is not only the language of the home, the street, and popular culture (film, radio, television, pulp fiction, comics, music, theater) in north India but also the language of conversation and asides in the very spaces where English is supposedly the most entrenched: government halls and university campuses.
The very fact that political constituencies may be defined in terms of language of course means that these constituencies themselves may be in flux. For instance, English education of dubious quality is increasingly being “sold” to the masses. The widespread opening of “global language institutes” in villages and small towns is just one indication that aspiring to know English is no longer the reserve of the urban middle classes; from construction workers to security guards to domestic servants—everyone wants their children to have English.42 What distinguishes these institutes (which may be located in office blocks or, more often, in ramshackle buildings in local bazaars) is that unlike the traditional English medium education available to upper-class and uppercaste Indians by way of convent schools run by nuns, or today, by mostly private Indian trusts and religious societies, these new centers are open to lower-caste and lower-class groups who could not afford private English medium schools. Contemporary language politics in fact hinges on the politics of both caste and class. English, in the meantime, is signified less and less as a colonial remnant and more as a contemporary global attribute.
THE CASTE OF LANGUAGE
The globalization of English has been especially relevant for the most socially disadvantaged, those who are from the lowest castes. In the realm of Dalit (what used to be called “untouchable” or harijan) and Dalit bahujan (which includes a wider group of lower castes) politics, access to the English language has come to symbolize a new political consciousness. In fact, some see the language as the most feasible and direct method of social empowerment. They are less concerned with the so called linguistic authenticity of the bhashas since the “culture” (and specifically, religion) associated with that authenticity is one from which they are already excluded. As detailed in the scholar and activist Kancha Ilaiah's contemporary political tract, Why I Am Not a Hindu, since Dalits were excluded from Hindu society in terms of day-to-day life on the scriptural principle of being “polluted,” why should they embrace a Hindu identity now?43 Ilaiah's tract hit a nerve precisely because he connected the issue of caste to religious identity and practice, challenging the idea of a large, all encompassing Hindu cultural umbrella. In one fell swoop arguments such as his threaten the Hindu vote bank, one that is dependent on lower-caste and Dalit voters.44
In many respects, Dalit and Dalit bahujan intellectuals who advocate English are responding to an already apparent desire by urban and rural lower classes to have English education for their children. However, for the English education of “the masses,” there will have to be more than an array of private and unregulated language institutes. The real question has become whether or not government schools, which are administered by each state, will offer English medium education and not just English as one among many subjects. What may seem linguistically expedient to some is a fierce cultural debate for others. Proponents of vernacular, or “mother tongue,” education are opposed to such a measure because they fear the end of the mother tongues in terms of their social and cultural relevance. These proponents tend to be from the ranks of the cultural and political elite, who see language as a key associative symbol in consolidating vote banks; the mother tongues are to be defended from everything from urban elites to the forces of globalization. Most centrally, perhaps, is the notion of what the mother tongues are in the first place. With the standardization of grammar, a more Sanskritized vocabulary, and the choice of script, the bhashas as modern, written languages are also expressions of upper-caste culture.45 In this sense, English, even with its colonial past and globalizing power, is in the context of Dalit activism a more neutral language. Its neutrality is premised on more direct access to power, one that bypasses more traditional or engrained social boundaries. Ilaiah and other activists also point out that those same mother tongue proponents, not to mention many mother-tongue-loving politicians who see Dalits as being essential for their own Hindu vote banks, make sure to send their own children to private English medium schools.46
Chandrabhan Prasad has been most associated with the promotion of English for Dalits in his column, “Dalit Diary,” which appears in the Pioneer, a national English-language newspaper. His method of instilling this desire and what he frames as a right to the language has come in the curious form of proposing English as a “Dalit Goddess.” Prasad's immediate aim is not historical revisionism but instead to instill the desire for English, a desire that he hopes will turn into a serious demand for the language among Dalits themselves. He wonders why in the past six decades of Indian independence the demand for government sponsored education in the language has not flourished. In line with this cause is what many see as his audacious valorization of Thomas B. Macaulay as a kind of saint for the oppressed Dalits.47 Since 2006 Prasad has made headlines for hosting parties each year in Delhi to celebrate the anniversary of Macaulay's birth.48 What is unclear at this point is how much of an effect this kind of valorization—to what extent it is a real movement or a gimmick—will have in the actual education of Dalits or even the creation of Dalit literature in English. It is clear, however, that the idea of English education as being the sole provenance of the elite is changing.
For these reasons and others, thinking about English solely as a postcolonial language fails to capture the complexity of the distinctions associated with language in India today. The term postcolonial has come to flatten our sense of a variety of social and cultural changes in over sixty years of post-independence cultural politics, mostly because it relies on the colonizer/colonized model of power and cultural interaction, and it sidelines competing nationalisms and regionalisms and their ideologies. Even in Delhi, where the architectural and governmental remnants of the British Raj are most obvious, English is no longer a postcolonial language. Instead, as I argue throughout, it is a mediator in a variety of cultural and political realms.
THE CITY AS A LITERARY FIELD
This mediation is, perhaps, most apparent in Delhi, a city that is not only the political and bureaucratic capital of India but also the center of English and Hindi publishing as well as home to the country's preeminent universities and a wide array of cultural institutions representing local, regional, national, and international concerns. Recognizing Delhi as the site of the major publishing houses in English and Hindi first enabled me to see the city as a literary field. There would certainly be other places in which to study Indian literary fields, in Mumbai, Kolkata, or Chennai, to name just three important sites of cultural production; however, to understand the nature of Hindi and English as competing national languages in the cultural and political arenas, there is no more significant site than Delhi. In addition, Delhi's role as the cultural capital of north India and as the bureaucratic center of the nation makes it a clearinghouse for a range of cultural production; hence I also contend that seeing literary production through Delhi allows one to understand the relationship not only between English and Hindi but also between those two languages and the bhashas as a whole, thereby allowing an understanding of the most important cultural debates of the past few decades. While my research took me to other places and people in those places, it always brought me back to Delhi. At the same time, this book is not a case study of literary production in Delhi; rather it views questions through Delhi and its institutions.
My inquiry began by focusing on the city as the publishing center for Hindi and English, the two most published languages in India. On the roadside the connection between publishers, distributors, and consumers seemed very direct. I would see the small publishing houses on Ansari Road just within the walls of Old Delhi and often buy books directly from them. This exploration led me to the Hindi publishers Raj kamal Prakashan and Vani Prakashan, with informal chats leading to longer interviews. It was the artisanal bent of these publishers, and also of the English publisher Ravi Dayal, that I found most interesting. They were small operations, yet pioneering ones that had become major cultural institutions. The life histories of the publishers themselves—how they came to publishing, how they related to the various languages they spoke, how
