English Heart, Hindi Heartland. Rashmi Sadana
Delhi and is the most populous state in India. In the state of Bihar, it is the city of Patna where Hindi books are sold en masse. And in Madhya Pradesh, it is the city of Bhopal that is a cultural center for many Hindi novelists and poets. These other places, not Delhi, are commonly referred to as the “Hindi heartland.” However, the “Hindi heartland” does not only refer to geography; it is also an idea about the place and role of Hindi. In this sense, the Hindi poet and literary administrator Ashok Vajpeyi told me, “Most small towns can't contain Hindi writers.” It is precisely the institutional and cultural offerings of Delhi that have made it a center for Hindi writers and a place where their own ideas have come into contact with those of writers in many other Indian languages, including English.
AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF LITERATURE
The process of English becoming an Indian language, alongside Hindi and vis à vis other Indian languages, is the story that I tell from the perspective of various individuals and institutions in Delhi. My reading of Delhi, my conversations with publishers, writers, and others, and my analysis of texts is meant to suggest how the meanings of a language, from the everyday to the ideological, emerge from the places in which it is located and lived through. In this sense, the individual's feeling for language is a prism through which I analyze contemporary society.
In the chapters that follow I document subjective relationships people have to language and their own linguistic histories. I locate them in particular places and in different paradigms, including the local, national, regional, and global. This book is not a survey of all I saw and everyone I met but instead is organized around key figures and places in the literary landscape that I believe encapsulate the most important features, moments, and problems that have defined Indian literary life since the early 1970s. In this respect the chapters offer three interlinked narratives: the cultural history of English vis à vis Hindi and the bhashas, debates about cultural and linguistic authenticity, and the city of Delhi as a postcolonial and now increasingly globalized literary space. Each chapter moves across the literary field, from text to institution to publisher to author or translator, highlighting and expanding on key ethnographic moments and milieus. My approach is not only a method but also a vision of how to understand English in India and the relationship between literature and politics in the world more generally.
In terms of my day-to-day methodology, I began by visiting publishing houses and bookshops and going to events at the Sahitya Akademi, the Habitat Centre, the India International Centre, and other cultural venues in the city. At first I relied on newspaper listings for cultural events, crunched in extra small type at the bottom of pages in newspapers such as the Times of India, Hindustan Times (in Hindi and English), and The Hindu. Then, as I got to know people, I was invited to events or often just had a sense of where to show up or whom to call. As the writer Pankaj Mishra told me in one of my first interviews in 2001, there was no real literary “scene” to speak of in Delhi. He was right in terms of—and this is what Mishra emphasized—the quality and standards of writing, editing, reviewing, and publishing that one found elsewhere and were essential to creating an informed reading public leading to that somewhat elusive scene. Yet my sense was that there was something to be found and discerned, even if it might not look the same, or feel the same, as it did elsewhere. I started to see English in relation to the bhashas, especially when listening to writers who inhabited multiple worlds, such as Gagan Gill, Nirmal Verma, K. Satchidanandan, Kiran Nagarkar, and Geetanjali Shree. And when I had conversations with publishers such as Ashok Maheshwari and Ravi Dayal, who offered their own linguistic ethnographies of the city, a map of the literary field began to emerge. As I connected my knowledge of texts to places and people, I began not only to read differently but also to see how a variety of literary practitioners were connected to each other and to recurring notions, realities, and moralities of place. Most of all, I started to see how different languages stood for different things to different people and what was being created emotionally, intellectually, and politically—on the page, in their lives, and in society—because of it.
The more research I did, the more my methods adapted to what I was seeing and listening to and the more I saw how language ideologies exist not only in political realms but in everyday life as well. For this reason, I propose the “ethnographic study of literature” as a way to link the practices of literary production to the politics of language in discrete and overlapping literary fields of actors and institutions. Literature reflects and represents, but it is also produced and consumed under particular social and political conditions. An ethnographic approach emphasizes the connection between literary analysis and the meaning of everyday life, even as it interrogates and unravels it. However, the point is not merely to juxtapose the methods of ethnography and literary analysis for some kind of layering effect, interpretation upon interpretation. Instead my method is to intercut between ethnography and the study of literary texts. I use the insights gleaned from one practice or realm to question and inform the analysis of another. It is this intercutting, a practice that emerged from my own experience of research, that is central to the critical perspective I introduce in the pages that follow.
CHAPTER 2
Two Tales of a City
On family visits to Delhi in the 1970 s, South Extension was a sleepy place. It was always summer, and we spent the afternoons under the fan. My cousins and I would quiz each other over world geography, they with their British-inflected accents and spellings, me with my wide American syllables. By early evening one of my uncles would show up with a bag of warm samosas and a few bottles of sweet, sizzling Thums Up. Later, another uncle would whiz me around on his scooter to the market. He would get a paan, and I would stand next to him and invariably be approached by street children for a rupee coin.
Once on the outskirts of the city where partition-era refugees bought government-subsidized plots of land, today South Extension is a congested, central, and upscale residential area and shopping hub. Over the years I have watched as the area has become emblematic of the new New Delhi, surrounded by flyovers, jammed with cars, and home to an array of Indian and multinational shops. Land prices have skyrocketed, and today the horseshoe-shaped market looks like a car dealership, its mass of metal gleaming under the sun. My grandmother's small pink bungalow on B-block, with its open courtyard, has long since been sold and its flowering tree replaced by an imposing multistory house built to the edge of the road. I still visit the market to eat gol gappas standing outside Bengali Sweets, admire the costly fabrics at Heritage, and visit Tekson's Bookshop, but I lament the passing of time and people more than the place itself.
This chapter unearths a cultural history of English, one whose origins I locate in the realm of colonial-era political discourse and in Delhi's Urdu, sublimely poetic past. In the post-independence era, it has become a truism to say, “English is an Indian language.” And yet its path to becoming one, especially in the literary realm, has been contested at every step along the way. I reflect on the “authenticity” of English by providing a genealogy of it from the political to the literary realm. I argue that it is precisely how English becomes indigenized and compromised in specific instances and discrete contexts that will come to characterize the language and its eventual role as mediator. On the one hand, the back story of any understanding of English as an Indian literary language necessarily involves its role as a language in the nationalist movement and, more specifically, as being integral to India's political modernity. English was accepted, by necessity, in the political realm because it allowed a pan-Indian movement, one that was at first merely critical of British rule and then eventually anti-British, to take shape. On the other hand, it is not that English came to represent a national consciousness in any holistic sense but rather that the language created a new set of compromises, both emotional and ideological.
A VERY SHORT STORY ABOUT ENGLISH BECOMING INDIAN
As Indians became increasingly critical of colonial rule in the last half of the nineteenth century, the British started to monitor Indian-language publications; in the aftermath of the 1857 Revolt in particular, they were naturally worried about seditious ideas that could reach the masses in their own languages.1 Amrita Bazar Patrika, a Bengali newspaper launched in 1868, was one such publication; the periodical was known for its support and promotion of Indian nationalist causes. In 1878 the British colonial government in India passed the Vernacular