was, however, not only a symbol of class division; rather it actively jeopardized the nationalist movement. Gandhi saw it as an impediment to the winning of independence and self-government. How could Indians come to know themselves in English? For him, it was not a question of English being a window on the world for some Indians but of there being an unbridgeable divide between poor and rich and between rural and urban, a divide along the lines of one's experience and way of life. To be sure, Gandhi did not want to imagine an independent India where English was still entrenched.
What did not fit in with Gandhi's polemic on things foreign and things Indian was that English in India did not exist in a vacuum; it was not something that had been casually set down and was now to be brushed aside. It had not merely usurped a “place,” but had created a place for itself. Gandhi, as much as the more comfortably Anglicized Jawaharlal Nehru, saw the great utility of English as a “link language” among Indian nationalists from across the incipient nation. But even if English had its place during colonial rule, that place would have to change after independence had been won. Gandhi's diatribes against English emphasized the symbolic, class-oriented meaning of English in India rather than its existence alongside other Indian languages. At the same time, his own strategic uses of English, Gujarati, and Hindi, depending on whom he was addressing or in which form and genre he was writing, were in some respects a precursor to how issues of language in post-independence India would unfold. And in this regard, it is also important to note that Gandhi's advocacy of Hindi as the national language was not for the Sanskritized Hindi associated with Hindus but for Hindustani, the common spoken language of north India that was a mix of Hindi and Urdu.
In this chapter, I consider how the meaning and “place” of English changes from being a strategic language to an Indian one and how this shift alters not only the language and its meanings and uses in India, but the urban landscape itself. This shift is not wholesale; instead, as I will show, English comes to take on a mediating role. In considering Delhi's linguistic history as showcased in two novels—Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi and Anita Desai's In Custody—I detail how the process of English becoming Indian is closely linked to its relationship to the other Indian languages. This relationship has to do with the social locations of language—of Urdu, Hindi, and English—and the conflicts that arise therein. Both novels happen to be classics, although that is not why I write about them. Rather, I was struck by the resonances—relating to language, genre, and narrative—between them as I thought about the corpus of writing in English by Indians as a whole. This resonance tells a story about the temporal and political disjuncture between the colonial and the postcolonial and relays a social and cultural narrative of acclimatization.
WHERE THE NOVEL TRUMPS POETRY
In the case of north India, the place of English is moderated by the shifting relationship between Hindi and Urdu. English becomes a way for Indians to reflect on their own society and to speak to different publics but also, most crucially perhaps, to assess the other Indian languages in its midst. The question of genre, of the novel versus poetry, and how the former trumps the latter, is also integral to these two tales; it is a mirror of the place of English vis-à-vis Urdu, whereby English plays the part of the novel, or prose, and Urdu of poetry, or verse. This mapping of genre onto language has, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has detailed, much to do with how prose, rather than poetry, has become associated with political modernity, with its attendant notions of the “real” and an “objectivist engagement with the world.” Poetry, meanwhile, comes to be seen as existing “outside of historical time.”6 This distinction plays out in my reading of Twilight in Delhi and In Custody both at the level of genre and of language, as we see the English-language prose novel take center stage.
The work of Ahmed Ali offers a literary understanding of what it meant for English to “usurp” another place, language, and cultural sensibility. His 1940 novel, Twilight in Delhi, brought us Mir Nihal, a Muslim patriarch steeped in the traditions and language of Urdu, living in Old Delhi at the peak of Britain's colonial enterprise in India, from 1911 to 1919. Forty-four years later, Anita Desai wrote another novel about the demise of Urdu; In Custody recounts the tale of a Hindi (and Hindu) lecturer from the provinces who comes to Old Delhi to find and interview one of the last great Urdu poets.
By reading the texts as a pair, one may see how Delhi is transformed by its own linguistic history from the colonial period to a postcolonial one and how the English language becomes central in the reformulation of people's identities as Indians and as Dilliwallahs (residents of Delhi). Read one after the other, the two novels create a surprising narrative of their own. This narrative is not a straightforward sociology or history of the city of Delhi but instead has to do with the kinds of artifice being created by each author. It is also a narrative whose resonance is felt precisely because of the gap in time between the writing of the two texts. English, it turns out, was not about the relationship between Indians and Britons but more about Indians' relationships with one another. Where Ali directs his English prose to English speakers outside India, Desai is speaking to a homegrown audience of Indian English readers, people essentially like herself. Further, both novels recount prose stories about Urdu poetry; in Ali's tale it is the poetic imagining of Old Delhi; in Desai, the tale of a degenerating Urdu poet living in Old Delhi. Both tales highlight a disjuncture in terms of language and of genre, whereby the form of the novel is summoned to explain, as it were, the poetic.
Franco Moretti intriguingly writes of the relation between verse and prose to suggest why prose prevailed “so thoroughly” in the historical formation of the novel. He writes that “a line of verse can to a certain extent stand alone, and so it encourages independent clauses; prose is continuous, it's more of a construction. I don't think it's an accident that the myth of ‘inspiration' is so seldom evoked for prose: inspiration is too instantaneous to make sense there, too much like a gift; and prose is not a gift; it's work.”7 The distinction between “work” and “gift” plays out especially, and to great comic effect, in In Custody, where the poet Nur sees his poetic utterances as gifts that can never be returned from a prosaic, Hindi world. Both novels tell tales of how poetry is romanticized, comically and tragically, and how it is ultimately squashed by a less forgiving, prose-dominant world. The lament for language is also a lament for genre.
Ali (1910-94) was part of an earlier generation of Indian English writers, those whose literary consciousness was formed during the colonial period. By writing a history of Delhi in literary form, Ali assumed the role of historian in the colonizer's language, and he achieved this within the temporal space and climate of the British Raj. His novel employs the English language to tell Britons of the emotional toll on their colonial subjects in a language they will not only understand, but uncannily recognize, as it describes a foreign city they themselves have come to dominate. Desai (b. 1937) is closer to the Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) generation of Indian writers. She came of age just after Indian independence but is usually not included in the post-Rushdie Indian fiction boom. In many ways the style and themes of Desai's fiction form a bridge from one generation of Indian English writers to the next, whereas Rushdie's marks a more decisive break.
Desai's In Custody is especially interesting for the way it almost seems to take up temporally where Ali's left off. The protagonist changes from an Urduwallah to a Hindiwallah; Delhi is still the capital but is no longer ruled by the British; most important, the population and character of Delhi have changed considerably after the partition of 1947. Yet, reading Ali's novel and then Desai's, it is also as if the same tale is being passed down and retold. Both novels recount the demise of Urdu literary culture in the city of Delhi, even if the manner in which they do so points to two different moments in what could be called the “localization” of English in India. Ali's is a mournful tale, heavy with despair and dilapidation; Desai fills her pages with sly humor and linguistic caricatures, balancing the personal failures and unfulfilled longings of her characters. In an attempt to locate Ali and Desai on the same map but then chart the distance between them, I will illustrate the shift from one kind of English to another, a movement that illuminates both the fact of Indian independence from the British and the complicated
