Abstract
The use of English language for creative expression in the Indian context raises questions of a complex nature. English in India is a language that has understandably been viewed as imposed from outside, as part of the colonial baggage, and as a language that is learnt more for material and practical motivations than for integrative purposes. Over its 150 years of co-existence with regional languages and Bhasha literatures, English begins to inspire creative energy in bilingual or trilingual contexts; it problematises the being of the creative self in multiple ways – it affects the sociocultural nodes of the creative voice; it riffs on the originating sources of artistic expression; and it struggles for cadence and gains a measure of it. The critics of Indian English Literature argue that the dissonance that a ‘foreign’ language injects into the indigenous culture and traditions affects and distorts creativity not just in the area of linguistic ease but also in the authenticity of the creative voice. This essay, ‘Another Window on the World: English for Creative Expression in the Indian Context’, counters such arguments, arguing that English language in India is uniquely positioned now and that it has become a part of the Indian landscape, having been dynamically engaged with the multilingual and multicultural traditions of India over a long period. In its forging of the creative energies of its near-native writers in multiple genres and in its diverse and colourful uses by over 50 million speakers, English continues to deliver rich dividends in terms in original expression as well as in translations from and into Bhasha domains.
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Notes
- 1.
Despite valiant attempts by V. K. Gokak, Sujit Mukherjee, and others, the literature written directly in English continues to be known variously as ‘Indo-Anglian literature’, ‘Indo-English literature’, and ‘Indian Writing in English’. The suggestion has not been heeded that we use the appellation ‘Indo-Anglian’ for literature written directly in English and ‘Indo-English’ for translations into English of regional Indian literatures. Despite the difficulties sometimes expressed in using ‘Indo-English’ as a substantive, it remains a preferred description. See Mukherjee, Sujit. 1972. Indo-english literature: An essay in definition. In Critical essays on Indian writing in english, eds. M. K. Naik, G. S. Amur, S. K. Desai, 21–32. Dharwar: Karnatak University.
- 2.
It is to suggest this sense of a dichotomy between the language used and the culture it expresses that Indo-English writing has been dubbed humorously as ‘Matthew Arnold in a sari’ or ‘Shakuntala in skirts’ or described as ‘a dog walking on its hind legs’ or as something ‘delivered through a caesarian operation’. See Hemenway, Stephen Ignatius. 1975. The novel of india: Vol. 1. The anglo-indian novel. 8–9. Calcutta: Writers Workshop.
- 3.
For a further comment on the viability of Commonwealth literature as an area of study, see my review article, Singh, Amritjit. 1978. The commonness of commonwealth literatures. Indian book chronicle, 3:3:67–9.
- 4.
(Added in 2018). In this essay, the ‘postcolonial’ is signalled by the use of the term ‘third-world’. For debates on the postcoloniality of Indian English and Bhasha literatures, see Trivedi, Harish and Mukherjee, Meenakshi. Ed. 1996. Interrogating post-colonialism: Theory, text and context. Shimla: IIAS; also, the three essays on postcoloniality and regional literatures (Hindi, Odia, Bengali) by Harish Trivedi, Subhendu Mund, and Auritro Majumder, respectively, in ‘Beyond the Anglophone – Comparative South Asian Literatures’, a special issue of Comparative literature studies, Vol. 53, Number 2 (2016), edited by Amritjit Singh and Nalini Iyer.
- 5.
Narasimhan, Raji. 1976. Sensibility under stress. New Delhi: Ashajanak Publications is one such study. For a comment on her approach, see my review of her book in Indian Book Chronicle, Vol. II, No. 1 (1 January 1977), p. 10–11.
- 6.
It is this view of Indo-English writing that has brought caustic and hostile attacks from regional language writers, including the eminent Sachchidananda Vatsyayan Agyeya. There is genuine fear (and some jealousy) that Indo-English writing, as a show window for Indian literature, might turn customers away by its gaudy display of poor products or else become a substitute for the shop itself. Very often, attacks on Indo-English writing by regional language writers and vice versa are unnecessary and unproductive. See, for example, Rajendra Yadav’s gratuitous reference to Indo-English writing in his annual review of Hindi literature in Indian Book Chronicle, Vol. III, Nos. 1 and 2 (1 and 16 January 1978), p. 47.
- 7.
For a comment on Indian English literature from the roop-nam perspective, see Manas Mukul Das’s review of Mukherjee, Meenakshi. ed. 1975. Let’s go home and other stories. New Delhi: Orient Longman. in the Journal of the School of Languages, JNU, Vol. IV, No. 2 (Winter 1976–1977), pp. 76–80. According to Das, the tension experienced in Indo-English writing is merely of the nature of ‘the tension found in translations’.
- 8.
In contemporary literature, multilingualism has been complemented by the devaluation of language that marks the theatre of Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter and the theory and practice of Antonin Artaud. George Steiner (Language and Silence, 1967, and Extraterritorial, 1975) and Susan Sontag (Styles of Radical Will, 1969) have both commented on the significant connections between these two apparently distinct developments. Notwithstanding the romantic inclination for silence (‘Heard melodies are sweet; but those unheard are sweeter’), both the multilingualism of the ‘unhoused’ poets and the language of silence of the Absurdist playwrights represent breaks with the romantic theories of language and creativity, just as they are responses to the ‘barbarism’ (Steiner) and ‘unwholesomeness’ (Sontag) of our times. India and Indian literatures, however, remain largely untouched by these developments.
- 9.
According to Steiner, ‘Until very recently, a writer has been... a being rooted in his native idiom, a sensibility housed more closely, more inevitably, than ordinary men and women in the shell of one language.... A poet or novelist whom political exile or private disaster bad cut off from his native speech was a creature maimed’ (p. 25).
- 10.
Cf., Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, ‘when we have grown insensitive to the beauty of our own language, any foreign language has an indescribable magic; we need only cast our faded thoughts into it and they come to life again like flowers put into fresh water’. Quoted in Forster, Leonard. 1970. The poet’s tongues: Multilingualism in literature. London: Cambridge University Press., p. 3. M.C. Bradbrook, in her collection of essays on Continental and Commonwealth literatures, Bradbrook, M. C. 1972. Literature in action. London: Chattus and Windus. p. 7, makes a parallel point about a writer’s choice of language: ‘Easy communication at a superficial level makes communication in depth more precarious. Perhaps one of the reasons why Beckett chose French is that it has been less damaged than English (he said that it was easier to write without “style”)’. In India, writers of Punjabi background have often written in a language other than Punjabi – Urdu, Hindi, or English. Consider Bhisham Sahni, Rajinder Singh Bedi, and Mulk Raj Anand, among many others.
- 11.
Cf., Deb Kumar Das in Lal, P. ed. 1969. Modern indian poetry in english: An anthology and a credo. Calcutta: Writers Workshop., p. 86, ‘… new ideas of poetry are emerging which make the issue of “language” far less relevant to judging the work of poetry – why must one write in one’s native language, for instance, if poetry is to be viewed as a McLuhanesque pattern of words, rather than a structure of meanings?’
- 12.
- 13.
While an individual Indian writer might achieve an expression that will match the best in English anywhere, it is hard to imagine that English will ever have the large base as a spoken language that lies behind its rich and varied use in West Indies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or the United States.
- 14.
Such a view of Indian culture is developed by S. Radhakrishnan in Radhakrishnan, S. 1927. Hindu View of Life. London: Allen and Unwin. There are instances in our cultural past where many creeds, including Buddhism and Jainism, have been absorbed back into the mainstream because the majority coopted some of the emergent symbols and ideals. English may also become an indistinguishable part of the Indian scene in the years to come.
- 15.
The need for more translations from Indian languages into Hindi and English was emphasised by Uma Shankar Joshi in his presidential address as well as by some award winners at the Sahitya Akademi Awards Ceremony, 1977, held at Hyderabad on 11 March 1978. Many of them thought English could play a crucial role in developing an Indian writer’s awareness of other regional literatures.
- 16.
An unknown Indo-English poet, M. K. Kaw, makes the same point: ‘I consider language to be a medium of expression, a vehicle of communication. As in art, you can do oils and water-colours and pencil and ink and terra-cotta and mural’.
- 17.
Indian Book Chronicle, Vol. II, No. 14 (16 July 1977), p. 244.
- 18.
Indian Book Chronicle, Vol. II, No. 11 (1 June 1977).
- 19.
Ramanujan employed this distinction between ‘father tongue’ and ‘mother tongue’ more than once in his work as a linguist and anthropologist, most particularly in his essay, Telling Tales, first published in Daedalus, 118.4 (Fall 1989), 239–261. On pp. 241–42 of his essay, Ramanujan clarifies these fascinating distinctions at some length: ‘As we grew up, Sanskrit and English were our father tongues, and Tamil and Kannada were our mother tongues. The father tongues distanced us from our mothers, from our childhoods, and from our villages, … [and] the mother tongues united us with them. … Sanskrit stood for the Indian past; English for colonial India and the West, which also served as a disruptive creative other that both alienated us from and revealed us (in its terms) to ourselves; and the mother tongues, the most comfortable and least conscious of all, for the world of women, playmates, children, and servants. Ideas, tales, significant alliances, conflicts, elders, and peers were reflected in each of these languages’. Apart from Sena, U. R. Ananthamurthy also refers to this distinction at two places. See Ananthamurthy, U. R. 1994. A. K. Ramanujan: A connoisseur of the arts of life and poetry. Indian Literature, 37: 4: 9–12 (p. 9). Also, Ananthamurthy, U. R. 2007. Towards the concept of a new nationhood: Languages and literatures. In Composite Culture in a Multicultural Society, eds. Bipan Chandra and Sucheta Mahajan. New Delhi: Pearson Education. 239–245. (p. 240).
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Originally published as Singh, Amritjit. 1979. Contemporary Indian literature: An approach, in Aspects of Indian writing in english: Essays in honor of prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, ed. M. K. Naik, Madras: Macmillan. This revised essay, with a new concluding section, is being included here with the permission of the author and the publisher. The editors believe the essay not only captures well the late 1970s sense of issues surrounding the presence of English in India and the status of Indian English Literature, but it also speaks to the issues that are central to this volume. While the essay is valuable for the specificity with which it invokes the (mis)perceptions between Indian English and Bhasha writers, it predates the currency of the term ‘postcolonial’. See Footnote 5 for an additional comment.
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Singh, A. (2019). Another Window on the World: English for Creative Expression in the Indian Context. In: Mahanta, B., Sharma, R. (eds) English Studies in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1525-1_4
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