In Search of Indian English: History, Politics and Indigenisation 9780367352714, 9780429331602

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 A historical background
3 Articles, letters, and a diary
4 Four works of fiction
5 Speeches philosophical
6 Speeches political
7 Two letters and a manifesto
8 Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

IN SEARCH OF INDIAN ENGLISH

This book presents a historical account of the development of an acrolectal variety of the English language in colonial India. It highlights the phenomenon of Indianization of the English language and its significance in the articulation of the Indian identity in pre-Independence India. This volume also discusses the sociocultural milieu in which English became the first choice for writers and political leaders. Using examples primarily from the writings of Rammohan Roy, Bankimchandra, Krupabai Satthianadhan, and Gandhi and from the speeches of Vivekananda, Tagore, and Subhas Bose, this book argues that prose written in English in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century scripted a nationalist discourse through its appropriation of the colonizer’s language. It also examines how these works, which absorbed elements of Indian culture and languages, paved the path for the emergence of Indian English as a distinct dialect of the English language. This book will be useful for teachers, scholars, and students of English literature, linguistics, and cultural studies. It will also be of use to general readers interested in the history of the English language and the history of modern India. Ranjan Kumar Auddy received his PhD from Calcutta University. He previously taught at Sabang Sajanikanta Mahavidyalaya, a college in rural West Bengal, and is currently an assistant professor at the Department of English, Heramba Chandra College, Kolkata, India.

IN SEARCH OF INDIAN ENGLISH History, Politics and Indigenisation

Ranjan Kumar Auddy

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Ranjan Kumar Auddy The right of Ranjan Kumar Auddy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-35271-4(hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-33160-2(ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

DEDICATED TO MY FATHER, THE LATE SRI BIMAL KUMAR AUDDY

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

viii

1

Introduction

1

2

A historical background

33

3

Articles, letters, and a diary

44

4

Four works of fiction

71

5

Speeches philosophical

97

6

Speeches political

126

7

Two letters and a manifesto

145

8

Conclusion

172

Bibliography Index

193 207

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to Dr Sinjini Bandyopadhyay and Prof. Tanmay Ghosh of Calcutta University for their guidance and encouragement; to my wife, Pallabi, and our children for their continuous support; to the library staff of National Library Kolkata, Central Library of University of Calcutta, British Council Library, Rammohan Library, Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, and College Libraries of Sabang Sajanikanta Mahavidyalaya and Heramba Chandra College. I am also grateful to my colleagues for diverse help and suggestions and the college administration of Sabang Sajanikanta Mahavidyalaya for supporting my research by facilitating the FDP Programme of University Grants Commission. I would like to thank the entire team of Routledge, including Ms Antara Raychaudhuri, for their hard work.

viii

1 INTRODUCTION

In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of the novel, expressed the universal feeling of dissociation of the colonized from the language of the colonizer: ‘the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine . . . My soul frets in the shadow of his language’.(146) For Ngugi, writing in English (or any other language of the colonizer, such as French) itself is a compromise with neocolonialism: ‘But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit?’ (26). But the foregoing observations do not constitute the entire history nor are they absolute truths as far as the relation between the colonized and the colonizer’s language is concerned. Dedalus himself ended up accepting his lot as an Irishman educated in the English language and justified his choice of English over Irish: My ancestors threw off their language and took another . . . They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? (156) Indians did not throw off their languages; neither did they discontinue using the English language ever since they began to use it. Rather their languages have cast a deep impact upon the English they use, resulting in the ‘Indianization’1 of the English language and subsequently the emergence of a new variant of the English language. In fact, ‘Indianization’ of the English language is itself a process of decolonization, leading to the emergence of a distinct variant of the English language called Indian English. Voices associating the identity with the English language can also be heard: for example, the poet Kamala Das said, It voices my joys, my longings, my Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing Is to crows (An Introduction, lines 16–18) 1

INTRODUCTION

That which voices the poet’s longings and joys is not the English of the colonizer, but as the poet says, ‘It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest/ It is as human as I am human’ (lines 13–14). This book is out to prove that Indian English is not just ‘funny’ but has a glorious legacy behind it. Its birth is associated with the rise of Indian nationalism. Today English is as a part of the multilingual texture of Indian life as trousers and shirts are a part of Indian dress. In India, shirts and trousers are continuously being readjusted and refashioned to meet the demands of new taste and time. For example, the famous and revered artist Hemanta Mukhopadhyay (known as Hemant Kumar in Mumbai) wore throughout his life the particular variety of shirt which looked like a punjabi with a collar. This indigenized variety of garment was popular during the 1950s and 1960s, and it was basically a cross between a Western shirt and a punjabi as worn by Bengali gentlemen. Nowadays collarless shirts are a part of casual wear in India. Just as the Western garments are adapted and readjusted in accordance with Indian clime and culture, needs and fancies, and simultaneously redefining modern Indian identity, the English language has undergone a process of indigenization in India, leading to the emergence of a new variant of English called Indian English. This process of indigenization is guided by practical needs as well as the politics of identity. Colonization by the Anglican race has led to the emergence of varieties of English or ‘englishes’, such as Indian, Jamaican, Singaporean, and Malaysian (Ashcroft 8). All these varieties do not belong to the category of creole.2 Indian English, unlike Jamaican patois, is not a creole but a second-language variant3 of the English language. In India pidgins ‘have not caught on’ (Kathau); rather Indian learners, especially the literate upper castes, having a rich tradition of written literature, were quick to acquire a fairly accurate knowledge of the English language. In a book published in 1990, David Crystal observed that there were more speakers of Indian English in the world than British English (English 10). In order to understand the emergence of Indian English, one has to study the use of the English language during the rise of Indian nationalism. A huge body of literature written in English by Indians came to exist by the end of the colonial era in 1947, consisting of poems, novels, essays, public speeches, letters, diaries, and so forth. Besides the vernaculars, this body of literature is also an expression of the age of renaissance and the age of nationalism. Homi Bhabha discussed ‘strategies of selfhood’ in locating culture ‘beyond’ the cultural realm of what is called the first world (Bhabha, Location, 1). The Indian writings in English of pre-independent India document adoption of diverse ‘strategies of selfhood’ as well as nationhood which are interrelated with the emergence of Indian English. According to G.J.V. Prasad, writing in English is ‘a quest for a space which is created by translation and assimilation’ (42). I argue that such ‘quest’ for a linguistic space and ‘strategies of selfhood’ in Indian writing in English can be traced back to the nineteenth century. 2

INTRODUCTION

Braj B. Kachru wrote extensively on the phenomenon of ‘Indianization’ of the English language. The phenomenon of ‘Indianization’ is explained by Kachru as ‘deviations’ (Indianization, 2), and as ‘acculturation of a western language in the linguistically and culturally pluralistic context of the subcontinent’ (Indianization, 1). Kachru used the term ‘nativization’ (Alchemy, 28) to generalize the phenomenon in all ‘non-native’ (Alchemy, 28) varieties of English. But ‘Indianization’ as a ‘strategy of selfhood’, as a means of asserting identity in the colonial period, has not been sufficiently explored. In 1975, Chinua Achebe spoke of ‘Africanization’ of the English language as an artistic necessity: I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings. (65) Analogically ‘Indianization’ of the English language in literature can also be seen as artistic necessity. But the artistic necessity of nativizing the colonial ruler’s language in a colonial context inevitably gets tangled with problems of identity, with maintenance and defiance of the Standard norm, and then the issue becomes political. The term ‘linguistic innovations’ (Alchemy, 28) used by Kachru in the context of ‘nativization’ does indicate the context of artistic and linguistic skill of users but its relation with the politics of identity and with loyalty to the Standard norm begs to be analyzed. More importantly, much of the Indian writings in English of the colonial era were rich in ‘innovative’ use of language, and this area has not been sufficiently explored. Some of the reasons for ‘Indianization’ being confined to aesthetic and linguistic domains are the facts that the contribution of the Indian writings of the colonial era towards the emergence of Indian English and the interrelation of the use of the English language in the colonial era with the emergence of Indian nationalism have not been explored enough. ‘Indianization’ of the English language and the subsequent emergence of Indian English may be viewed from two perspectives: as a natural outcome of several centuries of coexistence of the English language with the Indian languages and as a postcolonial phenomenon which presupposes the emergence of a nationalistic discourse, strategies of resisting the colonial discourses and resisting the hegemony of Standard English. As far as the first perspective is concerned, it is difficult to ascertain the first interface of the Germanic languages with the Indian languages as ‘India had commercial relations with countries of the West from time immemorial’ (Majumdar, Raychaudhuri, & Dutta, 623), although a regular interface may be considered to have taken place since the seventeenth century, when the English merchants established factories in western India. My study is concerned with 3

INTRODUCTION

the second perspective, which, however, is not inseparable from the first one. The expression of selfhood, the assertion of a rediscovered Indianness, and the resistance and interrogation of the colonial discourses in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries called for bold and strategic use of the colonizer’s tongue. This study aims to explore the ‘strategies of selfhood’ in a few specimens of the writings and speeches of Indians from Raja Rammohan Roy to Mahatma Gandhi. From a linguistic perspective, my study deals with the acrolectal4 variety of the English language as used by Indians since the early nineteenth century. The mesolectal and basilectal varieties must have had their share of contributions to the emergence of Indian English. However, in India, the dominant variant has always been the acrolect and its influence (in the colonial era) on setting the trends of language use has been decisive. Strangely enough, this area has been ignored by scholars and researchers who worked on Indian English. Prof. P.E. Dustoor, teacher and mentor of Braj. B. Kachru, ‘considered the English of Tagore, Sarojini Naidu and Manmohan Ghose “the better, not the worse, for bearing the stamp of national temperament”’ (qtd in Kachru, Indianization, 3). But neither Kachru nor the subsequent generation of linguists who worked on Indian English has shown much interest in the language of Indian writing in English of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. I would like to quote from Kachru and Probal Dasgupta, two major linguists who have worked on Indian English, to prove my point: Before 1947 English had a precarious position in South Asia. On one hand it was considered a symbol of British power and what is worse a politically superimposed language. On the other hand the regional varieties of English were considered, by the English themselves, ‘substandard’ and were often characterized as Babu English or Cheechee English, or simply labelled Indian or Lankan English in a derogatory sense. (Kachru, Indianization, 17) If English as it is spoken in India is a natural language, then normal linguistics, examining it, is bound to arrive at Kachru’s conclusion that there is an Indian English, an independent object of description that comes into its own after the political ties with England are severed in 1947. Since that year, the speakers of English in India have been on their own in their use and reproduction of the language: they are a bona fide speech community. (Dasgupta, P., 118) I think a few questions need to be raised regarding the foregoing observations. If English had a precarious existence before 1947, how do we account for the use of the English language by the galaxy of Indian writers and 4

INTRODUCTION

speakers from Rammohan Roy to Mahatma Gandhi? Further, according to Kachru, the emergence of the Indianized variant of English was preceded by two types of uses of the English language: as a politically superimposed language and as ‘Babu English’.5 Hence a few more questions inevitably rise: were ‘Babu English’ and ‘Cheechee English’ the precursors of Indian English? Was ‘Indianization’ of the English language an outcome of political superimposition of the English language on the Indians? Was English rescued from its ‘precarious’ existence as a superimposed language and placed on a secure platform – almost miraculously – by writers and speakers of English in India after 1947? Ironically, some of the novelists whose texts Kachru referred to began their literary career before 1947. And finally, did Indian English have to wait for the political ties to be severed formally before it could ‘come into its own’? Returning to Kachru’s statement once again, although his declared aim in Indianization of English Language was ‘to capture the processes and devices of the Indianness of this nativized variety of English which has been used by Indians to serve the typically Indian needs in distinct Indian contexts for almost two hundred years’ (2), the foregoing observation regarding the state of English in the colonial era (‘Before 1947’) makes his declaration contradictory. Moreover, his focus had been the use of the English language by Indians in the twentieth century, and hence the nineteenth century had to be dismissed with such terms as ‘precarious’ and ‘babu English’. However, in The Alchemy of English (1986), Kachru located the earliest example of ‘Indianization’ in Soshee Chunder Dutt and Lal Behari Day: ‘A few years after [S.C.] Dutt, another Bengali, Lal Behari Day, excelled his predecessor in Indianizing the English in his novels’ (47). Yet Kachru did not provide a thorough investigation of ‘Indianization’ in nineteenth-century Indian writing in English. Moreover, although he mentioned the relation between ‘the political writing’ (47) and ‘national awakening’ (47) in the colonial era, he did not relate non-fictional writings with the phenomenon of ‘Indianization’. Kachru pointed out that Indians’ English in the colonial era was ‘characterized’ and ‘labelled’ (Kachru, Indianization, 17) as babu English or Indian English in a derogatory sense. But he made no effort in examining those labels. My study shows in every chapter the fragility of such labels. In fact, all the examples of babu English given by Kachru (‘English’, 510–511) are in the form of letters. Binoo K. John also provided an important instance of babu English (John, 99), again in the form of a letter. I doubt if ever any book or article or pamphlet was written in babu or ‘Cheechee English’. Altogether, the crux of the problem lay in the fact that the significance of much of the Indian prose writings of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in the history of the ‘Indianization’ of the English language (and the subsequent emergence of Indian English) was ignored by Kachru and it has been largely ignored till today. Regarding the first of my queries posited on the statement of Kachru, I would like to point out that in the nineteenth and the early twentieth 5

INTRODUCTION

centuries, from the time period of Rammohan to that of Mahatma Gandhi, India witnessed quite a few international figures who shaped modern India by their thoughts and actions and also shaped, I argue, the English language by their use of English. In other words, they contributed to the nationalization of the English language and paved the path for the emergence of Indian English. The contribution of the Indian writers of English fiction in the nineteenth century has also not been properly evaluated. The idea of ‘precarious existence’ had taken root, I think, because the contributions of these writers have largely been ignored. These writers do not figure in Kachru’s arguments on ‘Indianization’ of English; Krishnaswamy and Burde (1998), for example, made no mention of the rich treasure house of English prose in the nineteenth century. Quoting a few formal letters of the nineteenth century, they pointed out the ‘bureaucratic register and officialese and the formulaic use of English’ (Krishnaswamy & Burde, 96), which had little scope or space for the creative use of language. Krishna Sen, in collaboration with Ramkrishna Bhattacharya, compiled and edited a collection of nineteenthcentury English prose and significantly named it Inscribing Identity (2009). But we need to analyze and understand how identity was inscribed in the Indians’ use of the English language. It is also worthwhile to ponder how ‘Indianness’ of Indians’ use of English can be measured. Traditionally, deviations from the Standard variety have been generally termed as ‘mistakes’, although linguists regard this attitude of considering Standard British English as the only ‘correct’ form of the English language as a ‘relic . . . instilled by the administrators and educators of the British Raj’ (Dixon, 437). In the course of time, some of these ‘mistakes’ and oddities have become part of Indian English, as we find in the analysis of Indian English of the postcolonial times in the works of Gumperz, Aulakh and Kaltman (1985), R.M.W. Dixon (1991), and Sethi (2011). But this is not the total picture of the phenomenon of indigenization or ‘Indianization’ because, in the case of acrolect the writer or speaker consciously adopts, to borrow the phrase from Bhabha, ‘strategies of selfhood’ (1994), ways of ‘inscribing’ the identity – singular or communal – seeking to form a native discourse. This also results in an ‘Indianized’ form of the English language. From this perspective a study of the pre-independent English writings, both fictional and non-fictional, is highly interesting. We find here an interface between Indian nationalism and ‘Indianization’ of the English language. The question of English as a ‘superimposed’ colonial language is a controversial one as the matter is involved with the history of colonization and the history of the colonized people’s reaction to the colonial system. Gauri Viswanathan (1989), citing various historical documents, exposed the imperial motives behind the sponsorship of English-language education in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, contrary to the notion that English was ‘imposed’ upon the Indians, some Indian historians have argued that 6

INTRODUCTION

English had a public demand since the late eighteenth century (Sinha, 22). R.C. Majumdar claimed that English was introduced not by the British but ‘in spite of them’ (Renascent, 33–39). He narrated the history of Brahmins led by Baidyanath Mukherjee, who petitioned before Sir Hyde East, the then judge of Supreme Court, for a college for imparting the Western mode of education for the Hindus, which ultimately led to the establishment of the Hindu College in 1817. In The History of British India published in 1858, Horace Hayman Wilson narrated the apprehension of the Hindus about religious conversion, which often deterred them from sending their young ones to missionary schools. In order to remove this source of apprehension ‘they [the wealthy Hindus of Bengal] were encouraged by several of the principal members of the British community, to establish an English seminary on a liberal foundation, of which they should retain . . . absolute control’ (411–412). The consequence, according to Wilson, was the ‘foundation of the English College of Calcutta, an institution which promises to exert an important influence upon intellectual development in Bengal’ (412). What Wilson calls ‘English College of Calcutta’ is understandably the Hindu College. Wilson narrates that following the establishment of the college Sir Hyde East and Mr Harington withdrew themselves from the committee as it was the original plan of the Committee and according to the ‘desire of the Governor General’ (411). It appears that the government was wary of getting involved in any possible controversy of religious conversion of Hindu Bengali men. On the other hand, the Hindu community of Calcutta was not willing to forego the chances of material advancement through English education even in the face of a possibility of religious conversion. Hence they devised a way out to bypass the problem and reach their goal. M.K. Naik documented that Baidyanath Mukherjee told the chief justice of the Supreme Court that ‘many of the leading Hindus were desirous of forming an establishment for the education of their children in a liberal manner’ (History 10). Hence while the colonizers had their plan of using language and literature for perpetrating imperial rule (as analyzed by Gauri Viswanathan), colonized community had their own strategies of assimilation and survival. Mohan Ramanan described the milieu of English education in Bengal before 1835: [T]he English schools established by Eurasians like Sherbourne, Martin Bowles and Arathon Petras were well thought of. Some very distinguished Indians like Dwarka Nath Tagore, Moti Lal Seal, Nitya Sen and Adaitya Sen studied in these schools. But the Government still hesitated to take concrete steps for fear of incurring public disfavour because English and modern studies meant criticism, even rejection, of orthodoxy. (‘Introduction’, 9) 7

INTRODUCTION

Soon the East India Company, urged by the British government to take measures for ‘the introduction of useful knowledge and religious and moral improvements’ (Majumdar, Raychaudhuri, & Dutta, 811), took steps to establish a Sanskrit college in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta. It was followed by a spirited protest by Rammohan Roy, whose letter to Lord Amherst in December 1823, pleading for the introduction of scientific knowledge, is much quoted by scholars, historians, linguists, and educationists. However, Rammohan’s protest entailed a debate on education. Followed by the debate between the Orientalists and the Occidentalists, English was officially adopted as the means of higher education in India in 1835. M.K. Naik documented that when the Hughli College was opened in 1836, ‘there were 1200 applicants for admission within three days’ (11). In the nineteenth century English was looked upon as a tool of progress and as a symbol of the positive aspects of Western civilization. The point is discussed in detail in Chapters 2 and 3. British English literature and modern science came to be appraised highly in Indian English-educated society, especially in Bengal, and an important stream of Indian literature in the English language came to exist by the late nineteenth century. In the light of these facts and findings, I think Kachru’s philosophy of Indianization of English cannot stand upon the presupposition that English had a ‘precarious’ existence before 1947, for ‘Indianization’, even from Kachru’s perspective, implies a process of assimilation that needs the support of free will rather than a process of coercion and superimposition. While the English language has been assimilated in the Indian society, Indian languages have been assimilated in the corpus of the English language. This process of assimilation does not take place overnight. It is my hypothesis – thus I come to the last of the queries posited on the statements of Kachru and Dasgupta  – that the process of assimilation started more than a century before India’s independence – much before ‘political ties’ were ‘severed in 1947’. Moreover, since Kachru took most of his examples of ‘Indianization’ from the novels written in English by Indian writers in the 1930s and onwards, it gives a misleading impression that writers like Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, and Bhabani Bhattacharya were the main architects of ‘Indianization’ of English, while Lal Behari Day was the ‘precursor’ (47) to the novelists of the 1930s and that non-fictional writings had no role to play. This study seeks to dispel that impression. ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the colonial era is a sociolinguistic issue, and its relation with the social, cultural, and political problems of pre-independent India demands to be ascertained. Otherwise, it might be reduced to the pointing out of a few loanwords, as done by Krishnaswamy and Burde, who argued that ‘a few Indian loan words and fossilized expressions found in Indians’ use of English do not constitute a valid base to claim “Indianization” of English or its pidginization/creolization’ (150). At the very outset of this chapter, I have pointed out that Indian English is not a 8

INTRODUCTION

creole but a variant of the English language. Hence seeing ‘Indianization’ solely from the perspective of ‘pidginization/creolization’ (Krishnaswamy & Burde, 150) is likely to be fallacious. Pidgins arise out of the need for basic communication. Secondly, ‘social distance must be maintained between speakers of the superstrate and the other languages; otherwise, if the substrate speakers so desired, they could eventually acquire enough information about the superstrate language to speak it in a non-pidginized form’ (Holm, 1: 5). In India, a considerable section of the substrate speakers in the nineteenth century acquired enough information about the English language to speak and write it like the native speakers, although native speakers often maintained a social distance from the Indians. The English language was adopted by aspiring young Indian men for the utilitarian purpose of improving their job prospects. Simultaneously, the language was promoted by Rammohan Roy so that Indian society could have access to the knowledge of ‘Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy and other useful Sciences’ (‘Letter’, 164); it was promoted by Michael Madhusudan Dutt so that Indians could redeem themselves from ‘superstition’ and ‘fatal adherence to institution’ (‘Anglo-Saxon’, 39). On the other hand Macaulay also did not promote the language for basic communication but for creating ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’ (n.p.). I have argued in Chapter 2 that the sociocultural milieu of the Bengal Renaissance was conducive to the emergence of a dialect or an indigenized variant of the English language rather than a pidgin or a creole because India had a rich cultural heritage of written literature and did not need the English language for basic communication. Moreover, use of loanwords, code-mixes, and code-switches, mother-tongue interferences, and the influence of Indian narrative structures on Indian writings cannot be written off today as ‘fossilized expressions’ because they are evidence of negotiation of cultures and redefinition of ‘selfhood’. Simultaneously, ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the colonial period was not confined to use of Indian loanwords, lexis-bound translations, and code-mixes, but it had a wide domain, including use of Indian argumentative traditions (as I find in the writings of Rammohan), traditions of oratory (as I find in the speeches of Vivekananda), and attempts to form new discourses in the English language out of influence from Indian life and culture (as I find in the novels of Bankimchandra or the speeches of Tagore). These influences of Indian culture and languages gave Indians’ English an Indian identity. ‘Indianization’ of the English language has never been an isolated linguistic process but deeply interrelated with contemporary politics and the cultural life of India. Much before the anti-partition movement of 1905, or the establishment of the Indian National Congress in 1886, Indian nationalism, according to Partha Chatterjee, launched ‘its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a “modern” national culture that 9

INTRODUCTION

is nevertheless not Western’ (6). This intended fusion of the national and the ‘modern’ called upon the Indianization of the modern and the modernization of the Indian in Indian life and culture. It is this milieu which aided the ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the nineteenth century. Later, during the heydays of the anti-colonial movement in India, from 1905 to 1947, the use of the English language as well as the process of ‘Indianization’ did not subside. Rather, we see a stronger presence than before of mother-tongue interference. Ironically, this process is quite conspicuous in the English writings of Mahatma Gandhi (discussed in Chapter 6), the staunchest opponent of the English language and Western culture. In other words, to trace the history of Indian English is a rediscovery of modern India. Iyengar, whose work Indian Writing in English is very much a part of academic curriculum in the departments of English all over India, viewed the history of English in India from a wide, non-problematic stance when he wrote, When Rammohan and Ranade, Dadabhai and Phirozeshah, Surendranath and Bepin Pal, Sankaran Nair and S. Srinivasa Iyengar, Tilak and Gokhale, Malaviya and Motilal, C.R. Das and Aurobindo  – when these and a hundred other nationalists and patriots of yesteryear wrote or reasoned in English, they were making Indian history, and they were creating a new literature. (8) The truth of the statement is obvious, but today we need to analyze how that ‘new literature’ which was composed in English was ‘making Indian history’. Was the literature ‘new’ only because it was composed in English? Or did it have a novelty of matter and approach, which may be summarized as ‘Renaissance’? What was the approach of the writers of this new literature towards English? And finally, does this ‘new’ literature tell the history of a ‘new’ English? It is a historical fact that this literature written in English since the early nineteenth century gave Indians a new consciousness of nationalism, of the past glory of India, and of her present plight. It is a historical fact that modern India found a new voice in the language of the Anglo-Saxons. But language is never a static entity but continuously changes and reinvents itself. In the writings and speeches of eminent Indians in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the English language gradually evolved from a foreign language to one of the Indian languages, getting closer to the other Indian languages and adapted to suit the Indian temperament and subject matter. The emergence of the Indian voice in English in the colonial era may be seen, in the words of Homi Bhabha, as the emergence of ‘interstice’ between East and West through which values of nationalism and social reforms were negotiated. Homi Bhabha viewed cultural interstices as crucial for the remapping of the location of culture in the postcolonial world: ‘It is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of 10

INTRODUCTION

domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated’ (Bhabha, Location, 2). ‘Indianization’ of the English language has therefore been a postcolonial phenomenon even in the colonial era, and this part of the history of the English language is all the more significant in understanding the emergence of Indian English as a distinct dialect. This problematic aspect of ‘Indianization’ has been largely ignored so far. While Kachru located ‘Indianization’ as a postcolonial phenomenon and explained it as ‘acculturation of a western language in the linguistically and culturally pluralistic context of the subcontinent’ (Indianization, 1), its problematic vis-à-vis politics has come to be located by postcolonial critics in the construction of ‘difference’ (Ashcroft, Griffith, & Tiffin, 44) and indirectly in the defiance of the common denomination of Commonwealth literature by writers like Salman Rushdie in the 1980s. According to Rushdie, the idea of Commonwealth literature was a ploy to create an exclusive literary ‘ghetto’ with a ‘segregationist’ motive (‘Commonwealth’, 63). While the phrase ‘Commonwealth literature’ segregates the literatures in English of erstwhile colonized nations from ‘English literature’, it also dilutes the identities of the individual bodies of literature, such as African and Indian; their cultural identities are buried under the common history of colonization and the common English language. Moreover, the term ‘Commonwealth literature’ is not inclusive of the vernacular literatures, such as Bengali or Hindi literatures. Hence critics and scholars since the late 1980s have attached a lot of value to ‘difference’ from the Standard British English (Ashcroft et al., 44). In the 1960s, before Kachru, R.K. Narayan in his essay ‘English in India’ spoke of ‘Indianization’ as a general but inevitable phenomenon: The English language, through sheer resilience and mobility, is now undergoing a process of Indianization in the same manner as it adopted US citizenship over a century ago, with the difference that it is the major language there but here one of fifteen. (467) Although Narayan used the phrase ‘now undergoing’, I would like to show in the subsequent chapters that the postcolonial tendency of interrogating and negotiating with the colonizer’s norm started in the colonial era itself. When Raja Rao discussed the need for a ‘dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American’ (‘Foreword’, 5) such a dialect was already taking shape, the process of which had started as early as the nineteenth century, if not earlier. Writers of English fiction in India have been positing ‘difference’ out of artistic need since the first Indian English novel was written in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Rajmohan’s Wife, an elderly woman addresses Matangini, the young heroine of the novel, as ‘mother’ (Chatterjee, 71), 11

INTRODUCTION

which is an example of cultural shift as in India even a female child can be called mother as a mark of affection and respect. In Satthianadhan’s Saguna, when two sakhis, Radha and Lakshmi, get separated, one of them expresses her anxiety of loneliness in the following manner: ‘Oh! How desolate I shall be, alone here. What shall I do on the river bank, in the temple, in our familiar place by the tamarind tree? It would seem as if it were all coming to eat me up’ (39). The three sentences, including the grammatical inversion, present the register of friendly conversation at the riverbank. Such a register is possible not only in Marathi – as Radha and Lakshmi are understandably two Marathi girls – but also in most of the languages of India. Thus Satthianadhan inscribed her identity in her use of the English language while positing a difference from Standard British English. Another possible reason for the idea that ‘Indianization’ of the English language is only a postcolonial phenomenon is the fact that nineteenth-century Indian English literature itself was largely ignored by scholars till the 1980s and, worse, looked down upon by some. Rushdie lamented that For some, English-language Indian writing will never be more than a post-colonial anomaly, the bastard child of Empire, sired on India by the departing British; its continuing use of the old colonial tongue is seen as a fatal flaw that renders it forever inauthentic. (‘Introduction’, xii) In 1971, Meenakshi Mukherjee wrote, Most of the early Indo-Anglian experiments in literature were done in verse. Prose of non-fictional variety existed in abundance, but it was motivated mostly by extra-literary impulses like political protest or social reform. The novel . . . was conspicuously absent until the nineteen-twenties. (Twice-Born, 28) The foregoing statement implies that there is scarcely anything worth studying in Indian English literature till the 1920s except verse. While the novel did not exist, non-fictional prose motivated by ‘political protest or social reform’ is of little significance to a literary critic. However, it was Mukherjee herself who rediscovered Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife in a new edition of the novel in 1996; in The Perishable Empire (2000), she also highlighted the importance of Satthianadhan and Lal Behari Day. But nonfictional prose is still largely confined to the pages by literary historians, like Iyengar and M.K. Naik. According to Leela Gandhi, independent nation states desire to forget their colonial past: ‘this will to forget’ is ‘chiefly symptomatic of the urge for historical self-invention or the need to make a new start – to erase memories of a colonial subordination’ (qtd in Das, 9). The 12

INTRODUCTION

view is tenable as far as Indian English fiction is concerned. In the political and social life of independent India the stalwarts of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries – from Rammohan to Mahatma Gandhi – have acted as polestars. It is their contribution to the culture of the English language in India which has been largely ignored to date. Further, Indian writers of English did not become popular among the educated section of India until the advent of Rushdie and the phenomenal success of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In 2007, in an article in a newspaper, Anita Desai reminisced that the situation for Indian writers in English in the 1950s and 1960s was far from encouraging: ‘Readers of the English language almost without exception preferred to read the English written in its native land, the only English considered pure and acceptable’ (‘Modern Indian’, 6). Remembering the ‘antipathy’ (8) towards the Indian writers in English, Desai wrote about her struggle against depression, ‘I tried to ignore the assumption that mine was the last generation in India that would write in English but shared in the sense that these were its twilight years’ (‘Modern Indian’, 8). However, in 2008, Desai’s assessment of the position of English in India was different from that of her days of depression: ‘Let us admit it, English is at best an immigrant in India. It was not originally a native even if it is almost one now’ (‘Timid Movement’, 20). Her metaphor is quite eloquent, for as an immigrant generally goes through a continuous process of readjustment with the new environment, resulting in an ongoing process of redefinition of identity, the English language in India has also had a similar fate. ‘Indianization’ of the English language, from the perspective of Desai, may be described – borrowing the words of Lachman Khubchandani – as an ‘ongoing activity negotiating between tradition and environment’ (‘Foreword’, xii). On the other hand, from the perspective of Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, ‘Indianization’ is also a conscious postcolonial attempt: in an interview, she said, ‘In order for there to be an all-India voice, we have had to dehegemonize English as one of the Indian languages’ (Landry and MacLean, eds, 19). Today it is high time to re-evaluate the linguistic contribution of the preindependent writers of English, both fictional and non-fictional, towards readjusting and dehegemonizing the language of the colonial rulers. I have studied selected pieces of prose – both fictional and non-fictional – from Rammohan’s arguments on the burning of widows to Subhas Bose’s famous speech delivered in 1944, which virtually covers a time period of almost one and a half centuries. I exclude verse from this study as the technical, linguistic, and artistic problems of verse and prose are different. Linguists who have worked on Indian English in the last fifty years have been obsessed with the present, with the here and the now, and have ignored the rich legacy of Indian writing in English of the pre-Independent India. In other words, linguists have approached Indian English from a synchronic perspective, but the diachronic perspective towards Indian English has not been undertaken to a large extent. Recently, some linguists have argued that 13

INTRODUCTION

speakers of Indian English can no longer be called ‘non-native’ as they have been called so far (Singh, R., 20–27). The term ‘non-native variety’ is ‘oxymoronic’ and is derived on the basis of a ‘structuralist and generativist conceptions of the native speaker’ (Singh, R., 22). Today, when most democratic societies are appraising multiculturalism and pluralism, ‘one can legitimately say that native speakers of Texan English are not native speakers of Heartland Canadian English’ but ‘one cannot legitimately say that native speakers of Texan English are not native speakers of English (because they do not speak Standard British or Standard Mid-Western American English’ (Singh, R., 22–23). Here the question of ownership and proprietorship is important, as Singh has pointed out.6 David Crystal comments on the British anxiety about losing the sole ownership of English: Such anxiety is most keenly felt in Britain, where, after centuries of dominance in the use of English, many people who take pride in their use of English find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that British English is now, numerically speaking, a minority dialect, compared with American, or even Indian, English. (English, 10) Here I would like to point out that the issue of ownership makes this study of ‘Indianization’ of the English language all the more relevant, as the following chapters document attempts of ‘owning’ the language and using it according to one’s requirements. The attempts of ‘inscribing identity’ and ‘strategies of selfhood’ inevitably entail a degree of possession when the writer is successful in her or his strategies. Hence the three phenomena are interrelated. Discovering these phenomena in pre-independent Indian English fiction and non-fictional prose will enable us to understand Indian English better. Today Indian writing in English is a part of academic curriculum from schools to universities in India. Hence, the students and readers of Indian English literature need something more than a debate about whether to call Indian English ‘native’ or ‘non-native’. The issue of possessing the English language is deeply linked with another controversy which is highly significant in this study: whether a writer or speaker using the colonizer’s tongue is imprisoned in the language of the colonizer. Shakespeare’s Caliban, the archetype of a colonized individual, claimed to be free as far as wielding his acquired skill in language is concerned: You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. (Tempest 1. 2.364–365) Yet the controversy does not end there. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a ‘language can affect a society by influencing or even controlling the 14

INTRODUCTION

world-view of its speakers’ (Trudgill, Sociolinguistics, 13). This idea seems to validate the argument posited by structuralists and poststructuralists that ‘we are enclosed in the language we inherit; we . . . cannot express a different way of thinking and perceiving’ (Innes, 98). Yet Trudgill argued – with comparative analysis between Hopi and English – ‘that any strong form of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis – say, that thought is actually constrained by language – cannot be accepted’ (Sociolinguistics, 15). According to Ngugi, the choice of English is related to the choice of audience and hence a Kenyan writer in English ‘cannot possibly directly talk to the peasants and workers of Kenya’ (qtd in Innes, 99). Ngugi observed that a ‘specific culture is not transmitted through language in its universality but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific history’ (15). But Ngugi did not consider the possibilities of hybridization of language and culture. Moreover, in India, neither language nor culture is ever bound in its specificities but they are overlapping all the time, creating new entities. W.B. Yeats believed that a ‘national tradition’ could be built which would be ‘none the less Irish in spirit for being English in language’ (as qtd by Innes, 99). Referring to diverse views, Ania Loomba observes, [L]anguage is seen to construct the subject. Perhaps the most radical result of these interconnecting but diverse ways of thinking about language was that no human utterance could be seen as innocent. Any set of words could be analysed to reveal not just an individual but a historical consciousness at work. Words and images thus become fundamental for an analysis of historical processes such as colonialism. (36–37) It needs to be pointed out here that language and ‘historical consciousness’ are two separate entities; language is never entrapped in one ‘historical consciousness’ but can bear more than one antithetical consciousness as colonialism and nationalism. In fact, both time and language accommodate the plural content of views and ideologies. In the nineteenth century Indian nationalism found expression in the vernaculars as well as in the English language, which the colonizer used as a tool for control of power. The coexistence of colonial and nationalist discourses within a language may be seen from the perspective of Certeau, as the dichotomy of strategy and tactics. According to Certeau, ‘strategy’ is the tool of the powerful, is ‘the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power . . . can be isolated from an environment’ (Certeau, xix). On the other hand, the ‘tactic’ is the tool of the weak who ‘must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities’ (Certeau, xix). The Indian nationalists may be said to manipulate with the colonizer’s tool of maintaining power when they used the English language to convey the message of nationalism. 15

INTRODUCTION

Arguing against George Lamming’s view on Shakespeare’s Tempest that the language Prospero teaches Caliban is an unequivocal prison, Ashcroft argued, ‘Caliban is not imprisoned in Prospero’s language incontrovertibly because it is by using Prospero’s language (or any other) that Caliban can actualize his own possibility for being’ (Caliban’s, 28). Arguing against Pennycook’s ‘Foucaultian view’ that language ‘embodies’ culture, Ashcroft posited that language ‘represents’ rather than ‘embodies’ culture (Caliban’s, 14). However, I find that the infinite possibility of language had been acknowledged by Foucault himself: ‘a language is still a system for possible statements, a finite body of rules that authorizes an infinite number of performances’ (30). Gramsci, who has been the theoretical source of much postcolonial criticism on the interrelatedness of culture and power, challenged the view of Vailati – the exponent of pragmatism in the nineteenth century – that language is an obstacle in the elimination of illusory conflicts. Gramsci’s thoughts on language were not antithetical to the view that language embraces plurality and difference: ‘[L]anguage’ is essentially a collective term which does not presuppose any single thing existing in time and space . . . At the limit it could be said that every speaking being has a personal language of his own, that is his own particular way of thinking and feeling. Culture, at its various levels, unifies in a series of strata, to the extent that they come into contact with each other, a greater or lesser number of individuals who understand each other’s mode of expression in differing degrees, etc. (665) In the context of the foregoing debate, I argue that the English language has never been an incontrovertible prison for Indian writers in English; rather the ‘Indianization’ of English offers a way of talking – in the words of Ngugi – ‘directly’ to the Indian reader. The elements of Indian languages and culture, when placed within the English language through loanwords, translations of idioms and colloquial expressions from Indian languages, and adoption of discourses from Indian culture, create a space shared by Indian readers and speakers of different provinces across the nation. Today, a sketch of the history of the emergence of that space is urgently required, and for that, one must begin one’s search in the early nineteenth century, if not earlier. It was argued by linguists like Phillipson (1992) that power in the shape of linguistic imperialism was active even in the postcolonial age. Phillipson pointed out two important areas of imperialist intervention: the enormous wealth that Britain and the United States had spent to promote and market the English language from the 1950s to the 1970s (10–11) in the third world countries, and the prejudices that are involved with English-language 16

INTRODUCTION

teaching in the twentieth century throughout the world.7 Following the theory of linguistic imperialism as expounded by Phillipson, Krishnaswamy and Burde sought to analyze the fact that ‘the English educated urban elite have become the colonizers though they were colonized under the British rulers’ (57). The perspective according to which English-educated ‘urban elite’ are seen as agents of exploitation and hegemony is also evident in Gandhi’s argument that by ‘receiving English education we have enslaved the nation’ (Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 104). Of the various types of fallacies pointed out by Phillipson, the foremost one was the monolingual fallacy based on the assumption that English is best taught monolingually. Vivian Cook exposed the colonial attitude in monolingualism in English-language teaching courses: The famous people whose photos proliferate in course books tend to be people who are not known as anything other than monolinguals, such as Whitney Houston, Emma Thompson and Steven Spielberg . . . Successful L2 users such as Gandhi, Einstein, Picasso, Marie Curie and Samuel Beckett . . . are never mentioned. It cannot do the students any harm to show them that there are many successful L2 users. (122) The history of English-language teaching in India shows that many of the fallacies discussed by Phillipson were actually not practised. Since the nineteenth century the European missionaries themselves used the method of translation to impart courses of English language. Hence, the subtractive fallacy which advocates the cleansing of other languages while studying a second language was not followed. Moreover, English in India is learnt mainly through reading, which is one of the main causes of its difference from British English. Moreover, English teachers at schools had seldom been ‘native speakers’ but had almost always been ‘natives’, although at some colleges, like the Hindu College and the Scottish Church, in the nineteenth century, there had been European teaching staff. Pennycook, much like Phillipson, wrote that ‘English Language Teaching was a crucial part of the colonial enterprise and . . . English has been a major language in which colonialism has been written’ (Scollon, 140). But linguistic imperialism in the Indian context is not ‘the’ truth but ‘a’ truth, for there are diverse truths regarding the role of English in the diverse sociopolitical situations in India in colonial and postcolonial times. Moreover, Pennycook himself ruled out the possibility of propositions like ‘English is . . . inherently colonial’ (4), although he argued that ‘connections’ (4) between colonialism and English ‘run deep’ (4). The word ‘connections’ indicates that language may be connected or associated with any ism or ideology and hence the two are not inseparable; therefore, resistance is possible since language is not ‘inherently colonial’. 17

INTRODUCTION

According to Makarand Paranjape, ‘English can be used to promote svaraj just as a native Indian language can be used to promote neo-colonialism’ (‘Common Myths’). The theory of linguistic imperialism has been questioned by critics like Alan Davies, who argued that Phillipson’s theory and approach provide ‘an explanation but there is no obvious way in which it can be upheld’ because ‘it makes the mistake not of failing to explain but of over-explaining, of being for a theory too powerful, so that it explains everything everywhere’ (136). Henry Widdowson argued that people can be controlled by means of language, but that does not mean that language can be kept under control: My point was that the language cannot be kept under control, not that people cannot be kept under control by means of language. Of course it is often the case that English is the gatekeeping language, and its acquisition, therefore, will often provide access to economic and political power, because power is exercised by means of that language. But the challenge to that power can be mounted by the very same means. The revolutionaries in 1789 (to return to the French for a moment) used the language of the ancien regime to overthrow it. (397) The much quoted words of Caliban, perhaps, should have the final say: You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. (Tempest 1.2.364–365) The word ‘profit’ is a part of economic discourse. The spread of English, as agued by Viswanathan, Phillipson, and Krishnaswamy, has economic mileage – ‘profit’ – for colonialists as well as neocolonialists. But Caliban can exact other ‘profits’ –not just cursing – as will be shown in the following chapters. The analysis of the texts in the following chapters demonstrates the claim made by Caliban of independent use of language. English has ever played the role of a ticket to the job market in Indian society, but its sociocultural symbol has changed from time to time: of reform in the nineteenth century, of colonial rule in the early twentieth, of ‘official’ language as well as ‘the real thing that binds the people of modern India’ (Rajagopalachari, Question, 42) in the postcolonial twentieth century. As a result the appropriation of English in Indian culture is virtually a maze. Certeau pointed out that the oppressed gets hold of his own strategy of resistance and survival which remains beyond the calculation of the powerful in society: 18

INTRODUCTION

The imposed knowledge and symbolisms become objects manipulated by practitioners who have not produced them. The language produced by a certain social category has the power to extend its conquests into vast areas surrounding it, . . . but in doing so it is caught in the trap of its assimilation by a jungle of procedures rendered invisible to the conqueror by the very victories he seems to have won. (Qtd in Krishnaswamy & Burde, 58) In fact, while English as a colonial tool has functioned in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, it has been ‘caught in the trap of its assimilation by a jungle of procedures’. It has functioned as a tool of negotiation and social reform, as evident in the writings of Rammohan, as a tool for the foundation of nationalism in the early twentieth century, as evident in the speeches of Vivekananda, and as an agent of binding India together in the postcolonial age, as claimed by Rajagopalachari, as the only means of satisfying the ‘intellectual hunger’ (Chatterji, S.K., 45) of educated Indians. In fact Tagore did not see the English language as a tool of enforcing slavery; rather he appraised English literature as a liberating force. In ‘Kalantar’, he observed, When we were introduced to English literature for the first time, we not only derived new ‘rasas’ [or aesthetic pleasures], but also got the enthusiasm to eradicate the wrongs man does on man; in politics, we got to hear the declaration of man’s release from fetters; in commerce, we saw attempts to resist man from being dehumanized to a consumer goods. It must be acknowledged that these attitudes were new to us. (My translations from Tagore, ‘Kalantar’, 539) This was an analysis of the content of English literature. The impact of English literature on the Bengali psyche was a highly complex issue, and Tagore analyzed that as well. In his autobiography, he remembers the 1880s in Kolkata when Bengali English-educated society was deeply moved by the exuberance of passion in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron: At least what we learnt to think of as the quintessence of English literature was this unbridled passion .  .  . the fury of King Lear’s impotent lamentation, the all-consuming fire of Othello’s jealousy – these contained an excess that fuelled our imagination. Our society, all our petty spheres of work are hedged in by such dull enclosures that upheavals of heart have no way of entering there. These areas were as still and quiet as possible. Consequently, when the sudden velocity and violence of the heart’s impulses as found in English literature struck us, it was a welcome jolt. The 19

INTRODUCTION

pleasure was not the aesthetic joy of literature; what appealed to us was the disturbance of the state of stagnation. (Qtd in Mukherjee, M., Perishable Empire, 6–7) Language is independent of human control. The oppressor may want to use it to his own advantage, but it may provide the oppressed with some way of freedom. One more critical issue needs to be addressed before I may begin my study: Can ‘Indianization’ of the English language be conceived as a single phenomenon or is it fractured into unresolved entities, like ‘Bengalification’ or ‘Gujratification’? The question is relevant because the integrity of Indian English has been questioned quite often, just as the integrity of India as a nation has also been put to doubts and queries. Krishnaswamy and Burde opined, ‘Like Indian nationalism, “Indian English” is “fundamentally insecure” since the notion “nation-India” is insecure’ (63). From this perspective the idea of ‘Indianization’ is also insecure. But linguists, like nationalists, have viewed unity in diversity in Indian English. Sridhar argues from a purely linguistic point of view: While transfer of structural features from the mother tongue adds to the diversity of non-native varieties in multilingual communities, it also has a unifying effect when the mother-tongues in question share typological or sprachbund (areal) features. This is true of South Asia, where due to millennia of language contact, most of the languages of the area have come to share a number of formal properties such as retroflex stops, the dative subject construction, sentential and participle relative clauses, etc. The English spoken in this area is influenced by these areal features, contributing to the structural cohesiveness of South Asian English. (43) Kachru also noted this aspect among the languages used in India: It is not only that the language families are shared across the continent; there is also considerable linguistic convergence (Sprachbund) due to areal proximity and contact between typologically distinct languages, such as Dravidian and Indo-Aryan. This convergence is additionally the result of shared cultural and political history, shared literary and folk traditions, and all-pervasive sub-strata of Sanskrit, Persian and English, in that chronological order. (‘English’, 498) One easily identifiable ‘areal’ feature is the use of reduplication in the Indian languages.8 Indianized English thus offers a way of communicating with 20

INTRODUCTION

Indians beyond provincial boundaries but through utilizing the common linguistic and cultural elements. Yet, the political dimension inherent in Krishnaswamy and Burde’s opinion needs to be further analyzed as the term ‘Indian’ invites a political and nationalistic discourse. I would like to revert back to their statement quoted earlier to point out that their opinion betrays the interrelatedness between Indian nationalism and Indian English. In fact it is difficult to refute Indian English without refuting Indian nationalism. Krishnaswamy and Burde’s argument begins with questioning nationalism itself: ‘Group loyalty and patriotism, which are difficult to define, have now taken the form of nationalism, which is equally difficult to define, because all the three are based on feelings and romantic themes’ (60). Citing the writings of Sudip to Kaviraj, Krishnaswamy and Burde further premised his argument that India ‘is not an object of discovery but of invention’ which was ‘historically instituted by the nationalist imagination of the nineteenth century’ (62). It seems now that this discussion on ‘Indianization’ should restart with a deeper understanding of nation, although my ultimate destination is a linguistic one. In the 1990s the term ‘nation’ was subjected to deconstruction by postcolonial writers like Homi Bhabha, who has seen nation as more abstract than concrete: ‘Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye’ (‘Introduction’, 1). However, this view is not new, as it is evident in Renan’s lecture ‘Qu’ est-ce qu’une nation?’ (‘What Is a Nation?’), delivered on 11 March 1882. In 1983, Ernest Gellner pointed out that Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent . . . political destiny are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality. (Qtd in Hobsbawm, 10) It is often pointed out that India was not a nation before colonization (as evident in Kaviraj’s argument). But the fact is that the idea of nation did not exist not only in India but in the entire ancient world. Renan observed that nations are ‘fairly new in history’ as ‘Antiquity was unfamiliar with them’ (9). Nirad C. Chaudhuri, writing in the 1990s, marked out three important events in European history which led to the emergence of modern nationalism: the rise of France as a superpower in 1792, when half a million common Frenchmen enlisted themselves in the army in response to the call of the French Assembly: ‘Citizens, the Motherland is in danger’ (as qtd in Three Horsemen, 54). Chaudhuri, referring to Albert Sord, narrates the moment of the emergence of French nationalism: ‘Before beginning his “cannonade” at Valmy, Kellerman raised his hat on the tip of his sword and cried out “Vive 21

INTRODUCTION

le nation!” His troops thundered back: “Vive la nation!”’ (Three Horsemen, 55). The second important event referred to by Chaudhuri is the Second War of American Independence. Referring to the writings of Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury and advisor of two American presidents, Chaudhuri pointed out that after the war was over in 1815, the people of America were ‘more American’; they felt and acted ‘more as a nation’ (Three Horsemen, 54). German nationalism consolidated during the Prussian war of liberation against subjection to Napoleon after the battle of Jena. The old mercenary army of Germany was transformed into a national army, which compelled Napoleon to abdicate following the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. In the words of Chaudhuri, this battle ‘was significantly called the “Battle of Nations”’ (Three Horsemen, 56). This is the third important event. Interestingly, all three events took place between 1792 and 1815, when the urge to defend the motherland (or fatherland, as in the case of Germans) led to the rise of the feeling of nationalism among common Europeans. In India, militant nationalism can be said to have begun in 1857, not much later than it happened in Europe. In fact, the spiritual search for nationhood or Indianness began in India in the mid-nineteenth century itself, during the Bengal Renaissance, as professed by Partha Chatterjee and already referred to earlier. Eric Hobsbawm argued that the ‘basic characteristic of the modern nation and everything connected with it is its modernity’ (14). He cited the etymology of the word ‘nation’ from the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy: ‘Before 1884 the word nacion simply meant “the aggregate of the inhabitants of a province, a country or a kingdom” and also “a foreigner”’ (14). Thus notwithstanding the advent of militant nationalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the modern concept of ‘nation’ was new when Renan was discussing the term in his lecture delivered in French in 1882. After contemplating diverse possible elements that constituted nationhood, like dynasty, race, memories and forgetfulness, geography, and language, Renan concluded that nation is ‘a spiritual principle’: A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. (Renan, 19) From Renan’s perspective the idea of ‘nation-India’ is not ‘insecure’ as Krishnaswamy and others like him would have us believe. Renan’s view is applicable to India as the ‘spiritual principle’ existed in many of her sons and daughters who worked (and in rare cases, devoted their lives) for her upliftment and freedom, and it still exists in many Indians who are proud of the glorious 22

INTRODUCTION

past, especially of the national movement and its influence on Indian life and culture. This spirit or ‘soul’ which binds the nation has been defined and redefined in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and much of this definition has occurred in English, which I have argued aided the process of ‘Indianization’ of the English language. I have already mentioned that the urge for national identity was located by Partha Chatterjee in the cultural renaissance that immediately preceded the anti-colonial freedom movement: By my reading anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power . . . In fact, here nationalism launches its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a ‘modern’ national culture that is nevertheless not Western. If the nation is an imagined community, then this is where it is brought into being. (6) It is quite clear now that Indian nationalism was consolidated in the cultural renaissance of the nineteenth century and the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century. Interestingly, the English language had a crucial role to play in the making of this nationalism. The language was used by Rammohan, Keshab Sen, Vidyasagar, Vivekananda, Tagore, Tilak, Subhas Bose, and Mahatma Gandhi, to name only a few, in sociopolitical and cultural activities. Simultaneously, creative writing in English also constructed a rich literary legacy. Unfortunately, although modern India is posited in the background of the legacy created in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘Indianization’ of the English language is still posited in the background of babu English, which I think is a great injustice to our cultural legacy in the English language. Indian English is regarded by many as a ‘bona fide dialect’ (Dixon, 447), as Standard English is a dialect (Trudgill, ‘Standard English’, 123; Sociolinguistics, 5). Hence it is worthwhile to restore the forgotten legacy of ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the colonial era, which might go a long way in revolutionizing our idea of Indian English. Nationalism has aided the process of ‘Indianization’ of the English language, but colonization brought ‘the tyranny of monolingualism’ (Lange, 128) and introduced the concept of ‘one nation – one language’ (Lange, 128). According to modern political scientists and linguists, language alone cannot constitute nationhood and most nations are multilingual today. Indian society had ever been multilingual, but the tyranny of monolingualism was superimposed by the Western beliefs about the nation. I think that this legacy of one nation/one language was one of the important reasons for the search for that ‘one language’ in India, since the rise of nationalism. Colonization caused the necessary situation for the ‘Indianization’ of the English language, but it also looked down upon the hybridity of the mesolectal 23

INTRODUCTION

varieties, such as babu English. Anindyo Roy demonstrated that the ‘baboo’s language became an object of constant surveillance’ (Roy, A., 5) because the baboos were a ‘threat to the status quo following the introduction and gradual implementation of the Indian Services Act of 1861’ (Roy, A., 4) and also because the ‘baboo’s language enabled a reassessment and reconsolidation of the centrality of British racial and national identity’ (Roy, A., 5). The following remark of Yule, although made in a jocular spirit, also manifests the same attitude: It is this bad habit of interlarding English with Hindustani phrases which has so often excited the just wrath of high English officials, not accustomed to it from their youth, and which drew forth in orders the humorous indignation of Sir Charles Napier. (Yule, ‘Introduction’, xx) Notwithstanding the ‘just wrath’ and the ultimate ‘humorous indignation’ of the colonial rulers, it is the linguistic outcome of the ‘bad habit’ or habits (for there had been various ways of fusion of English and the Indian languages described by Yule) which had been the subject of several years of painstaking study of Yule and Burnell, now famous for their scholarly work Hobson-Jobson. These two, on the one hand, were successors of reformists and Indologists, like Bentinck and Jones, of the early nineteenth century and on the other hand, precursors of staunch imperialists, like Lord Curzon, in the twentieth century. Amitav Ghosh in the novel Sea of Poppies documented how English merchants in the nineteenth century maintained a status quo in their usage of Indian words and phrases although they were capable of using them. Mr Doughty, the pilot of a ship, warns a fellow European against using the Indian languages too well: ‘Just a little peppering of nigger-talk mixed with a few girleys. But mind your Oordoo and Hindee doesn’t sound too good: don’t want the world to think you’ve gone native’ (Ghosh, 49). G.C. Whitworth, a retired Indian civil servant, subtitled his work Indian English (1915) in the following manner: ‘An examination of the errors of idioms made by Indians in writing English’ (qtd in Dustoor, 99). Hence if an Indian writer of English in the nineteenth century wanted deliberately to use an Indian loanword or a translation of an expression from her/his mother tongue, her/his text was at risk of being identified as ‘babu English’. In other words, ‘Indianization’ in the acrolectal variety existed under the colonial threat of ‘surveillance’ and colonial cynicism. In such circumstances, construction of an Indian discourse, composition of a narrative in a contemporary Indian sociocultural context, or inscription of an Indian identity in English demanded a highly strategic use of language. My study intends to give an idea of how some pre-independent writers and speakers responded to that demand and reacted positively to the ecology of time and place while risking colonial cynicism. 24

INTRODUCTION

On the contrary, in postcolonial India, ‘Indianization’ is appraised by multiculturalism, multilingualism, and hybridity. Moreover, the search for that ‘one language’ is now replaced in India by a growing acceptance of multilingualism; this, perhaps, is also a Western influence as ‘more and more individuals and communities within Europe realize that monolingualism is neither natural nor desirable’ (Lange, 129). The acceptance and appraisal of Indian English ‘as having a definable ecological place’ (Singh, R., 15) stand today in the postmodern context of multiculturalism, pluralism, and hybridity, but they also deserve to be grounded on the rich legacy of ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The nineteenth century, as I argue in Chapter 2, brought a new consciousness regarding the English language. Rammohan Roy was the first famous representative of this new consciousness. He was the first Indian who is known to promote the English language not for its material benefits but for the intellectual benefits which he thought was necessary in Indian society. Rammohan is also perhaps the first among the Indian writers of English whose writings are involved with the problematic of ‘Indianization’. Hence, this study begins with Rammohan’s ‘A Translation of a Conference Between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of, the Practice of Burning Widows Alive; From the Original Bungla’, written in 1818. This is a text where Rammohan, who began writing in English with translations of the Upanishads, deals with contemporary sociocultural and religious problems for the first time. With ‘Defence of Hindu Theism’, published in 1817, Rammohan transcended from a translator to an essayist. But the text on the burning of widows translated by him from his own Bangla composition is concerned deeply with the politics of representing Indian cultural heritage as well as its blatant misuse in contemporary society. It was done with the purpose of negotiation and argument with the British administrators and also with the native English readers. It is also concerned with the influence of Indian culture and Indian narrative traditions – both oral and written – on English writings. Hence this study begins with a text written in 1818, when both the original Bangla and the English translation of Rammohan were published. The time-span of the subject matter of my study is 1818–1944. Since my argument concerns mainly the Indian writings in English of the colonial era, I have chosen texts during this time period. The body of Indian writings in prose in English in this period is so large that it is impossible to select a few texts without some criteria. Although the choice has been personal, it is not arbitrary. Here I have been guided to a considerable extent by ‘situational factors’ (Sridhar, 44–47) which regulate the use of indigenized variants of English discussed by K.K. Sridhar. He pointed out that the ‘majority of speech situations in which IVE’s [indigenous variants of English] are employed involve exchanges between speakers of the respective IVE’s themselves’ (45). Although my subject matter is constituted of written texts and public speeches rather than the language used in ‘speech situations’, I have found 25

INTRODUCTION

the criteria helpful because I have found a theoretical support in choosing the speeches delivered by Tagore and Vivekananda in India rather than the speeches delivered abroad. I have shown in Chapter 4 that the former have more instances of Indian loanwords and mother-tongue interferences than the latter. The next important ‘situational factor’ for me is that of the ‘ideational content’ (Sridhar, 46): ‘Although English is foreign to these contexts, it [IVE] is used primarily to express an indigenous socio-cultural reality’ (Sridhar, 46). All the primary texts of this thesis deal with contemporary sociocultural, religious, and political reality. For example, the philosophical contents of Tagore and Vivekananda’s speeches address contemporary nationalistic, cultural, and political concerns. The speeches of Chapter 5 deal with contemporary politics, particularly with the assertion of the Indians’ right for ‘Swaraj’. In Chapter 6, the selected texts of Gandhi are embedded in contemporary issues of politics, language, and assessment of Western civilization. Sridhar, discussing the situational factor of ‘ideational content’ from a sociolinguistic perspective, explained the phrase as ‘indigenous sociocultural reality’; the novels discussed in Chapter 3 deal with the indigenous sociocultural reality of nineteenth-century Bengal and Maharashtra, and they are not altogether detached from the problems of selfhood and the making of nationhood with which I am particularly concerned. Giving shape to these ideational contents in the English language with the help of interferences of Indian languages is what ‘Indianization’ is directly associated with. According to Sridhar, modes and models of acquisition of the English language are an important factor. Sridhar pointed out that literature on ‘secondlanguage acquisition’ suggests that ‘formal learning (as opposed to informal education) is more conducive to mother-tongue transfer’ (47). Except Rammohan, all the other writers and speakers discussed in this study acquired the English language through formal instruction in India. Rammohan had been a private secretary to John Digby (an official of the East India Company), according to whom Rammohan began to learn English by ‘pursuing all my public correspondence with diligence and attention, as well as by corresponding and conversing with European gentlemen’ (qtd in Robertson, ‘English Writings’, 34). Rammohan was first drawn into the circle of Bengali intellectuals at the college of Fort William through his association with Digby (Robertson, Rammohan, 23). All the writers and speakers discussed in this book were firmly rooted in their respective Indian vernaculars, which is conducive to indigenization of the second language. It was also argued by Sridhar that in the ‘informal domain’ (45) of language use in the circle of family and friendship, indigenized variants were more likely to be used than in the ‘formal domain’ (45). But I have selected texts from both domains in order to form a comprehensive picture of the phenomenon of ‘Indianization’. The problematic of ‘Indianization’ in the two domains can be different, and moreover, the sort of Indianized language which is used in an ‘informal domain’ at one stage of history may be used in 26

INTRODUCTION

a ‘formal domain’ at a later stage. This has occurred in the case of ‘Indianization’ of the English language and is discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 7. It must be stated here that when a full-length novel or speech of such eminent writers as mentioned earlier is discussed, rather than individual instances of innovation or use of Indian words, it is the emergence of a discourse or mingling of discourses caused by innovative (or imitative) use of language which becomes important. My interest does not lie in just pointing out the habitual or deliberate intervention of Indian words and phrases but in analyzing the Indian discourses and ‘strategies of selfhood’ that contributed to the emergence of Indianized English. For example, in Rammohan’s ‘A Translation of a Conference Between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of, the Practice of Burning Widows Alive; From the Original Bungla’, the argumentative scholarly discourse in the Bengali tradition is represented in English; in Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife, the Vaisnav discourse of love penetrates the Western discourse of Romanticism; in Vivekananda’s speeches delivered in India, the Upanishadic discourse coexists with a nationalistic fervour. My book is divided into eight chapters. This chapter, the first one, introduces the argument, and the second chapter complements the first chapter with a brief history of the English language in India. The third chapter analyzes Rammohan Roy’s ‘Universal Religion: Religious Instructions Founded on Sacred Authorities’ (1829), ‘A Translation of a Conference Between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of, the Practice of Burning Widows Alive; From the Original Bungla’ (1818), and ‘A Second Conference Between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of, the Practice of Burning Widows Alive’ (1820), letters written in English by Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and the diary entries of Keshub Sen. The chapter discusses the context in which these writers adopted and promoted the English language. They did so not for the material benefits, such as the possibility of getting a job. Rather, their attitude towards the English language was based on their understanding and admiration of Western culture, on a consciousness of the intellectual achievements of the West, and on a consciousness of its necessity and applicability in Indian society. All this was not intended to be at the cost of the vernacular; in fact Rammohan and Madhusudan played a constructive role in the development of Bangla. Such an environment I have argued was conducive for the emergence of an Indianized dialect of English rather than a pidgin or a creole. In the fourth chapter, I study Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife (1864), Lal Behari Day’s Gobinda Samanta (1874), and Krupabai Satthianadhan’s two novels Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life (1894) and Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life (1887–88). The chapter discusses the sociocultural context in which these writers chose to write in English. All the novels discussed in this chapter attempt to depict the contemporary social reality; the three novelists responded in diverse ways to the artistic need for 27

INTRODUCTION

‘Indianization’ of the English language. Although Bankimchandra’s English has been accused of a ‘bookish predilection’ (Mukherjee, M., Perishable, 45), I have found attempts to construct an Indianized discourse through numerous Bangla loanwords, code-switching, cultural shifts, and a subtle use of a discourse of Vaisnav love poetry. Although Lal Behari Day apologized to his readers for making his rural folks speak like ‘educated ladies and gentlemen’, Bangla loanwords and idioms made an impact upon his English – not only in the use of dialogues but also in the third-person narration. In Krupabai Satthianadhan’s novels we find a confident use of dialogues where the nuances of Marathi have been captured excellently. The attempts of these writers to adapt the English language for portraying the Indian reality may be compared – borrowing an analogy from Certeau – to renters in an apartment: Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories; as do speakers, in the language, into which they insert both the messages of their native tongue and through their accent, through their own ‘turns of phrase’ etc. their own history. (Certeau, xxi) The attempts of the nineteenth-century novelists have paved the path for subsequent Indian writers to own and possess the language. In the next two chapters, I study a few speeches of the age of nationalism delivered by Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Chittaranjan Das, and Subhas Chandra Bose, and attempt to analyze how the colonizer’s tongue was adapted for feelings and thoughts beyond the periphery of colonial discourses. In the fifth chapter I have studied Swami Vivekananda’s speeches, with reference to four of his lectures delivered in 1897 soon after his first historic tour of the West: his speech in Colombo, delivered on 15 January 1897, his address at Ramnad delivered on 25 January 1897, the message of Vedanta delivered at Kumbhakonam, and the speech delivered at the Victoria Hall in Chennai and then Madras, the exact dates of which are not known. In the same chapter, I study two of Tagore’s speeches: the presidential address at the first Indian Philosophical Congress in 1925, entitled ‘The Philosophy of Our People’, and Tagore’s translation of his own address to Subhas Bose written in May 1939. Vivekananda, who was hailed by Subhas Bose as the ‘spiritual father of the modern national movement’ (Indian Struggle, 22), delivered many of his lectures in English in India. Any extract of his speeches delivered in India shows that he made English function in a new register which instilled the spirit of patriotism in his listeners and simultaneously resisted – I have argued – the colonial discourse created by the likes of Macaulay and the Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century. Moreover, his use of language in his speeches captures the rhythm of Sanskrit in the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. The philosophical and 28

INTRODUCTION

nationalist discourses in the speeches of Tagore have a marked Indianness with the use of Sanskrit words and English words with new meanings, which enable his language to convey the message of internationalism.9 In the sixth chapter, I have studied Tilak’s speeches with reference to his famous speech claiming Swaraj as a ‘birthright’, delivered in May 1917, a speech of C.R. Das titled ‘Indian Deputation to England’ delivered in Kolkata in 1918, speeches of Subhas Bose with reference to two presidential addresses delivered in Pune and Lahore in 1928 and 1929 respectively, and his famous address as the leader of Azad Hind Fauj delivered at a rally in Burma in 1944. The speeches delivered by Tilak, C.R. Das, and the presidential addresses of Subhas Bose countered the colonial discourse which challenged Indians’ right to independent self-rule, or Swaraj. Tilak’s speech on the Swaraj theme had a pronounced Vedic discourse and he may be considered as a successor of Vivekananda. C.R. Das responded to the demands of the national movement in championing the cause of secularism and Swaraj. Bose, in his use of ancient Indian themes and motifs, in his use of Sanskrit words as well as in his attempts to establish socialism and democracy as part of Indian culture, in his ability to instil the spirit of sacrifice for the motherland, created a legacy of nationalist discourse in English which incorporates ancient India and the modern West from a secular perspective. This discourse was also enriched by Pandit Nehru. The seventh chapter attempts to assess Gandhi as an Indian writer in English with reference to his own translation of Hind Swaraj made in 1910 and two of his letters: a friendly one written to Rajagopalachari and an official one written to the additional secretary of the Home Department of the British government. The friendly letter shows Gandhi as suffering from a sense of guilt about the use of English, although we find him as a user of Indian English. The official letter shows how his philosophy of ahimsa affected his style. In Gandhi’s translation of Hind Swaraj, ‘Indianization’ of the English language has an air of defiance of Standard English and – perhaps – a deliberate attempt to abrogate ‘the privileged centrality of “English” by using language to signify difference while employing a sameness which allows it to be understood’ (Ashcroft, Griffith, & Tiffin, 51). In this postcolonial sense Gandhi is perhaps the first writer of Indian English. The last chapter is the conclusion, where I speak about the important deductions distilled from the analysis of the texts. In this chapter, I discuss the various types of ‘Indianization’ I have come across in my entire study. My hypothesis is that ‘Indianization’ ought to be traced back to the nineteenth century, if not earlier, and that ‘Indianization’ is interrelated with the historical problems of nationhood and selfhood. The fact that has emerged in my study is that the acrolectal variety of the colonial era showed some clear signs of ‘Indianization’ of the English language which were deeply associated with the postcolonial problematic, such as assertion of identity, interpretation of culture, and nationalist consciousness. 29

INTRODUCTION

All four translations (Rammohan’s two conferences on the burning of widows, Tagore’s address to Subhas Bose, and Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj) selected as primary texts in this study were actually rewritten by the authors themselves. I have desisted from dealing with the problems of translation and focused on the ‘Indianization’ of the English language and, consequently, the evolution of an Indianized variant of the English language and the role played by these texts in this evolution. Secondly, the fact that these texts were translations cannot entirely account for the ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the individual texts. The language of the individual authors was influenced by time and historical pressures and also by the register of the individual texts. The subject matter and whether the text belonged to official or unofficial domain were also crucial, as discussed earlier. It is worthy of note that Rammohan’s texts do not carry the same degree of influence of Indian languages as shown in Vivekananda’s speeches which were not translated texts or in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, which was Gandhi’s own translation. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj has a greater degree of Indianism than Rammohan and Vivekananda because Gandhi’s text is representative of a later stage of ‘Indianization’ than the other two. Hence ‘Indianization’ of the English language has grown gradually with time, and offering a diachronic study of that growth and continuity is one of the main aims of my study.

Notes 1 I have taken the term ‘Indianization’ from the title of Braj B. Kachru’s book The Indianization of the English Language. Indigenized varieties of the English language are spread across the globe, such as American English, Jamaican English, and Singaporean English. The term ‘Indianization’ signifies the processes and patterns of indigenization of the English language which have taken place leading to the emergence of Indian English. 2 In the words of Peter Trudgill, ‘the term creole is applied to a pidgin language which has become the native of a speech community, and has therefore become expanded again, and acquired all the functions and characteristics of a full natural language. A pidgin is a reduced, simplified, often mixed language evolved for, say, trading purposes by speakers with no common language’ (Sociolinguistics, 50). A creole – for example, any of the West Indian varieties – in its ‘purest’ form is not ‘immediately comprehensible to English speakers’ (Trudgill, Sociolinguistics, 50). 3 A second-language variant of a language is a ‘nativised’ (Kirkpatrick, 5) or ‘indigenised’ (Trudgill & Hannah, 122) form of the language. ‘Nativised varieties [of English]’, according to Kirkpatrick, ‘are newer varieties that have developed in places where English was not originally spoken and which have been influenced by local languages and cultures’ (5). According to Trudgill and Hannah, the ‘second language varieties of English, as a result of widespread and frequent use, have acquired or are acquiring relatively consistent, fixed local norms of usage which are adhered to by all speakers. These varieties of English may differ, often considerably, from the English of native speakers elsewhere in the world, mainly as a result of influence from local languages (Trudgill & Hannah, 122). According to Kirkpatrick, the difference between creoles and indigenized English is ‘simply one of degree’ (Kirkpatrick, 13). In Chapter 2 I argue that creoles have developed

30

INTRODUCTION

4

5

6

7

where literacy was introduced with the English language, whereas people with a living tradition of written literature are likely to develop a variant of the English language. According to Barbara A. Fennell, ‘It is usually the case that a society in which a creole develops displays a continuum of language varieties, which we refer to as a post-creole continuum. The varieties that coexist in such circumstances range from a still relatively reduced “basilectal” variety, through a range of more standardlike “mesolectal” varieties to “acrolectal” varieties, which are very close to the dominant (lexifier) language, but which retain features of grammar, lexicon and pronunciation that still mark them off from the national (often European) standard variety’ (Fennell, 4). The terms ‘acrolect’, ‘mesolect’, and ‘basilect’ are now used in contexts beyond that of the post-creole continuum, in indigenized variants of a language. For example, Kamal K. Sridhar categorizes the English used by clerks and receptionists in India as ‘mesolect’ and the English used by journalists and professors as ‘acrolect’ (42–43). Hence the texts that I discuss in this thesis may be called ‘acrolect’. Babu English, as the term indicates, is the kind of English which was supposed to be used by the English-educated Indian middle class of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, some of whom had been clerks or babus of the East India Company, the clerks of the colonial governmentpost-1857, and the clerks of the Indian governmentpost-1947. For specimens see ‘English in South Asia’ by Braj B. Kachru (510–511) and Entry From Backside Only by Binoo K. John (99). According to Kachru, Babu English is ‘marked by excessive stylistic ornamentation, politeness and indirectness’ (‘English’, 509). The stereotypes of a nineteenth-century Babu, including his urge to show off his proficiency in English, is immortalized in the character of Hurree Babu in Kipling’s Kim. Babu English is thus a specimen of the mesolectal variety. Here, an important point is that even among native speakers amusing mesolectal specimens may be found. See Krishnaswamy and Burde (75–76). Hence the fuss about Babu English is a little blown up. The issue of owning the English language is a debatable area. Probal Dasgupta opined that ‘English is not “one of us”, but an important presence that one must be polite to: and Auntie is the way we express our politeness in our current social conjuncture; so the term “Auntie-Tongue” best expresses what English is to its users in India’ (201). But Kachru’s account of ‘Indianization’ of English basically establishes that English is ‘one of us’; the claim of the speakers of Indian English being ‘native speakers’ of English and Indian English would be hollow without the acceptance of English as part of Indian culture. The duel between Buddhadev Bose and P. Lal – over the issue of whether Indians should write poems in English – is well known (see Mehrotra, ‘Introduction’, 15–16). Today, when Indian English literature is a part of the academic curriculum even in schools all over India, when Indian English is rapidly developing under the impact of advertisements, Indian English fiction, and our overall bilingual and multilingual existence, the history of such wrangle has lost its relevance. The process of owning, from the perspective of Peter Barry, undergoes the process of ‘adopt’, ‘adapt’, and ‘adept’. Barry says that ‘all postcolonial literatures, it might be said, seem to make this transition’ (196). Phillipson analyzed five fallacies regarding the teaching of English throughout the world: the monolingual fallacy, based on a fallacious assumption that English is best taught monolingually, the native speaker fallacy, based on the assumption that the native speaker is the best teacher, the early start fallacy, which assumes that a second language is learnt better if started very early, the maximum exposure fallacy, which advocates maximum exposure to second language even at the cost of learning other useful subjects at school, and the subtractive fallacy, which advocates the cleansing of other languages while studying a second language

31

INTRODUCTION

(Phillipson, 185–212). In reality, most of the fallacies are actually not practised in Indian schools and colleges as they are not feasible in the Indian social reality. 8 Jyoti Sanyal enlisted the following expressions having the same meaning from several Indian languages: ‘chhoti chhoti baatein (Hindi), chhoto chhoto katha (Bengali), kochchu kochchu karyangal (Malayalam), chotya chotya goshti (Marathi)’ (310–311). 9 See Note 1 in Chapter 5.

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2 A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

My study is inextricably related with the history of the English language in India and the history of English-language teaching in India. Hence it is essential to be in touch with the history, without which proceeding with my argument is not possible. According to historians ‘India had commercial relations with countries of the West from time immemorial. But from the seventh century AD her sea-borne trade passed into the hands of the Arabs, who began to dominate the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea’ (Majumdar, Raychaudhuri, & Dutta, 623). Hence it is difficult to ascertain the first interface of the Germanic languages with the Indian languages. However, the English language can be said to have made its presence felt since the early seventeenth century, when the East India Company established factories at several places in India. In the year 1613 Jahangir, the Moghul emperor issued a firman permitting the English to establish a factory permanently at Surat. By 1619, the British had established factories at Surat, Agra, Ahmadabad and Broach, and Masulipatam. In 1698 the Company was granted the zamindari of the three villages of Sutanuti, Kalikata, and Govindapur on payment of Rs 1200 to the previous proprietors, thus laying the foundation of their political rule (Majumdar, Raychaudhuri, & Dutta, 629–632). It was in the seventeenth century that the first English school in India was established. According to Fr. Thainis, it was a school for the English-speaking children of Madras, presently Chennai, where the English had started to make their settlement from 1639. Francis Ephrem de Nevers, a French Capuchin priest, opened the school in 1642 within his residence of St Andrews in the Fort of St George. During the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries there was no proper structure for English education of the natives as there was no need for it either, Persian being the official language. But since the ascendancy of Company rule after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, a sizeable section in India was eager to learn it. A nation cannot be forced to learn and master a language and produce creative works in the language. Prof. M.M. Bhattacharjee had shown in ‘Bengal: Past and Present’ that not the British rulers but ‘the earnest desire and repeated representations of Indians’ were responsible for the introduction of English and Western culture into India 33

A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

(qtd in Iyengar, 27). There was a demand for English education since the late eighteenth century. S.P. Sinha observes, ‘Several English medium schools mushroomed in late eighteenth century with the view to gather revenue. It was the hope of broken-down soldier, the bankrupt merchant etc.’ (Sinha, 22). It was also during this time of the century, in 1797, that perhaps the first extant textbook was published in India for learning English. A.P.R. Howatt observed that John Miller’s The Tutor or a New English & Bengali Work, Well Adapted to Teach the Natives English, published in Serampore in 1797 and printed by the author himself – ‘one of Alston’s most fascinating discoveries, the only copy being in the library of Calcutta University’ – ‘is possibly the earliest textbook for the teaching of English in what today would be called the Third World’ (Howatt, 67–69). The demand for English education in India grew rapidly in the nineteenth century. According to Nurullah and Naik, English education was looked upon by many as a ‘royal road to a black-coated profession with a decent income and an important status in society’ (History of Education, 78). The spread of English education is one of the major agents of sociocultural changes in India in the nineteenth century. But there was no universal situation prevailing in the presidencies. Each of the four main presidencies in India has its individual history of English education. In fact, according to S.N. Mukerji’s contribution in Encyclopaedia Britannica, the demand for English education was ‘little effective’ in all the three provinces other than Bengal. Under the leadership of Mountstuart Elphinstone in the Bombay Presidency and under the leadership of James Thomason, lieutenant governor in North Western Provinces, the spread of education among the masses in vernacular languages was successfully conducted. In the Madras presidency, the missionaries played a leading role in imparting English education ‘more extensively’ (Mukerji, S.N.) than in Bombay. Imparting Western education through the mother tongue was quite successful in the early half of the nineteenth century in the Bombay Presidency. According to Nurullah and Naik, the Bombay Native Education Society1 published nearly 50,000 volumes between 1826 and 1830, which cost them more than Rs 200,000: These books which were mostly in the mother-tongue of the people sold in very large numbers and actually brought in some profit to the publishers – a fact which was in significant contrast to the position in Bengal where the classical publications of the General Committee of Public Instructions could hardly find a market. (96) While in Bengal the most important debate was whether the classical languages like Sanskrit and Arabic or English should be the medium of higher education, in Bombay the debate was whether the vernacular languages 34

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could be used to impart modern Western learning. While in Bengal the Orientalist experiment was a failure, in Bombay Elphinstone’s convictions were successful. However, the failure of the Orientalists in Bengal and Bengal’s power of imposing on other presidencies (by the Charter of 1833)2 decided the fate of English education in India. Following Macaulay’s Minute of 1835, English became the medium of higher education and the project of translating works of science into modern Indian languages was discouraged. With the aim of conversions, missionaries since the early nineteenth century began to impart education to the natives in their mother tongue, and for this they had to assiduously learn the modern Indian languages and translate the Bible. According to Nurullah and Naik, it was since the establishment of an English school in 1830 in Calcutta by Duff that missionaries took the matter of English education seriously (92). In the Madras presidency the missionaries played a leading role in the spread of English education and ‘consequently English education was more extensively imparted there than even in Bombay[,] where Government conducted an English school in almost every district in the province’ (Nurullah & Naik, 147). In Bengal, the Hindu College was an important institution that helped the spread of English education, and it was a petition of the Hindu Brahmins to the then chief justice of Supreme Court, Sir Hyde East, according to R.C. Majumdar, which led to the establishment of the college in 1817. Based on these facts Majumdar argued that English was introduced not by the British but ‘in spite of them’ (Renascent, 33–39). Citing Rammohan’s letter to Lord Amherst, Nirad C. Chaudhuri ridiculed the view that English ‘was imposed on a subject people by a set of foreign rulers for the sake of carrying on their alien government’ (qtd in Kachru, ‘English’, 505). The newspapers of the time bear testimony to the demand for English education: Indeed anyone who goes through the newspapers of the period cannot fail to be struck with the genuine enthusiasm which the foundation of these schools evoked in the mind of the public and a sincere desire on their part to multiply their number to meet a keenly felt need for liberal education. (Majumdar, Renascent, 39–40) Majumdar’s line of argument recurs in the works of scholars of more recent times, such as Ranbir Vohra, who pointed out that by 1835 there were no less than twenty-five schools in Calcutta imparting English education (Vohra, 94). Moreover, from July 1829, Samachar Darpan, the Bangla weekly published by the Baptist Missionary Press from 1818, which is considered to be the first Indian-language newspaper, began to appear in both Bangla and English. Even before that, the first Indian newspaper, the Hicky’s Bengal Gazette or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser, ‘began its short lived and cataclysmic existence in 1780’ (John, 116). 35

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In Bengal, English was the first choice for creative expression for writers like Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Michael Madhusudan Dutt. English represented a culture with which they readily identified themselves, owing mainly to their English education and admiration for Western literature. In the other parts of the country the penchant for producing creative works in English may also be found. For example, Behramji Malabari, when he first arrived in Mumbai (then Bombay), was equipped with a manuscript of English verse titled Indian Muse, which was published in 1876 and earned a lot of praise and appreciation from contemporary readers (Gidumal, lvi). Even when they wrote in Bangla, following their unsuccessful attempts in the English language, they excelled in the form which was decidedly Western. Michael modelled his epic after Virgil and Milton and wrote sonnets and dramas modelled on European plays. Bankim wrote novels, a genre that originated in the West. Nineteenth-century Bengal saw a number of orators who excelled in the form in English and Bangla, such as Keshab Sen and S.N. Banerjee. Vivekananda, who emerged as an orator in the last decade of the nineteenth century, delivered most of his speeches in English. Michael Madhusudan Dutt maintained correspondence in English with his friends, including Iswarchandra Vidyasagar. Keshab Sen and the famous Gujrati writer Govardhanram Tripathi maintained diaries in English. Near the end of the nineteenth century English correspondence among Indians became quite common. Nirad C. Chaudhuri observes how Bangla almanacs, normally consulted for astrological information necessary for the regulation of daily life, came by the end of the century also to include model letters in English for the use of fathers and sons (qtd in Mukherjee, Perishable Empire, 44). On the other hand, Gauri Viswanathan (1989) showed that English was introduced by the British with colonial and imperial motives. Referring to the parliamentary papers of the British Parliament of 1854, Viswanathan showed that British politicians aimed at establishing the English taste and lifestyle, which would lead to the creation of demand for British consumer goods (146); again, they aimed at diverting Indian minds away from business by encouraging them in literary pursuits so that they could occupy the commercial space in India easily (Viswanathan 161–162). But colonial motives may boomerang, as in the case of India. Majumdar, who wrote a decade earlier than Viswanathan, suggested that certain British administrators were not oblivious of the result of Western education in India. The evidence given before the select Committee of the House of Commons by Major General Lionel Smith on 6 October 1831 is a case in point: Q. If, in the progress of time, India were to become sufficiently instructed to understand the principles of Christian religion, and to comprehend the nature of government, such as that which belongs

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to the British constitution, is it your opinion that in that state of civilization, India would permit itself, for any length of time, to be governed by the authority of England? Ans. No; I should say not; taking the history of nations, they would feel the value of governing themselves. (Majumdar, Renascent, 47–48) In the nineteenth century – discussed in detail in the following two chapters – especially for people like Raja Rammohan Roy, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Keshab Sen, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, and Krupabai Satthianadhan, English represented not a tool of hegemony but the doorway to rationality and modern science. The letter written to Lord Amherst in December 1823 shows that the real reason behind Rammohan’s wanting to adopt English education was his desire that Indians must excel in modern science: But as the improvement of the native population is the object of the Government, it will consequently promote a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction, embracing Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy, with other useful sciences, which may be accomplished with the sums proposed by employing a few gentlemen of talent and learning educated in Europe and providing a college furnished with necessary books, instruments and other apparatus. (Roy, Letter, 166) Rammohan’s letter was written in the context of a decision by the East India Company to establish a Sanskrit college in Kolkata, urged by the British government to take measures for ‘the introduction of useful knowledge and religious and moral improvements’ of the Indians (Majumdar, Raychaudhuri, & Dutta, 811). Rammohan’s agenda of reform found an ally in Lord Bentinck, who became governor general in 1828, and found enemies all around among his own countrymen. However historians have viewed Bentinck’s reforms in the context of the poor financial condition and the vulnerability of the Company. According to Bayly, ‘Bentinck’s main aim and main achievement was to cut establishment costs by trimming the army’s perquisites and engineering a long-term fall in the number and remuneration of civil servants’ (Indian Society, 121). Thus, Bentinck used the humanitarian reforms as a safety valve against any possible uprising which might be dangerous for the British in India. Rammohan’s letter to Amherst entailed a debate regarding the medium of instruction for higher education in India. The debate was resolved a decade after Rammohan’s letter but with a different goal to that conceived by Rammohan. In 1835 Macaulay’s Minutes dismissed the Indian languages as ‘poor’ and rude’ and ordained English as the language of higher education,

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with the goal of making a class of ‘babus’ who would be Indian in blood but English in taste. Wood’s Despatch of 1854 introduced the filtration theory, according to which English-educated teachers would teach the pupils in the vernacular at the primary level. But the filtration theory did not earn the complete assurance of those sections of the Indian society who were eager to impart English learning to their children. Pandita Ramabai, who worked tirelessly for amelioration of Indian women, could not decide upon one language as the medium of instruction when she decided to set up a school for orphan women in the Bombay Presidency in 1889. Justice Ranade’s paper Indu Prakash announced on 18 February 1889 that ‘the school would be housed in rented premises at the rate of Rs. 135 per month, and that the medium of instruction would be four languages, Marathi, Gujrati, English and Sanskrit’ (Sengupta Padmini, Ramabai, 181). The apex of the filtration theory, as proposed in Wood’s Despatch, would understandably consist of the scholars of the universities where the medium of instruction would be solely English, as Wood’s Despatch also proposed the establishment of universities in the metropolitan cities, leading to the foundation of Calcutta University, Madras University, and Bombay University in 1857. Ironically it was an English-educated babu – Bankimchandra Chatterjee belonged to the first batch of graduates from the University of Calcutta – who wrote Anandamath, from which the nationalists would derive their slogan, ‘Vande Mataram’, and who in the words of Sri Aurobindo was the architect of ‘the religion of patriotism’ (Aurobindo, 12) According to Agnihotri and Khanna, English provided nationalists of diverse cultural and linguistic background with a ‘shared mass of knowledge and a means of communication among themselves’ (Agnihotri & Khanna, 28). In other words, English provided the lingua franca with which the nationalists could ‘decode and attack colonial designs’ (Agnihotri & Khanna, 28). However, Mahatma Gandhi, who gradually rose to leadership after his return from South Africa, brought a new attitude towards the English language: ‘It is worth noting that, by receiving English education, we have enslaved the nation. Hypocrisy, tyranny etc. have increased; English-knowing Indians have not hesitated to cheat and strike terror into the people’ (Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 104). Yet it was during the age of nationalism that English emerged as a lingua franca and fostered the cause of Indian nationalism, of which the speeches of Vivekananda delivered in India are evidence. A parallel system of education was founded by the nationalists in 1906, with the vernaculars as the medium of instruction and English as a compulsory subject (Agnihotri & Khanna, 25). Nirad C. Chaudhuri, the famous writer, was one of the beneficiaries of that education (Autobiography, 278 & 292–295). Chaudhuri praised the national school of his boyhood days and rated it higher than the government school as it was in the national school in Kolkata that he ‘first saw some apparatus for teaching the elementary principles of physics’ and learned about ‘a greater sense 38

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of duty to the country and society’ (Autobiography, 292). Further it would not be irrelevant to mention that Chaudhuri was modestly proud of the fact that his ‘English was not learnt from Englishmen or in any English-speaking country’ (Chaudhuri, ‘Preface’, xii). But the national schools ‘failed’ because, as observed by Chaudhuri, ‘It was mostly students of second-rate intelligence from the less well-to-do and less educated families that they obtained’ (Autobiography, 293), while the well-to-do middle class was too worldly to be seriously interested in national schools: The Indian middle-class intelligentsia is too worldly wise to be swept off its feet even by the rabid nationalism which is the staple of its recreational mood. I have never yet met a member of this class who does not possess an uncanny sense of which side of the toast is buttered. Nationalism in those days did not have any butter, or, for that matter, even any margarine, to coat itself with. So the national schools could not get the proper human material, and, since a system is only worth as much as the men who work it, the experiment failed. (Autobiography, 293) We see that Western education was necessary from the nationalist perspective of good education as well as from the middle-class view of utilitarianism. However, middle-class utilitarianism regarding English education may be explained as a result of socio-historical pressure, as seen by Kachru: ‘The word ‘imposed’ is tricky here, for what was attitudinally prestigious and pragmatically desirable and rewarding did not need imposition: Power seems to have a way of creating its linguistic base’ (Alchemy, 7). Debate on Western education and English language was further ignited soon after 1947. After independence, Hindi was adopted as the official language and English as the associate official language for fifteen years. As the tenure of fifteen years for the English language drew towards the expiry date (26 January 1965), when English was supposed to be abolished, ‘there were widespread riots in several parts of south India’ (Agnihotri & Khanna, 30). Nationalist leaders like Rajagopalachari argued that use of the English language in India ‘has nothing to do with the status of freedom’ (Rajagopalachari, Language, 11) and also warned that driving out English would threaten national integration (Rajagopalachari, Question, 42). As an outcome of arguments and movements the government of independent India proposed a three-language formula in 1961, subsequently modified by the Kothari Commission (1964–66). But the formula did not solve the linguistic problem: The spirit of the three-language formula was that in the north Indian (Hindi-speaking) states efforts would be made to teach a language 39

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from south, east or west India as the third language. But most Hindispeaking states chose Sanskrit instead. West Bengal and Orissa also chose Sanskrit. There was serious resentment in the south where people felt they were being forced to learn a north Indian language while the reverse was not true . . . . The inevitable reaction in both the south and the east was to increase the importance of English. (Agnihotri & Khanna, 32) In a lecture, Suniti Kumar Chatterjee spoke against the use of coercion in forcing people to learn a language and highlighted the place of English in modern India; he almost echoed Rammohan’s thoughts on English education when he said that ‘English alone and no other Indian language, not even Sanskrit, could meet with our new type of intellectual hunger and our eagerness for knowledge which have come to us in the modern age’ (45). In some states like West Bengal, a controversy emerged in the 1970s as to when English should be introduced in school. While linguists like Pabitra Sarkar felt that English should never be introduced at the primary level, Nabaneeta Deb Sen, writer and teacher, thought otherwise (Agnihotri & Khanna, 112–113). However, following the Report of the One-Man Commission on English in Primary Education, West Bengal, in 1998 by Pabitra Sarkar himself and following ‘campaigns by the opposition parties’ and criticism in the media, English was reintroduced at the primary level (Sau, Samanta, & Ghosh 652). The NCERT (The National Council of Educational Research and Training) estimated that by the end of 2009 around twenty states in India were teaching English from Class I (Graddol, 86). These changes in government policies are brought about more by demand from the less privileged sections of the people than by theory. On 22 February 2009 The Times of India quoted one mother, a domestic helper: I work at 3 houses, and it is difficult for me to afford a private English-medium school for my child. Still I send my daughter there because I want to hear her speak English. If Chennai Corporation is starting English-medium schools, I will definitely consider enrolling my child there. (Graddol, 86) Graddol indicated a split of identity for the Indian youngsters going to English-medium schools, pointing out the gap of culture between school and home for the young middle-class Indians as a cause behind confusion of identity (88). Perhaps for these young people Indian English offers a cultural space with which they can identify themselves. In fact, as English was a tool of imperialist design in the colonial age and continued to be so in the postcolonial age, it also proved its utility as an antiimperialistic tool in the colonial as well as postcolonial age. In recent times 40

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Dalit activists such as Meena Kandasamy from Tamil Nadu, and Chandra Bhan Prasad from Uttar Pradesh, argue that English is a key to Dalit emancipation – not just because of the opportunities for social mobility it provides, but because it allows escape from the traditional caste positioning which is encoded into the regional languages themselves. (Graddol, 65) It is further argued that English ‘unites the Dalit movement across India’ and thus the role played by English is ‘parallel, perhaps, with the role that English played for those who originally fought for India’s independence’ (Graddol, 65). Chetan Bhagat claims to have experienced the appetite for English first-hand: I was invited to a talk in Bastar, a backward area ten hours’ drive from the nearest airport of Raipur. I asked them ‘who reads Chetan Bhagat in Bastar?’ They said ‘tribal kids, they use your books to learn English.’ It shows you the hunger. (Qtd in Graddol, 121) The hunger is also evident in the foregoing quotation from The Times of India. Thus, we can safely derive at least this conclusion that language can be used as a tool of hegemony and also as a weapon of emancipation, it is a tool within as well as beyond the control of the imperialists, and English played and is still playing the double role in Indian society. I think a cyclic pattern evolves in the usage of English in India – as an imperial tool simultaneously countered by using English as a channel of affirming identity and resisting imperialism. The process is likely to continue until English penetrates the lowest strata of society, when knowing English will no longer be an advantage. The emergence of Indian English demands a relocation of Indian culture as well as English literature. The institutionalization of Indian English writings in the English departments all over the country has been a positive step in that direction. But serious research in this field, especially that of language, still needs to be done. The question of culture in ‘our times’, said Bhabha, is fated to be located ‘in the realm of the beyond’ (Location, 1). Indian English belonged and still belongs to that realm of the ‘beyond’, and it is the destiny of ‘our times’ to locate Indian culture, including that realm. In the twenty-first century it is argued that economic growth since the 1990s, along with the success of the Indian middle class in the information and technology industry, has boosted our confidence in Indian English. (John, B.K., 1). Indian English fiction has created a huge readership among the Indian middle class – ‘its managers, travel agents, salespersons, secretaries, clerks, and the like has a new appetite for literary entertainment’ 41

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(McCrum, 247). The Guardian reported that Chetan Bhagat’s novel The 3 Mistakes of My Life ‘sells a copy every 17 seconds’ (McCrum, 247), although his works have never been considered for the Man Booker Prize. English is emerging as a language of the masses rather than the lingua franca of the elites across India. Besides print capitalism and the monopoly of the publishing houses there are other power bases which hail from a non-English educational background in Indian society. We may legitimately argue that Dhirubhai Ambani and many entrepreneurs of his ilk, Lalu Prasad Yadav (not to forget Rabri Devi), and Mulayam Singh Yadav did not hail from the English-educated elite class. Krishnaswamy and Burde also pointed out quite aptly (although it negates their own argument of the hegemony of the English-knowing elites) that there are a number of leaders ‘who cannot function in English and some are Chief Ministers at the State level’ (77). Nandan Nilekani, chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India and co-founder of Infosys Technologies Ltd, opined, ‘I believe English is about access, it is one of the tools of access that we need to provide all our people’ (Graddol, 121). The ‘tool’, according to Phillipson, encourages consumerism and capitalist values (Phillipson, 10–11), but it is also a fact that English has aided social reform, the growth of nationalism, and intellectual hunger in India; since the 1990s, when India decidedly chose the path of the market economy, following the disintegration of the Soviet Republic, the ‘tool’ has become more indispensable as other Asian nations like China and Japan have also realized. The Asian countries are using English according to their own needs, both economic and sociocultural. English as one of the languages of India has been accepted for quite a long time, since the days of language riots and debates in the 1960s, when C. Rajagopalachari – and later Suniti Kumar Chatterjee in the early 1970s – came out to defend the English language from being displaced from the Indian Constitution. While Rajagopalachari (1958, 1962) saw in English an integrative quality, ‘the real thing that binds the people of modern India’ (Rajagopalachari, Question, 42), Chatterjee argued that English ‘after some 200 years, has virtually become an Indian language’ (Chatterjee, S.K., India, 45). It was also during the early 1960s that Indian English as an indigenous variety was discussed, perhaps for the first time, by V.K. Gokak, who observed that there was an English ‘whose soul is Indian in colour, thought and imagery, and, now and then, even in the evolution of an Indian idiom which is expressive of the unique equality of the Indian mind’ (qtd in Agnihotri & Khanna, 31); in 1964, Halliday, McIntosh, and Stevens opined on Indian English: ‘the doctrine that there is an “Indian English”, to which Indian and Pakistani speakers should conform rather than aiming at a native model, whether British or American, is one which commands sympathy’ (qtd in Kachru, Indianization, 7). Since the 1980s linguists like B.B. Kachru, K.K. Sridhar, and Rajendra Singh have discussed Indian English as an indigenous variety of English, like American English, Singaporean English, and 42

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Malaysian English (Kachru, Alchemy; Agnihotri & Singh). But the first signs of an Indian variant of English, ‘whose soul is Indian in colour, thought and imagery’, can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Although Indian words infiltrated the English tongue since the seventeenth century, Indian English came into being through Indians’ use of vernacular words, translation of phrases and idioms from the vernacular, and also appropriation of Indian cultural and philosophical elements in narration. It has come into existence in the multicultural and multilingual atmosphere of Indian society and has been the object of much conjecture and study of linguists in postcolonial India. In fact, the term has gained currency with the coming into prominence of Indian English fiction in world literature in the twentieth century. A few words more need to be said before I move to the next chapter. A discourse, we know, is not only a creation of an individual author but also a product of a time and place and a milieu. Unravelling the Indian discourses in Indian writing in English entails unravelling Indian history. The venerable Jespersen said that loanwords are the ‘milestones’ of history (27). Similarly, the history of ‘Indianization’ also tells the history of modern India. Hence, in trying to get a historical perspective of ‘Indianization’ of the English language in Indian writing in English of the colonial era, I am bound to a profounder project of rediscovering India.

Notes 1 According to Nurullah and Naik, the Bombay Native School Book and School Society was formed in 1822 under the inspiration of several such societies in Bengal, but its origin may be traced to Bombay Education Society which was established in 1815 by the members of the Church of England, residing in Bombay for the education of the children of soldiers of the East India Company. Since its inception in 1822 ‘the Bombay Native Education Society was accepted by Government as the official agency for the spread of education among the Indian people’ (Nurullah & Naik 130). Since 1827, the society is known as the Bombay Native Education Society. See Nurullah and Naik (93–96). 2 See Nurullah and Naik (97).

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3 ARTICLES, LETTERS, AND A DIARY

It flows on like a glorious, a broad river, and in its royal mood it does not despise the tribute waters which a thousand streams bring to it. Why should it? There is no one to say to it – thus far shalt thou go and no farther. Give me, say I, the beautiful language of the Anglo-Saxon. —Michael Madhusudan Dutt, ‘The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu’

The nineteenth century brought a new consciousness regarding the English language which had a lasting impact on the destiny of the English language in India. That the English language was already in demand by the late eighteenth century has been discussed in the previous chapter. Sisir Kumar Das argued that English ‘came to India not as the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible alone, but primarily as the language of the East India Company, promising new financial prospects and political patronage (Das, ‘Introduction’, 1: 17). Hence the demand for learning English was due to the material benefits the language might have promised for the new learners. But in the nineteenth century, besides the demand, there was an urge – mostly in some upper-caste Bengali gentlemen – to imbibe Western culture and to emulate Western education. Raja Rammohan Roy, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Keshab Sen, in spite of huge differences, may be grouped together for their promotion of Western education and, simultaneously, the English language. Keshub Chunder Sen, in October 1870, after having returned from England, appealed to his countrymen to reap the benefits of India’s contact with the West: Lo, the light is streaming in from the West; lo ten thousand hands are outstretched over mountains, across seas and oceans – outstretched to redeem the millions of the Indian population from ignorance and sin and idolatry. Then we shall not be idle. (Sen, K.C., Appeal, 4) 44

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In another address delivered on February 2, 1870, before his journey to England, Sen represented English rule as divine intervention for the regeneration of the Indians (Sen, Krishna, ‘Annotations’, 206). In 1854 , Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s observations in ‘The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu’ seem to justify the theory of the white man’s burden: I stand before you not as a Columbus proudly claiming the meed of a discovery of unknown worlds; I stand before you not as a Newton, whose god-like vision penetrated the blue depths of the ether and saw a new and bright orb, cradled in infinity .  .  . the fact I enunciate is a simple one . . . Why has providence given this queenly, this majestic land for a prey and a spoil to the Anglo-Saxon? Why? I say – it is the Mission of Anglo-Saxon to renovate, to regenerate, to Christianize the Hindu – to churn this vast ocean, that it may restore the things of beauty now buried in its liquid wilderness. (Dutt, 40–41) Raja Rammohan Roy, much before the foregoing statements were made, showed his enthusiasm for the introduction of Western education in India in his much quoted letter of 1823 written to Lord Amherst: ‘we already offered up thanks to Providence for inspiring the most generous and enlightened of the Nations of the West with the glorious ambitions of planting in Asia the Arts and Sciences of modern Europe’ (Roy, Letter, 164). All the foregoing statements show an awareness of Western arts and science and their necessity and applicability to Indian society rather than any political standpoint. All of these three men were critical of ‘ignorance’ (Sen, Appeal, 4), ‘superstition’, ‘fatal adherence to institution’ (Dutt, M.M., 39), and also discouraged the study of ‘grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions of little or no practical use to the possessors or to society’ (Roy, Letter, 164). The introduction of modern science and Western literature was thought to be an antidote to the evils prevalent in Bengali society. The feelings of such men as Rammohan and Michael Madhusudan were based on the premise that knowledge of science as it had been developed in the West was indispensable for Indian youths. This feeling developed to an extreme form among the Derozians, who began to defy social taboos in Hindu society, such as eating of beef or defying the Hindu gods and goddesses. The Oriental Magazine ‘made snide remarks about their habit of “cutting their way through ham and beef, and wading to liberalism through tumblers of beer”’ (Sarkar, Critique, 28). Hence in the nineteenth century, the English language was promoted by these people and their like not for any material advantage but for the values of liberalism and the intellectual treasures which the language might bring to the people. This consciousness of the treasures of science and literature, to which the English language offered an access, was a reason – besides the material opportunities of the English language – for the development of a 45

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sound base of knowledge of the English language among upper-caste Indians rather than the development of an English-based pidgin. Moreover, Indians with a long tradition of writing in Sanskrit and in other vernaculars were better equipped than the people of other colonies in Africa or in the Caribbeans in learning a language. According to S.A.A. Rizvi, Amir Khusraw, famous poet and musician of medieval India, was ‘impressed by the depth of learning among Indians and their ability to speak any language’ (253). In the Caribbeans and in the West Africa, where the vernaculars did not have a written tradition and literacy was introduced with English (Fennell, 250), the people had a need of a lingua franca along with a script, which was fulfilled with the emergence of creoles, like Jamaican Patois in the Caribbean islands and Krio in West Africa. In East Africa, in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, Swahili is written with Roman script and English has not produced any creole with wide circulation but is an important language. Similarly, in south-east Asia, as there had been a legacy of Tamil, Chinese, and Malaysian, English-based creoles, such as Manglish or Singlish, are used in informal contexts only. For example, in Singapore, there is the nativized variety Singapore English as well as the basilectal Singlish, which is not preferred in the formal domain (Leimgruber, 149). Chinese Pidgin English did not develop into a creole but ‘began falling out of use in the early twentieth century’ (Holm, 2: 514). But in Papua New Guinea, where, according to the ‘National Literacy and Awareness Secretariat’, literacy was introduced with English by the missionaries, Tok Pisin, a creole, is now the mother tongue of the people. But India had a millennia-long written tradition in Sanskrit and hundreds of years of tradition of written literature in Persian and several other regional languages. Understandably, literate Indians had developed skill in learning a new language. There had been a tradition of reading and writing in India among the upper caste, especially the Brahmins, when the English language was introduced by Christian missionaries. Rosalind O’Hanlon observed that in western India, with the consolidation of the rule of the East India Company, ‘new opportunities for administrative and political power’ were created and the literate Brahmans who had the flexibility to acquire a command of fluent English were better placed than the other castes to exploit those opportunities (O’Hanlon, 7). The English acquired by many of these upper castes was so accurate with regard to the Standard English that it perhaps resisted to a considerable extent the pidgin varieties, like Butler English1 or the mesolectal babu English. I have mentioned in the first chapter that all examples of babu English cited by linguists are in the form of letters and there was hardly any book or article or pamphlet written in babu English in India in the colonial era. However, the acrolect itself of the Indian educated section was involved with hybridity although it was of a different degree. The writers and speakers discussed in this study have used elements from Indian languages and culture consciously and very often deliberately

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to assert their own culture. Hence ‘Indianization’ discussed in this study is associated with not only language but also the politics of language. In fact, the English which the Indians came to acquire since the nineteenth century can be described as bookish because Indians learnt more from books than social interaction with native speakers of English. Since the late nineteenth century the colonial master created a distance from the natives consciously; the educated Indian’s acquisition of English was simultaneous with acquaintance with Western literature and political ideas of liberty and equality. Regarding the artificial distance between the master and the Indian subjects, Tapan Raychaudhuri, referring to diverse sources, points out the ways the official elite in India, who were drawn from the British middle class, sought to emulate the aristocracy and considered the preservation of social distance for the maintenance of structures of power and authority (Raychaudhuri, 215). The English-educated Indians formed their ideas of the English race from their literature. Speaking about his friend Andrews in his essay ‘Crisis in Civilization’, Rabindranath Tagore says, [P]ersonally speaking, I am especially beholden to him because he helped me to retain in my old age that feeling of respect for the English race with which in the past I was inspired by their literature and which I was about to lose completely. (725–26) In 1888 when young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi got an opportunity to study law in England he thought of London as the home of ‘philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization’ (Gandhi, R., 18). Gauri Viswanathan pointed out that one self-conscious British official Charles Trevelyan remarked, ‘[The Indians] daily converse with the best and wisest Englishmen through the medium of their works, and form ideas, perhaps higher ideas of our nation than if their intercourse with it were more of a personal kind’ (20–21). Viswanathan deduced that the English literary text, ‘functioning as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state, becomes a mask for economic exploitation’ (20–21). My concern here is not the masks of conquest sported by the colonial schemers but its linguistic impact upon Indians. It is no wonder that the Indian’s use of English is more dominated by bookish predilection than by its oral existence among the British. Hence the acrolect in Indian English seldom sounded colloquial. However, it is the colloquialisms of Indian languages which have been translated into English in Indians’ use of English.2 Sumit Sarkar focused on the valorization of book learning in the nineteenth century: ‘The sudden entry of print culture and western education, along-with the creative indigenous response to them through vernacular prose, valorized book learning to an unprecedented extent among the colonial middle class of nineteenth century

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Bengal’ (Writing, 282). Hence books became one of the most potent sources of acquiring the English language. Creoles generally develop from pidgin, and since none of the pidgin varieties in India earned either popularity or a wide circulation – unlike the circumstances in Africa, West Indies, and Papua New Guinea – a creole did not emerge in India. Instead, in India, rather than ‘pidginization’ or ‘creolization’ we have what has been discussed in the first chapter as the ‘Indianization’ of the English language. ‘Indianization’ of the English language involves influence of Indian languages and culture and also involves the politics of assertion or redefining of native culture. Hence, ‘Indianization’ is a form of indigenization as influence of culture plays an important role in indigenization of languages (Kirkpatrick, 5). In this chapter, I am going to show that ‘Indianization’ of the English language can be located since the early nineteenth century. In studying the writings of Rammohan Roy, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Keshub Sen, the focus of my argument is not a rediscovery of the genius of these men but how they used English prose in public and private domains of life and how their language forecasted the appearance of an Indianized English. In 1815, Rammohan published the first of his nine Upanishad tikas, sub-commentaries on Sankaracarya’s bhasyas, or commentaries. Since then until his death he had an eventful writing career full of acrimonious controversy with Christians and Hindus alike. As a writer of the first generation of Indian writers in English, Rammohan’s proficiency in the English language proves wrong the colonial assumption that the first-language writer is always more proficient than the second-language writer. English gave Rammohan the opportunity to negotiate with the British on equal terms, in the discourse they understood. It was a very useful weapon in his career as a social reformer and religious thinker. Rammohan’s attitude towards Western education and the English language needs to be contextualized in his views on language in general and in his views on the oneness of all religions. Rammohan is credited to have introduced the discipline of comparative religion in the world. ‘Rammohan’s idea was’, said his colleague Satish Chandra Chakraborty in 1833, ‘that his [Brahmo] Samaj was to be, not a temple of a new sect, but the unifier of all India through the common worship of one God by the members of all denominations’ (Iyengar, K.R.S., 31). Rabindranath Tagore, following the tradition of Rammohan, speaks of a God for all Indians –Bharata Bhagya Vidhata– in our national anthem. In 1803, more than a decade before he began his career as an Indian writer in English, Rammohan published ‘Tuhfatu’l Muwahiddin’ in the Persian language. It is a blend of diverse religious ideas – Christian, Sufi, Sunni Islam, Bhakti cult, Vaisnava doctrines, and teachings of Nanak, Dadu, and Kabir. Thus Rammohan established the values of acceptance of diverse religious traditions and the oneness of diverse religions, which Gandhi was to highlight a century later. Hence, the most creative venture of Indian nationalism which I discussed with reference 48

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to the observations of Partha Chatterjee in Chapter 1 was initiated by Rammohan Roy. Simultaneously, I find that Rammohan also paved the path for the emergence of Indian English, which found its definite shape in the English writings of Gandhi a century later. Hence there is an overlapping of the emergence of Indian nationhood with that of Indian English. But if Rammohan viewed the English language as a tool of colonial oppression – which Gandhi did a century later – perhaps he could not have contributed to the development of Indian English and the development of Indian nationhood. For Rammohan and his age, language was more a means of communication than a marker of identity. Robertson observed, Rammohan’s view .  .  . was that language was by its very nature ideologically, even culturally, neutral. This led him to use the language of the new colonial sarkar to define for everyone the terms of governance. For Raja Rammohan Ray, ‘vac’ (speech) had escaped the tyrannical gods of party, class and politics. (‘English Writings’, 40) The notion of national language was largely unknown in India in the early nineteenth century. According to Sandeep Bharadwaj, the first person to suggest that Hindi be accepted as the official language in all provinces of India was Lord Curzon in the year 1901. I think that Rammohan’s ‘neutral’ stand on language was associated with his broad stand on religion. It is significant that the discovery of the Indo-European family of languages by William Jones was soon followed by the introduction of comparative religions by Rammohan. Robertson argued that from 1815 onward Rammohan believed that the fundamental truth of all human existence is revealed to us and not acquired through discursive reason or through any other human activity. Revelation has been transmitted to all peoples in all places and times through the earliest texts of India and the Middle East – the Vedas, the Hebrew Christian Bible, and the Quran. Robertson further continued: This was not a regional viewpoint but, like his contemporary the English Indologist Sir William Jones (1746–94) who discovered the European family of languages, Rammohan Ray believed that the preexistence of a higher, universal, revealed religion was established by clear linguistic evidence and by monotheism. A universal ur-revelation was a corollary to the revolutionary notion of ur-language. It was the foundation of Rammohan Ray’s worldview. He believed it left no room for private truths and warring creeds. (‘Introduction’, xxi) As several religions have found themselves as ‘warring creeds’, language has also been fought about. In India and Bangladesh, for example, people 49

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have fought for and over language on several occasions. If a universal ‘ur-revelation’ leaves no room ‘for private truths and warring creeds’, the ‘ur-language’ should leave no room for warring dialects. Perhaps this kind of consciousness led Rammohan to argue for the promotion of Western learning in the English language with confidence. According to Romain Rolland, Rammohan, ‘the first really cosmopolitan type in India’, ‘went on so far as to wish his people to adopt English as their universal language, and then to achieve independence and enlighten the rest of Asia’ (Rolland, 67). In the early nineteenth century, English language was not the sensitive and controversial issue it was in the twentieth. Being a near contemporary of Sir William Jones, Rammohan’s firm stand on the English language showed that he not only was convinced about the need for scientific knowledge among Indian youth but also must have cherished the idea of the deeper unity of languages like the deeper unity of religions. The subject matter of Rammohan’s English writings, entirely non-fictional, is chiefly Indian religion, Indian philosophy, and debates on contemporary problems of Indian society, like the burning of widows, women’s rights, and freedom of the press. I intend to discuss Rammohan as an Indian writer in English with reference to the following three texts: ‘A Translation of a Conference Between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of, the Practice of Burning Widows Alive; From the Original Bungla’ (1818), ‘A Second Conference Between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of, the Practice of Burning Widows Alive’ (1820), and ‘The Universal Religion: Religious Instructions Founded on Sacred Authorities’ (1829). In Rammohan’s texts, ‘Indianization’ consists principally in shifting native structures of scholastic debate and dialogues to the English language. It is significant that Rammohan used, in all the three texts, the form of dialogue at a time when the form was not in vogue in English non-fictional writings. Till the beginning of the nineteenth century, the last influential English text written in the form of dialogue was Dryden’s Essay on Dramatic Poesie, which was published in 1668. Eighteenth-century English prose – be it the novel or the periodical essays or the philosophical writings of Thomas Paine and David Hume – brought ‘philosophy’, as aspired to by Addison, ‘out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses’ (qtd in Daiches, 595). But it gave the narrator an authoritative position rather than a dialectical one. The individualistic and authoritative standpoint was also present in colonial discourses, such as Macaulay’s Minute of 1835. Rammohan’s approach towards his subject was rational and dialectical, where the opponent is also allowed a voice. In fact, Rammohan’s approach is more classical than that of the neoclassicists of the eighteenth century because like the Platonic dialogues, Rammohan’s arguments are also placed in the form of dialogues. However, for Rammohan, the model for debate was not the Platonic dialogues but those that were available in the Indian traditions of argumentation. Platonic dialogues are 50

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an exercise of reason and common sense; they have no scriptural authority to fall back upon. But argumentative traditions in India, at least in Rammohan’s time, had to fall back upon Vedas, Puranas, and commentaries and sub-commentaries. A large part of the argument would consist of explanation of ancient texts. The two conferences on ‘Concremation’ are composed as debates. In the voice of the ‘Advocate’ Rammohan presents all the arguments he must have faced as an opponent of burning widows alive, and in the voice of the ‘Opponent’ he presents his own arguments against the barbaric custom. In the Second Conference the author, at the end of the argument, when the debate over scriptures is over, gave himself space to voice his feelings. In the two debates the Advocate of widow-burning refers to Ungira, Vyas, Hareet, Vishnoo, Brahmu Pooran, and Rig Veda. The Opponent refers to Munoo, Yugnuvulkya, the Bhagavad Gita, and some of the authorities referred to by the Advocate. Although Rammohan – it seems today – did not need to argue with reference to scriptural authorities to prove that burning a widow to death is a heinous crime, the scholastic note was introduced at the very outset of the first conference: Opponent. Those who have no reliance on the Sastra, and those who take delight in the self-destruction of women, may well wonder that we should oppose that which is forbidden by all the Sastras, and by every race of men. Advocate. You have made an improper assertion in alleging that Concremation and Postcremation are forbidden by the Sastras. Hear what Angira and other saints have said on this subject. (EnglishWorks, 323) In this way the centrality of the ‘Sastras’ remains intact throughout the two debates, except in the fag end of the Second Conference, when Rammohan came out of scholastic discourse to express his feelings on the injustices suffered by women. India had diverse traditions of scholastic debate when Rammohan composed his dialogues between the Opponent and Advocate of the practice of sati. For example, Bengal had an oral and musical tradition of scholastic debate in the early nineteenth century. Sisir Kumar Das documented that ‘kabir ladai’, the battle of the poets, became extremely popular in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. The main feature of this performance is a contest between two groups, each headed by a leader-poet . . . Both sides are expected to compose songs instantaneously on a particular theme, presenting opposite viewpoints. (Das, S.K., History, 37) 51

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Hensman Anthony, famous as Antony Firinghee, the Bengali poet of Portuguese origin, earned fame as a performer artist in this tradition.3 A more refined form of debate existed in Bengal since the medieval times, which may be inferred from the life of Sri Chaitanya (born in the year 1486 in the Nadia district of Bengal), who after he humbled Keshava Mishra of Kashmir in his early life was acclaimed, according to Srila Bhakti Vinoda Thakura, as the finest scholar and logician of the ‘Nyaya school of thought’. He was famous in Bengal as ‘Nimai Pandit’ before he renounced the world and adopted the name of Sri Krishna Chaitanya. According to Satis Chandra Vidyabhusana, Raghunath Siromani, a contemporary of Sri Chaitanya, made the district of Nadia in Bengal the foremost seat of learning after defeating in debates on Sastras Pakshadhara Misra of Mithila, which had been the most renowned place for learning the philosophy of Nyaya (462–464). Raghunath’s ‘triumph [over Misra] took place about the year 1514 A.D., from which the foundation of the university of Nadia is reckoned’ (Vidyabhusana, 464). The rulers of Nadia promoted this school of logic – for example, ‘Maharaja Krsnacandra Raya of Nadia (1728–1782) was the last landholder to encourage Pandits with monetary help’ (Vidyabhusana, 488). The ‘students of Navadwipa [a town in Nadia] have received grants from the British Raj’ since ‘India came into the possession of [the] British in 1757’ (Vidyabhusana, 490). Writing in 1920, Vidyabhusana observed that although ‘Nadia is still the best centre where students from all parts of India come to study Nyaya’ (488), a process of decline had already set in owing to the establishment of the University of Calcutta and the other universities established by the British government and also owing to the rise of the vernaculars in the nineteenth century (492). Hence, in the early nineteenth century when Rammohan wrote the texts on widow-burning, the Nyayikas had a place of prominence in the Bengali society. Hence participation in a debate over Sastras was a compulsion for Rammohan – as well as for Iswarchandra Vidyasagar later – if he had to convince the Hindu society and thereby pave the path for the abolition of the practice of sati. But Rammohan, instead of engaging in oral debates, fought the battle on paper. Traditionally, not only in Bengal but throughout India, pundits engaged in scholastic debates orally rather than in paper. The written texts of the medieval age were concerned mainly with commentaries on and interpretations of an ancient or a medieval text. For example, all the texts written by the Nyayikas of Mithila and Nadia were commentaries on Tattvacintamani, the prime source of the school of Nyaya, written by Gangesa Upadhyaya of the twelfth century AD. However, the scenario changed in the nineteenth century, when periodicals and dailies became a part of the cultural life of educated ladies and gentlemen. In both the ‘original Bungla’ and the translated English texts, Rammohan shifted the oral tradition into written form. It is no wonder that Kashinath Tarkabageesh, who countered Rammohan after the publication of the first Conference, also adopted the structure of 52

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scholastic debate in written form (Roy, Rammohan Granthabali, 3: 13–24). Hence, the scholastic duel between Rammohan and Kashinath represents a new milieu of negotiation between tradition and modernity, between the English language and the traditional Indian norms of argumentation. Interestingly, Kashinath countered Rammohan’s arguments in Bangla along with an English translation. Rammohan wrote the rejoinder – that is, the ‘Second Conference’ – in Bangla and subsequently translated the text into English. It is interesting that the scholastic duel was fought bilingually. Since the question of convincing the British authorities was a deciding factor, English emerged as the language for debates on social reforms. In the major part of the Second Conference, it is the Opponent who speaks. He narrates the views and arguments of the Advocate and begins his own argument with ‘I reply’. The brief sentence acts as a demarcation between the views of the Advocate and those of the Opponent. This pattern of the Opponent’s lengthy speeches is informed with the Indian logical discourse of ‘siddhanta’ or ‘purva paksha’. It is one of the thirty-two technical terms of ‘Tantra-yukti’ or scientific argument discussed by Kautilya in Arthashastra (Vidyabhusana, 24–25). Rajiv Malhotra defined this tradition of argumentation in his book Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism: [Purvapaksha] is the traditional dharmic [or righteous] approach to the rival schools. It is a dialectical approach taking a thesis by an opponent (‘purvapakshin’) and then providing its rebuttal (‘khandana’) to establish the protagonist’s view (‘siddhanta’). The purvapaksha tradition required any debater first to argue from the perspective of his opponent in order to test the validity of his understanding of the opposing position, and from there to realize his own shortcomings. (Qtd in Mythili, 84–85) Robertson detected the style in two of Rammohan’s English writings: In Second Defence [of the Monotheistical System of the Vedas (1817)] and even in Second Appeal to the Christian Public he formulated his arguments in the Hindu pandit siddhanta/purvapaksha style (‘if it is said/then the reply is’) of his Bengali versions’ (‘English Writings’, 37). In the Bangla versions, when he was addressing the Bengali Hindus, his participation in the battle of Sastras was almost compulsory and hence the structure of debate was appropriate as it transcribed the oral tradition on paper. But in the English text, he addressed the British authorities and the English-educated Indians like Kashinath Tarkabageesh. Hence, he could have chosen a narrative structure instead of the structure of dialogue. I think Rammohan adhered to dialogues for the following reasons: since the subject matter was a real social problem of India he wanted to give in his text the total and exact picture of the 53

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problem from the Indian perspective; secondly, he had to convince not only the Hindu society but also the British administrative and intellectual circle that they would not run the risk of violating the Hindu scriptures in abolishing the practice of sati. In the previous chapter, I have discussed that for Lord Bentinck, in the context of poor financial condition and vulnerability of the East India Company, humanitarian reforms were a sort of safety valve against any possible uprising against the British. However, what is viewed as ‘humanitarian’ and ‘just’ from a European Christian perspective could have been seen as an insult to the Hindu orthodox society. Hence it was necessary for Rammohan not only to appeal to ‘reason’ but also to present a reasonably valid commentary on the Hindu Sastras. Moreover, in maintaining the native argumentative structures he maintained the ‘dharmic’ stand, which meant that he was just towards his opponents. In so doing, Rammohan set a milestone in the process of developing an Indian identity in the English language. This application of the Indian argumentative and narrative traditions in the English language enabled the author to posit an Indian logical discourse in the English language. The text also provided Rammohan an opportunity to assert the richness of Indian logic and philosophy and its validity from the perspective of ‘reason’. For me, the most important fact is that Rammohan’s debates indicate that English in India was destined to grow as a dialect or a variant rather than as a pidgin or creole. Although Rammohan wrote in Standard English, his texts I think were indications of the entelechy of Indian writing in English. As Rammohan brought an oral dialectical Indian tradition to English non-fiction, Raja Rao, writing after more than a hundred years, introduced the oral form of storytelling in Kanthapura. Although the road was long, Rammohan treaded on a path which led towards Kanthapura. In India, philosophical and spiritual treatises are often in the form of dialogues and debate. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, may seem to be catechismal because Lord Krishna is the main speaker and for the major part of the text, Arjuna listens to Lord Krishna, whom he regards with utmost respect; but it can also be seen as a debate between two viewpoints represented by Lord Krishna and Arjuna. Pointing out the aspect of debate in the Bhagavad Gita, Amartya Sen argued that ‘it is important to take on board Arjuna’s consequential analysis, in addition to considering Krishna’s arguments for doing one’s duty’ (6). Referring to diverse instances from the Indian epics, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Carvaka school of philosophy, heritage of science created by Aryabhatta and his successors, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, the writings of Alberuni, the heritage of secularism created in the time of Akbar, the Mughal ruler, and the rich heritage of the Bhakti cult, Amartya Sen argued that the tradition of argument and scepticism is ages old in India and such formulaic interpretation of Indian culture as ‘overwhelmingly religious, or deeply anti-scientific, or exclusively hierarchical, or fundamentally unsceptical (to consider a set of diagnoses that have received 54

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some championing in cultural categorizations) involves significant oversimplification of India’s past and present’ (31). From this perspective, Rammohan’s structure of debate in the two conferences on widow-burning is highly significant for they are enriched in the national as well as local tradition of debate in India. Platonic dialogues were not unknown in nineteenth-century Bengal. The Platonic dialogues, such as The Republic, are based on common sense, whereas in the Indian tradition, the validity of a statement depends whether it is sanctioned by any scriptural authority. Rammohan’s debates follow the Indian tradition of logical contest which was based on commentaries, interpretations, and comparative analysis of diverse scriptures. As Rammohan belonged to the early nineteenth century his discourse was not informed with the subtleties of Western philosophy to the extent to which, for example, Sri Aurobindo’s philosophical writings were informed. However, Rammohan’s dedicatory letter of the Second Conference indicated that the idea of common sense championed in the Platonic dialogues and also by the neoclassicists of the eighteenth century was also taken on board in the Second Conference, if not in the first. Rammohan dedicated the ‘Second Conference’ to ‘the most Noble The Marchioness of Hastings, Countess of Loudoun &c, &c’: ‘The following tract, being a translation of a Bengalee Essay, published some time ago, as an appeal to reason in behalf of humanity, I take the liberty to dedicate to your Ladyship’ (Roy, English Works, 315). The letter is dated 26 February 1820. The letter indicates that ‘reason’ was the prime concern for Rammohan. Rammohan’s narrative style also befits his standpoint. From an Indian point of view ‘reason’ consists in commenting on the meaning of the Sastras and interpreting them, but from the Western point of view, the word was informed with eighteenth-century enlightenment and neoclassicism, known otherwise as the ‘age of reason’. It is crucial that at the end of the scholarly duel between Rammohan and Kashinath Tarkabageesh, Rammohan had appealed to both reason and feelings at once. Speaking of the injustices suffered by women (and replying on the charge that women are by nature not firm but frail in their virtue) he not only came out of scholastic discourse but also came out of a formal register and expressed himself in a colloquial register that bore a faint shadow of his mother tongue: The accusation of their (women’s) want of virtuous knowledge is an injustice. Observe what pain, what slighting, what contempt, and what afflictions their virtue enables them to support! How many kooleen Brahmuns are there who marry ten or fifteen wives for the sake of money, that never see the greater number of them after the day of marriage, and visit others only three or four times in the course of their lives. Still amongst those women, most, even without seeing or receiving any support from their husbands, living dependant on their fathers or brothers, and suffering much distress, 55

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continue to preserve their virtue; and when Brahmuns, or those of other tribes, bring their wives to live with them, what misery do the women not suffer? At marriage the wife is recognized as half of her husband, but in after-conduct they are treated worse than inferior animals. (Roy, English Works, 361–362) Rammohan’s appeal to reason as well as humanitarian feeling is involved with challenge to custom and tradition. This makes him more appealing to that section of his Western readers who had grown with the values of Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Altogether, Rammohan’s two texts on widow-burning presented a modern Indian voice in Indian literature: a new voice which could resonate with feelings on contemporary social injustices, which could appropriate the best of the past heritage of Indian logic and philosophy and present itself in a posture and language, which could appeal to a Western or a Westernized audience. Rammohan’s language in the foregoing quoted passage has a distinct rhythm of colloquial Bangla, his mother tongue. There are only two Indian words in the foregoing passage: the Bangla word ‘kooleen’ (the name of the caste ill-reputed for polygamy) and the Sanskrit ‘Brahmun’. But in the exclamatory outbursts, in the repetitive structure of the sentence: ‘what pain, what slighting’ and in the comparison at the end ‘they are treated worse than inferior animals’ Rammohan’s English merges with the rhythm of colloquial Bangla. Instead of simply ‘worse than animals’ Rammohan used the phrase ‘worse than inferior animals’, which points towards a mother-tongue interference. Again, instead of ‘what misery do the women suffer!’ Rammohan used the exclamatory clause ‘what misery do the women not suffer?’, which implies that there is no misery on earth which the women do not suffer. This is a typically Bengali manner of expression. In the first conference on the burning of widows, major parts of the dialogues consist of translations of or reference to Sastras. In some cases this led to ‘Indianized’ expressions owing to reference to a cultural detail peculiar to the Hindus. For example, the ‘Advocate’ of the practice of sati translates a verse of ancient literature thus: ‘There possessing her husband as her chiefest good, herself the best of women, enjoying the highest delight, she partakes of bliss with her husband as long as fourteen Indra’s reign’ (English Works, 324). He translates Brahma Purana thus: ‘If her lord die [sic] in another country, let the faithful wife place his sandals on her breast, and pure enter the fire’ (324). The ‘Opponent’ argues that concremation does not guarantee absorption in God: ‘In repeating the Sankalpa of Concremation, the desire of future fruition is declared as the object’ (327). These might be termed as examples of ‘transfer of context’ (Kachru, Indianization, 101). By this phrase, Kachru meant depiction of cultural details like the ‘caste system of India, social and religious taboos, notions of superiority and inferiority, and 56

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the like’ (Indianization, 101). In Rammohan’s text we have instead depiction of the Hindu mythic concept of time (‘fourteen Indra’s reign’), the Indian gesture of worship for the husband (placing sandals on breast), or the Hindu religious practice of Sankalpa. In the ‘Second Conference’ some of the original sources of the translations are given in Devnagri script in footnotes. Moreover, some parts of the Sanskrit sources are quoted in Roman script within the text. For example, the Opponent argues, ‘[F]or we find in the text of Harita and Vishnu the phrase “Pravivesa hutasanam”, which means entering into the flames, and the term “Samaroheddhutasanam”, signifying ascending the flames’ (356). He also code-switched to Bangla while explaining the word ‘Praves’: ‘“Griha pravesh koriachhilam”, I entered the house’ (356). Rammohan used loanwords quite freely, such as Sastra (323), Vidhayak (337), Prabartak (328), Nibartak (328), and Sankalpa (327 & 329). Although Rammohan adopted Standard English, he was not obdurately rigid: His use of language shows that stepping beyond Standard English was not sacrilegious for him. In fact, he was quite conscious about each word and phrase. Although Rammohan used a few Indian words as quoted earlier, although he could translate the Bengali manner of expression in English as discussed earlier, he never used the word ‘sati’ in his English writings on the inhuman practice. He was perhaps aware of the fact that the word had an aura of purity. Instead he used the word ‘concremation’ and the stronger phrase ‘burning widows alive’. In his translation of the ‘Gayatri’ as well as in the ‘Conferences’, he translated ‘moksha’ as ‘final beatitude’, finding a Christian alternative of a Hindu concept. B.C. Robertson was of the opinion that Rammohan’s use of English is responsible for his having received ‘so little credit as an expositor of vedantasastra’ (‘Rammohan’, 177). ‘This language’, he pointed out, ‘prompted the Unitarians to a great disservice in promoting Rammohan in India and in the West as their Indian Convert; as Emerson put it, their “trophy on the plain where the Trinitarians have builded a thousand”’ (‘Rammohan’, 177). However, a close analysis of Rammohan’s English writings does not reveal Rammohan as a ‘Christian convert’ as Rammohan hardly imitated the Christian religious discourse while talking about religion, except for a few terms like ‘beatitude’ for moksha. In fact, Rammohan’s exposition of religion is based on a samanway, a synthesis, of religious and scientific discourse, as evident in ‘The Universal Religion’ (1829). ‘It is generally agreed’ as observed by Sumit Sarkar, ‘that Rammohan’s true originality and greatness lay in his attempt to synthesize Hindu, Islamic and Western cultural traditions’ (qtd in Robertson, Rammohan, 166). This synthesis also called for a synthesis of discourse. ‘The Universal Religion’, one of Rammohan’s last compositions, is written in the form of questions and answers where Rammohan’s philosophy of universal religion is expounded. The proposed universality of Rammohan’s doctrine is achieved through a fusion of a modern scientific discourse with an Upanishadic one. Rammohan’s style of expounding and explaining 57

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religion is a scientific matter-of-fact one. As T.S. Eliot tried to make literary criticism a scientific, rational, and impersonal activity, Rammohan’s language expounds religion from a scientific perspective: Question: What is meant by worship? Answer: Worship implies the act of one with a view to please another; but when applied to the Supreme Being, it signifies a contemplation of his attributes. (English Works, 135) The language is of a tone as if the author is defining some concept of physics or chemistry. It is noteworthy here the way he refers to God in the entire text: ‘Supreme Being’ (English Works, 136), ‘Divine Being (136), ‘Author and Governor of the Universe’ (135), and ‘that Being Who is pure as well as eternal’. It is worthy of note that Rammohan’s God is unnamed. Rammohan pointed out that according to sacred authorities ‘he cannot be defined either by intellect or by language’ (135). Although his treatise is based on the Upanishads and Puranas he never used a single Sanskrit word. Even in his English version of ‘Tuhfat’ he sticks to English and refers to God in the same manner. It is significant that instead of the term ‘God Almighty’ Rammohan used the phrase ‘Author and Governor of the Universe’. Hence Rammohan’s language was not that of a converted Christian. In fact, Rammohan’s language in ‘Universal Religion: Religious Instructions Founded on Sacred Authorities’ is far removed from the language of the Authorized Version or the Sermons. Rather, his language appropriates a scientific discourse while expounding religion: Q – To whom is worship due? A – To the Author and Governor of the Universe, which is incomprehensibly formed, and filled with an endless variety of men and things; in which, as shown by the zodiac, in a manner far more wonderful than the machinery of a watch, the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars perform their rapid courses; and which is fraught with animate and inanimate matter of various kinds, locomotive and immoveable, of which there is not one particle but has its functions to perform. (135) Rammohan here presents a fusion of modern scientific and Upanishadic discourse. His point of comparison, his choice of words – ‘machinery’, ‘locomotive’ – suggests a scientific orientation of the author. Herein lay the typical quality of the Bengal Renaissance – the conglomeration of the past and the present, of ancient India and the modern West. Sometimes, he argued like a lawyer, coming step by step, to the desired conclusion: 58

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Q – Is anyone, on sufficient grounds, opposed to this worship? A – To this worship no one can be opposed on sufficient grounds; for, as we all worship the Supreme Being, adoring him as the Author and Governor of the Universe, it is impossible for any one to object to such worship; because each person considers the object whom he worships as the Author and Governor of the universe; therefore in accordance with his own faith, he must acknowledge that this worship is his own. In the same manner, they, who consider Time or Nature, or any other Object, as the Governor of the universe, even they cannot be opposed to this worship, as bearing in mind the Author and Governor of the universe. (136) The passage may be regarded as a defence of Rammohan’s religious cult, expressed in the formation of the Brahmo Samaj. Rammohan here conceived an idea of a universal religion that does not exclude the atheists, as Rammohan included those who consider Time or Nature (rather than God) as the governor of universe. Thus he achieved the samanway of diverse cultural and religious discourse. The impression that exudes from Rammohan’s text on religious instructions is that of a scientific temperament fitted into a religious matter. Therefore, Rammohan’s text presented in the English language a new modern Indian discourse. Like Rammohan Roy, Keshub Sen often fused the scientific discourse with the religious one. In his lecture That Marvellous Mystery– The Trinity he divided human history into two halves, the perihelion and the aphelion: In the dark age of aphelion conjectures we doubt and dream and despond, and Divinity is at best but an unknown and absent, though admitted something. But in the golden age of perihelion faith the unclouded soul hails the Unknowable as its Father and Friend, and holds him in sweet embrace as one near and dear. Gentlemen, through one such favoured period, is India passing at the present moment. (Lectures in India, 460) In another lecture, Am I an Inspired Prophet?, he argued in favour of scientific attitude instead of blind faith in religious matters: I accept no truth unless it be such as can be demonstrated. Thus I am a positivist in spirit, though I am opposed to positivism. I am fond of demonstration. Religion must have as strong and sound a basis of evidence as Euclid and mathematics; otherwise it cannot be acceptable. It must prove that my God is here, and that He speaks to me. (Lectures in India, 341) 59

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Rammohan and Keshub Sen were successful in authoring a modernity which was nonetheless Indian. Particularly Rammohan’s English writings appropriated Indian logical and philosophical discourses as well as Western scientific discourse. Since the English language was used as a means of expressing that modernity, the language got intertwined with Indian history and with the project of structuring a national identity. Although Universal Religion does not provide an alternative to Standard English, it is significant that the Standard English language was accurately acquired by Rammohan. This accuracy of Rammohan and his generation set the benchmark which could resist the basilectal or mesolectal varieties of the English language to be accepted among the Indian intelligentsia. Simultaneously, the translations of the conferences on widow-burning provided some clear ways of ‘Indianization’ of the English language, which indicated that a dialect distinct from Standard British English might come into being. The use of the Indian logical structures, the loanwords, the code-switch in the second conference, the influence of colloquial Bangla in the second conference and reference to cultural details, like ‘Sankalpa’, give an Indian identity to his English writings. From a different perspective posited by Peter Barry, Rammohan belonged to the age of ‘adopt’, which would be followed by ‘adapt’ and ‘adept’.4 Hence Rammohan prepared a solid platform for the subsequent generation of writers to adapt the language for local and national requirements. Although Rammohan belonged to the initial stage of ‘Indianization’, his English signalled the possibilities of ‘inscribing’ an Indian identity in Indian writing in English. Michael Madhusudan Dutt was a genius who adopted the best elements of Western culture with unforeseen vehemence and zeal. When he was composing his wonderful epic Meghnadbadh Kabya he had in his bones Milton, Shakespeare, the Romantics, Homer, Virgil, Tasso, and Petrarch, as well as Kalidas, the great Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, Bharatchandra, and Krittibas. From one of his letters written on 18 August 1849, from Madras, where he taught at a school, we come to know of his immense thirst for literary knowledge: ‘Here is my routine: 6–8 Hebrew, 8–12 School, 12–2 Greek, 2–5 Telegu and Sanskrit, 5–7 Latin, 7–10 English. Am I not preparing for the great object of embellishing the tongue of my fathers?’ (78).5 Even when he was immersed in poverty in France he was still not detached from the study of literature. He wrote to Vidyasgar on 11 July 1864, I hope to be a capital sort of European scholar before I leave Europe, I am getting on well with French and Italian. I must commence German soon. Spanish and Portuguese will not be difficult after Latin, French and Italian. Tasso is really the Kalidas of Europe. I wrote a long letter in Italian to Satyendra [Nath Tagore] the other day, but he has replied in English. I wonder why. I know he did a little Italian last year. (210) 60

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Michael’s letters in English show how English became the language of unofficial communication for a few Indians in the nineteenth century. He corresponded in English with all who knew the language. Even when he was composing his finest works in Bangla, English was the language for communicating with his friends, and even when he was starving and almost begging for money from Vidyasagar in his letters he did so in English. He never renounced the English language at any stage of his life. At the same time he was mentally rooted in Bengal. He dreamt of the ‘Albion’s distant shore’6 from his adolescence. Yet before setting off for England he missed his native land, which he addressed as mother in his famous Bangla poem Bangabhumir Proti.7 The subject matter of his literary works is drawn from Indian epic, history, and myth. He is the embodiment of the Bengal Renaissance in the nineteenth century. His correspondence in English was a matter of free choice rather than colonial coercive control. He adopted the language as his own as he had a profound admiration for Western culture. The poet of Captive Ladie tried to adopt the style and diction of Byron and Milton, but Michael the letter-writer felt free to cross colonial boundaries. His letters are interesting not only for the poet’s colourful personality but also for their use of the English language. Letter-writing, among friends, is an area where one can feel free to cross the boundaries of formal language. It is interesting that once he outstepped the boundaries of Standard English he veered towards Indianisms. Michael’s English, as far as his letters of his college days are concerned, suffered from a few typical marks of Indian usage of English, such as initialism. The principal of Hindu College, David Lester Richardson, is repeatedly referred to as ‘D.L.R.’ (20, 28, & 37) and his friend Banku Bihari Dutt as ‘B.B.D.’ (23 & 24). Other such initials are O.C. for Old Church (39), H.C. for Hindu College (31), M.I. for Mechanic’s Institute (30 & 31), and so forth. Indian names, in those times, were given an English accent when written in English. Michael’s letters bear that trait, as the following bear evidence: ‘Casidoss’ (63) for the Bengali poet Kashi Das, ‘Bysac’ (68), ‘Bysack’ (71) for Basak, ‘Ramtanoo Lahiree’ (68), and ‘Soroop’ (69). He spelt Krishnakumary as Kissen Kumary (143) and also Kissen Cumari (146), and Jagat Singh, a character in Krishnakumary, becomes Juggut Sing (148). In another letter Banku, in a joking spirit, becomes Banquo (75). Indian words were spelt with an English accent, such as ‘bajra’, meaning a ‘large boat’, was spelt as ‘budgerow’ (17) and ‘gari’, meaning a ‘carriage’, becomes ‘gharry’ in one of his letters to Gour Das Basak: ‘I shall be there to meet you and bring you home in my gharry’ (163). In another letter written to Gour Das he writes of The Captive Ladie in these terms: ‘Pray tell Bhoodeb that when he gets my Poem, he will be surprised at my knowledge of Hindu Antiquities, for it is a thorough Indian work, full of Rishis-Calis- Lutchmee-Camas – Rudras and all the Devils incarnate’ (67). But gradually Michael came out of this practice to some extent and spelled ‘Meghanad’ (164 & 166), referring to his 61

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epic poem, ‘Droupadi’ and ‘Arjuna’ (177), the characters in Mahabharata, and Tilottama (153 & 166), a poem, in accordance with the Bengali and Sanskrit accent. In Michael’s letters we thus find a growing confidence and ease in incorporating Indian words along with their accentuations. Michael wrote his letters in fluent and up-to-date English. It is a mark of his admiration for the language. Later it sticks to him as a habit. He mastered the language and used the English idiom with skill and imaginative power. Inviting impartial criticism on his poem Tilottama from his friend Raj Narayan Basu, he writes, ‘If you should review the work, pray, don’t spare me because I am your friend. Pitch into me as much as you think I deserve. I am about the most docile dog that ever wagged a literary tail’ (121). Yet, he did not suppress his instincts for code-mixed expressions, which was one of the important features of Michael’s letters. On 4 July 1864 he writes to Vidyasagar, ‘You know the English proverb – “A burnt child dreads fire” – or our own “He whose mother has been eaten up by an alligator, dreads even a েঢঁ িক [dhenki]”’8 (209). While discussing his dramas in his letters written to Keshab Chandra Ganguly or while discussing poetry in the letters written to Raj Narayan Basu, Michael habitually used technical literary terms, such as ‘anupras’ (115), ‘yamak’ (115), ‘payar’ (131), ‘tri-padi’ (131), ‘vira-ras’ (118), and ‘viraha’ (119), or the name of a character, such as ‘Madanika’ (141) or ‘Jagat Singh’ (139), in the Bengali script. Interestingly, in his college days, in his letters written to Gour Das Basak, code-switch was seldom used, although he used a lot of native words in the English script, such as ‘Tamasha’ (18), ‘Poojah’ (24), ‘Jattra’ (24), and ‘palkee’ (38). While staying in Chennai (then Madras), where he used to teach in a school, he described himself in a colloquial Bengali phrase used to refer (in a derogatory sense) to the Indians of Portuguese origin as well as to Anglicized babus of the nineteenth century: ‘Did you ever see me in my European clothes? I make a passable Tash feringee’ (65). Michael’s habit of code-switching and codemixing increased with time. In an undated letter in the heyday of his literary activities in Kolkata, then called Calcutta, he wrote to Keshab Kumar Gangooly that he was thinking of writing a play (which was eventually his third play, Krishnakumari) in quick speed: ‘If you all like the plot, I promise you the play in six weeks, if not earlier. But I must be met half-way. ধীমা েততালা [Dheema Tetala] is not the তাল [taal] for me’ (136). In Indian music there are names of different ‘taals’ or rhythms. ‘Dheema tetala’ is a slow rhythm. Michael wanted to imply that he was suited to speed rather than to slow motion. He often quoted Bengali poems of his own and other poets in his letters in the Bengali script. In the nineteenth century, code-mixes and code-switches were not appraised, although it was thought to be in fashion; English-educated men indulged in code-mixes and code-switches as ways of boasting their acquired knowledge of the English language and ‘modernity’. This strange situation is manifested in Tagore’s Hasyakoutuk (1887), which he classified as 62

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‘Heyali-natya’, understandably the Bangla term used by Tagore for ‘farce’. In this farce, the hybridized language of Baikuntha and his son Khagesh becomes an object of satirical laughter: খেগশ ।হাঃ হাঃ হাঃ বাবা has put the matter very well indeed।আিম েদেখিছ বাবা েযমন clearly and with great precision একটা proposition lay down করেত পােরন, এমন there are few men who – (Hasyakoutuk, 255)9 Khagesh is basically praising his father’s ‘precision’ and clarity of thought acquired through Western education. He is stopped in the middle of the sentence by his father who is embarrassed to hear his son praise his intellect, although the father does not feel embarrassed to mention smoking in front of his son (255). In Bengali society, smoking before parents (or anyone elder), or allowing the young to smoke is a violation of a social taboo and is considered a sign of moral decadence due to Westernization. Hence while the father and son boast about their Westernized selves they violate both linguistic and social codes of conduct. This perhaps indicates that in the late nineteenth century, speaking in code-mixed language and indulging in code-switches in public were not praiseworthy. Hence the code-mix or codeswitch Michael used in his letters could not be used in the formal domain of writing except in a farcical discourse used by his successor Tagore. Therefore the letters show an aspect of Michael’s identity as a ‘westernized’ Indian which one does not find in his serious works. Moreover, Michael’s language in his letters was poles apart from the language used by pseudo-intellectuals like Khagesh and Baikuntha, who make a desperate attempt to Anglicize their mother tongue through fragments of English. Michael indulged in code-mixing or code-switching for putting in his letters a cultural detail (like ‘dheema tetala’) which had no parallel in English life and language. His use of translation of idiomatic expressions from his mother tongue shows a skilful use of the English language aiming to depict his Bengali self in the English language rather than to flaunt the knowledge of English and pose as intellectuals as Tagore’s characters do. Michael’s use of Indian words and loan shifts also increased with time in his letters, which suggests a greater ease and confidence in the use of language. The awe for the language which may have occupied his mind in his early years gave way to a freedom and ease. In his letters since late 1840s, we see a few expressions which have become a part of English in India, like ‘Durga-Puja Holidays’ (153), ‘pucca’ (118), ‘half-mad’ (62), and ‘avatar’ (137). The word ‘avatar’ is now being used beyond India. I find that the word is recognized by the Microsoft word processor Word 2007 and a film, a big-budget production from Hollywood, directed by James Cameron is named James Cameron’s Avatar. The Hindi suffix ‘wallah’, extremely common in Indian English now, has an entry in the twelfth edition of the Concise 63

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Oxford English Dictionary. Michael Madhusudan used the suffix in coining the hybrid word ‘Namby-Pamby-Wallahs’ (115) to describe the ‘imitators of Bharat Chunder’ (115) in contemporary Bangla literature and the word ‘operawallahs’ (303) to refer to theatre groups. Understandably, in Michael Madhusudan’s time, these expressions were not in usage in formal English but in casual communication, like friendly letters. Michael used a few loanwords which have not yet gained very wide currency in Indian English, such as ‘kancha’ (173), meaning ‘unripe’ and ‘Dalbhat’ (300), meaning ‘rice and lentils’. In the latter stage of his life, when Michael was in Europe writing from Versailles in France, we see bolder use of Indianisms. There is an example of what Kachru termed ‘transfer of context’ (Indianization, 101) in the letter written to Manmohan Ghosh on 8 January 1863, as Michael observed a purely Indian custom in the letter. By ‘transfer of context’, Kachru meant reference to ‘the caste system of India, social and religious taboos, notions of superiority and inferiority, and the like’ (101). It is still a practice of all Indians to touch the feet of elders as a way of receiving blessings from them. In Bengal, it is called ‘pranaam’. Even in telecommunication by telephones and e-mail this custom is observed. Michael had a rupture with his parents when he converted to Christianity. However, he was respectful to Manmohan Ghosh’s father, who was a friend of his own father. This is evident in many of his letters. On 8 January 1863 he wrote to Manmohan Ghosh, ‘Send my respects to your venerable father’ (199). This is a way of observing the custom of ‘pranaam’ in letters. In Europe Michael – the fact is well known – fell in deep financial problems. The men from whom he was supposed to get money betrayed him and he asked for help from Vidyasagar. On 18 June 1864 he, in a frustrated mood, wrote, Have I some Zamindary here, some situation that gives an income? But a truce to all complaints; you must step forward and save me from the grave which these people have nearly finished digging for me! . . . Alas, my dear friend, I cannot possibly expect to hear from you before the middle or end of August next, even if you do not let grass grow under your feet after receiving my letters, and go to work with all the energy you possess. (206–207) Such expressions could have been the dialogues of a novel written by Mulk Raj Anand or R.K. Narayan. ‘Zamindar’ is a native word which means a feudal lord and ‘Zamindary’ is feudal lordship. Here we have two examples of lexis-bound translation of Bangla idioms. The rhetorical question asked by Michael is a common way in Bengali to imply ‘since I do not have a 64

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zamindary I do not have easy cash’. ‘To let grass grow under one’s feet’, in Bengali, means not to use one’s feet – that is, to be lazy. In another letter dated 11 July 1864 written to Vidyasagar, Michael expressed his anxiety over people who may dissuade Vidyasagar from helping him: ‘Many men will say many things to you, but you must not listen to them’ (210). The sentence is a lexis-bound translation of a common Bengali expression. In many Indian languages not being able to show one’s face implies a very shameful situation for one. Hence, when in another letter dated 18 December 1864 Michael expresses his deep resolution that ‘I shall never again show my face in India if I cannot accomplish my object [of becoming a barrister]’ (234), he was translating a common Indian expression in English. Yet, in the same letter Michael wrote in Bengali a few lines but resumed in English again, saying, ‘If I could write Bengali like you, I sh’d continue in that language, but want of practice prevents my doing so’. It is ironical that the great poet of Meghnadbadh Kavya said this. On the other hand, it is highly relevant that a multilingual person such as Michael Madhusudan found Indianized English the most suitable dialect for personal correspondence. Indianized English was also used by Kehub Sen while he wrote his diary entries, which I am going to discuss in this chapter. Michael did not write any literary work in English in the latter part of his life when his use of English bore the mark of his mother tongue. Perhaps, Michael could not imagine that Indianized English could be used to write a drama or a poem. Evidently, Michael had no agenda of writing back to the empire, but in his letters he constructed through the use of Indianisms a selfhood which he shared with his Bengali friends and well-wishers. It is the Bengali identity which he shared with Vidyasgar when he used those Indian expressions discussed earlier. According to Kirkpatrick, a dialect must fulfil three functions: a means of communication, a marker of identity, and a way of expressing culture (Kirkpatrick, 10). For Michael asking for financial assistance from a fellow Bengali, sharing the Bengali identity with Vidyasagar was spontaneous as well as crucial. It is my contention that while discussing ‘Indianization’ of the English language, these Indianized expressions among people of high English proficiency – like Michael Madhusudan – must be taken on board along with the mesolectal English of babus. Like Michael’s letters, Keshub Sen’s diary entries provide another example of Indianized expressions in the acrolect. Keshub Chunder Sen (1838–1884) lectured in English in India and abroad and set in motion a religious regeneration which was a crucial factor in the emergence of Indian nationalism. In the words of Surendranath Banerjee, ‘He was a great organizer, a born leader of men with a penetrating insight into human nature. He had a charming personality’ (qtd in Navavidhan Publications, ‘Publisher’s Note’, iii). Keshub was the first Indian in modern times, as claimed in the publisher’s note in the book Lectures in India, to contemplate All-India institutions. To name a few, he started the Indian Mirror in 1861, whose views were of great national importance. In 1864 he toured round India 65

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to unite different provinces into one common brotherhood of sentiment and action. In 1866 he founded the Bharatvarshiya Brahmo Samaj, pulled down the caste system, published the Sloka Samgraha, a compilation of theistic texts from the scriptures of all the religions honoured in India, and evolved a comprehensive form of Divine Worship. In his great socio-religious mission English proved to be a link language as he delivered many of his lectures in English. He became so famous that when he went to England he was given a grand welcome wherever he went. ‘Queen Victoria received him in private audience and he was introduced to several celebrities and influential people including Gladstone, Dean Stanley, Max Muller, John Stuart Mill’ (Sharma, 1). Keshub’s lectures have earned him a place in the history of Indian writing in English. But he could find his place in the same through his diary entries as well. In the twentieth century we have famous diary writers in India, like Mahadev Desai, Shahid Bhagat Singh, and Jay Prakash Narayan. But in the nineteenth century in India, Keshub Sen is perhaps the first diarist in Indian writing in English; Scrapbook, Govardhanram Tripathi’s diary entries, was written in the last decade of the nineteenth century, between 1894 and 1904. In this chapter I have discussed texts of three diverse registers. Rammohan’s texts are highly formal writings, and Madhusudan’s friendly letters were informal; but diary entries are supposed to be the most informal as in them one communicates one’s thoughts and feelings to a void space called a diary. Hence the language too is understandably supposed to be the uninhibited transliteration of the writer’s thoughts. Keshub’s preferring to write his diary entries in English speaks volumes about the extent to which the English language had been adopted by Keshub Sen and his like in the nineteenth century. We see that Keshub, along with Rammohan and Michael Madhusudan, was free from any kind of colonial guilt while using English. For all three writers discussed in this chapter, English and the culture it represented were means of regenerating the Indian society, which I have discussed at the very outset of this chapter. Keshub Sen was intensely drawn to Christianity, although he was rooted in the Brahmo faith. Keshub’s speeches are subsumed in the influence of the King James Version of the Bible, and the description of his mystic experiences also echoes the Bible. Biblical words like ‘unto’ and ‘verily’ comprise the common vocabulary of Sen. In his lecture Am I an Inspired Prophet? he says that the course of his life was finally decided by mystic experiences of meeting with John the Baptist, Jesus, and Saint Paul: A wild-looking man, John the Baptist, was seen going about – not exactly in the midst of the gloom of the night, but in the morning twilight – in the wilderness of India, saying, “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” I felt he was speaking to me as I am speaking to you here. (Sen, K.C., Lectures, 333) 66

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In the Bible these are actually the words of Jesus: ‘Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ (Matthew 4: 17). In his diary entries too, the biblical tone is present: ‘May the Lord have mercy on those whom I leave behind, and keep them ever in the path of faith and purity!’ (Keshub, 1).10 The unique quality of his diary entries is not this characteristic biblical note but the presence of a secular texture comprising the anecdotes of the diverse incidents of his journey to England and his brief stay in the country. Consequently, Keshub as a Bengali gentleman is revealed in the diary. Interestingly, he used quite a few Bangla words along with their context of usage, which is extremely rare in his speeches. On 18 February 1870, he wrote of his wonder at his taking five meals a day and then he thought that they – he and his fellow passengers – ‘do not eat more than we used to do at home’. He continued thus: ‘We only go to the table oftener, and the outward arrangements are grander. Civilization does not satisfy our belly so much as it makes outward dhoom dham’ (3). The expression dhoom dham, meaning ‘extravaganza’, is used in Hindustani and Bangla. Such an expression, like some of Michael Madhusudan, could have been part of a third-person narration in a novel by Rushdie. Hence the sort of Indianized English, which characterized Indian English in the twentieth century, actually existed in the nineteenth, although it was somewhat confined within the boundaries of informal domain. The interesting feature of Keshub’s use of Indian words and phrases is that the application of the Indian words and phrases is done in contexts similar to their native use. Hence some of these words and phrases bring along a particular attitude or mood. For example, he described his wonder on seeing the city of Marseilles in these words: ‘It is the first European city we pass through; I cannot help being struck with astonishment, everything is so unique, so perfectly beautiful, so perfectly bilaiti’ (25). The word ‘bilaiti’ has a one-word footnote in the text: ‘foreign’. But the Indian reader knows that the English word would not have carried the load of the attitude and perspective represented by the Hindi word.11 Similarly, his use of the word tamasha while describing a farce staged by the stewards in the ship also manifests his attitude towards the dramatic performance: ‘While enjoying the grand tamasha we almost forget that we are on board a ship!’ (10–11). The phrase ‘grand tamasha’ sounds a bit oxymoronic and shows the potential of the juxtaposition of an English adjective and a noun from an Indian language. Another innovative use of an Urdu noun with an English adjective is the phrase ‘parliamentary zenanah’ (36) in the entry of 8 April 1870. Keshub visited the House of Commons and disapproved the separated seats of ladies and gentlemen in the parliament: They have a separate place for them [the ladies] on the opposite side which is hidden from the public view by a wooden partition with small openings in it, and which is thus a parliamentary zenanah! Why this meaningless exclusion in this land of female liberty? (36) 67

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The word ‘zenanah’ evokes the entire world of the purdah system, which is juxtaposed with the Western institution of democracy. Another interesting use is the colloquial phrase ‘yar logues’ in describing a fun-loving group of Australian gentlemen: ‘They may best be compared to the yar logues of Bagbazar in Calcutta, having hardly anything to do except to “eat and drink and be merry”’ (10). On his way to England, Keshub’s ship halted at a port in South Africa. There is a colourful description of Keshub’s experiences in the little town of Aden in Africa: ‘On our way back [from the Post Office] we halt near the bazaar, and – is it not strange? – we purchase jilapi and gaja (Bengali sweetmeats) and betelnuts! Aden is a small interesting town’ (13). Keshub’s use of the Indian words demonstrates the necessity of their use if an Indian prefers to write of quotidian realities of the life of an Indian in English. Simultaneously, Keshub’s hybridized language reveals a hybridized self which was more or less confined to the pages of the diary and which was suppressed below his dignified self as a religious reformist. The two selves could not have been contradictory, if not complementary, because the confluence and the urge to appropriate the cultural influences of the East and the West were present in both the selves. What is important for my study is the conclusion – when I compare the ‘Indianization’ in Michael Madhusudan’s letters and in Sen’s diary entries with the ‘Indianization’ in Rammohan’s writings (belonging to the formal ‘public’ domain) –that ‘Indianization’ of the English language was operative at two stratas: the strata of intellectual consciousness in the formal and public domain of existence and the strata of daily life of problems and trivialities. Today, when the Indianized language of diary entries and personal letters of the nineteenth century has found and consolidated its place in novels and short stories, one may look forward to the future when such ‘Indianized’ language will find its place in the formal domain throughout India. Another conclusion which may be derived now is the fact that the hybridity of language in daily life was related with the fusion of cultures in the intellectual consciousness. Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Keshub Sen may be regarded as two representatives of that consciousness. Their spontaneous use of loanwords, translation from mother tongue, and so forth can help us to understand that ‘Indianization’ of the English language was used in their letters and was licensed by the intellectual consciousness. Today, when the ‘Indianization’ of the English language is located in the postmodern context of multiculturalism and hybridity, the phenomenon of ‘Indianization’ in the nineteenth century can help us to view the continuity of ‘Indianization’ in Indians’ use of the English language from a clearer perspective. This chapter, I think, has amply proved that ‘Indianization’ of the English language existed in the nineteenth century and that it was interrelated with the context of the Bengal Renaissance. With the rise of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, English was destined to be more and more

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Indianized. One of the main themes dealt with in the next three chapters is the relation between Indian identity and the English language.

Notes 1 For a detailed analysis of Butler English, see Priya Hosali’s Nuances of English in India: What the Butler Really Said, published in 1997. 2 There are examples of translation of Indian colloquial expressions in every chapter of this book. 3 Srijit Mukherjee’s film Jaatiswar documented the folk musical tradition of scholastic debate in Bengal (known as tarjaa, which often succumbed to base raillery) in the early nineteenth century, depicting Hensman Anthony, popularly known as ‘Antony Feringhee’, as the central figure of the tradition. 4 According to Barry, ‘[A]ll postcolonial literatures, it might be said, seem to make this transition’ – that is, from adopt to adept (196). 5 All extracts of Michael Madhusudan’s letters are taken from The Heart of a Rebel Poet: Letters of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, edited by Ghulam Murshid, OUP, 2004. 6 The phrase is taken from one of Michael’s poems, the first few lines of which are as follows: I sigh for Albion’s distant shore Its valleys green, its mountain high; Tho’ friends, relations, I have none In that far clime, yet, oh! I sigh To cross the vast Atlantic wave For glory, or a nameless grave! (Qtd in Murshid, ‘Young Love and the Crisis of Identity’, 6) 7 I have attempted to translate the first stanza of the poem: Remember me Ma; I pray at your feet. To pursue my dream if happens the worst, May your mind bloom still with mem’ries Madhu*. If life abroad, by fate, drops like a star From this corporeal sky, I repent not. Whoever is immortal? All born must die, The river of life, alas, flows on and on! But I dare death’s call, if remembers Ma, Ev’n a fly survives if falls in amrit#. Blessed is he who is forgotten not. What virtue have I that I may beg to be Immortal, O mother of green earth? Yet if you are kind, deem talent not lapses, If you would boon your servant immortal, Let me bloom in the pool of your mind as A honeyed lotus in autumn or spring. * ‘Madhu’ in Bangla means honey. It is also the name of the poet. # ‘Amrit’ in Bangla is divine mythical nectar by drinking which the gods became immortal.

8 The Bengali word ‘dhenki’ means a husking device. 9 An English translation of the extract might be as follows:

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Khagesh: Huh huh huh. Baba has put the matter very well indeed. There are few men who can lay down a proposition clearly and with great precision as my father does . . . 10 All quotations of Keshub Sen’s diary entries are taken from Keshub Chunder Sen in England: Diary, Sermons, Epistles, Navavidhan Publications, 1938. 11 Today, north Indians pronounce the word as wilayti and Bengalis as biliti.

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The Indian English novel of the nineteenth century made a significant contribution in the ‘Indianization’ of the English language, although its role has not been recognized so far. This chapter aims at assessing that contribution with reference to four novels. That English was the first choice for creative writing for a host of Indian writers, like Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Lal Behari Day, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Romesh Chunder Dutt, speaks volumes about the degree of proficiency acquired in English by the English-educated generation of the latter half of nineteenth-century Indian society, especially the Bengalis. It often resulted in the common phenomenon of starting in English and returning to the vernacular. Since language is almost universally related with national identity, the question arises of whether this return to the vernacular was brought about – with the rise of nationalism – by a remapping of identity. Bankimchandra and Romesh Chunder Dutt belonged to this category. Michael Madhusudan’s return, one may argue, was brought about more by his failure in English verse than by a problem of identity, and that was why he went to Europe to become a ‘barrister’ at a time when he was the brightest star in Bengal’s literary circle. However, Krupabai Satthianadhan, hailing from Maharashtra, then the Bombay Presidency, seemed to have reconciled herself with the English language; as a creative writer in English she showed no sign of being in doubt regarding her use of ‘Indianization’ of the English language. Unfortunately she died an untimely death, leaving only two novels to her credit. The attempts of writers like Bankimchandra and Satthianadhan laid the foundation of the Indian English novel; moreover, the presence of ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the Indian English novel can be detected in these early ventures. Ever since its birth the Indian English novel has continued to grow and simultaneously it has shown a tendency to deviate from Standard English. Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Krupabai Satthianadhan are representatives of this tendency in the mid-nineteenth and late nineteenth centuries, respectively. Lal Behari Day, by comparison, may be regarded as a foil to these two writers because Indianisms are used in spite of Day’s attempts to make his characters speak like English ladies and 71

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gentlemen. But before we venture to discuss their work, it is worthwhile to review the sociocultural milieu in which English was chosen as the language for writing poems and fiction. The nineteenth century was an age of contradictions. It witnessed the economic drain,1 a revolt and the heavy financial burden of the revolt imposed on its shoulders,2 a military rule, and profound taxations on the poor.3 Yet she was not crushed down. A wave of consciousness swept the Indian land mass, producing an unprecedented number of enlightened men and women who shaped the destiny of modern India. Indian nationalism, like the mythic amrit, was churned out of the depths of consciousness by a synthesis of Western materialism and Indian spiritualism. It is relevant for us because the history of Indian nationalism is intertwined with the history of English in India. The conflict and confluence of cultures, which brought about the ‘Renaissance’, encouraged among the leading artists and thinkers of the time a spirited analysis of both ‘East’ and ‘West’. The Bengal Renaissance in the nineteenth century brought new ideas and social upheavals and opened new roads for the English language in India. Iswarchandra Vidyasagar led the movement successfully in favour of widow remarriage, and Ramkrishna Paramhansa and his learned followers and admirers, some of whom carried the legacy of Rammohan, practised and preached the oneness of all religions before it could be preached abroad in the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. In India Vivekananda aimed to preach the highest ideals of the East and the West. In the words of Margaret Noble (who is famous as Sister Nivedita), ‘Long ago he had defined the Mission of the Order of Ramkrishna as that of realizing and exchanging the highest ideals of the East and of the West’ (Noble, 37). An urge to rejuvenate Indian Vedic philosophy, before the rise of Vivekananda, can be witnessed since the publication of Rammohan’s translations of ancient Indian texts; it is perceived in the Bangla works of Bhudev Mukhopadhyay and in the lectures of J.R. Ballantyne on Nyaya-Vaisesika (Bayly, Empire, 224–225). Speeches of Pandita Ramabai, condemning the evil practices of child marriage and the suppression of widows, ‘created a great sensation in Calcutta’ and earned for her the title of ‘Saraswati’ (Sengupta, P., 158). According to Poonam Trivedi, So overwhelmed were the Indians by the psychological realism of [the] eighteenth-century type of English theatre that the first Bengali private theatre was built on the western proscenium model and opened in 1831 with scenes in English from Julius Caesar and an English translation of a Sanskrit play Uttararamacharitamby Bhavabhuti. (14–15) The plays of Shakespeare, whom the Bengalis of the nineteenth century looked upon as ‘the epitome, test, and symbol of literary culture’ (Chaudhuri, 72

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N.C., Autobiography, 225), were translated and adapted for an eager audience. Michael Madhusudan’s Meghnadbadh Kavya derived its inspiration from Milton and Homer; the subject matter was a reversal of Ramayana, where Meghnad and Ravana, the archetypal Indian villains, were made antiheroes, much in the shadow of Milton’s Satan. Nirad C. Chaudhuri observed that ‘Ravana was to him another Priam, Ravana’s son Meghnad a second Hector, and Ravana’s city, which to us was the citadel of Evil, was to Dutt a second Holy Troy’ (Autobiography, 223). Derozio, the young professor of Hindu College, in the words of Pearychand Mitra, ‘used to impress upon them (his pupils) the sacred duty of thinking for themselves’ (qtd in Majumdar, R.C., Renascent, 52–53). Majumdar also gives an anecdote of an opportunist Indian bookseller who black-marketed one hundred copies of Paine’s Age of Reason at Rs 5 per copy, although the correct price was one rupee (53–54). Shipments of books from Europe landed on the Indian shores. In the preceding chapter, I have discussed that it was more through books than persons that Indians in the nineteenth century were introduced to the West. According to Bayly, official and missionary activities ‘swelled the huge number of books from Britain to India, which amounted in 1839 to 1,469 cwt per annum’ (Empire, 216). Bayly further records that a ‘petty raja in the Banaras region had accumulated large collections of books by the 1830s. He could not read English himself, but showed off his collection to a passing missionary as token of his broad-mindedness’ (Empire, 216). An anonymous article of The Calcutta Review expressed gratitude for enabling the British expatriates to keep in touch with European culture: ‘Thanks to our splendid steamships . . . every month brings to our shores a fresh supply of European literature, scarcely six weeks old’ (qtd in Mukherjee, Perishable Empire, 4–5). These gradually filtrated into the houses of English-educated Indians. In the words of Bayly, ‘The concerns of Bentinck and his generation – public instruction, the diffusion of European science, a free press and easy postal communication – all bore the hallmarks of the movement for useful knowledge’ (216). There was, we see, an immense thirst for knowledge of Western civilization, and the knowledge of English was indispensable to quench this thirst. It had its extremes as well. The followers of Derozio are said to use bombastic English. Lal Behari Day, in his preface to Govinda Samanta (1874), says, ‘The use of English words two or three feet long is now the reigning fashion in Calcutta. Young Bengal is a literary Bombastes Furioso; and Young Bengalese is Johnsonese run mad’ (4). Western education merged with the life and culture of the elite and the educated class, and it had its impact upon the masses as well through vernacular literatures, which got a new impetus owing to the Western influence. But the craze for the English language and literature was not paralleled by a similar passion for Christian religion, although proselytization, as history tells us, was the main object of the missionaries. Resentments against Christian conversion were organized before 1857. Bayly observed that in ‘the later 73

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1840s anti-Christian meetings in Calcutta brought together Gosains, Tantrists, Vedantists, orthodox as well as heterodox’ (Empire, 240). In one such meeting, led by Radhakanta Deb, ‘a great patron of the Dharma Sabha’, ‘a social boycott of those consorting with missionaries was suggested’ (Bayly, Empire 240). These incidents were ‘influential as far up-river as Allahabad’ (Bayly, Empire, 240). An interesting account of the teaching of the Bible in missionary schools is found in Samuel Satthianadhan’s Missionary Work in India: From a Native Christian Point of View, published in 1889: We the students were constantly reminded by the teacher that the study of the Bible would be of great help to us in the study of English literature. We were given ample philological notes. Parallel passages from well-known English authors were cited; but very seldom was there any attempt made to lead the students to a comprehension of divine truths. No appeals were made to the heart. (2–3) Satthianadhan was himself a Christian convert and was an ardent advocate of Christianity, and therefore his frustration was all the more acute on beholding that ‘some of the most distinguished natives of India are those who have been carefully instructed in missionary institutions, and have used their education and training to secure higher position and greater influence, with which they now the better withstand Christianity’ (2–3). It was those who did not belong to the ‘higher position’ who would often be converted. The Indians, according to Lawrence James, feared that ‘Christianity might be imposed upon the Indian people’ (qtd in Sanne, 6). Horace Hayman Wilson documented the formation of ‘Committees of the Bible Society and of the Society for the propagation of the Gospel’ in each of the presidencies (407); moreover, under the superintendence of the Baptist Mission of Serampore, ‘either the whole or considerable portion of the Scriptures had been printed and circulated in twenty languages spoken in India’ (407). Wilson narrated that the expense of huge sums on proselytization did not bring about the conversion of native Indians as expected: ‘Few genuine converts were made, and of them fewer still were persons of consideration or rank’ (407). According to Samuel Satthianadhan, ‘Christianity in India has proved successful only among the very lowest classes of Indian society’ and ‘a careful survey shows that only one of six converts belonged to the upper caste’ (2–3). It is thus a revelation that while the majority of the Hindu upper class enjoyed the benefits of English education a section of the lowest strata of the society was thrust towards the religion of the master class by the slings of casteism and superstition. Hence English education brought more a cultural conversion rather than a religious conversion. In the first chapter I argued that English education has ever been a ticket to the job market in Indian society. Probal Dasgupta argued that English in 74

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the colonial era was a ticket to elitism; in the postcolonial era it is a ticket to the job market (79). But history shows that it has been a ticket to the job market since the nineteenth century itself. After Macaulay’s Minute of 1835 the cause of English education was further advanced by the regulation introduced by the first Lord Hardinge that all public services were to be filled by a competitive examination held by the Council of Education (the Successor of the Committee of Public Instruction), ‘preferences being given to the knowledge of English’ (Majumdar, Raychaudhuri, & Dutta, 812). W. H. Sleeman, a major general of the East India Company in the early decades of the nineteenth century, wrote of his experiences in India for his sister and gave a valuable social history of pre-1857 India and its interface with the rule of the Company. He highlighted the distinguishing features of the administration in these words: The circumstances which, in the estimation of the people, distinguish the British from all other rulers in India, and make it grow more and more upon their affections, are these: The security which public servants enjoy in the tenure of their office; the prospect they have of advancement by the gradation of rank; the regularity and regular scale of their pay; and the provision for old age, when they have discharged the duties entrusted to them ably and faithfully. (Sleeman, 645) In Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala, the old Shastri of Sivagunga, Kamala’s father-in-law, sends his only son Ganesh to an English school ‘so much against his will’. Satthianadhan often makes the third-person narrator intrude into the fiction and comment on the contemporary society: But in these days Sanskrit learning is not appreciated, and those old days have gone when young men of high descent congregated in groves and temples . . . The groves are no more the resort of the wise and the good. Sanskrit learning is despised and English learning is all in all, for it pays best. (53) The standard of education introduced by Western education was not of a high standard, although it was highly desirable. Rabindranath Tagore, who was born in 1861, reminisces in his famous lecture ‘Crisis of Civilization’: In those days the type of learning that was served out to us was neither plentiful nor diverse, nor was the spirit of scientific enquiry very much in evidence. Thus their scope being strictly limited, the educated of those days had recourse to English language and literature. Their days and nights were eloquent with the stately declamations 75

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of Burke, with Macaulay’s long-rolling sentences, discussions centred upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all upon the large-hearted liberalism of the nineteenth-century English politics. (English Writings, vol. III, 118) Tagore, it seems, did not have a high opinion of the education prevalent during his childhood, but did not fail to notice the enthusiasm for English literature. Gauri Viswanathan observed the darker side of English education more thoroughly. James Johnstone, as quoted by Viswanathan, observed, In Europe the higher education is part of the equipment for the life of a gentleman, as well as a qualification for professional employment. To the Indian, the European culture is almost exclusively a preparation for professional and still more for official life, and disappointed by these, this education has only created wants and raised expectations which leave the unexpected aspirants a discontented and dangerous man. (Viswanathan, 163) She also remarked that the study of English literature ‘had merely succeeded in creating a class of Babus’ (159). But it was an English-educated Bengali babu – Bankimchandra Chatterjee belonged to the first batch of graduates of the newly founded Calcutta University – who gave the mantra of patriotism, ‘Vande Mataram’, to the entire nation. In the nineteenth century, English learning was representative of liberal thinking but it was not representative of colonial oppression, and that proved to be crucial behind the adoption of English. It was in the twentieth century that national education became a part of political discourse. According to Agnihotri and Khanna, both the Calcutta University Commission Report (1917–19) and the Zakir Hussain Committee Report (1938) opposed English largely under the influence of Gandhi and recommended that ‘the proper teaching of the mother tongue is the foundation of all education’ (Agnihotri & Khanna, 28). But in the preceding century, the Revolt of 1857 did not create much hindrance for English education, at least, in Kolkata and its suburbs. According to Amales Tripathi, the educated middle class had dreamt of co-operating with the new rulers in transforming India into a modern nation, and this was why it had thrown in its lot with the government rather than with the rebels. If Vidyasagar’s resignation from the post of principal of Sanskrit College, which he tendered on being discriminatingly treated by the government, ‘shook that dream, disillusionment of Madhusudan Dutt, dismissal of S.N. Banerjee and demotion of Bankimchandra Chatterjee were to shatter it’ (Tripathi, 75). Kshetra Gupta is, however, of the opinion that the job security offered by the British administration, along 76

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with pension as pointed out by Sleeman, created a servile mentality among the Bengali middle class which was not easy to overcome (47). Although the British administration brought a new concept of ‘job’, the number of jobs offered was never satisfying. From the statistical data provided by Romesh Chunder Dutt we see that only 2,813-odd Indians ‘found employment in Government services in British India in 1849. Less than a thousand of them [who found employment] held any post of honour, trust, and responsibility’ (189). The situation did not improve near the end of the century, as we find Gopal Krishna Gokhale venting the grievances of the educated mass of people over few job opportunities, as the bulk was occupied by Europeans: According to a Parliamentary return of May 1892, we have in India in the higher branches of the civil and military departments a total of 2388 officers drawing Rs. 10000 a year and upwards, of whom only sixty are Natives of India, and even these, with the exception of such as are judges, stop at a comparatively low level. (Dutt, R., 572) The racial discrimination of the government is manifested also in another statistics given by Sumit Sarkar: ‘Political decision-making and administration at higher levels were entirely the priviledge of the Europeans, who in the early 1880s manned all but 16 of the 900-odd posts of the Indian Civil Service’ (Sarkar, Modern India, 1). According to Robin J. Moore, ‘Graduates of the three universities [of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras] by 1882 accounted for some 1100 appointments to government service’ (431). According to the same author, in the same year, 1,172 students graduated from Calcutta University alone. So much for statistics; those acquainted with the life of Swami Vivekananda know the travails of young Narendranath for securing a job after graduating from Scottish Church College. Before job opportunity, social security and maintenance of law and order need to be pointed out. Sleeman gave a detailed account of the suppression of the Thugs in the nineteenth century.4 It is interesting that Bentinck, who led the social reforms of the early nineteenth century, also ‘moved against the practice of ritual murder and robbery associated with the wandering religious cult of the Thugs and supported their arch enemy William Sleeman’ (Bayly, Indian Society, 122). Bayly arrived at the following conclusion from the premise of security: The literate and monied townsmen whose security was greatly strengthened in the first generation of colonial rule found much to attract them in the rationalistic type of spiritual teaching which was already established within all the main religious traditions. It was in the context of well-developed indigenous movements of reform and practical reconstitution of religious organization that some Indians 77

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felt the influence of Christianity and Western rationalist and positivist thought. (Indian Society, 155) Hence the prospect of jobs and social security was instrumental in creating the context in which some English-educated gentlemen ventured, in the words of Partha Chatterjee (as mentioned in the first chapter), to ‘fashion a “modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western’ (6). On summarizing the foregoing facts and figures the following points may be listed: the hunger for knowledge and Western books, the economic advantage of learning English and the subsequent disillusionment, and the crucial role of Western culture behind social changes and reforms, as well as behind cultural regeneration. It is this social milieu of the nineteenth century which brought about Bankimchandra’s venture to write a novel in English. His proficiency in English could not have been the only factor. The circumstances of history have to be considered as well. Bankimchandra, as a graduate of the University of Calcutta, inherited the cultural milieu in which English was being continuously used beyond the periphery of colonial administration. English literature was used as a reference or inspiration for creative vernacular literature: the poetic and dramatic works of Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Girish Ghosh are cases in point. The English language had been used in the media since the birth of The Bengal Gazette or Hicky’s Gazette in 1780. Nineteenth-century Bengal saw more English newspapers which had a longer lease on life than Hicky’s Gazette, such as The Bengal Hurkaru and the Samachar Darpan. English was the language for debates on social reform, as both pro-reformists like Rammohan and Vidyasagar and anti-reformists like Kashinath Tarkabageesh used the English language; in the twentieth century, in Maharashtra, both Ranade and Tilak used the English language, besides Marathi, to debate on social reforms. English was the language for intellectual pursuit, as indicated by the black-marketing of Paine’s Age of Reason in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Hence cultural milieu played a crucial role in Bankimchandra’s choosing to write a novel in English. Besides, Bankimchandra as a magistrate lived with the English language as English was also the language of the court. Hence, while for Rammohan English was the language of the ruler and the gateway to modern science, for Bankimchandra, English was the language in use in official and intellectual circles. On the other hand, his switch to Bangla can be said to be overtly political, as he consciously participated in and almost single-handedly generated a nationalist discourse as a Bangla novelist and writer. But that can be a subject for a separate work of research. Bankimchandra opened new vistas in Indian literature by writing the first novel in India, Rajmohan’s Wife. It was published serially in a weekly magazine called Indian Field in the year 1864. Unfortunately the novel was lost until it was rediscovered by Brajendranath Banerji except the first 78

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three chapters, which were retranslated back from Bankim’s own unfinished Bangla translation of the novel. The work was published in the form of a book for the first time in the year 1935, coincidentally the year that Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan both entered the arena of Indian literature, with Untouchable and Swami and Friends, respectively, followed by Raja Rao’s Kanthapura three years later, in 1938. Meenakshi Mukherjee and Makarand Paranjape have written extensively on Bankim’s English novel. While Mukherjee (2000) sees it as a potential site for discussing crucial issues about language, culture, colonization, and representation, Paranjape (2013) sees the novel as an allegory of the future Indian society. Although Paranjape’s arguments are based on analysis of theme and historical context, the linguistic aspect has not been sufficiently discussed, on which I would like to focus in my discussion. The critics previous to these, Sri Aurobindo being one of them, however, did not give much weight to Bankim’s English novel and called it a ‘false start’ (qtd in Mukherjee, M., ‘Afterword’, 137) before Durgeshnandini, his first novel in Bangla. In this chapter I try to rediscover Bankim’s achievements in the novel in initializing Indian English fiction. In the previous chapter I discussed that Rammohan was not entrapped by Western discourses, although he wrote in English. Rather, he asserted an ‘Indianness’ in using the Indian structures of argumentation. Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Keshub Sen also inscribed a Bengali identity in their use of English in letters and diary entries. Bankimchandra, I am going to show, enriched that legacy. Meenakshi Mukherjee suggested that Bankimchandra as an Indian writer in English might have been entrapped in the language of the colonizer. She pointed out that the Bengali English-educated gentleman who is often the butt of joke in his Bangla fiction is the hero in Rajmohan’s Wife and Mathur, who does not have any taste of the English books, unlike Madhav, is given to lust and greed (Perishable, 37). She drew our attention to the ‘grim black figure of Kali’ and the ‘crab-like form of Durga’ (Chapter 13, 76) in Mathur’s bedchamber and commented, The unusually negative charge in the description of the goddesses is surprising because in Bankim’s Bangla writing we never see these icons treated in such a dismissive manner. These instances make one return to the question posited earlier – how much does the choice of the writer’s language (hence of audience) determine his tone and attitude? (Perishable, 37) Mukherjee did not provide an answer. I reply to this question in the negative. If language determines tone and attitude then the writer is quite imprisoned in the language. This book of mine is based on the assumption that a writer is not necessarily bound by the language. The availability of contradictory 79

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discourses, such as colonial and postcolonial, in the same language such as English indicates the point. Ashcroft, as referred to in the opening chapter, argued that Caliban is not imprisoned in his master’s language; his ‘possibility of being’ (Ashcroft, 28) is manifested in the text itself. I think it would be fallacious to equate the Bankimchandra of Rajmohan’s Wife, where Goddess Durga is described as a ‘crab-like’ figure, with the Bankimchandra of Anandamath, where the cult of Sakti occupies an important part. Bankimchandra Chatterjee is credited with the introduction of militant nationalism through his novel Anandamath, from which nationalists got their slogan, ‘Vande Mataram’, which eventually stirred the entire nation. Sri Aurobindo said, ‘The religion of patriotism – this is the master idea of Bankim’s writings’ (12). Since according to Aurobindo, the ‘religion of patriotism’ was Bankim’s chief contribution, Rajmohan’s Wife, where nationalistic issues are apparently absent, might seem to be a ‘false start’. The contrast is ‘surprising’ for Mukherjee because, I think, she equated the Bankimchandra of two different times. The reason for the contrast cannot be the fact that the former novel was written in English and the latter in Bangla. The reason lay in the writer’s attitude. In the Bankim of Rajmohan’s Wife we see the attitude of an enthusiast of ‘Young Bengal’ who used to make fun of the Hindu deities but took scholarly interest in ancient Indian literature as a part of a general hunger for knowledge. As an essayist in English, Bankimchandra identified himself as a ‘Young Bengal’ in the essay ‘Confessions of a Young Bengal’ (1872), which was written eight years after Rajmohan’s Wife was written, at a time when he was yet to discover the spirit of Hindu nationalism and assert it in his novel Anandamath (1882). A valorization of Western education and a dissatisfaction with the state of education in India are expressed in the essay: [N]o enlightened human being can find it in his heart to respect a man whose only claim to respect is founded on an old-fashioned ascetic purity of life, and an acquaintance with a literature, full of false history, false geography and false physics. (46) In fact, there was perhaps an urgency on the part of Bankimchandra to find out the truths out of so many falsities. The rich tradition of love poetry in Vaisnav padavalis was one such truism. Hence, although Goddess Durga is treated in a dismissive manner, there is a subtext of Vaisnava love poetry in Rajmohan’s Wife. It was noticed by Mukherjee herself and mentioned in a passing statement (Perishable Empire, 31). But the point is highly relevant in the context of the complexities between language and attitude and hence demands analysis. The coexistence of Western Romanticism and the Vaisnava cult in the novel is ample proof that the writer attempted to develop his own individual 80

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‘tone and attitude’. Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife is a romance substantiated with the concept of love of the Vaisnava cult. Its plot is based on the ill-fated love between a middle-class woman and her brother-in-law. The protagonist is a woman who overcomes the limitations and taboos of Indian society heroically. In reality the nineteenth-century Indian woman is expected to be shy in speaking with her own husband in the presence of other family members, which was pointed out by Satthianadhan in Saguna and is discussed ahead. In Rajmohan’s Wife, Matangini’s sister Hemangini ‘refused to appear before her husband in the presence of her sister, though she did not say as much in words’ (45) when Matangini arrived at night to warn them of the dacoits. Earlier in the novel, when Matangini asked her sister to request her husband, Madhav, to help the unemployed Rajmohan in any way he could, Hemangini, in the words of the narrator, ‘had in the ardour of her affection for her sister undertaken a task which she knew not how to execute’ (20). Hemangini is the typical Indian woman of the nineteenth century for whom talking with her husband face to face was an impossible proposition. In the essay ‘Bibaho, Dampotyo Jibon O Prem’, Nirad C. Chaudhuri documented an incident of Moymansingh during his childhood where a mother of three children failed to recognize her husband because married couples in those times, as narrated by Chaudhuri, had no opportunity of seeing each other (191). However, Matangini is verbose. In Chapter 9, she expresses her love to her beloved Madhav: ‘Spurn me not for this last weakness; this, Madhav, may be our last meeting; it must be so, and too, too deeply have I loved you – too deeply do I love you still, to part with you for ever without a struggle.’ . . . ‘Yes, reproach me, Madhav,’ she continued, ‘censure me, teach me, for I have been sinful; sinful in the eyes of God, and I must say it, Madhav, of my God on earth, of yourself.’ . . . ‘Oh say again, again say those words, words that my heart has yearned to hear – say Madhav, do you then love me still?’ (53–55) Mukherjee raised the question of compatibility between language and culture in Matangini’s expression of love, although she did not explain it further (Mukherjee, ‘Afterword’, 149). Obviously it is not a realistic situation in the nineteenth-century context. But Bankim’s Bangla novels had no less fantastic situations and characters. If Matangini has broken the conventions of nineteenth-century decorum of female behaviour she may be regarded as only a precursor of more heroic characters, like Devi Choudhurani, Shanti, and Kapalkundala. One might argue that Matangini’s expression of love 81

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can exist only in a discourse of English Romanticism. But the issue of gender is also involved here. Matangini is no Byronic lover, but a woman. In English literature – till the nineteenth century – expression of love on the part of a woman for a brother-in-law or extramarital feelings of a woman is almost inevitably incestuous and sinful. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Gertrude’s marriage with Claudius compels Hamlet to reflect on ‘incestuous sheets’ (1.2.157) and say, ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ (Hamlet 1.2.146); in King Lear, it is the villainous Regan and Goneril who are sexually attracted towards Edmund. Matangini is no belle dame sans merci; like Sri Radhika of Vaisnav literature, she remains until the end of the novel the epitome of virtue and heroism. Her resistance against the advances of the devilish Mathur at the end of the novel underlines her heroic spirit and virtue. However, in Bangla literature before Bankim, Matangini’s verbal expression of outlawed love could exist only in the epic characters of Radha and Krishna. Interestingly, the Romantic discourse of Matangini is posited with a Vaisnava approach to love. Like Sri Radhika, Matangini is completely devoted to her love. Her expressions of devotion and love are examples of Vaisnava discourse. Matangini in calling her lover ‘my God on earth’ is actually more Indian than Western. She could have used the word ‘lord’, which would have been more ‘English’, but the phrase ‘my God on earth’ in the context of outlawed love seems to be inspired from the section of ‘Nibedan’ in Vaisnav Padavali, where Krishna, the lover, performs the dual role of ‘friend’ (bondhuwa) and ‘lord of the soul’ (Prananath) (Mitra et al., eds, 82–83). Hence in Indian English fiction, ‘Indianization’ of the English language in its complex aspect of intermingling of discourses came to exist from the first novel itself. The phenomenon of ‘Indianization’ further demonstrates that the writer’s tone and attitude cannot be dictated by language. Simultaneously it is also evident that ‘Indianization’ of the English language is involved with reassertion and reinterpretation of Indian culture. The characterization of Matangini is the chief site of this reassertion in the novel. In the third-person narrative Matangini is a medley of Western influence and Eastern inspiration. The narrator’s description of Matangini’s physical beauty is an imitation of Western Romantic discourse as the narrator speaks of ‘luxuriant tresses of raven hue’ and wonders that ‘earth had not to show a more dazzling vision of female loveliness’ (54). Simultaneously, Matangini is the archetypal Sri Radhika who can cast aside her shame and even her care for life for the sake of her beloved. When Matangini was about to make her nocturnal journey to Madhav’s abode, the narrator describes, ‘As the appalling dangers rose before her mind, her noble love expanded and rose also, and she longed to sacrifice at its altar a life whose burden her crushed heart could not [sic] longer bear’ (38). Still she is held back because an Indian lady in the nineteenth century is not expected to visit a gentleman’s house alone even during the day and that during midnight is a proposition beyond imagination: ‘But still another womanly feeling kept her back. To 82

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go to the house of Madhav at midnight and alone! Who would understand her? What would Madhav think!’ (38). Defying all fear of shame and all fear of journeying alone in the darkness, Matangini ultimately sets off to meet Madhav. But the inner struggle that precedes, the ‘womanly feeling’ that she has to overcome, the exclamations and questions that pull her back and which appropriate the delineations of the anxieties of a nineteenth-century Bengali lady create a discourse which is beyond the manly perspectives of Byron, Wordsworth, or Keats. However, Matangini’s inner struggle and her victory over all fears may be posited in the context of Vaisnav poetry in Bengali literature. In the ‘abhisaar’ section of Vaisnava poetry, there is analysis of the feelings, thoughts, and emotions which compel Sri Radha to set out on her secret journey. For example, in one of the poems of Gobinda Das, Sri Radha tells her ‘sahachari’ (friend) that she has crossed the doors of ‘kulamarisaad’ (family-prestige) and hence the wooden door is no barrier; she continues that she has crossed the ocean of ‘nija-marisaad’ (self-dignity) and hence the river (understandably Yamuna) is no obstacle (Mitra, K.N., et al., eds, 53). The deep thought and the earnest love of the speaker are expressed in an exquisite rhythm and musicality which defy all attempts of translation. Here it is also worthwhile to point out that both the names of the two lovers, ‘Matangini’ and ‘Madhav’, refer to the archetypal lovers Radha and Krishna of Vaisnav poetry. In the ‘abhisaar’ section of Vaisnava Padavali, rain, cloudy sky, and darkness are recurring motifs. Meenakshi Mukherjee also observed the ‘descriptive conventions of vaisnava love poetry’ in the descriptions of Matangini’s nocturnal journey (‘Foreword’, vi). But I think that there is also a gothic overtone in that episode where Matangini walks through the ‘jungly path’ (39): The dreary silence and the dark shadows appalled her. The knotted trunks of huge trees showed like so many unearthly forms watching her progress in malignant silence. In each leafy bough that shot over her darkened path, she fancied there lurked a demon. In each dark recess she could see the skulking form and glistening eyes of a spectre or of a robber. (39) In fact, the chapter opens with an introductory note of the author ruing the narrowly missed opportunity of ‘introducing a few ghosts’ (36). The gothic is also present in the description of the dungeon in Mathur’s house, which has been mentioned by Mukherjee (Perishable Empire, 35). I think this coexistence and blend of the Western and Indian elements are one of Bankim’s contributions to the development of Indian English fiction. What is more relevant in this study is the fact that Bankim attempted to create a discourse which could accommodate diverse cultural elements from East and West. According to Kirkpatrick, the nativized varieties of English are a 83

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consequence of the influence of ‘local languages and culture’ (5). In Bankim’s English, there are these distinct signals of the appearance of a nativized variety or a new dialect. Bankim has been criticized, and quite rightly so, for ‘the absence of the range of registers’ (Mukherjee, Perishable Empire, 42). In the novel, robbers talk in Standard English; Rajmohan vents his anger against his wife like a villain in a Jacobean drama: ‘“Woman”, he said fiercely, “deceive me not. Canst thou? Thou little knowest how I have watched thee”’ (60). Citing such instances as these, one can definitely say that a ‘second hand and bookish predilection is regulating expression’ (Mukherjee, Perishable Empire, 45). But we would be doing injustice to the author if we miss the merits of his use of language and highlight only the drawbacks. In Chapter 4, Matangini tells her sister that her husband ‘has besought me to ask you to speak to my brother-in-law’ (19) as he is unemployed. The episode has been referred to earlier, but with a different purpose. Anyway, the third-person narrator, after the talk of the sisters is over, comments, ‘Rajmohan had, with the usual bashfulness of boors, chosen the indirect agency of sari Government, usually resorted to by poor relatives, instead of a direct and personal application to his brother-in-law’ (20). Bankim plays with the language in using the word ‘sari’ as an adjective, and is successful in producing the desired comic effect. However, in the twenty-first century saris and skirts cannot be a reference to an alternative government because women belong to mainstream politics. But in the nineteenth century, the metaphor was quite apt. A Bangla exclamation comes out spontaneously as Kanak exclaims, ‘Ma gow’ after she listens to Matangini’s nightly adventure (69). But as the story proceeds and as the author hastens to finish the novel, owing perhaps to poor response, the heroine as well as all the other characters speaks in the Standard bookish English of the time. Yet some deviations from Standard English are there, and they have occurred perhaps spontaneously. For example, Suki’s mother, a minor character, is called ‘Suki’s mother’ by the characters and the thirdperson narrator throughout the story but near the end we see Matangini code-switching to call her ‘Sukir-ma’ (118). In fact, calling a woman not by her name but as somebody’s mother is itself a typical Indian practice, which is, however, on the wane in the twenty-first century owing to women’s empowerment. Earlier in the novel, Suki’s mother, on listening to Kanak’s fabricated story, advises Matangini not to return to her supposedly unfaithful husband: ‘Why, where could he get a more beautiful wife? And will the little child he will bring home be a housewife like her? No mother, do not return but go to your sister and see what he will do’ (71). Suki’s mother is obviously older than Matangini, but throughout India a woman is called mother as a mark of respect and affection. Here we have an example of what Kachru discussed as ‘transfer of context’ (Indianization, 100–101 & 131–132). But the term ‘little child’ in the foregoing quote is decidedly Western and is not compatible with the character of the speaker. 84

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Bankimchandra used a large amount of Indian loanwords in his novel on which the critics did not comment. Some of those words are ‘zenana’ (23), ‘ghee’ (25), ‘Zaruri’ (23), ‘dalans’ (26)’, ‘Agdum-Bagdum’ (26), ‘Masi’ (27), ‘Khuri’ (27), ‘anchal’ (29), ‘jungly’ (38 & 39), ‘apadevata’ (41), ‘khirki’ (42), ‘lattial’ (48), ‘taktaposh’ (66), ‘andarmahal’ (76), ‘noth’ (77), ‘khompa’ (81), ‘binuni’ (81), ‘ghomta’ (83), ‘baithak-khana’ (86), and ‘Thakurpo’ (113). Sometimes, Bankim would make a plural by adding an ‘s’ or ‘-es’. Thus we have in the novel words like ‘kautas’ (83), ‘churis’, ‘latties’ (48 & 89), ‘khompas’ (81), ‘taluqs’ (99), and so forth. The Indian words, mostly Bangla, play an important role in portraying the rural life of nineteenth-century East Bengal, especially in portraying the quotidian routines of the lives of women. Moreover, the loanwords indicate an important fact about Bankim’s target audience. Bankim was writing with English-educated Indian readers – principally Bengali readers – in mind, for words like ‘khompa’ (bun [of hair]) and ‘binuni’ (braid of hair) are still unknown to most non-Bengali Indians, not to speak of Europeans. A Bengali English was quite discernible in Bankim’s English. Bankim’s English may be characterized by an unharmonized coexistence of a ‘bookish predilection’ and an Indianized English. This lack of harmony of registers was absent in his Bangla. The language of the British novelist had to be remodelled for writing a story with Indian characters in an Indian rural setting. But Bankim did not have any model before him; he did not have any predecessor in Indian literature as he was the first novelist in India. On the other hand, the Indian middle class of the 1860s was perhaps not prepared to appreciate a serious creative work in hybridized English. Yet, in Rajmohan’s Wife, Bankim not only heralds the Indian English novel but also forecasts the emergence of Indian English in fiction, as we have already seen such signs for in non-fiction in the previous chapter. Written just a decade after Bankim’s debutant venture, Lal Behari Day’s Govinda Samanta gives a realistic portrait of nineteenth-century rural life of Bengal. But the work is amateurish and looks more like a documentary than a work of art. It was, in fact, an entry in a competition. Day does not make any conscious attempt to mould the language except using some Bangla loanwords. Instead of facing the challenge of forming a suitable discourse to describe the rural life of Bengal, Day made a compromise. He peacefully resolved the matter by apologizing to his ‘gentle reader’ for making the rural folks speak Standard English: [T]hey speak almost like educated ladies and gentlemen, without any provincialisms. But how could I have avoided this defect in my history? If I had translated their talk into the Somersetshire or the Yorkshire dialect, I would have turned them into English, and not Bengali, peasants. (61) 85

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By the phrase ‘educated ladies and gentlemen’ Day perhaps meant English-educated Indian ladies and gentlemen’ because Nirad Chaudhuri observed that in the nineteenth century ‘the word education which had passed into the Bengali speech, .  .  . was applied only to those who knew English well, as never to anyone else, however learned they may be in Sanskrit or Bengali. (Qtd in Mukherjee, Perishable Empire, 43) Simultaneously, the reference to Somersetshire and Yorkshire dialect implies that Day might mean British ladies and gentlemen as well. However, it did not occur to Day that the Indian loanwords and translations of Bengali idioms – which he did use in his novel – have actually added a provincial colour to his novel. From this perspective, Day’s novel has also participated in ‘Indianization’ of the English language and this is quite important. Day used quite a few Indian words and translations of Bengali idioms, which might have been the practice among Indian users of English or among European administrators and settlers. Day, while presenting the dialogues of his characters, presented some Indianized phrases. For example, Manik, a peasant, characteristically abuses the ox while ploughing: ‘You sala (wife’s brother), why don’t you move?’ (29). The typically Indian concern for the unmarried daughter is presented with commendable skill: ‘Dear me, she is shooting like a plantain-tree! and you are taking no thought of her marriage!’ (79). A lexical shift is used to voice the agonies of the woman tormented by in-laws: ‘Happy should I be if I die! The air would then enter into my bones’. In some cases Day mentions that he is translating a Bangla expression: ‘To make use of an expression in Bengali, his hands and feet entered into his stomach, through fear’ (360). It is quite evident that Day was writing for the British reader, or the British judges of the competition, in mind. Hence either he would give parenthetical annotation or follow or precede the Bangla expression with the meaning in English, such as ‘ma-bap, that is mother and father’ (304). The prize that Day won for the novel may have encouraged him in using the same kind of dialogues in his translations of folk tales of Bengal. For example, in the first tale, when Dalim asks of her mother the secret of his life, his mother showers her affection on her son thus: ‘My pet, my darling, my treasure, my golden moon, do not ask such an inauspicious question. Let the mouth of my enemy be covered with ashes, and let my Dalim live for ever’ (Folk Tales, n.p.). Day was writing Govinda Samanta to inform his colonial master about Indian rural life, besides obviously vying for the prize. But Day was nonchalant in giving a true picture of an indigo plantation and even criticizing the government. Criticizing a law which brings about the ruin of Govinda, Day observes, ‘[I]t is worthy of note that, for half a century, those horrible engines of oppression were allowed, by a government calling itself Christian, to 86

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grind to the dust many millions of probably the most peaceful people upon earth’ (361). Day’s novel, I think, is suggestive of the space that existed in the English language of the nineteenth century for an account of social realism as well as for discussion and negotiation between the ‘educated ladies and gentlemen’ and the colonial master. That Day won the prize suggests that the nativized English which Day used in his novel was appreciated by the gentlemen who judged the novel. Krupabai Satthianadhan gave Indian English fiction a maturity as well as a readership which none before her could give.5 She could tell an Indian story in an Indian context in the English language convincingly and touchingly, perhaps for the first time. Until the late 1990s her novels had almost been forgotten by readers of Indian writing in English until Oxford University Press under the editorship of Chandani Lokuje revived the two novels in 1997 and 1998. Satthianadhan had been ignored by critics for a long time. Rama Jha, quite surprisingly, mentioned the nineteenth-century women writers with neglect: ‘[T]hese novels are mere tales told by women’ (161–162). Meena Shirwadkar called these writers ‘didactic and sentimental’ (202). However, critics like Alphonso-Karkala (1970) and K.S. Ramamurti (1987) appreciated her work. Meenakshi Mukherjee, highly appreciating the two novels of Satthianadhan, saw a plurality of discourses in the novels: Opinions are likely to remain divided on whether Satthianadhan should be considered a feminist before her time or a staid conformist, a realist or a romancer; a propagator of social emancipation through Christianity or a nostalgic evacuator of the timeless part of legends, myths and rituals. (Mukherjee, Perishable Empire, 87) The issue of upliftment of women was a preoccupying thought of the stalwarts of the Renaissance. A woman describing her own reality was not an uncommon phenomenon of the nineteenth century either. Swarnakumari Devi in Bangla and Rajlakshmi Devi and Pandita Ramabai in English detailed the plight of contemporary women and the society at large. Satthianadhan’s cause of women’s upliftment is quite unambiguous in her novels. Yet in a society where literacy of women was negligible, women’s voices were suppressed in general. But Satthianadhan portrayed the miserable status of women in nineteenth-century India in a poignant language. In Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life, the protagonist is remonstrated by her mother for her fondness for books: ‘What is the use of learning for a girl? A girl’s training is near the chool [oven]’ (21). The two sentences appropriate the patriarchal discourse used in almost all the Indian languages. Satthianadhan not only gave a realistic picture of the women in the nineteenth century but also pointed out the patriarchal mindset of the Hindu society in unambiguous language. In Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life, when the heroine 87

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realizes that she ‘as a woman was even less than a servant in her husband’s eyes’, the third-person narrator comments, ‘It was but the old rooted prejudice in the Hindu mind against women’ (133). Satthianadhan not only outstepped the lakshman-rekha6 of the nineteenth century in voicing her protest but, like Ramabai, also seized the masculine role of analyzer and reformer. Simultaneously, she also seized the language of the colonizer to voice the agony of witnessing the injustices meted out to Hindu women in India. The phrase ‘in her husband’s eyes’ in the foregoing quotation is a lexisbound translation from Marathi, but it can be recognized by speakers of other Indian languages as it represents a sprachbund feature. There are quite a few such instances in her novels. For example, Kamala’s father rues the absence of his wife in a manner which is recognizably Indian: ‘Poor girl, your mother, what would she not have done for you if she had been living? (34). Kamala’s husband in Kamala reassures her in a language which is a common expression in several Indian languages: ‘Don’t be mad. I am not going to eat you up’ (64). It is really commendable that Satthiandhan wrote her novel in a language which could portray the thoughts of her Marathi characters. However, it is quite evident that ‘Indianization’ of the English language is used in Satthianadhan’s novels not to counter or posit an alternative to Western narrative discourses but for the sake of realism. The remarkable fact about her use of ‘Indianization’ is that she dared colonial cynicism for the sake of artistic necessity. Satthianadhan’s choice of English is quite relevant here. Although her mother tongue was possibly Marathi as she was born in Maharashtra, English perhaps came as a spontaneous choice for artistic expression. The linguistic home of a native Christian is not English but the language of the province in which she or he is born; in the case of Satthianadhan it is Marathi, although there is a greater presence of English in their lives than in the lives of other Indians. Being a native Christian, Satthianadhan unhesitatingly adopted the English language but she did not surrender her Indian identity, unlike many of her contemporaries in the native Christian societies. She herself gave an account of that. In her autobiographical novel Saguna, the first-person narrator gives a satirical picture of the young Indian ‘barrister’ who speaks of England as his ‘adopted home’; the narrator feels ‘indignant at their artificiality’ (147). It is interesting that the novel’s protagonist, who clings to her identity as an Indian and resents the ‘artificiality’ of the imitators of Western culture and their thinking of England as their adopted home, adopts English as her medium of artistic expression. Adopting England as an ‘adopted home’ was artificial but adopting the English language was natural. It sounds odd but Satthianadhan’s observation is a demonstration of a truth which is an integral part of Indian writing in English. Indian writers in English have for centuries demonstrated their rootedness to the Indian soil, while they expressed themselves in English. As writers are not bound by

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language and have managed to express the Indian realities and sentiments – matters foreign to the English people – the English language itself is not bound by geographical boundaries and nationalities. Satthianadhan’s narration incorporates a wide range of discourses derived from the West: rational, Romantic, and the mystic. Yet she did some experimentation with Standard English in presenting the Indian reality. Satthianadhan’s novels have a Wordsworthian discourse in the description of nature and in the characterization of Kamala, who is ‘brought up in the innocent freedom of her mountain home’ (Kamala, 86). The unmarried Kamala, who is enjoying being alone and almost lost in nature, epitomizes ‘the poetic sensibilities of a Lucy educated by nature’. (Lokuje, ‘Introduction’, 10). Saguna also possesses a similar sensibility. The Romantic sensibility also colours the narrator’s description and appreciation of not only the lonely hills but also the Indian countryside in both novels. In Kamala the narrator enjoys a journey through a village and also enjoys how a ‘youthful peasant’ sings out to a damsel carrying a load on her head with the girl’s angry retort: ‘My song is locked in a box, thou long-tongued man’ (66–67). Satthianadhan’s Romantic perspective does not hamper the portrayal of realism. Her Western discourse has been well appropriated by her modern Indian identity. In her presentation of social reality Satthianadhan’s attitude was rational. She viewed Hindu life from the perspective of Western education on science and rationality. The constraints in the relation between husband and wife in a Hindu family are presented as unnatural and queer. The third-person narrator observes that unless the wife lives with her husband in separation from her in-laws, the marital relation is constrained because the wife ‘scarcely exchanges a word with him [the husband] before other members of the family’; they behave as if they were strangers to each other, the woman covering her head at her husband’s approach, or leaving the room when he happens to come in, or standing aside, and when talked to, either not taking any notice of what is said, or, with head turned aside, answering in the distant manner possible. (Kamala, 62) Kamala could not escape or conquer the anomalies of the Hindu society, but Radha, Saguna’s mother, could, in escaping through conversion, after which she and her husband come close to each other: ‘There was now no feeling of constraint between Harichandra and Radha. The unnatural fetters of custom had fallen away, and they met and talked with the freedom of children’ (62). She also portrayed the Indian woman’s attachment to jewellery from a rational perspective. In fact, the Indian woman’s attachment to

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jewellery has often surfaced in Indian literature,7 but the social compulsions behind the attachment to jewels have seldom been depicted: Blame not the poor Indian woman for her love of jewellery. She strives and toils hard to put by a few rupees out of the money allotted to her by her husband for home expenses, and invests them in jewels. She knows well that they are the only things that will not be taken away from her at her husband’s death or when any trouble or calamity overtakes the family . . . She sees her future independence in them, or at least has the consolation that she will have something to fall back upon in times of distress . . . Such feelings are purely Hindu, and are the outcome of wrongs committed for generations on the poor unprotected Hindu woman. (114) I think that although the Romantic and the rational discourses of the thirdperson narrator did not have much interference of Indian languages and culture, it was commendable that an Indian writer could describe in English the details of the negative sides of Indian family life. It is interesting that Satthianadhan in describing the negative aspects of Hindu life was not asserting an Indian identity; rather her perspective was Western; in other words she may be said to have voiced the criticisms of the Christian missionaries against the conservatism and superstition of the Hindu society. According to R.C. Majumdar the Christian missionaries throughout the nineteenth century attacked Indian religion and culture from their ‘rational outlook’ (‘Great Saint’, 268) and the Indian educated middle class ‘had always been on the defensive and their attitude was mostly apologetic’ (268). However, when it came to presenting the inner self of the protagonist through spiritual experiences, the interference of Indian culture and language makes the narration plausible and sincere and its absence makes her narration look unrealistic. Both the novels Kamala and Saguna have a depiction of mystic perception. Saguna is pricked to the quick when she experiences racial treatment in the house of a British clergy in a village of native Christians. Her mother’s consolation perhaps aggravates the feeling: ‘Hush! You are a naughty girl; how can you expect them to be friends? Don’t you see the difference, they are white and we are black’ (99). But colour does not create any hindrance in her mystical perception of God. Saguna, in a moment of deep depression when she is suffering the blows of calumny, prays to Christ, who answers her call: Him I needed, and He came and I found joy. Ah! Such joy. It seemed too great for heart to share. I grasped His feet in faith, and exclaimed: ‘I cannot let Thee go. I could not do without Thee. Thou 90

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knowest the future and Thou wilt guide me. Stand by me, Christ, and all will be right.’ (135) The language is biblical, but there is an interference of Indian culture, for those who surrendered to Christ had rarely grasped his feet, as far as the Bible informs us. Touching the feet is not a part of Christian culture but a common practice in entire India. Saguna, like Krupabai, is an Indian Christian and her consciousness does not separate the Indian and Christian elements. Hence the language also accommodates and adjusts the two cultures. The thought ‘I cannot let Thee go’ is also typically Indian and is reminiscent of the relation between the devotee and her/his personal God in the Indian Bhakti cult. All the same, the experience does not seem unnatural or strange but natural from the native Christian point of view. Kamala also experiences a presence of a benevolent and merciful God deep in her heart and the experience has an unmistakable Christian discourse. When she returns from the temple of the goddess Rohini, she feels a mystic presence of God Almighty over and above the goddess: As she dreamily looked at the long stretch of road that led to her home, the mound by its side, and the curve at the far end, she seemed to feel that her God was not far off, and that He was able to help her. Her heart rose as she looked over all and unconsciously added: Yes, Thou art here. Thou knowest me. Thou hast made me and lookest on all. Thou seest the wicked and the good. The vile plots of the wicked thwart. Rescue my husband and me. I invoke thy aid and supplicate thy help. (98) What seemed apt for Saguna seems out of place in the case of Kamala. The Christian discourse seems out of place and strange in the case of Kamala because she has little orientation to Christianity. A discourse on the Bhakti cult would have been appropriate. Kamala ‘had a highly cultured father and a learned mother’ (141), yet her thoughts seem unreal and superimposed by her author. Satthianadhan failed to provide a suitable discourse for Kamala’s mystic perception. In the dialogues of Satthianadhan’s novels, Indianisms came naturally and the author used them with ease to give the touch of realism to her characters. The use of Indianized English in dialogues has already been shown while discussing the sprachbund features of Satthianadhan’s English. In Saguna, an autobiographical novel, Saguna’s mother, Radha, is taunted by her friend Lakshimi, ‘You little schemer! Shiva! Shiva! What a sister-in-law you have got!’ (29). The author has taken care to transmit the mood of the scene but she is not able to maintain the tempo all the time. In Radha’s village a festival 91

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‘takes place when a girl reaches the auspicious twelfth year’. Radha attends one such ‘festival’ where the girls in their best attire ‘were like petty rajahs, each a kingdom in herself’. Encomiums are poured upon the girl on whose twelfth year the festival takes place; her hair is praised thus: ‘Dear! Dear! Such black strings, you dark-coloured mouse, I must put a yellow Shewanti in yours’ (36). Any Indian girl would only be angered and disheartened by such encomium, but perhaps a European girl wouldn’t be hurt that much to be called a mouse. However, Satthianadhan has succeeded much more than faltered in depicting the tone and mood of her characters in their speech. On the eve of Radha’s journey to her in-laws there is a poignant depiction of the pain of separation between Radha and Lakshimi: ‘Oh! How desolate I shall be, alone here. What shall I do on the river bank, in the temple, in our familiar place by the tamarind tree? It would seem as if it were all coming to eat me up’ (Saguna, 39). There is the deliberate breaking of the grammatical order of an exclamatory sentence which conveys the feelings of the illiterate girl speaking in Marathi. Lakshimi further exhorts her friend to promise and take the vow of ‘sakhi’, which is something peculiar to Indian rural life: ‘Here before Gunga mata, before Surya Narayena I say that you are my own sakhi, my friend, till the end of my life. Now do not fear. Your brother will be my brother when you are gone and your father mine,’ and she drew little Gopala to her breast and the three wept. (Saguna, 39) We know that these words are not spoken or cannot be spoken in English but in Lakshimi’s mother tongue, Marathi, and therein lies the fun of this and such dialogues in Indian English novel. Dialogues in Indian English novels are a potential site for the use of Indian English. Here English allows the reader what Lachman Khubchandani calls an ‘interface with the Indian languages’ (‘English’, 80). This phenomenon has boosted ‘Indianization’ of the English language. Makarand Paranjape is of the opinion that Indian English literature ‘functions best as a minority or a frontier discourse, occupying a middle ground between the west and India’ (Towards a Poetics, 93). Yet the Indian English novel has reached a pan-Indian readership within India as its Indianized language now readily appeals to the Indian readers of English. Satthianadhan’s experiments with dialogues in English were steps in the direction that led to the novels of Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, and R. K. Narayan in the twentieth century. Paranjape’s arguments come in the light of the stupendously booming market for Indian writings in the West, but it must not be forgotten that Indian English novel and the first signs of an Indian dialect of the English language had emerged a century earlier and that they were written not solely for a Western audience but for readers in English, cutting across national boundaries. 92

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In Saguna, as the novel progresses Radha recedes into the background and Saguna comes to the forefront. In the urban world of the educated native Christian there is little scope for such interface as in the rural world of Radha, except when Saguna happens to question ‘the hardy peasants’ about their homes and they reply in incomplete sentences: ‘“It is two years. Come for stomach and money. Land is mortgaged,” the weary longing fellow would say, “but in Divali I shall go back”’ (118). The reference to ‘stomach’ in the context of poverty and hunger surfaces in many Indian languages, and an Indian reader cannot fail to understand it. In Kamala, where the protagonist stays far away from the world of Western education, Satthianadhan uses the Indianisms with her characteristic ease: ‘“You turn them round your fingers,” they [ Kamala’s friends at the well in her in-law’s house] said, “We hear that the syrupy sugar is running in streams in your house”’ (45). There is indeed no English word for ras, but she has captured the spirit of the banter with skill. In fact, even Mulk Raj Anand used a similar phrase in Untouchable: ‘sweet syrup’, which Bakha relishes after buying a four annas’ worth of jalebis (37). We find a few Indian idioms translated, indicating the beginning of a new dimension in the Indian English novel. For example, Kamala’s friend, Harni’s mother-in-law, pours out her anger on Harni in these words: ‘You have thrown dust in his eyes,8 you have drugged him with draughts, so that his heart is against the mother that bore him’ (61). Kamala’s mother-in-law is welcomed in Kamala’s house with these words by the ladies: ‘“The goddess Lakshmi has smiled in this direction, I see”. “Which side has the sun risen today.” “What good fortune brings you here?” Such were the remarks made on all sides’ (113). When Kamala drives away Sai from her home a quarrel breaks out between the couple: ‘“What have you done, you Avadasa . . . How shall I show my face outside? Are you not satisfied with the disgrace that you have already heaped on me that you add this too?”’ (138). Satthianadhan, much before R.K. Narayan or Raja Rao, captured the rhythm of Indian speech in the English tongue. She used the loanwords and translations of Indian expressions and idioms with skill and confidence, indicating the emergence of an Indian dialect of the English language. Satthianadhan used the loanwords in plenty and in such an effective manner that they portray the atmosphere and mood of the scene: ‘what have you done, you Avadasa’. The loanword here is used to underline the typical attitude of the patriarchal Hindu society towards women. In Kamala we come across loanwords like ‘pujaris’ (24), ‘mamlatdaar’ (‘Collectorate’) (33), ‘ambari’ (‘fibre from a tropical Asian malvaceous plant’) (38), ‘bakshish’ (40), ‘tamasha’ (44), ‘mutts’ (50), ‘yatras’ (54), ‘Bheels’ (109), ‘dharmashala’ (110), ‘jaghirdari’ (117), ‘swarga’ (121), ‘chella’ (122), and ‘bhairagi’ (122). In Saguna, there is also a similar range of Indian loanwords: ‘jadu’ (24), ‘mandapam’ (24), ‘suttee’ (24), ‘ghats’ (27), ‘chemboo’ (30), ‘padur’ (31 & 103), ‘kunku’ (35), ‘choli’ (35), ‘kersoonee’ (38), ‘mlechas’ (49), ‘vina’ (77), 93

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‘poojah’ (87), ‘odhni’ (98), ‘halwa’ (106), ‘zenanas’ (113), and ‘kitchari’ (119). In some cases, she gave a parenthetical annotation on the loanword – for example, ‘gunjee’ is annotated in Kamala as ‘mixture of marijuana’ (79), ‘padur’ in the same novel is ‘the end of the upper cloth worn by women’ (87), and in Saguna it is annotated as ‘the portion of the saree that falls on the shoulders’ (31). Like Bankimchandra, Satthianadhan made plurals of Indian words by adding an ‘s’: ‘pujaris’, ‘mutts’, ‘yatras’, ‘Bheels’, ‘ghats’, and ‘zenanas’. In Satthianadhan, there is also use of code-switches like ‘Arrai! Arrai!’ (Kamala, 51), meaning ‘Enough!’, ‘Kabar dhar’ (Kamala, 80), and ‘Batte! Batte!’ (Saguna, 94), meaning ‘polluted’. Saguna describes a church in a village of native Christians where after the service ‘all the people stood up with one accord and shouted: “Salaam! Papa, Salaam! Mamma”’; she comments that that is ‘the usual morning salute to the European missionary and his wife’ (97). Further there is a Marathi song of the children in the church which is translated by the narrator. In Kamala there is the cry of the hawker selling curd, ‘Bhagighya Bhagi! Dahighya Dahi’ (39). She went further and formed verbs by adding suffixes to Indian words: On reaching Vishrampoor, a village of native Christians and seeing a Christian family on the platform, the narrator in Saguna is overjoyed: ‘My heart went out to them, I caught myself salaaming and smiling’ (94). Later, Saguna and her mother are greeted by the local missionary’s wife: ‘She salaamed and said “Sit down”’ (99). Samuel Satthianadhan, Krupabai’s husband, a year after her death, posited the right question: ‘Who can say what Krupabai might have achieved had her life been prolonged and had her fragile frame been strong in proportion to the soul within it?’ (qtd in Ramamurti, 78–79). In fine, one may say that nineteenth-century Indian English fiction made some decisive steps towards ‘Indianizing’ the English language and formulating suitable discourses for the depiction of the realities of Indian life and culture. According to Peter Trudgill and Jean Hannah, an indigenized variety, ‘as a result of widespread and frequent use’, acquires ‘relatively consistent, fixed local norms of usage, which are adhered to by all speakers’ (122). In the use of loanwords, in the use of referring to cultural details, such as addressing a lady as ‘mother’ (in Rajmohan’s Wife) or the special bond of friendship (sakhi) depicted by Satthianadhan, in the use of lexis-bound translation as used by Lal Behari Day and Satthianadhan, a relatively consistent pattern of using elements from Indian languages and culture was emerging in the late nineteenth century. Here we may also keep in mind similar use of language by Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Keshub Chunder Sen, discussed in the previous chapter. R.K. Narayan was reported to have said that the English language was ‘adaptable . . . and it’s so transparent it can take on the tint of any country’ (qtd in Lowry, 287). Now, I may safely say that the phenomenon of the English language taking on Indian colours had ever been a part

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of Indian writing in English since the early nineteenth century. The process of mixing Indian colours in the English language was consciously used in the informal domain of writing, as I have discussed in the previous chapter. Indian English fiction, since the first novel was written, attempted to utilize this practice for artistic necessity.

Notes 1 According to Romesh Chunder Dutt, the ‘import of Indian goods to Europe was repressed by prohibitive duties; the export of British goods to India was encouraged by almost nominal duties’, and by 1882 ‘all import duties were abolished, except on salt and liquor’ (‘Preface’, vii–ix). According to D.A. Washbrook, ‘India became a subordinate agricultural colony under the dominance of metropolitan, industrial Britain’ (399). Bayly also observes that the India of the nomad, of the soldier, and of the tribesman (followed by their defeat by the European merchants) was replaced by the India of peasants and the India of more rigid castes (Bayly, Indian Society, 155 & 175). 2 Romesh Chunder Dutt explained the financial burden in the aftermath of the Mutiny: ‘[A] debt was piled up which amounted to sixty millions when Lord Dalhousie left India. And the first year of the Mutiny expenses brought it up to seventy millions when the East India Company was abolished . . . The Empire of India was purchased by the crown from the Company, but the people of India were charged with the purchase money. The value received by shareholders of the Company’s stock was not paid by the British Crown which won an imperial property, but was added to the Indian debt’ (220). According to Robin J. Moore, between 1857 and 1860, India’s public debt ‘jumped by 70 per cent, imposing an additional interest charge of £2m upon the revenues, so that the deficits averaged £10m a year’ (430). 3 The policy of increase of taxation, in the words of Charles Trevelyan, ‘was the favourite at Calcutta and in England’ (qtd in Dutt, R., 592–593). The Madras famine of 1877 did not lead to a reduction either of expenditure or of taxes. A new tax to create a Famine Relief and Insurance Fund was imposed but the ‘grant for famine relief and insurance disappeared’ (Dutt, R., 592–593). 4 See Sleeman’s Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official (77–91, 650–653, First Pub. 1844). Bayly gave a detailed account regarding Sleeman, his lieutenants, and Meadows Taylor, who decoded the language of the thugs and disillusioned the administration regarding the fabled centralized organization of the thugs. See Bayly’s Empire and Information (Cambridge, CUP, 1996). 5 Chandani Lokuje in her edition of the novel Saguna reported that the book was popularly read and reviewed in India and in England and that Queen Victoria also appreciated her work (ix). In her introduction to Kamala she gave extracts of favourable reviews of the novel. But later Satthianadhan fell out of the limelight until the two books were republished by OUP in 1998 under the editorship of Chandani Lokuje. 6 In Ramayana, Lakshmana drew a line and asked Sita not to outstep it. She would have been secure if she stayed within the line. But Sita outstepped it and endangered herself to Ravana. In many Indian languages lakshman rekha metaphorically means some-thing beyond which one should not venture. 7 The theme of attachment to jewels was explored by Tagore in his short story ‘Monihaar’ and also by Shirsendu Mukhopadhyay in the novel Goynar Bakso.

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Tagore’s story was translated into celluloid by Satyajit Ray in the second story in Teen Konya and that of Mukhopadhyay by Aparna Sen in a film of the same name. Mukhopadhyay, like Satthianadhan, did focus on the social economy, while Tagore focused principally on the eternal mysteries of the woman’s psyche, which is also the theme which binds the three stories in Ray’s classic. 8 In many languages of India, to throw dust in somebody’s eyes is to deceive her or him.

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Parang bhuyah prabakshami Gyananang Gyanmuttamam Jayagyatwa munayah Sarbe parang sidhimatoh gatah. (I am speaking again of that ultimate knowledge, knowing which the Munis got liberation from this bondage and attained enlightenment.) —Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 14, Verse 1

The people of India are still moved and enlightened by the speeches of Vivekananda and Tagore, a major portion of which was delivered in English. Colonial India derived from Vivekananda and Tagore the enlightening message of humanism, which harmonized the best of the ancient Vedic wisdom and the Western rationalistic discourses. But the legacy of the use of the English language which was created by these two contemporary speakers of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries has not been explored enough. This chapter presents a glimpse of that legacy. The history of the speeches – not only of Vivekananda and Tagore but also of nationalist leaders, like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi, and Subhas Bose – tells us the history of the rise of the consciousness of nationalism. The speeches also constitute an important episode of the history of English in India, of its role as a link language. In this chapter and the next, I shall study a few speeches of the age of nationalism delivered by Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Chittaranjan Das, and Subhas Chandra Bose and see how the colonizer’s tongue was adapted for feelings and thoughts beyond the periphery of Western discourses. Vivekananda and Tagore – whose speeches are the object of my study in this chapter – spoke of a synthesis of the best of the East and that of the West and tried to evolve a new humanism each in their own way. While Vivekananda played a decisive role in the formative years of Indian nationalism, Tagore, in the heydays of Indian national movement, warned of the menace hidden in the idea of nationalism. Tagore can be credited with taking the nationalist discourse to its logical climax in the idea of internationalism.1 The speeches of

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Vivekananda and Tagore become all the more relevant in the context of the massive destruction and bloodshed brought about by the two world wars. In the voice of Vivekananda and Tagore colonial India found an alternative to the colonial discourses which consistently devalued Indian culture and history. Finally I will attempt to show that these speeches signal the appearance of an Indian variant of the English language. Legend goes that Demosthenes, the orator of ancient Greece of fourth century BC, roused the Athenians out of their mental stupor with his oratory when King Philip II of Macedon was about to attack Athens. As he finished his third Philipics,2 the Athenians, according to Brett and Kate Mckay, raised the cry ‘To arms. To arms’. In the Mahabharata, Lord Krishna roused Arjuna, the finest warrior, to action with his words when Arjuna was sunk in despondence as the great battle of Kurukshetra was about to begin. Swami Vivekananda’s words, mostly uttered in English but subsequently translated into the regional languages of India, may be said to perform a similar act of arousing and inspiring his listeners to action. As far as his speeches delivered in India are concerned, Vivekananda, I think, drew upon both Western and Eastern traditions of oratory. Harshavardhan Dutt (2005) gave the impression that ancient India did not have any remarkable tradition of oratory except Sri Krishna and Lord Rama of the epics. But the idea is quite far from the truth, for India, since ancient times, had a rich tradition of speeches which is different from oratory as it is understood in the West. Since ancient times India has had a legacy of elocution on spiritual themes. Catherine Ludvik found that the goddess Sarasvati evolved from a deified river to a deity of eloquence and inspired thought: In the Rg Veda, Sarasvati is a deified river representing abundance and might. She is associated above all with Waters (Apas) and the Storm gods (Maruts), and forms a triad with the goddesses Ita and Bharati. Subsequent developments in her conceptualizations are rooted in her Rg Veda connection with inspired thought (dhi) which in turn is linked to the sacrificial activity on the banks of the sacred river Sarasvati. (11) Ludvik found the deity to be associated also with eloquence. Hence the urge for inspired thought and eloquence had been present in India since the Vedic Age. In the Upanishad we find several speakers like Yama, the lord of death, who speaks on the philosophy of Vedanta to Nachiketa in Kathopanishad, Pippalad, who answers questions posed by six Rishis in Prasnopanishad, and Maharshi Angira speaks on Vedanta to Rishi Sounak. Neither Yama nor Krishna nor the legendary Yagnavalkya spoke to a large gathering (rather they speak to a single inquisitive listener); yet their speeches are milestones on the legacy of oratory in India. In the later Vedic period Mahavira and Buddha 98

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were eloquent and influential speakers who led a religious movement against the tyranny of the Brahman priests. After attaining enlightenment, Lord Buddha observed silence for forty-nine days and then proceeded towards Sarnath near Varanasi. At Deer Park in Sarnath he met his five former friends who had observed austerities with him in pursuit of Truth. There he delivered his first speech to his former friends on the four noble truths and the Eightfold Path. In Buddhist literature this event is known as the Dharmachakrapravartana or, setting of the Wheel of Law in motion. According to Buddhist beliefs, the words of the Lord were memorized and orally transferred to subsequent generations and were subsequently recorded in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. Ludvik pointed out that in Buddhism the ‘orator’ of a sutra is called dharmabhanaka ‘who is represented as almost equivalent to Buddha’ (160). In fact, in India it was such ‘orators’ who bore and expounded on their respective philosophical streams. Shankara of the eighth century AD may be considered as an exception as he not only spoke but also wrote his interpretations of the Vedas, but most of the surviving Sanskrit works ascribed to Shankara are not ‘authentic’ (Britannica 9: 32). After Shankara and Ramanuja (of the eleventh century AD), Swami Vivekananda may be considered as one of the most famous exponents of the Vedanta philosophy in modern India. But as an orator, especially with reference to his speeches in India, Vivekananda, besides carrying forward the spiritual tradition of speeches, performed a Demosthenes-like act; while preaching Vedanta he not only implanted a patriotic zeal in the mind of his audience but also laid the foundations of Indian nationalism. Vivekananda, before he landed on Indian shores after his first and historic tour of the West, had a clear picture before him of what he was going to do. Months before his return to India, while staying in Detroit, his disciples remember him shaking with emotion to think of his challenges in India: Suddenly, as he was speaking, his body began to shake with emotion, and he cried out: ‘India must listen to me! I shall shake India to her foundations. I shall send an electric thrill through her national veins . . . India, my own India, that knows truly how to appreciate that which I have given so freely here, and with my life’s blood, as the spirit of Vedanta.’ (His Eastern and Western Disciples, 166) The core of the message remained the same – ‘the spirit of Vedanta’ – but its approach would be different. He aspired to motivate the Indian masses just as the legendary Demosthenes raised the spirit of the Athenians. Obviously, the man was more confident than ever before, owing to his enormous success in the West. Vivekananda was successful in sending the ‘electric thrill’, in motivating a large section of the Indian populace to selfless action and patriotic spirit. In the history of the English language in India, it was a 99

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crucial fact – perhaps a turning point – that the English language played a major role in sending out the ‘electric thrill’ through the ‘national veins’ of India as almost all his speeches delivered in undivided India were in the English language. Vivekananda’s speeches delivered in India indicate that language and discourse are separate: that however powerful a discourse may be, there is always a possibility of an antithetical discourse. Vivekananda’s speeches delivered in India may be considered as antithetical to materialism and colonialism. Particularly, the Macaulayan discourse – that is, the discourse which rated a single shelf of European library as greater than all the accumulated wisdom of the East – was countered strongly by Vivekananda. It will be interesting to find out how far the resistance to colonial discourses necessitated a deviance from the English used by the colonizers. With this aim, I would like to analyze Swami Vivekananda’s speeches, with reference to four of his lectures delivered in 1897 soon after his first historic tour of the West: his speech in Colombo, delivered on 15 January 1897, his address at Ramnad, delivered on 25 January 1897, the message of Vedanta delivered at Kumbhakonam, and the speech delivered at the Victoria Hall in Chennai, then Madras, the exact dates of which are not known. Quotations of all the four primary texts are taken from Vivekananda’s Lectures From Colombo to Almora, published from Advaita Ashrama. I have chosen from the speeches delivered in the East and addressed to an Indian audience, because ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the colonial era of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries is deeply associated with the impact of the Indian languages on the English tongue and with the emergence of Indian nationalism. Vivekananda’s speeches delivered in the West reveal him as a philosopher par excellence. But his speeches delivered in India shine with his love for India. His speeches in the West are in Standard English, laden with English idioms and often American colloquialisms, like ‘hundreds of thousands’ (Vivekananda, Realisation, 96) or ‘It is all bosh’ (Vivekananda, Realisation, 62). But the language he used in India was laden with cultural and lexical items of his mother tongue. Moreover the speeches delivered in India are highly emotive and poetic; the syntactic structure of his sentences was influenced by his readings of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. Most importantly, it is his speeches delivered in India and Sri Lanka which are laden with the discourse of nationalism. The major two themes of his speeches in India are redefinition of India and Indian culture and chalking out the course of action that must be followed if India is to regain her glory. These speeches, I intend to argue, created new possibilities for the English language in India and fostered the growth of a new variant of the English language in India, which is called Indian English today. Vivekananda spoke in long sentences with repetitive use of words and phrases leading to a climactic effect. This is evident in the speeches delivered in India as well as in his Chicago lectures. Long, sonorous sentences are found in many works of verse and prose in English literature – particularly 100

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in Milton – but Vivekananda had a style of his own: using the rhetorical devices of palilogia and epanophora, he would create a rhythm that carried the emotive weight of his speech: If there is any land on this earth that can lay claim to be the blessed Punya Bhumi, to be the land to which souls on this earth must come to account for Karma, the land to which every soul that is wending its way Godward must come to attain its last home, the land where humanity has attained its highest towards gentleness, towards purity, towards calmness, above all, the land of introspection, and of spirituality – it is India. (Vivekananda, Lectures, 3) [F]or good or for evil, our vitality is concentrated in religion. You cannot change it. You cannot destroy it and put in its place another. You cannot transplant a large growing tree from one soil to another and make it immediately take root there. For good or for evil, the religious ideal has been flowing into India for thousands of years; for good or for evil, the Indian atmosphere has been filled with ideals of religion for shining scores of centuries; for good or for evil, we have been born and brought up in the very midst of these ideals of religion, till it has entered into our very blood and tingled with every drop in our veins, and has become one with our constitution, become the very vitality of our lives. (Vivekananda, Lectures, 87–88) The last quotation, taken from the speech delivered in Kumbhakonam, has several repetitive structures conjoined together. The speech at Colombo, from which the first quotation is taken, is Vivekananda’s first lecture in Asia after returning from his first tour of the West. The entire speech is interspersed with this stylistic feature. The repetition of a word or phrase or clause followed or preceded by clauses of similar structure has an echoing effect upon the mind. It is a style which tends towards expansion rather than precision. Use of palilogia and epanophora is not uncommon in English literature, especially in sermons and speeches. For example, the Sermon on the Mount in the King James Bible (The Beatitudes of St Matthew) has an air of solemnity; but the clauses are pithy and instead of expanding one single idea, it knits diverse ideas together into a single whole: Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5, Verses 3–5) 101

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The end-stopped lines have an air of calmness and precision while Vivekananda’s speeches give an impression of non-stop breathlessness. Shakespeare, in one of his plays, used a repetitive structure of sentence construction in the context of oratory: Brutus: . . . As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears, for his love; joy, for his fortune; honour, for his valour; and death, for his ambition. (Julius Caesar, 3.2.24–28) It is quite evident that Brutus’s clauses are short and pithy too, in comparison to Vivekananda’s. Other orators in the drama do not speak in this manner; Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, other than Marcus Brutus (and he does use it only once), do not use this repetitive style. In soliloquys, Shakespeare avoided the style. For example, Hamlet could have repeated the clause ‘who would bear’ in the following passage, but had he done so, he would have sounded more like an orator making a public speech than a tragic hero thinking aloud: For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’oppressors wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay. (Hamlet, 3.1.70–72) The style, I think, does not suit any comic spirit and is not likely to be used in comedy except for ridiculing a character. For example, Dickens used this style for caricature when he made the bankrupt Mr Micawber write the following: Under the circumstances, alike humiliating to endure, humiliating to contemplate, and humiliating to relate, I have discharged the pecuniary liability contracted at this establishment, by giving a note of hand made payable fourteen days after date, at my residence, Pentonville, London. When it becomes due, it will not be taken up. The result is destruction. The bolt is impending and the tree must fall. (David Copperfield, 258) It is interesting that Dickens ultimately managed to create his characteristic blend of pathos and humour in the foregoing extract. In the Bhagavad Gita, the repetitive style has been used in an altogether different register: to inspire an individual into self-belief and action. In India, Vivekananda in his speeches also seeks to inspire his countrymen into selfbelief and action. In the Upanishads, the style occurs in yet another register: 102

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in the explication of metaphysical ideas of Advaita Vedanta. Since the two texts are deeply linked with Vivekananda’s teachings, the stylistic semblance of his speeches with the two texts is worth looking into. Long sentences may be used in a variety of contexts, but repetitive occurrence of a clause or phrase is most suitable in oratory as it helps an orator to dramatize and emphasize a point. As the style is suitable for texts of oration, it was used on a large scale in the Bhagavad Gita, where Lord Krishna, debating with as well as answering the queries of Arjuna, emerged as an orator par excellence. In the context of the epic plot, it is intriguing because Krishna, who had vowed not to use any weapon in the battle of Kurukshetra, actually used the most powerful weapon – that is, words – to instil the much-required vigour and readiness in Arjuna. I have discovered that the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads are the two texts where the style occurs quite frequently. I quote three instances – along with my own translation in prose – in defence of my argument: Ahamatma gudakesh sarvabhutashaysthitah/ Ahamadischah, madhyanchah bhutanamanta eva chah/ Adityanamahang Visnurjyotishan ravirangshuman/ Marichirmarutamasmi nakshatranamahang shashi// (I am the inherent soul in all creatures, I am the beginning, the middle and the end. Of all the Adityas, I am Vishnu, of all celestial bodies that give light, I am the sun, of all the Marich, I am Marut, the Lord of Wind and of all the Nakshatras, I am the moon.) (Vibhuti Yog, Chapter 10, Sloka 20–21) Etadhyehvaksharang Brahma, Etadhyevaksharang Param/ Etadhyeyvaksharang gyatwa yo yadichhati tasya tat// (This Word [Om] is Brahma[Nirguna], this Word is God[Saguna], Knowing this Word, the wise gets as she/he desires.) (Kathopanishad, Chapter 1, Canto 2, Sloka 16) Om Purnamadah Purnamidang Purnamudachyate/ Purnasya Purnamadayah Purnamebavashisyate// (God is whole and complete, this world is whole and complete, the wholeness of the world is derived from the whole God; if the wholeness of the whole is taken away, still whole remains.) (BrihadarnyakUpanishad, Chapter 5, Canto 1) All the foregoing extracts give an impression of continuity and flow of words and ideas. The style is more frequent in the Bhagavad Gita than in the Upanishads. Almost the entire tenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita was composed in this style, which may also be seen in Chapter 9, Sloka 16–18, in Chapter 7, Sloka 8–12, in Chapter 6, Sloka 20–23, in Chapter 12, Sloka 13–19, and Chapter 14, Sloka 23–26. Moreover, the slokas of the Bhagavad Gita give a sense of continuity of thought and ideas, which marks them off 103

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from the sombre precision of the Sermon on the Mount. But their rhythm comes close to Vivekananda’s style in his speeches delivered in India. Hence I conclude that Vivekananda’s style of framing sentences in his speeches delivered in India was influenced by his study of the Sanskrit texts mentioned earlier. According to Miss Margaret Noble, famous in India as Sister Nivedita, Vivekananda quoted nothing but the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita (Noble, My Master, 14–15). Hence it is quite likely that Vivekananda’s use of language could have been influenced by these texts – perhaps more than by the Bible. Consciously or unconsciously, in using the repetitive, circular pattern of long sentences in his speeches delivered in India, Vivekananda authored an ‘Indianized’ style in the English language which readily appealed to the English-educated Indian intelligentsia. As Rammohan before him shifted the Indian argumentative structures in the English language, Vivekananda shifted the Hindu oratorical structure in the English language. This style of inspired oration, initiated in the English language in India by Vivekananda, was echoed from other quarters, national and international: Lokmanya Tilak in his famous speech ‘Freedom Is My Birthright’, Subhas Bose in the legendary speech of 1944, and, interestingly, Martin Luther King’s civil rights speech at the Lincoln Memorial, delivered on 28 August 1963. I quote the following respectively in order to illustrate my point: Freedom is my birthright. So long as it is awake within me I am not old. No weapon can cut this spirit, no fire can burn it, no water can wet it, no wind can dry it. (Tilak, Freedom, 76) Friends, my comrades in the War of Liberation! Today I demand of you one thing, above all. I demand of you blood. It is blood alone that can avenge the blood that the enemy has spilt. It is blood alone that can pay the price of freedom. Give me blood and I promise you freedom. (Bose, Important Speeches, 30) But one hundred years later [a hundred years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln], the negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. (King, 140) The repetitive pattern of sentences is representative of Vivekananda’s stylistics in the speeches delivered in India. Vivekananda made a second trip 104

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to the West in the year 1899. He delivered some memorable lectures in the United States on Raja Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Jnana Yoga, and Karma Yoga.3 But these speeches reveal him as a refined teacher rather than as a powerful orator. The surge of emotions, the poetic quality, and the peculiarity of the framing of sentences are missing in the speeches on the four Yogas. Vivekananda’s sublime words often surprise us with the music of alliteration, although alliterative prose was not in vogue in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Phrases like ‘wending its way’, ‘pure and perennial’, ‘slow and silent’, and ‘Arise, awake’ create an echoing effect. It is noteworthy that the extract from the Brihadaranyak Upanishad I quoted earlier was highly alliterative. In his speech at Ramnad he creates a poetic effect with the repetition of the word ‘beyond’: This continent is illumined with brave and gigantic minds and intelligences which even think of this so-called infinite universe as a mud-puddle; beyond and still beyond they go. Time, even infinite time, is to them but non-existence. Beyond and beyond time they go. Space is nothing to them; beyond that they want to go, and this going beyond the phenomenal is the very soul of religion. (53) Poetic effect has also been created by the similes and the music of words: ‘Slow and silent, as the gentle dew that falls in the morning, unseen and unheard yet producing a most tremendous result, has been the work of this calm, patient, all-suffering, spiritual race upon the world of thought’ (9). Vivekananda’s ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ captured in repetitive phrases and clauses and use of alliteration and similes in the speeches delivered in Colombo and Ramnad segregates his language from the language of the colonizer during the 1890s. As far as this study is concerned I would say, borrowing the words of Certeau, which I have referred to in the first chapter, that it is a part of the ‘jungle of procedures’ (qtd in Krishnaswamy & Burde, 58) through which the colonized individual is strengthened by the language and literature of the colonizer and simultaneously posits her or his own individuality and identity. ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the speeches of Vivekananda is a site where ‘strategies of selfhood’ (Bhabha, Location, 1) have been executed. Vivekananda’s speeches delivered in Chennai and Kumbhakonam further illustrate the phenomenon. In the first few speeches delivered in 1897 in Asia – for example, in Colombo and Ramnad – the style is poetic and sublime, whereas in the speeches delivered in Chennai and Kumbhakonam, we find Vivekananda veering towards colloquialism. Vivekananda’s spontaneous expression of emotion in Chennai is a landmark not only in the history of Indian nationalism but also in the history of English in India. Crossing the periphery of 105

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formal English language, Vivekananda presented a dramatic and conversational style through the recurrence of interrogative sentences building up to a climax: Do you feel? Do you feel that millions and millions of the descendants of gods and of sages have become next-door neighbor to brutes? Do you feel that millions are starving today, and millions have been starving for ages? . . . Does it make you restless? Does it make you sleepless? . . . Are you seized with the one idea of the misery of ruin, and have you forgotten all about your name, your children, your property, even your own bodies? Have you done that? That is the first step to become a patriot, the first step. (Vivekananda, Lectures, 142) The speech marks a decisive moment for the history of the English language in India; the language of the colonizer is adapted to serve as a link language which was essential for the growth of Indian nationalism. Romain Rolland made a special reference to this speech delivered in Chennai (then Madras) while discussing Vivekananda’s contribution to the national movement: If the generation that followed saw, three years after Vivekananda’s death, the revolt of Bengal, the prelude to the great movement of Tilak and Gandhi, if India today has definitely taken part in the collective action of the organized masses, it is due to the initial shock, to the mighty ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ of the Message from Madras. (Rolland, Prophets, 93) Vivekananda’s speech indicates the fact that it was possible to make an emotional appeal to an Indian audience in the English language. Vivekananda’s expression of intense emotion through interrogative sentences forecast a similar expression in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, discussed in Chapter 7 of this book, where it is argued that Gandhi’s expressions forecast the use of Indian English in the dialogues of Indian English novels. Hence there is an attempt made through generations of Indian writers and speakers in English to create a space in the English language for the delineation of Indian psyche and the Indian reality. ‘My ideal of language’, Vivekananda reportedly said, ‘is my master’s language, most colloquial and most expressive’4 (Naik, History, 84). Vivekananda’s language can hardly be called colloquial in the sense that a British author uses colloquialisms in her or his text. However, colloquial expression in an Indian language could be translated into English. Repetition of questions in circumstances of emotional excitement is a common phenomenon in most Indian languages, especially in their oral existence. However, repetition of questions exists in the English language too, in its colloquial discourses. But the last sentence of the passage, where there is a 106

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repetition of a phrase for emphasis, provides an example of mother-tongue interference: ‘This is the first step to become a patriot, the first step!’ A few lexis-bound translations may be noticed, such as ‘life-giving water’ (Lectures, 3) and ‘burning fire of materialism’ (Lectures, 3) in the speech delivered in Colombo. The compound ‘life-giving’ and the phrase ‘burning fire’ are translations of common Bengali expressions. Another such example is ‘language of the mouth’ (Lectures, 50) and ‘imitation-jewels’ (Lectures, 58) in the speech at Ramnad and ‘this little sense-world of three-days’ duration’ (Lectures, 89) in the speech of Kumbhakonam. These are also translations of common Bengali expressions. He ends the speech delivered in Ramnad in yet another lexis-bound translation which can be understood completely by an Indian audience only: ‘Peace, peace, peace, in the name of Hari’ (60). Thus Vivekananda, by impregnating the English language with colloquialism, enriched and widened the acrolectal variety of Indian English. He left behind a legacy of language use which attempted to create a space for the translation of traditional, colloquial, and conversational expressions in Indian languages. I have discussed in the first chapter that in the colonized Indian society, any deviation from Standard British English was viewed as an error. Vivekananda’s spontaneous expressions, in this context, were a big step towards owning the colonizer’s tongue. The translated expressions used by Vivekananda were not used in the ‘public domain’ by writers like Raja Rammohan Roy, Keshab Sen, and Michael Madhusudan Dutt (as discussed in Chapter 3). In Bankimchandra’s English novel, written in 1864, Indianization of the English language occurred out of artistic necessity. However, Bankimchandra could not respond to the necessity wholeheartedly, as discussed in the previous chapter. In Rajmohan’s Wife, Indianized English and Standard British English were not complementary to each other. In Lal Behari Day’s novel Indianization occurred inevitably, perhaps in spite of the author. Both novelists dwelt in tension between the demands of Standard British English and the demands of ‘Indianization’. But the speeches of Vivekananda and the novels of Satthianadhan of the 1890s dwell in a state of harmonious coexistence between Standard English and the demands of Indianization. Thus a gradual acceptability of Indianization of the English language among Indian users is perceptible here. Here it would not be irrelevant to point out the spontaneous use of loanwords in Vivekananda’s speeches. Vivekananda used Indian words quite freely, as the following examples taken from the lecture of Colombo demonstrate: ‘Punya Bhumi’ (3), ‘Karma’ (3 & 7), ‘Sannyasin’ (6), ‘Yuga’ (11), ‘Rishis’ (11), and ‘Bhakti’ (15). Vivekananda’s prose style in his speeches may be precisely described as sublime, poetic, lucid, but highly emotive. The speech at Colombo and at Ramnad began with an outburst of emotion in poetic prose. At the outset of his first speech in Asia in Colombo after his first successful tour of the West, he expressed his gratitude to his well-wishers and for the blessings he 107

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had received. Then he went on to describe India – the passage has already been quoted– as the only place under the sun which can be called the ‘blessed Punya Bhumi’. At once, the listeners as well as the readers of his speech are carried away by a torrent of emotion. The intensity of the torrent hardly subsides until the end of the speech. The thought of India being a holy land or ‘Punya Bhumi’ had never been given a better and grander expression than what Vivekananda gave. The speech delivered at Ramnad begins with a magnificent description of the breaking of daylight: The longest night seems to be passing away, the sorest trouble seems to be coming to an end at last, the seeming corpse appears to be awaking and a voice is coming to us – away back where history and even tradition fails to peep into the gloom of the past, coming down from there, reflected as it were from peak to peak of the infinite Himalaya of knowledge, and of love, and of work, India, this motherland of ours – a voice is coming unto us, gentle, firm, and yet unmistakable in its utterances, and is gaining volume as days pass by, and behold, the sleeper is awakening! (Lectures, 50) The passage sounds poetic and for Vivekananda’s listeners it would have sounded more like poetry than prose. At the same time it seems that the orator, like an accomplished performer of Indian classical music, has created here a morning raga5 in language. Vivekananda performed spontaneously, amplifying the mood of the dawn and connecting it with the theme of India’s reawakening. It is a passage that instils the reader with confidence and at the same time resists the colonial discourse which looks down upon Indian culture as inferior and superstitious. Tarun Goswami wrote that ‘Narendra [Vivekananda’] was a trained classical singer who was trained by Benimadhab Sarbadhikari (popularly known as Beni Ustad)’ (58). However, Vivekananda’s musical aptitude (and its relation with his linguistic and oratorical skill) is itself a broad and a separate research area. Vivekananda’s speeches did not end in poetic vision. He generally gave a fairly clear idea of what the Indians might or should do, what should be learnt from the West and what not. For example, the long speech at Kumbhakonam did not end in the note of renunciation, although he glorified its value. The speaker carried his listeners to another emotional crescendo as he transcreated a line from Kathopanishad into the following: ‘Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached. Arise, awake! Awake from this hypnotism of weakness’ (Vivekananda, 105). The lines follow a quotation from the Kathopanishad: ‘Uttisthat jagrata prapya barannibodhata’ (Chapter 1, Canto 3, Sloka 14). It is noteworthy that the characteristic repetitive style of Vivekananda discussed earlier is present in this transcreation, although it is not present in the statement of the Upanishad. Here, one cannot also 108

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fail to be reminded of the pithy and powerful utterance of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost Bk I: ‘Arise, awake, or be for ever fall’n’ (line 330). From the thematic point of view, Vivekananda had touched upon a delicate point where East had met West, where the two literary discourses had come close even before Vivekananda uttered those words. From the stylistic point of view, Vivekananda uttered those powerful words in his distinct manner and stirred his listeners, like Demosthenes did thousands of years ago, out of their mental stupor. It is also noteworthy that the first two words of the statement of Kathopanishad are translated as ‘Arise, awake’. But the latter part of the sentence, prapya barannibodhata (meaning ‘learn from the best of men’), is replaced by the clause ‘and stop not till the goal is reached’. This change is relevant in the context of the urge for a nationalist self-consciousness in the late nineteenth century. Thus, Vivekananda merged nationalism with a Vedic discourse. In fact, the political aspect of Vivekananda’s speeches needs to be discussed a little more in order to comprehend his contribution to the legacy of ‘Indianization’ of the English language. Although Vivekananda consciously distanced himself from contemporary politics,6 the speeches delivered in India reveal the nationalistic aspect of Vivekananda very conspicuously. In the words of Subhas Bose, ‘So far at least as Bengal is concerned, Swami Vivekananda may be regarded as the spiritual father of the modern national movement’ (Bose, Indian Struggle, 22). Romain Rolland’s observation on the speech at Chennai (quoted earlier) is also significant here. Vivekananda fused the patriotic spirit of the Europeans with the universal truth he found in the Vedanta. In Vivekananda’s speeches, Indian nationalism as well as Indian English becomes real. The Indianness of the speeches consists not only in the stylistics of Sanskrit literature, not only in the use of vernacular words and phrases, but also in the construction of an ‘Indian’ or, more precisely, a Hindu nationalist discourse. Vivekananda made English function in a new register, hitherto unknown to the colonized mass of people. Subodh Chandra Sengupta, who argued that the emergence of fearless freedom fighters such as Jyotindranath Mukherjee was due to the spread of Vivekananda’s message of patriotism (114–115), pointed out the way Vivekananda was interpreted by British administrators. Charles Tegart, a police commissioner in the early twentieth century, opined in a confidential report that more than Vivekananda’s followers, Vivekananda’s own writings were ‘pregnant with sedition’ (Sengupta, 65). Sengupta commented, ‘This is a very correct estimate which will be acceptable to all, provided we are allowed to replace “sedition” with “patriotism”’ (65). In the academic world, Englisheducated Indians were familiar with the ideals of Renaissance humanism and Romanticism, owing to their proximity to English literary works. But in the sociopolitical world, they were accustomed to colonial discourses either of the type constructed by Macaulay,7 or that by administrators like Curzon, or that of the Christian missionaries who throughout the nineteenth 109

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century attacked Indian religion and culture from their ‘rational outlook’ (Majumdar, R.C., ‘Great Saint’, 268), and the Indian educated middle class, according to R.C. Majumdar, ‘had always been on the defensive and their attitude was mostly apologetic’ (268). According to Longinus, ‘[T]hat which is admirable ever confounds the judgment and eclipses that which is merely reasonable and agreeable’ (On the Sublime, Chapter 4, n.p.). In fact, Vivekananda eclipsed colonial discourses (e.g., those of colonial administrators and Christian missionaries) which were based on prejudices in the guise of cold reason. I would like to argue that Vivekananda’s sublime oratory posited a difference from the discourse which empowered, in the words of Partha Chatterjee, the ‘ideals of reason and rational religion’ (40). Sankara Menon, who had been the president of the Madras theosophists’ educational centre at Kalakshetra, reminisced about the indifference of the colonizers towards Indian art and culture: They wouldn’t know what the Bhagavad Gita contained, what the Upanishads contained, what the Zend Avesta contained. They did not know any Indian art, in spite of the great art that there is. Today everybody comes from the West to hear our music and see our dancing; but in those days, no Englishman would come to see any of those things, absolutely not. They thought that it was infra dig to do so, that they would lose caste if they did. (Qtd in Masani, 72) In the face of colonial cynicism, Vivekananda provided the Indians with an alternate attitude and discourse, which was composed in English but had a distinct Indian character owing to its content of Vedanta philosophy and its appeal to the emotion, owing to its celebration of Indian spiritual and religious heritage, and owing to its Indianized prose style. In the Colombo speech, the metaphorical vision of India as the ‘last home’ for all souls (understandably of all castes and creeds) attaches a value and utility to India’s rich spiritual heritage. When Vivekananda defined ‘India’ in concrete terms in his speech in Colombo, it was a moment of outburst, of feelings and passions for the speaker as well as for the listeners. Vivekananda found what the nation was searching for: its identity and nationhood. That there was a search for a nationhood in India is evident in Bhudev Mukhopadhyay’s Samajik Probondho, the fifth edition of which was published in 1892. Mukhopadhyay started his book with an anecdote of the author’s conversation with an Irish gentleman. The European was of the opinion that any attempt to form nationalism without having independence was vain, while the author replied that the attempt to form nationalism was itself a search for freedom (Mukhopadhyay, B., 1). Mukhopadhyay can be called a precursor of Vivekananda as he pointed out the culture of tolerance and hospitality ingrained in the Hindu religion as one of the unifying forces of India, 110

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while at the same time categorizing the positives and negatives of Western civilization. In Satthianadhan’s autobiographical novel Saguna– we have seen in the previous chapter – the protagonist expressed resentment towards surrender of one’s identity to Western culture, but she could not define what constituted the Indian character. For Vivekananda India as a nation was a reality as real as his own person. He spoke of the organic unity of India, of which he himself became a symbol owing to the nationwide as well as international fame and trust he earned. Hence Vivekananda’s listeners were all ears when he asserted the nationhood of India. As far as the speaker himself was concerned, that there was a deep urge on the part of Vivekananda to penetrate the soul of the Indian masses is evident in the foregoing quotation, where he intended to send an ‘electric thrill’ through the ‘national veins’. Interestingly, Vivekananda was conscious of the fact that a link language could play an instrumental role in the consolidation of Indian nationalism, provided there was an inner unity among the masses. After his death, Sister Nivedita remembered her master’s concept of national integration: To his sound judgment the idea that two pice postage, cheap travel, and a common language of affairs could create a national unity was obviously childish and superficial. These things could only be made to serve India’s turn if she already possessed a deep organic unity of which they might conveniently become an expression. (Basu, Vivekananda, 274) Vivekananda not only discovered that ‘organic unity’ but also made the ‘common language of affairs’ serve India’s turn. Thus the development of Indian nationalism and that of Indian English were complementary to each other. For a colonized community, to deliver a speech in the colonizer’s tongue is itself an act of seizing the master’s power. It also allows the speaker and the listeners to assert their identity and boost their confidence in the colonial set of affairs. The speaker becomes an alternative of the colonial ruler. The British were seen by Asians as, to borrow Orwell’s phrase, ‘the white man with his gun’ (Orwell, ‘Shooting’, 194); the spoken word never had been their forte in the East, although Edmund Burke was well known through print media. Hence a gifted orator like Vivekananda, championing Indian culture and heritage in the West and then in his motherland, came as a revelation. In south India, when Vivekananda landed in 1897 after his first tour of the West, he had little choice other than English in which to address the audience, since he was not proficient in the south Indian languages.8 On the other hand, English came as a spontaneous choice for Vivekananda as he addressed his audience in English in Kolkata and Dhaka (Lectures, 238–294 & 404–419). The speeches of Vivekananda, as well as of those discussed in this chapter and the next, are instances of what E. Boehmer defined as postcoloniality: ‘that condition in which colonized people seek 111

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to take their place, forcibly or otherwise, as historical agents in an increasingly globalised world’ (3). Quite obviously they appealed to the Englisheducated mass of the Indian people, which was thin but widely distributed in the Indian subcontinent. The literacy figures, according to Sumit Sarkar, were ‘only 1 percent for English and 6 percent for vernaculars’ even in 1911. (Sarkar, Modern India, 66). However, other statistics show that the circulation of English dailies ‘climbed from 90000 in 1885 to 276,000 in 1905’ (Sarkar, Modern India, 65). On the whole, the success of Vivekananda as an orator in English in India was a big boost for the English language in India as well as for the ‘Indianization’ of the language. While the speeches of Vivekananda left an immediate impact upon the listeners and the society at large, the speeches of Tagore did not have as immediate and as wide an appeal as those of Vivekananda. But among scholars and critics the fame and relevance of his speeches are increasing day by day. To some extent circumstances compelled Tagore to become a speaker. H.D. Sharma observed that the chief motivation behind Tagore’s speeches was to raise funds for his university (117). Sisir Kumar Das, in his introduction to the third volume of The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, made a more important observation, that Rabindranath actually shouldered the responsibility of ‘representing India to the world’ (16), after Keshab Sen and Vivekananda. Both observations suggest a situation which the poet could hardly avoid. Both observations refer to the speeches Tagore delivered abroad in English. But the speeches Tagore delivered in India are not few in number. Moreover they are born from another sense of responsibility for the poet. In the twentieth century he was acclaimed as ‘Gurudev’9 throughout India and hailed as such by Gandhi himself. He had to play the role of a friend, philosopher, and guide to the nationalists, especially since his worldwide renown after 1913. His speeches delivered in India in the twentieth century may be seen in the context of his stature as ‘Gurudev’. The chief medium of communication in his role as ‘Gurudev’ of the nation was English. Realizing the indispensability of the English language, he even translated some of his own speeches into English, his address to Subhas Bose being one of them. Besides his lectures on nationalism and the famous lecture ‘Crisis in Civilization’, his letters to Gandhi and his articles on Gandhi’s methods were important contributions to the discourse of nationalism in the early twentieth century. It can be seen how English the ‘weapon’ (Ashcroft, Griffith, & Tiffin, 4) of imperial rule could be used by Tagore to communicate his messages of universal truth and his own sense of nationalism and internationalism. Moreover, the speeches ‘Gurudev’ delivered in India constitute a body of literature which shows a significant part of the history of ‘Indianization’ of the English language. Tagore, unlike the other orators discussed in this thesis, used to compose his speeches and addresses before he delivered them to his audience. One advantage of that for us is that we do not have to depend upon the 112

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short-hand writers or reporters for their authenticity. But perhaps the poet never saw himself as an orator. In a statement to the press in Munich in July 1930, Tagore reportedly said, ‘My poetry is for my countrymen, my paintings are my gift to the West’ (Dutta & Robinson, 287). What about his speeches? Within his speeches he often doubted his own authority as a speaker: ‘From time to time he would cry out in exasperation: “I am only a poet”’ (Das, ‘Introduction’, 3:17). In his presidential address at the first Indian Philosophical Congress in 1925, he begins thus: ‘My timidity makes it difficult for me properly to enjoy the honour you have done me today by offering a chair which I cannot legitimately call as my own’ (559). Interestingly philosophy had been the subject matter of many of his speeches. Although his reputation as a speaker rests mainly on Sadhana, Religion of Man, Nationalism, and Crisis in Civilization, all of which were delivered abroad, I am going to examine two of his speeches delivered in India: his English translation of his address to Subhas Chandra Bose written in May 1939 and the presidential address at the first Indian Philosophical Congress held on 19 December 1925, titled ‘The Philosophy of Our People’. In these speeches Tagore appears free from the burden of ‘representing’ Indian culture; he is more emotional (especially in his address to Bose) and more informal than the dignified impersonality of his speeches abroad. But the reason I selected the speeches delivered in India is the same as the reason in the case of Swami Vivekananda. Since my focus is on the communion of the Indian mind and the English language, the communion which aided the spirit of nationalism and which also made the emergence of Indian English possible, I have examined the speeches delivered for an Indian audience and maintained the principle for all the speakers discussed in this book. But before I discuss the texts I need to contextualize my discussion with the wide range of discussions and criticisms that Tagore as a writer in English has evoked until today. Tagore shot to fame in the West with the publication of Gitanjali in English, although his fame was ‘by 1916 already on the decline’ (Trivedi, H., ‘Introduction’, a1). The decline, according to critics and scholars, was due to Tagore’s English translations of his own poems. Tagore himself ratified the idea in a letter written in 1921: In my translations I timidly avoid all difficulties, which has the effect of making them smooth and thin . . . When I began this career of falsifying my own coins I did it in play. Now I am becoming frightened of its enormity and am willing to make a confession of my misdeeds. (Qtd in Trivedi, H., ‘Introduction’, a1) Although Tagore did not approve of his method of translations, the word ‘play’ suggests that writing in English was not an onerous task but a joyful activity. Tagore was in fact the first writer of prose poems in English. Later, 113

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he did similar experimentation in Bangla poetry, such as in Shes Saptak. Sisir Kumar Das, in his introductions to The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, discusses Tagore as a writer of English. From his viewpoint Rabindranath did not choose English but ‘it was a compulsion arising out of the predicaments faced by the speakers of “minor” languages anywhere in the world’ (‘Introduction’, 3: 15). According to Sisir Kumar Das, To achieve the status of a major language, it must be associated with power: political, economic and ideological. None of the Indian languages, despite their language and distinguished literary tradition and enormous large number of speakers, is a ‘major’ language. (‘Introduction’, 1: 17) Dyson also analyzed the predicament of Tagore when she asked her reader to imagine what a tragedy it would have been if Shakespeare had to translate his works into French or Latin to become famous (Dyson, 42–43). Therefore, according to Das and Dyson, Tagore did not choose English but choosing English was inevitable due to historical reasons. However, although Das’s and Dyson’s lines of argument are impeccable, writing in English could not have been a sorry predicament for Tagore. Since his childhood Tagore had revolted against activities which did not bring joy to the soul.10 Hence compulsion or circumstance alone could not have driven him to engage himself in creative work in English. I think that writing in English must have brought certain joy and sense of fulfilment to Tagore. A bilingual writer has a duality of existence. For Tagore his existence as a writer of English was perhaps a channel of reaching the distant because in one of his songs he says, ‘Ami chanchalo hey, ami sudurer piyasi [I’m full of quick spirits, I am all thirst for the distant]’ (Gitabitan, 398). In his speech on the occasion of acceptance of the Nobel Prize Tagore said that he felt a great urge to reach out to the West: ‘And I felt a great desire to come out and come into touch with the Humanity of the West, for I was conscious that the present age belongs to the Western man with his super abundance of energy’ (19). Sisir Kumar Das himself related Tagore’s engagement with English with the poet’s love for the distant. In 1932, the poet retrospectively turns back to 1912 when he set off for Europe with the mentality of a pilgrim: ‘[I]t was to know this great humanity, the ever-awake spirit of man that one day I took leave of my home for a far away pilgrimage to Europe in the year 1912’ (qtd in Das, ‘Introduction’, 3: 17). The first translations of Gitanjali, better to say transcreations, were completed on board this voyage to England. They were works of joyful inspiration rather than ‘compulsion’, as Sisir Kumar Das or K.K. Dyson might have us believe. Based on the foregoing argument I would like to argue that in his role as ‘Gurudev’, in his role as an enthusiastic critique of Indian nationalism, English was also associated with his love for his country, with his urge to communicate with the humanity of India beyond Bengal. That Tagore 114

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translated his address to Subhas Bose underlines the urge for communion with the Indian people at large. Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay reported that the speech remained undelivered and unpublished, although it had been printed (181). Mukhopadhyay observed that the speech, full of adulation for Subhas Bose, at a time when Bose had just resigned from presidentship of the Indian National Congress, was an indirect criticism of the Congress and guessed that Tagore’s well-wishers in Santiniketan had a role in suppressing the speech (181). In other words, Tagore’s well-wishers did not want ‘Gurudev’ to be politically incorrect. Whatever may be the reason behind the speech not getting published, it is my contention that Tagore’s act of translation suggests his urge for participating with the nationwide enthusiasm about Subhas Bose. It is interesting that in the entire speech Tagore identified himself as a Bengali and hailed Subhas Bose as a role model for every Bengali, yet at the end of his speech he raised his line of thought to the level of nationality, to the interconnectedness of Bengal with the rest of the nation. In Tagore’s holistic vision each feeling and each incident are part of a cosmic rhythm. In the words of Dyson, ‘His Upanishadic background made him constantly aware of the interconnectedness of all things in the cosmos’ (‘Introduction’, 17). ‘As Bengal’s poet’ (‘To Subhas’, 716), Tagore addressed Bose as a source of inspiration for Bengalis. However, Tagore must have felt that his address had a national importance, which is why he translated the address. Bengal is also a part of India, the ‘punyatirtha’,11 and her love for Subhas is but a part of the national zeal for fighting for freedom. The speech was composed soon after Subhas Bose resigned from the post of president of the Indian National Congress in 1939 (Das, ed., ‘English Writings’, 3: 979), when Bose was becoming increasingly popular in India. Tagore, who in his famous speech ‘Crisis in Civilization’ said that worship for God and mankind was greater than worship for the country, did not hide his ‘provincial pride’ (Tagore, ‘To Subhas’, 716) for young Subhas Chandra, whose ‘strength of character’ could transform ‘troubles’ into ‘allies’ and ‘obstacles’ into the ‘ladder of your success’ (‘To Subhas’, 716). Tagore hails Subhas not only as the leader of the country but also as a role model for all Bengalis: ‘We, in Bengal, need to emulate this strength of character more than anything else’ (‘To Subhas’, 716). Subhas was seen as the redeemer of the character of the Bengali young man who was ‘idle’ by nature and ‘finds a peculiar pleasure in sitting in opposition and refuting the other man’s viewpoint in the pride of his sterile intellect’ (‘To Subhas’, 717). He hoped that the idle Bengali would be initiated to a path of adventure: ‘It is with the hope that you will uphold our courage that I now call upon you to lead us in the path of this dare-devil adventure’ (‘To Subhas’, 717). The entire speech is interspersed with this enthusiasm. This enthusiasm could be shared on a national level as the whole nation was enthusiastic about Bose. Tagore was speaking ‘[a]s Bengal’s poet’ (716) and on behalf of ‘[w]e, in Bengal’ (716). A Bengali nationalistic consciousness is evident in his concern for 115

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‘[o]ur economy’ (716) and ‘[o]ur politics’ (716). Yet, at the end of his speech he anticipated– perhaps –being misunderstood and hence added: Let no one misapprehend that in my provincial pride I want to separate Bengal from the rest of India or that I want to place anybody on a seat of rivalry with the Mahatma who has brought in a new age in the realm of politics and has thus made India’s name famous in the comity of nations. My appeal is being made today because I want Bengal fully and substantially to co-operate with India and because I want this valuable co-operation to bear real fruit. (Tagore, ‘To Subhas’, 718) Hence, it is in Bengal’s substantial contribution to India wherein lies the redemption of Bengal as a nation within nation. This speech thus offers an opportunity for us to see how the English tongue was used to voice the Bengali’s complex identity, his passion and anxiety. While translating, Tagore kept intact the Bengali passion and emotion with very limited deviation from Standard English, but adapting it well for a negotiation between his ‘provincial pride’ and nationalistic feelings. This and other such creative aspects of Tagore as a writer of English have not been explored enough. Critics still often walk on the beaten track of comparison between Tagore’s English and his Bangla. Das’s discussion of Tagore’s English is fraught with contrast with Tagore’s Bangla. The predictable conclusion of one’s superiority over the other was inescapable for Das: ‘As a creative writer [in Bangla] he governed the language, but as an Indian messenger [in English] he was governed by the language . . . it [English] was a language of communication only, not a language of communion’ (Das, ‘Introduction’, 3: 17–19). The suggestion was obvious that Bangla, not English, was the language of communion, that Tagore used English not as a ‘creative writer’ but as a ‘messenger’. My discussion begins where Das ends. I venture to see Rabindranath as a creative user of the English language, to see Tagore’s English prose as a way of communion with the people of his country beyond the linguistic borders of Bangla. Amit Chaudhuri, in his contribution to An Illustrated History of Indian Writing in English, also stepped on the beaten track, although with different conclusions: [I]t is his English, the language of his public and international persona, that is shaped by his cultural confusion, personal drives, inspirations, and limitations, more nakedly than his Bengali where the formal accomplishment at first conceals these contradictions; and these contradictions at least partly hold the key to an understanding of Tagore’s achievement, his marginalization in the West, and his continuing interest in us today. (115) 116

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I think Chaudhuri’s argument needs to be supported by linguistic analysis in order to be valid. It has to be explored whether or how far ‘formal accomplishment’ is proportionally related to manifestation of ‘contradictions’. Moreover, the matter is sociolinguistically relevant. A bilingual writer, when writing in the second language, has her or his own reasons and goals to fulfil; she or he derives a new pleasure in indulging in creative activity in the second language. From this perspective to say that Tagore’s inner ‘contradictions’ are manifested more ‘nakedly’ in his English writings would be too naïve. Moreover, there is no explanation why the ‘language of his public and international persona’ would reveal his ‘contradictions’ more ‘nakedly’ than the language, understandably, of his personal and regional persona. However, as far as Tagore’s success in the West and also his ‘marginalization’ are concerned, it was not only for the English translations of his own poems but also because Tagore as a Bangla writer was unknown in the West. In fact, in the West a misconception prevailed for a long time, as experienced by Dyson, that Tagore was an English poet. Dyson had first-hand experience: ‘No wonder that recently I met an academic from Britain visiting Tagore’s university at Santiniketan, who thought that Tagore actually wrote his poems in English’ (Dyson, 43). There are other reasons for this misunderstanding, as one English edition of his poems ‘did not even mention that the contents are translations’ (Dyson, 43). Anyway, I think comparing Tagore’s English with his Bangla kept critics like Chaudhuri and Das from seeing Tagore as an Indian writer in English in a clear light, which might enable one to assess the place of Tagore in Indian writing in English – also to assess his contribution to the development of Indian English. While Chaudhuri forcefully tried to stress the importance of Tagore’s English in understanding him, Das viewed Tagore’s English as a poor shadow of his Bangla. To assess Tagore as an Indian writer in English is not a part of my programme just now, but within a very brief area of two of his speeches I would like to assess how Indian English was taking shape in the words of Tagore. And now, I may resume my discussion of the texts which I have already begun while discussing Tagore’s urge to communicate with the mass of humanity beyond the borders of Bengal. At the very outset of his address to Subhas Bose, Tagore recalled the promise made in the Bhagavad Gita: ‘God the preserver, says the Gita, incarnates Himself whenever need arises to protect the meek and chastise the wicked’ (‘To Subhas’, 716). Tagore thus rendered the matter of the Bhagavad Gita in Standard English. The word ‘meek’, an element of Christian discourse, became the equivalent of Sanskrit ‘sadhunang’ (Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 4, ‘Gyanjog’). The sentence has a typical English precision. But soon Bangla intruded into the English frontier. While narrating the plight of his country, Tagore said, ‘Trodden down under the heel of foreign domination, her energies dissipated by ever deepening clouds’ (716). Instead of ‘Trodden down by foreign domination’, which would have been precise and Standard English, 117

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the phrase ‘under the heel’ reflects not only an influence of a Bengali way of speech but also the anguish of a colonized and brutalized nation. Interestingly, the lexis-bound translation also occurs in one of Vivekananda’s speeches: ‘It was because he [the Brahmin] did not open this treasury [of knowledge] to the people from the beginning, that for a thousand years we have been trodden under the heels of every one who chose to come to India’ (Lectures, 228). In Tagore’s English verse, critics and scholars have noticed biblical overtones rather than the influence of Bangla or any other Indian manner of expression. But in his translation of his address to Subhas Bose although the biblical discourse is used at the very outset a very prominent Indian discourse emerges in the speech. Tagore used a host of images which are Indian in character, the most beautiful of them being the image of dawn and its association with sadhana: Subhas Chandra, I have watched you from afar when you first began your penance for the country. In that dawn of your sadhana, in the uncertain twilight, I was assailed by misgivings about you  .  .  .  Today you are revealed in the clear light of the midday sun – there is no room for doubt to darken the sky. (716) It is relevant that Subhas Bose is here seen not as a warrior but as a sadhak– that is, a person engaged in ‘sadhana’. In using this word Tagore had reasserted and reinterpreted an aspect of Indian culture and simultaneously enriched the English language because the word can hardly be translated into English. The word ‘sadhana’ is used in Indian languages with a wide connotation: a wholehearted pursuit of any discipline is a sadhana, be it music, arts, poetry, science, or even sports, and all such sadhanas are journeys towards perfection. Life itself is a sadhana towards peace and happiness or ‘mukti’ or ‘nirvana’ – the goal being defined in various ways. Hence for Indian readers, it is not a far-fetched conceit to describe a patriot’s activities as sadhana. Herein the discourse of nationalism is raised to the level of internationalism as the patriot’s sadhana has a relevance and dimension beyond national boundaries. Although the image of ‘dawn’ is used metaphorically – ‘in that dawn of your sadhana’ means ‘in the early days of your activities as a patriot’ – the image is closely linked with the idea of sadhana as early morning or dawn, according to Indian faith and practice, is the best time for learning and practising anything. The image of the ‘clear light of the midday sun’ as a model of clarity – in the foregoing quote – is quite common in Indian languages. Hence for an Indian reader the sentence seems to be the reflection of its original Bangla counterpart. The image of the dawn returns near the end of the speech, where Tagore defined the ‘real and natural leaders’: ‘They belong to all men of all times. They stand on the crest 118

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of the present and are the very first to bow in obeisance to the first purple rays that usher the dawning future’ (718). The image alludes automatically to an old Hindu ritual and Indians are quite acquainted with it. Hence the religious dimension of the image is automatically shared by the readers. The word ‘sadhana’ also returns as the poet draws towards the conclusive part: ‘Through your sadhana let Bengal’s self-dedication be true and noble, let her lamps of offering shine with her own true light’ (719). The phrase ‘lamps of offering’ has also a ritualistic atmosphere with which all Indian readers can easily correlate. In Tagore’s vision the struggle for freedom is noblest when it is a ‘sadhana’, and herein lies Tagore’s deep affinity with Mahatma Gandhi. Tagore is here not ‘governed by the language’, as Sisir Kumar Das argued (‘Introduction’, 3: 17), but he beautifully harmonizes the Indian sensibility and thought with the English tongue. The negotiation between East and West in the sphere of language in this text was indicative of the possibilities of the English language in India. Further, the Indian images and the lexical shifts have robbed much of the alienness of the English language to the Indian reader. The English language was in the process of developing an Indian identity. In one of the sentences in the speech, the main clause ‘Bengal’s destiny is today darkened by ever deepening clouds’ (716) reflects the exuberance of emotion through imagery of clouds and the use of consonance, which is deep-rooted in Indian culture.12 Alliteration, a prominent characteristic feature of his Bangla poems, pervades most of Tagore’s English writings and gives them a poetic rhythm. In the same paragraph we have been discussing so far, we have an example of assonance: ‘[O]ut of the very throes of the body politic is the leader born’. We have alliterative phrases like ‘flag of fearless freedom’ (717) and ‘springtime of sprouting hopes’ (718) and clauses like ‘the scimitar sought to sever the body politic of Bengal’ (717), which are not out of place with the emotional content of the speaker. Here it is worthwhile to point out that alliterative prose was not in vogue in the twentieth-century English literary world. But Tagore deviated a little from the beaten track of Standard English to do justice to the feelings which defined the times. In the year 1939 political dissensions among the nationalistic leaders were stronger than ever, but the British administration was fast losing all moral support to rule, which was to find vent in the Quit India movement. The emotional upsurge needed some deviations from the conventions of modern English prose, which was characterized by precision and economy of expression, a chief exponent of which was Bernard Shaw. Hence Tagore’s style in this speech which incorporated a resonance of sound in harmony with the emotions was out of date as far as modern British prose was concerned but was very much in tune with the modern Indian political situation. Interestingly, in his speeches abroad we do not find this quality to a great extent. Tagore was ever critical of jingoistic and destructive aspects of nationalism; in his famous essay ‘Crisis in Civilization’ he placed humanism above the worship 119

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of country. Yet when it came to addressing a local hero of national stature, he did express his emotions in poetic prose. Besides the alliterative quality Tagore’s address to Bose is metaphorical. Metaphorical phrases like ‘flag of fearless freedom’ and ‘hairsplitting arguments’ (717) and metonymical clauses like ‘the impending blow of the scimitar which sought to sever the body-politic of Bengal’ (717) constitute the poetic texture. The phrase ‘hairsplitting arguments’ is again a lexis-bound translation from Bangla; phrases like ‘death-triumphing hope’ (717) indicate not only the growing tendency of shifts from vernacular languages but also the Indians’ knack of forming compound words in English. Tagore’s speech demonstrates that notwithstanding the popular misgivings about the English language, deep emotions and anguish were expressed in the English language, even by those who shared the misgivings.13 In his presidential address entitled ‘The Philosophy of Our People’ Tagore elaborated on Indian philosophy which is not imprisoned in books and scriptures but which permeates Indian life and culture – the philosophy of the ‘people’ of India. A major part of the essay is actually taken from the thirteenth chapter of Religion of Man, and the interpolations are well integrated so that the speech does not lack in organic unity. Here, we find an Indian writer of English who is not weighed down by the ‘compulsion’ of writing in English but a jubilant soul who triumphantly exploited the cultural richness of the East and the West while quoting from Shelley, Keats, and the Upanishad and from different branches of Indian folk literature in his own translation. Tagore’s speech is a stitch-work of diverse poetic patterns in relatively little texture of prose. In the Tagore of 19 December 1925, the day when the speech was delivered, we find an Indian writer in English who had reconciled within himself the best of the East with the West, who was privileged with Indian roots on the one hand and deep knowledge and love for European literature on the other. Besides the literature of the academic world Tagore quoted from Kabir, the renowned medieval poet of the Bhakti cult whose ‘dohas’ are now the interest of scholars. He also referred to operas he saw in an obscure village of India and quoted from songs of unknown wanderers – songs which Tagore did not discover with the zeal of a scholar but those which he heard from a ferryman on a boat or ‘from my roadside window . . . remaining inscribed in my memory’ (561). Poetry is beyond the periphery of my argument, and hence I would desist from a fullfledged discussion of Tagore’s translations of Indian folk literature which he used in this speech. Tagore began his lecture with his characteristic humility, mentioned already in this chapter. In a joking spirit he said that he thought of avoiding ‘the risk’ of presiding over philosophers ‘with the help of the doctor’s certificate’ (559). Obviously, Tagore did not need a ‘doctor’s certificate’ to certify his illness. He could have simply conveyed a message. But perhaps he did not miss the opportunity to dig at the hypocrisy prevailing in the academic 120

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world. From the perspective of language and expression the statement is relevant for us. Here we have an instance of a shared knowledge conveyed in a link language. Almost all Indians belonging to the world of academics and offices of business and administration are acquainted with the culture of avoiding responsibility with a ‘doctor’s certificate’. Hence the statement of Tagore is indicative of the emergence of morphological features peculiar to the Indian’s use of English. However, these Indianisms are not the product of innovative or strategic use but emerge automatically as a result of the peculiarity of context. Tagore, in using the shared knowledge, increased the currency of such expression. More such expressions can be cited. As he entered his subject of discussion Tagore said that he, as a poet, derived his confidence to speak in a philosophers’ meeting from the fact that in India ‘all the vidyas– poesy as well as philosophy – live in a joint family’ (559). Most Indians today are not aware of the fact that the phrase ‘joint family’ is not English but Indian English, being an example of lexis-bound translation from Bangla. In Bangla there is the compound term ‘joutha [joint]paribaar[family]’. Besides ‘joint family’ we also have ‘nuclear family’ (the inherent scientific metaphor is worthy of note) in India – the latter being a recent contribution. But for a Westerner, needless to say, a family is a family, neither joint nor fragmented nor nuclear. In this clause the use of the loanword ‘vidyas’ was appropriate as ‘vidya’ is not a subject but knowledge and skill on a particular subject. The word also means ‘wisdom’ in general. Later Tagore used the terms ‘vidya’ and ‘avidya’ in the special Upanishadic significance of ‘knowledge of the Brahma’ and ignorance which ‘causes our disunion with our surroundings’ (566) respectively. In Tagore’s speech, we find a few Indian words with English endings, like ‘pundits’ gathering’ (560) and Vedic Rishi (560). In the phrase ‘pundits’ gathering’, we have an English plural ending suffixed to an Indian word, of which we have plenty of examples in Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife (cited in Chapter 3). In the latter, there is an English suffix with an Indian word. Thus ‘Vedic’ is formed in parity with ‘romantic’, ‘nationalistic’, and so on. It is not important who first used such novelties in expressions as those which are discussed earlier. It is important that they have come into use by creative men and women, of which Rabindranath was a representative and an important contributor to the development of Indian English. Tagore used quite a few Sanskrit words and a few words common to many Indian languages, like ‘advaitam’ and ‘mukti’, a number of times – words which helped to denote his own ideas of unity and freedom, ‘the ajab, the anirvachaniya’ (565), ‘anantam’ (565). Altogether Tagore’s discussion negotiated between Eastern and Western patterns of discourses. For example, he used a metaphor deriving the comparison from science while discussing the role of folk literature in India: Operas based upon legendary poems, recitations and story-telling by trained men, the lyrical wealth of the popular literature distributed 121

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far and wide by the agency of mendicant singers, – these are clouds that help to irrigate the minds of the people with the ideas which in their original form belonged to difficult doctrines of metaphysics. (562) Again, while concluding on the subject of ‘satyam’ and ‘anandam’, we see an intertextual reference to Keats: ‘In the world of art, our consciousness being freed from the tangle of self-interest, we gain an unobstructed vision of unity, the incarnation of the real, which is a joy for ever’ (563). But Tagore in the same discussion dissociated an English word from its cultural history and gave an Indian orientation to it, leading not to semantic change but an extension of significance. After referring to a prayer in the Upanishad (‘Asato ma sadgamaya’) in his own translation, ‘Lead us from the unreal to Reality’, Tagore continues: ‘For satyam is anandam, the real is joy’ (563). Throughout the discussion, Tagore dissociated the word ‘real’ from the context of modernism and realism and invested it with the Upanishadic significance of the Sanskrit sat. The clause ‘the real is joy’ and the phrase ‘the incarnation of the real’ are two examples of that. This type of semantic change, or to say more precisely, semantic extension, has taken place in later times. A very well-known example of this type of semantic extension is the word ‘secular’,14 which has been included in the preamble of the Indian Constitution with the new significance. Tagore used the two words ‘mukti’ and ‘freedom’ a number of times in his speech, sometimes interchangeably, investing a broader significance to both, releasing ‘mukti’ from the narrow significance of freedom from the cycle of birth and death to imply freedom from the bondage of attachment and ignorance (‘avidya’) leading to the disinterested joy of the ‘real’. Simultaneously he invested ‘freedom’ with the annexed significance of ‘mukti’: ‘Freedom is not in emptiness of its contents, it is in the harmony of communication through which we find no obstruction in realizing our own being in the surrounding world’ (566). Further, Tagore’s discourse of freedom became a critique of materialism: I myself have come across a fisherman singing with an inward absorption of mind, while fishing all day in the Ganges, who was pointed out to me by my boatmen, with awe, as a man of liberated spirit. He is out of the reach of the conventional prices which are set upon men by society, and which classify them like toys arranged in the shop-windows according to the market standard of value. (564) The contrast between the world of the ‘liberated spirit’ singing on the Ganges and the world of ‘conventional prices’ and ‘shop-windows’ presents with poetic effect the contrast between the spiritual aspect of the ancient East 122

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and the material aspect of the modern West. The phrase ‘liberated spirit’ is another variation on the theme of ‘freedom’ and ‘mukti’ and another instance where not a word but a phrase is invested with new meanings, for Tagore is talking of liberation not in the physical sense but in the Indian philosophical sense of liberation from attachment. The discussion inevitably encroaches upon the topical discourse of the nation’s dream of political independence or Swaraj – the word which was in greater currency: When nature’s phenomena appeared to us as manifestations of an obscure and irrational caprice, we lived in an alien world never dreaming of our swaraj within its territory. With the discovery of the harmony of its working with that of our reason, we realize our unity with it and, therefore, freedom. (566) Here Tagore explained philosophy through a topical political discourse and thereby himself participating in the political discourse. To the listeners who are dreaming of political independence or Swaraj, the word resonates with a new dimension, for Tagore talks of an inner ‘Swaraj’ that is realized within by discovering a harmony between the inner world of feelings and thoughts to nature. Tagore’s ideas of ‘freedom’ had finally a universal and international appeal through his interpretation of mukti: In all appearance the world to us is a closed world, like a seed within its hard cover. But in the core of the seed there is the cry of Life for mukti even when the proof of its possibility is darkly silent. When some huge temptation tramples into stillness this living aspiration after mukti, then does civilization die like a seed that has lost its urging for germination. (567) Yet again the poet entered into a political discourse, and I think a greater and more refined criticism of materialism and colonization can hardly be given. The phrase ‘huge temptation’, which tramples Life’s aspiration for ‘mukti’, signifies Western materialism and its product colonization. It is an interpretation of colonization from the perspective of Indian philosophy presented in the English language. Thus, emergence of an Indian discourse was possible in the English language. Thus Lamming’s idea that Caliban is imprisoned in Prospero’s language is not applicable to Indian writing in English. The postmodern idea that we are imprisoned in the language we speak does not hold in the case of Indian writing in English. Tagore’s English is evidence that the English language was not an obstacle for ‘possibility of being’ (Ashcroft, Caliban’s, 28). 123

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For Tagore, the contrast between East and West was never the focus of attention. He was focused throughout his life on bridging the East and the West. Sometimes Tagore juxtaposed the Hindu and the biblical discourse: ‘In the first verse of the Isha, the injunction is given to us ma gridhah. Thou shalt not covet’ (568). The speech ends with a juxtaposition of Eastern and Western poetic discourse, with Tagore’s translation of a Baul song into a prose poem, where the poet is poised between the world of the senses and affection on the one hand and the world of the spirit on the other, while the translator’s diction is poised – without reconciliation, as if in a metaphorical extension of negative capability – between East and West: It goes on blossoming for ages; the soul-lotus in which I am bound, as well as thou, without escape. There is no end to the opening of its petals, and the honey in it has such sweetness that thou like an enchanted bee canst never desert it, and therefore thou art bound, and I am, and mukti is nowhere. (569)

Notes 1 Internationalism, based on a negotiation between East and West, was the cornerstone of Tagore’s life and works. Tagore wanted Visvabharati to become an international meeting place of minds, ‘“where the world becomes one nest”’ (Dyson, 34). Martin Kampchen, who claimed that he had been staying in India for the last forty years, said that he had ‘never betrayed’ the ideal of Tagore during his stay in India: ‘Rabindranath’s ideal has been that men of different nationalities work together as equals for a common goal’ (Kampchen, ‘The Deciding Factor’, 1). According to Rabindrakumar Dasgupta, Rammohan and Tagore were the pioneers of internationalism. See Dasgupta’s Rabindranath Tagore’s Ideal of Internationalism (Tagore Research Institute, Kolkata, 2008). The word ‘international’, Dasgupta argues, is used in the context of any interaction between two nations – be it commercial or military or cultural. But Tagore’s internationalism denotes a world humanism, and the concept is present in the coinage of such words as ‘Visvamanavaman, Visvamanasalok, and Visvajaninata’ (6–7). The impact of his ideals of internationalism is perceptible in the modern world. Two of his biographers, Dutta and Robinson, observed, ‘When Rabindranath was born in 1861, notions of racial inferiority and superiority were engrained in educated minds eastern and western. By the time he died in 1941, such ideas were no longer respectable in democratic societies. Tagore was among the pioneers of that global sea change in attitudes’ (13). 2 According to Sheldon Senek, ‘Three orations against Philip [delivered by Demosthenes (384–322 BC)] were so heated and bitter that today a severe speech denouncing someone is called a Phillipic’ (n.p.). 3 See Vivekananda’s Realisation and Its Methods (Calcutta, Advaita Ashrama, 1999). 4 By ‘master’, Vivekananda referred to Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa, who used to preach in lucid words. Some of his words were recorded from memory by Sri Mahendranath Gupta in the SriSri-Ramakrishna-Kathamrita in Bangla and in the Gospel of Sri Ramkrishna in English.

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5 In Indian classical music, each raga captures a mood which dominates the human mind at a particular time of the day or a season. Thus Raag Bhairav and Bhairavi are morning raga, Raag Shuddh Sarang is an afternoon raga, and Raag Darbari Kanada is for the midnight; similarly, Raag Malhar is for monsoon and Basant is for the spring. Reba Som explained that a raga did not imitate natural sound but attempted to capture ‘the underlying spirit’ of a particular time of the day or season ‘which could be understood only through a deep proximity with nature’ (38). 6 Vivekananda distanced himself from contemporary politics throughout his life. He said once, ‘I do not believe in any politics, God and truth are the only politics in the world, everything else is trash’ (Vivekananda on Himself, 26). Vivekananda’s example has been followed by the Ramkrishna Mission to date as none of the presidents or any other monk of Ramkrishna Mission has been seen in any of the political meetings in India. 7 In the Minutes of 1835 Macaulay said, ‘I have never found one among them [the Orientalists], who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. This statement, in fact the entire Minute, may be regarded as a milestone of the colonial discourse in India in the nineteenth century. 8 In south India, English was the only means of communication for Vivekananda. He lamented that in spite of listening to Tamil, Telegu, and Malayalam for six years he was not able to speak the languages (Sankar, 167). 9 Tagore was widely addressed as ‘Gurudev’ not only by teachers and students at Visvabharati but also by national leaders like Gandhi, who had addressed Tagore as ‘Gurudev’ in many of his letters. See Selected Letters of Mahatma Gandhi (1968). 10 Tagore did not have a degree of any university, and his sour relation with the education system of his time is well known today. He undertook a lot of hardships and sacrifice to establish a school where education would be joyful and where the student would not be distanced from nature. The result was a school at Santiniketan at Bolpur in the Birbhum district of West Bengal. Tagore later established Viswabharati in the same place. In politics too, he did not approve of activities which were destructive in nature and which brought monotony. It was one of the reasons for his protest against the burning of clothes; he also disliked the colourlessness of khadi. Perhaps the ‘batik’ print devised by Tagore was a reaction against khadi. I therefore argue that such a man cannot be compelled to write poems or essays in English. Writing in English must have been a certain kind of joy and fulfilment for the artist. 11 The word is from the poem ‘Bharat-Tirtha’ and means ‘hallowed place’ (Dyson, I Won’t, 150). 12 Ujjwalkumar Majumdar reports that Tagore’s eldest brother would often recite aloud from Kalidasa’s Meghdutam when he would see clouds rising from the horizon of the Ganges. It was not totally comprehensible for the child Rabi, but he would feel the exuberance of joy and emotion (Majumdar, U., 3). 13 Tagore described the poems of Toru Dutt, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Manmohan Ghosh, and others as ‘imitative efforts of the Bengalis, passionately responding to Western literature’ (qtd in Das, ‘Introduction’, 1: 16–17). Citing the example of Bangla literature, he asserted that the mother tongue is the ‘natural channel’ (same source) of literary expression. 14 The word ‘secular’ is used in the preamble of the Indian Constitution with the significance of ‘religious impartiality’. The word in this new sense has such a high currency in India that the original English meaning, ‘non-religious’, is unknown to many Indians.

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Know you how much the people may be moved By that which he will utter. —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Tilak, C.R. Das, and Bose – whose speeches are dealt with in this chapter – gave voice to the spirit of nationalism, each in their own way and each representing a phase of the evolving nationalistic consciousness. It will be my aim in this chapter to review the use of the English language and its ‘Indianization’ in empowering the nationalist discourse. Simultaneously, I am going to discuss how ‘Indianness’ was inscribed in the use of the English language by national leaders. The common theme in all the political speeches selected in this chapter is the assertion of the right to self-rule. Before the analysis of the text of the speeches of Tilak, C.R. Das, and Bose, I think it is worthwhile to review briefly the sociopolitical context and its relation with the English language. In the introduction, I pointed out that the term ‘Indianization’ inevitably brings up the issue of Indian nationalism. From Vivekananda’s speeches delivered in Colombo and Ramnad, it is quite evident that for Vivekananda ‘India’ was not an invention but a discovery, for he discovered it in the rich legacy of religious culture. Tagore established his concept of internationalism on the foundation of India’s spiritual and religious ethos. For political leaders like Tilak, C.R. Das, and Subhas Bose, India as a nation was a reality for the spirit of nationalism was widespread among the masses; salvation for the motherland was the call of the hour for which the freedom fighters must oppose and finally oust the British government. Ironically the language of the colonial power proved to be useful for the nationalist leaders in their battle against imperialism. The national movement gained momentum in the twentieth century with the partition movement in Bengal, when the cult of the Swadeshi and boycott of foreign goods were born. However, the English language was never boycotted in either social or political circles, even though anti-British feelings continued to grow in the last three decades 126

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before independence, particularly after the Amritsar massacre in 1919. In this context, English functioned as a lingua franca, as observed by Agnihotri and Khanna: ‘For freedom fighters coming from different parts of the country, it [English] constituted a shared mass of knowledge and a means of communication among themselves’ (28). I quoted this statement in the second chapter, where I also discussed the fact that the popularity of English education in the early twentieth century did not decline. From 1905 to 1947, freedom fighters were repeatedly put in jail, satyagrahis1 were lathicharged brutally,2 and rebels treading the path of violence were hanged. Representatives of the British government were not known to address a public gathering, but the rule of the sword was supplemented by a colonial discourse questioning the legitimacy of the Indians to run a democratic government. Tilak’s declaration ‘Swaraj is my birthright’ countered this colonial discourse. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, which will be discussed in the next chapter, was partially a riposte to G.K. Chesterton’s3 argument that the Indians’ demand for a share in the administration was not tenable because the social system based on parliamentary democracy was devised by Westerners. C.R. Das in a speech delivered in Kolkata in 1918 titled ‘Indian Deputation to England’ voiced the feelings of the people when he challenged this line of argument: You have had 150 years. Why is it that at the end of that period we are told that we are not fit to govern ourselves? The very statement fills us with apprehension. As days go by, we will be rendered more and more unfit. No gentlemen, nobody really believes that the time has not come. It is a matter of immediate necessity and we must have it (cheers). (99) The debate was alive for at least another decade, for in his presidential address at the Maharashtra Provincial Conference held in Pune, then Poona, on 3 May 1928, Bose pointed out that some ‘European writers – Lord Ronaldshay for instance – go so far as to say that democracy is unsuited to the Oriental temperament . . . Ignorance and effrontery could not go further’ (Bose, Selected Speeches, 30). Much of the nationalist discourse of the twentieth century was engaged in countering such effronteries. Here it was crucial that the colonial discourse was countered in the same language in which the effronteries were hurled as nationalist leaders in the twentieth century wrote and spoke extensively in the English language. In this chapter I am going to discuss with reference to four speeches how the aforesaid colonial discourse was countered and how far the English language was ‘Indianized’ in the process. Although the leaders and workers of the Congress used Hindi and the provincial languages to connect with the masses, English remained an indispensable medium of communication as a link language among nationalists distributed all over undivided India. 127

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A key theme that emerges in the nationalist discourse of the twentieth century is an assertion of the eligibility of self-rule or ‘Swaraj’. In this context, Indian nationalist discourse had several dimensions: the continuation of Vivekananda’s brand of nationalist and patriotic discourse enriched with a consciousness of India’s ancient cultural and philosophical heritage; the humanist discourse of Tagore in which nationalism merged with internationalism; and finally a secular nationalist discourse (as evident in the speeches of C.R. Das, Subhas Bose, and Nehru) which posited an Indian brand of democracy and socialism based on the assumption that democracy was not an invention of the West. An important factor in these various kinds of nationalist discourses is the fact that the high proficiency of the nationalist leaders in the English language put them in a position of psychological advantage over their colonial rulers. The English language acted as a leveller between the ruler and the ruled. To prove my point I may cite an anecdote told by Swami Vivekananda: When I came to this country (America) and was going through the Chicago Fair, a man from behind pulled at my turban. I looked back and saw that he was a very gentlemanly looking man, neatly dressed. I spoke to him, and when he found that I knew English he became very much abashed . . . The sympathies of these men were limited within the range of their own language and their own fashion of dress. Much of the oppression of powerful nations on weaker ones is caused by this prejudice. (Vivekananda on Himself, 139) There are two important points made. First is the fact that the colonial oppressor himself suffers from a prejudice caused by the difference of language and dress, and secondly, the proficiency of the subjugated people in the language of the oppressor may cause the latter to be ‘very much abashed’. The English language used by leaders like C.R. Das, Tilak, Gandhi, and Subhas Bose had understandably two ambitions: generating mass opinion among the Indians in support of the demand for Swaraj and putting the colonizers to shame. In the 1940s Gandhi’s slogans ‘Quit India’ and ‘Do or die’ marked a turning point in this nationalist discourse when it reasserted itself, pushing colonial discourses towards insignificance. Subhas Bose’s call ‘Give me blood and I promise you freedom’ does the same. Nehru’s much quoted speech at midnight on 14 August 1947 can be read as a final declaration of the victory of the anti-colonial, nationalist discourse. It was a crucial factor for the emergence of Indian English in India that the English language was never forsaken in the evolution of the nationalist discourse. The phenomenon of ‘Indianization’ of the English language went on unhindered in the age of nationalism. Tilak, belonging to the generation previous to that of Gandhi, did not politicize the issue of using the English language, although he felt that India 128

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needed a national language desperately. However, in a speech delivered in Benares at the ‘Bharata Dharma Mahamandala’ on 3 January 1906, he found himself in an embarrassing situation because he felt that religious matters should not be expressed in English, although he was doing exactly so. So he said, ‘But I cannot help and hope you will excuse me’ (Tilak, Writings and Speeches, 35). Bal Gangadhar Tilak was known in the nineteenth century as an anti-reformist as he opposed the consent bill4 and had bitter confrontations with the pro-reformists of his time, such as Ranade and Gokhale. However, N.G. Jog, one of his biographers, argued that Tilak was not against reform but he had his own ideas of reform to which he held with the steadfastness of an orthodox Hindu (37). Jog quotes from D.S. Sharma’s The Renaissance of Hinduism for support: The reformer has to spread knowledge; the politician has to generate power. The former has to resort to persuasion; the latter to some sort of coercion. Tilak understood the problem correctly and thought that his opponents confused the issue and tried to use coercion in social reform and persuasion in politics. (Qtd in Jog, 37) Tilak never nourished animosity against the English language. In fact, he taught English and mathematics in a private school, which became the basis of his political career. Gloria Lotha narrates that he developed the school into a university college after founding the Deccan Education Society (1884), which aimed at educating the masses, especially in the English language. Vishnushastri Chiplunkar exercised a deep influence on Tilak and his friends. Chiplunkar called English ‘the milk of the tigress’ but defended Indian culture and traditions from the onslaught of Christian missionaries and derided ‘the British claim that they had come here only for our good’ (Jog, 13). The metaphor in the phrase ‘the milk of the tigress’ captures the enthusiasm of not only an individual but also the mood of the English-educated Indians who comprised perhaps the second or the third generation of the Englisheducated middle class. Zareer Masani commented on the nature of the response to Western education in southern and eastern India: The Madras theosophists and the Bengali revivalists were part of an East-West dialogue that rejected colonial values and education, while assimilating what was positive in Christian and European thought. As Professor Swaminathan of Madras reminds us, the English language in India was more than an administrative convenience. It brought European literature, through English translations, within reach of educated Indians and enabled India to export her own classics to the rest of the world. (78–79) 129

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In fact, it seems from all the facts and ideas discussed in the previous chapters that in modern India, the colonial discourse in the English language, from Macaulay to Kipling, was counterbalanced by the powerful impact of the values of individuality and romanticism in English literature, by the spirit of rational pursuit of knowledge in modern science, and by the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity in Western politics. English did not necessarily imply a colonial discourse, which is evident from our discussion in the previous chapters. Tilak’s speeches delivered in English demonstrate the fact that the English language could be adapted to give voice to the new national consciousness, in the wake of new confidence of India’s past culture and the longing for independence from foreign rule. Speakers like Tilak integrated the English language with the nationalist consciousness so that it no longer remained a foreign language. Tilak and his friend G.G. Agarkar started two weeklies, the Mahratta in English and the Kesari in Marathi, in 1881, a few years after their graduation. According to Mazumdar, Raychaudhuri, and Dutta, ‘the speeches and articles of Bal Gangadhar Tilak are generally held to have been responsible for the growth of a Radical section which soon became a powerful wing of the Congress’ (884). Although a big portion of his articles are in Marathi, his speeches in English carry the nationalistic zeal for which he sacrificed his life. In Nasik in May 1917, Tilak delivered a little speech which became a milestone in the history of India’s struggle for independence. The speech was made on the occasion of the first anniversary of Tilak’s Home Rule League. As an introduction to this speech, Rudrangshu Mukherjee wrote that Tilak ‘was speaking as an old man to the young’ (75) and his words were so impassioned that they became the clarion call of the national movement. Tilak’s demand for freedom was incorporated in the purna Swaraj resolution of the Congress in 1929 (Mukherjee, R., 75). In his speech Tilak defied the dominion of colonial rule and coercion with the strength of the human spirit: Freedom is my birthright. So long as it is awake within me, I am not old. No weapon can cut this spirit, no fire can burn it, no water can wet it, no wind can dry it. I say further that no C.I.D. can burn it. (Tilak, ‘Freedom’, 76) The statement bears an allusion to the twenty-third sloka of the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita: Nainang chindanti sastrani nainang dahati pavaka Na chaina kledayantapo na shosayati marutah.5 Lord Krishna’s statement may be considered as a mantra of mental strength. Tilak’s statement marks a climactic point of the age of political and spiritual 130

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consciousness which was heralded by Swami Vivekananda. Tilak’s language documents the adaptation of the English language for nationalist goals. Although no Indian words were used in the sentence, the intertextual relation with the Bhagavad Gita had a special appeal to Indians. The statement documents the existence of a nationalist discourse expressed in Indian English. In the second chapter, I referred to Gokak, who defined Indian English as the English ‘whose soul is Indian in colour, thought and imagery’ (qtd in Agnihotri & Khanna, 31). From this perspective, Tilak’s statement was definitely an instance of Indian English. The statement is a bold defiance of all kinds of physical power: artificial (i.e., weapons) and natural (fire, water, and air). In the Bhagavad Gita Lord Krishna utters these words in order to bring a sea change in the mind of Arjuna, who is reluctant to fight with and kill his kith and kin. The effect of Krishna’s words are twofold: instilling Arjuna’s mind with strength and fearlessness, and enabling him to overcome his depression by making him realize the mutability of the physical world and the immortality of the human soul, of the littleness of sentiments which have depressed him and the reality of the call of duty. Besides his degree in law, Tilak was a scholar on Mahabharata and had composed his magnum opus Srimad Bhagavadgita Rahasya in the Mandalay prison, where he was deported in 1908 with a six-year sentence. Tilak realized the political potential of the words of the Bhagavad Gita: especially its potential to instil strength and fearlessness and inspire people to selfless action. Vivekananda exploited the potential to inspire when he said, ‘Awake arise and stop not till the goal is reached’, transcreating the line ‘uttisthat jagrata prapya barannibodhata’ from Kathopanishad (Vivekananda, Lectures, 105). But while Vivekananda’s goal was spiritual awakening, Tilak’s goal – freedom – was overtly political. With that goal in mind, through allusion to the words of Lord Krishna, the meaning of which is well known not only to the Hindus but also to most Indians, the speaker instilled fearlessness and mental strength in his listeners. With such strength the tyranny of colonial rule seems a trifle, as the comical appendage ‘no C.I.D. can burn it’ makes evident. Instead of being imprisoned in the language of the colonizer, Tilak, like Vivekananda, evolved a new discourse derived from the Bhagavad Gita wherein the might of the sword was challenged – through words – by the might of mental strength. Moreover the colonial discourse putting to doubt the Indians’ fitness to rule was challenged by the right of nature – that is, ‘birthright’. Tilak asserted his birthright in a religious discourse. Tilak’s statement became an idiomatic expression in India. T.K. Madhavan, one of the vanguards of Vaikkam Satyagraha6 in Kerala, claimed, ‘[T]emple entry is my birth-right’ (qtd in Panikkar, 128). By the 1920s English education, according to Panikkar, had penetrated that section of the south Indian society which suffered the evils of untouchability. Panikkar reported that in 1921, 4,529 Ezhavas (one of the non-castes in Vaikkam) were literate in English (126). It was because English literacy constituted a 131

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sizeable portion in some pockets of Indian society that the English words of nationalist leaders loaded with the nationalist discourse created echoes in diverse places. It may be concluded that a significant number of Indians were poised to absorb and bask in the nationalist discourse in the English language. Tilak represented the early phase of Indian nationalism when nationalist consciousness and self-confidence derived their strength from philosophical heritage in Hinduism. Simultaneously, his use of the English language is laden with the Hindu nationalist discourse. In fact, English was seized from the colonizer long before political emancipation. The hallmark of Tilak’s style in the speech under consideration is the coexistence of Vedic and Western rational discourses. The Vedic and the Western rational discourses intermingle in his attitude towards politics, expressed in the following sentences: ‘The Science which ends in Home Rule is the Science of Politics and not the one which ends in slavery. The Science of Politics is the “Vedas” of the country’ (76). Tilak’s language reveals the dual parameter of ‘Science’ and ‘Vedas’ which dominated the social psyche of the thoughtful people of the time. Thus in Tilak’s language ‘Indianization’ consists in forming an Indian narrative through allusion to the sacred Hindu culture and through application of metaphors derived from Indian culture. Altogether, he was successful in forming an Indian nationalist discourse in the English language. The duality of parameter – of science and Vedas – has been discerned since the days of Raja Rammohan. Duality or coexistence of parameters defined not only Indian nationalistic discourse but also the English language used by the nationalists. Since the term ‘Indian English’ is associated with Indian nationality, it is expected to convey an ‘Indianness’ to assert its identity. Hence ‘Indianization’ of the English language was unavoidable and inevitable in Indian nationalist discourse. Makarand Paranjape in ‘Indian English and Its Con-texts: Re-presenting India in Our Time’, a plenary talk, observed that it is an obligation for all Indian writers in English (understandably of the twentieth century) to assert an ‘Indianness’: [T]his debate over ‘Indianness,’ in some form or another, is central to the whole question of Indian literature, especially of Indian English literature. This is obvious because the Indian English literature will always have to strive to prove its Indian credentials, as it were, just as other literatures in Indian languages have to strive to prove their modernity or internationality. The nationalist discourse thus provided the platform for further innovation and the subsequent emergence of a distinct second-language variant capable of conveying the religious identity and culture of Indian users. Tilak’s short but compact speech documents a significant fragment of the history of ‘Indianization’ of the English language for nationalistic goals. 132

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In 1917, Ganesh & Co. Madras published a volume of speeches of C.R. Das, then already famous among Indians as ‘Deshbandhu’. The book was titled India for Indians, which was also the title of the first speech in the anthology. The second edition of the volume came in the following year with the speech ‘Indian Deputation to England’, which I am going to discuss in this chapter. The publications are evident of two things: the reputation of C.R. Das as an orator and a readership among the English-reading population in undivided India for speeches in English delivered by a reputed Bengali Indian nationalist. It is evident from the foreword by the then editor of Ananda Bazar Patrika, Babu Motilal Ghose, that the book was aimed at the English-educated nationalist youth of the country: ‘Students of current political literature in this country will find in these a freshness of ideas and a freedom of treatment which are so much needed just now for the formation of a sound and healthy public opinion among us’ (v). This is how the English language constituted ‘a shared mass of knowledge and a means of communication’ for ‘freedom fighters coming from different parts of the country’ (Agnihotri & Khanna, 28). Being a champion of Hindu-Muslim unity in Bengal, C.R. Das’s speeches maintained a distance from Vedic discourses. Standing firmly on the newfound modernity of Renaissance Bengal, Das, with his sacrifice and legendary love and benevolence for the people at large and his patriotic speeches, became a concrete symbol of Indian nationalism, which earned him credibility with Hindus and Muslims alike. In one of his speeches delivered in Mymensingh, in present-day Bangladesh, he presented a vision of nationalism which defies the Western concept of exclusive nationalism but is based upon the Renaissance humanism of Tagore and Vivekananda: a nationalism which defies all national boundaries and unites the colonizer and the colonies, including nationalities like Australian and South African: All of us live and grow under the sway of the same Empire. If you consider the geographical magnitude of this Empire, the different races, the different creeds, the different cultures, the different religions which this Empire represents, you will find that there is a glorious opportunity for federating so many human races, with so many distinct interests, distinct nationalities, different cultures, different religions and in that way for contributing to the ultimate federation of the whole human race. That is the philosophy of nationalism today. (12) Although it sounds utopian, the spirit of the popular discourse of ‘unity in diversity’ and ‘mile sur mera tumhara’, the popular catchphrases in twentiethcentury independent India may easily be discerned in Das’s speech. Further, 133

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Abraham Lincoln’s interpretation of democracy entered the nationalist discourse of home rule and Swaraj: We want no bureaucracy, we want Home-rule, we want self-government by the people and for the people. We want Self-government in which every individual of this country, be he the poorest ryot or the richest zemindar – will have his legitimate share. Every individual must have some voice. (6) It is quite evident that Indian nationalist discourse in English was veering towards all-inclusiveness; there was a necessity to make Indian nationalism a common platform for ‘every individual’ – there was a need for a discourse which might appeal to people irrespective of religion and caste. Notwithstanding the minimal literacy in the English language in India, the language enjoyed an advantageous position to cater to this necessity in the absence of a national language. Moreover, to a certain extent the English language enjoyed a neutral position with respect to the diversity of cultural ethos of Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs. Hence to the Englishspeaking Indian mass scattered all over India, the English language became a convenient means of communicating the modern nationalist consciousness which cuts through diversity of caste and creed. However, in this new scenario the influence of Vedic and Upanishadic discourse was replaced by a more spontaneous use of Indian loanwords and translations of idioms; moreover, there was a bold assertion of translations, cultural details which alienate Indians’ English from the language of the colonizer. It is most prominent I think in Gandhi’s translation of his Hind Swaraj, which is discussed in the following chapter. On 18 March 1918, a public meeting was held in central Kolkata to support and convey solidarity with the team of deputation which was leaving for England to advocate for self-rule. The team included stalwarts like Lokmanya Tilak and Bepin Chandra Pal. C.R. Das, in the process of moving a resolution that the meeting accorded its full support to the team, delivered a speech in which he countered the chief objections that were raised against Indian self-rule, such as lack of education, diversity of caste and creed, and the existence of a revolutionary party. Exposing the frivolity of these arguments, Das conveyed in his speech the urgency for self-rule, which drew loud cheers and responses from the audience.7 The urgency is further reflected in the spontaneous intrusion of mother-tongue interference: ‘Gentlemen, when I consider the objections put forward to the grant of self government, I can hardly keep my patience. What is that they say? They say we are not educated enough to get self-government’ (98). In Bangla, expression of loss of patience indicates anger. The last two sentences also reveal Das’s anger.

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Most Indians would easily notice the mother-tongue interference in these sentences, as presenting a fact in question and answer in a note of anger is common in several Indian languages. It is evident in Gandhi’s own translation of Hind Swaraj from Gujrati.8 A similar vein of mother-tongue interference is noticeable in the following passage: ‘If you consider for one moment the history of the last 30 years, what do you find? You find that the noble policy of Lord Ripon was opposed by the Bureaucracy’ (96). The phrase ‘consider for one moment’ instead of ‘for a while’ or simply ‘consider’ indicates mother-tongue interference. Das’s spontaneous outburst gathered more interference of the mother tongue as he spoke to the delight and excited response of his listeners: If you consider again such a simple reform as the separation of the Executive and the Judiciary what do you find? You find that Viceroy after Viceroy recommended it. You find that statesman after statesman recommended it. Yet, what is it which has prevented such a useful reform being put through? My answer is, it is the Bureaucracy in this country. (shame, shame). (96–97) Phrases such as ‘Viceroy after Viceroy’ and ‘statesman after statesman’ are also indicative of mother-tongue interference, although they are not ‘unEnglish’. Near the end of his speech, Das, while exposing the colonial nature of the Indo-British Association – a pro-British association in Britain – uses a similar type of mother-tongue interference: ‘if they have fed the British public with falsehood after falsehood, surely it is necessary for our representatives to meet them and expose the falsity of their utterances’ (102). Instead of ‘one falsehood after another’, the phrase ‘falsehood after falsehood’ indicates an interference of Bangla, Das’s mother tongue. But this pattern of expression may be found in other Indian languages as well, and hence it is an example of sprachbund feature expressed in English. These aspects of his language create a linguistic space which is shared exclusively by him and his Indian listeners. Another instance of mother tongue interference occurs when Das severely criticized the bureaucracy in India as an impediment in the path of the attainment of independence: I said to this high official that this scheme was something when it left the shores of England, but it became absolutely ridiculous when it got into the hands of Indian Bureaucracy (shame, shame) . . . Under these circumstances are we not justified in saying that that scheme was rendered absolutely ridiculous when it got into the hands of the Indian Bureaucracy (cheers). (97)

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In many Indian languages, ‘got into the hands’ idiomatically implies ‘under the control and responsibility’. Thus sprachbund features spontaneously came into play in Indian nationalist discourse, where diverse linguistic spaces converged which technically facilitated the consolidation of Indian nationalism. C.R. Das’s confident and spontaneous use of Indian English demonstrates that he bothered little with the ‘surveillance’ to which Indian users of English were subjected since the mid-nineteenth century. Anindyo Roy, as I referred to in Chapter 1 of this book, demonstrated that the ‘baboo’s language became an object of constant surveillance’ (Roy, A., 5) because the babus were a ‘threat to the status quo following the introduction and gradual implementation of the Indian Services Act of 1861’ (4) and also because the ‘baboo’s language enabled a reassessment and reconsolidation of the centrality of British racial and national identity’ (5). While the babu’s language belonged to the mesolectal variety of English, from Keshub Sen to C.R. Das and Subhas Bose, we have a very rich acrolectal variety where the user, free from anxiety of ‘surveillance’, is adept in giving an Indian identity to the English language. Being highly regarded in their respective fields, Keshub Sen as an orator, Vivekananda as a preacher of Vedanta, Tilak as a leader of the Indian National Congress, and Tagore as a poet, C.R. Das as a pleader, these articulators of the English language could afford to defy ‘surveillance’ and inscribe an Indian identity in the English language for succeeding generations to follow and emulate. It was pointed out by Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin that the ‘imperial education system installs a “standard” version of the metropolitan language as the norm, and marginalizes all “variants” as impurities’ (7). But in the context of rise of nationalism, such ‘impurities’ may become the milestones for the succeeding generations. This is true of the speeches of C.R. Das and of Subhas Bose, discussed ahead, and the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, discussed in the next chapter. From the late second and third decades of the twentieth century, a clear shift in nationalist discourse may be perceived: from a spiritual to a socialistic orientation. Indian nationalistic discourse incorporated in itself socialistic ideals of which Subhas Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru were two of the main professors. Nehru has been discussed in almost all the literary history of Indian writing in English. Binoo K. John gave an interesting account of the amateurish writings on the life and works of Nehru (John, 129–153). But it is a pity that Subhas Bose has been ignored by almost all the literary historians of Indian writing in English, although his complete works extend to several volumes. In fact, Sugata Bose and Sisir Bose commented aptly that ‘the popular perception’ about Bose is that of a warrior rather than as a writer (‘Introduction’, 1). However, with special reference to three of his speeches – his presidential address at the Maharashtra Provincial Conference, held in Pune, then Poona, delivered on 3 May 1928, his presidential 136

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address at the Students’ Conference held at Lahore, 19 October 1929, and his famous speech at a rally in Burma in 1944 – I would like to show the importance of Bose’s writings in the context of ‘Indianization’ of the English language. English had most often been the preferred means of communication for Bose while he wrote – be it letters or history or an autobiography.9 In the speeches delivered in English he spoke in the Standard English of the English-educated young men of the twentieth century, and the Indian words and translations of Indian phrases used by Bose also represent the distinct acrolectal variety of the nativized English shared by the English-educated mass in India. In his speeches Bose often used words and expressions which are peculiar to Indian users of the English language. Bose began his address in Pune with an expression of gratitude which translated a common form of expression in Bangla and other Indian languages: ‘Friends, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the high honour you have done me by requesting me to preside over the deliberations of the Sixth Session of the Maharashtra Provincial Congress’ (Bose, Selected Speeches, 29). The speech at Lahore also began in a similar fashion: ‘I thank you from the core of my heart for the warm and cordial welcome you have given me on the occasion of my first visit to the land of five rivers’ (Selected Speeches, 48). Instead of thanking earnestly or sincerely Indians prefer to thank from the ‘core’ or ‘bottom’ of the heart. There is another such expression which is peculiarly Bengali: ‘Friends . . . I ask you to lift your eyes from the realities of the present and attempt to scan the future that looms before us’ (Bose, Selected Speeches, 32). In Bangla, to ‘lift one’s eyes’ from certain things to something else is to divert one’s attention from the present object of attention to something else. Another such example is the phrase ‘blind imitation’, which is a translation from a Bangla expression: ‘India has long passed through the traditional period of blind imitation’ (Selected Speeches, 29). Such expressions are also found in Vivekananda’s and Tagore’s speeches discussed in the previous chapter, such as ‘burning fire of materialism’ in Vivekananda’s speech in Colombo or the phrase ‘joint family’ in Tagore’s speech ‘The Philosophy of Our People’. A word which gained in currency during the early twentieth century was ‘hartal’. The word was originally used in the context of religion but developed the political significance of ‘general strike’ following Gandhi’s calling a hartal in the wake of the Rowlatt Act in 1919. The word gained in currency and is also used by Bose in his speech in Pune: ‘The movement will reach its climax in a sort of general strike or country-wide hartal coupled with a boycott of British goods’ (Selected Speeches, 36). It is interesting that while ‘boycott’ entered into several Indian languages, hartal became a part of the English vocabulary of Indians. Simultaneously, the word has new significance in Indian languages. Indian users of English have also developed some idioms. The phrases ‘Himalayan miscalculation’, first used by Gandhi, and ‘tryst with destiny’, first used by Nehru, have become idioms for Indian 137

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writers of English. But there are some expressions which do not owe their origin to famous personalities. One such expression is the phrase ‘chalk out’, meaning ‘to make a plan before commencement of action’. The idiom was used by Subhas Bose in the speech in Lahore: ‘They should chalk out for themselves a programme of action which they should try to follow’ (Selected Speeches, 52). In his presidential address delivered in Pune, Bose used what may be termed a ‘transfer of context’ (Kachru, Indianization, 131–132): ‘As long as India lies prostrate at the feet of Britain the right [to shape one’s destiny] will be denied to us’ (Bose, Selected Speeches, 31). To lie prostrate before a deity is a ritual act of worship among Hindus, but to do so before a person is a posture of surrender and acceptance of lordship. The European equivalent is to bow. In a feudal society bowing or lying prostrate is not uncommon, but in a democratic society, one may lie prostrate in very rare circumstances. In India today, the act is often referred to in words to mean surrender but the action is seldom carried out. One might discuss Tagore’s short story ‘Postmaster’ and Satyajit Ray’s adaptation of the story in celluloid in the first ‘Teen Kanya’ film. In the end Tagore’s postmaster offers Ratan some money, but Ratan falls at the feet of the postmaster and begs him not to give her money. In Ray’s film, Ratan does not do so. In the last shot, Ratan ignores the postmaster while carrying a pail of water and the postmaster looks at her with wonder. Ray, as an artist of the latter half of the twentieth century, could not accept Ratan lying prostrate at the feet of the postmaster. In retrospect, in the light of feminist and Marxist literature, one may justify Ray’s bold decision to change the ending of the story of an undefined relation between a poor girl working as maid (in modern terms, a child labourer) and a young man from the city posted in a remote village. In Ray’s time the values imbibed from Marxism and socialism were in the air and could not be ignored. Ray’s Ratan has an air of professionalism in her character, while Tagore’s character is relatively more burdened with the plights of feudalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. At the same time worship is an expression of love in Tagore’s songs. From that perspective, Ratan’s falling at the feet of the young man is suggestive of her great love. But Subhas Bose, a contemporary of Tagore, upheld the values of socialism and democracy as a political leader; he was intent on shaking off the burdens of feudalism and colonialism from the social psyche. Hence he considered the posture of worship as unacceptable from the socialist and democratic perspective: ‘as long as India lies prostrate at the feet of Britain the right [to shape one’s destiny] will be denied to us’. Bose’s sentence is symbolic of the anxiety of a nation desperate to stand on her own feet and assert herself instead of lying prostrate before a capitalist colonizer. Interestingly, the same anxiety is echoed in the speech in Lahore: ‘There is hardly any Asiatic today to whom the spectacle of Asia lying strangled at the feet of Europe does not cause pain and humiliation’ (Selected Speeches, 52). It may be argued further that the use of expressions 138

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common in Indian languages was also part of a ‘shared mass of knowledge’ (Agnihotri & Khanna, 28), and consequently these expressions helped the nationalists like Bose to reach out to the common man enthusiastic about the imminent political sovereignty of India. Subhas Bose attempted to silence all the critics of Indian nationalism through his speeches. In his presidential address at the Maharashtra Provincial Conference, he attacked the colonial assumption that democracy is a ‘Western institution’ (Bose, Selected Speeches, 30). In the process he drew the attention of his listeners to those terms in Indian languages which indicated the democratic framework of Indian society. For example, according to Bose, terms like ‘Nagar Sreshthi (i.e. our modern Mayor)’ (Selected Speeches, 30) and ‘village Panchayats’ (Selected Speeches, 30) were suggestive of the ‘democratic institutions handed down to us from days of yore’ (30). Bose also took on the sceptics who thought that Indian nationalism was ‘a hindrance to the promotion of internationalism in the domain of culture’ (Selected Speeches, 30). He presented the counterargument that Indian nationalism was ‘inspired by the highest ideals of the human race, viz., Satyam (the true), Shivam (the good), Sundaram (the beautiful)’ (Bose, Selected Speeches, 30). Thus Indian loanwords were used strategically, highlighting the legacy of democracy and idealism to consolidate his nationalist discourse. Further, in the last example, Bose adapted ideas from ancient scriptures to the secular content of his speech. Bose did not speak of God or of the search for absolute truth but of values which are comprehensible by all and sundry, which may be harmonized with the socialistic and secular character of his vision. One may compare Bose’s treatment of Sanskrit words to Tagore’s treatment of the word ‘mukti’ in a purely philosophical discourse – which has been discussed in the previous chapter. It may be argued here that these similarities of use of language indicate a trend of experimentation in Indian writing in English in the early twentieth century. Not only words from Indian languages but also English words have been given new significance in Indian writing in English. Tagore treated the English words ‘real’ and the word ‘freedom’ with new meaning and significance, which has been discussed in the previous chapter. In his presidential address in Pune, Bose used the word ‘labour’ in a similar manner. Like Tagore, Bose brought about a semantic extension in the word ‘labour’ to include the ‘peasants’: ‘I plead for a coalition between labour and nationalism (I am using “labour” here in a wider sense to include the peasants as well)’ (Selected Speeches, 31). Thus Bose adapted the socialist discourse to suit the Indian reality. The use of Indian mythology as subtext has been a common theme in Indian writing in English – for example, in R.K. Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura. Subhas Bose’s description of the sacrifice of Jyotindranath Das in the students’ conference in Lahore in 1929 is one of the most memorable uses of Indian myth to describe a freedom fighter. Interestingly, Bose also referred to a piece of English poetry. He 139

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described the martyrdom of Jatindranath Das in these words, borrowing a phrase from Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: ‘Jatin today is not dead. He lives up in the heavens as a star of “purest ray serene”10 to serve as a beacon-light to posterity’ (Selected Speeches, 49). However, in the same speech, he evaluated the supreme sacrifice of Jatindranath Das from an Indian perspective: ‘I therefore, envy your great city [Lahore] which has been the tapasyakshetra – the place of penance – of this modern Dadhichi’ (49). Subhas Bose was speaking about a contemporary incident which touched the heart of every conscious Indian, and it is significant that he referred to Gray’s Elegy as well as to the Indian myth to convey his sincere feelings. One of the hallmarks of Indian writing in English is that it readily appropriates and blends the cultural influence of both the East and the West. Bose’s speeches as a leader of the Indian National Congress are evidence of that quality. As a speaker, Subhas Bose is remembered for his famous appeal: ‘Give me blood and I promise you freedom’ (Bose, Important Speeches, 30). The words were the concluding part of a speech in a rally of Azad Hind Fauj in Burma in 1944. It was as the vanguard of the Azad Hind Fauj (or the Indian National Army) that Subhas Chandra Bose enthralled the entire nation with his heroism, adventure, and sacrifice. The nation was all ears when he spoke, either in a rally or in the radio station. Bose’s speech in Burma is not a great instance of Indianization, but the speech is an important milestone in the history of English in India. Unlike the political situation of the nineteenth century, nationalism was no longer a privilege of the elite and the educated in the 1940s. Gandhi’s ‘Do or die’ and Bose’s ‘Give me blood . . .’ baptized the nation in the religion of sacrifice for the motherland. Although both statements had their popular translated versions, the wide currency of the English version was not an insignificant fact. Language was an important issue at that time, especially in the context of Mahatma Gandhi’s disapproval of English. As far as the issue of national language was concerned, Bose, in his presidential address at the fifty-first session of the Congress at Haripura in 1938, prescribed Hindustani with the Roman script (Bose, Selected Speeches, 75). As commander of the Azad Hind Fauj he adopted Hindoostani as the national language. But Tamil and English were also used in public meetings and proclamations (Bose, Sugata, 256–257). Bose’s legendary speech in 1944 at the rally in Burma demonstrates one of my primary assumptions that one is not necessarily imprisoned in the language one speaks or writes. Although Bose was speaking to his soldiers his appeal for sacrifice caught the imagination of the entire nation. He began in a matter-of-fact note and gradually climbed the emotional scale. Before appealing to the emotion of his listeners, Bose set the stage by analyzing the political situation. He attempted to convey to his listeners that it was the right time and

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a ‘God given opportunity’ (‘Give Me Blood’, 156) for the freedom fighters because the British forces were encountering defeats on many fronts in the world war. He also reminded his soldiers of the ‘gigantic movement going on inside India’ (156). However, Bose did not attempt to lead his soldiers to a fool’s paradise. He explained the ‘problem of supplies and transport’ (157) and also the advantage of ‘men, money and materials’ (157) on their side. He said that he had enough ‘men, money and materials’ but that alone was not enough, for without motivation and ‘brave deeds and heroic exploits’ (158) the battle could not be won. He impressed upon his listeners that ‘heroic exploits’ could give them victory. Then, finally he appealed to his soldiers: Gird up your loins for the task that now lies ahead . . . We should have but one desire today – the desire to die so that India may live – the desire to face a martyr’s death, so that the path to freedom may be paved with the martyr’s blood. Friends, my comrades in the War of Liberation! Today I demand of you one thing, above all. I demand of you blood. It is blood alone that can avenge the blood that the enemy has spilt. It is blood alone that can pay the price of freedom. Give me blood and I promise you freedom. (158) The clause ‘Gird up your loins’ is interesting, as it is a very common idiom in English as well as in many Indian languages, having the same meaning: ‘Prepare for energetic action’. The unique feature of Bose’s speech is the quasi-religious discourse which subverted the capitalist discourse of pay and receive. The discourse of capitalist economy of ‘Give . . . and I promise . . .’ readily appeals to the contemporary generation, but it is an appeal not to the material self but to the spiritual and the patriotic self. Bose thus subverted capitalist discourse with a patriotic goal. I discussed in Chapter 5 that the repetitive structure of the sentences in Bose’s speech carry the legacy of Vivekananda’s stylistics derived from the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. The repetition of the words ‘desire’ and ‘blood’ and the clause ‘It is blood alone’ lifts the emotional pitch to the climactic appeal. Like Vivekananda, Bose’s speech also inspired his audience to selfless action. The philosophy inherent in the passage is apparently the philosophy of revenge: ‘It is blood alone that can avenge the blood’. But actually, the theme of this passage is that of self-sacrifice: it is the ‘desire to die’; it is ‘blood’ alone that can bring redemption to the motherland. The emphasis is not on spilling but on shedding ‘blood’, of which the blood of Christ is the most universal symbol. It is noteworthy that in the entire speech there is not a single sentence which inspires hatred. The image of blood in the last sentence does not suggest revenge but sacrifice of life for the country. There

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is an inherent semblance between Subhas’s appeal and Gandhi’s appeal in 1942, as aptly observed by Sugato Bose: Bose’s and Gandhi’s discourses on unity sanctified by the fire of sacrificial patriotism relied more on the language of blood than on the language of rights, even though there was room for both in their formulations. Gandhi’s call in 1942 that ‘rivers of blood’ must flow to pay the ‘price of freedom’ was not qualitatively different from Bose’s exhortations in 1943. (Bose, Sugata, 257) Thus there is a distinct feature of Indian nationalist discourse in English which cuts across as ideologically distanced leaders as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Mahatma Gandhi. In the context of Indian writing in English, the terms ‘Indian’ and ‘Indianness’ have never exhausted themselves. In the words of Makarand Paranjape, [D]ebates over what constitutes Indianness or on the cultural politics of Indian representations are really a part of what one might call the larger process of Indian self-apprehension and self-awakening. This process has been underway for several millennia; it is in this sense that we might say that the wonderful thing about India and its traditions is that they are never finished. (‘Indian English’) In this constantly changing scenario of Indianness, Bose’s speech posited one of the most updated versions of Indianness. I have argued that Indian nationalism passed from an age of Vedic inspiration in the nineteenth century to an age of socialism in the twentieth. In both the ages, ‘Indianization’ of the English language continued, although a movement against English surfaced in the early twentieth century under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi – which is discussed in detail in the next chapter. The changing contours of the Indian national movement were mirrored in the changing patterns of ‘Indianization’ of the English language. In fact, the presence of Indian words in the writings of first-language users, such as Kipling and Nehru, indicated a growing acceptability of Indian words in the corpus of the English language. But there is a lot of difference between the use of Indian words and phrases by Indian writers I am discussing and the use of Indian words and phrases in Rudyard Kipling. In the writings of Kipling Indian loanwords were used quite frequently. However, Kipling never attempted to ‘Indianize’ his English. Kipling never projected the Indian family or home; his was the tourist’s or ‘alien’ perspective, relishing and capturing the snapshots and sounds of variegated and exotic India. Yet Kipling, to a large extent, licensed the use of Indian words and expressions. Nehru’s

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occasional use of Indian loanwords, such as kismat (Iyengar, U., ed., 8), may be called ‘Kiplinesque’. The presence of Indian words in the writings of Kipling and Nehru indicates that ‘Indianization’ of the English language in independent India was inevitable; its tryst with Indian languages and culture had been determined by a century of cultural interaction with Indian languages and culture. While Nehru and the first Indian government led by him had a big role in allowing the English language to continue as the official language in India, Gandhi, who had his vision of the past, present, and future of India from an insider’s perspective, opposed the hegemony of the English language but indirectly promoted by using it continuously. The next chapter deals with the Mahatma’s contribution towards ‘Indianization’ of the English language.

Notes 1 Gandhi called his non-violent movement ‘satyagraha’. The term was used since the days of the non-violent movement in South Africa. Participants in the nonviolent movement were called ‘satyagrahis’. 2 ‘Lathicharge’ is common Indian English today meaning charging with ‘lathi’ or batons. A report on the excesses of ‘lathicharge’ was written by Ms Madeline Slade (better known as Mirabehn, the adopted daughter of Gandhi). Subhas Bose quoted the report in The Indian Struggle, 1920–42(208): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Lathi blown on head, chest, stomach and joints. Thrusts with lathis in private parts, abdominal regions. Stripping of men naked before beating. Tearing of loin cloths and thrusting of sticks into anus. Pressing and squeezing of the testicles till a man becomes unconscious. Dragging of wounded men by legs and arms, often beating them the while. 7. Throwing of wounded men in thorn hedges or into salt water. 8. Riding of horses over men as they lie or sit on the ground. 9. Thrusting of pins and thorns into men’s bodies, sometimes even when they were unconscious.

3 4

5 6

Beating of men after they have become unconscious, and other vile things too many to relate, besides foul language and blasphemy, calculated to hurt as much as possible the most sacred feelings of the Satyagrahis. For details on Chesterton’s arguments against Indian nationalism, see R. Guha’s Gandhi Before India 363 and Chapter 6 of this book. According to Wikipedia, the Age of Consent Act, 1891, was legislation enacted in British India on 19 March 1891 which changed the age of consent for sexual intercourse for all girls, married or unmarried, from 10 to 12 years in all jurisdictions, its violation subject to criminal prosecution as rape. Social reformers like Ranade and Behramji Malabari supported this legislation, while Tilak was an opponent. The sloka means that the human soul is not subject to destruction or damage by weapons, fire, water and air. Vaikkam is a small town near the northern border of the former State of Travancore in modern Kerala. The majority of the Hindu population of the town

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7 8 9

10

consisted of the Ezhavas, the Pulayas, and the Parayas, all of whom suffered the evils of untouchability and unapproachability regarding roads and temples. An agitation grew beginning the late nineteenth century, and it merged with the national movement in the early 1920s (Panikkar, 125–136). The responses of the audience have been recorded in parentheses, such as ‘loud cheers’ or the chant of ‘shame, shame’. See page 164 of this book. Many of Bose’s personal letters are written in English. The Indian Struggle is an important historical work written by Bose in English, and his unfinished autobiography The Indian Pilgrim was also written in English. See The Essential Writings of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, edited by Sisir Kumar Bose and Sugata Bose (Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta, Delhi, OUP, 1997) and The Indian Struggle (New Delhi, OUP, 1997). The phrase ‘purest ray serene’ is taken from line 53 of the fourteenth stanza of Gray’s Elegy: Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness in the desert air. Allusion to English literature may be found in Bose’s other speeches. For example, in his presidential address at the Haripura Congress, there is an allusion to Marcellus’s reflection, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (1.5.90), in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘I shall only ask you if there is not “something rotten in the state of Denmark” that such bright and promising souls as Jatin Das, Sardar Mahavir Singh and others should feel the urge not to live life but to end it’ (Selected Speeches, 68). His ‘Vision of a Free India’, the presidential address of Pune, ended with an allusion to Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: ‘Let us all stand shoulder to shoulder and say with one heart and with one voice that our motto is, as Tennyson said through Ulysses, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”’ (Selected Speeches, 38). Although he was a confirmed enemy of the British government, Subhas Bose was a lover of English poetry.

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We write to each other in faulty English, and from this even our M.A.’s are not free; our best thoughts are expressed in English; the proceedings of our Congress are conducted in English; our best newspapers are printed in English. If this state of things continues for a long time, posterity will – it is my firm opinion – condemn and curse us. —Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 103 They spoke politely with one another, pretending that they were discussing realities. They spoke in English, the only language they had in common. —Robert Payne on the pre-Partition conversation between Gandhi and Jinnah (as qtd by Gandhi, Gopalkrishna, ed., 490)

Gandhi noticed long ago what has been largely ignored until today: that ‘[some of, if not all] our best thoughts are expressed in English’ (Hind Swaraj, 103). What he did not realize in 1909 – the year Hind Swaraj was composed – was that English could hardly be avoided. Speaking in English was perhaps more indispensable than the Partition of India. Even much of the debate on national language in the 1940s was done in English by the leading participants of the debate, Gandhi being one of them. Moreover, Gandhi’s foresight has not proved right. He himself used English throughout his life, and posterity has not subjected him to curses and condemnation as he anticipated (Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 103); rather literary historians of Indian writing in English have paid him tribute for his role in the development of English in India and also for the development of Gandhian literature in English, among other languages. In this chapter, my aim is to review Gandhi’s opposition to the English language and to highlight a neglected area in Gandhi’s English writings: his contribution to the development of Indian English in the context of his changing views on the English language. Since he is regarded in India as the ‘Father of the Nation’, his approach towards 145

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the language at different stages of his life and also his lifelong engagement with the English language were perhaps crucial in shaping the destiny of the English language in India. Hence a large part of this chapter deals with analyzing Gandhi’s approach and attitude to the English language. I shall also analyze in this chapter Gandhi’s Indian Home Rule or Hind Swaraj, which was a translation made by Gandhi from his own Gujrati composition, and two of his letters, a friendly one written to Rajagopalachari and an official one written to the additional secretary of the Home Department of the British government. The other writers discussed so far in this study paved the way for the emergence of an Indian variant of the English language, but Gandhi’s translation of Hind Swaraj has an air of defiance towards Standard English which is rarely found in the writings of the other writers discussed in the previous chapters. In the postcolonial sense of positing a ‘difference’ in the use of language, Gandhi is perhaps the first practitioner. In Chapter 1, I referred to Ashcroft’s argument that ‘Caliban is not imprisoned in Prospero’s language’ (Caliban, 28), and now we come full circle in Gandhi’s own English translation of his Hind Swaraj, which proves best my assumption. Gandhi’s dichotomous relation with English (opposing English as a tool of enslavement as well as using the English language) is a potential site for debate and discussion on the relation between language and hegemony. His views on the role of the English language in India as expressed in Hind Swaraj are themselves a potential site, and they are also significant because the text is regarded as the manifesto of Gandhism. Gandhi’s use of English is used as evidence of the fact that the English language was a tool for struggle for independence, and in the light of this fact his view that ‘to give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them’ (Hind Swaraj, 103) seems highly ironical. However, it would not be wise to equate Gandhi’s objection to English education with the postcolonial objection of George Lamming that Caliban is imprisoned in Prospero’s language (Ashcroft, Caliban’s, 28). Gandhi’s ‘enslave’ and Lamming’s ‘imprisoned’ seem to be close but they are really wide apart. Gandhi never said that an Indian could not express his or her true self in English; he lamented that ‘our best thoughts’ were being expressed in English, which betrays that Gandhi’s position was wide apart from Lamming’s. What did he mean then by ‘enslave’? It is necessary to study the statement in its entire context. Although the passage is large the main points need to be highlighted: READER:

Do I then understand that you do not consider English education necessary for obtaining Home Rule? E D I T O R : 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 . . . Is it not a sad commentary that we should have to speak of Home Rule in a foreign tongue? . . . 146

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The English Chancellor, Mr. Lloyd George, is taking a leading part in the movement to make Welsh children speak Welsh. And what is our condition? We write to each other in faulty English, . . . our best thoughts are expressed in English; the proceedings of our Congress are conducted in English. . . It is worth noting that, by receiving English education, we have enslaved the nation. Hypocrisy, tyranny, etc. have increased; English-knowing Indians have not hesitated to cheat and strike terror into the people . . .  . . . 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? . . . I have told you that my answer to your last question is both yes and no. I have explained to you why it is yes. I shall now explain why it is no. We are so much beset by the disease of civilisation, that we cannot altogether do without English education. Those who have already received it may make good use of it wherever necessary. (103–104) Gandhi’s explication of the idea of English enslaving the masses points towards an indispensability of the English language, which is a fact of history. Both the two answers of the editor – ‘yes’ and ‘no’ – point to the same predicament. That it was ‘a sad commentary’ on the plight of the Indians and that they were ‘beset by the disease of civilisation’ were matters of opinion and observation on the part of the editor in Hind Swaraj. The bare fact was that English was indispensable for professionals like barristers and doctors, for those who constituted the colonial system of administration as well as for those who argued with or against the colonial government – for example, the members of the Congress, the ‘proceedings of which are conducted in English’ (Hind Swaraj 103). Gandhi’s comment ‘we write to each other in faulty English’ (Hind Swaraj 103) further suggests that English was one of the preferred languages of private or unofficial communication. As most of the social and religious reformers wrote in English (perhaps that was the reason) Gandhi said that ‘our best thoughts are expressed in English’. Gandhi never considered the English language as one which embodied imperialism or hegemony, as maintained by some postcolonial critics and linguists, like George Lamming (1960) and Pennycook (1998). Yet, in the same passage quoted earlier from Hind Swaraj, the editor says that those ‘who have studied English will have to teach morality to their progeny through their mother-tongue’ (104). The question inevitably arises of whether morality, according to Gandhi, was incompatible with the English language. Morality is the major underlying theme in Gandhi’s political visions and opinions in Hind Swaraj; Gandhi viewed his politics from the perspective of morality and ethics. His idea of ‘satyagraha’ and his objections against the use of violence had a pronounced moral texture. His morality was derived 147

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from a variety of sources both Indian and Western. Besides the ‘masters of Indian philosophy’ (Gandhi, ‘Preface’, 6), Gandhi was inspired by a variety of Western texts: Ruskin’s Unto This Last, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You and The Slavery of Our Times, and Thoreau’s Life Without Principle and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, only to name a few.1 So what did Gandhi actually mean by teaching morality through the mother tongue? Gandhi himself did not learn all his moral lessons in the mother tongue. His Hind Swaraj in its English version is itself proof that morality could be conveyed in any language. Hence the view that morality could be conveyed only through the mother tongue is not tenable. Before the composition of Hind Swaraj Gandhi, after a series of discussions with Henry Polak, had ‘come round to the view that “there is no impossible barrier between East and West”; rather there was one between ancient and modern civilization’ (Guha, 365). Gandhi’s bone of contention was ‘modern civilization’, and I think that for Gandhi, the English language was objectionable for the problems it created: channelling the vices of modern civilization and creating a new area of haves and have-nots. In later life Gandhi can be said to have indirectly asserted the neutrality of language while backing Mulk Raj Anand’s choice of language. Mulk Raj Anand, whom Gandhi advised to ‘cut meretricious literariness’ (Mehrotra, ‘Introduction’ 13) from his first novel Untouchable, once asked Gandhi if he should continue to write exclusively in English. Gandhi was reported to have answered, ‘The purpose of writing is to communicate, isn’t it? If so, say your say in any language that comes to hand’ (qtd in Mehrotra, ‘Introduction’, 13). In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi’s main concerns, understandably, were that the Welsh should speak Welsh and the Gujratis Gujrati, the Bengalis Bengali and so forth, that education should be imparted in the mother tongue and that the Indians should protect themselves from the vices of modern Western civilization. For Gandhi use of the English language was a sign of slavery as an Indian was not free to use her or his mother tongue. For Gandhi the mother tongue was a tool for consolidating the spirit of nationhood. In 1909, the year the Hind Swaraj was composed, Gandhi was invited to a meeting of some expatriates in support of a Gujrati literary conference being held in Rajkot. There Gandhi ‘urged his audience to cultivate pride in their mother tongue, noting that “one strong reason why the Boers enjoy swarajya today is that they and their children mostly use their own language”’ (Guha, 364). For Gandhi, at the time of his composition of Hind Swaraj the mother tongue was also a shield against the vices of modern civilization. But in pre-Independent India (and also beyond 1947) for many Indians, the vernaculars represented backwardness and English symbolized modernity. In 1921, Gandhi complained, ‘I know husbands who are sorry that their wives cannot talk to them and their friends in English. I know families in which English is being made the mother tongue’ (qtd in Mehrotra, ‘Introduction’, 13). Gandhi’s opposition here, as argued rightly by Mehrotra, is not against the 148

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language but what it symbolized for many deluded Indians. Hence he made his speeches in Hindi and Gujrati whenever he found it feasible. It is the hegemony of the English language which I think Gandhi intended to oppose throughout the major part of his life. On the other hand, English remained an important tool in his lifelong mission of freedom against colonial rule. The English-educated people composed only a small portion of the Indian population, and the people who did not use the English language were subject to the tyranny of the English-educated professionals, like the doctor and lawyer. Yet a language could not be discarded because some sections of the people were using it for exploiting the people because there were others, like Gandhi himself, who were using it to preach the message of satyagraha. However, Gandhi’s agenda against the English language had political significance for the backward sections of the Indian society. Gandhi’s protests against the hegemony of English, I think, was related with the caste politics of northern and western India to which Gandhi belonged. One of Gandhi’s main contributions to the national movement is that he was successful in drawing the Dalits or the backward sections of the Indian society into the nationalist fold. In western India, the end of the rule of the Peshwas of Maharashtra and the beginning of the Company rule in the eighteenth century brought this hope to the backward castes of western India that the hegemony of the Brahmins would end. The hope was encouraged by ‘the burgeoning of educational establishments of all kinds [to which students of all classes had equal access] in the hands of the protestant missionaries’ (O’Hanlon, 6). But they were disillusioned to find that the old association of the higher castes with the skills of literacy gave them a much greater flexibility and readiness to exploit these new possibilities [of acquiring administrative and political power] than was [sic] possessed by any of western India’s agricultural or urban lower castes. (O’Hanlon, 7) The superior skills of the English language which the upper castes came to possess put them in an advantageous position in the service sector over the aspirants of the lower class. Moreover, the movements that emerged in the lower castes in the nineteenth century aiming to discover their identity ‘deprived the emerging nationalist movement [led by English-educated upper caste] in western India both of a considerable body of support, and of the considerable advantages that nationalists would have gained in their arguments with the British government’ (O’Hanlon, 8). Since the leaders of the Indian National Congress of the nineteenth century came mostly from the English-educated upper class, English was not only the language of the colonialists but also the language of the upper castes. Hence Gandhi’s opposition 149

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to the English language had a greater appeal for the backward castes than it had among the upper castes all over India. In Hind Swaraj, which was written before Gandhi finally settled in India following his legendary political achievements in South Africa, he pointed out that the ‘English-knowing Indians have not hesitated to cheat and strike terror into the people’ (103– 104). And for the Dalits, the issue of the exploitation of the upper castes remained in the uppermost part of their political agenda. Gandhi attracted the backward sections towards him through his simplicity, through his conception of ‘ramrajya’ derived from the epic Ramayana, through his adoption of poverty, and through his agenda of opposing the hegemony of the English language. Hence the anti-English propaganda of the early twentieth century had an undercurrent of the complexities of caste politics besides its obvious anti-colonial agenda. Gandhi’s English writings and speeches in English are not only an invaluable legacy but also a part of what Certeau said ‘the jungle of procedures rendered invisible to the conqueror’ (qtd in Krishnaswamy & Burde, 58), to which I have referred in the first chapter. Through a long and winding procedure the English language has functioned as a postcolonial tool, and perhaps the ‘procedure’ was invisible not only to the colonial ruler, as claimed by Certeau, but also, to some extent, to Gandhi himself. Gandhi’s English writings, I am going to show in this chapter, used the English language to construct a powerful anti-colonial and anti-imperial discourse. It was a fact that for the major part of his political career, Gandhi did not speak of the English language in positive terms. It was only during the last days of his life when his opinion seemed to change. This chapter does not aim at deconstructing Gandhi – although that already seems inescapable – but to bring out a facet of his vast contributions to Indian life and culture and thereby to bring to completion our brief survey of the ‘Indianization’ of the English language. Before we discuss particular texts of Gandhi we need to review the man’s lifelong relation with the English language. Gandhi’s stand on the English language did not remain the same throughout his life. Moreover, his extensive use of English betrays the fact that he was never fanatic about denouncing English – which we are often misled to believe. In his early life he thought highly of English society and culture. In the year 1888, when he was 18, he ‘jumped at the proposal’ of studying law in the UK and imagined London as ‘the home of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization’ (Gandhi, Rajmohan, 18). It is interesting to think that for almost a year in South Africa Gandhi had been a tutor of English. In South Africa in June 1893, after his horrible experience of racism at the Pietermaritzburg station on his journey from Durban to Pretoria, Gandhi called a meeting, which was attended by Indian Muslim merchants and a few Indians of other sects residing in Pretoria. Gandhi appealed to his listeners to overcome religious, communal, and provincial boundaries in a common Indian interest, and finally he ‘urged them to learn English, 150

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offering his services to those few young men who wished to do so’ (Adams, 49). After several such meetings Gandhi got only three students willing to be taught English: a Muslim barber, a Muslim clerk, and a Hindu shopkeeper. Rajmohan Gandhi narrates, For about eight months, Gandhi went to their places to teach them, often waiting while they were busy. Two of the three learnt enough English to keep accounts and write ordinary business letters, while the barber was satisfied with a few sentences to use with his customers. (76–77) Gandhi mentioned this experience in his autobiography, which he called the story of his experiments with truth: ‘My pupils might become tired, but not I. Sometimes it happened that I would go to their places only to find them engaged in their business. But I did not lose patience’ (Gandhi, Autobiography, 66). So here we have not the Gandhi who thought that ‘To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them’ (Hind Swaraj 103) but one who thought that giving free English tuition was a valuable piece of social service for the Indian immigrants in South Africa. However, there were many second-generation young Indians in Natal in South Africa who could write English. They were mostly children of free labourers. Gandhi reported that these young men volunteered to copy petitions when Gandhi started a movement in 1894 against the government’s decision to seize the voting rights of the Indian immigrants (Dakshin Afrikay Satyagraha, 77). I think that the two things are interconnected: his witnessing the most horrible face of racism in a colonial administration and his advising the Indian brethren to be united and to learn English. The latter is a reflex action caused by the former. In the face of utter unkindness and threat to existence for the poor Indian community on foreign soil, Gandhi realized the need of the hour. But while he was writing Hind Swaraj his opinion regarding the necessity of English in India was both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. While he protested against the hegemony of English in India, he also realized the indispensability of the English language. Soon after returning from South Africa, in February 1916, at Benares Hindu University, he said that it was ‘a matter of deep humiliation and shame’ that he had to address his ‘countrymen in a language that is foreign to me’ (Mukherjee, R., ed., 68); yet he continued and delivered a historic speech. Later when he got more involved with Indian politics, he developed and popularized the cult of the charkha and tried to negate Western industrialization by affirming Indian cottage industries. But a language could not be discarded like foreign clothes, with which bonfires were made. Language, unlike foreign cloth, could not be put on the bonfire. It was a fact Gandhi was aware of more than anyone else. I think it is a fact worth pondering that the man who participated in the burning of foreign clothes – in spite of the 151

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disapproval of Tagore, whom he used to address as ‘Gurudev’2 – the man who stuck to his loincloth and rugs even during early winter in Britain (during his visit for the Round Table Conference in 1931) and went to meet the king George V in the same cloth3 continued to use English. In his own words, the loincloth was ‘the dress of my principals, the people of India’4 (Bose, S.C., Indian, 241). But Gandhi could not stick to the language of ‘the people of India’. In one of his letters he remarks, ‘I reach the masses only through Hindustani, however imperfect it may be, never through English, however perfect it may be’ (Gandhi, G., ed., 552–553). In Young India he also voiced his doubt about whether he was wasting his time in writing in English: I frankly confess that to me editing a newspaper in English is no pleasure. I feel that in occupying myself with that work I am not making the best use of my time. And but for the Madras Presidency, I should now leave the work of editing Young India . . . Until Hindustani becomes compulsory in our schools as a second language, educated India, especially in the Madras Presidency, must be addressed in English. (Qtd in John, 130) This doubt is not an expression of disapproval of the English language but his urge to communicate with the Indian masses since ‘the English journals’, according to Gandhi, ‘touch but the fringe of the ocean of India’s population’ (qtd in Bhatacharya, S.N., 39). Gandhi was speaking a statistical truth as the English literacy in 1911 was 1 percent (Sarkar, S., Modern, 66). Although English literacy in India in the 1920s and 1930s could not have been dramatically greater, it was widespread throughout the length and breadth of the country. However, the circulation of Young India multiplied rapidly under the editorship of Gandhi5(Bhattacharya, S.N., 39). Khilnani observed that though ‘ambivalent about the function of English in India, they [Gandhi and Nehru] kept a political commitment to English as a language of public communication’ (136). This only proves the obvious truth that English had taken root in India and had become a part of Indian culture, which Gandhi was to realize in the late 1940s. Towards the end of his life Gandhi was divested of both adolescent fascination and political ardour and saw the bare truth: that the English language had acquired a permanent settlement in Indian soil. In Harijan on 25 January 1948, only five months after the colonial rule came to an end, he wrote, I cannot discontinue the English Harijan . . .  My contact with the West is also widening. I was never opposed to the British or to any Westerner nor I am today . . . So English will never be excluded from my small store of knowledge. I do not want to forget that language nor give it up. [However] it cannot become our national language 152

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or medium of instruction . . . The rule of the English will go because it was corrupt, but the prevalence of English will never go. (Qtd in Khilnani, 154) Gandhi’s forecast was accurate this time. In 1997 Salman Rushdie’s statement validates what Gandhi said half a century earlier: ‘English has become an Indian language. Its colonial origin means that like Urdu and unlike all other Indian languages, it has no regional base; but in all other ways, it has emphatically come to stay’ (‘Introduction’, 1997). Gandhi’s understanding of English changed as he came to terms with reality, which is also evidence of his being a ‘satyagrahi’, a pursuer of truth. The separation of the two: the English language and English rule indicated a truth which was institutionalized later. This truth validates the view that a language may represent imperial power but does not embody imperialism or hegemony. Just a week before he would be assassinated Gandhi realized what Ashcroft intended to argue in Caliban’s Voice: that language itself does not have any ideology or dogma. His vision was also exact: The administration can be corrupt but language is never so. A colonial user of a language cannot paralyze the postcolonial potential of the language; a racist user of a language cannot corrupt the humanitarian potential of the language and so on. In the legendary trial of 1922 – well dramatized in the Attenborough film – Gandhi spoke entirely in Standard English and still exposed the hypocrisy and hollowness of the right of the British to rule. According to Khilnani, Gandhi ‘used English legal language and etiquette’ to unmask the supposed neutrality of law and the English legal language (143). It is important that Gandhi did not need to outstep the periphery of legal discourse to achieve his goal. Gandhi unwittingly proved that the user of a language or a discourse may not remain imprisoned in the language or discourse. Rather, a creative use of language unlocks the hidden possibilities in language. As a writer of non-fiction Gandhi was bilingual, the two languages being Gujrati, his mother tongue, and English. His range of subjects included autobiography, politics, vegetarian diet,6 and a guidebook for young men aspiring to go to England for studies.7 He contributed to the weekly journal Indian Opinion8 in English and Gujrati in South Africa and edited Young India9 and Harijan10 in English in India. He also edited an unregistered English weekly journal, Satyagrahi, in 1919, in defiance of the Indian Press Act (Bhattacharya, S.N., 34), with the intention of creating a mass awareness against the Rowlatt Act. Gandhi composed his autobiographical works, The Story of My Experiments With Truth and Satyagraha in South Africa, in Gujrati. In 1909, Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj, which was accepted as the manifesto of Gandhian revolution in 1919, in his mother tongue and translated the text himself in 1910; he did not feel theurge to translate any other work of his. The vast body of his English writings consists mainly of letters, speeches, editorials, articles, talks, and interviews, besides the English 153

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translation of Hind Swaraj. Although he is not known as a poet, he translated a number of Indian devotional lyrics into English during one of his periods of stay in prison. Some of these were later adapted for publication by John S. Hoyland, with the title Songs From Prison (1934). Gandhi’s prose style has been analyzed by scholars, critics, and literary historians and was a matter of conjecture even during his lifetime. A fortnight before his assassination, Gandhi himself reportedly said, ‘English and Indian scholars of English believe there is something special about my English’ (qtd in Khilnani, 145). Gandhi’s prose style has traditionally been defined as lucid and simple, devoid of ornamentation. K.R.S. Iyengar’s observations on Gandhi’s prose style may be the starting point for any discussion on Gandhi’s English: Although no great scholar, Gandhi knew very well the New Testament in English, and his writing in English had accordingly a simplicity, pointedness and clarity that was in refreshing contrast to the heaviness often characteristic of earlier Indian writing. Thanks to the Gandhian example, Indian writing in English became recognizably functional. Gone were the old Macaulayan amplitude and richness of phrasing and weight of miscellaneous learning. (272) Iyengar made an important point: that Gandhi was the leader in initiating a new path of English writing in India. But the point has not been explored enough. I attempt to further expound on this aspect of his prose style with respect to one of his letters. I also intend to show, with reference to his translation of Hind Swaraj, that Gandhi was one of the first writers of Indian English. A British journalist, Arthur Hawks, described his visit to Gandhi’s office (then a young lawyer cum social worker in South Africa) around 1904. Hawks was surprised by Gandhi’s command over English: ‘From the opening of the conversation, I was stuck by his exquisite English – as natural in flow as if he had never spoken any other tongue, and as mellifluous in diction as it was in inflection’ (qtd in Adams, 83). John Haynes Holmes was quite apt in his critical appreciation of Gandhi’s prose: Seldom if ever, in his writings, did he rise to the heights of eloquence and beauty . . . I doubt if, in all his works, Gandhi wrote a sentence which failed to express with utter precision the thought he had in mind to convey. Gandhi mastered his medium. He wrought a style which was perfect for his purpose of communication. To read his writings is to think of content and not of style – which means a triumph in the adaptation of means to ends. (vii)

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Bhabani Bhattacharya highlighted the same quality of clarity and simplicity when he showered his adulation: No one who has used the stuff of words on a massive scale has been as passionately purposive as Gandhi. No one has used words with such intense longing to be down-to-earth on the one hand and, paradoxically, to reach for the stars on the other. (2) Sunil Khilnani also commented on the argumentative and simplicity of his style: Perhaps the most distinctive trait of his writing, though, was his forensic skill in arguing a case. Rarely did he fall into the customary mode of Indian political writing: rhetorical bluster. Gandhi’s own writing often reads like a lawyer’s brief, but without the obfuscations of legal language. (145) From these observations it is quite apparent that there was conformity between the man and his style of writing. The simplicity and bareness of his thoughts, dress, and speech left their mark on his written words as well. I would like to stretch this compatibility of language and character further and say that the creeds of non-violence and satyagraha have also left their mark on his words. I find that his prose style, as time rolled on, reflected a mind which was becoming increasingly non-violent, gentler and gentler, which was in deep contrast with the colonial-imperial discourse of the British government, which was becoming unsympathetic towards and distanced from the Indian masses. In his translation of Hind Swaraj he presented his theory of satyagraha and ahimsa, but he was rather unrestrained in his expression of feeling (to borrow Gandhi’s own words) in his ‘severe condemnation of “modern civilization”’ (qtd in Khilnani, 140). There is, if I may say, verbal violence in his outburst against Western modern civilization (Hind Swaraj, Chapter 6) and against English education (Chapter 18), when he is complaining of weaknesses in Indians’ character responsible for their being in bondage (Chapter 7), and when he is pouring out his feelings against lawyers and doctors. Much of the controversy generated in these cases was due to the lack of restraint of feelings rather than lack of reason. But whether he was restrained or exuberant he set milestones in the use of the English language in India. During his later phase of his life there was a greater restraint in his expressions. Restraint is the main theme in the advice he gave to his son Manilal Gandhi, who took over the responsibility of Indian Opinion in South Africa when Gandhi shouldered the leadership of

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the freedom movement in India: ‘You should write what is truth . . . Do not give way to anger. Be moderate in your language’ (qtd in Bhattacharya, B., 53–54). Gandhi also remarked upon his own efforts on this matter: The reader can have no idea of the restraint I have to exercise . . . in the choice of topics and my vocabulary. It is a training for me. It enables me to peep into myself and to make discoveries of my weaknesses. Often my vanity dictates a smart expression or my anger a harsh adjective. It is a terrible ordeal but a fine exercise to remove these weeds. (Qtd in Bhattacharya, B., 2) A great example of Gandhi’s verbal restraint is his reaction on the death of his wife, Kasturba. Rajmohan Gandhi documents, ‘On 22 February 1944, a day of the full moon, . . . Kasturba died in her husband’s arms’ (514). She died in the Aga Khan Palace, where the Gandhis were detained since 1942. She was not offered release even when she was on her deathbed. Though refusing to apply for her release, her husband asked for doctors, nurses, and bedside comfort, but with very little response from the government. She died without much medical care. Any other man would be enraged in such circumstances and would be moved to feelings of violence and vengeance. But Gandhi remained unbelievably restrained, not making any charge on the government for his wife’s death, reluctant, to borrow his own words, ‘to make any political capital’ (Gandhi, G., ed., 520) out of a personal tragedy. But when there was a claim on the part of the government that Kasturba received all possible medical care Gandhi protested gently, not to vent his anger but for the sake of truth. He wrote a letter to the additional secretary of the Home Department: Detention Camp 4 March 1944 Sir, It is not without regret and hesitation that I write about my dead wife. But truth demands this letter. According to the newspapers, Mr Butler is reported to have said in the House of Commons on 2nd March 1944: ‘.  .  . She was receiving all possible medical care and attention, not only from her regular attendants but from those desired by her family . . .’ The deceased herself had repeatedly asked the Inspector-General of Prisons for Dr Dinshaw Mehta’s11 help during practically a month previous to that. He was allowed to come only from 5 February 1944. Again, the regular physicians Drs. Nayar and Gilder

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made a written application for consultation with Dr. B.C. Roy of Calcutta on 31 January 1944. The government simply ignored their written request and subsequent oral reminders. Mr. Butler is further reported to have said: ‘No request for her release was received and the Government of India believe it would be no act of kindness to her or her family to remove her from the Aga Khan’s Palace’. Whilst it is true that no request was made by her or by me (as satyagrahi prisoners it would have been unbecoming), would it not have been in the fitness of things, if the Government had at least offered to her, me, and her sons to release her? The mere offer of release would have produced a favourable psychological effect on her mind. But unfortunately no such offer was ever made. As to the funeral rites, Mr. Butler is reported to have said: ‘I have information that the funeral rites took place at the request of Mr Gandhi in the grounds of Aga Khan’s Palace at Poona, and friends and relatives were present’. The following, however, was my actual request which the InspectorGeneral of Prisons took down in writing from dictation at 8.07 p.m. on 22 February 1944 . . . . Government will perhaps admit that I have scrupulously avoided making any political capital out of my wife’s protracted illness and the difficulties I experienced from the Government. Nor do I want to make any now. But in justice to her memory, to me, and for the sake of truth, I ask the Government to make such amends as they can. If the newspaper report is inaccurate in essential particulars or the Government have a different interpretation of the whole episode, I should be supplied with the correct version and the Government interpretation of the whole episode. If my complaint is held to be just, I trust that the amazing statement said to have been made in America by the Agent of the Government of India in U.S.A. will be duly corrected. I am, etc, M.K. Gandhi. (Gandhi, G., ed., 521–522) Nelson Mandela was once asked the question, after such barbarous torment, how do you keep hatred in check? His answer, I think, may help us understand men like the Mahatma and Mandela: ‘Hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders cannot afford to hate’ (Keller, 2). The most distinguishing feature of the letter quoted earlier is the fact that it is devoid of any sign of hatred. There is no verbal violence, no sarcasm, no sly dig for the immense hypocrisy of the government, no ‘smart expression’ or ‘a harsh adjective’. There are only reminders of the actual facts in a manner

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which seems just gentle but which hides great spiritual stamina. Without outstepping the periphery of such clichés as ‘reported to have said’ and ‘duly corrected’, Gandhi wrote a letter which speaks volumes about the virtue of ahimsa and his commitment to satyagraha; the sentence at the outset, ‘But truth demands this letter’, sets the tone. Gandhi’s letter is an example of the fact that language can never be colonized. What is more important is that Gandhi left behind a legacy of language use which has endured to date. Gandhi pruned down his emotions and walked the path of bare truth. This official and impersonal discourse still survives while the affected humility of such expressions as ‘I beg to state’, ‘I shall be highly obliged if . . .’, and ‘for your kind perusal’– the legacy of colonial domination – is on the decline. Today the Indian user of English is confident of such expressions as ‘satyagrahi prisoners’, while the clerks and babus of Gandhi’s time would not dare to outstep the periphery of the English lexicon. In the 1940s when the discussions on national language were in full swing, Gandhi wrote a few letters in Hindi. Since his proficiency in English was greater than that in Hindi, he would sometimes write first in English and then get it translated into Hindi. In a letter to Nehru dated 13 November 1945, he writes, I have had Rajkumari [Amrit Kaur] translate the letter which I wrote to you earlier. I am getting this also translated and will send the translation along with this. I serve two purposes by getting the letters translated. First I can explain to you more clearly in English what I want to say and secondly I shall be able to know better whether I have understood you fully or not. (Parel, ed., 105) Rajagopalachari, who also could read Hindi, was the recipient of a letter which Gandhi understandably, wrote in Hindi himself. Rajagopalachari wrote back (in English) complaining that Gandhi’s handwriting was difficult to decipher and argued that he saw no point in toiling over Hindi when English served their purpose wonderfully well. He ended his letter by warning that he would write to him in Tamil if he continued in ‘illegible Nagari’ (Gandhi, G., ed., 762). In his letter dated 11 March 1946, Gandhi responded by countering Rajagopalachari’s argument but switched back to English with a sprinkling of Tamil and Hindi words. This letter is a priceless document revealing a tension between the English language deeply rooted in the Indian psyche and the prejudiced view that the English language should not be used in the private or creative domain. The letter also documents the interface of English and the Indian languages that resulted in the shaping of Indian English. The letter began as follows: 158

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‘If we discover a mistake, must we continue it? We began making love in English – a mistake. Must it express itself only by repeating the initial mistake.’ (Gandhi, G., ed., 573). Towards the end of the letter he changed the topic, but his use of Indian English virtually continued the theme of the use of the English language for personal correspondence: This tamasha will vanish leaving the water of life cleaner for the agitation. If it does not, what then? Ambudan12 Bapu (Gandhi, G., ed., 573) From Gandhi originated a legacy of paradox, comments Binoo K. John in a joking note: ‘This is the great Indian paradox [to use or not to use English] that confronts users of English in India. The way out is the Gandhian way: express your misgivings about the language and continue to use it’ (John, 133). But Gandhi’s contribution to English in India, needless to say, is not this paradox. The letter actually reveals more than it purports to express. It documents the fact that ‘making love in English’, although a ‘mistake’ from the Gandhian perspective, was deemed possible by Gandhi, and the truth came out of his first-hand experience. According to Gandhi, making love for mere pleasure was sinful. On 28 March 1936 in Harijan, Gandhi wrote, ‘Sex urge is a fine and noble thing. There is nothing to be ashamed of it. But it is meant only for the act of creation. Any other use of it is a sin against God and humanity’ (Selections, 23). From that perspective the metaphorical phrase ‘making love in English’ bears a connotation of sin, more so when the ‘mistake’ is repeated. Hence English when not used for official or nationalistic purposes was sinful. But that the Mahatma himself tasted the forbidden fruit was also a truth – a truth which proved to be more powerful and decisive than his ideology on the English language, which he professed in Hind Swaraj. It has been discussed in this chapter that Gandhi’s political stand on English did not remain the same, but his liaison with the English language continued throughout his life, influencing his perspective on the use of the English language by Indians. Moreover this liaison with the English language bore its fruit and it can also be discerned in the letter itself: the loanword ‘tamasha’, the code-switch to Tamil, and the metaphor ‘the water of life’ point towards the existence of an Indian variant of the English language. This dilemma of language, when placed in the context of debates and discussions by postcolonial critics in recent times, multiplies in its significance. For example, in an interview G.C. Spivak was asked the question, ‘Is the choice of language, English or Bengali, for example, particularly significant for the writer writing in India?’ Answering in the affirmative 159

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‘because India is a multilingual country’, Spivak explained that the postcolonial is like the child of rape who cannot be ostracized and whose birth can neither be celebrated: We see there a certain kind of innate historical enablement which one mustn’t celebrate, but toward which one has a deconstructive position, as it were. In order for there to be an all-India voice, we have had to dehegemonize English as one of the Indian languages. Yet it must be said that, as a literary medium, it is in the hands of people who are enough at home in standard English as to be able to use Indian English only as the medium of protest, as mockery or teratology; and sometimes as no more than local colour, necessarily from above. (Landry & MacLean, ed., 19) By ‘postcolonial’ in the sentence ‘To an extent the postcolonial is that’ Spivak possibly means everything that is postcolonial, which includes postcolonial literature, art, and culture. Anything that is inherited from the colonial past – for example, the English language – might enrich a postcolonial existence with a ‘historical enablement’. Yet those things are not to be celebrated because they are the children of rape. Hence this situation puts the colonized people or the people with a colonial past in a deconstructive position as they can neither abandon the source of ‘historical enablement’ nor can they wholeheartedly utilize it and celebrate it. Gandhi’s position as a user of English can be said to be ‘deconstructive’ in the sense implied by Spivak. Born in colonial India, his knowledge of English was also an enablement of colonial history. Throughout his life he used the language extensively. Yet that element of culture could not be celebrated and hence developing a personal relation in English was erroneous and continuing it was sinful; yet the language could not be ostracized like foreign clothes. It formed a part of his inner being; otherwise the incident of ‘making love in English’ would not have materialized. He was at home with Standard English, although he was half inclined to add local colour; in Hind Swaraj there is usage of Indian English ‘as the medium of protest’ through which the language was also ‘dehegemonized’. But Spivak missed an important criterion which Gandhi had unwittingly mentioned: the element of pleasure inherent in the phrase ‘making love in English’. Writing in English – beyond the official and public domain – has to be an act of pleasure when the language comes as a spontaneous choice for the Indian writer. It is something which several writers of the English language – from Michael Madhusudan Dutt to Mahatma Gandhi – loved to do. In Indian Home Rule or Hind Swaraj he did with the English language what R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, and Raja Rao were to do later. Unfortunately this has gone unnoticed until today and the common knowledge of 160

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Gandhi’s Indianisms does not go beyond ‘Himalayan miscalculation’.13 But while translating the Gujrati text into English, Gandhi steered away, quite often, from the path of Standard English. In this text, the interface of his mother tongue with the second language, which is the most defining characteristic of Indian English, is quite apparent. I would like to show here that Gandhi actually wrote in Indian English, although the term was not in vogue in the early twentieth century. Indian Home Rule or Hind Swaraj (1910), the subject of my analysis, enjoys a special place in Gandhi’s writings. It is the only book that Gandhi himself translated, and it was to this text that he returned throughout his career as if to the source of his inspiration. It was written on board the Kildonan Castle on his way back to South Africa from London in 1909. According to Gandhi himself, he wrote because he could not restrain himself (‘Foreword’, Parel, ed., 9) and the composition went on with such a furious speed that when the right hand was tired Gandhi continued writing with his left (Parel, ‘Introduction’, xiv). The text was published in book form in January 1910 by Gandhi’s own International Printing Press at Phoenix in Natal in South Africa (Parel, ‘A Note’, lxiii). The English version of the book was dictated by Gandhi to his friend Hermann Kallenbach and appeared two months after the Gujrati version (Guha, 362) with the title Indian Home Rule (or Hind Swaraj). In a Young India editorial of 26 January 1921, Gandhi gave the English text a new title, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. On 10 March 1910 the book was seized at Bombay and placed in the hands of the Gujrati interpreter of Madras High Court. On 24 March 1910, the text was banned by the government of India for security reasons (Guha, 362). By that time the English version had been published (20 March 1910). According to Gandhi the news of the seizure of the Gujrati text made him publish the translated one in haste: ‘whilst opinions were being invited as to the advisability of publishing the work, news was received that the original was seized in India. This information hastened the decision to publish the translation without a moment’s delay’ (Gandhi, ‘Preface’, 5). In this text he countered the line of violence of the extremists as well as G.K. Chesterton’s charges against Indian nationalism that ‘it is not very Indian and not very national’, that there was a big difference between ‘a conquered people demanding its own institutions and the same people demanding the institutions of a conqueror’ (qtd in Guha, 363). The text has been compared to such diverse works as Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’, the ‘Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola’, and Chapter 4 of St Matthew and St Luke (Parel, ‘Introduction’, xiii). It is in this text that Gandhi announced his life’s mission, which in the words of Rajmohan Gandhi is ‘to attain India’s swaraj through satyagraha and thereby present satyagraha to the world’ (154). Madeline Slade, better known as Mirabehn, the adopted daughter of Gandhi, supervised much of his English letters and writings (Adams, 181). Whether she helped Gandhi in translating the text is not known. 161

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The first group of texts discussed in this book consists of the three texts of Rammohan’s written in the form of conversation: ‘Religious Instruction’ and the translation of the two conferences on the issue of the burning of widows. As I come near the end I again chance upon another text written in the form of a conversation. The entire body of the text in Hind Swaraj is a conversation between Editor and Reader. Critics and biographers have traced this form to the Socratic dialogues in the writings of Plato (Adams, 128) as well as to the conversation between Lord Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita (Guha, 366): It [Hind Swaraj] was constructed around an imaginary conversation between a ‘Reader’, who was almost certainly modelled on Pranjivan Mehta, and an ‘Editor’, who, of course, was Gandhi himself. The sanction for this device came from tradition, for it was widely used in classical literature, above all the Bhagavad-Gita, where Krishna answers and clarifies the doubts and anxieties of Arjuna. Gandhi himself spoke on the subject: Some of the friends who have read the translation have objected that the subject matter has been dealt with in the form of a dialogue. I have no answer to offer to this objection except that the Gujrati language readily lends itself to such treatment and that it is considered the best method of treating difficult subjects. Had I written for English readers in the first instance, the subject would have been handled in a different manner. (‘Preface’, 6) The structure of scholastic debate enabled Rammohan to participate in the traditional Indian oral debates on the Sastras. Similarly, the structure of dialogues in Hind Swaraj enabled Gandhi to present his arguments in a manner which he thought would suit his Indian readers. Thus native cultural traditions had an effect on the use of English by Indians. On Rammohan’s use of the form of dialogues, I commented that the form of dialogue was not in vogue among English writers in the early nineteenth century. The singleness of the narrator in any text of the first or third-person narration was ideal for a colonial discourse, while the form of a conversation or debate is more suitable for a democratic and rational discourse. The same thing can be said in the case of Hind Swaraj (the form of conversation was also not in vogue in the early twentieth century). Both Rammohan and Gandhi happened to avoid the trappings of colonial discourse and chose a form which accommodated the view of the opposition. Although writing in English, they sought inspiration from the pre-industrial West and the ancient East, thereby producing a history of difference from the colonizer’s style of language. Hence, 162

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the influence of the mother tongue and Indian culture had a role in forming a distinct dialect for the Indian users. The very first sentence of Indian Home Rule or Hind Swaraj shows the influence of Indian languages on Gandhi’s English: ‘READER: Just at present there is a Home Rule wave passing over India’ (13). There is a distinct Indian quality in the metaphor, for images such as waves and wind are used in many Indian languages in such circumstances as suggested in the sentence. The use of images common in Indian life and languages by an Indian writer in English is only natural. Hence, while speaking about lawyers, when the Editor says, ‘Their touts, like so many leeches, suck the blood of the poor people’ (59), it sounds natural just as in the writings of famous Indian novelists in English. In Hind Swaraj, perhaps for the first time, we have a book written in English but not entirely in the Standard variety, as very often, the tone and texture of Standard English are replaced by a texture of Indian languages, especially Gujrati. There is an instance of cultural shift in the application of a Gujrati proverb: ‘One negative cures thirty-six diseases’ (85). As annotated by Parel the word for negative in the Gujrati text is ‘nanno’, which carries the meaning of a firm ‘no’. The proverb may be interpreted as follows: The ability to say a firm no saves one from many diseases. Sometimes, Gandhi preferred a lexis-bound translation even when there was an English alternative. While defining ‘Swaraj’ he said, ‘It is swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is therefore in the palm of our hands. Do not consider this Swaraj to be like a dream. Here there is no idea of sitting still’ (73). It is significant that Gandhi used the phrase ‘palm of our hands’ – common in many Indian languages – and not an English alternative, such as ‘in our hands’ or ‘in our grip’. According to Ngugi, the choice of English is related to the choice of audience and hence a Kenyan writer in English ‘cannot possibly directly talk to the peasants and workers of Kenya’ (qtd in Innes, 99). But it has to be acknowledged that this preference for the lexis-bound translations, as I find in this text of Gandhi, enabled Gandhi to appeal more ‘directly’ to his Indian readers. The phrase ‘sitting still’ is also a translation of an expression common in many Indian languages. In Chapter 18, the editor attempts to disillusion the reader about Western education with a splendid metaphor from Indian mythology: ‘I have not run down a knowledge of letters under all circumstances. All I have shown is that we must not make of it a fetish. It is not our Kamadhuk’14 (102). What Gandhi tried to imply was that English education would not be able to fulfil all we need. However, in some cases Indian proverbs or expressions had been Anglicized. The Gujrati proverb ‘mangoes do not ripen in a hurry’ is presented as follows: ‘Remember the old proverb that the tree does not grow in one day’ (14). Here the image of mangoes is substituted by the common ‘tree’, which shows that Gandhi was not cynical about Standard English. But he was quite bold in outstepping the peripheries of Standard English. Hence we 163

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have sentences like ‘The salt-tax is not a small injustice’ (20) instead of ‘no small injustice’; also noteworthy is the word ‘tremblingly’ in the following sentence where the editor analyzes the aftermath of the movement against the Partition of Bengal: ‘That which the people said tremblingly and in secret began to be said and to be written publicly’ (21). Creative writers of English in India have often attempted to produce an impression of an Indian language on their English. In some cases it is an artistic necessity, especially in the case of dialogues in fiction. It has been a matter of considerable critical discussion since Raja Rao wrote foreword to his novel Kanthapura. Developing Rao’s observations, G.J.V. Prasad argued – as mentioned in the first chapter – that for an Indian writer of fiction in English, the act of writing in English is not merely one of translation of an Indian text into the English language, but a quest for a space which is created by translation and assimilation and hence transformation of all three – the Indian text, context and the English language. (42) Interestingly, this transformation can be located in several passages of Hind Swaraj. Moreover, since the text is the author’s own translation of a text written in Gujrati and in the form of dialogues, the regional flavour begged to be translated and Gandhi stood up to the challenge boldly. In the seventh chapter the editor gives vent to his feelings on the responsibility of the Indians in their being enslaved: They came to our country originally for purposes of trade. Recall the Company Bahadur. Who made it Bahadur? They had not the slightest intention at the time of establishing a kingdom. Who assisted the Company’s officers? Who was tempted at the sight of their silver? Who bought their goods? History testifies that we did all this. In order to become rich all at once, we welcomed the Company’s officers with open arms. We assisted them. If I am in the habit of drinking Bhang, and a seller thereof sells it to me, am I to blame him or myself? (39–40) As one reads these lines one can feel that the world of Indian English fiction of Anand, Rao, and Narayan had already arrived. Meenakshi Mukherjee observed that Mulk Raj Anand ‘at his best manages to convey a Punjabi flavour through his English’ (Mukherjee, Twice-Born, 161) and R.K. Narayan ‘delineates people whose actions, behaviours and responses are shaped by a language different from English’ (161). Gandhi, I argue, is successful in both ways: in not only bringing an Indian, particularly Gujrati flavour to 164

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his English but also delineating a Gujrati character in the framing of sentences. Needless to say, it is not just the phrase ‘Company Bahadur’ and the word ‘Bhang’ which give the passage its typical Indian character, but in the very framing of the thoughts and in the construction of sentences there is a distinct Indian character. It is interesting that although Gandhi substituted the Indian ‘mango’ with ‘tree’, he did not substitute ‘Bhang’ with any of the Western drinks. However neither ‘mango’ nor ‘bhang’ was unknown to the English ladies and gentlemen residing in India as both the words can be found in Hobson-Jobson (Yule & Burnell, 59 & 553). Indian users of English have a tendency to construct compound words, such as ‘tiffin-box’ and ‘good-name’. The tendency can be seen in the title itself: Indian Home Rule or Hind Swaraj. The term ‘Home Rule’ is a coinage to denote the idea of Swaraj. The compound is used in the text as well and present in the first sentence itself: ‘Just at present there is a Home-Rule wave passing over India’. Speaking about the inevitability of the coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in India, he observed, ‘If the Hindus believe that India should be peopled only by Hindus, they are living in dreamland’ (52). The compound ‘dreamland’ instead of ‘land of dreams’ has gained currency. In the same chapter, titled ‘The Condition of India (cont.): The Hindus and the Mahomedans’, there is a spirited discussion on ‘cow-protection’ (the compound is not hyphenated always in Parel’s edition) between the reader and editor. The latter argues, When the Hindus became insistent [on protecting cows], the killing of cows increased. In my opinion, cow-protection societies may be considered cow-killing societies . . . What am I to do when a blood-brother is on the point of killing a cow? Am I to kill him, or to fall down at his feet and implore him? If you admit that I should adopt the latter course, I must do the same to my Moslem brother. (55) The use of the phrases ‘blood-brother’ and ‘Moslem brother’ is worthy of note. Gandhi used such phrases which rendered his text partly incomprehensible by Western users of the English language. ‘Moslem brother’ is a translation of a common Indian expression in the Hindu community used to show feelings of brotherhood towards the Muslims; the word ‘bhai’, common in several Indian languages, means ‘brother’, but the word is used also as a part of compound word to mean ‘cousins’; hence the reference to blood is made to imply belonging to the same family. On the contrary, the word ‘brother’ is used among Christians to convey the feeling of brotherhood. Hence ‘blood-brother’ implies what a Westerner would understand by ‘brother’. Yet the use of the phrase ‘blood-brother’ carries for Indian readers an added emphasis which could not be made simply by ‘brother’. The 165

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chapter has more instances of coinage of compound words, Elsewhere, in the same chapter the editor says, ‘If I were overfull of pity for the cow, I should sacrifice my life to save her, but not take my brother’s’ (54). In Chapter 14, while discussing the greater significance of ‘Swaraj’ he said, ‘We measure the universe by our own miserable foot-rule’ (72). The reason for the emergence of compound words is I think that most Indian languages have a natural ability to make compounds which have been translated into English. In Chapter 5 of this book, I pointed out that English words are invested with new meanings by Tagore (as well as Indian words used with multilayered significance), leading to the formation of a new Indian discourse. A similar trait is discerned in Gandhi’s discussions on ahimsa and Swaraj. It is so because for both Tagore and Gandhi, although they debated on the significance of Indian nationalism and on the aptness of the methods of burning foreign cloth, they agreed on the point that real freedom is to be achieved in the mental and the spiritual planes rather than on the political plane. Both of them were driven by the concept of truth, although in their own ways. In Hind Swaraj Gandhi used the word ‘religion’ in the sense of sect as well as in the sense of a love for the ultimate truth. In Chapter 14, he argued that modern civilization is destroying Indian civilization, the bedrock of which is its religiosity: Religion is dear to me, and my first complaint is that India is becoming irreligious. Here I am not thinking of the Hindu, the Mahomedan, or the Zoroastrian religion, but of that religion which underlies all religions. We are turning away from God. (42) Gandhi was not a new participant in the Indian discourse of religion. In India, since the early nineteenth century, social reforms have been aided by interpretation and reinterpretation of religious texts, and comparative discussion of religion existed even before Rammohan since the days of the Mughal ruler Akbar and was present prominently in the Sufi and the Bhakti movements. With the leadership of Gandhi, religious tolerance and integrity became a part of the Congress manifesto and the implication of the word ‘religion’ in the broader sense became a part of the nationalist discourse. Gandhi inherited the legacy of the rich discourse of religious integrity and carried it forward, making it the cornerstone of Indian nationalism, necessary for the foundation of independent India: In reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals, but those who are conscious of the spirit of nationality do not interfere with one another’s religion. If they do, they are not fit to be considered a nation. (52) 166

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‘Religion’ is used in a dual sense of ‘way of attaining Truth or God’ and ‘religious sect’. What is perhaps more important is the fact that this duality of religion is made the cornerstone of Indian nationalism and Indian English is one of the dialects in which this entire discourse came to exist. In the preceding chapter it has been shown how Tagore used the term ‘Swaraj’ metaphorically with an apolitical implication in a lecture on Indian philosophy. In Hind Swaraj Gandhi presented his idea of freedom or dragged Indian philosophy into his discussion on ‘Swaraj’: It is swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is therefore in the palm of our hands. Do not consider this Swaraj to be like a dream. Here there is no idea of sitting still. The Swaraj that I wish to picture before you and me is such that, after we have once realized it, we will endeavour to the end of our lifetime to persuade others to do likewise. But such Swaraj has to be experienced by each one for himself. (73) Tagore’s poem ‘Where the Mind Is Without Fear’ has a similar perspective regarding freedom. Neither Tagore nor Gandhi conceived a freedom which could be only dreamt but not translated into action. For Gandhi ‘there is no idea of sitting still’, and for Tagore, the realization was to inspire ‘everwidening thought and action’ (Gitanjali, 109). However, unlike Tagore, Gandhi seldom used the word ‘freedom’; even the phrase ‘home-rule’ of the title has been used less frequently than ‘Swaraj’. The use of the phrases ‘palm of our hands’ and ‘sitting still’ has been discussed earlier. Altogether the foregoing passage is evidence of the fact that my story of the search for Indian English is intertwined with the history of Indian nationalism. Indian English here is not strategically placed for local colour or protest or for merely creating a difference but to express one’s realizations and beliefs. In the words of Boehmer, ‘postcoloniality can be defined as that condition in which colonized peoples seek to take their place, forcibly or otherwise, as historical agents in an increasingly globalized world’ (3). Both Tagore and Gandhi have been proved as ‘historical agents’ of ideas and culture new to the Western world. Usage of Indian loanwords was quite common when Gandhi was writing the translation of Hind Swaraj in English. Kipling’s books are evidence of the fact that Indian words were acceptable in English in the early twentieth century. In 1910 Gandhi published the English version of the text from Natal as ‘Indian Home Rule’. But in 1921 he published the work under a modified title: ‘Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule’. Not just the title but the entire text is coloured with Indian loanwords, like ‘Swadeshi’ (21), ‘Bhang’ (40), ‘Ahinsa’ (non-violence) (55), ‘vaid’ (physician) (63 & 69), ‘Rishis’ (69) ‘Fakirs’ (69), and ‘vakil’ (pleader) (69). There is also the lexis-bound 167

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translation ‘the Black Age’ (37) for ‘Kalijuga’. Further there is the codemixed word ‘Englistan’ used to ridicule the reader’s dream of an India which has obtained freedom through arms and ammunition: ‘that is to say, you would make India English, and when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englistan’ (28). One obvious explanation of the Indianisms in this text is the natural influence of Gujrati and other Indian languages on translation. But the matter is not as simple as it seems. Rammohan Roy, like Gandhi, himself translated his own Bangla texts, discussed in Chapter 3. But his English translations did not have such a prominent Indian flavour as we find in the text of Gandhi. Rammohan used Indian loanwords and the structure of scholastic debate which had been a part of Indian argumentative tradition and which differentiated his style from the dominant style of non-fictional British prose of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. But the kind of translation of Indian phrases and the lexical shifts which characterize the Indian English of the twentieth century are not present in Rammohan. Yet they are present in some of the English letters of Michael Madhusudan Dutt and the diary entries of Keshab Sen, also discussed in Chapter 3. Therefore, the fact that a text is a translation done by the author himself from a text originally written in an Indian language cannot account for the prose style of the translated text. Here, it needs to be remembered that Rammohan belonged to the early nineteenth century and his translations were done in the pre-Macaulayan period, when Indians were adopting the English language, but Gandhi is the representative of that generation of English users who are adept in asserting a difference from colonial discourse and Standard English. Hind Swaraj is one of the finest texts written in Indian English in the early twentieth century, and this fact has been overlooked for a long time. Even Raja Rao seems to be oblivious of this fact when he wrote the much quoted foreword to Kanthapura. Nativization of the English language in India – I have maintained throughout this book – is not the outcome of a particular author or group of authors but the result of a long evolutionary process influenced by cultural, historical, economic, and political pressures. ‘Any set of words’, observed Ania Loomba, ‘could be analyzed to reveal not just an individual but a historical consciousness at work’ (36–37). It is the historical consciousness which guided each author in the history of Indian writing in English. Rammohan and Gandhi belonged to two diverse stages of historical consciousness. It is relevant that a free use of Indian words and translations of Indian expressions was common in the private domain of language use and in some Indian English fiction in the nineteenth century. Bankimchandra, writing the first English novel in Asia in the sixth decade of the nineteenth century, was torn between Standard English and an Indianized variety, discussed in Chapter 4. But Gandhi, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century – when English had been

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present in Indian society for more than a century – used a hybrid variety quite freely. According to Peter Barry, any postcolonial literature written in the language of the colonizers seems to make a transition from adopt to adapt and from adapt to adept (196). Following Barry, Rammohan can be said to belong to the stage of adopt, while Gandhi indeed adapted the English language for conveying his disapproval of modern Western civilization. He may also be said to be quite adept in creative use of the English language. Moreover, the approach to Western culture and the colonial administration ran parallel with the approach to the English language. Rammohan’s was a time of adoption of the scientific approach of the West, and hence Rammohan’s approach to the English language was that of adoption. Bankim’s was a time when the Bengali intelligentsia sought ‘to fashion a “modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western’ (Chatterjee,  6). Hence Bankim’s approach towards English reflected a tension between Standard English and nativized expression, between Western literary discourse and a Vaisnava discourse. Moreover, the colonial administrators looked down upon the influence of Indian languages on the English of Indians as ‘errors’ (discussed in the first chapter of this book). Hence those ‘errors’ could be freely practised only in personal letters and other such private domains. Gandhi belonged to the heyday of Indian nationalism, when Western culture was questioned, colonial rule was attacked, and a movement seeking freedom from colonial rule began. Simultaneously, we find an attempt to free oneself from the rigours of Standard English. One must keep in mind that the translator was proficient in Standard English. Today when the issue of using language variants has been politicized one is bound to ponder the writer’s strategies, especially when the writer/translator was sensitive to the issue of language. Hence Gandhi’s use of Indianism might have been a deliberate strategy to abrogate ‘the privileged centrality of “English” by using language to signify difference while employing a sameness which allows it to be understood’ (Ashcroft, Griffith, & Tiffin 51). In this respect, Gandhi is perhaps the first postcolonial writer in India in the English language. It is too far-fetched to think that Gandhi intended to make a mockery of the English language in using the compound words discussed earlier or in using the Gujrati flavour in his English. It also does not seem to be so. Gandhi did not make a mockery of his opponents, and hence he would hardly mock their language. But the man was a severe critic of the hegemony of the English language in India. Hence in being bold with language use he challenged – with success – the hegemony of Standard English. Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, and M.R. Anand did the same only two decades later in the world of fiction. But their experimentations with language were not some magic bird which they conjured out of nothing. Now, I think I have made it clear that there was a historical consciousness which was inherited by those writers. Today we need to celebrate the legacy of language use left behind by Gandhi.

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Notes 1 Gandhi was also opposed to the idea that East and West cannot meet and coexist. In October 1909, just before Hind Swaraj was to be composed, Gandhi in a speech at the Hampstead Peace and Arbitration Society rejected Kipling’s claim that East and West could never meet and observed that ‘there had been individual instances of English and Indian people living together under the same rule without a jarring note, and what is true of individuals could be made true of nations’ (Guha, 364). It was the materialism of industrialized Western civilization which he criticized in Hind Swaraj. 2 Dennis Dalton chronicled the summary of the Tagore-Gandhi controversy. Tagore feared the menace of dogma in manual spinning and burning of foreign cloth. Tagore argued, ‘Swaraj is not a matter of self-sufficiency in the production of cloth. Its real place is within us, the mind with its diverse powers goes on building swaraj for itself’ (qtd in Dalton, 74). On the other hand for Gandhi ‘spinning was a symbolic form of identification with the masses’ (Dalton, 75). In his article ‘The Great Sentinel’ he invited the poet to the symbolic act: ‘I do indeed ask the poet and the sage to spin the wheel as a sacrament. When there is war the poet lays down his lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books’ (qtd in Iyengar, K.R.S., 267). While Tagore argued that Gandhi’s social reform hindered the ‘mind’s unfoldment’ (qtd in Dalton, 74), Gandhi proclaimed, ‘I hope I am as great a believer in free air as the great Poet. I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any’ (qtd in Dalton, 75). 3 Gandhi’s dress was a talking point in London during 1931. The British press found his dress and eating habits ‘irresistible’ (Gandhi, R., 357), and Churchill’s phrase ‘naked fakir’ became a much-used adjective. But Gandhi was quite confident on the appropriateness of his dress. Rajmohan Gandhi mentions an amusing anecdote about Gandhi’s visit to Buckingham Palace: ‘[A]nd despite his own reluctance Gandhi went to the royal reception, wearing what he always wore. Asked afterwards whether he felt comfortable about his dress, Gandhi replied, ‘The King had enough on for both of us’ (358). 4 Although critical of Gandhi’s policies against the British, Subhas Bose admired Gandhi’s maintenance of his dress-code in England in 1931. He gives an interesting account of his feelings and the actual facts recollected from memory: The writer was one of those who at one time felt misgivings as to whether the Mahatma would be well advised to visit Europe in his characteristic loin-cloth. On his former visits to Europe, he was, of course, clothed differently. But on this occasion he did the right thing in adhering to his favourite dress. Questioned by a reporter about his dress, the Mahatma once jocosely remarked: ‘You people wear plus-fours, mine are minus-fours.’ Then changing to a more serious vein, he said: ‘If I came here to live and work like an English citizen, then I should conform to the customs of the country and should wear the dress of an Englishman. But I am here on a great and special mission, and my loin-cloth, if you choose so to describe it, is the dress of my principals, the people of India.’ (Bose, Indian Struggle, 241) 5 In 1919, the year Gandhi accepted the editorship of Young India, the English weekly which became a biweekly the same year, and of Navajivan, the monthly journal, which became a weekly, the annual subscription of the former – reported by Gandhi himself – was ‘a little more than 1200’, while that of the latter was

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6

7

8

9

10

11 12 13

14

12,000. Gandhi was very proud of reaching ‘numerous readers among farmers and workers’ (Bhattacharya, S.N., 39). However, according to S.N. Bhattacharya, ‘At one time the circulation [of Young India] reached the figure of 40000’, which was more than ‘the combined totals of several newspapers in India’ (39). In 1890 Gandhi joined the London Vegetarian Society and contributed articles to the journal The Vegetarian. ‘The subculture of vegetarian restaurants and journals’, observed Alexander Bubb, ‘provided Gandhi with object lessons in organization and campaigning. It was ‘a haven for various eccentric renegades of the late Victorian revolt. A broad trend embracing dissent from both class and gender norms and from conventional politics, this would have included Fabian socialists like G.B. Shaw, along with spiritual renascents and Irish nationalists such as Annie Besant and W.B. Yeats’ (50). Guha observed, ‘It is a striking if little noticed fact that his writing career began with these lucid, informative and surprisingly confident series of essays on the foods and festivals of India’ (50). Guha reports that through ‘the latter half of 1893, as he worked during the day for Dada Abdullah [in Natal, South Africa], Gandhi spent most evenings writing a book he hoped to publish. It was a “how to” guide, aimed at students who wished to go to London’. Of its contents Guha says, ‘Several pages of Gandhi’s Guide outlined the best way to get wholesome and nutritious food at a reasonable price’ (71). The Indian Opinion started its publication on 4 June 1903, though according to Gandhi’s autobiography it was 1904 (Bhattacharya, S.N., 9). Though he was not the editor he was the main inspiration behind it. Gandhi once admitted, ‘The Indian Opinion in those days, like the Young India and Navjivan today, was a mirror of part of my life’ (qtd in Bhattacharya, S.N., 16). While leaving South Africa in 1914, Gandhi ‘left the Indian Opinion to the able hands of Mr. Polak. But there was none to look after the Gujrati section of the paper and Gandhiji was approached for advice. In 1916, he sent his second son, Shri Manilal Gandhi, aged 23, to take charge of the edition’ (Bhattacharya, S.N., 31). S.N. Bhattacharya observed, ‘The Indian Opinion was a weekly paper, publishing news of interest from the South African Indian point of view. Journals that Gandhiji subsequently edited in India were viewspapers’ (28). This fitted in remarkably, argued Bhattacharya, with the ‘journalistic trend in India’ (28). Rammohan Roy, Keshab Sen, Mrs Annie Besant (in New India), S.N. Banerjee (in Bangabasi), and Tilak (in Kesari) have all used the press to disseminate their ideas. The first weekly journal devoted to the cause of the untouchables in India appeared in English with the name Harijan on 11 February 1933. The first issue carried an English rendering by Tagore of a Bangla poem of Satyendranath Dutta entitled ‘Scavenger’ (Bhattacharya, S.N., 54). Dinshaw Mehta was a practitioner of Ayurveda medicine. ‘Ambudan’ is a slip for ‘anbudan’, which in Tamil means ‘with love’. Gandhi corrected himself in his next letter to Rajagopalachari dated 17 March 1946 and wrote ‘Romba anbudan’, ‘with much love’ (Gandhi, G., ed., 574 & 762). Though Gandhi’s Autobiography, translated by Mahadev Desai, mentions ‘Himalayan miscalculation’, the phrase ‘Himalayan blunder’ also obtained wide currency. Gandhi himself was reported to have expressed his wonder at the wide currency of the expression coined by him (Gandhi, G., ed., Essential Writings, 209). ‘Kamadhuk’ is the Gujrati name for the mythical cow which can produce anything that is desired of it.

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The English language had a rich acrolect1 in the British colonial era among Indian users. A major part of this acrolect consisted of a nationalist discourse which is uncelebrated and an ignored part of the history of the rise of Indian nationalism. The accomplished users of the English language in India in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries played a creative role in ‘Indianizing’ the English language. But it is the mesolect, particularly the language of the Bengali babus, which has been highlighted since the colonial era. Anindyo Roy argued that the use of the English language of the babus had been the ‘object of constant surveillance’ (5) for the British because the mistakes and lapses of the babus in their use of the English language consolidated their position as a superior race. In the postcolonial times, babu English had been highlighted by linguists like Braj B. Kachru, N. Krishnaswamy, and A.S. Burde. Perhaps a colonial mindset had seeped in which made linguists highlight mesolectal varieties and overlook the contribution of the acrolectal varieties of the colonial period. However, the fact that has emerged in my study is that in the acrolectal variety of the colonial era the spirit of Indian nationalism found a voice; further, it showed some clear signs of ‘Indianization’ of the English language, which was also evident – understandably in a distinct way – in the mesolectal varieties. However, ‘Indianization’ in the acrolectal variety was deeply associated with artistic necessity and also with the postcolonial problematic, such as assertion of identity, interpretation of culture, and nationalist consciousness. From the discussion and analysis of the selected Indian prose writings of the colonial era, several types of ‘Indianization’ of the English language emerge. They may be divided into the following categories: use of loanwords derived from Indian languages, code-mixing, translation of phrases, colloquial expressions and idioms from Indian languages, reference to cultural details or what Kachru called ‘transfer of context’2 (Indianization, 101), impact of particular cultural traditions, such as the impact of the tradition of scholastic debate in Rammohan or the tradition of Vaisnava literature in Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife, the use of Vedic and Upanishadic discourse, as in the writings of Rammohan, Rabindranath, and Swami 172

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Vivekananda, the impact of nationalist consciousness, and the impact of particular texts like the Bhagavad Gita. The use of loanwords derived from the vernacular was – as it is still today – a means of ‘Indianizing’ the English language in a number of ways. For example, the use of the word ‘sastras’ (‘Conference’, 65) and ‘kooleen’ (English Works, 361–362) was indispensable for Rammohan Roy for constructing the context of the debate on sastras over widow-burning; the use of the words ‘Agdum-Bagdum’ (26), ‘Masi’ (27), and ‘Khuri’ (27) in the novel Rajmohan’s Wife portrays the milieu of rural life in nineteenth-century Bengal. While Agdum-Bagdumis a game that children in Bengal play indoors, masi is ‘mother’s sister’ and khuri is the colloquial term for the wife of the father’s younger brother but generally used to address an old lady. Satthianadhan used the words mamlatdaar (33), meaning ‘collectorate’, jaghirdari (117), and bakshish (40) to portray the social milieu in Kamala. In the speech ‘The Philosophy of Our People’, Rabindranath used the words ‘anantam’, ‘vidya’, and ‘avidya’ to construct a Vedic discourse; in the speech delivered at Lucknow, the use of the word tapasyakhetra (Selected, 49) by Subhas Bose deifies the martyrdom of Jatindranath Das in a religious as well as Hindu nationalist discourse. Thus loanwords were associated with the construction of Indian discourses in the English language. Translation of phrases and idioms from the vernacular, which may also be described as mother-tongue interference, was used less frequently in the ‘formal domain’ of writing in the early nineteenth century than in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have found only one instance of mother-tongue interference in all three texts of Rammohan which I analyzed in Chapter 3, where Rammohan vents his feelings against injustices suffered by women in Bengali society.3 Although Bankimchandra used plenty of loanwords and also indulged in a few code-switches, like the exclamation ‘Ma gow’ (Chapter 12, 69), it is not a consistent feature of the novel Rajmohan’s Wife as even thieves speak in Standard English in the novel. However, Lal Behari Day, who wrote his novel a decade later than Bankimchandra, indulged in quite a few instances of translation of idioms from Bangla. One of Day’s characters, a Bengali woman tormented by her in-laws, expresses her agony through the use of a lexis-bound translation: ‘Happy should I be if I die! The air would then enter into my bones’ (101). In some cases Day mentions that he is translating a Bangla expression: ‘To make use of an expression in Bengali, his hands and feet entered into his stomach, through fear’ (360). Code-mixing is used quite a number of times in Day’s novel. For example, Manik, a peasant, characteristically abuses the ox while ploughing: ‘You sala (wife’s brother), why don’t you move?’ (29). An ojha, a sorcerer, shouts at Aduri, who is supposed to be under the spell of a cursed spirit: ‘But why have you come into the body of choto bou?’ (110). Day, in most cases of code-switching and translations from the mother tongue, would give parenthetical annotations or follow or precede 173

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the Bangla expression with the meaning in English, such as ‘ma-bap, that is mother and father’ (304). Day’s explanations of code-switching and translations of idioms from his mother tongue suggest that the use of such expressions in English was not in vogue even in the 1870s. But Satthianadhan, who wrote in the last decade of the nineteenth century, used not only codeswitches and code-mixes but also lexis-bound translation in dialogues with commendable skill. In Saguna, Lakshmi makes her friend Radha her sakhi by taking a vow: ‘Here before Gunga mata, before Surya Narayena I say that you are my own sakhi, my friend, till the end of my life. Now do not fear. Your brother will be my brother when you are gone and your father mine’ (39). In Kamala, Kamala’s mother-in-law is welcomed in Kamala’s house with these words by the ladies: ‘“The goddess Lakshmi has smiled in this direction, I see”. “Which side has the sun risen today.” “What good fortune brings you here?” Such were the remarks made on all sides’ (113). Thus Satthianadhan was successful in indigenizing the English language for portraying rural life in nineteenth-century Maharashtra. She was successful in positing a ‘difference’ from the Standard variety at a time when any sort of lapse from the Standard norm was viewed with suspicion and cynicism. Simultaneously, ‘Indianization’ of the English language was becoming acceptable during the last decades of the nineteenth century. I have already mentioned the colonial attitude towards babu English. Yule and Burnell mentioned ‘this bad habit of interlarding English with Hindustani phrases’ (‘Introduction’, xx). G.C. Whitworth, I mentioned in the first chapter, subtitled his work Indian English (1915) in the following manner: ‘An examination of the errors of idioms made by Indians in writing English’ (qtd in Dustoor, P.E., 99). This defiance of colonial cynicism at a time when Indian nationalism was still in its formative years is highly significant because in the twentieth century, in the heyday of Indian nationalism and anti-colonial sentiment, mother-tongue interferences occurred spontaneously, as I find in the writings and speeches of Gandhi, C.R. Das, and Subhas Bose. Hence, in the late nineteenth century, these were already signs of possessing and owning the colonizer’s language. Vivekananda, one of the chief architects of Indian nationalism and the contemporary of Satthianadhan, also indulged in lexis-bound translation in his public speeches delivered in India, such as ‘life-giving water’ (Lectures, 3) and ‘burning fire of materialism’ (Lectures, 3) in the speech delivered in Colombo. The compound ‘life-giving’ and the phrase ‘burning fire’ are translations of common Bengali expressions. In the twentieth century, in Hind Swaraj (or Indian Home Rule), which was Gandhi’s own translation from his Gujrati text Hind Swaraj, we find spontaneous use of lexis-bound translations which had a definite air of defiance of the Standard norm. While defining Swaraj the editor, who is understandably the representative of Gandhi, says, ‘It is swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is therefore in the palm of our hands’ (Hind, 73). Gandhi could have used the phrase ‘in our pockets’, which would have sounded more 174

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English, but his preference for ‘in the palm of our hands’ suggests a deliberate shift towards ‘Indianized’ English. Gandhi’s use of the phrases ‘blood-brother’ (55) and ‘Moslem brother’ (55) while discussing ‘cow-protection’ is worthy of note. Gandhi’s coinage of compounds also demonstrates Indians’ ability to form new compound words in English, such as ‘tiffin-box’ and ‘joint-family’. Gandhi used such phrases which rendered his text partly incomprehensible to non-Indian users of the English language. ‘Moslem brother’ is a translation of a common Indian expression in the Hindu community used to show feelings of brotherhood towards the Muslims; the word ‘bhai’, common in several Indian languages, means ‘brother’ but the word is used also as a part of compound word to mean ‘cousins’, and hence the reference to blood in the compound ‘bloodbrother’ is made to underline the fact that the person implied is a brother and not a cousin. Hence ‘blood-brother’ implies what a Westerner understands by ‘brother’. Yet the use of the phrase ‘blood-brother’ carries for Indian readers an added emphasis which could not be made simply by ‘brother’. Finally, I would mention that Subhas Bose, in his speeches as the leader of the Indian National Congress, also indulged in translations of expressions from his mother tongue. Bose began his presidential address in Pune with an expression of gratitude which translated a common form of expression in Bangla and other Indian languages: ‘Friends, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the high honour you have done me by requesting me to preside over the deliberations of the Sixth Session of the Maharashtra Provincial Congress’ (Bose, Selected Speeches, 29). Instead of thanking earnestly or sincerely Indians prefer to thank from the ‘core’ or ‘bottom’ of the heart. The speech at Lahore also began in a similar fashion. Thus, an Indian voice emerged in the English language. It is also significant that several of the lexis-bound translations discussed earlier are colloquial expressions, such as ‘blood-brother’, ‘burning fire’, and ‘this little sense world of three days’ duration’. This suggests that since the late nineteenth century, some Indian users of the English language developed a sense of ‘owning’ the English language and therefore they were confident of adapting the English language to suit their requirements. Further it is quite evident that the patriotic spirit and confident assertiveness of the makers of Indian nationalism authenticate the ‘Indianization’ of the English tongue as well as the scripting of the difference and distance from Standard English. This legacy of the English writings and speeches and the simultaneous ‘Indianization’ of the English language by the makers of the modern Indian nation is a very important part of the cultural history of modern India. Our knowledge of Indian English and our perspective on the English language cannot afford to be indifferent to this history. It is interesting to note, as shown in Chapter 3, that translations from his mother tongue Bangla were freely used by Michael Madhusudan Dutt in his personal correspondence with Vidyasagar in the 1860s when Lal Behari Day, as I have already pointed out, used parenthetical explanations to protect 175

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himself from possible criticism. The rhetorical question asked by Dutt, ‘Have I some Zamindary here . . .?’ (The Heart, 206–207), in the letter dated 18 June 1864, is a common way in Bengali to imply ‘since I do not have a zamindary I do not have easy cash’. ‘To let grass grow under one’s feet’, also used in the same letter, in Bengali, means not to use one’s feet – that is, to be lazy. Evidently, Dutt had no agenda of writing back to the empire, but in his letters he constructed through the use of Indianisms a Bengali identity, which he shared with his Bengali friends and well-wishers. In the first chapter I asserted that English is a part of Indian culture as shirts and trousers are a part of Indian dress. As shirts and trousers have been adapted and hybridized under the impact of Indian culture, the English language was similarly adapted according to needs. According to Kirkpatrick, a dialect must fulfil three functions: a means of communication, a marker of identity, and a way of expressing culture (Kirkpatrick, 10). For Dutt, asking for financial assistance from a fellow Bengali, sharing the Bengali identity with Vidyasagar was spontaneous, but crucial. It is my contention that while discussing ‘Indianization’ of the English language, these Indianized expressions among people of high English proficiency – like Michael Madhusudan Dutt – must be taken on board along with the mesolectal English of babus. It is also relevant that the kind of ‘Indianized’ English which was used in unofficial domains could not be used in the official domain of the use of language. Dutt did not use Indianized English in his literary works in English. Keshub Sen’s lectures bore the impact of his deep liking for the Bible, while his diary entries have several instances of loanwords and code-switching, such as tamasha (Keshub, 10–11), dhoomdham (Keshub, 3), and yarlogues (Keshub, 10). It is in the novels of Satthianadhan written in the 1890s and in the speeches of Vivekananda delivered in India in the same decade where I find that translations from the mother tongue were used freely in the official domain. This transition of the lexis-bound translation from the unofficial to the official domain is an important finding of this research work. A reference to a cultural detail which does not belong to the culture of native speakers of English helps in creating an Indian narrative. Kachru called this ‘transfer of context’ (101), by which he meant reference to ‘the caste system of India, social and religious taboos, notions of superiority and inferiority, and the like’ (101). I have found in Indian English writings of the colonial period reference to minute cultural details. For example, Rammohan mentioned a concept inherent in Hindu tradition: ‘At marriage the wife is recognized as half of her husband, but in after-conduct they are treated worse than inferior animals’ (Roy, English Works, 361–362). Rammohan is not referring here to any Western metaphysical conceit but the ancient Hindu concept of ‘ardhangini’ and ‘ardhanariswar’ in which man and wife are complementary in forming a whole. In Rajmohan’s Wife, Suki’s mother, a minor character, addresses Matangini as ‘mother’, although the latter is much younger than the former: ‘No mother, 176

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do not return but go to your sister and see what he will do’ (71). Throughout India a woman is called ‘mother’ as a mark of respect and affection. The special bond of sakhi among Indian girls, by which two friends vow not to keep anything secret from each other and also to remain friends forever, is depicted in Satthianadhan’s Saguna, and I already referred to that part of the novel earlier. Tagore referred to ‘joint family’ (‘Philosophy’, 559) while discussing the affinity between poetry and philosophy. He observed that in India ‘all the vidyas, –poesy as well as philosophy, – live in a joint family’. In his address to Subhas Bose he described Bose’s dedication towards his political goal as ‘sadhana’ (716). Tagore could have used an English word or phrase but the word ‘sadhana’ is used in Indian languages with a wider connotation: a wholehearted pursuit of any discipline is a sadhana, be it music, arts, poetry, science, or even sports; and all such sadhanas are journeys towards perfection. Hence for Indian readers, it is not a far-fetched conceit to describe a patriot’s activities as sadhana. Gandhi referred to ‘cow-protection’ and ‘cowkilling’, a typical problem in Indian society, while analyzing the relation between the Hindus and the Muslims in Indian society. Subhas Bose talked of his anxiety about colonized India in the following terms: ‘As long as India lies prostrate at the feet of Britain the right [to shape one’s destiny] will be denied to us’ (Bose, Selected Speeches, 31). To lie prostrate before a deity is a ritual act of worship among Hindus, but to do so before a person is a posture of surrender and acceptance of lordship. The European equivalent is to bow. In a feudal society bowing or lying prostrate is not uncommon, but for Subhas Bose, who upheld socialistic and democratic values in colonial India in the early twentieth century, the feudal image depicted his anxiety, pain, and the urge to free India from colonial manacles. Cultural details thus help to create an Indian discourse in the English language and widen the domain of ‘Indianization’ or nationalization of the English language. It is not only necessity which brought about these usages but also the rise of the spirit of Indian nationalism which emboldened Indian writers and speakers in English to assert Indianness in English writings and speeches since the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, taking into consideration these and such other instances of transfer of cultural context in the colonial era, one might establish continuity between colonial Indian writing in English and postcolonial Indian writings in English. In Chapter 1 I discussed the bitter realizations of Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie regarding Indian writing in English, which was viewed as an aberration or a ‘post-colonial anomaly’ (Rushdie, ‘Introduction’, xii).4 The tremendous material success of recent Indian fiction in English since the 1990s has pushed that attitude into insignificance but cannot overcome it completely until and unless we recognize and acknowledge the glorious history of Indian writing in English and its contribution in the shaping of modern Indian nationhood. ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the colonial era was not limited to the domain of loanwords and mother-tongue interference. Besides 177

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‘transfer of context’, use of certain cultural traditions of India as a subtext and the impact of certain native cultural traditions on style and content of writing also created possibilities for the ‘Indianization’ of the English language. The style and content of Rammohan’s texts on the practice of sati are influenced by the oral tradition of scholastic debate in the philosophy of Nyaya and also in the Indian style of purvapaksha. Rammohan Roy shifted the oral tradition of scholastic debate on paper while composing his texts in Bangla and then subsequently in English. In the two ‘Conferences’ on widow-burning, Rammohan used the form of dialogues – between an ‘Advocate’ and an ‘Opponent’ of the practice of widow-burning – which allowed him to participate in the Indian logical traditions of oral debate on ‘sastras’ not orally but on paper. In the second conference, which was a reply to Kashinath Tarkabageesh, who attempted to counter the arguments of Rammohan’s first conference, the Opponent speaks for the major portion of the debate. But he adopts the traditional ‘dharmic’ (qtd in Mythili, 84) style of argumentation known as Purvapaksha, according to which the participant in a debate presents his understanding and analysis of the arguments and views of his opponent before presenting his own. Rammohan wrote the texts in the second decade of the nineteenth century, before Macaulay’s Minute of 1835. He acquired an excellent knowledge of Standard English, but the way he applied that knowledge revealed the entelechy of Indian writing in English, that the English language was destined to grow into an individual dialect and, simultaneously, the vernaculars of India were not likely to be wiped away by Standard English, but rather the English language was destined to be ‘Indianized’ by the impact of Indian languages and culture. Generally, a pidgin is used for basic communication, and neither Rammohan nor Macaulay advocated English for basic communication but for the improvement of useful knowledge. On the other hand, the influence of culture plays a crucial role in the indigenization of English (Kirkpatrick, 5). Hence the circumstances were conducive for the emergence of an indigenized variety of English. In Bankimchandra’s novel Rajmohan’s Wife, there is a subtext of Vaisnava literature. The way Matangini dares all odds and ventures into the night to meet Madhav, the way she speaks of her love and calls her lover ‘My god on earth’, and the way she remains an epitome of virtue and courage until the end of the story despite her ‘illicit’ love for Madhav suggest that Bankimchandra presented her as the modern Radhika of the nineteenth century. Hence, the language in which she expresses her love, the way in which her inner conflicts are narrated (especially before she ventures into the darkness to meet her lover), and the description of her nocturnal journey bear an influence of the poetic discourse of Vaisnava literature. Thus ‘Indianization’ of the English language was quite a complex phenomenon even in the nineteenth century, and it needs to be located in the broader domain of cultural influence rather than the domain of the influence of languages. 178

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One of the most prominent ways of consolidating colonial power has been the writing of history. However, attempts to resist colonial historical discourse could be seen in nineteenth-century Bengal in such works as Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay’s Bharatbarsher Itihas.5 That India had a rich ancient cultural heritage had been highlighted by Max Muller and Sir Charles Jones. But the European Indologists also discovered that ‘India has no true historical account’ (Chatterjee, P., 95). About the trend in Bengal intelligentsia of claiming a historical heritage in the Vedic past Partha Chatterjee argued, ‘If the nineteenth century Englishman could claim ancient Greece as his classical heritage, why should not the English-educated Bengali feel proud of the achievements of the so-called Vedic civilization?’ (Chatterjee, P., 98). Vivekananda proudly asserted the historicity of ancient India. In the speech delivered in Colombo, he said, ‘Here activity prevailed even when Greece did not exist, when Rome was not thought of’ (Lectures, 4). This pride for the Vedic past became a focal point of Hindu national reawakening in entire India. In 1917, in his famous speech ‘Freedom Is My Birthright’ Tilak said, ‘The Science which ends in Home Rule is the Science of Politics and not the one which ends in slavery. The Science of Politics is the “Vedas” of the country’ (Mukherjee, R., ed., 76). Tilak’s language reveals the dual parameter of ‘Science’ and ‘Vedas’ which dominated the social psyche of thoughtful people of the time. The duality of parameter – of science and Vedas – has been discerned since the days of Raja Rammohan. Duality or coexistence of parameters defined Indian nationalistic discourse and the English writings of Indians. This presence of the Vedic discourse caused a way of ‘Indianization’ of the English language. Tagore’s speech ‘The Philosophy of Our People’ demonstrates, perhaps more clearly than Tilak’s, how the Vedic or Upanishadic discourse resulted in the ‘Indianization’ of the English language. Tagore used quite a few Sanskrit words and a few words common to many Indian languages, like ‘advaitam’ and ‘mukti’, a number of times – words which helped to denote his own ideas of unity and freedom, the anirvachaniya’ (565) and ‘anantam’ (565). While concluding on the subject of ‘satyam’ and ‘anandam’, we see an intertextual reference to Keats: ‘In the world of art, our consciousness being freed from the tangle of self-interest, we gain an unobstructed vision of unity, the incarnation of the real, which is a joy for ever’ (563). Tagore ‘Indianized’ Keats’s philosophical discourse by replacing the word ‘beauty’ with the phrase ‘incarnation of the real’. Tagore’s use of the word ‘real’ is also worthy of note. After referring to a prayer in the Upanishad (‘Asato ma sadgamaya’) in his own translation, ‘Lead us from the unreal to Reality’, Tagore continues: ‘For satyam is anandam, the real is joy’. Throughout the discussion, Tagore dissociated the word ‘real’ from the context of modernism and realism and invested it with the Upanishadic significance of the Sanskrit sat. The clause ‘the real is joy’ and the phrase ‘the incarnation of the real’ are two examples of that. Tagore used the two words ‘mukti’ and ‘freedom’ a number 179

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of times in his speech, sometimes interchangeably, investing a broader significance in both, releasing ‘mukti’ from the narrow significance of freedom from the cycle of birth and death to imply freedom from the bondage of attachment and ignorance (‘avidya’), leading to the disinterested joy of the ‘real’. Simultaneously he invested ‘freedom’ with the annexed significance of ‘mukti’: ‘Freedom is not in emptiness of its contents, it is in the harmony of communication through which we find no obstruction in realizing our own being in the surrounding world’ (566). The discussion inevitably encroaches upon the topical discourse of the nation’s dream of political independence or Swaraj – the word which was in greater currency: When nature’s phenomena appeared to us as manifestations of an obscure and irrational caprice, we lived in an alien world never dreaming of our swaraj within its territory. With the discovery of the harmony of its working with that of our reason, we realize our unity with it and, therefore, freedom. (566) Thus Tagore’s Vedic discourse binds nationalism with internationalism.6 The speeches of Vivekananda delivered in India show how Vedic or Hindu religious discourse consolidated Indian nationalism as well as ‘Indianization’ of the English language. For example, in his first lecture delivered after returning from his historic first tour of the West, he defined ‘India’ in concrete terms: If there is any land on this earth that can lay claim to be the blessed Punya Bhumi, to be the land to which souls on this earth must come to account for Karma, the land to which every soul that is wending its way Godward must come to attain its last home, the land where humanity has attained its highest towards gentleness, towards purity, towards calmness, above all, the land of introspection, and of spirituality – it is India. (Vivekananda, Lectures, 3) Vivekananda’s nationalistic discourse is enriched by the phrase ‘Punya Bhumi’ and the word ‘Karma’ and is informed with the Vedic vision of ‘Karma’ and of ‘every soul wending its way Godward’. In his speech in Kumbhakonam he uttered the famous appeal: ‘Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached. Arise, awake! Awake from this hypnotism of weakness’ (Lectures, 105). The lines follow a quotation from the Kathopanishad: ‘Uttisthat jagrata prapya barannibodhata’ (Chapter 1, Canto 3, Sloka 14) from which the statement was transcreated. The first two words are translated as ‘Arise, awake’. But the latter part of the sentence, prapya barabnnibodhata (meaning ‘learn from the best of men’), is replaced by the clause ‘and stop not till 180

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the goal is reached’. This change is relevant in the context of the urge for a nationalist self-consciousness in the late nineteenth century. Thus, Vivekananda merged nationalism with a Vedic discourse. Subhas Chandra Bose, while defending Indian nationalism from the charge that Indian nationalism was ‘a hindrance to the promotion of internationalism in the domain of culture’ (Selected Speeches, 30), presented the counterargument that Indian nationalism was ‘inspired by the highest ideals of the human race, viz., Satyam (the true), Shivam (the good), Sundaram (the beautiful)’ (Selected Speeches, 30). It is interesting how Bose adapted ideas from ancient scriptures to the secular content of his speech. Apart from Vedic discourse, Bose also enriched Indian nationalist discourse by incorporating into it an Indian version of democracy. He attacked the colonial assumption that democracy is a ‘Western institution’ (Bose, Selected Speeches, 30). In the process he drew the attention of his listeners to those terms in Indian languages, which indicated the existence of some form of democratic framework in Indian society. For example, according to Bose, terms like ‘Nagar Sreshthi (i.e. our modern Mayor)’ (Selected Speeches, 30) and ‘village Panchayats’ (Selected Speeches, 30) were suggestive of the ‘democratic institutions handed down to us from days of yore’ (30). A discourse of religious tolerance and a broader view of religion also enriched Indian nationalist discourse and ‘Indianization’ of the English language. For example, the word ‘religion’ was ‘Indianized’ to incorporate the Hindu consciousness of ‘dharma’ and ‘love for God’. In India, since the early nineteenth century, social reforms have been aided by interpretation and reinterpretation of religious texts; comparative discussion of religion existed even before Rammohan since the days of the Mughal ruler Akbar and was present prominently in the Sufi and the Bhakti movements. With the leadership of Gandhi, religious tolerance and integrity became a part of the Congress manifesto and the implication of the word ‘religion’ in the broader sense became a part of the nationalist discourse. Gandhi inherited the legacy of the rich discourse of religious integrity and carried it forward, making it the cornerstone of Indian nationalism, necessary for the foundation of independent India. In Chapter 14 of Hind Swaraj, Gandhi began his argument with the proposition that he was not thinking of the Hindu, the Mahomedan, or the Zoroastrian religion, but of ‘that religion which underlies all religions’ (42). The word ‘religion’ is used in a dual sense of ‘way of attaining Truth or God’ and ‘religious sect’. The influence of particular literary texts has also been crucial in the ‘Indianization’ of the English language. I have shown how language in Rajmohan’s Wife was influenced by Vaisnava poetry. The language in Vivekananda’s speeches, I have found, bore the influence of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. Much of the sentences in Vivekananda’s speeches had a particular pattern: long sentences with repetitive clauses and phrases leading to an emotional crescendo, giving an impression of non-stop breathlessness. 181

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The extract quoted from Vivekananda clarifies my point. I give one more instance: I am not just now discussing whether it is good to have the vitality of the race in religious ideals or political ideals, but so far it is clear to us that, for good or for evil, our vitality is concentrated in religion. You cannot change it. You cannot destroy it and put in its place another. You cannot transplant a large growing tree from one soil to another and make it immediately take root there. For good or for evil, the religious ideal has been flowing into India for thousands of years; for good or for evil, the Indian atmosphere has been filled with ideals of religion for shining scores of centuries; for good or for evil, we have been born ad brought up in the very midst of these ideals of religion, till it has entered into our very blood and tingled with every drop in our veins, and has become one with our constitution, become the very vitality of our lives. (Lectures, 87–88) The foregoing extract, taken from the speech delivered in Kumbhakonam, has several repetitive structures joined together. The speech at Colombo, from which the first quotation is taken, is Vivekananda’s first lecture in Asia after returning from his first tour of the West. The entire speech is interspersed with this stylistic feature. The repetition of a word or phrase or clause followed or preceded by clauses of similar structure has an echoing effect upon the mind. It is a style which tends towards expansion rather than precision. I argued in Chapter 5 that this palilogic style, this circular pattern of long sentences which give a sense of continuity, was influenced by the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. According to Miss Margaret Noble, famous in India as Sister Nivedita, Vivekananda quoted nothing but the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita (Noble, My Master, 14–15). Hence it was not unlikely that his sentences would bear the influences of those two texts. I quote two instances – along with my own translation in English prose – to clarify my point: Ahamatma gudakesh sarvabhutashaysthitah/ Ahamadischah, madhyanchah bhutanamanta eva chah/ Adityanamahang Visnurjyotishan ravirangshuman/ Marichirmarutamasmi nakshatranamahang shashi// (I am the inherent soul in all creatures, I am the beginning, the middle and the end. Of all the Adityas I am Vishnu, of all celestial bodies that give light, I am the sun. Of all the Marich, I am Marut, the Lord of wind. Of all the nakshatras, I am the Moon.) (Vibhuti Yog, Chapter 10, Sloka 20–21) Om Purnamadah Purnamidang Purnamudachyate/ Purnasya Purnamadayah Purnamebavashisyate// (God is whole and complete, 182

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this world is whole and complete, the wholeness of the world is derived from the whole God; if the wholeness of the whole is taken away, still whole remains.) (Brihadarnyak Upanishad, Chapter 5, Canto 1) The foregoing extracts give an impression of continuity and flow of words and ideas. Consciously or unconsciously, in using the repetitive circular pattern of long sentences in his speeches delivered in India, Vivekananda authored an ‘Indianized’ style in the English language which readily appealed to the English-educated Indian intelligentsia. The style is more frequent in the Bhagavad Gita than in the Upanishads. Almost the entire tenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita was composed in this style, which may also be seen in Chapter 9, Sloka 16–18, in Chapter 7, Sloka 8–12, in Chapter 6, Sloka 20–23, in Chapter 12, Sloka 13–19, and Chapter 14, Sloka 23–26. The legacy of the use of the English language initiated by Vivekananda was echoed from other quarters: Lokmanya Tilak in his famous speech ‘Freedom Is My Birthright’ and Subhas Bose in the legendary speech of 1944. I quote the following respectively in order to illustrate my point: Freedom is my birthright. So long as it is awake within me I am not old. No weapon can cut this spirit, no fire can burn it, no water can wet it, no wind can dry it. (Tilak, Freedom, 76) Friends, my comrades in the War of Liberation! Today I demand of you one thing, above all. I demand of you blood. It is blood alone that can avenge the blood that the enemy has spilt. It is blood alone that can pay the price of freedom. Give me blood and I promise you freedom. (Bose, Important Speeches, 30) Tilak’s sentence was particularly inspired by the twenty-third sloka of the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita: Nainang chindanti sastrani nainang dahati pavaka Na chaina kledayantapo na shosayati marutah. (This [soul] is not destroyed by any weapon, not burnt by fire, not soaked by water and not dried by the wind.) Lord Krishna’s statement may be considered as a mantra of mental strength. Tilak’s statement marks a climactic point of the age of political and spiritual consciousness which was heralded by Swami Vivekananda. Tilak’s language documents the appropriation of Bhagavad Gita and the adaptation of the English language for nationalist goals. Although no Indian words were used 183

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in the sentence, the intertextual relation with the Bhagavad Gita had a special appeal to Indians. The statement documents the existence of a nationalist discourse expressed in Indian English. Now in retrospect, I find that the basic pattern of the ‘Indianization’ practised by all the writers and speakers discussed in this thesis might be defined as cultural interference. Andy Kirkpatrick differentiated native and nativized varieties with the ‘influence of local languages and culture’ (5). Viewing from another perspective, I have found that ‘Indianization’ of the English language not only is a result of ‘influence’ of Indian languages and culture but also involved depiction, assertion as well as reassertion, and interpretation as well as reinterpretation of Indian culture. In the context of an Indian writer or speaker addressing an Indian audience, ‘Indianization’ of the English language involves reassertion and reinterpretation of Indian culture. Hence when Rammohan used the structure of scholastic debate in his English writings, he asserted Indian logical tradition and interpreted Indian philosophy for his Western readers, but for his Indian readers then and now, it was an example of reassertion and reinterpretation. Similarly, when Michael Madhusudan Dutt or Vivekananda translated some Bangla idiom, or when Tagore used the concept of sadhana while appreciating the dedication of Subhas Bose towards his ideal and aim, they were reasserting and reinterpreting Indian culture in the English language. Simultaneously, they were also creating a ‘space’ (Prasad, 42) in the English language for an Indian cultural discourse. English in India has trod the path of heteroglossia since the early nineteenth century, and it is a sign of its vigour and liveliness. In the words of Tabish Khair, ‘heteroglossia is the condition of survival of a language; pure monoglossia is to be found only in dead languages’ (90). Cultural influence at any particular time is bound to incorporate in itself the dominant historical consciousness of the time. Since the early nineteenth century and until the end of the colonial era in 1947, Indian society witnessed diverse new consciousness: in the nineteenth century, the consciousness of the need for social reforms and Western education; the Renaissance of Bengal through which cultural elements of East and West were redefined and harmonized; Indian nationalism that aimed to assert its cultural identity; and, in the twentieth century, anti-imperial nationalism that swept across the nation. These multiple consciousnesses shaped not only the content but also the style of much of the Indian writing in English in the preindependent era. Consequently, these writings have contributed towards the emergence of an Indianized variant of the English language. For example, consciousness of nationalism in the late nineteenth century produced a nationalist discourse which is evident in the speeches of Vivekananda and Tagore’s address to Subhas Bose. Anti-imperial nationalist consciousness in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj in its English version abrogated the ‘privileged centrality of “English”’ (Ashcroft, Griffith, & Tiffin, 51) by its use of Indian English. Of all the texts I have discussed, this aspect of abrogating the 184

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‘privileged centrality’ of Standard English is most prominently present in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. Ironically he is known as the staunchest opponent of the use of English in India. It is quite evident that all the writers and speakers discussed in this study have participated in ‘Indianizing’ the English language in some way or other. In so doing, they resisted the hegemony of Standard British English, which had been a focal point of reassertion of power for the British race. Simultaneously, a ground was gradually prepared in the colonial period where more and more experimentation on nativizing and indigenizing the English language could be done. This phenomenon of nativizing and indigenizing the English language was associated with the emergence of modern Indian nationhood in the colonial period, and this is perhaps the most important finding in my research work. In this context, Rammohan Roy and Bankimchandra Chatterjee may be considered as precursors of the following generation of writers, like Vivekananda and Tagore. Rammohan and Bankimchandra, in using Indian cultural influence in their English writings, such as the Indian structure of argumentation and the Vaisnava discourse, constructed an Indian identity in the English language. This legacy was subsequently inherited by Vivekananda and Tagore. Vivekananda not only expressed in English a definition of ‘India’ as a nation but also structured a creative space where influences of Indian modes of speech and oratory can be accommodated. Tagore’s contribution to the development of Indian English – with reference to the two texts I have discussed – was not confined to using loanwords and cultural shifts. In fact they had become quite common by 1925 (Gandhi had written in Indian English in his translation of Hind Swaraj in 1909). Tagore’s main contribution lay in enabling the English language to voice matters of deep personal concern, such as enthusiasm over a political hero or explication of the philosophy of the Indian people. In so doing, he prepared the ground for the growth of an Indian variant of the English language. Gandhi went on to reverse the standpoint of Rammohan as he defied both Western civilization and the English language. In Hind Swaraj he considered both as detrimental to Indian society. Yet he not only continued to use English, not only contributed to the ‘Indianization’ of the English language, but also realized the inevitable continuity of the English language: ‘I cannot discontinue the English Harijan . . . The rule of the English will go because it was corrupt, but the prevalence of English will never go’ (qtd in Khilnani, 154). As far as Indian English or for that matter any dialect is concerned, we may say continuity is all that matters most. It is the continuity of several things together – the use of the English language in India, the development of the vernacular literatures, and the continuity of Indian cultural and religious life which went on notwithstanding the onslaught of colonialism – which is the primary reason for the English language to be remodelled in the shape of a new dialect in India. This, I think, is the most important realization at the end of my study. 185

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This realization, I think, is a valuable one today when Indian English is becoming widespread in India. On studying the ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the writings and speeches of some of the prominent Indian writers of the colonial era, it seems that a consciousness of the legacy of the English writings of the colonial era would change our outlook on Indian English. Although Suniti Kumar Chatterjee (1973) and Salman Rushdie (1997) claimed that English had become an Indian language, the history of the Indianization of the English language in the colonial era has not yet come to the forefront in debates in India on the English language. Indian English is a recognized dialect today (as discussed in the first chapter), but the history of ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the colonial era has remained untold. As a consequence, although English is an indispensable part of modern Indian culture, the legacy of the English language has not been celebrated. According to Spivak, the presence of the English language is one of the several types of ‘historical enablement[s] which one mustn’t celebrate, but toward which one has a deconstructive position’ (Landry & MacLean, ed., 19).7 For a long time, the general attitude towards English in India has been – borrowing again the words of Spivak – like the general attitude towards the ‘child of rape’ (Landry & MacLean, ed., 19) whose birth cannot be celebrated. Although the language was used to voice nationalist consciousness and to express the creative self, the body of literature went uncelebrated, its birth and existence unsung. Rather, voices of resentment against the language could be heard, and the users of English in India were often called ‘Macaulay’s children’. Since the 1990s, with the Indian economy opening itself to foreign traders, English has been able to consolidate its position in Indian society by spreading its wings to utilitarian, interactive, and interpretive functional domains. Yet, the ‘deconstructive position’ has not been overcome completely. English is a language of empowerment and the Indian literate society is always too eager to acquire that power. Yet since Gandhi’s opposition to use of English, voices of resentment are often heard. In November 2013, for example, Mulayam Singh Yadav, the leader of the Samajwadi Party, proposed that English should be banned from Indian Parliament. Derek O’Brien, a member of Parliament, argued that Mulayam’s proposal is ‘worrying’ and ‘represents disconnect with energies of new India and today’s youth’ (Outlook). Not only Mulayam’s proposal but also Derek’s arguments reflect the lack of consciousness regarding the use of the English language in the colonial era and the role played by the English language in the emergence of Indian nationalism. Unless it is recognized that not only ‘new India’ but also the makers of modern India in the colonial era used the language to express its consciousness of nationhood and modernity, unless it is recognized that not only ‘today’s youth’ but also the Young Bengal of the nineteenth century and great Indian thinkers of the past chose to speak and write in the English language, India will find it ‘worrying’ and difficult to reconcile itself spiritually and completely with its linguistic predicament. Jug 186

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Suraiya, a columnist, satirized Mulayam’s proposal by pointing out that in independent India, English was retained as a link language and subsequently replaced by Hindlish: Humne Angrezi ko retain kiya as link language, yani hum sab Indians ko aik doosre, yani one another, se link kare . . . Angrezi ko humne kaise hataya? Bahut simple. Humne pardeshi Angrezi ko swadeshi Hindlish se replace kiya. (‘Mulayam’s Demand’)8 It seems from the foregoing quote written in Hindlish in an English daily that the resistance to the hegemony of British English in India is a postcolonial phenomenon. But my study I hope will provide the participants of the debate with new ideas and enable the users of the English language in India to see ‘Indianization’ as it is being used today, from a fresh outlook. I think much of the nation’s ‘deconstructive position’ regarding the English language could have been dissolved had the history of ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the colonial era been highlighted. From my study it is also evident that the ‘deconstructive position’ of Indians regarding the English language discussed earlier did not exist in the time of Rammohan and Michael Madhusudan Dutt – that is, until the mid-nineteenth century. Until the rise of Gandhi in international politics, resentment against the use of the English language in India was seldom heard. Hence the ‘deconstructive position’ regarding the English language came into prominence only in the early twentieth century. On the other hand, ‘Indianization’ of the English language, as my study shows, can be traced to the acrolectal variety in the early nineteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, social reformers, religious reformers, orators, novelists, and political leaders ‘Indianized’ the English language with strategic goals. It was associated with the politics of identity, resistance of colonial discourse, and the formation of non-Western and nationalistic discourses. An awareness of this history would help the Indian users of ‘Indianized’ English to relate themselves better with this dialect, especially when it is fast growing. The presence of ‘Indianized’ English is quite regular in English dailies in India. One of the front-page headlines of The Times of India on 19 May 2015 was ‘Winked at by Gunner, Agra Woman Breaks Neta’s Car’. In India, the word ‘neta’ (leader) has undergone a subversion of meaning as it is used more often to refer to an inefficient and corrupt leader in a political party. Hence the word ‘leader’ would not have carried the air of suppressed ridicule against the political leader who reportedly misbehaved with a lady in the street. ‘Indianization’ is also quite prominent even in the editorial pages in Indian newspapers in English. The editorial (titled ‘Pace That Thrills’) of the Times of India on 19 May 2015 had the following subheading: ‘Modi sarkar must meet the expectation of voters who gave it the first majority in 187

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30 years’. One of the two editorials in The Statesman on 2 June 2015 commented on the proceedings of Parliament and government policy and had the title ‘Strategic khichdi’. The Times of India features on its editorial page – quite frequently – the column ‘Jugular Vein’, by Jug Suraiya, who in recent times has mastered the art of using Indian English for banter and fun. He is also quick in appropriating the recent trends of Indian use of the English language. For example, in one of his columns, published on 27 March 2015, Suraiya reflected on the Indian use of ‘combo’ for ‘combination’: ‘More and more eateries are making “combo offers”. I thought “combo” was a new form of cuisine, like molecular gastronomy. But it turns out that combo is a shortened form of “combination”’. From offers of restaurants, Suraiya switched to the ‘combo offers’ of political parties. His reading on the offer of the ruling party runs thus: BJP, for example, has promoted a combo comprising Narendra Modi, Swachh Bharat, Make in India, RSS, VHP, ghar wapsi and saffronised school syllabi, all rolled into one, and which the customer gets for the price of a single vote. Ek vote, hazaar mazaa. (‘Combo Offers’, 16) Suraiya made a satirical presentation of the ‘combo’ offers of the four main political parties of India in the similar ‘vein’. The widespread use of Indian English has changed to some extent Indians’ attitude towards Standard British English. Today, social media offers the common man and woman a lot of space for the expression of their selves in hybridized languages, such as Indian English. But Indian English has a history in the colonial period. Its emergence is not abrupt but it has had a steady development in the last two hundred years. It is my contention that unless the history of ‘Indianization’ of the English language along with the rich legacy of English writings is valorized or critically appreciated, it will be difficult to redefine the status of Indian English in India in the twenty-first century. The role of the English language in India has been defined by Agnihotri and Khanna (1997) as that of a ‘shared mass of knowledge’ (28); it has been defined as a contact language by Khubchandani (‘English’) and as an ‘auntie tongue’ by Probal Dasgupta (1993). But today, when it is high time to redefine the status of Indian English, Indians will not be able to claim it as a part of their cultural heritage, as a part of national glory unless the history of its use in the last two hundred years is properly assessed. The association of ‘Indianized’ English with the rise of nationalistic consciousness in the colonial period gives to Indian English a position of prestige, the acknowledgement of which, I think, is still due. For the scholars and students of Indian writing in English, the history of ‘Indianization’ of the English language in the colonial period presents the Indian English fiction of independent India in a new light because 188

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‘Indianization’ of the English language has continued to be appreciated by the readers of Indian English fiction. Meenakshi Mukherjee analyzed the Punjabi influence in the novels of Mulk Raj Anand and the delineations of the south Indian mind in the use of language by R.K. Narayan (Twice-Born, 161). Raja Rao’s experimentation with narrative technique in Kanthapura has been discussed by several critics and literary historians. Rushdie’s novels, especially Midnight’s Children, made scholars and critics in India and abroad consider the phenomenon of ‘Indianization’ of the English language more seriously than before. Lise Guilhamon described Rushdie’s English as ‘English “Made as India”’ and observed, Language in Rushdie’s novels is presented as fundamentally diverse and plural, . . . in the sense that it is actually enriched by its multiple foundations; not ‘homeless’ but constantly inventing its own ‘imaginary homelands’ in the irreducible diversity of languages and cultures. (203) O.P. Dwivedi, quoting from Sisir Kumar Chatterjee’s article ‘Chutnification’, argued that Rushdie ‘attempts to destroy “the natural rhythms of the English language” and to dislocate “the English and let other things into it”’ (1). In the third chapter of my study, I have pointed out Satthianadhan’s use of Indianized English where she tampered with the natural rhythm of the English language: ‘Oh! How desolate I shall be, alone here’ (Saguna, 39). Rushdie obviously utilized such break from the natural rhythm of the English language on a bigger scale and to a higher degree. When Padma says, ‘Eat na, food is spoiling’ (Midnight’s, 24) or uses the compound word ‘writing-shiting’9 (24), a British reader unacquainted with Urdu and modern Hindi might find Padma’s dialogues difficult to comprehend. In this context, the findings of my study indicate continuity between Bankimchandra and Rushdie as far as ‘Indianization’ of the English language is concerned as Bamkimchandra’s English was also ‘enriched by multiple foundations’. I expect scholars and critics will explore this continuity further in the colonial as well as the postcolonial Indian English literature. It is I think worthwhile to point out that Amitav Ghosh in Sea of Poppies expanded the dimension of ‘Indianization’ in Indian English fiction by interweaving diverse linguistic influences in his English: Bangla, Bihari, and the language of the sailors (laskars). The third sequel of the novel, The Flood of Fire, was published in 2015, in which Ghosh continued with his experimentations with language. Indian English novels have captured a major portion of the Indian book market in the twenty-first century. The success of Chetan Bhagat is documented in the first chapter with reference to Robert McCrum’s book Globish. The Indian readers of English are coming across new names every year, like Sudha Murty, Kunal Bose, Aravind Adiga, Durjoy Dutta, and Neel 189

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Mukherjee (to name only a few). In this context, the dimension of ‘Indianization’ is likely to be explored further by talented writers. Regarding the integrity of Indian English, which has often been put in doubt, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon. It is that the common areal or sprachbund features of several Indian languages – which I have mentioned in the first chapter – play an important role in Indian English. For example, all the mother-tongue interferences in Vivekananda’s speeches discussed in Chapter 5 come from his mother tongue, Bangla, but they did not make his language sound strange or incomprehensible to the south Indian audience. Similarly, the influence of Gujrati in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj does not render the texts less comprehensible to many of the non-Gujrati readers. The same philosophy holds in the case of the novels of Satthianadhan. The feeling of anxiety expressed in Tagore’s phrase ‘trodden down under the heel of foreign domination’ and also in Subhas Bose’s sentence ‘As long as India lies prostrate at the feet of Britain . . .’ is likely to be readily shared by non-Bengali readers. Hence ‘Indianization’ of the English language does function as an agent of integrating the linguistic diversities of India. When Naseem in Midnight’s Children is asked by her husband to come out of purdah she argues in desperation: ‘They will see more than that! They will see my deep-deep shame!’ (Rushdie, 38). Naseem’s (later she metamorphoses into Reverend Mother) idiolect is depicted in English with the help of lexisbound translation: Reverend Mother took to confiding her fears to the family cook, Daoud. ‘He fills their heads with I don’t know with what foreign languages, whatsitsname, and other rubbish also, no doubt.’ Daoud stirred pots and Reverend Mother cried, ‘Do you wonder, whatsitsname, that the little one calls herself Emerald? In English, whatsitsname? (50) The interferences of Hindustani and Urdu are not likely to obscure the language to most non-Urdu or non-Hindi speakers in India, although they might sound alien to British readers. Similarly when Gauri in Sudha Murty’s The Mother I Never Knew asks her mother, ‘Amma, should I buy a cow just because I have a rope?’ (7), a Bengali reader may guess it as an interference of Kannada. For the Indian readers, these influences of the vernacular offer a greater linguistic space within the English tongue. Thus ‘Indianization’ of the English language has been a way of integrating the linguistic diversities of India, the process of which can be traced back to the early nineteenth century. Hence it is high time to celebrate the legacy of the use of English language by great Indian writers and speakers in the colonial era. It is necessary to point out here that compared to what little I have studied and analyzed in this book – which has brought me to the foregoing 190

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realization – all that could have been studied and discussed is huge. Hence there is ample scope for reviewing the process of indigenization of the English language in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries with reference to authors whom I did not study, such as the English prose works of Toru Dutt, Behramji Malabari, Govardhanram Tripathi, Harish Mukherjee, Surendra Nath Banerjee, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, to name only a few. I have studied diverse genres in this book, such as letters, speeches, and diary entries; these genres, particularly letters, have a huge body of literature – for example, the letters of Tagore and Vivekananda written in English. The sociolinguistic dimension of newspaper reports, interviews, and petitions of the colonial era has largely been unexplored. Many of these literatures are available in books and archives. Old books available in e-book format are easily accessible, such as The Miscellaneous Writings of the Late Hon’ble Mr. Justice M. G. Ranade, originally published in 1915 and in 1992 by Sahitya Akademi, the 1888 publication of The Life and Life-Work of Behramji M. Malabari by Dayaram Gidumal, preserved in the Library of The University of California, Los Angeles, Surendranath Banerjea’s A Nation in Making: Being the Reminiscences of Fifty Years of Public Life, the second impression of which was published by Oxford University Press in 1925. The book last mentioned is an autobiography of Surendranath Banerjea, and it is a priceless historical document as well as a wonderful piece of literature. There were several other Indian writers who composed autobiographical works in English in the early twentieth century, such as Swami Vivekananda, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, and Subhas Chandra Bose. I have discussed the introduction of the English language in the first two chapters with reference to diverse sources, of which Syed Nurullah and J.P. Naik’s History of Education in India During the British Period is very interesting as it gives the ground realities of each province of India regarding the introduction of English learning and Western education. However, in spite of the diversity of situations prevailing in each of the provinces, one common element in nineteenth-century India is its fascination for Shakespeare. Sukanta Chaudhuri’s article titled ‘Shakespeare on the Early Modern Indian Stage’ in the section ‘Shakespeare in India’ on the website ‘Internet Shakespeare Editions’ discusses the impact of Shakespeare on the ‘early modern Indian stage’. Besides discussing the Bengali adaptations of Shakespeare, it mentions a Gujrati adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, and the commercial success of Othello in Gujrati in 1903; the article highlights the figure of Ganpatrao Joshi, who became famous in Maharashtra by portraying Shakespearean tragic heroes on stage and was popularly known as ‘Garrick of Maharashtra’ in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The article also draws our attention to Kannada, Tamil, and Telegu adaptations of Shakespeare. Since Shakespeare was presented on the stage in the vernacular, it is not an indication of proficiency in the English language among the masses. But that playwrights all over India were simultaneously fascinated 191

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by one English author indicates that Shakespeare suddenly became a repository of dramatic content across India. Tagore in his autobiography did not fail to observe the impact Western literature had on the minds of Bengal in the late nineteenth century, mentioned in Chapter 1 of this book. Thus the exuberance of passion in Shakespearean tragedy, which according to Tagore was ‘a welcome jolt’ (qtd in Mukherjee, M., Perishable Empire, 6–7) as it relieved the society from a certain sort of stagnation of impulses and emotions, did increase the cultural value of the English language for many Indians who have access to Shakespeare’s works or who are aware of the impact of Shakespeare or of the Romantic literature on Indian writers and thinkers. This is also an interesting area of research.

Notes 1 See the entry in note 4 of Chapter 1. 2 By ‘transfer of context’ Kachru meant depiction of cultural details, like the ‘caste system of India, social and religious taboos, notions of superiority and inferiority, and the like’ (Indianization, 101). 3 See Chapter 3, p. 55–56, of this book. 4 See Chapter 1, p. 12–13, of this book. 5 Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay’s Bharatbarsher Itihas was first published in 1858. Discussing the historical significance of the work, Partha Chatterjee reported that Tarinicharan’s book was reprinted every year and ‘also served as a model for many other textbooks’ (106). 6 See the entry in note 1 of Chapter 5. 7 Spivak’s view is quoted and discussed in detail in Chapter 6. 8 Suraiya’s extract means the following: ‘We have retained English as link language . . . How did we oust English? It was very simple. We replaced the foreign English with the native Hindlish’. 9 The compound ‘writing-shiting’ is formed in accordance with such expressions used in several Indian languages. Constructions like ‘icecream-ficecream’ and ‘pumpery-shumpery’ make Indian English morphologically different from Standard British English.

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206

INDEX

170, 173, 174, 175, 177, 181, 183, 184, 190, 191 Brahmo Samaj 48, 59, 66 Burnell, A.C. 24, 165, 174

Achebe, Chinua 3 acrolect 4, 6, 24, 29, 31, 46, 47, 65, 107, 136, 137, 172, 187 ahimsa/ahinsa 29, 155, 158, 166, 167 Akbar 54, 166, 181 Alberuni 54 Amherst, Lord 8, 35, 37, 45 Anand, M.R. 64, 79, 92, 93, 148, 160, 164, 169 Anthony, Hensman/Antony Firinghee 52, 69 Arthashastra 53, 54 Ashcroft, Bill 2, 11, 16, 29, 80, 112, 123, 136, 146, 153, 169, 184 Aurobindo, Sri 10, 38, 55, 79, 80 Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam 191 babu English 4, 5, 23, 24, 31, 38, 46, 65, 136, 172, 174, 176 Banerjee, S. N. 36, 65, 76, 171, 191 basilect 4, 31, 46, 60 Basu, Rajnarayan 62 Battle of Plassey 33 Bayly, C.A. 37, 72, 73–74, 77, 95 Bentinck, Lord 24, 37, 54, 73, 77 Bhabha, Homi 2, 6, 10, 11, 21, 41, 105 Bhagat, Chetan 41, 42, 189 Bhagavad Gita 28, 51, 54, 97, 100, 102, 103, 104, 110, 130, 131, 141, 162, 173, 181, 182, 183, 184 Bharatchandra 60 Bhattacharya, Bhabani 8, 155 Bible, The 35, 44, 49, 66, 67, 74, 91, 101, 104, 124, 176 Bose, Subhas Chandra 13, 23, 28, 29, 30, 97, 104, 109, 112, 113, 115–120, 126, 128, 136–142, 143, 144, 152,

Caliban 14, 16, 18, 80, 123, 146 Certeau, Michel de 15, 18, 28, 105, 150 Chaitanya Sri 52 Chatterjee, Bankimchandra 9, 12, 27, 28, 36, 37, 38, 71, 76, 78–85, 94, 107, 121, 168, 169, 172, 173, 178, 185, 189 Chatterjee, Partha 9, 22, 23, 49, 78, 110, 179, 192 Chatterji, Suniti Kumar 19, 40, 42, 186 Chaudhuri, Nirad C. 21, 22, 35, 36, 38, 39, 72, 73, 81, 86 colloquialism 16, 47, 55, 56, 60, 62, 68, 105, 106, 107, 172, 173, 175 creole 2, 9, 27, 30, 31, 46, 48, 54 Crystal, David 2, 14 cultural shift 12, 28, 163, 185 Curzon, Lord 24, 49, 109 Dadu 48 Dalit 41 Das, C.R. 10, 28, 29, 97, 126, 127, 128, 133–136, 174 Das, Gobinda 83 Das, Jatindranath 140, 144, 173 Das, Kamala 1 Das, Sisir Kumar 44, 51, 112, 114, 119, 136 Dasgupta, Probal 4, 8, 31, 74, 188 Dasgupta, Rabindrakumar 124 Day, Lal Behari 5, 8, 12, 27, 28, 71, 73, 85–87, 94, 107, 173, 174, 175 Dharmabhanaka 99

207

INDEX

Jones, William 24, 49, 50, 179 Joyce, James 1

Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta 99 de Nevers, Francis Ephrim 33 Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian 73 Desai, Anita 13, 177 Desai, Mahadev 66, 171 Devi, Rajlakshmi 87 Devi, Swarnakumari 87 Dickens, Charles 102 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan 9, 27, 36, 37, 44, 45, 48, 60–65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 76, 78, 79, 94, 107, 160, 168, 175, 176, 184, 187 Dutt, Romesh Chunder 71, 77, 95, 125 Dutta, Satyendranath 171 Dyson, Ketaki Kushari 114, 115, 117, 124, 125

Kabir 48, 120 Kachru, Braj B. 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, 20, 31, 35, 39, 42, 43, 56, 64, 84, 138, 172, 176, 192 Kalidas 60, 125 Kautilya 53 Keats, John 83, 120, 122, 179 Kenya 15, 46, 163 Khusraw, Amir 46 King George V 152 King, Martin Luther 104 Kipling, Rudyard 31, 130, 142, 143, 167, 170 Kothari Commission 39 Krittibas 60 Krsnachandra Raya, Maharaja 52

economic drain 72 Eliot, T. S. 58 Elphinstone 34 Foucault, M. 16 Gandhi, Manilal 155, 171 Gandhi, M.K. 17, 23, 26, 29, 30, 38, 47, 48, 49, 76, 97, 106, 112, 119, 125, 127, 128, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 142, 143, 145–171, 174, 175, 177, 181, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190; on dress 152; on the English language 145–153, 158–161; Hind Swaraj 160–168; on London 150; his prose style 154–155; on religion 166–167; sex 159; vegetarianism 153, 171; views on restraint in language 155–158 Ghosh, Amitav 24, 189 Gokak, V.K. 42, 131 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna 10, 77, 129 Gramsci, Antonio 16 Gray, Thomas 140, 144

lexis bound translation 9, 64, 65, 94, 107, 118, 120, 121, 163, 167, 173, 174, 175, 176 Longinus 110

Indian Opinion 153, 155, 171 Iyengar, K.R.S 10, 12, 34, 48, 154

Macaulay, Thomas Babington 9, 28, 109, 125, 130, 146, 178 Mahabharata, The 60, 62, 98, 131 Majumdar, Ramesh Chandra 3, 7, 8, 33, 35, 36, 37, 73, 75, 90, 110 Malabari, Behramji 36, 143, 191 Malaviya, Madan Mohan 10 Manglish 46 mesolect 4, 23, 31, 46, 60, 65, 136, 172, 176 Milton, John 19, 36, 44, 60, 61, 73, 101, 109 monolingualism 17, 23, 25 mother tongue interference 9, 10, 26, 56, 107, 134, 135, 173, 174, 177, 190 Mukherjee, Harish 191 Mukherjee, Jyotindranath 109 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 12, 20, 28, 36, 73, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 164, 189, 190, 192 Mukhopadhyay, Bhudev 72, 110 Mukhopadhyay, Shirsendu 95 Murty, Sudha 189, 190

Jahangir 33 Jespersen, Otto 43

Naidu, Sarojini 4 Nair, Sankaran 10

Hicky’s Bengal Gazette 35, 78 Hindu College 7, 17, 35, 61, 73 Homer 60, 73 hybridity 23, 25, 46, 68

208

INDEX

Nanak, Guru 48 Narayan, Jayprakash 66 Narayan, R.K. 8, 11, 64, 79, 92, 93, 94, 160, 164, 169, 189 Nehru, Jawaharlal 29, 128, 136, 137, 142, 143, 152, 158 Ngugi wa, Thiong wo 1, 15, 16, 163 Nivedita, Sister (also Margaret Noble) 72, 104, 111, 182 Nyaya 52, 72, 178 Orwell, George 111 Pal, Bepin Chandra 10, 134 Papua New Guinea 46, 48 Paranjape, Makarnd 18, 79, 92, 132, 142 Parliament of Religions 72 Pennycook, Alistair 17, 147 Petrarch 60 Phillipson, Robert 16, 17, 18, 31–32, 42 pidgin 9, 27, 30, 46, 48, 54, 178 platonic dialogues 50, 55 Prasad, G.J.V. 2, 164, 184 Purvapaksha 53, 178 Rajagopalachari, Chakravarti 18, 19, 29, 39, 42, 146, 158, 171 Ramabai, Pandita 38, 72, 87, 88 Ramakrishna, Sri 124 Ramayana, The 60, 73, 95, 150 Ranade, Justice 10, 78, 129, 143, 191 Rao, Raja 8, 11, 54, 79, 92, 139, 160, 164, 168, 169, 189 Ray, Satyajit 96, 138 Raychaudhuri, Tapan 47 Renan, Ernest 21, 22 Revolt of 1857 72, 76 Rig Veda 11 Robertson, B.C. 26, 49, 53, 57 Roy, Rammohan 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 19, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 35, 37, 40, 44, 45, 48–59, 60, 66, 68, 72, 78, 79, 104, 107, 124, 132, 162, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 176, 178, 179, 181, 184, 185, 187 Rushdie, Salman 11, 12, 13, 67, 153, 177, 186, 189, 190 Samachar Darpan 35, 78 Sankaracharya 48 Sarasvati/Saraswati, Goddess 72, 98

Sarkar, Sumit 45, 47, 57, 77, 112, 152 Satthianandhan, Krupabai 12, 27, 28, 37, 71, 75, 81, 87–94, 95, 96, 107, 111, 173, 174, 176, 177, 189, 190 Satthianandhan, Samuel 74, 94 Satyagraha 131, 143, 147, 149 Scottish Church College 17, 77 second language 2, 17, 26, 30, 31, 48, 117, 132, 152, 161 Sen, Amartya 54 Sen, Aparna 96 Sen, Keshub Chunder 23, 27, 36, 37, 44, 45, 48, 59, 60, 65–69, 70, 79, 94, 107, 112, 136, 168, 171, 176 Sen, Krishna 6, 206 Sen, Nananeeta Deb 40 Shakespeare, William 14, 16, 19, 44, 60, 72, 76, 82, 102, 114, 126, 144, 191, 192 Singh, Shahid Bhagat 66 Singlish 46 Siromani, Raghunath 52 Sleeman, W.H. 75, 77, 95 Spivak, G.C. 13, 159, 160, 186 Sprachbund 20, 88, 91, 135, 136, 190 Standard English 3, 23, 29, 46, 54, 57, 60, 61, 71, 84, 85, 89, 100, 107, 116, 117, 119, 137, 146, 153, 160, 161, 163, 168, 169, 173, 175, 178, 185 Sufi 48, 166, 181 Suraiya, Jug 187, 188 Swahili 46 Swaraj 26, 29, 123, 127, 128, 130, 134, 161, 163, 165, 166, 167, 170, 174, 180 Tagore, Rabindranath 4, 7, 9, 19, 23, 26, 28, 29, 30, 62, 63, 76, 97, 98, 125, 126, 128, 133, 136, 137, 139, 152, 166, 167, 170, 171, 177, 179, 180, 184, 185, 190, 191, 192; ‘Crisis in Civilization’ 47, 75; English writings 112–124; Gitanjali 113, 167; Hasyakoutuk 62–63; ‘Monihaar’ 95–96; national anthem (of India) 48; ‘Postmaster’ 138; ‘Shes Saptak’ 114 Tagore, Satyendra Nath 60 Tanzania 46 Tarkabageesh, Kashinath 52, 53, 55, 78, 178 Tasso 60 Thugs 77, 95

209

INDEX

Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 10, 23, 28, 29, 78, 97, 104, 106, 126, 127, 128–132, 134, 136, 143, 171, 179, 183 Tok Pisin 46 transfer of context 56, 64, 84, 138, 172, 176, 178, 192 Tripathi, Amales 76 Tripathi, Govardhanram 36, 66, 191 Uganda 46 Upadhyaya, Gangesa 52 Upanishads 25, 27, 28, 48, 54, 57, 58, 98, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 115, 120, 121, 122, 124, 134, 141, 172, 179, 181, 182, 183

Vidyasagar, Iswarchandra 23, 36, 52, 61, 62, 64, 65, 72, 78, 175, 176 Virgil 36, 60 Viswanathan, Gauri 6, 7, 18, 36, 47, 76 Vivekananda 9, 19, 23, 26, 28, 29, 30, 36, 38, 72, 97, 98, 99–112, 113, 124, 125, 126, 128, 131, 133, 136, 141, 173, 174, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 191 Wood’s Despatch 38 Young Bengal 73, 80, 186 Young India 152, 153, 161, 170, 171 Yule, Henry 24, 165, 174

210