English Heart, Hindi Heartland. Rashmi Sadana
people of a population of just over one billion).26 As the journalist and former Times of India editor Dileep Padgaonkar said to me, “The percentages of English speakers are small, but the numbers are large.” Its numerical strength puts English on par with many of the regionally based languages or bhashas. Its place in the global order of things and the fact that it is entwined with modern, urban culture give English great prestige in the Indian context, while its lack of regional specificity within India often marks it as being culturally inauthentic. Just as there is a global geography that privileges English and its Anglo-American sponsors, there is a linguistic geography within India that recognizes twenty-two official, or “scheduled,” languages, as listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It is this geography that at once confirms and marginalizes the place of each language in its regional context. Sisir Kumar Das links the competition among languages in each region to “the rise of the middle class within each language community” and to its members having “legitimate aspirations to share political and social power.” The result is what he calls “language tension,” which becomes “more acute” in such situations. He gives the examples of the sociocultural power of standardized Hindi over the Hindi “dialects,” of Urdu over Kashmiri, Bengali over Oriya and Assamese, Tamil over Telugu, and Marathi over Konkani.27
MAP 1. Some of the languages of the subcontinent.
English might be irrelevant to some of these interregional linguistic tensions, but it often factors in, either by assuming a more neutral position or by exacerbating class or caste tensions. And it is this linguistic geography that has inadvertently impinged on many regional and national literary and cultural debates. It may be true, as Pascale Casanova has written, that language is the major component of literary capital, but it is perhaps most vital to understand how the nature of that capital changes in different geographic contexts.28
In 1949 the Constitution of India included a proviso whereby Hindi was to be “phased in” as the language of national integration, in order to mark a national “resurgence” in the service of the “ordinary citizen.” English, after all, had been the language of the erstwhile British colonizers. Meanwhile, Hindi was the most widely spoken language in India, even if its speakers were concentrated in the North. During the proposed fifteen-year transition period, English would retain its bureaucratic and political functions, while there would be “the progressive use of the Hindi language for the official purposes of the Union.” The Report of the Official Language Commission, 1956, documents the copious debate and analysis regarding the uses of English in India and imagines its role in the future. It is not that the members of the commission did not see the value of English, especially in the realms of science and technology, and the way in which India had benefited and would continue to do so by using the language. In fact, there were as many proponents of keeping English as the official language of the union as there were those who wanted to switch to Hindi.29 The report itself was in English not only because it was an official government document, but because it was the only language that could link the committee members who came from all corners of the country, north, east, west, and south.
Hindi became a cause and a symbol of national unity, but the language debates pointed to a larger malaise: the Indian languages in general had languished under colonial rule. As one committee member put it, the Indian languages “failed to develop a sufficiently rich and precise vocabulary for the requirements of modern social life, during this period when the progress of scientific knowledge wrought a great revolution in the physical conditions of living in the country.”30 It was perhaps this conflation, of English being not fully Indian and seeing the Indian languages as having suffered under British colonialism, that opened committee members to the idea that Hindi could stand for all things linguistically Indian at the national level, that there could be some postcolonial linguistic redemption after all.
The broader aim after independence, in large part, was in developing not only Hindi but also the thirteen other major languages “so as to make them adequate vehicles of thought and expression” (a somewhat paternalistic attitude to the bhashas that goes back to Macaulay) leading to “the eventual displacement of the English language.” At the same time, for reasons of administrative practicality, the official bureaucracy at the national level could only occur in one language. Where English had previously forged a pan-Indian consciousness, credited with enabling a countrywide nationalist leadership to orchestrate the ousting of the British, Hindi would now take over and spread. There would be a “changeover” to Hindi, especially in the fields of “education, administration, and law courts, so as to bring them in a live and continuous communion with the common people of the country.”31 In deference to the other Indian languages, Hindi would not be referred to as the “national language” but the “official language of the Union.”
The long term goal was for Hindi to enable a pan-Indian dialogue and consciousness among all classes of Indians. To this end, the Ministry of Education was charged with creating a new scientific vocabulary in Hindi, organizing the massive translation of administrative documents, teacher training, correspondence courses for Indians in non-Hindi regions, subsidies to Hindi publishers and prizes to their authors, and the elaborate distribution of Hindi books to non-Hindi states, schools, colleges, and libraries. Beyond the rhetoric and debates, what was being called for was nothing less than a linguistic revolution.
But in the decades after independence, the English language was not “phased out,” as had been planned by the first postcolonial government. Instead, the language became even more entrenched in public life and the change over to Hindi never happened. At the same time, governmental programs to promote Hindi have had long lasting effects on institutions such as publishing houses and cultural bodies such as the Sahitya Akademi. This lopsided cultural “development” kept the reins of Hindi in the firm grasp of its cultural elites, who effectively became the custodians of Hindi culture.
The place of English is defined vis à vis Hindi, and also in relation to the other bhashas. In 1956 India's Official Languages Act organized states along linguistic lines, despite the fact that nearly every state has sizable linguistic minorities. So, for instance, although Marathi is the mother tongue of nearly three quarters of those living in the western state of Maharashtra, about 8 percent of Maharashtrians count Hindi as their mother tongue and a little less than 8 percent Urdu. Literature is nevertheless largely mapped along those same state borders to the extent that bhasha literatures are often referred to in English as “regional literatures.” In addition, most of these “regional” literatures serve reading populations larger than those of most European nations. For example, there are close to 80 million Hindi speakers in the state of Bihar alone, 74 million Telugu speakers (largely in the state of Andhra Pradesh), and 83 million Bengali speakers, mostly in West Bengal.32 Hence both the size and the dimensions of a vernacular literary culture become obscured by the idea of the regional. This obfuscation becomes a veritable distortion when regional literature itself is continually juxtaposed with the “global” literature written by Indians in English. In the face of globalized English literary production and the prominence of Indian English writing, the regional has to some extent become a diminutive. Being confined to a limited geographic space has in many respects come to restrict the stature of bhasha literary texts when placed side by side with Indian English ones, as they increasingly and inevitably are.
It had not always been this way. When there were fewer Indians writing in English, in the 1930 s, 1940 s, and 1950 s, for instance, these writers (e.g., Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hossain, Kamala Markandaya, R.K. Narayan, and Raja Rao) were thought to be writing against the grain. They were thusly perceived in part because they were not taken as seriously by the English literary establishment based, naturally, in London. Yet they were also not taken as seriously in India, since at this time English was not an Indian language in the way it is today.
The change in the relationship between English and bhasha literatures is partly due to the shift in how Indian English writing has been received and published abroad, a dynamic that, I argue (in chapter 8), generates a new politics of place. Yet Indian literature in English also has more validity and social