when I become a barrister, I may not speak my mother-tongue, and that someone else should have to translate to me from my own language? Is not this absolutely absurd? Is it not a sign of slavery? Am I to blame the English for it or myself? It is we, the English-knowing men, that have enslaved India. The curse of the nation will
