script and Hindus in Devanagari. And yet, in the film at least, Urdu literally mediates in an improbable yet telling way. It supports the premise of the film, that religious cultures are “separate but equal,” the hallmark of the Indian secular ideal. Urdu as a sign of difference enters mainstream Hindi cinema—an industry that is ironically made up mostly of Hindustani speakers. Even more telling perhaps is that in today's Mumbai cinema, the often ridiculed “filmy Hindi” screenplays and television scripts are written in Roman script, since many actors do not read Hindi anymore, whether in the Perso-Arabic or Nagari script.
A SHIFTING LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE
To return to the realm of the Indian English novel, what does it mean for Ali and then Desai to recount the demise of another language? And to do so, not as triumphalist accounts, but as mournful tales? By writing about Urdu in English in this satirical mode, Desai emphasizes her own complicity in Urdu's demise. Her satire is far from the world of Hindi comedy, yet creates its own measure of ironic distance. For lament has turned to satire on the very question of language itself, as Hindi is ridiculed and the desire for Urdu is doomed from the start. English meanwhile has become a normative narrative presence. It embodies a self-consciousness that becomes part of its very definition as an Indian language. In this sense, the novel tells the story of the relationship between English and the bhashas. English enables Indians to look out onto the world (the most common refrain of Indian cosmopolitanism), but in Desai's reckoning, it perhaps even more significantly allows them to reappraise their own linguistic backgrounds and struggles.
Thus, English in India is shaped by internal struggles over language as much as it has been by the colonizer-colonized relationship. This shaping of English goes beyond the interpretation of each text on its own. By reading the texts as a pair, it is possible to see the ways in which English has sparked the social and literary consciousness of modern Indians, of the work that English does on that consciousness, and the effect that English has on lives and livelihoods. Indians who write in English do so not merely because they have been educated in that language. The language has become part of the social fabric, and that fabric includes intersections with and relationships to other Indian languages. Both novels show that to live in a particular language is to inhabit a different cultural world, and what it means for English to “usurp” a place (to return to Gandhi) is really a story of how individual subjectivities change with the adoption of new linguistic sensibilities. In Delhi, and many other parts of north India, English changed the way Urdu and Hindi exist socially and politically. People sometimes speak of “Englishwallahs” and “Hindiwallahs” not to denote which language someone speaks—most people are at least bilingual—but instead to denote the relationship they have to that language, their world-view, the family they come from, the type of education they have had, the beliefs they hold and promote.
In the novels of Ali and Desai, the shifting linguistic landscape changes what people think, believe, and desire. It is this larger social and historical texture of English in Indian society and the meanings of the uses of English for Indians in everyday life that then becomes paramount.
CHAPTER 3
In Sujan Singh Park
In 1967 Nirad Chaudhuri issued a characteristically dire pronouncement on the place of Indian writers in the world. “It is essential,” he wrote, “from every point of view to secure the imprint of a London or New York publisher, and the higher the status of even these publishers the better for the writer.”1 For Indian writers of English, Chaudhuri seems to be saying, the only path to literary recognition is through the publishing apparatus of the Western world. Further along he continues in a slightly more ominous vein: “But one warning I must give. To be acceptable to Western publishers, an Indian must write English not only with competence, but with distinction. The competition with the natural writers of English is so severe that British and American publishers will not submit to the impact of any English from an Indian writer which is not quite out of the ordinary.”2
In Chaudhuri's mind, and in the minds of many of his generation and class, the intellectual center of the English-speaking world could only ever be located in the West. And, by implication, the traffic in ideas could only ever be directed by the demands of London-based publishers, the “natural” speakers of the English language. It was they who would judge literary merit and disperse literary capital accordingly. And in the evaluation of the literary, there would be a measurement of linguistic competence. In Chaudhuri's passive, double-negative construction regarding publishers not willing to submit to “the impact of English that is not quite out of the ordinary,” it is almost as if the Indians have the upper hand, wielding their wanton prose through the streets of London. Chaudhuri's advice to other writers details a classic center-periphery dynamic: how to turn the colonizer's gaze to one's own advantage, to “write back” and get published. And yet if postcolonial writing was meant to be about the reappropriation of the colonizer's language, would not the place of publication also have to be refigured?
The last chapter detailed how English mediated the linguistic realms of Hindi and Urdu, emphasizing key shifts from the colonial to postcolonial periods. This chapter argues for English as mediator in the realm of elite intellectual life, specifically in the decades after independence. It is a story of a particular upper-caste background and upper-middle-class sensibility, one in which secular and liberal values become defined and associated with cultural production in English. It is a set of values that I identify as emerging from a dual sense and experience of one's own place in society. From the 1970s onward Delhi was the major hub of this intellectual life, largely because the academic and then literary publishing outfits in English moved there and, along with other institutions, became the center for the exchange of ideas in English, ideas that would ultimately inform the larger multilingual intellectual and literary spheres in the city and beyond.
POSTCOLONIAL PUBLISHING
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