English Heart, Hindi Heartland. Rashmi Sadana
press. Amrita Bazar Patrika responded by switching to publishing in English overnight, effectively evading a law meant for “vernacular” languages.
English, of course, was not a vernacular language, and, in this case, publishing in English turned out to be a safe zone for Indians. The British were not willing to censor the English-language press, among which Amrita Bazar Patrika could now be counted, since doing so would go against their own notions of free speech. In line with their liberal values, freedom of the English-language press was paramount. Freedom of speech for Indians in their own languages—the bhashas—was not. That the editors of Amrita Bazar Patrika switched from publishing in Bengali to publishing in English suggested an attempt to alter the language-knowledge-power equation to their advantage.
For Partha Chatterjee, the story of the Vernacular Press Act reveals the true nature of British liberalism and what he calls “the rule of colonial difference.”2 He argues that the universal claims of British liberalism were in fact undermined and curtailed by its own racism, since there was one rule for the British and another for Indians.3 In another way, we may also read this event as symbolic of the myriad ways in which the English language, by necessity, ingenuity, and compromise, has become Indian. There was a social and political cost to the Indian editors, who in a move to retain their right to publish, had to turn their Bengali newspaper into an English-language one. There was also a cost to the newspaper's Bengali readers, many of whom were not able to read English. Their “rights”—access to information and ideas in their own language—were surely diminished in the process. It is this kind of process that created a wedge between Indian English-speaking elites and Indians who did not have English, a wedge that would create its own set of problems for the subsequent nationalist movement. And yet if English was seen as the language of whites alone, this was beginning to change.
GANDHI'S PLEA
A year before Indian independence nationalist leaders were necessarily reckoning with what would stay and what would go. In a column that appeared in English on August 25, 1946, in the consciousness-raising journal Harijan, Mohandas K. Gandhi wrote, “I love the English tongue in its own place, but I am its inveterate opponent, if it usurps a place which does not belong to it.”4
In Gandhi's view, the English language had come with the English, had become rooted in elite Indian society, and had gone on to become a contributing factor to what divided elite Indian interests from the masses. Gandhi's diatribe against English was part of his larger critique of modernity, most cogently presented in Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) in 1909. In that book, written as a polemic, Gandhi emphasized that self-government (the rule of one's self by the self) was a precursor to home rule and that for Indians to rule themselves they would have to draw on Indian, not Western, civilization. This line of reasoning, of course, required a definition of what constituted Indian civilization. It did not matter to Gandhi that he himself had been educated in London, an experience that enabled his work as a civil rights lawyer in South Africa and his ultimate return to lead the anticolonial movement in India. Gandhi saw his critique of English in India as a critique of the class of people (in India and those abroad, such as the Indian expats in London whom he had met) who spoke English and claimed to represent the nation.
Despite the fact that English may have been one of the factors leading to the very creation of the first pan-Indian national organization, in the form of the Indian National Congress, established in 1885, Gandhi saw English as another example of what divided Indians and argued that it obstructed real freedom, or swaraj (self-rule). The seeming contradiction of what English allowed and prevented fit perfectly with Gandhi's larger critique of the nationalist movement—that it was elitist and out of touch with the masses. In Hind Swaraj, written originally in Gujarati as a dialogue between a newspaper editor and a reader (and then translated into English by Gandhi himself), he writes:
Reader: Do I then understand that you do not consider English education necessary for obtaining Home Rule?
Editor: My answer is yes and no. To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them. The foundation that Macaulay laid of education has enslaved us. I do not suggest that he had any such intention, but that has been the result. Is it not a sad commentary that we should have to speak of Home Rule in a foreign tongue? …
Is it not a most painful thing that, if I want to go to a court of justice, I must employ the English language as a medium; that, when I become a barrister, I may not speak my mother-tongue, and that someone else should have to translate to me from my own language? Is not this absolutely absurd? Is it not a sign of slavery? Am I to blame the English for it or myself? It is we, the English-knowing men, that have enslaved India. The curse of the nation will rest not upon the English but upon us.5
English was, however, not only a symbol of class division; rather it actively jeopardized the nationalist movement. Gandhi saw it as an impediment to the winning of independence and self-government. How could Indians come to know themselves in English? For him, it was not a question of English being a window on the world for some Indians but of there being an unbridgeable divide between poor and rich and between rural and urban, a divide along the lines of one's experience and way of life. To be sure, Gandhi did not want to imagine an independent India where English was still entrenched.
What did not fit in with Gandhi's polemic on things foreign and things Indian was that English in India did not exist in a vacuum; it was not something that had been casually set down and was now to be brushed aside. It had not merely usurped a “place,” but had created a place for itself. Gandhi, as much as the more comfortably Anglicized Jawaharlal Nehru, saw the great utility of English as a “link language” among Indian nationalists from across the incipient nation. But even if English had its place during colonial rule, that place would have to change after independence had been won. Gandhi's diatribes against English emphasized the symbolic, class-oriented meaning of English in India rather than its existence alongside other Indian languages. At the same time, his own strategic uses of English, Gujarati, and Hindi, depending on whom he was addressing or in which form and genre he was writing, were in some respects a precursor to how issues of language in post-independence India would unfold. And in this regard, it is also important to note that Gandhi's advocacy of Hindi as the national language was not for the Sanskritized Hindi associated with Hindus but for Hindustani, the common spoken language of north India that was a mix of Hindi and Urdu.
In this chapter, I consider how the meaning and “place” of English changes from being a strategic language to an Indian one and how this shift alters not only the language and its meanings and uses in India, but the urban landscape itself. This shift is not wholesale; instead, as I will show, English comes to take on a mediating role. In considering Delhi's linguistic history as showcased in two novels—Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi and Anita Desai's In Custody—I detail how the process of English becoming Indian is closely linked to its relationship to the other Indian languages. This relationship has to do with the social locations of language—of Urdu, Hindi, and English—and the conflicts that arise therein. Both novels happen to be classics, although that is not why I write about them. Rather, I was struck by the resonances—relating to language, genre, and narrative—between them as I thought about the corpus of writing in English by Indians as a whole. This resonance tells a story about the temporal and political disjuncture between the colonial and the postcolonial and relays a social and cultural narrative of acclimatization.
WHERE THE NOVEL TRUMPS POETRY
In the case of north India, the place of English is moderated by the shifting relationship between Hindi and Urdu. English becomes a way for Indians to reflect on their own society and to speak to different publics but also, most crucially perhaps, to assess the other Indian languages in its midst. The question of genre, of the novel versus poetry, and how the former trumps the latter, is also integral to these two tales; it is a mirror of the place of English vis-à-vis Urdu, whereby English plays the part of the novel, or prose, and Urdu of poetry, or verse. This mapping of genre onto language has, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has detailed, much to do with how prose, rather than poetry, has become associated with political modernity, with its attendant notions of the “real” and an “objectivist engagement with the world.” Poetry, meanwhile, comes to be seen as existing