Or was it just that the desire to be published internationally was very strong? Was what I was seeing in the slush pile the old Naipaulian quest, writers desperate to connect to a bigger, wider, better literary world, writers whose very sense of self and being in the world depended on it? Was it not possible to be a writer at home? Or was the very meaning of writing in English still, after years of supposed independence, to aim for London?
Some of these questions have been at the center of postcolonial studies for many years. Its central paradigm—indigenous resistance to colonial domination and, in literary terms, of “writing back to empire”—has necessarily and productively emphasized “the postcolonial” as a conversation between Europe and its others. It has largely been the story of how writers of colonized or formerly colonized nations reappropriated European colonial languages—English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—as a form of political resistance and cultural critique. This paradigm forged new understandings of the nature of knowledge, culture, and power in diverse colonial and postcolonial contexts. It also became a way to begin to understand the neocolonial world in which we live.1
Yet the premise of the postcolonial critique has been that the traffic in ideas moves from the centers to the peripheries and back again. I believe this premise, based as it is on a single model of resistance, limits our understanding of how colonial languages become indigenized and begin to create their own circuits of knowledge and power. Part of the problem with the postcolonial paradigm is that it has become so linked with issues of migration and transnationalism that the focus has remained on and in many respects has strengthened an East-West dialectic. What, I wondered, had happened and was happening to English in India after colonization? How and why did it sustain itself as an Indian language, and to what extent was it part of Indian cultural life? These questions are pertinent not only to the story of English in India, but to the disparate processes of the globalization of English happening around the world.
I became convinced that I would not find the answers only by reading and analyzing Indian English texts or by comparing them to other bodies of literature. The texts mattered, but so, I started to believe, did the place from which the writing emerged. For one, I needed more tools that would enable me to see—literally—the ground of literature. As a result, I turned to anthropology as a way to question the role of language in colonial discourse, the relationship between history and ethnography, and eventually between language and textual production.2 I realized that rather than only study literature, I needed to immerse myself in the larger world of the production of literature in India.
CHAPTER 1
Reading Delhi and Beyond
THE PAVEMENT BOOKSELLER
I ask a pavement bookseller what he has for sale, and he replies, “Only best-sellers.” I have little interest in best-sellers, but that is about to change. “What makes a book a best-seller?” I ask matter-of-factly. He points to Difficult Daughters, the first novel by the Delhi based writer Manju Kapur. To me this novel is serious literary fiction, and I am happy to hear that it is also selling well. A paperback copy of the book is lying face up on the ground with other novels, magazines, travel guides, and histories about India. Whether for tourists or locals, in Delhi the roadside compulsion to define India is strong.
We are in Kamla Nagar market in north Delhi, near Delhi University. The bookshops here on Bungalow Road mostly sell English language textbooks. Students appear with lists and leave with books, the ones they have to have, the ones they can't get online. One shop in the row sells spiritual texts and guides; it has the most floor space and the fewest customers. The pavements are reserved for best-sellers. Some are re-bound photocopies selling for half the price of the published versions. The print is faded, but you can still read it.
The pavement bookseller explains to me in Hindi that when Amitabh Bachchan asked who the author of Difficult Daughters was, as a trivia question on Kaun Banega Crorepati? (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), the novel started to sell.1 What became a best-seller certainly also had to do with the perennial best-seller status of the Bachchan brand. If the “Big B” was mentioning the novel and asking who its author was, surely it was worth knowing who she was and perhaps even buying what she had written.
A few years later when I told Kapur about my encounter, she smiled incredulously and said, “Really?” At that time the paperback version of her fourth novel, Home (2006), was just coming out, and she was a bit dismayed by the cover. It was being published by Random House India, one of the new MNCs (multinational corporations) on the block that had launched its Indian venture with Kapur's novel. The hardcover features a curtained window on the facade of a house with a telephone wire crossing the foreground, all overlaid in mustard hues. I told Kapur how I thought the image perfectly captured the essence of the novel, since the reader gets to pull aside that curtain and witness the intimate lives of a joint family in an everyday Delhi milieu, the old neighborhood of Karol Bagh. She smiled and nodded and said, “But Rashmi, you're an academic so you see that.”
Now it was my turn to be dismayed. I said, “But I'm a reader first! It appealed to me naturally!”
She then sighed and explained that she wanted her novel to be seen as serious literature but that her editor thought the book could be both serious and more popular, that is, reach a wider audience. The paperback version had a shinier look: its cover featured a blurred figure of a woman in a colorful sari with a large bunch of keys tied to her waist, as is the custom of the female head of household in the kind of joint family being depicted in the novel; another woman looms in the background, suggesting intrigue and potential conflict. Kapur was happy to have more readers, but she was also hoping the new cover would not diminish the seriousness of the work.
We returned to Amitabh Bachchan, and Kapur told me she had been at home watching the show with her family the night the question was asked. She seemed amused by it, even if reluctant to associate her works with a distinctly nonliterary media hype.
Star TV's Kaun Banega Crorepati? was the most popular Hindi television show at the time and became the vehicle by which Amitabh Bachchan reclaimed his number one superstar status. That the show was in Hindi but also offered up elements of Indian-English culture was no surprise, as the worlds of Hindi and English constantly overlap. Moreover, print and electronic media worlds, especially in the nation's “metros,” or urban centers, have become increasingly multilingual; Hindi newspapers feature advertisements in Hindi and English;Hindi radio, especially stations geared to younger audiences, is peppered with English phrases and words; and popular Hindi romantic comedies feature titles such as Jab We Met (When We Met) and Love Aaj Kal (Love These Days), with Hindi dialogue spliced with English to match.
However, this “mixing” (Hinglish, as it is sometimes called) is evidence not merely of greater linguistic facility among India's cultural consumers; many, in fact, argue that the quality of spoken English in India is becoming worse, not better, as the number of people who know English increases. On the one hand, the urban middle classes have come to define their own identities partly through their association with the English language; English has become more integral to middle-lass identity in the past few decades and has led to the rise of a sizable middle-class readership for English language publications. On the other hand, the desire for the language is greatly expanding as more people further down the class and caste hierarchies see the possibility of adding it, in some form, to their social profiles. What has changed for everyone is that the things people feel they should or have to know—cultural information, trends, and trivia—are crossing the linguistic divide like never before.
On another pavement, in south Delhi, the drama heightens as younger “booksellers” step down onto the asphalt, selling their wares to the calibrated interludes of stop-and-go traffic. They sell paperbacks and glossy magazines, as well as balloons, roses, tissue boxes, and kitchen towels. The scene is replayed throughout the day and into
