a stack of books will try to sell you a copy of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss as you sit in an auto rickshaw or car (as opposed to if you're riding a bicycle or on the bus).2 He will also have Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian on offer, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies, and perhaps Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan.3 These are some of the emblems of Indian-English culture, sold alongside international best-sellers by authors such as John Grisham, Paulo Coelho, and Dan Brown.
The boy, it turns out, gives most of his money to his parents, and with the encouragement of a local nongovernmental organization is learning the Hindi alphabet on some afternoons under the flyover. It is sometimes hard to know what the “serious” literature is in this scenario: the boy's life circumstance or the book in his hand?
In Delhi, as elsewhere, the two continually go together, but here what separates the boy from the book and the motorized world of Indian-English cultural production and consumption it represents is not merely the money to buy the book, but a private English medium education that makes his chances of gaining fluency in English and entrance to the jobs and access to the cultural emblems of that world practically nonexistent. The legendary social divides in Indian society—of caste, class, gender, religion, and, perhaps most significant, urban versus rural belonging—work in tandem with linguistic divides. To speak of urban elites is to refer to the class of people (the rich, the upper middle class, and many sectors of the middle classes, who also tend to be upper caste) who are educated from primary school onward with English as their medium of instruction. The rest of India, about 80 percent of Indians have, until recently, tended to be educated in government schools that may teach English as a subj ect but whose medium of instruction is in one of the thirteen other official state languages. The boy may well be represented in the books that he sells, but he probably won't ever read them.4
It is this disjuncture—between the language on the ground, of daily life, and literary representation—that is most relevant to the place and role of Indian fiction in English. And it is in fact what raises the stakes of literary debate in the Indian context. English is part of the social scene, but the bulk of conversations and sentiments of fictional characters would in reality take place not in English but in one or more of the other Indian languages. More important, this disjuncture is indicative of a larger schism in Indian society that has to do not only with language as it is spoken but with the disparate thought worlds and hierarchies of language that saturate everyday life. The linguistic divide is sometimes quite stark, especially where poverty and the lack of access to education mark its parameters. However, in many respects the divide is even more insidious for those who “know” English but have not had the opportunity to master it.
This divide came into relief in the tragic real life story of Brajesh Kumar, a Hindi educated twenty-two-year-old who came to Noida (a middle-class extension of Delhi's urban sprawl) and entered the world of English higher education to study engineering at a technical college. Kumar was from Jaunpur, a small city in Uttar Pradesh (the largest state in India and part of the Hindi heartland), and though he studied English as one of his subjects until the tenth standard, his medium of instruction was Hindi. In his suicide note he wrote that he had felt undue pressure from his English language courses and did not want to burden his parents with the costs of English coaching to help him prepare better. This disturbing story, covered in the Hindi and English print media, highlights the long standing divide between students who come from English medium backgrounds and those who come from “vernacular” ones.5
Several months after Kumar's suicide, the weekly news magazine Outlook ran a cover story calling this aspect of the linguistic gap the “English speaking curse.”6 The story describes the mad rush among the middle and lower classes to get some kind of English any way they can, amid a sea of unqualified teachers at the primary and secondary levels, where funding for English language instruction is extremely limited. Four months earlier, in the same magazine, the same reporter had written another story, “Jab They Met,” about how English words and ideas were increasingly being featured in small Hindi magazines and newspapers published in the heart of the “Hindi belt,” the state of Uttar Pradesh, in cities such as Lucknow, Kanpur, Meerut, Agra, and Varanasi.7 It spoke of how young people wanted to “get into the mode” of English. The aim of editors in such a mixing of the languages was to reach “aspirational readers”—defined as people aged eighteen to thirty-five who wanted to live their lives partly in English and be part of the consumer revolution—and to use the English language “especially for descriptions of modular kitchens, cutlery, electronic gadgetry, career options and college festivals.”8
Of course, there is nothing contradictory about English being both the language of aspiration and a curse for those not in a position to master it. The issue is not merely one of who speaks English and who does not, but is more substantially about a cultural divide based on the kinds of English that people learn, speak, and write, depending on their access to different levels and kinds of education. As one writer explained it to me, “One was learning English, talking English, but a large part of our consciousness was something else. There was a strange contradiction, which always had to be negotiated.”9 In these milieus knowing English is not a question of language fluency alone but says much about one's exposure to different worlds and values. This familiarity with and exposure to English-resides alongside the mother tongues, hence English is at the heart of many social changes, yet exists within the reality and idea of the Hindi heartland. More and more Indians know and aspire to learn English, but the language marks a social, economic, and at times cultural divide that most are unable to cross.
THE PLACE OF ENGLISH
This book is an account of postcolonial literary production, centering on the relationship between language politics—what languages mean and represent—and the literary field. Its premise is that English has taken on a more contentious and more varied role in Indian society than it did during the period of British colonial rule, which formally ended in 1947. After independence, I argue, colonial binaries withered away, as English became a mediator between other Indian languages. English often takes on the role of mediator because of its seeming neutrality, a position that has a logic and new politics of its own. Politically, English becomes less polarizing even as it remains a clear marker—a dividing line really—of certain kinds of elite privilege. Knowing English fluently provides innumerable social and economic advantages, but—and this is key—it always exists alongside Hindi or other Indian languages. I contend that it is the qualities that different languages impart, at times manifesting themselves as veritable ideologies relating to caste, class, gender, and other social and political identities, that become important in a multilingual context, qualities that highlight or detract from various aspects of the identity of an individual, an institution, a community, or even a state.10 Even for those who do not know English—the vast majority—it is a symbol of what is attainable by Indians in India, and this belief or aspiration is not confined to urban consumers or to the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. It is for this reason that an inquiry into the English language in India can never only be a story of numbers or of discernible public spheres. Most crucially, since English in Indian society is no longer a language of colonization, it must be viewed in the context of other Indian languages in order to grasp the profound effects of linguistic identity on modern Indian life. It is not enough to say that English is a language of privilege, which it is, among other things. English is also a language of globalization, but this fact alone does not tell us very much without delving into the specificities of place, history, and present circumstance. To this end, the process of reading Delhi and beyond highlights the place of English in the multilingual literary consciousness, the work it does as mediator in India's linguistic landscape, and its complex and hierarchical social positioning vis à vis other Indian languages, especially Hindi. What I find remarkable is not that Indians write, publish, and critique in the language of the former colonizer but that they do so in an English that has been infused with the social and political consequences of its own indigenization.
It is in this respect that literature, and specifically what might be called an anthropology of literature—one
