English Heart, Hindi Heartland. Rashmi Sadana
Islamic Cultural Centre, the Ford Foundation, UNICEF, the India International Centre, and other venues linking Indian cultural worlds to those abroad. Auto rickshaw—the ubiquitous three wheel “scooter”—drivers tend to know it only as “vah badi lal imarat Lodhi Road par” (that big red building on Lodhi Road). That night at the book club meeting, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger was being discussed. The novel had won the Man Booker Prize the previous month, and Adiga had publicly dedicated his prize “to the people of New Delhi.”20
The novel was heralded by some critics and derided by others for its recounting of the stark social divides between rich and poor and one poor man's growing resentment of his place in this schema. Adiga is a Chennai born Indian who was brought up partly in Australia and educated at Oxford and Columbia, details that inevitably became part of his “cultural cache” or, depending on his reviewer, evidence of his “foreignness.”
That evening at the book club meeting, about twenty-five people, ranging in age from mid-thirties to mid-seventies, gathered to discuss the novel. After introductions over tea and biscuits in the foyer, we moved to a small auditorium and sat in clusters in the front center section. The two leaders of the group, an older man with short white hair and a woman in her late forties, sat up front facing the small group. They began by reading from Amitava Kumar's review of the novel that had appeared earlier that week in the English daily The Hindu. Kumar criticizes the novel for grossly misrepresenting the realities of everyday life and speech—not because it was written in English but because Adi ga's style distances the first person narrator from the harsh realities of what he sees and describes. Kumar essentially argues that the real people behind Adiga's novel—the underclass that he is heralded for having represented—are in fact disrespected. The book club leaders raised some general questions for the group to consider: To what extent was Adiga's perspective that of an insider or outsider? Was his vision of the “underbelly” of Delhi life authentic or inauthentic? Was Adiga's novel, as Kumar had stated in his review, merely a “cynical anthropology”?21
About a third of the group had read the novel, and others said they were planning to, but everyone seemed to have an opinion. The hosts then alternated reading from parts of the beginning of the novel to give the flavor of the text. Written as a series of long letters from the protagonist, Balram Halwai, to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, they explained, the novel begins:
Mr Premier,
Sir.
Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.
My ex-employer the late Mr. Ashok's ex-wife, Pinky Madam, taught me one of these things; and at 11:32 P.M. today, which was about ten minutes ago, when the lady on All India Radio announced, ‘Premier Jiabao is coming to Bangalore next week', I said that thing at once.
In fact, each time when great men like you visit our country I say it. Not that I have anything against great men. In my way, sir, I consider myself one of your kind. But whenever I see our prime minister and his distinguished sidekicks drive to the airport in black cars and get out and do namastes before you in front of a TV camera and tell you about how moral and saintly India is, I have to say that thing in English.
They continued for a few pages and then came to another section:
I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and water buffaloes wading through the ponds and chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those who live in this place call it the Darkness. Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well off. But the river brings darkness to India—the black river.22
For some, Adiga's style and portrait of Indian social realities was a timely unveiling of the real social divides in India, a counter to the “India Shining” slogan of the past decade that has trumpeted the roaring GDP and the rising disposable incomes of well employed urbanites. Others saw the book as a crass diatribe based on Adiga's widely reported journalistic forays into “village India” when he was a reporter for Time magazine. Some said that his use of English did not convey the pain of the oppressed but mocked them by making them sound like American teenagers. Were his perceptions in fact “researched” and based on “truth,” or were they a “foreigner's” view of what one expected “India” to look like?
In what is essentially an amoral morality tale, the servant-driver Balram eventually kills his rich employer, absconds with a bag of cash, and starts anew as an entrepreneur in Bangalore. He is never caught, nor does he feel remorse, he tells us, even with the knowledge that his extended family in his village would have surely been killed as punishment for his own deed.
The crux of the book club debate that evening—for it turned into a debate—was whether the novel revealed something true about the perpetual state of unease between the haves and have-nots in Delhi or whether it was merely sensationalistic. And if it was sensationalistic, as three quarters of the people in attendance seemed to think, why did it win the Booker?
The younger host asked, “Did the Western mind enjoy the sensationalism of an emerging nation? This award was given by a Western agency after all.”
The white haired man posed another leading question when he suggested we compare The White Tiger to other Booker Prize winning novels the club had read, such as J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Yann Martel's The Life of Pi. “What is the literary merit of this book?” He asked. He went on to compare Adiga's novel to another Indian novel that had been short-listed the same year, Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. “Ghosh is a researched writer,” he announced, as if that somehow answered his earlier question. Several people raised their hands, and a lively discussion ensued. One woman started to explain that ever since moving to Delhi she had felt under threat and spoke of how her home had been burgled twice, coinciding with the marriage of each of her daughters. “This book struck a chord with me; this is how it is here,” she said. This statement launched the group into a discussion of the glorification of violence in the novel and whether it merely feeds on “middle-class fears.” Some argued, “Adiga knows his craft”; “It's readable”; “It has a good style.” Others countered with “It is journalistic, not literary”; “There are no real characters”; “It's about marketing”; “He has the formula right”; “It's all about the hype; the timing of the book was perfect.” And then, a chorus of voices: “Sea of Poppies should have won!”
THE POLITICS OF LITERARY GEOGRAPHY
In India, as elsewhere in the world, the social distinction of English has alienated non-English speakers to such an extent that people speak not of “knowing” English but of “having” it.23 The social reality of linguistic haves and have nots stands in stark contrast to the realm of elite cultural production, where Indian fiction in English has brought writers such international acclaim and prestige that many assume—much to the chagrin of writers in the other Indian languages—that Indian literature only comes in English.24 In this realm of literary production English is often put in contrast to and is often at odds with “the languages” or “bhasha,” the appellations commonly used to distinguish English from the other Indian languages. Bhasha literally means “speech” and is the Hindi word for “language.” Yet the word has now also become part of the English language as spoken among Indians. For instance, sometimes people refer to the “bhashas,” pluralizing the word as if it were an English one, or they use the word as an adjective, meaning Indian language other than English, as opposed to “regional” or “vernacular.”25
If “the bhashas” or “the languages” has a clubby ring to it, it is not because English is not seen as an Indian language in these circles but that English carries a different symbolic meaning in the Indian context. These are the issues—the competing values, ideologies, and identities associated with language—that I explore in the context of literary production today.
English is spoken fluently by close to 5 percent of Indians and