Professional Documents
Culture Documents
In my own world the world of English writing and publishing in India the language
has wrought neuroses of its own. India, over the past three decades, has produced many
excellent writers in English, such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and
Arundhati Roy. The problem is that none of these writers can credit India alone for their
success; they all came to India via the West, via its publishing deals and prizes.
India, when left to its own devices, throws up a very different kind of writer, a man such
as Chetan Bhagat, who, though he writes in English about things that are urgent and
important like life on campuses and in call centers writes books of such poor literary
quality that no one outside India can be expected to read them. India produces a number
of such writers, and some justly speculate that perhaps this is the authentic voice of
modern India. But this is not the voice of a confident country. It sounds rather like a
country whose painful relationship with language has left it voiceless.
The Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky felt in the 19th century that the slavish imitation of
European culture had created a sort of duality in Russian life, consequently a lack of
moral unity. The Indian situation is worse; the Russians at least had Russian.
In the past, there were many successful Indian writers who were bi- and trilingual.
Rabindranath Tagore, the winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in English
and Bengali; Premchand, the short story writer and novelist, wrote in Hindi and Urdu; and
Allama Iqbal wrote English prose and Persian and Urdu poetry, with lines like:
The illusion is comfort, stability
In truth every grain of Creation pulsates
The caravan of form never rests
Every instance a fresh manifestation of its glory
You think Life is the mystery; Life is but the rapture of flight.
But around the time of my parents generation, a break began to occur. Middle-class
parents started sending their children in ever greater numbers to convent and private
schools, where they lost the deep bilingualism of their parents, and came away with
English alone. The Indian languages never recovered. Growing up in Delhi in the 1980s, I
spoke Hindi and Urdu, but had to self-consciously relearn them as an adult. Many of my
background didnt bother.
This meant that it was not really possible for writers like myself to pursue a serious
career in an Indian language. We were forced instead to make a roundabout journey back
to India. We could write about our country, but we always had to keep an eye out for
what worked in the West. It is a shameful experience; it produces feelings of irrelevance
and inauthenticity. V. S. Naipaul called it the riddle of the two civilizations. He felt it
stood in the way of identity and strength and intellectual growth.
That day almost a year ago in Varanasi, the boatman felt that Mr. Modis coming to
power would rid India of the legacy of English rule. Mr. Modi, who had risen to power out
of poverty with little to no English, seemed to pose a direct challenge to the power of the
English-speaking elite. The boatman was wrong. Though the election was in some ways a
dramatization of Indias culture wars, English, and all that it signifies, will endure here for
generations still.
This is as deep an entrenchment of class and power as any the world has known; it will
take more to change it than a change of government. It will take a dismantling of colonial
education, a remaking of the relationship between language and power.The boatman
spoke from anger, but I was not out of sympathy with his rage. It was the rage of
belonging to a place that, 70 years after the British left, still felt in too many ways like an
outpost.
Aatish Taseer is the author of the novels Noon and the forthcoming The Way Things
Were.