researched writer,” he announced, as if that somehow answered his earlier question. Several people raised their hands, and a lively discussion ensued. One woman started to explain that ever since moving to Delhi she had felt under threat and spoke of how her home had been burgled twice, coinciding with the marriage of each of her daughters. “This book struck a chord with me; this is how it is here,” she said. This statement launched the group into a discussion of the glorification of violence in the novel and whether it merely feeds on “middle-class fears.” Some argued, “Adiga knows his craft”; “It's readable”; “It has a good style.” Others countered with “It is journalistic, not literary”; “There are no real characters”; “It's about marketing”; “He has the formula right”; “It's all about the hype; the timing of the book was perfect.” And then, a chorus of voices: “Sea of Poppies should have won!”
THE POLITICS OF LITERARY GEOGRAPHY
In India, as elsewhere in the world, the social distinction of English has alienated non-English speakers to such an extent that people speak not of “knowing” English but of “having” it.23 The social reality of linguistic haves and have nots stands in stark contrast to the realm of elite cultural production, where Indian fiction in English has brought writers such international acclaim and prestige that many assume—much to the chagrin of writers in the other Indian languages—that Indian literature only comes in English.24 In this realm of literary production English is often put in contrast to and is often at odds with “the languages” or “bhasha,” the appellations commonly used to distinguish English from the other Indian languages. Bhasha literally means “speech” and is the Hindi word for “language.” Yet the word has now also become part of the English language as spoken among Indians. For instance, sometimes people refer to the “bhashas,” pluralizing the word as if it were an English one, or they use the word as an adjective, meaning Indian language other than English, as opposed to “regional” or “vernacular.”25
If “the bhashas” or “the languages” has a clubby ring to it, it is not because English is not seen as an Indian language in these circles but that English carries a different symbolic meaning in the Indian context. These are the issues—the competing values, ideologies, and identities associated with language—that I explore in the context of literary production today.
English is spoken fluently by close to 5 percent of Indians and is “known” by as much as 10 percent of the population (i.e., about 50 million to 100 million people of a population of just over one billion).26 As the journalist and former Times of India editor Dileep Padgaonkar said to me, “The percentages of English speakers are small, but the numbers are large.” Its numerical strength puts English on par with many of the regionally based languages or bhashas. Its place in the global order of things and the fact that it is entwined with modern, urban culture give English great prestige in the Indian context, while its lack of regional specificity within India often marks it as being culturally inauthentic. Just as there is a global geography that privileges English and its Anglo-American sponsors, there is a linguistic geography within India that recognizes twenty-two official, or “scheduled,” languages, as listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It is this geography that at once confirms and marginalizes the place of each language in its regional context. Sisir Kumar Das links the competition among languages in each region to “the rise of the middle class within each language community” and to its members having “legitimate aspirations to share political and social power.” The result is what he calls “language tension,” which becomes “more acute” in such situations. He gives the examples of the sociocultural power of standardized Hindi over the Hindi “dialects,” of Urdu over Kashmiri, Bengali over Oriya and Assamese, Tamil over Telugu, and Marathi over Konkani.27
MAP 1. Some of the languages of the subcontinent.
English might be irrelevant to some of these interregional linguistic tensions, but it often factors in, either by assuming a more neutral position or by exacerbating class or caste tensions. And it is this linguistic geography that has inadvertently impinged on many regional and national literary and cultural debates. It may be true, as Pascale Casanova has written, that language is the major component of literary capital, but it is perhaps most vital to understand how the nature of that capital changes in different geographic contexts.28
In 1949 the Constitution of India included a proviso whereby Hindi was to be “phased in” as the language of national integration, in order to mark a national “resurgence” in the service of the “ordinary citizen.” English, after all, had been the language of the erstwhile British colonizers. Meanwhile, Hindi was the most widely spoken language in India, even if its speakers were concentrated in the North. During the proposed fifteen-year transition period, English would retain its bureaucratic and political functions, while there would be “the progressive use of the Hindi language for the official purposes of the Union.” The Report of the Official Language Commission, 1956, documents the copious debate and analysis regarding the uses of English in India and imagines its role in the future. It is not that the members of the commission did not see the value of English, especially in the realms of science and technology, and the way in which India had benefited and would continue to do so by using the language. In fact, there were as many proponents of keeping English as the official language of the union as there were those who wanted to switch to Hindi.29 The report itself was in English not only because it was an official government document, but because it was the only language that could link the committee members who came from all corners of the country, north, east, west, and south.
Hindi became a cause and a symbol of national unity, but the language debates pointed to a larger malaise: the Indian languages in general had languished under colonial rule. As one committee member put it, the Indian languages “failed to develop a sufficiently rich and precise vocabulary for the requirements of modern social life, during this period when the progress of scientific knowledge wrought a great revolution in the physical conditions of living in the country.”30 It was perhaps this conflation, of English being not fully Indian and seeing the Indian languages as having suffered under British colonialism, that opened committee members to the idea that Hindi could stand for all things linguistically Indian at the national level, that there could be some postcolonial linguistic redemption after all.
The broader aim after independence, in large part, was in developing not only Hindi but also the thirteen other major languages “so as to make them adequate vehicles of thought and expression” (a somewhat paternalistic attitude to the bhashas that goes back to Macaulay) leading to “the eventual displacement of the English language.” At the same time, for reasons of administrative practicality, the official bureaucracy at the national level could only occur in one language. Where English had previously forged a pan-Indian consciousness, credited with enabling a countrywide nationalist leadership to orchestrate the ousting of the British, Hindi would now take over and spread. There would be a “changeover” to Hindi, especially in the fields of “education, administration, and law courts, so as to bring them in a live and continuous communion with the common people of the country.”31 In deference to the other Indian languages, Hindi would not be referred to as the “national language” but the “official language of the Union.”
The long term goal was for Hindi to enable a pan-Indian dialogue and consciousness among all classes of Indians. To this end, the Ministry of Education was charged with creating a new scientific vocabulary in Hindi, organizing the massive translation of administrative documents, teacher training, correspondence courses for Indians in non-Hindi regions, subsidies to Hindi publishers and prizes to their authors, and the elaborate distribution of Hindi books to non-Hindi states, schools, colleges, and libraries. Beyond the rhetoric and debates, what was being called for was nothing less than a linguistic revolution.
But in the decades after independence, the English language
