book is about the politics of language in India's literary field. Several key figures in that field—the publisher Ravi Dayal, the writer Nirmal Verma, the literary scholar Meenakshi Mukherjee—passed away before it was published. I am grateful to them and to all those represented in these pages who shared their experiences and insights with
The support for the original research for this book came from Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, a Society of Women Geographers' Fellowship, a Robert E. Lowie Grant, and two Humanities Research Grants from the University of California, Berkeley, where I was a graduate student in anthropology. Lawrence Cohen, my advisor at Berkeley, has been with this project from beginning to end, and his support, in too many ways to recount, has been tremendous. Vasudha Dalmia has been a true mentor to me, and I must have consulted her on every aspect of this book and its publication. I can't thank her enough. At Berkeley, I was also inspired and challenged by Stefania Pandolfo, Aihwa Ong, Raka Ray, Gene Irschick, Tom Metcalf, Sharon Kaufman, Michael Watts, Trinh Minh Ha, and Usha Jain. I first began to form some of the intellectual questions I had about Indian modernity when I took Sudipta Kaviraj's politics seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and I was fortunate to be able to study with him again when he came to Berkeley as a visiting scholar. It was my good luck that Ram Guha was also a visiting scholar around this time and taught a brilliant course on Gandhi.
The period of revision and further research was made possible when I was a National Science Foundation-funded postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, in the Department of Anthropology, from 2003 to 2006, and then by a second postdoctoral fellowship in the Committee on Global Thought in 2006-7. I thank Nick Dirks, Sherry Ortner, Brink Messick, Kate Wittenberg, Partha Chatterjee, and Akeel Bilgrami for providing the intellectual support and institutional space that made my time there so productive and enjoyable. In New York, I was also fortunate to receive encouragement and valuable feedback for this project from Robert Young and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan.
My revisions were helped along with the excellent comments I received from audiences when I was invited to present work at the Mellon Humanities Workshop at Stanford University, the South Asia Colloquium in Anthropology at Yale University, the Department of English at New York University, the Departments of History and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, the Women's Studies Programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Centre for Contemporary Theory in Baroda, and at Sarai / the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi.
Teaching in India for the past two years has been a wonderful experience and has deepened my understanding of the issues of place and language that are central to this book. I thank my students, as well as V. R. Muraleedharan and Chella Rajan of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and Amrit Srinivasan of IIT Delhi for making it possible. The Sahitya Akademi was one of my research sites, but it also became a place where I sat and wrote. I thank the staff of the library there and especially S. Padmanabham.
I feel lucky to be part of the FlashPoints series and am grateful to the editorial board for its enthusiastic support of the manuscript from the start. Special thanks go to Ali Behdad of FlashPoints and Lynne Withey of UC Press for expertly shepherding the manuscript through. I also thank my two anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions for revision. I was thrilled to have Rukun Advani on board as the publisher of the book in India, and credit goes to him for coming up with the book's title. Portions of this book originally appeared in earlier versions in the following journals: “Two Tales of the City: The Place of English and the Limits of Postcolonial Critique,” in Interventions; and “A Suitable Text for a Vegetarian Audience: Questions of Authenticity and the Politics of Translation,” in Public Culture.
The continual support of family and friends has strengthened and, in many cases, made possible this work. I thank Promilla Mathur, Veena Naregal, Sunila and Pramod Sharma, Sonia Palitana, Raj and Indra Chugh and families, who over the years in their respective homes created a base for me in Delhi, Mumbai, and Pune, one that was then happily fortified by Harini Narayanan, Gautam Mody, and Alli Roshini in Delhi and Padma and R. I. Narayanan in Chennai. Veena Sadana, Suren Sadana, Ritu Sadana, Jacques Bury, Jacques-Kabir Bury, and Gitanjali Bury have given unstinting support everywhere and through it all. Meanwhile, Ambika delights as we anticipate which language her first words will be in.
My co-conspirators, Falu Bakrania, Ritu Birla, Diana Blank, Anindita Chakrabarty, Batya Elul, Ilana Feldman, Paul Frymer, Rachel Heiman, Poonam Joshi, Mani Lambert, Scott Morrison, Gustav Peebles, Renee Rubin Ross, Neil Safier, Shalini Satkunandanan, Miriam Ticktin, and Ananya Vajpeyi read drafts, showed by example, and much else; Vivek Narayanan did all the above and brought the essential perspective that had been missing for too long.
Prologue
The Slush Pile
In the mid-1990s, working as a part-time editorial assistant at Granta in London, I was, for a very short time, in charge of the slush pile. The pile consisted mostly of short stories that had been sent in to the magazine; they came unsolicited and without representation by a literary agent. The submissions largely came from the United States and Britain but also from places like Bangladesh, Canada, India, Kenya, Nigeria, and Singapore—together sometimes referred to as the British Commonwealth or, lately, the Anglophone world. I found myself reading stamps and return addresses as carefully as the stories and concluded that they made a story of their own.
I read solicited manuscripts, too, most of which came from first-time American and British writers, all of whom had agents. But it is the slush pile I was most impressed by, the collective bulk of it, lying in stacks that lined one side of the office. On several Saturdays I was asked to come in to read through it, that immovable feast. I was given few formal instructions about what to do, but I knew I was supposed to make the pile smaller, if for no other reason than to create room for the new submissions that were continually streaming in. Someone gave me a stack of little mimeographed rejection slips. It was assumed that if I came across a gem I would pass it on to the editor. Unfortunately, on the few Saturdays I worked on the slush pile, that never happened, but the experience gave me a different way to think about the nature of what is often called “postcolonial literature.”
As I sifted through the pile and read through the stories, it became apparent just how different these writers' relationships to the English language were. The pile offered an array of Englishes, but it also offered an array of literary representations from vastly different societies. It seemed too simple to think of this literary democracy that was the slush pile as evidence of a vibrant Commonwealth or Anglophone world of letters. Instead, I started to think about what was behind some of this English, such as the other languages in its midst, and the realms of literary production in different parts of the world. In the case of India, whose cultural and political history I had been studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), English was just one of more than a dozen important literary languages with long histories of their own, including Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, and Bengali, to name a hefty handful.
In those days, from the Granta office in Islington, I used to take the tube from Angel station; two stops later, Russell Square, and a short walk over to SOAS. Between trendy Islington and stately Russell Square, I would change from the Northern Line to the Piccadilly Line at King's Cross Station, surely one of the world's most impressive confluences of people, nationalities, and languages. Where, I wondered, did literature begin? In a place? In a language? Over that year, I started to see in concrete terms how publishing was about the politics of language and location.
I also saw in the offerings of the slush pile a politics of desire. It made me consider what literature was before agents and publication, before texts are made great and become known. I became increasingly curious about the writers of these submissions themselves and how they might live in a non-English milieu or a multilingual one, yet write in English, and sometimes desire to be published
