its production, and analyzes its individuals and institutions ethnographically—can allow us to understand the complexity of English and its relationship to other Indian languages and sensibilities in India today. In regard to “anthropology of literature,” Arjun Appadurai likens the role of fiction to myth, and hence as being part of “the conceptual repertoire of contemporary societies.” He goes on to link fictional content with social mores when he writes, “Readers of novels and poems can be moved to intense action (as with The Satanic Verses of Salman Rushdie) and their authors often contribute to the construction of social and moral maps for their readers.”11 I would take this assertion much further to say that the world of literary production shows not only how authors, readers, and texts but also how the entire nexus of literary producers and discourse create a social and moral framework that at once reflects and interrogates cultural norms. In this regard, I draw on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the literary field; however, I build on it to include the social and political dynamics central to a field composed of multilingual literary production.12 The multilingual is not a mere feature of the literary landscape, but rather it redefines and makes more complex the very notion of a literary field. My approach, therefore, dwells on the connections between place, language, and textual production in order to show what language comes to stand for in people's lives and in society more generally.13
By “literary production,” I do not mean the actual putting together of paper and print, but I do mean the producers of literature, be they writers, editors, translators, or publishers. I also mean booksellers, readers, critics, and others who create meaning in and around texts once they are in the public domain. To write about these figures, connected directly and indirectly to the production of literary texts and the social life of those texts, is to do more than contextualize or even historicize the literary text at hand. By combining textual and ethnographic analysis, this book critically evaluates the problem and promise of the chasm between social reality and literary representation. It mines the paradoxes within this chasm. Thus, literary production is not only about the creation of literary texts but also about the production of social identities and the differences between them. It is in this sense that the anthropology of literature, in the way I have developed it, offers a new analytical frame.
In my approach, literature and novels in particular are significant both as works of the imagination and as cultural emblems that travel across regional and national borders carrying an array of meanings and significations.14 These meanings and significations reveal the moral uses and dimensions of language. Thus, my engagement with English in India is also an engagement with English in the world, that is to say, how English mediates a set of social and linguistic hierarchies not only in India but also globally. This project is, in many respects, a response to the phenomenon of Indian fiction in English that has swept the English-reading public and its marketplace around the globe since the 1980s. This phenomenon has been mostly celebrated outside India; within India the response has been more ambivalent and varied, largely because of the homegrown politics of language that frame this international attention. The broadest aim of this book is to understand how this debate looks from the Indian side and to delve into the social factors and historical circumstances that have shaped it.
Literary fiction is a modern artistic and cultural form, replete with social values and symbolic meanings. I contend that these values and meanings created in turn generate their own social reality and that this reality has become central to debates about what is deemed culturally and linguistically authentic. I present different aspects of the authenticity question in the chapters that follow, showing it to be an elastic, ever changing set of principles, one that drives debate and action forward in unlikely ways. A principal aim of this book is to show how the idea of cultural authenticity is a political variable—rather than a cultural truth—that comes into play depending on particular social and literary circumstances. These circumstances most often hinge on issues of caste, class, and gender—that is to say, markers of identity formation that have been central to the shifting, unstable articulation of modern Indian selves. English, and the way it is positioned among the other Indian languages, does not represent a fixed pole but rather serves to change political and literary alliances among classes and castes, often in surprising ways.
WRITING IN ENGLISH
Many Indian novelists who write in English about Indian social realities have written or spoken about how in one way or another they cross the linguistic divides of society by literally translating conversations in their heads as they write dialogue. This is not to say that they regret writing in English or believe they are less Indian or lesser writers for doing so. Yet the seeds of cultural debate—essentially about the relationship between literature and society—are planted here. It is not, however, that authors writing in other Indian languages represent monolingual worlds in their novels either. Where there is Hindi, for instance, and its numerous dialects, there might be Punjabi and Bengali too. Yet the literary divide among these languages—social, cultural, and linguistic—would certainly be smaller. There are more similarities between Bengali and Hindi or Hindi and Punjabi than there are between English and any of these languages. North Indian languages share Sanskrit and Persian based vocabularies, a fact that distinguishes them as a whole from English. And even though the north Indian languages are also “modern” languages in that their grammatical and lexical standardizations were formalized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they have been existing in dialect form alongside one another for much longer; there is a shared social history among and between these languages to which English is a latecomer. English exists in a distinct temporal reality in the Indian context, as well as a distinct spatial reality, as it belongs neither to any particular region nor to any “indigenous” Indian cultural tradition. As in much of the world, literary culture—a record of society's practices, histories, and ways of being—has been part and parcel of defining particular nations and the cultures therein. For English, which has long symbolized modernity, its shifting lines of exclusivity create a situation whereby it commands popular recognition as a sign and symbol while largely being an instrument of the elite.
The Indian-English writer Shashi Deshpande, who comes from a Kannada-speaking background and has lived in various multilingual settings in India, puts it this way: “The truth is, that while a great number of people do speak English, it is yet a language that many of the characters we write of will not only not be speaking, it is one they will not be able to speak.”15
Deshpande's comment captures a central paradox of writing about India in English: the question of the linguistic authenticity of fictional characters themselves. All writing and art for that matter is a representation of reality, even when the language of the text matches the language of the street. English is certainly part of India's social reality; it has filtered in to the most common and basic level of everyday communication, often in the form of phrases, slogans, idiomatic expressions, and advertisements. Yet English is not a sustained presence in most people's lives, and even those for whom it is are surrounded by non-English worlds. As a result, English can at times seem like it is everywhere and nowhere.16
Deshpande, who has grappled with incessant querying by others as to not just why she works in English, but how she can, writes: “The point is, that, not only was English not born in this soil, it has not grown through the daily use of all classes of people or developed layers like a pearl through years of its association with a particular people.”17
However, this is only the beginning of the story. Despite Deshpande's assessment of linguistic authenticity, or perhaps because of it, she eloquently defends her use of English in the making of her literary prose and resents being marginalized for it, as she and others often are by the regional literary establishments. In an essay in which she both defines and rejects the notion of being a marginal writer, she writes of the circumscribed quality of her English, of its place in her life but also in the lives of her readers: “I began writing in English, not because I ‘chose' to, but because it was the only language I could express myself in, the only language I really read. Yet, I had two other languages at home, languages I spoke and lived my daily life in. Living in a small town in a middle-class family, life was,
