English Heart, Hindi Heartland. Rashmi Sadana
in culture) and the new hinterlands of Delhi (devoid of culture). Where Urdu culture was symbolized as being on the decline in Ali's Delhi, in Desai's Delhi it is a nearly dead literary presence. In this regard, her novel is also a post-partition view of the state of literary language in Old Delhi; but, unlike Ali's novel, it illuminates the space of Hindi as much as Urdu. So for instance, Murad, a buffoon-like character in the novel who has started up an Urdu literary journal says, “Someone has to keep alive the glorious tradition of Urdu literature. If we do not do it, at whatever cost, how will it survive in this era of—that vegetarian monster, Hindi?…That language of peasants…raised on radishes and potatoes.”22
The notion of cultural refinement is central to both novels, but Desai's novel views Delhi from the provinces and structures the relationship between Hindi and Urdu accordingly. The spatial ordering of Hindi, Urdu, and English is not dependent on a distinction between public and private space, as it is in Twilight in Delhi. Instead, it is reflective of an urban-provincial divide. It is a moment in which English takes the place of Urdu as the language of urban sophistication. Mir Nihal views Delhi as the center of his world, and as the city changes, he becomes emotionally dislocated. For Deven, Delhi is the locus of his desires, which from beginning to end is always just beyond his reach. The space of the “countryside” is never the site of action but a space that Deven must traverse in order to travel to and from Delhi, as the narrator describes:
Of course the stretch of land between Mirpore and the capital was so short that there was no really rural scenery—most of the fields looked withered and desolate, and tin smokestacks exhaling enormous quantities of very black and foul-smelling smoke, sugar-cane crushing works, cement factories, brick kilns, motor repair workshops and the attendant teashops and bus-stops were strung along the highway on both sides, overtaking what might once have been a pleasant agricultural aspect and obliterating it with all the litter and paraphernalia and effluent of industry: concrete, zinc, smoke, pollutants, decay and destruction from which emerged, reportedly, progress and prosperity.23
In this passage, the bucolic ideal is unmasked for the industrial wasteland it has become. And yet country and city are tied by this space, or perhaps tied up by it.
What is the “really rural scenery” that Deven expects and hopes for? Would that landscape redeem his position as a small-town Hindi lecturer? Would it perhaps make his spatial positioning more palatable if he were surrounded by something “really rural”? The narrator continues to probe Deven's spatial past:
As a student he had known the countryside only as a background for an occasional picnic with his friends: they had gone out into it on their bicycles, bought sugar cane from some surly farmer and sat in the shade of a ruined monument to chew it and sing songs from the latest cinema show and talk lewdly of cinema actresses. That countryside had had no more connection with the landscape celebrated in the poetry he read than the present one. Then, after he graduated and married and came to Mirpore to teach, it became for him the impassable desert that lay between him and the capital with its lost treasures of friendship, entertainment, attractions and opportunities. It turned into that strip of no-man's land that lies around a prison, threatening in its desolation.24
In this passage, Deven has discovered the despoilment of the space that Hindi was meant to occupy in his ordering of the landscape. But this spatial setup is further betrayed, since Delhi itself only disappoints. It continually offers Deven the possibilities of poetic exaltation, of cultural renewal amid decay, but takes them away before he can grasp them. Do they exist at all, he wonders?
Where Ali's Mir Nihal was a cultured and romantic gentlemen quoting Urdu verse as part of his daily life, Desai's Nur has let his love for food and drink, the sycophantic antics of his admirers, and the bitter rivalries between his two wives overtake his poetic life. The satiric setup is played out as Deven, longing for Delhi, for its urbanity, and for an Urdu way of life, enters the world of Nur. Deven is longing for a different life, whereas Nur is biding his time until he is released from the one he is in. Deven, like Ashgar in Twilight in Delhi, is of a younger generation and yearns for modernity, even if, unlike Ashgar, he is looking for it in an older, now-lost tradition of Urdu poetry. In Desai's tale, tradition itself is longed for and refabricated with tape-recorded recitations in order to make sense of modern selfhood. But the recording itself shows up the futility of the longing. In one scene, Nur vehemently resists the management of his art by Deven:
Frantic to make him resume his monologue now that the tape was expensively whirling, Deven once forgot himself so far as to lean forward and murmur with the earnestness of an interviewer, ‘And, sir, were you writing any poetry at the time? Do you have any verse belonging to that period?'
The effect was disastrous. Nur, in the act of reaching out for a drink, froze. ‘Poetry?’ he shot at Deven, harshly. ‘Poetry of the period? Do you think a poet can be ground between stones, and bled, in order to produce poetry—for you? You think you can switch on that mincing machine, and I will instantly produce for you a length of raw, red minced meat that you can carry off to your professors to eat?'25
In other scenes, Deven and Nur are able to strike up moments of understanding, but it is a story that will ultimately offer little redemption.
LAMENTING URDU IN ENGLISH
Reading Twilight in Delhi and In Custody in tandem, one is struck by their surface similarities: they are both set in Old Delhi and reflect the waning of Urdu literary culture within a male world of cultural pleasure. A sense of bleakness and loss pervades both narratives, as does a palpable forlornness in the principal characters. For both Ali and Desai, Old Delhi symbolizes the Urdu language as well as a declining Muslim sensibility and culture that came to life through Urdu. Urdu itself is a translated idea in Ali's text; we might sense the meaning of the language to his protagonists, but we never experience it for ourselves. Desai has explained that she wrote the verses that were to stand for Nur's Urdu poetry by “concocting poetry” that she then attributed to him. In the process, a new kind of literary question, and perhaps conundrum, arises: How does one write Urdu poetry in English? Desai's method was to “write verses in English that echoed their Persian origin,” verses that employed “traditional images and metaphors” and followed “Persian verse forms.” She goes on to say that despite their authentic ring to some ears, she saw them as “pastiche, not poetry.” And yet, when Nur's verses (her concoctions) had been translated into Urdu for the film In Custody, directed by Ismail Merchant, she writes: “Hearing the translated lines spoken, I felt myself translated into an Urdu poet—a surreal experience.”26 A concocted language is returned to Urdu to complete the fabrication begun by Desai. Yet her research and writing also come from her own experiences of speaking and living in Hindustani in 1950s Daryaganj, part of Old Delhi. There is both remembrance and resonance in her text, even if it is sociologically—happily so—unsound. It is in this way that Desai's text, and perhaps all literature, “refracts” rather than reflects.27 It is her imagination and vision that achieve “accuracy,” not merely the representation of a single social reality.
In other moments, Desai's narration is more removed from the language. For instance, she writes of “flowery Urdu,” “ornate Urdu,” and “chaste Urdu.” Here, Urdu is object and nothing more. But the meaning of Urdu in both texts—Desai's and Ali's—was perhaps never meant to be the language itself; how could it be in an English-language novel? Instead the idea of Urdu is the locus for drama, regret, discussion, and the delving into dense emotional webs of disappointment. In both novels, language and place are symmetrical, as both narratives continually inscribe the loss of language onto the physical structures and landscapes of the city and its environs. What is revealed is how the politics of language is an intimate affair in modern Indian life. So it is not surprising that the question of language—who speaks what, when, and where and how they feel about doing so—becomes the engine of both novels' narratives. For the principal characters of each tale, it is the very right to create and exist in different languages that is at stake.
In the temporal move from Ali's novel to Desai's, Urdu's decline is mirrored by the greater influence of a Sanskritized and so upper-caste Hindi, a Hindi that is slowly but surely purged of its Arabic and Persian vocabulary. And it is the shifting places of Hindi and Urdu that influence