What are you Reading?: The World Market and Indian Literary Production [1° ed.] 0415502438, 9780415502436

Table of contents :
Cover
Half
Title
Title
Page
Copyright
Page
Dedication
Table of
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Literacy, Language and Literature
1.
Speaking in Tongues: The Politics of Language in India
2.
The Disease of Gigantism: Global Plans and Local Consequences
3.
Fit to Print: The Transnational Publishing Industry
4.
India Shining: Territories and Translation
Conclusion: Academic Imperialism
Bibliography
About the Author
Index

Citation preview

What Are You Reading?

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What Are You Reading? The World Market and Indian Literary Production

PAVITHRA NARAYANAN

Rutledge T avlnr ‫ ة‬Francis ^ ٢٥□□ LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI

First published 2012 in India by Routledge 912 Tolstoy House, 15–17 Tolstoy Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi 110 001

Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2012 Pavithra Narayanan

Typeset by Star Compugraphics Private Limited 5, CSC, Near City Apartments Vasundhara Enclave Delhi 110 096

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized 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 and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-415-50243-6

അച്ഛനും അമ്മയ്ക്കും - എന്നും നന്ദി For my Father and Mother

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Contents Acknowledgements

Introduction: Literacy, Language and Literature

ix

1

1. Speaking in Tongues: The Politics of Language in India

12

2. The Disease of Gigantism: Global Plans and Local Consequences

45

3. Fit to Print: The Transnational Publishing Industry

76

4. India Shining: Territories and Translation

113

Conclusion: Academic Imperialism

136

Bibliography About the Author Index

153 171 173

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Acknowledgements The generosity of many people made this book possible, and I am grateful to everyone who shared this journey of research and writing with me. All shortcomings remain mine. I owe a personal and intellectual debt to Jigna Desai, Uma Narayan and P. Sainath. They read my book proposal in its earliest form and their appreciative as well as critical comments made this a better book. I cannot thank them enough for their support, encouragement and generous engagement with my work. I owe a debt of gratitude to Vaijayanti Gupta and Ammu Joseph for connecting me with Indian writers and publishers who changed my understanding of literary production in crucial ways. I am deeply indebted to Anita Nair, C. K. Meena, Geetanjali Shree, K. R. Usha, Mahasweta Devi, Mallika Sengupta, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Nongthombam Kunjamohan Singh, Heisnam Kanhailal, Ritu Menon, Ratan Thiyam, Shashi Deshpande, and Simon Prosser for responding to my requests for interviews. I learned much from these remarkable writers and publishers, and am grateful to them for generously giving me their time and sharing their thoughts with me. I owe a special debt to the late Mallika Sengupta, who was the first writer I interviewed in 2005. She was an extremely gracious and kind host, and I wish I had told her that the generosity of her spirit helped me overcome my anxieties aboutmeeting and talking with other Indian writers, some of whose works I have read only in translation. I owe an enormous debt to Kumi Silva, Iveta Jusová, Vaijayanti Gupta, Gomati Jagadeesan, and Richard O’Brien, whose presence in my life has made living in the United States memorable and intellectually invigorating. I am grateful for their conversations, critical insights and countless other ways in which they continue to help me. I offer my heartfelt thanks to the editors at Routledge, New Delhi, for their support and patience, and the care they have taken in the production of this book. Thanks are due to Meagan Lobnitz and Amy Huseby for meticulously copy-editing the manuscript. I also thank Carolyn Long for her editorial comments on the book proposal. I am grateful to my colleagues in the English department at Washington State University (WSU) in Vancouver and in Pullman, and

x  What Are You Reading? the faculty of WSU Vancouver’s Center for Social and Environment Justice for creating a supportive, political and intellectual environment at WSU. I am indebted to Candice Goucher, Noël Sturgeon, Luz María Gordillo, Carol Siegel, Jon Hegglund, Clay Mosher, Armando Laguardia, and Marcelo Diversi for their invaluable suggestions and encouragement. I owe a tremendous debt to Laurie Mercier, Desiree Hellegers and Wendy Dasler Johnson, without whose help this book would not have been completed. I am grateful to them for their detailed and thoughtful comments on every draft of the manuscript, and for providing moral and political support. I take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude to all my students, friends and colleagues at WSU and universities within and outside the United States who stood up for me when I was denied tenure to ensure that the academic community continues to play a central role in governance. My greatest debt is to my parents, Anitha Elayath and N. Narayanan Elayath, for introducing me to Marx, and teaching me the importance of collective action and socialist policies. The political discussions with them and the stories of their involvement in Indian nationalist and Marxist–Communist movements and labor unions have inspired and shaped my life and research. This book is dedicated to them with love and gratitude.

Introduction: Literacy, Language and Literature It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl - the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom . . . the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface - and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world. I began to rely on my knowledge of how books get written, how language arrives; my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of their project. —Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

In India, where literacy has been and still is a privilege, a conversation about the history of a book is a conversation about inequalities. Over two-thirds of the Indian population who are illiterate also live below the poverty line,1 and while they are subjects of postcolonial theory or protagonists in postcolonial fictions, their realities are far removed from the discussions taking place in academia.2 For this group, issues of migration, diaspora and identity, which are central to First World postcolonial academic scholarship, are not about the flow of global capital or about being recognized in the First World, but are related to caste, displacement and poverty. The migrant poor are India’s “unreserved” travelers boarding trains in search of work in towns or cities, and their central concerns revolve around finding work and making enough money to feed their families. In Orissa’s Ganjam district alone, almost every household has a migrant going to Surat in Gujarat in search of work (Sainath 2009a). How relevant 1

There is conflicting data on the number of people living below the poverty line, with different estimates provided by each of the three committees set up by the Government of India. The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (“Nearly 80 pct of India lives on Half Dollar a Day”) puts the figure at around 26 per cent, the Suresh Tendulkar Committee estimates that 38 per cent of India’s population is poor (Siddhanta 2009), and the Expert committee says that 50 per cent live below the poverty line (Bageshree 2009). 2 According to India’s 2001 census, the literacy rates of the population, women, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes were 65.38 per cent, 54.16 per cent, 54.69 per cent, and 47.10 per cent respectively (Government of India 2001).

2  What Are You Reading? is it to ask this migrant community “What are you reading?” when many of them depend on Tappawalas, Ganjam’s postmen or paperless money couriers, to send money home to their families, since they cannot fill out the money order forms themselves? “Even if you are literate, which most migrants are not,” says one of the workers, “you cannot fill out your money order form in Surat in the Oriya language. Getting someone to write it in poor English risks having your money order going astray” (qtd. in Sainath 2009b). Although the realities of Ganjam’s migrants on the one hand, and academics who theorize about the subaltern, representation and identity on the other, are disconnected, both groups are directly impacted by socio-economic policies and globalization; one favorably, the other not. It is precisely because of these disparities between communities that the intrinsic connection between economic policies and hierarchical structures and the history of the book and contemporary global literary production need to be readdressed. Drawing on the visions of Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci, and B. R. Ambedkar, this book examines postcolonial pedagogical concerns in relation to social, political and economic inequities engendered by global capitalism. The 2008 economic meltdown rendered even more urgent the need to bring further class and economic analyses to bear on postcolonial studies. The transnationalization of book publishing in postcolonial countries, like the economic crisis, colonization, imperialism, and globalization is the result of capitalist expansions. How much revenue will a £1.5 million advance to Hari Kunzru generate for Hamilton publishers? Would Gautam Malkani’s book have become the “literary novel of the year” without its much publicized £300,000 advance? Why can Arundhati Roy’s writings be found in every bookstore in the United States while it is difficult to locate books by Ambai? The answers to these questions do not reveal a hidden side of the Indian literary world; they merely make visible the all-too-evident economic and hegemonic structures on which societies are built. Beginning in the 1990s, when postcolonial studies emerged as a major field in North American academy, scholars such as Gayatri Spivak,3 Arif Dirlik and Aijaz Ahmad adopted a materialist approach in their analyses of postcolonial studies, arguing that the discipline needs to be understood, questioned and examined in a materialist context. Following the exponential growth of Indian writing in English 3 In response to scholars analyzing her work, Spivak asserted: “My work is not really on colonial discourse. It is very much more sort of the contemporary cultural politics of neocolonialism in the US” (1989: 164).

Introduction  3 within the international literary scene, which occurred as a result of global operations, greater attention has been drawn to the relationship between literature and economic structural changes. The hegemonic position of select Indian authors in Western academic institutions, the modes of cultural production, the commodification of texts, star authors, the death of the author and of disciplines, and the business of books, are some of the topics that have been explored by scholars4 in recent decades. My study overlaps with these critiques of postcolonial studies and expands on Dirlik’s argument that postcolonial studies as a discipline in English and its scholars are products of de/reterritorialized global capitalist operations (1994: 100). Defining globalization in terms of economic liberalization, What Are You Reading? offers a material critique of the effects of powerful economic forces on various aspects of contemporary Indian literary production. The archive of texts by Indian authors is examined within the context of institutional hiearchies, nationalist histories, and political, social and economic policies. The analysis in this book reiterates the idea that why we read what we read is more than coincidental. In the 21st century, with nationalist and capitalist slogans overlapping in various parts of the world, postcoloniality is still very much a class issue. In India, it is also a caste issue. Although some of the earliest works in Indian literature date back 2,000 years, they emerged out of a hierarchical structure wherein only some communities had the right to education. Most of the literature on the history of Indian writing fails to include this history of caste oppression. It is only in the past 64 years that education policies have been implemented by Indian governments to provide equal education opportunities for all its citizens. But with a dropout rate of 72 per cent amongst Dalit school students, very few of them go for higher education, and even fewer Dalits are a part of intellectual communities, the arts and the academia (S. Menon 2009). Despite all odds, Dalit writers have transcended oppressive systems and established themselves in the literary world. However, even today these writers have to fight for Dalit literature to be accorded the same status as mainstream Indian literature. While Dalit writers have received marginal recognition, the voices of Adivasis have been almost completely absent in postcolonial scholarship. In the 4

Suman Gupta’s Globalization and Literature (2009), Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers in the Global Marketplace (2007) and Ruvani Ranasinha’s South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (2007) are some of the most of the recent monographs examining the intersections between global capitalism and postcolonial literature.

4  What Are You Reading? southern Indian state of Kerala, the first Malayalam novel by an Adivasi writer, A. Narayan’s Kocharethi, was published only in 1998. Thirteen years later, the novel’s English translation by Catharine Thankamma is not yet out in print. Indian writers who have received international literary awards, such as the Nobel, Booker and Commonwealth prizes, are not from communities which have been ostracized and denied basic rights. Understanding this correlation between class and caste, and political, social and economic inequalities is therefore indispensable to understanding formulations of the canon of postcolonial literature and theory. Social movements of the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Arts Movement, which led to the emergence of immigration, feminist and minority scholars in universities in the United States and Europe, radically altered the demographic make-up of faculty and the study of particular disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences. By the 1970s, English studies had expanded to include courses in women’s studies, Black studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies, with many of these new fields eventually evolving into distinctive programs and departments. Globalizing the curriculum and bridging the gaps between the First and the Third Worlds, these interdisciplinary scholars made a major impact on the traditional methods of literary and cultural analysis by bringing issues of colonialism, neocolonialism, hegemony, empire, race, ethnicity, hybridity, gender, and sexuality to the forefront of academic discourse. Recognizing a new publishing market, corporate publishers like Jonathan Cape, Random House and Penguin, and independent publishing houses such as Virago, Allison & Busby, Bogle L’Overture, Akira, and South End, which emerged in Britain and the US in the 1970s, began to publish feminist, minority, activist, Third World, and Black British writers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the literary scene witnessed the rise of a number of new writers from postcolonial countries. Prior to the 1970s, few Indian writers had made it to the international market and into American and British university syllabi. However, by the end of the 1990s, Indian writers in English, such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, could be found in almost any course that referenced non-Western texts. It is therefore not surprising, that many scholars attribute the recent attention of international publishers and academics to Indian writing in English to these writers, particularly Rushdie. If literary value is the basis for the scholarly attention these writers receive, then the relatively minimal research on Indian authors such as Qurratulain Hyder, Kiran Nagarkar, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai,

Introduction  5 Volga, Girish Karnad, and Ambai by North American scholars who specialize in postcolonial literature cannot be explained. It is true that the work of multicultural US scholars and even the selective inclusion of texts by feminist, minority and non-Western writers, as Gauri Viswanathan points out, “has forced the field of ‘English’ to rethink its accepted parameters,” but it has not deterritorialized “the national implications of English literature” (1996: 58). My argument here is that English studies in the West still remains locked within nations, because although the work of scholars in postcolonial studies is global in scope, it is national in its location. National paradigms define the scholarship produced in Europe and North America, where discourses are dominated by intellectuals located in the First World and writers whose works are produced and marketed in a transnational space. Scholars and writers located and published in postcolonial countries are excluded from postcolonial discourses in Euro-American academic institutions. Despite the enormous body of scholarship that addresses issues of marginalization and privilege, the canon continues to be dominated by writers from privileged backgrounds writing in English, who are published by transnational publishers, partly because these writers have been legitimized by the First World. Language and location are key factors that not only determine how literary canons are formed, but also how academic success is defined. Western pedagogy, moreover, is organized around voices articulated in or translated into languages of powerful economies, and published in First World spaces which have either international or academic recognition. Thus, there is little room for writers and academics who do not fall within these parameters to gain successful entry into the portals of First World academic institutions, and they remain background material for theoretical discussions on absent postcolonials, subaltern voices and underrepresented communities. My interrogation of the politics behind such postcolonial literary formations begins with a simple query: “What are you reading?” It was a question I was often asked in India when I travelled by train with my face buried in a book. It is also a question often posed to prominent public figures. For some, the query is simply a conversation starter. For others, it creates arbitrary identities of the reader. In India, if the book is written in English, the reader is categorized as urban, educated, and elite. If the book is in a regional language, it situates the reader geographically. But where do these arbitrary categories place those who do not read or cannot read? Although neither a pan-Indian nor a regional identity suffices to describe India’s linguistically and culturally

6  What Are You Reading? diverse population, literary status and language do create contestable identities. India might pride itself on its linguistic diversity, but of its 24 official languages, it is the English language that symbolizes economic growth and success. Language, as Frantz Fanon asserted in Black Skins, White Masks, is an index of power, and in India the “mastery of English affords remarkable power” (2008: 18). Since English does enable its speakers to successfully navigate through multiple linguistic and cultural spaces, the general consensus amongst Indians is that English is the only language through which some measure of economic and social success can be achieved. Despite the growing class divide between English and non-English speaking Indians, its current global currency has made English the preferred language for education. For transnational publishers today, just as for British publishers in the 1800s, the rapid growth of English educational institutions in India provide a lot of opportunities to expand their business empires. “The world is getting smaller,” says Penguin’s former publisher David Davidar, “there are far more Indian children today with English as their first language than there were even 10 years ago. As they grow into adulthood, the sky will be the limit for publishing in English” (qtd. in Jai Arjun Singh 2003). Who are the children Davidar is talking about? More than 50 per cent of Indian children are illiterate, and of the remaining population, more than 50 per cent drop out of school before fifth grade (Nelson 2009).5 If by “smaller” Davidar means that there are fewer options available for people in a world dominated by First World economies and languages, he is right. Transnational publishers can afford to set the sky as their limit because current economic policies and trade agreements work in their favor. Since India’s economic reforms of the 1990s, alongside other commercial foreign corporations, US and European publishers have formed transworld chains and partnerships with local publishers and firmly established themselves in India. In the past two decades, the world of Indian publishing has witnessed English literary production evolve into a mega-business industry, accompanied by the rise of star authors, literary agents, bidding wars, and five- and six-figure advances offered to unknown Indian writers and for unwritten books in English. It has been widely acknowledged that these changes have

5

In response to the low literacy rates in the country, it was only in July 2009 that the Indian Parliament approved the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, which guarantees free and compulsory education for children aged between six and 14.

Introduction  7 benefited only English-language publications because such transborder operations are first and foremost business transactions. Commenting on the near-exclusive focus of transnational publishers on works in English, Associate Director for Dalkey Archive Press, Chad Post, writes: Theoretically, the presence of companies like Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, Picador, and Hachette in India should increase the number of Indian titles published in the US and UK. Although that seems to be the case for Indians writing in English, in 2008 only five works of fiction and poetry originally written in Indian languages were published in the United States. And of those five works, two were from a Tamil Nadu based publishing house. It’s ridiculous to claim that the presence of foreign-owned multinationals in India is helping to spread regional literature — that is, anything not originally written in English — to readers outside of India. (2009a)

Further, Post speculates that the “lack of translators” might be one of the causes for this imbalance. But if this is the case, how are bestsellers today translated into multiple languages? As Pico Iyer points out, “Publicists who used to talk of copies sold now boast of how many languages they’ve reached” (2001: 166). The reality is that transnational partnerships were not formed with regional-language publishers or with the idea of publishing regional-language writing in mind. If the global visibility of Indian writers is a significant consequence of de/ reterritorialized corporations, its most adverse effect is the hegemony of these corporations as the prime global producers of Indian writing, and as the prime sources of book acquisitions in Western academic institutions. The connections between the rise to stardom of a select group of Indian authors and economic structural changes which are central to discussions of postcoloniality are also explored in my book. I do not argue that the success of writers is due solely to economic transactions, but contend that when publishing is an economic decision, what defines postcolonial literature in First World institutions is what private capital enterprise makes available. On the one hand, the conquest of territories has broadened the field of English studies and, on the other, it seems to have sealed the fate of the discipline. Also, the issue is not about the language that writers choose to write in, but rather about the unequal social divisions that language engenders and the exclusion of regional language writers in transworld exchanges. I use the term “regional” to denote a geographical border that cannot be dissolved, because, unlike English, Indian languages are not international vehicles for communication. Addressing the politics of translation and

8  What Are You Reading? language, I focus on various marginalized positions of Indian regionallanguage writers in the global and national marketplace, calling attention not only to unequal publishing spaces between English and regional languages, but also to unequal spaces within regional-language publishing. To better understand the complexities of unequal literary systems, I include, in addition to theoretical discourses, conversations taking place in journalistic and popular media in India. I also talked with writers and publishers, and their comments about literary production underscore the importance of locating literary formations within material realities. In questioning the selective inclusion of writers and theorists, this study articulates an ethics and political economy of postcolonial Indian literary production and reception. If institutional mechanisms and academic practices of defining, evaluating and expanding knowledge do not change, intellectuals, along with publishers and literary agents, will continue to be inadvertent agents of censorship for voices from the global South. Addressing the nature of such censorship by intellectuals, institutions and corporations functioning within global capitalism, this book calls for scholars to become Gramscian organic intellectuals who seek counter-hegemonic publishing spaces to not only acquire course material but to also publish their own work. Non-traditional models for translation and production are provided in the chapters to show that reconciliation between dominant and marginalized literatures is possible even in capitalist literary production. If demand determines supply, academics who teach courses on world literature can certainly demand that the publishing industry rethink modes of production. However, scholars have to first address the hegemonic structures that they are part of, or that they create. It is well known that academics subscribe to a hierarchy of publishing spaces, and the critical recognition received by scholars is often linked to where they are published. We have in academe our own First and Third World presses and journals. The question is: would scholars be willing to dismantle these unequal publishing spaces, which they themselves endorse? Starting with the politics of language, the first chapter, “Speaking in Tongues,” examines four factors — India’s history of decolonization, language policies, language wars, and the establishment of English as the lingua franca of economic mobility — that have facilitated the domination of Indian intellectuals and writers writing in English in postcolonial studies. The multilingual structure of India was a difficult territory to navigate for India’s policy makers. Debates were about the national language, the inclusion and exclusion of Indian languages

Introduction  9 into an official category, and coercive strategies were used to reinstate English as the official language. Today, despite its colonial history, it is the English language that has emerged as the fix to deal with India’s complex multicultural and multilingual structure. Most Indians steer clear of examining the power and social differential between those who have access to English and those who do not. The tendency is not to seek counter-hegemonic structures, but to find ways to be part of the existing hegemony. Here, Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the native intellectual dependence on a metropolitan or colonial culture in Black Skin, White Masks (2008), Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony outlined in “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” (1978) and Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and its Fragments (1993) provide a framework for understanding existing hegemonies — the relations between the masses and the dominant groups, between intellectual natives and power, and between language and identity. The second chapter, “The Disease of Gigantism,” follows the Indian narrative of transnationalization, which started with the globalization policies of 1991 implemented by the Narasimha Rao government in India. Foregrounding the apathy of scholars towards inegalitarian structures in their own workplace, this chapter draws attention to notions of democracy, political participation, collective resistance, institutional reform, and individual agency, all of which are perceived as important solutions to inequalities engendered by globalization. Concentrating on non-spatial networks and activities, many scholars argue that the necessary tools for resisting and countering hegemonic institutions rest in the immaterial aspects of globalization, such as international organizations, transterritorial actors, and de-territorialized forms of communication and technologies. What scholars seem to have taken for granted is that civic engagement is rooted in personal convictions. For civil society to organize, or become an agent of social change, the masses need to believe that change can happen and is necessary. Ronald Reagan certainly understood that all he needed to do was to convince people “to believe in the magic of the marketplace” (qtd. in “Tribute to President Ronald Reagan”). It is this conviction that sustains capitalism, which has also driven postcolonial countries like India to embrace Western economic forms of development. Therefore, I argue that a material approach is essential to understanding the process of globalization in India, which is primarily about liberalization — the opening of economies to allow foreign capital, trade and investment. Chapter three, “Fit to Print,” focuses on the nexus between trade policies, capitalism and the process of knowledge production in India. Examining the metamorphosis of the publishing industry into

10  What Are You Reading? a transnational corporate enterprise as a result of economic policies, I look at some of the most powerful cultural gatekeepers — transnational publishers and agents — who are shaping the Indian literary canon in Western academic institutions. Challenging the idea that the foray of transnational publishers into the Indian literary scene and the international recognition of writers in English such as Salman Rushdie are largely responsible for the growth of English-language publications in India, this chapter demonstrates that India’s vibrant publishing industry is a result of the efforts of national publishers. Framing the debate about literary canons within a discussion about the ways we acquire texts for our curriculam, I argue that the inclusion of new voices and writers in syllabi has taken place without reducing our dependence on dominant publishers. As a result, writers and theorists published outside the realm of transnational and First World publishing remain unnoticed. In the next chapter, “India Shining,” conversations with Indian writers such as Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Mallika Sengupta, Ammu Joseph, C. K. Meena, and K. R. Usha about the homogenization of literature, the emergence of a dominant monolingual culture, and the production of the “global” illuminate the challenges that Indian writers face today. The consensus amongst the writers and publishers I interviewed was that the translation of regional-language works into English is imperative not only because this ensures a wide-reading audience (national and international) but also because translation is essential for the dissemination of texts. While it is true that translation has made the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Mahasweta Devi and Geetanjali Shree accessible to a reading audience across the globe, it is unfortunate that English is seen as the only economically viable option in a global literary world. It is the inequality of nations and languages that problematizes the argument for translation. The issue is not translation per se, but the fact that hegemonic language structures and production zones privilege certain languages and particular texts for translation. This examination of the hegemonic structures influencing canon formations is not intended to valorize literatures in regional languages and disregard the value of works in English, as recent debates argue, but rather to emphasize that postcolonial literary production has yet to find a way to construct itself outside these structures. Including the voices of writers seldom, or never, heard within debates about the direction of postcolonial studies, in postcolonial research and coursework, is imperative, I believe, not only because it expands the discipline of postcolonial studies, but also because every name unfamiliar to the reader reveals the politics of language, translation and distribution, as

Introduction  11 well as the role of scholars and teachers who select, include, exclude, and determine who will be read in their classes. The conclusion, “Academic Imperialism,” calls for academics to engage in more than a theoretical discussion about the connections between global capitalism and literature. As Urvashi Butalia points out, publishers alone cannot change the canon. For “change to be effective . . . [it] must come from within the academy, from writers and teachers, curriculum developers and publishers and students” (1993: 188). Literary formations are a process — a process that involves the agency of institutions, individuals and communities. The crisis facing postcolonial studies today has a lot to do with academic publishing practices. Not unlike writers whose success is defined by global recognition enabled primarily by the location of their publishing houses, the recognition and acclaim received by academics is also dependent on the zone in which their publications occur. Social movements might have challenged and displaced the traditionally stratified structures in academia with respect to disciplines and hiring practices, but they have had little impact on the hierarchical structures inherent in academic publishing. Many new presses which have been formed for disciplines such as Black studies, postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies have mostly been re-stratified on the hierarchical ladder. A majority of scholars do not opt to challenge the pecking order of academic presses and journals because it gives them credibility, and while countries such as India are hotbeds of research, they are not viewed as viable or credible sites for academic publishing. When I chose to go with Routledge in India as the publisher of my book, unlike my peers who have been published by Routledge in the UK and the US, queries that I had to answer included: Would the book cross borders? Who are the “well-known” academics published by this press? Why not go with a US publisher for a first book? Will there be a US edition? How would I convince university administrators that Routledge in India is comparable to its transnational counterparts? It is ironical that the global credentials of transnational publishers and India’s claims that it is on par with First World nations are being questioned. The larger issue is: what do these questions say about academia if location determines the value of knowledge?

J

1

Speaking in Tongues: The Politics of Language in India Every time the question of language surfaces it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore: the formation and enlargement of the governing class, the need to establish more intimate and secure relationships between the governing groups and the national-popular mass, in other words to reorganize cultural hegemony. — Antonio Gramsci

In 2008, Yalini Munisamy’s Dalit Ilakiamum Aarasiyalum, a collection of poems in Tamil by Aranka Malliga, Alagiya Periyavan, Sukirtharani, Ithayavendan, Muthukanthan, Anpathavan, Mathivanan, Rajkumar, and Gunasekeran, was published. The same year, Arvind Adiga’s White Tiger was out in print. At the end of the year, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire was released. Adiga won the Man-Booker Prize, Boyle won the Oscar, and Munisamy got a 200-word review in The Hindu. By January 2009, the-slum-dog-riding-a-white-tiger theme was part of “film and literature of the world” syllabi in the US. “There is a school of thought, that the truth of life is spelt out in literature only through ‘lived experience.’ This collection is a specific example,” writes Sri Lankan Tamil writer Se. Ganesalingan (2008). The writer is referring to Munisamy’s book, not the collection of texts that have become part of required reading lists of postcolonial literature courses. The “lived experiences” of economically, socially and politically disadvantaged groups have always served as products for imagination, for authentication, for nation building, and for postcolonial discourses, but outside the mode of production they remain “insufficiently represented” (Spivak 1999: 244), if they are represented at all. If the aim of postcolonial studies was to “intervene in . . . ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples” (Bhabha 1994/2005: 171), then

Politics of Language in India  13 the discipline has failed. Dominated by the discourses of a luminous list of intellectuals who are not-quite-First-and-not-quite-Third World, “postcolonial” has been defined by these authors’ terms and their imaginations, not because these intellectuals demanded or sought it, but because postcoloniality is located in a hegemonic system where class, capital and the English language authenticate some voices over others. Critiquing this domination of the postcolonial intelligentsia, Arif Dirlik’s “partly facetious” response to Ellah Shohat’s rhetorical question, “When exactly… does postcolonial begin?” — “When Third World intellectuals … arrived in First World academe” (1997: 52) — calls attention to this unequal development of the discipline. However, the scholarship of the represented postcolonial intellectuals cannot be understated. It is their body of work, Dirlik’s included, that opened up a critical space of inquiry of “postcoloniality” and created a countercanon in literary studies in institutions earlier dominated by EuroAmerican intellectuals. But alongside their scholarly contributions, it is also important to examine the social and economic mobility of this group which enabled their movement from the Third World into First World academe. It is a very specific demographic population that has the ability not only to move across continents for higher education, but also to successfully establish themselves in the First World. They are voluntary immigrants from middle/upper-class families, primarily upper caste, and highly educated — a background they share with Indian writers who dominate the canon of postcolonial literature. To suggest, as Leela Gandhi does, that their primary education in elite schools is an “interesting accident” (1997–98) is to claim that systems of class are “interesting accidents” in a capitalist structure. The command that they have over the English language has been acquired through their schooling and is a by-product of their privileged upbringing/social class, which Nabaneeta Dev Sen acknowledges does privilege certain writers: [W]e are extremely lucky people that we have had the kind of education we had; we had the background, we had the accessibility to reach out and the world reaches out to us. Everyone who is writing in English, I am afraid, has had that opportunity. Very few maybe haven’t. They had an English language education, so they have mastered the language; they have a command over a language which is not the language that their parents spoke to them. (2006)

If there is a group that benefits from colonial and neocolonial structures, it is this class; moreover, it is their body of work and not those

14  What Are You Reading? of the poets in Munisamy’s collection, that defines the canon of postcolonial studies. As Ania Loomba points out, for many Dalit writers, “The term ‘postcolonial’ does not apply . . . [They] are still at the far economic margins of the nation-state… [and] nothing is ‘post’ about their colonization” (1998: 9). These writers belong to the class that is “micro-minoritized, or managed like an exilic community within national borders” (Apter 2006: 150). Marginalized by caste and silenced by prejudice, institutional injustices and systems of capital, this group struggles to make their voices heard even in India. It is only recently that the literature of Tamil Dalit writers has found a place in the Tamil literary domain, but even here they are not given the literary status of their counterparts because their language is colloquial, non-literary Tamil. Dalit aesthetics, says G. J. V. Prasad, shock Tamil literary scholars, who refuse to recognize Dalit writings as literature (2007: 6). Their resistance to Dalit aesthetics reflects larger caste wars and a reluctance to dismantle caste divisions. As Omprakash Valmiki says, “When caste is the basis of merit and respect” (2003: 132), then the literary value that scholars talk about needs to be viewed with caution. The fact that the voice of this “other” India is not as immediately accessible or aesthetically appealing to an international (and national) readership is therefore not, as Leela Gandhi asserts, simply “a matter of taste rather than value” (1997–98). It is a question of class, caste and capital; further, the visibility and recognition of particular writers (regional-language writers and Indian writers in English) are a result of both local and global forces that legitimize one voice over another. In the global context, linguistic layering in literature has been established by the economic configurations of nations, and in the national context, it has been exasperated by the language policies that India adopted during the formative years after independence, and by the economic policies of the 1990s. In India, while contemporary discussions on language revolve around the domination of English, language wars when the nation was newly formed centered around indigenous languages. In a way, even then the debates were about English, because the early nationalists wanted to replace the language of the colonizer with an Indian language. The question of language then became “the most controversial subject in the Constituent Assembly,” writes historian Ramachandra Guha (2007a: 128). Debates at the time were about “the language to be spoken in the House, the language in which the constitution would be written, the language that would be given the singular designation, ‘national’” (Guha 2007a: 128). These discussions led to fierce battles between regional provinces and the center, and also generated demands

Politics of Language in India  15 for the inclusion of other languages in the Constitution as well as for the linguistic reorganization of states. All the strategies — petitions, satyagrahas, representations, street marches, and protests — that early nationalists used in their fight to gain independence, needed to be reemployed before the center conceded to make changes in its language policies and to allow the formation of states along linguistic lines. Since the process of a political democracy relies on representation, freedoms were given “only by imposing at the same time a whole set of controls . . . [and] the dignity of citizenship . . . [granted] to some only because the others always needed to be represented and could not be allowed to speak for themselves” (P. Chatterjee 1993: 155). The lack of representation led to a number of languages being excluded and dialects being discounted. This battle ironically culminated in reinstating the very language that nationalists had fought to replace — English. In the years that followed, economic policies further empowered English and the 10 per cent comprising the population who wrote and spoke the language. The construction of the archive of postcolonial literature, therefore, needs to be understood in relation to nationalist historiographies, the politics of language formation, and economic policies. This chapter will examine four factors — India’s history of decolonization, its language policies, the language wars, and the establishment of English as the lingua franca of economic mobility — that have facilitated the hegemony of a selective group of Indian intellectuals and writers in English in postcolonial studies. At the time of independence, Indian nationalists1 envisioned a free India with an indigenous identity, unified by a common Indian language. In the multilingual, multicultural and multiethnic context of India, with its history dating back centuries before British imperialism, this notion of a “common identity” was based on the assumption that a shared history of anti-colonialism had infused a sense of a pan-Indian consciousness. However, nationalists’ notion of a nation-state was flawed not because they did not recognize the diversity of this newly established geopolitical entity, but because they had an essentialized vision of identity. Such a vision of aligning the country under a single identity is a simplistic formulation of an extremely complex structure, and nationalists expected a sense of nationhood to override social and 1

I am going to focus primarily on the discourses of Mahatma Gandhi, who has come to represent the freedom movement, Jawaharlal Nehru, whose policies and ideas impacted the development of the nation, and Dr B. R. Ambedkar, constitutionalist, economist and lawyer, who, as Guha says, “in terms of ultimate impact, [is] the greatest of all opponents of caste” (2002).

16  What Are You Reading? economic inequalities and cultural and historical differences. Mahatma Gandhi launched an appeal for national consciousness by advocating the “unity in diversity” concept: “Though we have numerous languages and still more numerous dialects, India is geographically one, and we are and have been only one people” (qtd. in Parashar 1996: 178). Gandhi’s abstract and utopian notion of being “one” embodies the concepts of both “nationalism” (traditional ethnic markers transformed into an ideologized nationality) and “nationism”(geographical boundaries required to maintain or strengthen political boundaries) that Joshua Fishman uses to distinguish different forms of nationbuilding (1968: 41–42). The problem with the construction of a panIndian identity is that it leads to fundamentalist definitions of the nation and nationality, while suppressing other expressions of identity. The right to self-determination was the basis of the freedom struggle, but this right was not extended to communities that did not share the identity imagined by the new political entity. “Trapped within . . . [a] framework of false essentialisms” (P. Chatterjee 1993: 134), the discourse of resistance that freedom fighters had adopted against the forces of imperialism transformed into a discourse of hegemony after independence, when the former resistance took up authoritative positions on how the nation should be formulated. The process of authenticating movements, religions and nations often requires symbols, and of the many symbols that nations use to establish themselves, the idea of a common language or national language is perhaps the most pervasive. Indians, not unlike their European counterparts, believed that a national language was essential for the unity of the nation. Gandhi, who was very vocal on the issue of language, stated that “If Indians are to become a nation,” they need a national language (qtd. in I. Ahmad and Reifeld 2004: 152). Gandhi’s correlation of nation with language — “[W]ithout a common language no nation can come into being” (qtd. in Dalton 1996: 110) — is similar to Joseph Stalin’s view that “a national community is inconceivable without a common language” (qtd. in Guha 2007a: 742). However, the significant difference between their ideas is that unlike Stalin, Gandhi did not believe that a nation could not survive if its citizens spoke several languages. Gandhi’s linguistic formula for the nation was to retain “provincial languages for provincial use” and a national language to maintain “inter-provincial relations” (qtd. in Lelyveld 2002: 184). In postcolonial countries, the idea that a national language will unify the nation cannot be taken for granted because the need to identify with a national language is primarily located in

Politics of Language in India  17 the construction of a postcolonial nation outside of its colonial past. A national language symbolizes freedom, and the early reformers believed that the independence they had struggled so hard to achieve could be asserted only when the nation reinvented itself from within its own cultures, traditions, histories, and languages. Thus, nationalists agreed that it was imperative that the official language adopted by the British — English — which had become a symbol of slavery and oppression, needed to be replaced by an Indian language. Referring to this contrastive process of self-identification in his analysis of “the hegemonic domain of nationalism,” Partha Chatterjee writes, “The domain of the ‘national’ was defined as one that was different from the ‘Western.’ The new subjectivity that was constructed here was premised not on a conception of universal humanity, but rather on particularity and difference” (1993: 75). A linguistic and ethnic plurality of the nation was the difference that nationalists were seeking, but when they proceeded to identify a single language to represent unity, all the problems that are associated with privileging one language over another surfaced. Following the logic of “common sense,” the language of the majority became the criterion by which to choose a national language, and Hindi was the “natural” choice. But far from the intended effect of serving as a common link between the various regional provinces, this choice recreated a linguistic hegemonic order, and language became the battleground on which different groups fought to authenticate their own individual identities. Language became a tool for fundamentalist Hindu and Muslim factions to exacerbate tensions between the two groups. Hindi was coopted by Hindus and Urdu by Muslims, and the fact that neither of these languages was the mother tongue of a significant population of Hindus and Muslims was ignored in the Hindu–Muslim conflict. As Paul Brass explains, both Hindi and Urdu had “evolved into separatist symbols” (2005: 139). While scholars such as Jyotirindra Dasgupta believe that religion was the cause for the Hindu–Muslim conflict (2003), Brass points out that religion and language were just symbolic instruments in a political conflict which was a result of unequal power balances between Hindu and Muslim elites involved in the process of nation building (2005:138). Both groups, Brass adds, used language and particular religious symbols, heroes and their own historical narratives to create separate identities: Revivalism . . . turned the Hindus in their historical orientation either to the great empires and Hindu civilization of the pre-Muslim period or to the regional Hindu kingdoms of the Mahrattas and the Sikhs, who fought

18  What Are You Reading? against the Muslim power. Muslims, for their part, found their inspiration in history from the period of Muslim dominance, in India and, before that, from Muslim achievements in Arabia. (2005: 140)

This divisive fundamentalist mindset, exploited by British rulers, was used by national leaders,2 and continues to be employed by contemporary Indian politicians to gain political power.3 The compromise that nationalists arrived at was to make Hindustani, which “was to be neither Sanskritized Hindi nor Persianized Urdu,” the national language (Sankar Ghose 1993: 216). The hope was that this choice might bring communal harmony between Hindus and Muslims. While it can be argued that this advocacy for Hindustani is problematic because it was not based on the principle of unifying the country, but on unifying only two conflicting groups, it is important to point out that given the reality of the situation, it offered an opportunity for nationalists to ensure the rights of minority groups. Nationalists strived hard to establish a secular nation. Their notion of one nation, unlike the rhetoric of nationhood in Euro-American countries, was not based on a policy of excluding other communities. However, it was the translation into policy of this pluralistic vision that demanded assimilation, which alienated communities. Paradoxically, Gandhi’s argument that a numerically predominant language should be the national language is the case made for English today. The numerical predominance of English in the global world, proponents of English argue, necessitates the privileging of the English language in communication and education in India. It was precisely this Indian mindset to continually defer to colonial structures for solutions that Gandhi criticized. On challenging hegemonic institutions, Gandhi’s view was that critique cannot be directed at those whom we emulate, but at ourselves: Is it not a painful thing that, if I want to go to the court of justice, I must employ the English language as a medium, that when I become a barrister, I may not speak my mother tongue and that someone else should translate

2 Though Jinnah himself was not religious, he adopted a fundamentalist view with regard to the Hindu–Muslim conflict, claiming that Islam and Hinduism were different and distinct social orders, and that the two groups could not have a common nationality. On the other side, Hindu fundamentalists like V. R. Sarvarkar and M. S. Golwalkar articulated a similar divisive logic. 3 The prominent position of Hinduvta groups in Indian politics today gives credence to the fears expressed by Muslims during the nationalist movement that minorities would be marginalized in the new nation.

Politics of Language in India  19 to me from my own language? Is this not absolutely absurd? Is it not a sign of slavery? It is we, the English-knowing Indians, that have enslaved India. The curse of the nation will not rest upon the English, but upon us. (Qtd. in Crystal 2003: 124)

For Gandhi, the solution for undoing the wrongs of colonialism was to rid the country of colonial structures, including its language. English, he said, could be used for “international purposes,” but within the nation, Indians had to have their own national language (qtd. in Lelyveld 2002: 184). He laid out a set of criteria that an Indian language had to meet in order to become the national lingua franca: 1. It should be easy to learn for government officials. 2. It should be capable of serving as a medium of religious, economic and political intercourse throughout India. 3. It should be the speech of the majority of the inhabitants of India. 4. It should be easy to learn for the whole of the country. 5. In choosing this language, considerations of temporary or passing interests should not count. (Qtd. in Agrawal 1996: 55) The language that fits these criteria, Gandhi argued, “is indisputably Hindi [Hindustani]. It is spoken and understood by both Hindus and Muslims of the North. It is called Urdu when it is written in the Urdu character” (Qtd. in Brown and Ogilvie 2008: 175–76). One among many problems inherent in Gandhi’s argument, scholars point out, is that he often used the words “common” and “national” synonymously. A common language refers to a vehicle of communication that can be used uniformly across the country, while a national language, like a national identity, embodies a narrow and essentialized notion of the nation and its citizens. Most of Gandhi’s rhetoric is located within a definition of Hindustani as a common language that serves as a bridge language between regions. However, he also used “common” to imply a common national identity and demanded that the “common language” be learned by the entire country. Examining Gandhi’s conflation of the two concepts of “common” and “national,” M. M. Agrawal argues that while Hindustani might have established itself as the common language, making it a national language disadvantaged those who did not speak it (1996: 56–57). Unlike the Hindi belt4 which was defined 4

The Hindi belt comprises the states of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttaranchal, and Uttar Pradesh, and the Union territories of Chandigarh and Delhi.

20  What Are You Reading? more along religious lines rather than linguistic lines, it was language that united other numerically significant populations. Gandhi wanted these populations to accept and learn Hindustani. “I say it is your dharma,” he said, “to learn Hindustani which will link South with the North” (qtd. in Sankar Ghose 1993: 218). The Northeast is completely excluded in Gandhi’s discourse. Gandhi’s vision for the nation was for it to grow naturally until there was one common language with one common script, with “provincial languages for provincial use,” but it must be said that there is nothing “natural” about either learning a language or about instituting a policy that demands the acquisition of a language. To learn a new language requires some kind of formal education. Even today, literacy rates in India are abysmally low. The census of 2001 shows a literacy rate of only 65 per cent (“Census India”). So it is puzzling how Gandhi, who recognized that English could not be learned by the masses, especially the poor and the working poor, thought that they could learn Hindustani as a second language. Gandhi’s vision of one nation, one language and one script is the very antithesis of plurality, and his rigid stance on the issue of a national language shifted his discourse from that of resistance — India asserting herself through language — to one of hegemony — all Indians should learn Hindustani. In Gandhi’s opinion, “All the ‘undeveloped’ and ‘unwritten’ dialects should . . . be sacrificed and merged in the greater Hindustani script” (qtd. in Agrawal 1996: 54). Agrawal questioned how this computes in the Northeast since this part of the country “is replete with the so called ‘undeveloped’ and ‘unwritten’ dialects” (1996: 54). One is reminded of a similar “for the greater common good” argument made by Nehru with regard to development: “If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country” (qtd. in Khagram 2004: 37). It is one of the abiding ironies of nation-building that the oppressed becomes the oppressor once he assumes power. In India, the contradictory discourses of resistance and hegemony of the early reformers, Partha Chatterjee explains, occurred in part because of the dual positions that they occupied — subordinate in one relation and dominant in another (1993: 37). Thus, as counter-narratives to imperialism were constructed, discourses of nationism metamorphosed into nationalism: abstract symbols were created to counter dominant ones; enunciations of resistance transformed into hegemonic imperatives; and reformers became imperial masters. It is primarily in their subordinate position to the British that the nationalists’ narratives of resistance are located. The Motilal Nehru Report is an example of one such narrative.

Politics of Language in India  21 The Motilal Nehru Report of 1928 was a response to the Simon Commission, an all-British committee that was set up in 1927 to review Indian constitutional affairs. Outraged that no Indians were included in the Commission, Indian leaders came together and demanded the right to self-determination.5 “There was never an issue,” writes V. P. Menon, “on which Indian opinion was so completely united” (1957: 35). The Motilal Nehru Committee included members of the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities and reflected the spirit of the anti-colonial movement, a movement that sought to erase colonial structures and build a secular nation from within. Chaired by Motilal Nehru, the task of the Committee was to draft a constitution for India, and to address fundamental rights and language use in India. The document drafted, the Motilal Nehru Report recommended that Hindustani be considered the national language of India. While the Report categorically recognized “that progress in education as well as in general culture and in most departments of life depends on language,” India’s leaders pointed out that progress cannot come about by using “a foreign language.” English was considered necessary for science and to communicate with other countries, but it was imperative in a democracy, the Report noted, “to conduct the business and politics of a country in a language which is understood by the masses. So far as the provinces are concerned, this must be the provincial language” (qtd. in Thirumalai 2005). The Report also stated that English would continue as the “medium for debate in the central legislature” until India transitioned to the use of the national language (Thirumalai 2005). This Report, M. S. Thirumalai points out, “laid the foundation even for the present day Constitution of the Republic of India in so far as the fundamental linguistic and religious rights of the people of India and the official language policy of India were concerned” (ibid.). It is important to note that the objections that were raised against the Motilal Nehru Report by different groups had nothing to do with the way language policies had been drafted there. Radical groups took issue with the Report because it sought a dominion status for India and not complete independence, while Muslim leaders6 sought “safeguards” for Muslims which they felt hadn’t been reflected in the 5 This is one of the contradictions to be found in Indian history, because after independence, citizens have had to fight for the right to self-determination. 6 Jinnah’s response to the Motilal Nehru Report was a 14-point amendment, “which subsequently became the plank for the two-nation theory and the ultimate partition of India” (Thirumalai 2009).

22  What Are You Reading? Report and wanted to retain “separate electorates” and “weightage,” that is, reservation of seats for minorities (Vohra 2000: 147). These demands reiterate scholars’ observations that language conflicts were primarily due not to religious but to ideological and political differences between leaders about how the nation state should be constructed. The temporary unity among Indians dissipated and discussions took on a religious dimension. Even secular leaders like Dr B. R. Ambedkar and Muhammad Ali Jinnah identified Muslims not as citizens but as “ethnic” national groups, thereby strengthening the argument of fundamentalist religious groups that Hindus and Muslims could not coexist. Ambedkar believed that too many compromises were being made to “appease” Muslims, and he made a specious distinction7 about the difference between “appeasement” and “settlement” (1940). Ironically, this argument is made even today by opponents of reservation policies for Dalits. This so-called distinction is unfortunate because Hindu fundamentalists used and still use Ambedkar’s arguments against Muslims, conveniently forgetting that Ambedkar was one of the biggest critics of Hinduism. Ambedkar was one of the few in the early history of the new nation who spoke against Hinduism8 and addressed caste discrimination. In his thesis on the origin of untouchability, Ambedkar wrote: The Hindu Civilisation . . . could hardly be called [a] civilisation. It is a diabolical contrivance to suppress and enslave humanity. Its proper name would be infamy. What else can be said of a civilisation which has produced a mass of people who are taught to accept crime as an approved means of earning their livelihood, another mass of people who are left to live in full bloom of their primitive barbarism in the midst of civilisation and a third mass of people who are treated as an entity beyond human intercourse and whose mere touch is enough to cause pollution? (1948)

In 1927, Ambedkar launched a civil rights movement against untouchability, arguing for a system of reservations for minorities. Unlike other Indian nationalist leaders, Ambedkar recognized that just gaining 7

In response to the demands of the Muslim League, Ambedkar said: “The Muslims are now speaking the language of Hitler and claiming a place in the sun as Hitler has been doing for Germany. For their demand for 50 per cent is nothing but a counterpart of the German claims for Deutschland Uber Alles and Lebenuraum for themselves, irrespective of what happens to other minorities” (1940). Ambedkar, like Jinnah, strongly supported the two-nation idea. 8 Guha points out, “Gandhi wished to save Hinduism by abolishing untouchability, whereas Ambedkar saw a solution for his people outside the fold of the dominant religion of the Indian people” (2010: 34).

Politics of Language in India  23 freedom from the British could not be the primary goal for the new nation. Guha notes: Ambedkar made a clear distinction between freedom and power. The Congress wanted the British to transfer power to them, but to obtain freedom the Dalits had to organise themselves as a separate bloc, to form a separate party, so as to more effectively articulate their interests in the crucible of electoral politics. (2010: 36)

It is thus surprising that someone who was well aware that only policies could insulate minorities from disenfranchisement claimed that relenting to the demands of Muslims was likely to “reduce the Hindu majority into a minority” (Ambedkar 1940). In his critiques against Muslims, Ambedkar seems to have abandoned the very principles that he stood for — the political rights of minorities — and trades them instead for the all-too-common confirmation bias, the unwitting molding of evidence to fit hypotheses or beliefs (Nickerson 1998: 175), which pervades every society and fosters oppression. There was no longer one imagined nation, but two under the imminent shadow of partition. Hindustani and Urdu were removed from the language equation one month before India gained independence, when the Congress Assembly Party passed a resolution in favor of Hindi as the national language. This resolution only intensified the language wars. In fact, these debates over language, Ambedkar wrote, consumed the Constituent Assembly: It may now not be a breach of a secret if I revealed to the public what happened in the Congress Party meeting when the Draft Constitution of India was being considered, on the issue of adopting Hindi as the national language. There was no article which proved more controversial than article 115, which deals with the question (Hindi as national language). No article produced more opposition. No article more heat. After a prolonged discussion when the question was put, the vote was 78 against 78. The tie could not be resolved. After a long time when the question was put to the meeting once more the result was 77 against 78 for Hindi. (Qtd. in Das 1995: 388)

This narrow margin of victory for Hindi was anything but a victory as far the question of national language was concerned. When the Eighth Schedule of the newly framed 1950 Constitution of India declared Hindi in Devanagari script to be the only official language, it became one of the most contested policies in the early years of independent India.

24  What Are You Reading? The problem of replacing English with Hindi as the official language existed from the very beginning. Unsure at what point this transition should occur, the very first debate involved deciding in what language the Constitution should be written. Should it be in Hindi or in English? Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the first Prime Minister of the country, argued that it should be in English. Only experts and translators, he said, and not members of the Constituent Assembly, should be involved if it were to be drafted in Hindi. Thus the Constitution came to be written in English (Sankar Ghose 1993: 217). Coming from someone who was an ardent supporter of Hindustani and who said that “English was too far removed from the masses” (qtd. in Guha, 2007a: 130), it is surprising that Nehru made no attempt to write the Constitution in an Indian language, even if this had resulted, as he had then argued, in “fierce arguments at every step and on almost every word” (qtd. in Sankar Ghose 1993: 217). Doesn’t the process of democracy inherently involve disagreement and dissent, and solutions arising from different ideological perspectives? Weren’t there “fierce arguments” even when the Constitution was written in English? The so-called pragmatic approach that Nehru adopted to argue for English foreshadows the direction that both Nehru and the newly formed nation would take. If there was one thing that Nehru could not prevent, it was “fierce arguments,” if only for the sheer fact that diversity in a population by default entails diverse opinions. When the Constitution was written, only 14 regional languages were included in the Schedule: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Since then, under political pressure, the Constitution has been amended three times to include more languages. In 1967 Sindhi became the first language to be included in the Schedule over and above the original 14. Twenty-five years later, the 71st amendment brought Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali into the Eighth Schedule, and in 2003, the Constitution was amended again (the 100th amendment) to include Bodo, Santhali, Maithili, and Dogri (Mallikarjun 2004b). It is commendable that the House unanimously approved this last bill, and to its credit, the language policy is open-ended and does allow for the inclusion of more languages.9 It is also a fact, however, that 9 Quoting Mr L. K. Advani, the Deputy Prime Minister in 2003, who said there was a demand to include “35 more languages,” The Hindu reported that Advani had “assured members [of bringing about] . . . a comprehensive legislation to include more languages in the Eighth Schedule after consulting experts and linguists” (“Government to bring Comprehensive Legislation on Languages”).

Politics of Language in India  25 inclusion directly depends on representation. As B. Mallikarjun notes, no rationale is offered to explain the basis on which the Schedule which “has emerged as the most important language policy statement . . . clusters thousands of written and unwritten languages and dialects into two broad categories — Scheduled and Non-Scheduled languages” (2004b). This Schedule fundamentally affected the multilingual dimension of the nation, resulting in the unequal development of languages, people and literature. Language policies privilege particular languages, a fact that Ramachandra Guha seems unwilling to acknowledge (2007a: 739). Lower economic groups are particularly disadvantaged by language policies because the resources to develop language in the fields of science, medicine and technology are available only for mainstream languages. Examining the social problems that linguistic inequalities generate, Nandita Ghosh highlights the issues that Adivasis face on account of their languages not being recognized: Adivasis are unable to help themselves because they do not know what causes their deaths — an ignorance based on their inability to access a language containing scientific information. Scientific, legal, and technological information is available to some extent in most Indian languages as well as English. Their own language is not officially patronized in the same way and therefore is subalternized not only by English but also by Hindi and other regional languages. Being poverty stricken and lower caste, most Adivasis cannot afford an education in any of these languages because it is expensive. Class exclusions are reinforced by language exclusions; each feeds off the other. Their exclusion from mainstream languages incapacitates them from representing their interests to government officials and bargaining for the funds set aside for their welfare. (2001)

As Ghosh illustrates, since India’s language policies do not recognize the dialects and languages of non-mainstream Indians, they do not benefit from any of the advances made in science and medicine unless they learn mainstream languages. The linguistic divisions that we see in literature, therefore, are not just about unequal spaces between English and regional languages, but also about unequal spaces within regional languages and dialects. The singular distinction given to Hindi and the selective inclusion of particular languages in the Constitution have both been heavily debated by scholars. There is “preferential treatment,” says Mallikarjun, “of the languages listed in this schedule . . . [They] are considered first for any and almost every language development activity, and are bestowed with all facilities including facilities to absorb language technology initiatives of the government” (2004b). Andrew Simpson also talks about this correlation between development and recognition.

26  What Are You Reading? The recognition of languages, he points out, provides “an impetus to education in the mother tongue as well as to the development of the language itself” (2007: 67). It also impacts the development of literature in regional languages, since literature in any language will gain public recognition outside of its borders only if the language is officially recognized. Even national literary awards for regional-language writers, such as the Jnanpith, have been set up based on languages that have been categorized “official.” It is unfortunate that although the Indian nationalist movement gained its popularity by recognizing the plurality of languages, after independence this recognition became contingent upon political representation. It was in Britain’s favor to not recognize or organize communities linguistically, because the colonials felt that a multilingual structure would reduce the forces of nationalism. For nationalists, on the other hand, it was advantageous to organize the freedom struggle along linguistic lines because it strengthened the movement. In fact, one of the promises made by Gandhi and Nehru was that the new nation would be linguistically reorganized (Guha 2007a: 189–90). However, in light of the partition after independence, Nehru reversed his position because he believed that linguistic provinces fostered “fissiparous tendencies,” blocking all demands for a linguistic reorganization of the states (ibid.: 191–92). It was only when Potti Sriramalu, who demanded that the Andhra region be separated from the Madras Presidency, fasted to death that Nehru reconsidered his position. Bose and Jalal point out that the day Sriramalu died, 15 December 1952, was ironically “the same day that Nehru presented the Preamble of his first Five-Year Plan for India’s development to Parliament, describing it as the ‘first attempt to create national awareness of the unity of the country’” (1998: 209). The intense riots that broke out in all the eleven Andhra districts of Tamil Nadu on Sriramalu’s death forced Nehru to set up the States Re-organization Committee of 1956 to look into how the boundaries of states could be redrawn. Under the States Reorganization Act of 1956, 14 states were created based on language. Demands to make Bombay, Punjab, Nagaland, and Jharkhand and separate states were rejected. Once again there were language-related riots, this time by Marathi speakers, and the centre agreed to separate Maharashtra from Gujarat (ibid.: 173). Nehru refused to allow the creation of the state of Nagaland out of Assam, or the separation of the Mizo areas (Inoue 2005: 22). Yet again, only violent resistance caused the centre to grant Nagaland statehood in 1963 (Ali 1993: 34). Demands for reorganization continued, and after various amendments to the Constitution, 28 states and 7 union territories were created.

Politics of Language in India  27 Many of the decisions that Nehru made as Prime Minister had an imperial flavor to them. Sadly, while India’s freedom struggle provided a unique model for resistance against imperialism and oppression and has inspired civil rights movements around the world, later non-violent struggles within the nation were not respected, and most of the policy changes that Nehru made were in response not just to resistance, but to violent resistance. In thinking about all the opportunities Nehru lost to respond to voices of dissent, it is useful to remember what Arundhati Roy said: “If governments do not do all they can to honor nonviolent resistance, then by default they privilege those who turn to violence” (2005). The power that the central government has in India, Chadda (2002) writes, is a result of the way the Constitution was framed. Ambedkar, the Chairman of the Drafting Committee, described the Constitution as “a dual polity [which] . . . will consist of the Union at the centre and the States at the periphery each endowed with sovereign powers to be exercised in the field assigned to them by the Constitution” (qtd. in ibid.: 46). This tiered system resulted in policies being shaped by “political bargains between the centre state and its provinces” (Chadda 2002: 45) and the exclusion of regions and people lacking political representation. Ambedkar, who was the chief architect of the Constitution, predicted that such contradictions inherent in the functioning of a political democracy would be one of the biggest challenges that India would face, and urged “Indians not to be content with . . . mere political democracy” (qtd. in Guha 2007a: 133). Though the principle of democracy is based on equality, political democracy is devised on the model of elected representatives and political parties. This in turn leads to an unequal relationship between the representatives and the represented. The former become heroes and the latter depend on the “goodness” of these men to be heard. In a nation stratified by caste, Ambedkar knew that Dalits had no chance of equality unless their rights were written into the Constitution, but he was aware that even this document could not guarantee the rights of minorities, who would inevitably depend on the morality of those in power. “However good a Constitution may be,” he warned, its value depended on the people “who are called to work it” (qtd in Chitkara 2002: 83). Quoting the Greek historian Grote, Ambedkar also asked minorities to be mindful of constitutional morality “since even any powerful and obstinate minority may render the working of a free institution impracticable without being strong enough to conquer ascendancy” (qtd. in Sezhiyan 2005b). He wondered if constitutional morality could be cultivated in a nation where “democracy is only a top dressing on a soil which is essentially undemocratic”

28  What Are You Reading? (qtd. in Sezhiyan 2005a). Moments of reconciliation in history occur only when the rule of morality becomes a fundamental component of governance. It is necessary, says Partha Chatterjee, when examining the “specific process of ideological construction . . . [to] disentangle the web in which experiences of simultaneous subordination and domination are apparently reconciled” in order “to identify the possibilities and limits of nationalism as a hegemonic movement” (1993: 36). Such a moment occurred when the Official Language Commission recognized that creating all official documents in Hindi would sound a death knell for democracy. Chaired by Shri B. G. Kher, the Official Language Commission was set up in 1955 to guide the development of the Hindi language to include administrative, legal and scientific terminology, as well as the translation of all legal documents into Hindi. The project of translation was arduous because it involved identifying a methodology to develop Hindi, and the Commission quickly realized not only the complexities of translation, but also that it was in the best interests of the nation to ensure “a measure of permanent bilingualism” (qtd. in Mallikarjun 2004a). The Commission10 thus recommended that documents should be in both Hindi and regional languages. It passed an order calling for “local offices of the Central Government departments . . . [to] use Hindi for their internal working and the respective regional languages in their public dealings in the respective regions” (President’s Order — 1960), an order which indicates a recognition of the necessity for a multilingual terrain, without which participation would be limited only to communities that speak the dominant language. One of the mistakes that national leaders made when enforcing a homogenous linguistic identity was not recognizing that the multilingual make-up of the country was an asset and not a liability. Instituting a national language policy made monolingualism a right and legitimized the fundamentalist “one nation, one language” slogan, thereby instantly creating hegemonic divisions between those who knew and those who didn’t know the language. Before Nehru could realize that India’s national language policy had opened the proverbial Pandora’s box, it was too late. Hindi zealots demanded that Hindi be the only language spoken in the House. There was also a move to sanskritize Hindi, a move which many Indians saw as a threat to a secular democracy and to the rights of the minorities. Nehru warned 10

In order to make it an ongoing permanent project, the Commission was abolished and the Official Languages Wing created as a part of the Legislative Department in 1976.

Politics of Language in India  29 Hindi enthusiasts that their approach was authoritarian and dangerous: “There is very much a tone of the Hindi speaking area being the centre of things in India, the centre of gravity, and others being just the fringes of India. This is not only an incorrect approach, but also a dangerous approach” (qtd. in Das 1995: 388). Non-Hindi speakers did believe they would end up on the fringes if Hindi became the only official language. The English language was already part of the institutional structures of administration, legislation, education, and the government service sectors that India had inherited from the British. If Hindi became the language of these institutions, non-Hindi speakers believed that they would get cut off from various opportunities. Native speakers of the national language were clearly at an advantage since they didn’t have to learn a new language, and tension between the two groups escalated. In the Constituent Assembly, the battle this time was between Hindi-speaking and non-Hindi speaking members. Even though Hindi had not yet become the official language, certain Hindi speakers spoke only in Hindi, even if there were members present who did not know the language. “Their crusade,” writes Ramachandra Guha, “provoked some of the most heated debates in the House . . . Whenever a member spoke in Hindi, another member would ask for a translation into English. When the case was made for Hindi to be the sole national language, it was bitterly opposed” (2004). This fundamentalist attitude towards Hindi was not surprising given that even when the debate had been over Hindustani, there were members in the House such as R. V. Dhulekar who were intolerant towards anyone who did not speak the language (Guha 2007a: 129). However, in 1946, there was greater support for Hindustani than there was for Hindi a decade later. Leaders such as Rajagopalachari, who had been strong supporters of Hindustani, spoke vehemently against Hindi, making a case against the removal of English as the official language. Sankar Ghose writes: Rajagopalachari now claimed that English was the language not only of modern enlightenment but also of Indian unity. English, which had been in India for two hundred years, was the classical language of modern India as Sanskrit was of ancient India. To replace English would be to encourage parochialism, foster the forces of disintegration, and make Indians … the laughing stock of the world. (1993: 218)

Rajagopalachari seems to have forgotten that the freedom movement that he was a part of started precisely because “English . . . had been in India for two hundred years”! In the South, leaders launched a battle against what they called “Hindi imperialism.” Regional provinces adopted the strategy of the nationalist

30  What Are You Reading? movement by constructing a common identity, momentarily ignoring caste and class differences to mobilize the masses in a linguistic battle against the center. Tamil Nadu (which literally translates into “nation of Tamil”), called “Madras” at the time, was particularly opposed to the national language policy. The protests in the state were organized by E. V. Ramaswami Naicker (EVR) and C. N. Annadurai. Both of them believed that only the creation of a Dravidian state could prevent the subjugation of the Tamils (Hardgrave 1965: 402). The Dravidian regions (the present-day states of Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka) were part of the Madras Presidency at that time, but the idea of a Dravidian nation and the calls for secession and the right to self-determination were not supported by the other three linguistic groups. It was primarily a Tamil issue which, as Hardgrave notes, was not really about Hindi as opposed to Tamil, but Hindi as opposed to English (ibid.: 404). The issue was brought to the forefront by EVR when he launched the Justice Party. An avowed atheist, EVR broke away from the Congress, which he described as a party of Brahmins, and denounced Hinduism. While he used the prejudices against Dalits to launch his crusade against the caste system, EVR did little, according to B. Mangalam, to secure their rights: The self-respect movement of the Justice Party in the twenties and thirties of the last century sought to subsume the Dalit category (categorized as Harijan at that point of time) into the backward castes. The benefits that accrued to the backward castes following an agitation for better representation in legislature and in the job sector were not allowed to reach the Dalits among the backward castes. (2007)

The Justice Party was reborn as the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) in 1944. EVR failed to gain mass support for his party, writes political analyst Cho Ramasamy, because in his stance against the new nation’s policies, he advocated that the province should remain under British control. His position on this issue was ultimately one of the causes for the rift between him and Annadurai (2000). Consequently, Annadurai emerged as the leader of Tamil Nadu when he defeated EVR in the elections of 1967. Annadurai formed a new party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), in 1949, dropped the idea of secession,11 replaced EVR’s slogan of “no God” with “one God,” and shifted his fight to autonomy for 11 He was forced to do so, because the Sixteenth Amendment (popularly known as the Anti-Secessionist Amendment) banned any party with sectarian principles from contesting the elections.

Politics of Language in India  31 Tamil Nadu in the nation state. It was under his leadership that the state adopted a two-language policy, instead of three, and Madras was named Tamil Nadu in 1968. Unlike EVR, whose arguments for Tamil were not the center of his battles, says Cho Ramasamy, language was Annadurai’s focus (2000). Annadurai’s campaign against the threelanguage educational policy that the All India Council for Education had recommended was not unjustified, says Hardgrave (1965: 403). The policy required the study “of a modern Indian language, preferably one of the Southern languages, apart from Hindi and English in the Hindi-speaking states, and of Hindi along with the regional language and English in the non-Hindi speaking states” at the secondaryeducation stage (qtd. in Pattanayak 1990: 44). While the policy itself was pluralistic in its vision, its wording forces non-Hindi speaking states to adopt Hindi, whereas Hindi-speaking states had the option of choosing a third language. The northern states, Hardgrave points out, conveniently opted for Sanskrit, which defeated “the integrative purpose of the formula” (1965: 6). It is this double standard and the “imposition of Hindi” that Annadurai challenged. To the argument that Hindi should be the national language because it was numerically the dominant language, Annadurai retorted, “If we had to accept the principle of numerical superiority while selecting our national bird, the choice would have fallen not on the peacock but on the common crow” (qtd. in Guha 2007a: 393). Like Annadurai, T. T. Krishnamachari, a businessman-turned-politician,12 was not in favor of Hindi. Both of them opposed the compulsion of Hindi and the intolerance of “Hindi chauvinists” towards non-Hindi speakers: This kind of intolerance makes us fear that the strong Centre which we need, a strong Centre which is necessary will also mean the enslavement of people who do not speak the language of the Centre. I would, Sir, convey a warning on behalf of people of the South for the reason that there are already elements in South India who want separation . . . and my honourable friends in U.P. do not help us in any way by flogging their idea (of) “Hindi Imperialism” to the maximum extent possible. Sir, it is up to my friends in U.P. to have a whole-India; it is up to them to have a Hindi-India. The choice is theirs. (Krishnamachari, qtd. in Guha 2004)

Nehru was forced to compromise, and he assured the South that Hindi would not be imposed on them. The Official Languages Act of 1963 stated that English could continue as the official language, but it also declared that Hindi would become the official language of 12

Krishnamachari was India’s first Minister of Commerce and Industry.

32  What Are You Reading? India on 26 January 1965. Anxious that the center would not uphold the promise made by Nehru, violent riots broke out in Tamil Nadu. Subsequently, in 1967, the Official Languages Act was amended to allow English to continue as the official language along with Hindi (Official Languages Act, 1963). The long-drawn-out battle to replace English with a specifically Indian language was thus lost. The discourses of the national leaders that followed tell us that there was never any real battle against English in the first place. It was a battle that Gandhi fought in his lifetime and it died when he did. Indigenous languages provided a powerful zone for national leaders to articulate their fight for sovereignty and to mobilize the masses against colonialism, but the lack of a commitment to these languages during nation-building, coupled with Nehru’s reluctance to follow through on his promise to linguistically reorganize the states and the coercive strategies used to make Hindi the link language between the different regions, resulted in reinstating English as the official language. Nehru was not reluctant to give in to the demand to let English continue as the official language, because he sincerely believed that English was essential for India to grow as a nation. It was Gandhi who had primarily influenced national leaders to support Hindustani as the official language. With Gandhi gone, a country divided, and the absence of a freedom struggle to hold people together, the nation that emerged was not the one imagined by those who had fought for its independence. In the 21st century, language wars in India are class and caste wars. Tamil Nadu serves as an example to illustrate the shape that movements, politics and literature have taken in the nation state since the 1960s. While the battle started in EVR’s time against Hindi was successful in the sense that it impacted national language policies, the principles of rationalism, self-respect, women’s rights, and the eradication of caste, which had been fundamental to the movement that EVR had built, were forgotten. The Dalits, B. Mangalam notes, did not benefit from the war that Tamil Nadu waged with the nation and with Hindi: The anti-Hindi agitation of the sixties, spearheaded by Dravidian political parties subsumed caste identity within a linguistic identity. It was a mass agitational movement but the linguistic agenda of the movement contained the caste frictions and divisions embedded in Tamil social, cultural space. Literature influenced by Kzhagam ideology, while foregrounding social inequalities and economic disparity, did not allow caste discrimination within a homogenous linguistic community to raise its head. The Dalit

Politics of Language in India  33 voice remained submerged and Dalit consciousness did not find a favourable ground to break free of the Dravidian fold dominated by other backward castes. (2007)

Even today, the only national figure who serves as an inspiration for Dalits is Ambedkar. In the global sphere, Marx has been the biggest influence. However, Tamil Dalit writers of the past two decades, Mangalam says, have carved out a new literature for themselves, outside of these two influential figures. Drawing “upon autobiographical as well as a community’s history,” Tamil Dalit protagonists are neither Marxist workers nor radical Ambedkarites, but are themselves and people in their lives (Mangalam 2007). It is these authors’ texts and their use of non-standardized forms that challenges the Tamil literary tradition today. While non-Western writers in English are lauded for the way they have transformed traditional constructions of language, Dalit writers are chastised for doing exactly the same with Tamil. Is it because the former is a more acceptable aperitif and the latter a less palatable reality? Does the “classical” status that Tamil has recently been conferred with by the Indian government include the Dalit dialect? Nowadays, language serves only as rhetorical fodder for political parties in Tamil Nadu whenever elections are approaching. However, the parties do not stop at exploiting only local issues to promote themselves: ethnic strife in Sri Lanka and the discrimination of Tamils have also become part of political agendas. This pan-identity — whether based on nation, religion or language, and which has become one of the characteristic features of diaspora everywhere and of postcolonial literature as well — is what defines nationalism. Class and caste differences between groups are conveniently left out of discourses designed to mobilize the masses to challenge hegemonic systems. Once these new groups achieve their goals, the hegemonic systems inherent in these communities are set in place again. Ambedkar rightly predicted that issues of social equity and justice that had dominated the drafting of the Indian Constitution would continue to plague the country: On January 26, 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man–one vote and one vote–one value. In our social and economic life, we shall by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man–one value. (Qtd. in Chitkara 2002: 58–59)

It is the socio-economic structures that Ambedkar was referring to which also plague postcolonial studies today. The literary world reflects

34  What Are You Reading? the class, caste and language hierarchies within the nation. It is in this context that the politics of representation, central to postcolonial studies, must be examined. The domination of Indian writers using English in world literature courses is one of the outcomes of the rise of English in India. Though the precondition of English is colonialism, “one cannot reject English now, on the basis of its colonial insertion,” says Aijaz Ahmad, “any more than one can boycott the railways for that same reason” (1994: 77). The language is embedded in the systems of governance, education and legislation that India inherited from the British. Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock rightly observe, “The sun may have set on the British Empire, but that Empire, in establishing English as a language of trade, government, and education … helped create what may be a more enduring ‘empire’ of the English language” (1992: 4). India’s globalization policies of the 1990s helped to further cement this British legacy into the system. The global currency that the English language gained with the emergence of the United States as the most powerful political and economic nation has firmly established the notion that dislodging English would be disastrous for the economy and the development of the country. Salman Rushdie recognizes English’s dominant position as “a kind of linguistic neo-colonialism” (1992: 64), but adds, “English is an essential language in India, not only because of its technical vocabularies and the international communication which it makes possible, but also simply to permit two Indians to talk to each other in a tongue which neither party hates” (ibid.: 65). Guha echoes this idea that English is indispensable “to reach out to regions other than one’s own” (2007a: 750), and claims it has helped “consolidate national unity” (ibid.: 751). Both writers are referring only to Indians who communicate in English, a group which amounts to only 10 per cent of the population, and their statements are factually wrong on many levels. If Rushdie is referring to the conflict between Hindus and Muslims, it is today primarily due to religious, rather than linguistic, differences, and the two groups coexist in every state. Together, they are a linguistically heterogeneous group. If Rushdie is referring to Hindi and non-Hindi speakers, then English is not the only option for their communication because, although provinces are mapped along linguistic lines, the regions are also linguistically heterogeneous. It is an erroneous assumption indicative of Rushdie’s own hegemonic buy-in that English is necessarily one of the languages of Indians who are bilingual or polylingual. So too Guha, who has gone to great lengths to stress the pluralistic nature of India, and contradicts himself when he supports Sarvepalli Gopal’s argument that English “counters blinkered

Politics of Language in India  35 provincialism” (ibid.). Wasn’t it Guha who refuted Bernard Nossiter’s description of India as a country “plagued by particularistic, separatist tendencies, the continuing confusion of tongues . . . can only further these tendencies and puts in question the future unity of the Indian state” (ibid.: 741)? The idea that the English language serves as a fix to deal with India’s complex multicultural and multilingual structure reflects the mindset of the bourgeois middle class that has emerged from a colonial situation and has since moved into a neocolonial space. Frantz Fanon’s analysis of a native intellectual dependence upon a metropolitan or colonial culture in Black Skin, White Masks (2008) and Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony together provide a framework for understanding the relations between the masses and the dominant groups, between intellectual natives and power, and between language and identity. Focusing on the assimilation of the black Antillean into French culture, Fanon explains: All colonized people … position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e. the metropolitan culture. The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more he will have escaped the bush. The more he rejects his blackness and the bush, the whiter he will become . . . The black man who has been to the métropole is a demigod . . . After a fairly long stay in the métropole many Antilleans return home to be deified. (2008: 2–3)

India certainly had, and still has, its fair share of demigods — from nationalists who received an English education to the more recent diasporic population. The hegemonic power that this group has achieved is best described by Gramsci in his essay entitled “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (1978). Gramsci suggests that hegemony is the process generated by the “spontaneous consent” of the masses to the ruling class. This process does not involve physical force; instead, it is “a system of class alliances”— an organic cohesion of dominant and subordinate groups — which creates a “historic bloc.” It is this structure, the historic bloc, that allows the dominant group “to mobilize the majority” in support of dominant ideologies. But to maintain long-lasting social control, the dominant group has to address and incorporate the interests of subordinate groups. Institutions and ideas that are then perpetuated by the ruling class are not seen as particularistic, but as representing the interests of all groups. Though the very nature of a historic bloc implies hegemony in its creation of those who lead and those who are led, it is not necessarily negative.

36  What Are You Reading? The creation of historic blocs in oppressed societies is the basis for establishing counter-hegemonic structures — oppositions formed to counter an existing hegemonic rule. Problems arise, however, when such movements and coalitions do not define counter-hegemonic positions, and instead replicate dominant projects, supporting the very principles they opposed. This is the trajectory that India followed. India’s freedom struggle started as a counter-hegemonic project, with organic alliances formed to defeat colonial rule, but the nationalist project, as Partha Chatterjee points out, was in principle a hegemonic one (1993: 36), because the new nation was fashioned in the model of colonial class rule and Western ideas of capitalist production. The nationalist narrative of the group that inherited power from the colonizers seems to have been limited to the principles of governance and did not extend to the institutions set in place by the imperialists because the inheritors essentially comprised a British-created, Western-educated Indian middle class that subscribed to “principles of a modern regime of power . . . modeled on specific examples by Western Europe and North America” (ibid.: 74). It is of this class that Ambedkar wrote: In every country the intellectual class is the most influential class. This is the class which can foresee, advise and lead. In no country does the mass of the people live the life for intelligent thought and action. It is largely imitative and follows the intellectual class. There is no exaggeration in saying that the entire destination of the country depends upon its intellectual class. If the intellectual class is honest and independent, it can be trusted to take the initiative and give a proper lead when a crisis arises. It is true that the intellect by itself is no virtue. It is only a means and the use of a means depends upon the ends which an intellectual person pursues. An intellectual man can be a good man but he may easily be a rogue. Similarly an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity or it may easily be a gang of crooks or a body of advocates of narrow clique from which it draws its support. (1936)

Unlike the “gang of crooks,” the body of corrupt politicians, the religious fundamentalists, and the Nehru dynasty that India is left with to lead the nation, the early nationalists, I believe, were “good men” who started writing a good story but didn’t know quite where to take it. While they were able to imagine a nation free from colonial rule, they were unable to construct the nation outside of colonial institutions. Their policies resulted in postcolonial India inheriting and retaining British systems of administration, law and education, and in the process these policies established a hegemony of the English language. “Here lies the root of our postcolonial misery,” writes Chatterjee, “not

Politics of Language in India  37 in our inability to think out new forms of the modern community but in our surrender to the old forms of the modern state” (1993: 11). It is this surrender that naturalizes hierarchical and colonial structures. Even if nationalists had toyed with the idea of an Indian national language, their surrender to English came about because it was far too entrenched in the system and in their own lives to be completely erased. But they also benefited from English as it was the language of the nationalist elite. “Patel, Bose, Nehru, Gandhi and Ambedkar,” Guha points out, “all spoke and wrote in their native tongue, but also in English” (2007a: 750). However, Gandhi, who was aware that English was “a permanent bar between the masses and the Englisheducated classes,” wanted English to leave with the British because he knew it would only intensify class divides. Not everyone shared his view. Rajagopalachari, says Guha, was “among the most articulate advocates for English” (ibid.). Recall that Rajagopalachari was also an ardent advocate for Hindustani. His discourse changed once Hindi was declared the official language, and English then no longer remained the language of the colonizer, but became an “Indian” language. The British, he wrote, “for certain accidental reasons, causes and purposes . . . left behind a vast body of knowledge . . . [English is now] ours. We need not send it back to Britain along with the Englishmen” (qtd. in ibid.). English had suddenly acquired all the characteristics that the national leaders had once attributed to Hindustani. It was the language, they now argued, that would unite India. For Nehru, English was also necessary for India to evolve into a modern industrialized secular nation. Like Gandhi, Nehru acknowledged that English was the language “for a handful of upper-class intelligentsia . . . [and] had no relation to the problem of mass education and culture” (qtd. in Spring 2006: 175). Yet he believed that the only way India could keep up with science and technology was through English: “English is today by far the most widespread and most important world language and perhaps two-thirds of scientific and technical books are published in English . . . If India cannot keep herself abreast of the latest scientific and technological developments, she will find herself lost” (qtd. in Sankar Ghose 1993: 218). One wonders why Nehru ever even flirted with the idea that Hindi could be the only official language. Certainly much grief could have been avoided if these leaders had expressed their views earlier. But if they had, would the masses have supported them? History tells us that the Western-educated, English-speaking nationalist elite earned the legitimate consent of the masses to be their leaders not by speaking English, but by communicating with them

38  What Are You Reading? in an Indian language. For Gandhi, the rejection of both Western clothes and the English language was a symbol of protest and resistance against the British. Other national leaders followed suit and white khadi kurta and pajamas became the attire of leaders13 participating in the freedom struggle. Of this group, Ambedkar was the only one who did not have to prove his “Indianness.” In fact, Ambedkar was the Indian who others were trying to identify with, and he wore a suit from the moment he could afford one until the very end. The sharp contrast between the man in a suit and the others in white reflects a class–caste divide between these leaders. The latter came from privileged uppercaste backgrounds; Ambedkar, on the other, was from a poor untouchable family. As Guha says, if Gandhi wore a loin cloth, it was because he could afford to. Had Ambedkar done the same, it would not have symbolized simplicity and sacrifice, as it did for Gandhi. “He is a Dalit, we would say — what else should he wear?” (2002)14. Although all these leaders spoke and wrote to each other in English, yet for this “bilingual intelligentsia,” Partha Chatterjee says, it was their own Indian languages which marked “that inner domain of cultural identity, from which the colonial intruder had to be kept out” (1993: 7). Therefore, Indian languages became the “zone over which the nation had to declare its sovereignty” (ibid.) and the zone through which they connected with the masses. Sixty-four years later this still holds true. As soon as the European-educated or the European-born decide to step into the Indian political arena, the metamorphosis begins. They discard their Western outfits, don khadi clothes and revert to their mother tongue. The “row of men clad in white” who run for political office, as Bhaskar Ghose describes it, is an “image straight out of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi” (2003). The latest to join this clan clad in a khadi dhoti and white shirt is Shashi Tharoor, a successful Indian writer in English, St Stephen’s college graduate, columnist, former UN Under-secretary General, Chairman of Dubai-based Afras Ventures, and 13

Nehru had his own style of dressing, which was eventually adopted by politicians for formal occasions. The “Nehru jacket” became popular even in the West. 14 Guha points out, “Millions of his caste fellows wear nothing … [more than a loin cloth]. It is the fact that he [Ambedkar] escaped their fate that is symbolised in that suit. By the canons of tradition and history, this man was not supposed to wear a suit, blue or otherwise. That he did was a consequence of his extraordinary personal achievements: a law degree from Lincoln’s Inn, a Ph.D. from America and another one from England, the drafting of the Constitution” (2002).

Politics of Language in India  39 a member of Coca-Cola’s advisory board. Tharoor’s political campaign, in a way, puts to rest the authenticity debate which has become one of the central issues when talking about writers in English and regional languages. Or at least if the Indian writer in English wants to become a politician then, he, like Tharoor, would have to retract his claim to authenticity, as far as language is concerned. Prior to entry into national politics, in an August 2008 article “Celebrating India’s Linguistic Diversity,” the London-born NRI (non-resident Indian) wrote, “India is not based on language.” Within a year, his political ambition proved him wrong. “I am running for the Lok Sabha to earn the right to represent the people,” said Tharoor. “To be in politics . . . you have to be able to establish a connect with the people . . . for that reason without Malayalam you can’t run a Lok Sabha election from here” (qtd. in Ullekh 2009). Throughout his own campaign, Tharoor had to establish his Indian and regional credentials. As Ullekh describes it, Tharoor had to prove he was an “authentic malayalee” (2009) and the writer-turned-politician reiterated his “authenticity” over and over again: “I speak simple Malayalam and I have my roots here. My mother lives in this city. My ration card is from here” (qtd. in Ullekh 2009) said the global citizen who relocated to his 200-year-old ancestral home in Thiruvananthapuram after he lost the United Nations Secretary General elections. One of his campaign videos was called “I am a Malayalee.” If Tharoor was irritated that his accent and his fluency in Malayalam were constantly questioned, he didn’t show it. “You can see the evidence for yourself as I’ve been going around from one end to the next of my constituency, I’ve been speaking nothing but Malayalam,” Tharoor told a reporter at News X, Thirivananthapuram (“Shashi Tharoor in a New Role”). As a writer, Tharoor did not need to cater to the masses or answer to them, and when his “Indianness” was challenged, he lashed out: It is, of course, that dreaded nemesis of every Indo-Anglian writer: the denizen of desidom challenging the authenticity of the NRI. There are many voices and accents engaged in our national conversation. The punspouting Stephanian is as much an Indian as the dhoti-clad dehati, and the Stephanian does not become less — or more — of an Indian if he dons the dehati’s dhoti. No more than the dehati ceases to be Indian if he pulls on a pair of Levi’s. (2000)

Tharoor was responding to a comment made about his attire, “a good bordered off-white Kerala style mundu . . . with a long blue striped cotton kurta.” If a comment about clothes had been applied to “a

40  What Are You Reading? female15 novelist,” he added, “any self-respecting feminist [would be] howling in rage” (2000; emphasis mine). However, the media’s constant reference to his attire doesn’t seem to bother Tharoor the politician. He even engages in a conversation about his clothes with the press (Kiran 2009). It is not surprising that Tharoor references Gandhi’s attire and not Ambedkar’s to claim “authenticity” (2007a). Speaking in Malayalam, dressed in a mundu,16 a pristine white shirt, and a “Congress-flag colored shawl” (Kiran 2009), Tharoor’s metamorphosis17 is complete. Tharoor, the English-speaking NRI, who became Tharoor, the resident Indian Malayalee, successfully won the elections in 2009. Indian elections are those brief periods in time when regional languages have the last laugh, and the claim that English is an “Indian” language is put to test. English is no more an Indian language than is French or Portuguese. What English has become is the language of a global currency, and it benefits Indians economically to claim it as their own. With India emerging as a major player in the global scene, Nehru’s vision of English as an integral part of the framework of development and modernity no longer remains the view of only the ruling elite. Despite the growing class divide between those who speak and those who do not speak English, it has become the preferred language of the masses, who link English with upward class mobility. Even if Guha does not want to admit that the Indian nation privileges a single language (2007a: 739), an examination of preferred educational systems and jobs demonstrates which language is privileged. Guha himself admits that “behind the spectacular rise of the software industry lies the proficiency of Indian engineers in English” (ibid.: 751). While India’s language policies are intended to democratize “the use of languages in administration, education, judiciary, legislature, [and] mass communication” (Mallikarjun 2004b), they are not, however, the template that independent India adopted even in higher education. In his analysis of multilinguism and education in India, Mallikarjun writes: As one goes up in the ladder of education, the number of languages available . . . to study and the medium of instruction become less. Though many 15

A few years later Tharoor did write an article about women having abandoned Indian clothes for Western attire (2007a). It must have been directed at selfrespecting feminists! Women, of course, flooded his email inbox. His response was that his article was only an “innocent expression of concern” (2007b). 16 Traditional ankle-length garment worn around the waist. 17 Tharoor’s reinvention of himself is relevant to postcolonial discourses about representation. I will take up this discussion in Chapter 2.

Politics of Language in India  41 languages are media of instruction at the lower level, only English is the medium of technical and management education. (Mallikarjun 2004b)

The rationale is that English is the only language that will enable modernization and globalization because of its existing monopoly in the field of science and technology. The link between English and economic domination is regarded as a fact, and the general consensus amongst Indians is that English is the only language through which some measure of economic and social success can be achieved. Even regional-language writers who I spoke with echoed this thought. “How can you not acknowledge that English is the language that has power?” asks Nabaneeta Dev Sen, and goes on to say: [English] is the language of the internet. It is the language which opens the door to the outside world. This is the language of the young people. There is no question that English is the power language and that we should all have command of it, and that our children should know English as well as they know their regional language. It is much more important today than it was twenty years ago. It is very important that you know English well and you can use it. But knowing English as a tool is something else, and learning English as a creative medium is completely different. Writing in English is something that everyone cannot do, but reading in English is something that everyone should be able to do. In order to be a good scientist you have to be able to read everything. You must know English for anything. (2006)

Sen also acknowledges that she didn’t feel the same way about English when she was younger. “There was a nationalist feeling associated with your mother-tongue,” the writer says, and adds, But those days have passed and it is different. We should not carry the same values over. Some of my friends still do, and I don’t agree with it. Every day the world is changing and our values should also change. Not basic values, but practical attitudes should also change, and we must adjust ourselves to the changing times and needs. (Ibid.)

The “practical attitudes” that Sen suggests that we must adopt primarily refers to capitalism and the English language. Addressing this issue, writer Amit Chaudhuri says, It isn’t just a Western perception, but also India’s, particularly middleclass India’s perception of itself. It’s linked to de-regularization and globalization and the idea that India can be a big player. The dividing line between postcolonial pride and imperialistic ambition is very small for the

42  What Are You Reading? middle class in India — one lapses into the other very easily. (Qtd. in Phalnikar 2006b)

While this middle class will fervently defend Indian religious and cultural differences, when it is a matter of education and language, they defer to European systems because they offer the optimum choice for economic growth. Their individual notions of identity and success are tied directly to capital. It is not only the middle class that subscribes to the theory that English will enable an individual to climb a notch higher on the economic ladder. According to a recent editorial in The Times of India, lower economic groups and Dalits also believe that English offers them more economic and employment opportunities (“Yes We Can”). The report states it is the “pay-offs of English language skills” due to globalization that have created the widespread demand across communities to learn English. Borrowing Barack Obama’s campaign slogan “Yes we can!”, the same article asserts that English “is making a substantial difference across levels” (ibid.). The term “passport” has become the popular metaphor to link English to economic mobility. “Knowledge of English,” says historian Sarvepalli Gopal, “is the passport for employment at higher levels in all fields, [and] is the unavoidable avenue to status and wealth” (qtd. in Guha 2007a: 751; emphasis mine). Similarly, the author of “Yes We Can!” says that English is the “passport to a lucrative job and entry [of lower economic groups] into the country’s growing middle class. (2008; emphasis mine)” The fact that this passport indicates only one-way travel — Indians have to learn English, but monolingual Euro-Americans are not required to learn Indian languages — is not discussed. These economic discourses raise the question: will English abolish caste divisions? For the answer, we need look only at Britain from whom we inherited the language to know that English does not erase hierarchical structures. However, with hierarchies naturalized and accepted, we continue to argue that if English engenders some form of economic mobility and independence, it should be embraced. This internalization of a set of beliefs by individuals, Douglas Litowitz writes, “represents a kind of degree zero of hegemony, where the individual’s self understanding merges with the dominant understanding” (2000: 8). The results of the 2009 elections18 in India illustrate this merger. The elite have 18

Indians were in an unfortunate position of electing either a party that supported capitalism or a party that supported Hindu fundamentalism. The former is undoubtedly the better of the two options.

Politics of Language in India  43 successfully convinced the masses that capitalism is the solution to bridge economic disparities and since English is the language of global capitalism, the dominant idea that English offers the only option for economic mobility is passively accepted. As Gramsci says, it is in this passive acceptance and internalization of the rulers’ worldviews by the ruled as common sense, natural, legitimate, practical, and reasonable that hegemonic institutions gain strength and are naturalized (1971: 282). To rephrase Arif Dirlik, what is interesting in this postcolonial phase is that the arguments in favor of English are divorced from the history of colonialism and are instead situated within the narrative of progress (1997: 92). Underlying this pragmatic line of reasoning is also the Fanonian idea of what the knowledge of a language represents. With its colonial history and its current global currency, English represents the possibility of the transformation of the powerless native into the powerful métropole. If French opens doors that remain locked to the Antillean, it is English that enables Indians to successfully navigate through different linguistic and cultural spaces, nationally and internationally. For India’s early nationalists, English elevated them from a position of subordination as colonized people to a position of dominance as the ruling class (P. Chatterjee 1993: 36). For the Englishspeaking elite, it consolidated their hegemony in the national sphere. For Indian writers in English, it gave them international visibility. For Indian scholars, it gained them entry into First World academe. There is a long line of Indians waiting to enter this world. With the recent re-election of the Manmohan Singh government and the popular support for globalization, that line will continue to lengthen. Unlike social hegemonic structures that are constantly challenged, economic hegemonic structures, of which the English language is part, are much more deep-rooted and systemic, and except theoretically, they remain unchallenged. Since postcolonial studies is situated within this hegemonic economic structure, Aijaz Ahmad rightly observes that “privileging of the English literary text in the ‘national’ media and archive — not to speak of the metropolitan university and the literary Establishment [cannot] be altered in any significant degree unless much else changes in areas far beyond literary studies per se” (1994: 78). However, what can be changed, even in capitalist structures, is the way texts are produced. Mark Shell and Werner Sollors’s Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (2000), a 29 language collection of American texts presented in their original language alongside a translation, provides one model for thinking about

44  What Are You Reading? inclusive methods of publishing and shows us that a reconciliation between dominant and marginalized literatures is possible in literary productions. If demand determines supply, academics who teach world literature courses can certainly demand that the publishing industry produce multilingual texts. Even if the scholar’s linguistic knowledge is limited to a single language, the publication of multilingual texts will open up a space for readers to rethink formations of identity and the relationships between languages. More importantly, this model will not limit readership to only a particular linguistic community. Motivating this collection which “attempts to recuperate forgotten American languages and literatures” is a recognition of the fact that multilingualism in the nation becomes invisible when a monolingual policy is instituted (Shell 2001: 9). It is fortunate that India did not adopt a monolingual policy and that its language policies are pluralistic in scope. However, by endorsing English as the lingua franca that represents a developed, modern nation, we make invisible the contributions made by other languages and people, both mainstream and non-mainstream. How can we argue that all languages are equal, that regional languages are as important as English, and that they must be learned, when time and again we reiterate that English is the language of economic mobility, of science and technology, of progress, of independence, and of unity? The linguistic diversity that Indians are so proud of will be meaningful only when we can say that English or any language is just a language like any other, and mean exactly that. Can postcolonial scholars get to that place? If we cannot, those of us who talk about hegemony, representation, colonialism, and neocolonialism might as well be speaking in tongues.

J

2

The Disease of Gigantism: Global Plans and Local Consequences One day the apolitical intellectuals of my country will be interrogated by the simplest of our people. They will be asked what they did when their nation died out slowly, like a sweet fire small and alone. — Otto René Castillo

The catchphrase of the 1980s, “the Empire writes back,” which originally appeared in a 1982 article by Salman Rushdie, and was popularized after the publication of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin has elicited both celebration and concern in the postcolonial literary world. The celebration was a response to the growing visibility of postcolonial writers in Western academic institutions, while the concern was that the growth is not located as much in literary exchange as in the expansion of global capital and markets. Debating and discussing the positive and problematic aspects of the international success of a select group of postcolonial writers in English, scholars in the United States and Britain explored the transformations taking place in English studies; the relationship between such changes and world markets; neocolonial systems of production, circulation, communication, and consumption; issues of selective representation; the hegemony of language; nationalism; class; and identity formation. The term “postcolonial” itself has come under

46  What Are You Reading? intense scrutiny, with scholars questioning their own hegemonic positions as First World intellectuals and the role they have played in ushering in and shaping postcolonial studies in Euro-American academic institutions. These scholars also note that there is often a disconnect between their own theoretical and literary endeavors to counter academic colonial discourses, and the political process of decolonization and nation-formation in former colonies. In many ways, the premature celebratory phrase “The Empire writes back” captures issues such as knowledge production, representation, marginalization, privilege, territorialization, and institutionalized hierarchies, all of which are central to postcolonial studies. Not only does “Empire” imply a world that is inherently stratified and unequal, but the political and historical context of its appearance also creates a specific valence of subjectivity, locating the study of postcolonialism primarily within the domain in which it gained recognition, namely, the First World. Understandably, in Western academic institutions, postcolonialism emerged as a counter response to Anglophone colonial discourses. Therefore, postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Albert Mimmei, Gauri Viswanathan, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, whose works are considered the foundation texts of postcolonial studies, focused on illustrating that colonialism was not only about brutal conquests and exploitation, but also about the psychological and cultural violence inflicted on the colonized, the systemic pursuit of dehumanization, institutionalized hierarchies, and in-built racism. The purpose of these initial theoretical articulations of postcolonialism was to reverse the colonial “process by which the empire [British] . . . defines itself against those it colonizes, excludes and marginalizes” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1998/2006: 173), challenge essentialized images of the “Other” in the West, deconstruct colonial discourses and Eurocentric notions of literature and language, and redefine postcolonialism outside of colonial identities. Although this critical line of thinking significantly transformed both the critique of colonialism and the discipline of English studies, the scholars who followed, such as Arif Dirlik, Aijaz Ahmad, Ania Loomba, Vijay Mishra, Bob Hodge, Neil Lazarus, and Benita Parry, argued that such exclusive interrogations of the colonial discourse ignored the material context in which colonialism and postcolonialism are grounded. These critics insist that postcolonialism also needs to be examined within the activities that take place in material deterritorialized global spaces, which are instrumental in producing and reproducing cultures and hegemonies. Dirlik asserts that postcolonialism cannot be understood

The Disease of Gigantism  47 or “explained without reference to structural transformations in the global economy, which have empowered Third World societies in new ways . . . made the motions of Third World intellectuals possible, and enabled them to acquire a hearing in First World institutions” (1997: 8–9). Reiterating this idea, Ania Loomba argues: If postcolonial studies is to survive in any meaningful way, it needs to absorb itself far more deeply within the contemporary world, and within the local circumstances within which colonial institutions and ideas are being moulded into the disparate cultural and socio-economic practices which define our contemporary globality. (1998: 257)

This battle to equally ground literary studies in the ontology of economic globalization, as it is in cultural, political and social studies, in a sense, was laid to rest by extrinsic factors of literary production, such as capital flows across borders, the frenzy of mergers and acquisitions of publishing houses, and the recognition that Third World markets were the new arena for corporate investment. In the face of largescale transnational/transterritorial activities, material, international and intercultural analyses became an inevitable and integral component of postcolonial studies, and since the 1990s there have been significant theoretical discussions about the complex processes of globalization, the consumption and commodification of literature, and the unequal and uneven modes of literary production and representation. If one could call the analytical, structural and disciplinary shifts that have taken place in literary studies a victory, it is a victory, as Haun Saussy notes, that has “brought little in the way of tangible rewards to the discipline” (2006: 4). English studies remain deeply hiearchical, and the benefits of newly introduced international and multicultural curriculum seem to serve only one purpose; they allow academic institutions, like corporations, to claim a “global vision.” With the neoliberal restructuring of universities since the 1970s, practices, norms and institutional safeguards that privilege one group over another have only intensified. Academics witness universities being run like businesses, with expansions in education taking place with the cheapest labor available, success and rewards based on the commercial viability of academic programs and research projects, widening disparities in pay structures,1 and deep hierarchical divisions 1 According to an article in the The Chronicle of Higher Education (“College Presidents’ Salaries”), the average pay of university presidents is over $400,000, and over 50 presidents of public universities earn more than half a million dollars.

48  What Are You Reading? between institutions, departments and faculty. But there has been little response to calls for collective action to oppose the growing power of administrators in shaping academic programs to serve market needs, the buying out of university bookstores by transnational chains, the increase in student fees, the way labor is organized (tenured, part-time, adjunct positions), inequities in program funding, and instituted methods of evaluating or producing scholarship. Scholars seem to have ceded to neoliberal forms of governance and growth in order to protect their own careers and academic interests, consequently erasing opportunities to transform the image of universities as ivory towers of privilege. My intention in foregrounding the apathy of scholars towards inegalitarian structures in their own workplace is to draw attention in this chapter to notions of democracy, political participation, collective resistance, institutional reform, and individual agency, which are perceived as important solutions to minimize inequalities engendered by globalization. Concentrating on non-spatial networks and activities, many theorists posit that the necessary tools for resisting and countering hegemonic institutions rest in the immaterial aspects of globalization, such as international organizations, transterritorial actors, and deterritorialized forms of communication and technologies. There is also an assumption that globalized communities operate on a different set of ethics and values, and therefore have the potential to be agents of social change. Such arguments not only under-theorize these networks as products of economic, institutional, political, and legal frameworks, but also fail to take into account material ambitions and immaterial systems of control, such as law, consensus, institutionalized hierarchies, and sanctioned state violence, which suppress resistance and maintain power relations. Even a cursory interrogation of academic governance, research, and labor practices reveals that acquiescence can be bought and opposition silenced. Despite their empowered positions as First World professionals who have access to modern technological and communication tools as well as to networked systems and communities, many academics are not inclined towards changing existing social and power tiers in academia, challenging authority, or even taking part in decision- making processes in their own institutions. As in most democratized institutions, faculty, in theory, have a voice, but the majority prefer to be shepherded by the administrative class and are often indifferent when unfair practices and policies do not directly affect them. The culture of passivity and deference to authority has become further entrenched with the 2008 global financial crisis. Although salary freezes elicit widespread distress, few faculty are

The Disease of Gigantism  49 willing to question administrators who use budgetary constraints as an excuse to change policies, and slash programs, jobs and tenure lines. Identifying the apathetic attitude of scholars as a result “of a belief that nothing can be done or that the administration and board of governors are doing all they can,” the American Association of University Professors (AAUP 2009) has urged faculty to be better informed, to speak up, and to actively participate in institutional governance in order to protect academic freedoms (ibid.). Barrington Moore explains that this sense of resignation towards existing social orders which acts as an impediment to political participation is because apathy, much like civic engagement, is rooted in personal beliefs. The masses need to believe that it is possible to reorganize forms of power, that alternatives do exist, and most importantly, that all social structures are outcomes of historical processes. Individual convictions, and not discontent, suffering, or moral outrage, says Moore, prompt civil society to organize, take action and become primary agents of social change (1993: 438–39). Ronald Reagan knew that all he needed to do to gain mass support was to convince people “to believe in the magic of the marketplace”(qtd. in “Tribute to President Ronald Reagan”). It is such a conviction that sustains capitalism and drives elites in countries like India to embrace Western economic forms of development. Similarly, it is also due to personal convictions that injustice, inequality and hierarchies are not inevitable, that social revolutions make possible. However, in societies that have undergone revolutions, gained new freedoms and adopted democratic forms of governments, it is even more difficult to motivate members to take a stance against unfair and unjust practices because they rely on established methods of governance for resolutions. This is the case in academia. In focusing on an expanded role for faculty in academic governance as a solution to safeguard the democratic foundations on which the academy is built, scholars isolate the issue of individual and collective sovereignty and agency from deep-seated structural inequalities. This disconnect is also prevalent in academic discourses about globalization, where arguments are made that the new forms of sovereignty that have emerged from deterritorialized activities and exchanges have created democratic public spaces within which the masses can organize and liberate themselves and the society at large. Such arguments falsely present all members as being equally empowered, and also completely overlook rationalized cultural and economic systems which deter democratic practices and political engagement.

50  What Are You Reading? In his definition of what constitutes a democracy, B. R. Ambedkar wrote, “The first is an attitude of mind, and attitude of respect and equality towards their fellows. The second is a social organisation free from rigid social barriers” (1943). Making a Marxist distinction between political democracy and social and economic democracy, Ambedkar pointed out that the former was about governance, while the latter was defined by social structures, economic conditions, and laws, policies and practices that privileged or disadvantaged particular groups. If social inequalities persist, he asserted, political rights have little meaning. Elaborating further on the necessity of constructing societies that are equally built on the principles of equality and fraternity, as they are on liberty, Ambedkar wrote: The formal framework of democracy is of no value and would indeed be a misfit if there was no social democracy . . . What we must do is not to content ourselves with mere political democracy. We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there is at the base of it, a social democracy . . . The prevalent view is that once the rights are enacted in law then they are safeguarded. This again is an unwarranted assumption. As experience proves, rights are protected not by law but by [the] social and moral conscience of the society. If social conscience is such that it is prepared to recognise the rights which law proposes to enact, rights will be safe and secure. But if the fundamental rights are opposed by the community, no law, no parliament, no judiciary can guarantee them in the real sense of the world. (1943)

The contradictions that Ambedkar identifies in members of democratic societies who uphold the principle of political equality and at the same time accept and resign themselves to social and economic inequalities are crucial to understanding the apathy of the masses towards issues of social justice. As long as glaring inequalities among different classes exist, and the rationalized beliefs of the majority that sustain hierarchies and impede the questioning of unfair policies and practices remain unaddressed, societies cannot be truly transformed. This does not imply that continuing struggles against oppression and suppression are futile. But, as in the past, in order to radically restructure society, it is imperative to ensure that battles against injustice are not isolated efforts. If the majority are unwilling to be a part of those struggles, Marx and Engels remind us, even victories that have been won will cease to be revolutionary, because political and social milestones achieved by social and freedom movements are tested on the ways societies endeavor to destroy “all the inhuman conditions of life” (1956: 53). According to Karl Marx, the task of the proletariat is to destroy class. For the critical thinker, “class” embodies the social structure of society,

The Disease of Gigantism  51 the ways in which human beings identify their social positions, and organize their lives and relationships around a system of material production (1848). Since economic processes form the foundation of society upon which all institutions and ideas rest and emerge, he argued, changes to the economic structure were required “for the proletarians to become masters of the productive forces of society” (ibid.). But the end goal for the proletariat, Marx asserted, was to establish a classless society. Class struggles, therefore, are not only a battle against the bourgeoisie, but also the struggle from becoming the bourgeoisie. Described as “economic determinism,” Marx’s material approach towards understanding social divisions and his unapologetic stance against capitalism have been heavily criticized and rejected by various scholars and analysts. Even theorists who apply a Marxist perspective safely distance themselves by noting that they are not suggesting that a “vulgar economism” is at the root of their analysis. There are certainly other social, judicial and moral factors that influence and shape society, but an economic perspective is essential to understand the relationship between capital on the one hand and colonialism, postcolonialism, globalization, logic, identity, race, literature, language, power, social positions, judicial systems, and nationbuilding on the other. These relationships form the base of systemic injustices and irregularities which cannot be overlooked if our goal is to work towards creating a just and equal society. Marx’s class-based perspective is essential to understand what M. K. Gandhi meant when he asked: “What can be the fate of India trying to ape the West?” (1926: 478). In the answer to this question lies India’s narrative of globalization, which is primarily about liberalization — the opening of economies to allow foreign capital, trade and investment. Anticipating the direction towards which India was headed decades before the country gained independence, Gandhi wrote: God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 millions took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. (1928: 243)

Gandhi’s critique of Western industrialization is rooted in a Marxist understanding of the relationship between industrialization and violence, the capacity for exploitation and elimination of competitors, and the endless search for new dumping grounds. He was afraid that if India adopted the economic development strategies of the US and

52  What Are You Reading? England, it would also become “a curse for other nations, a menace to the world” (1931: 85). Gandhi was not against industry, and his “resistance to Western civilization,” he explained, was “a resistance to its indiscriminate and thoughtless imitation based on the assumption that Asiatics are fit only to copy everything that comes from the West” (1927: 370). He wanted India to be self-reliant, develop and support its own industries, and localize both production and consumption (1934: 22). While India did build its own industries, it did not heed Gandhi’s caution about mimicking the West’s exploitative processes of development. Like in many postcolonial countries, deregulation was one of the conditions imposed upon India by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in return for a loan to get the country out of a major financial crisis. Following that directive, the then finance minister, Manmohan Singh (India’s Prime Minister since 2004), liberalized the economy in 1991, and the policy reforms that followed included reduction of tariffs, elimination of industrial licensing, removal of quantitative restrictions on most imported goods, and abolition of the 40 per cent threshold on foreign equity investment. If Britain’s Charter Act of 1813 provided British industries an opportunity to expand their markets into India in the early 19th century, it was the World Bank and IMF’s loan conditions that gave US and European corporations the necessary break to further their capitalist expansions in India. Observing India’s rapid rise as a major player in the global market, many believe that opening up its borders to allow international trade facilitated economic growth. However, even prior to 1991, India’s borders had not been closed to foreign companies and private trading, and industries that had existed under British rule continued after India gained independence in 1947. Given the history of colonization, early post-independence leaders were understandably wary of foreign trade, and imposed strict regulatory structures in an attempt to build national industries, develop necessary infrastructures, and provide employment. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, believed that the public sector was essential for economic development and decided that the government should take a leading role in bolstering India’s growth. Advocating a mixed economy, Nehru’s economic policies were both socialist and capitalist. While he championed for land reform, cottage industries and community programs, he also supported private enterprises, big dams and nuclear growth. Big industries were part of his plans to modernize India, but just three years after he described big dams as the “modern temples of India,” Nehru regretted that he had not

The Disease of Gigantism  53 thought small. In a speech, “Social Aspects of Small and Big Projects,” Nehru said: For some time past, however, I have been beginning to think that we are suffering from what we may call, “disease of gigantism.” We want to show that we can build big dams and do big things. This is a dangerous outlook developing in India . . . the idea of having big undertakings and doing big tasks for the sake of showing that we can do big things is not a good outlook at all . . . We have to realise that we can also meet our problems much more rapidly and efficiently by taking up a large number of small schemes, especially when the time involved in a small scheme is much less and the results obtained are rapid. Further, in those small schemes you can get a good deal of what is called public co-operation, and therefore, there is that social value in associating people with such small schemes. (Qtd. in Thakkar 2000: 192)

Nehru’s realization came a little too late, and big dams have turned out to be one of India’s biggest social, economic and environmental disasters. In the last 60 years, over 3,000 dams have been constructed after submerging hundreds of villages and displacing more than 30 million people. Fifty-five per cent of the displaced are Adivasis, who constitute only eight per cent of India’s population (Thakkar 2009). Although there are Constitutional and legal provisions to protect Adivasi land, Usha Ramanathan (1995) points out that the power of eminent domain nullifies all protections. Within this legal framework, which grants governments the right to identify land for public projects and “experts” the right to justify this decision, there is no space to address the serious socio-economic consequences of displacement and resettlement, and the rights of the displaced are simply reduced to discussions about claims and compensations (ibid.: 44). In its report for the year 2000, India’s Planning Commission admitted, “Less than 50 percent [of the people displaced by dams] have been rehabilitated — the rest pauperized by the development process” (qtd. in Scudder 2005: 195). Since 1985, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), one of India’s biggest people’s movements, has staged various protests, filed appeals, and written letters to political officials, demanding justice for the communities that have been negatively impacted by the development project. But they have received no support from state and central governments and the Supreme Court, and there is little public debate on the issue. Arundhati Roy’s support for the NBA, and her political essays, such as “The End of Imagination,” “The Greater Common Good,” and “Power Politics”, deserve special mention. Roy’s activism has brought wider attention in the West to the issue of big dams and their consequences

54  What Are You Reading? on the Indian population. This does not mean that the activism of numerous others and of the people affected by the dams is any way inconsequential, for it is certainly because of these groups that the World Bank withdrew its funding and the Indian government stopped the building of a few dams. An unfortunate reality is that we do live in a world that is obsessed by the lives of celebrities and stars, and their activities receive greater media coverage than the social causes they support. Roy’s involvement with the NBA, therefore, has not gone unnoticed, and her political essays, like Siddharth Dube’s Words like Freedom (2000) which chronicles the history of a single family to illustrate the relationship between caste and poverty, and P. Sainath’s articles which name farmers who have been affected by India’s economic policies, make visible the invisible poor and throw India’s middle class out of their comfort zones. As Dube puts it, such writings are imperative not only to ensure that “The history of poorer Indians [will not disappear] without record . . . [but also to] stoke the outrage that more of us should be feeling about our country’s failures on poverty, failures that we’re all complicit in” (qtd. in Dubey 1999). However, the India which once praised the writer for winning the Booker prize and making millions on a single novel is no longer happy with Roy, who is now focusing on the social and political issues that many Indians would prefer to ignore.2 Accused of “sensationalizing” the “dam issue,” Roy’s activism has been criticized even by critical thinkers like Ramachandra Guha. The historian admits that the writer, unlike “other novelists [who] like to shut themselves away from the world,” is courageous to engage in political battles (2000). Guha himself refrains from taking a public stance on social and political issues, and his disagreement with Roy’s critique of the Narmada project, which starts off as a concern that celebrities often become larger than the causes they support, winds up in a derisive personal attack on Roy. Faulting Roy’s writing style, he claims that the writer lacks an intellectual understanding of environmental issues. “Her retreat from activism,” he writes, “would — to use a term from economics — be a ‘Paretto optimum’: good for literature, and good for the Indian environmental movement” (2000).3 As Chittaroopa Patil (2000–2001) points out, Guha seems to believe that his training as a historian gives him the credentials to take on

2 In November 2010, Roy was booked on charges of sedition for an apparently anti-India speech she had made. 3 On hearing that Roy might be writing a second novel, he arrogantly assumed that she acted upon his advice (Sarkar 2007).

The Disease of Gigantism  55 this role as gatekeeper, passing judgment on who does and does not qualify as a “remarkable and public-spirited” activist (A. Nair n.d.). Over the years, Guha has taken various opportunities to discredit Roy, ironically drawing attention only to the writer and himself, and not the cause. Published responses to his articles are mostly arguments endorsing or refuting his opinions about Roy, with the focus of Roy’s essay — the environmental and social impacts of big dams — being completely sidelined. It is clear that Guha’s acrimony towards Roy has little to do with the media’s excessive coverage of celebrity4 activism and its scant attention to the work of other activists, and more to do with the fact that Roy is an outspoken critic of globalization and free markets. Guha’s own view is that we cannot live without the market . . . We have to learn to regulate and use (the market) for our best purposes . . . There can never be a perfect solution to any global problem. There can only be less bad and more bad solutions. The problem with the environmentalists is that they want an ideal solution, which is not possible (Qtd. in Gadgil 2008).

Using a classic neoliberal line of defense, Guha cashes in on necessities such as “transportation, decent clothing, [and] good food,” to argue that markets serve the needs and “wants” of ordinary citizens. “Anyone who rides a cycle wants a motorcycle. Everyone yearns for a better life,” he says, “which means more economic efficiency, better use of technology, entrepreneurship, the market — all things that activists are so suspicious about and demonise” (qtd. in Gadgil 2008). And, we might ask, what about ordinary citizens who do not want to be evicted from their homes, and want their rights, lands and livelihoods protected? Is their displacement in their best interests? In the trade-off between equity and economic growth, the rights of some citizens become, once again, secondary to others. Under the guise of being realistic, these inequities are shrugged off with the reasoning that perfect solutions are impossible. It is an easy stance to adopt and serves as a cover for individuals to disguise their acquiescence to structural inequalities, to excuse their silence, and to create an illusion that those who challenge these structures are the problem. Like Guha, Surjit Bhalla and Arindom Mukherjee (2001) also target Arundhati Roy; their main point of contention is that the author 4 Guha himself has now joined the celebrity club with his 97-lakh deal with Penguin for his seven-volume book on Gandhi.

56  What Are You Reading? rounded off the number of people displaced by dams to 50 million. After their own calculations, the scholars conclude that only 3–4 million have been displaced, and argue that this “economically sensible number” (Bhalla and Mukherjee 2001: 90; emphasis mine), reduces the magnitude of the problem, which is now “manageable” (ibid.: 97)! Reducing the social and economic consequences of displacement to a market argument, Bhalla and Mukherjee justify the losses incurred by the displaced: “If the true displacement number were 3 million or even 10 million, “they argue, “it would not carry the same weight, the same human costs [as 50 million] . . . Only by letting the free hand of the market operate, shall we ever be able to design appropriate tariffs and aid conservation” (ibid.: 91, 97). This notion that displacement is economically “manageable,” Bartolome, de Wet, Mander, and Nagraj (2000) point out, rests on the idea that resettlement and compensation are adequate measures to address the issue of displacement. Taking the process for granted, displacement is viewed as a one-time experience, instead of as a “multidimensional phenomenon” that affects the lives of millions of people in different ways. Furthermore, these scholars argue, the issue is not just about numbers, but involves various factors, such as violations of rights; self-determination; participation in the decision-making process; laws; and policies. Any sincere attempt to address displacement, they emphasize, cannot result from a “complete alienation of the rights, customary and legal, of people through payment of a one-time compensation. On the contrary, the process must result in the creation of new rights that will enable people to share directly in the benefits of the development project” (Bartolome et al. 2000). There is no way of knowing how many people have been displaced by dams. All the reports by various governmental and non-governmental agencies have different estimates of displacement because such calculations depend on the criteria and the methodology employed by individual committees. The general consensus is that dams and reservoirs in India have displaced anywhere between 30 to 50 million people (qtd. in Hemadri, Mander and Nagaraj 1999: 78). 5 These numbers are only increasing with India’s relentless pursuit of capitalist forms of development. While the value of millions evokes an excited 5

Explaining Bhalla and Mukherjee’s ridiculously low estimate of displaced persons and Roy’s higher figure, Walter Fernandes notes that the calculations are inaccurate because these studies account only for dams above 15 metres, which is “the minimum height for a dam to be considered large but their height and submergence area differ.” He estimates that the number is closer to 40 million (2004: 1192–93).

The Disease of Gigantism  57 response when writers receive million-dollar advances, there is indifference when those numbers refer to the millions displaced by various projects. Nehru did not live long enough to change the policies he had initiated, and India has built 3,300 big dams and a 1,000 more are being constructed (Chaudhary 2005: 270). When Lal Bahadur Shastri became the Prime Minister, he continued Nehru’s socialist economic policies but cut back on his industrial schemes. He actively promoted the White Revolution, a rural development campaign to increase the production and supply of milk by small farmers and co-operatives. The National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), which he set up in 1965, is one of India’s most successful programs, and today 13.9 million farmers are members of village dairy co-operatives (NDDB n.d.). During his short tenure, India faced acute food shortage, and although he introduced market-based schemes such as the Green Revolution program and the US Food for Peace Act (FPA), formerly known as Public Law 480 (PL 480), as a long-term strategy, his first response was to urge citizens to evenly distribute their food so that no one would go hungry. Under Shastri’s and Indira Gandhi’s (India’s third Prime Minister) leadership, the central government continued to be a dominant player in economic activities. In an effort to construct a national arena for commerce and to stabilize the essential services upon which commerce depends, Indira Gandhi implemented rigid policies that restricted domestic and foreign industrial licensing. Such policies had a greater negative effect on domestic private industries than on foreign corporations, since older and newer market schemes ensured an export market for international firms. Under the English Language Book scheme (ELBS) sponsored by Britain and PL 480 subsidy schemes, Urvashi Butalia notes, a large number of books were imported from the UK, the US, and the USSR and sold at affordable rates, making it hard for unsubsidized domestic publishing houses to compete (1993: 187). Policies, therefore, were not unfavorable to multinational corporations as free-market advocates Arvind Panagariya and Jagdish Bhagwati contend.6 Until 1973, Majumdar points out, there were over 500 foreign companies operating in India (2008: 41). In his book India: The Emerging Giant, Panagariya describes Shastri’s and Indira Gandhi’s Prime Ministership as a period when socialism struck “with a vengeance,” and blames these leaders for India’s slow economic progress (2008: 47). According to the economist, the Green 6

See Arvind Panagariya’s India: The Emerging Giant (2008) and Jagdish Bhagwati’s In Defense of Globalization (2004).

58  What Are You Reading? Revolution was the most positive development during the period 1961–80 (Panagariya 2008: 71). However, he doesn’t mention its connection to the Bhopal gas tragedy, and categorically states that economic policies are unconnected to the growing rate of farmer suicides (ibid.: 130). Most troubling about Panagariya’s analysis is not his advocacy of a neoliberal economy, but the need to defend it at any cost. Setting aside all moral arguments and looking at it from a purely economic point of view, it makes no sense to pursue policies that are not favorable to the entire community. The cost of correcting policy mistakes is much higher than the original investment. Even such an economic argument rests on the idea that equality, and not blindly following Western models of growth, is the end goal of development. With its rising debt and “Third World” status — although India seemed to have little choice in accepting trade conditions set by the World Bank — India’s elite were already in favor of free markets. The country’s financial situation only gave them a much-awaited opportunity to liberalize the economy. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who supported “centralized ‘command,’ policies” before he adopted a neoliberal ideology, admits that the crisis of 1991 “helped us liberalise the economy. There would have been difficulties in making changes without a crisis. Before that, most people would have taken the American view: ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’” (qtd. in Tully 2005). The course for liberalization had already been initiated during Rajiv Gandhi’s term as Prime Minister (1984– 89), characterized by a partial reduction of tariffs and regulations, and the lifting of import restrictions. But it was with the policy reforms of the Narasimha Rao government in 1991 that India opened its borders to foreign investment, deregulated domestic businesses, privatized a few publicsector undertakings, and considerably reduced ownership, import and export restrictions. In the next two decades, India was inundated by foreign goods and US and European industries. Firms such as IBM and Coca-Cola, which had opted to leave the country when Indira Gandhi implemented the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices (MRTP) and Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), restricting foreign companies from holding more than 40 per cent of the shares, returned when ownership rights were raised to 51 per cent. In 1997, ownership rights were increased to 74 per cent, motivating more foreign firms to invest in India (Majumdar 2008: 43). Forging alliances with domestic firms, US and European corporations firmly established themselves in India, integrating some of India’s industries with the transnational world of trade. Over the years, controls and

The Disease of Gigantism  59 tariffs have been further dismantled, and today there is a steady stream of foreign goods, services and companies crossing India’s borders. After living for decades under a closed, protectionist economy, many Indians welcomed liberalization. For a small section of India’s middle class, it brought about enormous lifestyle changes: new job opportunities opened up in local and foreign companies, particularly for engineering graduates from smaller towns, as the information technology industry started recruiting students from colleges across the country. Conservative middle-class families became less reluctant about sending women to work or taking up graveyard shifts, especially after companies started providing transport.7 There has been a sharp increase in income levels, with children working in MNCs making more money a year than their parents did in a lifetime. Further, for a select group, modes of transport have shifted from trains and buses to cars and planes; consumer items such as cars, televisions, refrigerators, and telephones are no longer luxuries and have became affordable; and weekends are spent lounging in malls or expensive coffee houses such as Café Coffee Day, Barista and Costa Coffee. This is, of course, only one part of the globalization narrative, and one side of the story of India’s new middle class. If greater purchasing power is one of the upsides for those employed by transnational firms, some of the serious challenges they face is coping in high-pressure environments, and balancing work and a personal life. For example, Indians working in outsourced businesses, such as call centers, claims processing, accounting, book publishing and editing, medical transcription, and software coding, writes Rajesh Mahapatra, do earn far more than their peers, but they also have more health and family problems. The stressful nature of their jobs, combined with working only graveyard shifts, has taken a toll on the mental and physical health of the employees, who complain of intense competition, verbal abuse by callers, sleep deprivation, headaches, backaches, and depression (R. Mahapatra 2007). Responding to complaints, companies have set up 24-hour counseling cells (ibid.), but colleges like New Delhi’s Sri Venkateswara College have banned call-center recruiters 7

It should be pointed out here that Indian women working graveyard shifts is not a new phenomenon. For example, women telephone operators have always worked night shifts, and it was through unions that some of their infrastructural needs, such as the provision of dormitories and rest rooms, were successfully addressed. But unlike other industries where workers can rotate their shifts, those who work in the outsourced industry have little choice regarding their work timings because the firms operate in accordance with Western time zones.

60  What Are You Reading? from their campus (Thanawalla 2007). Requirements for working at call centers include fluency in English, adopting a European pseudonym, and knowledge of the culture, climate and geographical locations of foreign clients. In addition to front-line employees, call centers therefore have corporate versions of Professor Henry Higgins, “accent takers” and “accent givers,” who train workers to successfully transform from being Indian to American. This metamorphosis is aptly captured in the title Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005), a documentary film by Sonali Gulati which focuses on India’s latest mimic men. The irony of Indians acquiring an American accent is not lost on the filmmaker whose migration to the US is seen almost “as an act of betrayal” by her family and friends in India, and her “Indian-ness is restored” on account of her accent still remaining Indian. In contrast to her own life, Gulati says, identity is not an issue with Indian call-center workers who view the makeover from Indian to American “as a job akin to an acting job where actors take on personas” (qtd in King 2008). However, call-center trainer and theater artist Arjun Raina points out that the absence of choice moots such comparisons with actors or immigrants who voluntarily take on different roles or change their names. His play A Terrible Beauty is Born (Raina 2004) which was triggered by the suicide of a call-center employee, calls attention to the mental anguish of the workers who are acutely aware that an Indian accent can cost them their jobs. For Raina, the transformation of day-time Indians to night-time Americans is not about identity politics but about labor issues. Why should Nalini become Nancy? Why should Nancy work at night? Which Nancy has Nalini replaced? What are Nalini’s/Nancy’s rights? In the international global economy, says Raina, call-centers workers are the “new dalit elite,” an English-speaking, hardworking workforce that makes relatively good wages and in return shares the oppressed group’s “condition of invisibility” (ibid.). Dismissing these concerns, Thomas Friedman, who has also made a film on outsourcing, asserts that the jobs make Indians “happy.” A positive by-product of outsourcing, he tells National Public Radio’s talk-show host, Terry Gross, is that “you are producing people who do not want to blow up the world, they want to be part of it” (qtd. in Gross 2004)! Never mind that the suicide rate among these workers is increasing. Considering the profit margins, the questions raised by Raina and other critics are often glossed over in debates on outsourcing. Representing the industry as a free, ethical and tranquil form of entrepreneurship that serves the interests of its labor class and customers, Raman Roy, chairman of Wipro Spectramind, a successful outsourcing company, insists that it instills a “terrific sense of nationalist pride” as

The Disease of Gigantism  61 it proves that Indians “are equivalent to, if not better than, anybody else. Anywhere in the world” (qtd. in Leung 2004). Oblivious to the paradox in his argument, he fails to recognize that neither corporations nor their customers want Indians. American companies want any workforce that is cheap and not in a position to negotiate labor terms. As Raina remarks, Indians are “in an interconnected and interlinked global reality not concerned about them or about the millions of Filipinos or Ghanaians or wherever the business threatens to move itself” (2004). Friedman admits that the intention behind masking workers’ identities is to fool Americans who are not comfortable with dealing with foreigners, or unhappy about the fact that their jobs have been shipped overseas (qtd. in Gross 2004). The fact that Americans and Europeans who set up shop in India and other parts of the world do not have to “neutralize” their accents remains unquestioned. Friedman’s advocacy of globalization is reserved for an audience that is skeptical or critical about the way transnational companies do business, and he wants the focus to remain on the economic and job opportunities that have arisen for a select group of Indians. A similar myopic perspective leads even Gulati, who is critical of the training methods employed to create perfect mimic men, to conclude her observations about call centers with a cost–benefit analysis. They are not quite like sweatshops, says the filmmaker, since their employees, mostly young graduates between the ages of 18 and 25, “get to hang out with others in their age group,” are transported to and from the workplace, provided with meals, and “paid $10 a day . . . [which is] a lot given the standard of living in India” (qtd. in King 2008). These lifestyle changes, in her opinion, complicate the question of benefits: at “the macro level . . . multinational corporations . . . are saving billions in this age of global capitalism . . . at the micro level, Indians are benefiting from these jobs” (ibid.). If anything, it only demonstrates the predatory nature of transnationals, which selectively choose cheap workforces from around the world to maintain high profit margins. But what is problematic about Gulati’s views, which are consistent with other discussions of outsourced industries, is that social relationships between workers, their income, and their ability to navigate different cultural networks are portrayed as evidence that call centers are not sites of imperialism and exploitation, but the fautlines of a globalized world — what Homi Bhabha calls an “interstitial passage between fixed identifications [that] opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (1994/2005: 5).

62  What Are You Reading? Removing the relationship between capital and labor practices, and the history of imperialism and its consequences from his narrative, Friedman argues that the Nancy–Nalini metamorphosis is a prerequisite for global success. It is about “glocalization,” he says, which he defines as the ability of a culture, when it encounters other strong cultures, to absorb influences that naturally fit into and can enrich that culture, to resist those things that are truly alien and to compartmentalize those things that, while different, can nevertheless be enjoyed and celebrated as different. (1999: 295)

The journalist contends that India’s success in the global arena is the outcome of its citizens’ “natural” propensity to “glocalize”: It is in their [Indians] DNA. The Moguls come, the Moguls go, the British come, the British go, IBM, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft come and they go, but we still wear saris, we still eat curry, we still live with our extended family. We found that when you scratch these kids underneath the patina of Levi Jeans and cell phones and assumed accents, they were still hard core Indians! (Qtd. in Gross 2004)

There is nothing new about the way Friedman frames globalization within a biological/genetic discourse. Similar essentialist narratives have long served the purpose of giving meaning to colonialism, but it is no longer just the white man’s burden to defend market expansions, tacit trade agreements between countries and corporations, and the creation of workforces to sustain empires. Governments, businessmen, academics, and journalists from around the world reconstruct the history of imperialism around image and identity analysis; and inequitable economic policies, unequal and uneven development of communities, expropriation of labor, and imperial tactics to garner cooperation are buried under an overarching story of the new cosmopolitan worker. For Bhabha, he’s the vernacular cosmopolitan; for Hardt and Negri, the new empire; for Friedman, the glocalized citizen; and for Raman Roy, the proud Indian. While their theories might persuade audiences and readers into believing that technologically savvy, rooted, yet borderless, Indians are empowered individuals who represent “the processes of transfer — financial, cultural, the media, markets — as well as the process of transformation — the challenge to national sovereignty, the ambiguities of international law and conventions, the hybridization of cultures, the complexities of global governance” (Bhabha 2010), these ideas are not even marginally applicable to the employees of India’s second-largest industry, garment manufacturing.

The Disease of Gigantism  63 Even younger than call-center workers, India’s 4-lakh strong workforce in the garment industry, mostly teenagers and young women, does not have to reinvent its identity because it is not dealing directly with a transnational clientele, only making clothes for them. The industry follows a “camp coolie” system where employees are contracted to work for a select period and paid a fixed salary at the end of the term. Eighty per cent of the employees are recruited from towns and villages in Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Rajasthan, but because they are housed in hostels and provided meals, they are not paid the same wages as local employees. The workers are from low-income families and accept the job in the hope of paying off debts or saving money, but when their contract expires they do not get the sum they were promised because the cost of housing and boarding is deducted from their salaries. According to the employees, during the peak seasons, they work over 90 hours a week, but only the bigger exporting companies pay them for working overtime (Dorairaj 2010c: 6).These practices could have been stopped by existing labor laws had factory and government officials not been so indifferent, says A. Aloysius, a member of the Tirupur People’s Forum for Protection of Environment and Labour Rights (TPF) (qtd. in Iyengar 2008: 16). It was only in 2010 that the dismal living and labor conditions drew the attention of the public and the government when Frontline reported that “the number of suicide cases in Tirupur district exceeded the State [Tamil Nadu] average by 40.” In the past four years, over 2,300 suicides have been reported, and 879 of these deaths occurred between January and September 2010 (Dorairaj 2010c: 4). Tirupur has the highest number of manufacturing units in India and employs over 400,000 workers. Its average turnover is ` 10,000 crore per year (Iyengar 2008: 16). Dismissing that stressful working conditions could be one of the reasons for the deaths, Arumugam Sakthivel, president of Tirupur Exporters Association and the owner of Poppys, a company with a turnover of around ` 250 crore a year, says that he is confident that the “suicides have nothing to do with the garment industry.” The industrialist surmises that they are related instead to unsuccessful ventures of small-scale business owners and traders who had taken big loans. “Garment workers do not take such loans. I am 100 per cent sure about this,” Sakthivel categorically states (qtd. in Dorairaj 2010d: 19). Experts, however, are not so sure. Although there are various factors that push people to the edge, says psychologist Gita Menon, we cannot ignore that exploitative and alienating working environments; the desire to return home weighed against losing an income; the absence of recreation facilities and basic comfort; and constant supervision

64  What Are You Reading? do lead to “feelings of worthlessness, helplessness and in many cases, hopelessness” (Dorairaj 2010b: 16). Similar to its response to the cries for help from call-center workers, the government set up helplines and counseling centers for workers of the garment industry. Labor-rights activists and union workers, however, point out that a meaningful resolution to the problems faced by garment workers is possible only if in addition to the efforts initiated by the government, the state also protects the rights of workers, ensures a living wage and improves work conditions. One of the solutions that was proposed to address the undesirable working conditions of call-center workers was to form a union (Marquez 2006). Tirupur is a union town, or as Tamil writer Subrabrathi Manian describes it, it is “the erstwhile bastion of leftist and tradeunion movements of western Tamil Nadu” (qtd. in Dorairaj 2010e: 18). But in an era of liberalization, where trade quotas have been removed and private sectors have gained more power, it has become difficult for unions to protect workers: Trade unions face several hurdles in bargaining for the rights of unionised workers and for enrolling the large number of non-unionised workers. In the post-MFA [Multi Fibre Arrangement] situation, the unionist’s task is turning out to be tougher than before because employers adopt diverse strategies with the single objective of creating textile mills and garment factories without trade unions. (Aloysius, qtd. in Dorairaj 2010c: 6)

While non-governmental organizations are calling for more rigid laws, exporters such as Sakthivel argue that India needs more “flexible labour laws, favourable to entrepreneurs” in order to compete with China (Iyengar 2008: 16). Refuting charges that the industry’s contract labor system is a contemporary form of bonded labor, Sakthivel claims that manufacturers comply with labor laws and wages are fixed (sometimes higher) as per their agreement with trade unions (Dorairaj 2010d: 19–21). Tirupur’s garment workers, however, tell a different story. Just a year before Frontline’s exposé on the alarming suicide rates in Tirupur, Sakthivel was awarded the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian honour, for his services to the garment industry. Since his tenure as President of the Tirupur Exporters Association in 1990, exports from Tirupur have grown from ` 700 crore per annum to ` 11,000 crore per annum (“Padma Shri for Sakthivel”). Considering that the export target for 2012 is set for ` 25,000 crore (Dorairaj 2010a: 21), it is highly likely that the Government of India, manufacturers and buyers will continue to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of garment workers,

The Disease of Gigantism  65 and agree with Sakthivel that the future looks bright for Tirupur because “more people in the world prefer to wear t-shirts” (Dorairaj 2010d: 19). At the bottom of the labor classes that serve transnational industrial traffic are India’s poor migrant laborers8 who move from city to city hoping to get a job in the mega construction projects underway to build more airports, flyovers, malls, luxury condominiums, and electronic cities. They are daily-wage workers making barely enough to eat, living in make-shift homes, with little or no access to clean drinking water and healthcare. Although the Government of India passed a new education law in 2009 that states that no school can deny anyone admission, the migratory nature of construction jobs makes it almost impossible for laborers to enroll their children in schools. There are no unions to protect the unorganized sectors, as a result of which these workers have no bargaining power and cannot exercise their labor rights. The struggles of these members of the Indian population against hunger, poverty, the lack of drinking water and healthcare, literacy, dispossession of land, and the right to self-determination fit neither India’s claim that it has made enormous economic progress nor its assertion that its economic and social policies do not favor any particular group. None of these examples even begins to address the socio-economic realities of India. Tirupur is only one among several examples of Indian towns and cities where poverty, debts, bad policies, corruption, and indifference have led hundreds of Indians to commit suicide. Since 1995 alone, a quarter of a million farmers have committed suicide (Sainath 2010). Suicide rates have also escalated in cities such as Bangalore, Indore, Kanpur, and Nagpur, which have become headquarters for many multinational corporations (Baudelot and Establet 2008: 29). While policy makers, industrialists and scholars might not be ready to admit that there’s a correlation between globalization and these deaths, they cannot deny that as one group of Indians is prospering economically, another group is living in abject poverty. The negative impacts of liberalization policies have been felt mostly by the poor, the working poor, Dalits, Adivasis, farmers, small-scale merchants, and fisher folk. Today, India has an abundance of cell phones, but not enough drinking water; an abundance of fast-food places, but one-third of the population goes hungry; numerous internet cafes, but 40 per 8

Many of the people displaced by industrial development projects have become migrant laborers.

66  What Are You Reading? cent of Indians are illiterate; 44 billionaires, but 400 million living below the poverty line. Talking about the disparities and inequalities in India, Guha says: Marxist ideologues claim that one is the consequence of the other — that many Indians have recently become prosperous only because many other Indians are still poor. This is a gross simplification. Economic growth is not a zero-sum game. A more nuanced, and more accurate, way to understand these differences in income and status is to interpret them through the lens of culture and geography. A certain kind of Indian, with a certain kind of social or caste background, living in a certain kind of concentrated settlement, and in certain states of India is likely to be better-off than Indians of other social backgrounds and other residential locations in other states. (2009)

Marxist interpretations of globalization do not, as Guha claims, suggest that one group is prosperous because another is poor. Instead of locating India’s social and economic divides in a generalized myopic opinion about Marxism, had Guha engaged in an analysis of the economic and political concepts of Marxist theory, he might have recognized that Marxist analysis offers an explanation of how institutional arrangements unfairly advantage and disadvantage particular communities. Critiques that view Marxist approaches as economistic and therefore relevant only to understanding material transactions and not cultural and social structures, arise from an assumption that the sphere of social interactions is distinct and separate from economic exchanges. Let us not forget that India’s caste structures were designed on the basis of the roles people performed in society, on the way labor was organized. A Marxist approach furthers an understanding of why caste divisions remain intact, the logic that underlies civil society’s passivity towards systemic inequalities, and the implications of such a logic. If we do not analyze the rationale that permits structural inequities, and merely point to social and cultural norms as the reasons for injustices and economic stratifications, we ignore the roles played by those in power who control and influence unjust policies. In much of the political debate surrounding globalization, analysts unanimously acknowledge that structural and policy reforms are required to address socio-economic inequities. The disagreement is about the kinds of reforms that should be instituted. Proponents of free trade are in favor of implementing more market-based initiatives, while liberals call for greater control over existing economic policies in order to curb the flow of capital and the growth of unrestricted markets. Neither side, however, is willing to admit that capitalism is the problem. Even the most progressive educators, Peter McLaren points out, do not seriously challenge capitalism (2005). In such a situation, it is

The Disease of Gigantism  67 inevitable that all reforms will only be reactionary and not structural. For instance, although the 2008 global financial collapse certainly destroyed the theory that entities which are “too big” will not fail, there is no move to break up giant conglomerates that monopolize markets. Thus, instead of changing the banking structure of Wall Street, the financial reform bill merely bails out banks. Such solutions are temporary and ineffective in the long run because the focus is only on banks and its managers and not on the system that enables financial institutions and its CEOs to control and manipulate the flow of capital. No amount of reactionary measures can protect societies from similar collapses and other disasters if the underlying structures that create the problems are not radically changed. For the past few decades, deregulation policies have governed our lives, but all warnings about globalization and laissez-faire economic policies engendering a system where an individual’s life is controlled by corporate rules have mostly been dismissed as a “radical left” agenda. Take, for instance, Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary film, Roger & Me, which highlights the plight of autoworkers laid off by General Motors (GM) in Flint, Michigan. With most of the criticism of the film directed at Moore’s style of film-making, his critics ignored the underlying message about the socio-economic impact of deregulation on the working class. Exactly 20 years after Roger & Me was released, GM collapsed, and with more than 100,000 people unemployed (Isidore 2009), even the film-maker’s harshest critics are forced to ask the questions Moore did about deregulation and corporations.9 If the 30,000 workers who were laid off by GM in the 1980s were not a concern for George H. W. Bush, unemployment is certainly a concern that Barack Obama takes seriously. Having inherited the consequences of laissez-faire policies, the 44th President of the US has to find solutions not only for the unemployed, but also for industries like GM which have gone bankrupt as a result of the same policies which helped them gain profit. As the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCATD) report states, “Competitiveness in a global economy is a zero sum game” (2009: 72). There are winners, losers, and in-betweens; but since the losers also come from First World nations in the 21st century, demands for global regulation are now coming from the “developed” world. 9

Had film critic Pauline Kael been alive, she would have had a chance to retract her statement about Moore exaggerating the social consequences for American workers of GM’s decision to close down eleven of its production units.

68  What Are You Reading? Prior to the economic meltdown of 2008, Alan Greenspan was a hero in the eyes of the proponents of free trade markets. One of the most influential voices of deregulation, Greenspan’s 2008 judgment was that “free competitive markets are by far the unrivalled way to organize economies.” He refused to admit that the collapse of Enron and WorldCom in 2002, as Paul Krugman warned, “wasn’t just a market bubble, [and that] the system failed” (2004: 9). Greenspan (2008) did not believe that a public policy case existed to justify government intervention; he trusted markets to regulate themselves. He was not alone in holding the view that the corrupt practices of these major companies were aberrations and did not represent corporate America. Financial journalists Roger Lowenstein and Maggie Mahar have revealed how Greenspan, along with policy makers and the media, “cheered on false business heroes and made the corruption possible” (qtd. in Krugman 2004: 9).10 British Labor politician, author and journalist, Roy Hattersley’s remark that in spite of free enterprise flaunting its failings, “the world’s social democrats have not said a word” (2002) warns us that unless all leaders acknowledged the self-destructive nature of capitalism, further economic crises cannot be prevented. George W. Bush’s response to the crisis of 2002 was to blame his predecessor Bill Clinton (“Bush Urges ‘New Era of Integrity’”), and six years later, the blame-game continues with Democrats pointing a finger at Republicans and vice versa. Many believe that Greenspan and CEOs of corporations are responsible for the economic meltdown. Some even attribute it to the people who were unable to pay their mortgages, while others assign responsibility to Wall Street’s avarice. “Part of the reason this crisis occurred,” Obama said in his 2008 presidential campaign, “is that everyone was living beyond their means — from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street” (qtd. in Wills 2008). According to “The Global Economic Crisis: Systemic Failures and Multilateral Remedies,” a 2009 report by the UNCATD Secretariat Task Force, “The combination of financial and technological innovation in banking and credit markets, unaccompanied by adequate regulation and supervision . . . led to today’s predicament” (2009: 36). Since the crisis was triggered by the collapse in the market for subprime mortgages in the US, resolutions focus primarily on stabilizing banking sectors. While the stimulus package is the short-term solution offered by policy makers, many economists, scholars and experts believe that the long-term solution is to charter another “New-Deal” or combination of regulations and 10

See Roger Lowenstein’s Origins of the Crash and Maggie Mahar’s Bull!

The Disease of Gigantism  69 job programs. The UNCATD report calls for a multilateral oversight, with the United Nations playing a key role in the “reform process” (ibid.: 10). However, as George W. Bush correctly pointed out, the remedies offered are “not intended to take over [or transform] the free market, but to preserve it” (qtd. in Teslik 2008). In a couple of decades, scholars might debate how the United States once again missed an opportunity to radically reform capitalist structures, but if those conversations are not happening now, it is because many people enjoy the benefits of deregulated markets, especially with regard to goods and services, and the immediate concern seems to center around returning to a life where the average citizen can remain relatively disengaged from economic policy decisions. Behind the unwillingness to seek structural remedies might lie an element of self-interest, a fear that if capitalism is replaced, then the benefits and privileges that come with it will also be taken away. Thus, one way to ensure that nothing changes is to focus the discussion on the perceived positive aspects of capitalism and to advance an argument that says that resolutions lie within the very site that causes the problems. This is the direction discourses on globalization have taken. In the process, the people who have paid the heaviest price are the poor and the working poor, but the atrocities and injustices against them are downplayed or erased in discussions which center on the various other manifestations of globalization. In a talk outlining the economic advancements in India, Panagariya (2008b) points to the growth in telecommunications, and states that in 1990, India had five million telephone lines, whereas in 2008, India was adding eight million telephones every year. His other indicators of development include the growth of the Information Technology sector, the automobile industry, and the 44 Indians who had made it into the latest listing of billionaires. Panagariya asserts that economic reforms have not bypassed the poor, and that poverty has been reduced. At the same time, he acknowledges that the inequality between the rich and the poor has increased, as has regional, urban and rural inequality. The economist openly admits that he is “not going to lose any sleep over this increase in inequality.” In his opinion, liberalization, privatization and free markets are the solutions to social issues and the only route for economic progress (ibid.). Unfortunately, Panagariya’s views accurately sum up popular notions and theories about globalization. Mixing capital together with new forms of technology and communication, transterritorial mobility, and cultural changes, the process of globalization has been collapsed into a single metanarrative of the changes, influences and interactions engendered by liberalization, transnational institutions and organizations, and deterritorialized flows

70  What Are You Reading? of capital, goods and people. Abstract concepts such as “global forces,” “global consciousness,” “global networks,” “global mobility,” and “global citizens” have become the defining features of the new world order. There is also an overuse of spatial metaphors, presenting an illusion of not only a borderless world but also an unguarded borderless world, or, as Friedman (2005) describes it, a “flat world.” What deterritorialization of capital has accomplished, as Dirlik points out, is jumble up different worlds, “with the appearance of the Third Worlds in the First World, and the First Worlds in the Third” (1997: 73). If the First World once meant developed, capitalist industrial countries, and the Third World referred to developing and poorer nations, globalized capital has reconfigured the class divisions of people occupying these two spaces. The deterritorialization of production, goods and capital, which has increased outsourcing and contract labor and replaced full-time employment with temporary or part-time jobs, and the dismantling of social welfare programs (McLaren, qtd. in Aguirre) has resulted in Third World countries no longer being the only low-wage areas. In the First World, there is an expanding pool of working-class people whose lives mirror the lives of low-wage earners in the Third World. As Dirlik says, “Parts of the First World marginalized in the new global economy are hardly distinguishable in way of life from what used to be viewed as Third World characteristics” (1997: 72). And, in the Third World, those who have benefited from the new capitalist structure have adopted First World lifestyles. Capitalism or “the expansion of capital and goods,” as Peter McLaren says, “has always benefited classes in an unequal fashion” (qtd. in Aguirre 2001: 4), but the difference with global capitalism is that the “transnational capitalist class” to which William Robinson and Jerry Harris (2000) refer includes not First World members alone. Third World nations today are active participants in global capitalism and the elite from these societies have gained entry into what McLaren calls the “Millionaire’s club” (qtd. in Aguirre 2001: 7). It is also important to recognize that these new First World communities that have emerged from the Third World are products of economic, institutional, political, and legal frameworks that do not benefit everyone equally. The euphoric vision of globalization creating a territoryless, porous, flat world that everyone can gain entry into is therefore misleading and ignores the institutions that enable economic mobility. As David Harvey points out, “production of space” is a political process and “[t]here are absolute spaces all around us and we cannot evade their significance” (2003: 42). Scholars, however, seem to be unwilling not only to engage in a discussion about this process but also to identify the power players.

The Disease of Gigantism  71 Few globalization theorists are willing to concede that deterritorialized productions and markets are an extension of colonial capitalist enterprises and that the US is the controlling center today. In contrast to Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Mann and Perry Anderson’s views that contemporary world affairs, particularly in the global South, are controlled by dominant Western nation-states, scholars such as Amartya Sen, Arjun Appadurai, Roland Robertson, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt are not willing to conceive of globalization along the lines of Western hegemony, arguing instead that cultural and social global interactions are independent of and have transcended the expansions of Western capitalist systems. In his article “How to Judge Globalism”, Amartya Sen asserts: The agents of globalization are neither European nor exclusively Western, nor are they necessarily linked to Western dominance . . . To reject the globalization of science and technology because it represents Western influence and imperialism would not only amount to overlooking global contributions — drawn from many different parts of the world — that lie solidly behind so-called Western science and technology, but would also be quite a daft practical decision, given the extent to which the whole world can benefit from the process. (2002)

Likewise, Hardt and Negri in their trilogy on Empire (2000, 2004, 2009) argue that although globalization does connect with the history of imperialism, the new global order or Empire is different from imperialism because it “establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers” (2000: xii). Given the multitude of actors and organizations that participate in global activities, the scholars insist that “the new capitalist empire is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule . . . [and] the United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today form the center of an imperialist project” (ibid.: xii–xiv). Such claims grossly misrepresent reality. We are presented not only with an image of a world without frontiers, but also with a world that seems to have functional democracies, where all the actors are involved in decision-making processes. Even if we ignore the fact that a vast majority of the world’s population does not “participate in global activities,” and consider only those who do, are they all equally empowered? What choice did many countries that were in debt have when trade conditions were imposed on them? It was not the US, scholars respond, but international economic bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank that set trade requirements. The US is only “a back-seat driver” of the global economy, Mann argues (2003: 74). But aren’t the drivers either willingly

72  What Are You Reading? or unwillingly chauffeurs of the US? Imperial methods, Hardt and Negri (2000: xiv) contend, do not make the US an “imperialist,” since imperialism implies using coercive force to gain direct territorial control. Indulging in yet another semantic game, the authors limit the meaning of “coercive force” to militaristic methods, forgetting that colonialism, as Vivek Chibber (2004) rightly observes, has already created a space where physical coercion is no longer necessary to force countries into submission. In an age when Western languages, institutions and “the basic economic preconditions to successful capitalist integration are already in place, and profits are made not by political control, or through state-granted monopolies,” territorial control can be acquired without annexation (2004: 440). All that the US requires, Chibber adds, is “political muscle” in order to keep the market open for its industries and to “ensure a steady supply of needed raw materials and inputs” (ibid.: 441). Being a “back-seat driver,” says the scholar, also helps the superpower “because it is the invisible force directing local actors, who shoulder the blame in times of trouble” (ibid.). The truth is, when things do go wrong, it is actors such as the Bhopal gas tragedy victims, who do not participate in global activities, that suffer the consequences. The idea that a network of actors controls the empire certainly came in handy during the 2008 financial meltdown. In various analyses of the crisis, at least 25 people, ranging from CEOs to consumers, were listed as being responsible for the crisis, in addition to moral concepts such as dishonesty, greed and integrity. The phantom driver in this case was the “market.” “Markets run on confidence and the US does not control them, for this is capitalism,” says Mann (2003: 51). If this is true, then isn’t the call for reform futile? Do we expect markets that failed to self-regulate to self-reform? The system in place was created through decades of political policies, by US and Northern governments colluding with corporations and financial institutions and using supraterritorial organizations such as the WTO to successfully export “the free-market gospel preached in the 1980s by President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain” (Chomsky 2003: 66). Without protective policies and government intervention, transnational industries and institutions could not have monopolized and dominated domestic and international markets. The reluctance of scholars to identify a locus of power can at best be understood as an inability to predict how long the US can influence other nations; at worst, it constitutes a refusal to engage with the realities of communities which are used as pawns in economic power games. Similar to neoliberal arguments, Hardt and Negri divorce “the practice of Empire

The Disease of Gigantism  73 [which] is continually bathed in blood” and oppressive, from the concept of Empire which is perceived as a liberating and benevolent force “dedicated to peace” (2000: xv)! In many ways, these contemporary formulations of globalization, which treat the new global order as a public-good subject that has the ability to resolve the problems it creates, have inadvertently taken on the function that English literary texts performed for colonizers (see Viswanathan 1989). Such ideas deflect attention from the exploitative nature of capitalism and the ways in which Western nation states consolidated their power in the world through indirect forms of governance. One of the reasons given by scholars for resisting a material analysis of globalization is that such interpretations overlook the cultural and social dimensions of globalization, the “global contributions” engendered by “science and technology” and deterritorialized activities (A. Sen 2002). Attempts to locate globalization within a framework of capitalism and imperialism are perceived by Amartya Sen as antiglobalization, anti-Western rhetoric. In Sen’s opinion: [T]he confounding of globalization with Westernization is not only ahistorical, it also distracts attention from the many potential benefits of global integration. Globalization is a historical process that has offered an abundance of opportunities and rewards in the past and continues to do so today. The very existence of potentially large benefits makes the question of fairness in sharing the benefits of globalization so critically important. The central issue of contention is not globalization itself, nor is it the use of the market as an institution, but the inequity in the overall balance of institutional arrangements which produces very unequal sharing of the benefits of globalization. The question is not just whether the poor, too, gain something from globalization, but whether they get a fair share and a fair opportunity. There is an urgent need for reforming institutional arrangements — in addition to national ones — in order to overcome both the errors of omission and those of commission that tend to give the poor across the world such limited opportunities. Globalization deserves a reasoned defense, but it also needs reform. (A. Sen 2002)

The problem, I argue, is not “the confounding of globalization with Westernization,” but the muddling of capital with the transformations enabled by capital. Sen seems to miss the point that Gandhi made in his critiques about industrialization and aping the West, which is about exploitation and the methods employed by Western countries to expand and develop their economies. Policy reforms to address problems of inequities that scholars call for are certainly necessary. What is also required, however, is the radical reformation of institutional structures called for by both Marx

74  What Are You Reading? and Ambedkar. Policies, legislation and regulations, Ambedkar said, are only the first phase in building an equitable society. This phase must be followed by a political and social revolution; a revolution to transform traditional conceptions of society. It was such a transformation that Marx also had envisioned, a transformation of not only labor processes, but also of all social processes; a transformation that is ceaseless until class is annihilated. These critical thinkers ask us to expand our visions and to think beyond what already exists. Unfortunately, we are still enamored with the transformation that Karl Polanyi (2001) talked about, which led to the rise of the modern state and capitalist market economies, and seem unable to move beyond that. Americans themselves, Joseph Stiglitz (2010) points out, have paid an enormous price for their blind faith in capitalism. The financial crisis, he says, “uncovered fundamental flaws in the capitalist system,” which cannot be corrected by “fixing a few minor problems or tweaking a few policies” (ibid.). It is clear from public debates about the crisis, which focus only on tweaking policies, that creating a new financial system is not an option that the majority favors. Is this because we are afraid that we might lose “the potential benefits” of capitalism? This is where the potpourri narratives of globalization which provide no explanations for our materialism, which permits systemic irregularities, inequalities and injustices, have failed us. The “multitude,” according to Hardt and Negri, “through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real” (2000: 411). The problem with such abstract concepts of revolution and “multitude” is that there is no discussion about what we can do today or why scholars who provide theoretical models of change do almost nothing to resist even the neoliberal structures in their own academic institutions. Stiglitz (2010) rightly observes that it is time for “collective action,” but whether the collective will act depends on how societies are and can be imagined. In India, so far all evidence points towards a significant majority that seems “content to take the world as they found it, dominated by the West, and then find a niche for themselves in it; they were, above all, sly materialists” (Mishra 2006: 235). This was certainly Manmohan Singh’s Independence Day message in 2009. Despite the fact that India is yet to find solutions to address socioeconomic inequities and injustices, the “greatest challenge” the nation faced, according to the Prime Minister, was to find ways to restore the “growth rate to 9%. We will make every necessary effort to meet this challenge — whether it is for increasing capital flows into the country, or for encouraging exports or for increasing public investment and

The Disease of Gigantism  75 expenditure” (M. Singh 2009). This speech illustrates the real crisis that India faces — the inclination of its leaders to define the nation only in economic terms, their unwillingness to envision possibilities other than what already exists, and their inability to pause and consider why Nehru regretted his big plans and urged India to explore the possibility of pursuing small schemes. One small scheme that critics said did not make “fiscal sense” is the mid-day noon-meal plan that Tamil Nadu’s former Chief Minister M. G. Ramachandran revived in the state in 1982. The objective behind providing free and nutritious meals once a day to all children enrolled in government, corporation, panchayat, and municipal schools (primary and secondary) was to boost enrollment and prevent children from dropping out of school. Within a decade, Tamil Nadu had achieved its goals and its literacy rates rose up from 54 per cent in 1985 to 74 per cent in 2001 (Raja 2008). This success led to a landmark order on 28 November 2001 by the Supreme Court of India directing all state governments to introduce cooked mid-day meals in primary schools (Dreze and Goyal 2003). The program certainly has problems which need to be fixed, but considering that in addition to achieving its set targets, the scheme has fostered gender and social equity, it is a step in the right direction. There are a number of similar successful local initiatives which have been implemented by government and nongovernmental organizations, communities, grass-roots movements, activists, and individuals. Unless “big global plans” resemble these small local efforts that focus on socially and economically disadvantaged communities and not on GDP growth rates, socio-economic disparities between communities will continue to widen.

J

3

Fit to Print: The Transnational Publishing Industry The publisher is a middleman, he calls the tune to which the whole rest of the trade dances; and he does so because he pays the piper. — Geoffrey Faber

Five years after Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was published, India was made the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1986. Two decades later, Frankfurt turned the spotlight on India once again. The second time, organizers were careful to make sure that the focus was not only on Anglophone writing but also on regional-language writing. However, there was little doubt as to who were the real stars of the show. In contrast to a packed audience that had gathered to listen to Amit Chaudhuri and Shashi Tharoor, Sonia Phalnikar notes, only a few were present to hear Kashmiri writer Shafi Shaq speak. Indian writers in English were also the exclusive focus in the 100-page Frankfurt Book Fair supplement published by the German newspaper Die Zeit. It was “a completely one-sided face of Indian literature today,” said publisher Christian Weiss — a point of view echoed by Zubaan’s publisher, Urvashi Butalia as well (qtd. in Phalnikar 2006a). “Don’t be fooled by the Indian stand at Frankfurt,” said Butalia. “It gives no indication of the complexity, wealth and depth of Indian publishing” (qtd. in Shah and Boos 2009). Since Frankfurt, India has been given the center stage in subsequent book fairs held in Paris, London and Moscow, and in addition to well-known Indian writers in English and transnational publishers, their guest lists have expanded to include more independent Indian publishers and regional-language writers. The recent interest that Europe has evinced in Indian writers and the recognition that regional-language writers need to be acknowledged reflects both the growth of English-language publishing in India and the problems that have arisen from an almost exclusive focus on English-language writers by the literary world market and Western academia. As Peter Ripkin says, “Indian literature is still largely seen as

The Transnational Publishing Industry  77 the literature of authors who write in English. Regional literature hardly makes a dent in the West’s consciousness even though it’s such a diverse scene” (qtd. in Phalnikar 2006a). Language, according to scholars and publishers, is one of the main reasons for the disproportionate attention given to Indian writers in English, and translations of Indian regionallanguage writings into English, they advocate, would correct this imbalance. If that were true, how does one explain the scant attention paid by participants of the 2009 literary festival on postcolonial literature from South Asia in Newcastle to Hindi writer Geetanjali Shree, whose novel Mai (2004) has been translated into English and French? Writers in English formed the “big band,” said Shree (2008), “while two of us, one Maharashtrian and one me of Hindi, represented all other languages and looked like near extinct animals who no one thought were worth saving or even noting for posterity!” The writer admitted that she might be stretching the analogy, but “behind the joke and exaggeration of it,” she added, “there are serious issues we have to pull out” (ibid.). It is some of the issues concerning Indian writers today, particularly the disparities between writers which have been enhanced with the rise of a transnational publishing industry in India, that are examined here. Continuing the discussion on the Indian narrative of globalization, this chapter focuses on the nexus between trade policies, capitalism, and the process of knowledge production. With 24 official languages, India’s book-publishing industry is a complex heterogeneous enterprise serving multiple markets. However, the ascent of English as a world language as well as various trade policies have led to an asymmetrical development not only between English and regional-language publishing, but also between transnational and indigenous English-language publishers in India. While publishing houses such as Penguin India have expanded into billiondollar enterprises, most indigenous presses still remain cottage industries dependent on support from patrons and the government. Assessments of the achievements of the industry, therefore, are often measured by the successes of transnational publishers, ignoring the fact that it was indigenous publishing houses that fostered a literary environment for Indian authors. Further, it is also mostly the body of works in English produced by transnational publishing giants for the past 30 years that is included in narratives of India’s literary accomplishments, particularly because these texts have gained entry into the portals of Western academies. While the rise of Indian writers in English in the Western literary scene is symptomatic of certain dramatic shifts in the Western academia towards English studies, the preferential treatment given to these writers by Indians themselves is linked to the

78  What Are You Reading? idea that Indians are now “global” players. Here, “global” euphemistically stands for “First World.” Although literary shifts may have erased traditional definitions of First and Third World writers, what it hasn’t abolished is the colonial idea that the First World symbolizes progress and development. Therefore, success is measured by the ability to no longer be seen as a Third World writer, and to be on par with First World writers. As Amit Chaudhuri says, “The dividing line between postcolonial pride and imperialistic ambition is very small . . . one lapses into the other very easily . . . And Indian writing in English . . . traverses that thin line” (qtd. in Phalnikar 2006b). It is on account of these “imperialistic ambitions” that deregulation policies gain credence and support; and while it cannot be denied that deregulation has led to significant positive changes in India’s publishing scene, especially English-language publishing, it also cannot be overlooked that it has been advantageous mainly to transnational publishers and Indian authors writing in English. Advocates of deregulation insist that free-trade policies are instituted to alleviate socio-economic inequalities, but since these policies have proven that they exacerbate disparities, shouldn’t they be re-evaluated? And what better time is there to re-examine deregulation than in the current recession, when it has failed even its most ardent supporters? While much of the discussion on deregulation now centers around the banking industry, the effect of these policies extend far beyond Wall Street. Deregulation policies which caused industrial shifts to transnational systems around the world, peripherally improved the flow of transnational communication, people, identities, thoughts, and literatures. This movement has been particularly facilitated by two capitalist terrains that benefit from deregulation — telecommunications and the book-publishing industry. Similar to other commercial and financial industries, the dynamic changes in these two enterprises were enabled by a combination of technological innovation, capital and deregulation. Since publishing and telecommunications are also sites of free speech and social agency, and cultural and knowledgeproduction channels, a general expectation is that the deregulation of information-producing zones would result in open competition, equitable spaces, and greater agency for individuals. On the contrary, deregulation narrowed the playing field, as firms shut down, merged, or formed alliances with each other. These consolidations have resulted in megacartels that control the flow, production and reception of communication and information. Since 1983, the number of corporations controlling the media in the US has shrunk from 50 to five, the latter

The Transnational Publishing Industry  79 being Walt Disney, Time Warner, News Corporation, Viacom, and Bertelsmann. And with the exception of Bertelsmann, for other media conglomerates, book publishing is only an ancillary industry (Bagdikian 2004: 3). While the social implications of concentrated ownership have been central to the scholarship of media critics, our exuberance over changes emerging from technological advancements often leads us to ignore problems inherent in structures that enable transformations taking place in society. Referring to this focus on the obvious, Marshal McLuhan wrote, “[I]t is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium” (1964: 9). McLuhan applies the word “medium” to any space that results in change, and his observations are particularly relevant in understanding an imperative need to stand aside from the economic advantages that result from deregulation, and take an objective view of what McLuhan calls “operative principles and lines of force” (1969). As McLuhan surmised, blind enthusiasm precludes recognition of the structural changes that have become extensions of our lives, leaving us “one step behind our view of the world” (ibid.). While we can blame policy makers and financial analysts for having systematically brushed aside the consequences of deregulation, we cannot forget our own apathetic stance towards socio-economic disparities engendered by capitalist structures. The 2008–2009 financial fiasco which caused many people to lose their savings, homes and jobs, offers an opportunity to rethink McLuhan’s warning — either understand and seek to change economic policies that transform and control our lives, or “continue in our self-induced subliminal trance” and be enslaved by them (1969). For those of us in academia, the crisis provides another chance to seriously evaluate the consequences of the intricate relationship between capitalism and knowledge production. The nexus between trade policies, academia and the publishing industry in India dates back to the colonial period, with the passing of the Charter Act in 1813 and the English Language Act in 1835. It is under these Acts that foundations were laid for the formation of the academic discipline of English studies, the establishment of English as both a lingua franca and the medium of education, and the entry of missionaries and British publishers into India (G. Viswanathan 1989). Exploring this early history, literary scholars point out that at the turn of the 18th century, the excesses of the East India Company forced Britain to try to shift its image from being a greedy colonizer to being a benevolent ruler concerned with the welfare and education of its colonial subjects. “The extravaganza and demoralized life-styles

80  What Are You Reading? of the East-India Company servants, combined with their ruthless exploitation of native material sources,” Gauri Viswanathan writes, raised “serious and alarming questions in England about the morality of the British presence in India” (1989: 24). The British Parliament realized that the best way to remedy the situation and to ensure that the Empire continued to maintain its hold on India was to introduce social and economic reforms. As J. Farish put it, the English had two choices — either keep the natives down by power, or make them “willingly submit from a conviction that we [the British] are more wise, more just, more humane, and more anxious to improve their condition than any other rulers they could possibly have” (qtd. in ibid.: 2). Having already acquired territorial control, the British attempted to pursue the latter option. The first step in that direction was the Charter Act of 1813. The Charter Act of 1813 ended East India Company’s monopoly of trade with India, opened India’s borders to foreign markets and missionaries, and included a clause allocating funds for the development of literature and education in India. With attention turning towards educational institutions, discussions began to be centered on the language to be used “for the intellectual improvement” of the natives (G. Viswanathan 1989: 37). Orientalists were in favor of Arabic and Sanskrit, believing that being forced to learn a foreign language and literature would be alienating for the natives, while Anglicists advocated for English, arguing that progress could be achieved only through a European language. Thomas Macaulay’s Minute of 1835, which settled the debate in favor of English, reveals that the bone of contention between Orientalists and Anglicists was primarily about the methodology to be employed to educate the natives. Both groups had the same goal — to consolidate British presence in India — and they all agreed “that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information” (Macaulay 1998). It was therefore practical, Macaulay argued, to institute English, which Orientalists and Anglicists acknowledged was far superior, both in the fields of literature and science, to any Indian language, as the language for education: We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us, with models of every species of eloquence, with historical composition, which, considered merely as narratives, have seldom been surpassed, and

The Transnational Publishing Industry  81 which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equaled with just and lively representations of human life and human nature, with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, trade, with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man. (Macaulay 1998)

As if Macaulay had not been explicit enough about the superiority of English language and literature, he continued: Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said that the literature now extant in that language is of greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. Nor is this all. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australia, communities which are every year becoming more important and more closely connected with our Indian empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects. (1998)

Macaulay won the argument for English and under his recommendations the English Education Act passed in 1835 established English as both a lingua franca and the medium of education, and also introduced English literature as a subject in the curriculum in India. History warns us to never underestimate the ability of those in power to not only convince the masses that they have their best interests in mind, but to also get them to support and perpetuate the ideas of the powerful. Herein, Gramsci (1978) theorizes, lies the success of the ruling class. Similarly, in India, the triumph of Anglicists such as Macaulay lies not in the passage of the English Education Act, but in the fact that150 years after his death, we still have Indians reiterating Macaulay’s ideas that English is the only language through which economic and social progress is possible. Historian Ramachandra Guha (2007b) goes as far as to say, “The software revolution in India might never have happened had it not been for Macaulay’s Minute. And India might not have still been united had it not been for that Minute either.” Granting Macaulay moments of arrogance, Guha nevertheless remembers him “not as an insolent colonialist but rather as a far-seeing

82  What Are You Reading? democrat” (Guha 2007b). What is apparent in the historian’s statement is that Macaulay’s political strategy to educate a select body of people to become spokespersons for the British worked. This class of people, Macaulay (1998) stated: may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, — a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

Although out of this group a resistance movement against imperialism also emerged, it was this class of people which cemented the foundations laid by the British. While Indians were not in favor of being ruled by the British, they welcomed their institutions, language and literature, partly because they did not know how to replace them. Indians did not resent the colonizers’ anglicizing of India also because acquisition of the social and cultural trappings of the British “was seen as a way of entering the well-paying and upwardly mobile ranks within the colonial administration” (Joshi 2002: 16). Such an acquisition also eventually paved the path for those who were part of the freedom struggle to emerge as the ruling class in independent India. With economic considerations motivating arguments in favor of particular British legacies, it is no surprise that Indians have made Macaulay’s grand plan of anglicizing the nation their own. In their analysis of Britain’s political strategy to introduce English literature in India, Gauri Viswanathan (1989), Jyotsna Singh (1989, 1996) and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (1986) point out that the initial encounters of Indians with British books explain to a large extent the merger of the ideologies of the colonizer and the colonized. For the English, literature served as a nation-building tool to downplay the brutality of imperialism, establish cultural superiority, and perpetuate a worldview of the colonizers as humanists. By representing English writers as universal, ahistoric, and embodying the ideas, morals and cultural values of the British, G. Viswanathan (1989) argues, the colonizers found a way to maintain control over their colonial subjects. Canonized writers such as Shakespeare were particularly important sources for establishing British hegemony. The use of the phrase “common to all” by literary critics to describe the Bard, says Jyotsna Singh, “not only erases cultural and racial differences among former subjects of the British Empire, but also denies them human agency and originality”

The Transnational Publishing Industry  83 (1996: 35). In light of the function that Shakespeare served, Singh goes on to say, “It would be appropriate to use ‘Shakespeare as Empire’ to describe their [British] strategy” (ibid.: 31). Priya Joshi, on the other hand, argues that Indian readers were “neither passive recipients of British print nor bit players in a story dominated by European production” (2002: 18). Her study shows that Indian readers in English preferred popular British fiction to canonized texts introduced to propagate and legitimize Englishness. Joshi argues that the colonial history of India is not “a bland and familiar narrative of imperial zealots such as Thomas Babington Macaulay on the one end and silent and compliant natives on the other but a much more complex story where Indians exercised choice in their consumption of the world of print” (ibid.: 17). There are multiple problems with Joshi’s arguments; foremost among them is that publications of popular novels did not negate the effect that books had in promoting British culture. Popular fiction also does not constitute the required reading list in educational institutions, and it is in the realm of education that Englishness gained credence. Moreover, academics like Joshi herself, or students of English Literature, might have grown up reading G. W. M. Reynolds and Enid Blyton, but it was the British novel of the “serious standards” that was part of their education, and till today, Western literary texts continue to dominate the curriculum. And, with 95 per cent of the print imports in the 19th century coming from Britain, isn’t the question of choice skewed? With the British dominating publishing, whatever choice could be exercised by Indian readers in English was only limited to the options that the English offered. However, it is interesting that today, in spite of the choices we do have in the world of books, the Englishspeaking Indian community, as Joshi herself points out, is still following a pattern set by its “forebears” (2002: xvii). It is this class-coded value system inherited by us that Butalia refers to when she talks about “students brought up on a diet of Shakespeare and Lawrence rear[ing] children whose staple was Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins” (1993: 186). A point that Viswanathan and other scholars make (and which Joshi misses) is that the history of colonization is a story of an unequal world. In such a world, even if transactions and exchanges between cultures do take place, it is only within the parameters established by those in power. Nevertheless, Joshi makes an important point about the British publishing industry also catering to the interests of different readers. At the end of the day, publishing is a business and the goal of publishers is to make profits. If gaining profits entails acting as a medium of propaganda (British in this case) or pandering to the taste of consumers, publishers will willingly venture down that road.

84  What Are You Reading? Protected under the aegis of free speech and culture- and knowledgeproducing zones, publishers are rarely held accountable for their role as propaganda mouthpieces for their countries, although scholarship such as Gauri Vishwanathan’s Masks of Conquests (1989), Valeri Holman’s “Carefully Concealed Connections: The Ministry of Information and British Publishing, 1939–1946 (2005)” and Hersch Fischler and John Friedman’s “Bertelsmann’s Nazi Past” (1998) clearly testify to the fact that the history of the publishing industry is not as clean as its manufactured image. A strategy that the British publishing industry adopted to conceal its role in the dissemination of propaganda during World War II, says Holman, was to give no indication that they were anything more than trade publishers. British publishers accomplished this disguise by listing in their catalogues only works by authors ranging “from academic historians and philosophers to novelists such as G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” (2005: 198). The publications of popular British novels in India alongside canonical writers had a similar effect, I suppose, as attention turned away from the political agenda behind British publications to the belief that the industry was being influenced by what Indian readers in English wanted to read. Some historians also tend to present publishers as having little or no agency during war time with regard to their publications; and while this may be partially true, according to Holman, a number of British publishers profited from their links with the government (ibid.). This was certainly the case with Bertelsmann, one of the world’s largest publishing houses today. Bertelsmann made huge profits during the Nazi era, a fact that the German publisher did not confess to until it was revealed that the company had published Nazi propaganda, and that the founder, Heinrich Mohn, was “a ‘sponsoring member’ of the SS — that is, he made financial contributions to Hitler’s crack troops — and a member of the Nazi Flying Club who made sure that his children, including his still-influential son Reinhard, joined the Hitler Youth” (Boyes 2002). The story about the company’s Nazi connection broke soon after Bertelsmann purchased Random House in 1998. The former assured American writers of Jewish origins who raised objections to the corporate takeover that the company had an impeccable anti-Nazi record; it even asserted that the company had been shut down by Nazi officials. This was the official history recorded in Dirk Bavendamm’s 150 Years of Bertelsmann: The Founders and Their Time, which carries a foreword by Mohn. However, after Fischler’s and Friedman’s findings were released, Bertelsmann was forced to set up a commission to examine the “inaccuracies” in its corporate history. The report confirmed that Mohn was a Nazi supporter and that the publishing firm “used

The Transnational Publishing Industry  85 its ties with the regime to transform itself from a provincial Lutheran printing company into a mass-market publisher” (Lander 2002). Bertelsmann was in fact the largest publisher for the Nazi regime, with 19 million titles published during this period, some of them clearly anti-Semitic. The report also stated that in all probability the publisher had also profited from Jewish labor. Bertelsmann’s response to the report was to issue a statement of regret for historical inaccuracies, but no apology was made. “Can you really apologize for the actions of a different generation and what we view as a different company? It is a global company with very different values. Our regret is genuine and sincere,” said Tim Arnold, who coordinated the commission’s work on behalf of Bertelsmann (qtd. in Lander 2002).1 An apology implies recognition and accountability, but if countries and corporations are absolved of the part they play in contributing to tragic histories, it is because the masses also prefer not to remember these histories. To date, Union Carbide has never apologized to the Bhopal gas tragedy victims, a factor which directly influences the market value of Dow Chemicals, which bought Union Carbide. In 2004, a group of artists called The Yes Men (Ollman, Price and Smith 2003) decided to do what they believed Dow should have done and posed as representatives for the company. When BBC contacted them for an interview on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, Andy Bichlbaum as Jude Finisterra, the “representative” of Dow, stated that the corporation finally accepted responsibility for the world’s largest industrial disaster, and that a multibillion dollar fund had been set up as compensation. When this news got aired, even The Yes Men were surprised at the different reactions. In the US, Dow lost over two billion dollars in the stock market. The only response by the corporation was to announce that “Finisterra” did not represent them and “there was no basis for the report.” On the other hand, in Bhopal, though the victims of the accident were disappointed that the news was a hoax, they were not angry. In fact, they believed the event made a statement about Dow. Twenty years after the disaster, those who inhaled the gas are still suffering from various medical problems; most received little or no compensation. The ground water is contaminated, and the plant site is yet to be cleaned. On the response of the stockholders, Finisterra aka Bichlbaum said that as children they had learned it was not ok to be bad, and a reward would be given if they were good. However,

1 This argument has surfaced in other times and places as well, most recently with respect to the former Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, who refused to apologize to the Aboriginal children of the “stolen generation,” saying that his government should not be held responsible for past policies.

86  What Are You Reading? when an announcement was made that Dow was finally going to do the right thing, “the market gave Dow a spanking” (Ollman, Price and Smith 2003)! It is interesting that in the latest stock-market debacle, stockholders were enraged and demanded accountability because they had become the victims of corporate greed. Although we might like to argue that the two stories about Union Carbide and Bertelsmann cannot be intertwined because these corporations produce different kinds of goods, the reality is that the operating practices of publishing enterprises are not very different from those of other commercial corporations. They are profit-driven industries attempting to erase tainted pasts through advertising, social activities, or by literally rewriting their histories. Business enterprises, however, depend on the public to defend, support or forgive them in order to successfully accomplish the task of cleaning up their image. With corporations such as Dow, financial benefits to consumers and stockholders override their dark histories and unethical practices; so also with publishers such as Bertelsmann, there is currently too much at stake for those affiliated with the conglomerate to pay much attention to the past. Thus, the easier option is to dismiss history as irrelevant, or to quickly forgive conglomerates, as Farrar publisher Roger Straus did Bertelsmann: There seems to be some conversation about who lied when and about what. In all fairness, the [Bertelsmann] managers are very concerned. At least they’re making the right noises. The interesting thing to find out is, Is there any publisher in Germany that went through the Hitler period and survived and came out clean? (Qtd. in Manus 1999)

This raises the question: does knowledge of a company’s seamier past result in not doing business with the firm? Apparently not. Strauss sold Farrar to another German publishing conglomerate, Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, which is also unapologetic about its Nazi past. In the words of a von Holtzbrinck employee, who virtually echoes Strauss, “Any company that came through the war would have to have had some dealing with the Nazis. Georg von Holtzbrinck was a really smart businessman who knew he had to get in bed with the Nazis to stay in business. He practiced Realpolitik” (qtd. in Manus 1999). Writers and publishers associated with these firms distance themselves from historically awkward ties by claiming that the German corporation’s values now are different from those of its founders. It is disappointing to hear Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum say that they did not get “a single call from authors, agents, special-interest groups — not an Email, not a letter” when the news about Bertelsmann’s Nazi connections made headlines (qtd. in Manus 1999). There wasn’t a murmur

The Transnational Publishing Industry  87 from Germany either. André Schiffrin, who resigned from Pantheon and set up a non-profit publishing house called the The New Press, explains that Bertelsmann is big and powerful, and people are careful of criticizing a firm that owns half of American and German publishing (Manus 1999). Another explanation could be that consumers benefit from large corporations and cannot (and do not want to) conceive of a world without them. It is in this space of dismissed histories, economic considerations, unequal power structures, biased policies, and public sanction that the British and now transnational publishers dominate the publishing scene in India. In the 19th century, after the industrial revolution, the publishing industry, alongside other industries, expanded in the West. Britain forcibly instituted a free-trade policy, allowing British commercial enterprises to enter India. The establishment of English as an official language in India and the rapid expansion of educational institutions opened up a whole new market for British publishers.2 Macmillan was the first to set up its operations in 1892, and by 1914, the company had branches in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras (Bently 2007: 1200). Referencing a letter written by Alexander Macmillan in 1893, Priya Joshi notes that Macmillan and other British publishers quickly recognized that they could make profits through sales of educational texts in India: We are increasing our business with India both in school books and in the supply of Libraries and Book Clubs and private persons, and we could do more if it came our way. What strides education must be making among the natives! We sell considerable number of our mathematical books, even high ones, every year to India. I should be glad to know something about these same scientific natives. Please write me a longer letter when you next write. (2002: 96)

Macmillan’s interest in the “scientific natives” was in line with what Gauri Viswanathan describes as the “Orientalist phase,” a time when understanding indigenous cultures was a necessary administrative strategy for the British to rule India efficiently (1989: 28). For publishers, knowledge of “Oriental needs” made good business sense, a move which contributed to Macmillan’s “success in the Indian literary marketplace” (Joshi 2002: 97–98). Following Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Blackie and Sons, and Green and Sons set up offices in

2

Many English-medium schools were set up by missionaries, but only a select class/caste of Indians could afford to study there.

88  What Are You Reading? Bombay, Calcutta and Madras in the early 20th century.3 Longman entered India in 1948. Tracing the history of publishing in India, Tejeshwar Singh points out that the publishing activity of these British presses was designed to ensure that only British publications were used in educational institutions (2006: 53). British texts were thus imported, reprinted, and even translated into regional languages, but virtually nothing was done “to encourage indigenous authorship,” an omission which consolidated the position of British presses and their publications in India (ibid.).4 Thus, these British presses became, and still are, an integral part of education. During this early period, an indigenous publishing industry did not exist in India. Small presses primarily provided an avenue for political writings during the freedom movement. According to David Davidar, founding editor of Penguin India, the choice made by “writers of those days … to educate their fellows politically and culturally and to direct their writing talents in protest against foreign rule … [stifled] the creative aspects of their work” (1995: 145). This assertion is disingenuous coming from an author who defends the political nature of his own book The Solitude of Emperors by stating, “I find it more and more strange that a serious writer could be apolitical. How can you not engage — who can write in a vacuum?” (qtd. in Rickett 2007). But the comment also reflects a trend in the post-Rushdie phase to celebrate contemporary writers and their work at the expense of Indian authors published prior to the 1980s. Predictably, early political writings from India that receive serious attention after independence are essays, letter, and speeches by cosmopolitan national leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, published in the UK and the US. Recently, the Subaltern Studies group, Susie Tharu, and other Indian scholars compiled, republished and translated some of the early writings of Indian authors in order to make visible other political and literary narratives in the nation’s history, which had previously been dismissed or neglected. The indigenous presses that were established in the first two decades after India gained independence in 1947 included Chand and Co., Asia Publishing House, India Book House, Orient Paperbacks, Jaico, B. I. Publications, Allied, and Popular Prakashan. Particularly noteworthy, wrote Tejeshwar Singh, were the efforts of Asia Publishing 3 For a history of the operations of Macmillan and Oxford University Press in India, see Rimi Chatterjee (2002, 2006). 4 The fact that translation projects were undertaken by British presses in this early period is particularly significant in current discussions about transnational book publishing and the feasibility of translation.

The Transnational Publishing Industry  89 House and Orient Paperbacks, which provided a space for Indian authors, and India Book House, which “pioneered the Indian comic book through its Amar Chitra Katha series” (T. Singh 2006: 53–54). Textbook publishing was the focus of most Indian publishers, but they could not displace British presses such as Macmillan and Oxford University Press as primary distributors and producers of textbooks. This inequity existed not only because colonial policies advantaged British presses, but also because most private Indian schools preferred foreign publishers, and Indian academics favored Western authors over Indian ones in their curriculum. The monopoly of foreign presses in textbook publishing was curtailed only when new regulation policies of the 1960s and 1970s were introduced as part of the institution-building process in India after independence. Subsequently, autonomous organizations such as the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and the State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERTs), set up by the Government of India in 1961 and 1979, respectively, to oversee education, became the main producers of textbooks. Private publishing sectors, both Indian and foreign, were confined to publishing “only supplementary readers, workbooks and textbooks in a few subjects in which enrollments were not high” (ibid.: 54). Production, however, still centered around British texts because the easier economic option for Indian publishers was to reproduce and reprint existing texts instead of “spending time and money on developing new ones” (Butalia 1993: 184). India’s attempts at adapting British texts were often simplified to merely replacing British pictures and names with Indian ones, and for several years “because of lack of other material, these were the books that were used in schools” (ibid.). Even today, little attempt is made to restructure English-language courses to suit the interests and needs of students; abridged versions of Shakespeare, Milton and Stevenson are still the standard texts in most schools. The import policies and foreign subsidy schemes of the 1960s, which enabled the entry of US and Soviet publishers into India, further hindered indigenous publications, and foreign authors continued to dominate the reading list of students in lower and higher education. In the fields of sciences, medicine and engineering, schools relied almost entirely on foreign publications. Alongside textbooks, popular fiction was also imported, and the market was flooded with low-priced editions of US and Russian books. “The presence of cheap subsidized editions of British and American books,” says Butalia, “made it much more difficult for their Indian unsubsidized counterparts to compete, the more so in a market already convinced of the ‘superiority’ of the

90  What Are You Reading? ‘Western’ article” (1993: 187). Anything Western — goods, entertainment, education — has always been a symbol of upper-class status in India, and a business that offers Western products has a guaranteed market. So, while questions of economic feasibility arise when foreign or transnational publishers consider translation of regional-language books into English or into other regional languages, there has been little hesitation in translating popular English-language titles into regional languages. Even comic books such as Superman and Spiderman have been translated into Hindi. Contrary to Davidar, who claims that the reason for few Indian writers in English being published before the 1980s is that very little was worth publishing at that time, both Butalia and Tejeshwar Singh point out that the policies and publishing practices of earlier decades, geared towards indigenizing the publishing industry, “had little to do with developing indigenous authorship” (Butalia 1993: 187; T. Singh 2006: 53). For Indian and British publishers, once again the solution to producing books for the education market was simply “to import or to reprint foreign works locally or, at the school level, to adapt — not to spend time and money on establishing local authors” (T. Sing 2006: 53). Kannada writer Girish Karnad, who has worked with Oxford University Press, supports Bhutalia’s and Tejeshwar Singh’s point of view that indigenous publishing had no place to grow in an environment dominated by British publishers whose affiliations lay with their parent companies. The indifference of foreign presses to Indian authors, the writer says, led many early writers to publish their work in small indigenous enterprises, but limited editions and the lack of public response resulted in most of the books going out of print (Karnad 2008: 73). The space that was eventually created for the expansion of Indian writing in English was not due to deregulation, as many scholars and critics argue, but due to the strict regulation policies regarding foreign ownership that were implemented during the era of protectionism (1970–90). In order to protect the Indian market, the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) of 1973 was instituted, restricting foreign companies from holding more than 40 per cent of the shares. Following this legislation, foreign firms withdrew from India, sold their assets, or merged with Indian companies.5 In the publishing world, FERA marked the beginning of alliances between foreign and Indian houses, such as Tata-McGraw Hill, Wiley Eastern, Prentice Hall of India, Affiliated East-West Press, Sage Publications Inc., and Penguin 5

Firms like Coco-Cola, which did not want to comply with the policy, withdrew from India, and re-entered the nation with the liberalization policies of 1991.

The Transnational Publishing Industry  91 India (T. Singh 2006: 56). Such mergers also brought about a shift in management, which created a new publishing space for Indians writing in English. With Indians replacing their British and American counterparts as managing editors, American and British presses finally ventured beyond the reprinting and importing of foreign books, and turned towards domestic publishing (ibid.). Rupa & Co., founded by D. Mehra in 1938, also emerged in the 1970s as a leading publisher of Indian writing. Their author list includes Bharati Mukherjee, O. N. V Kurup, Keki N. Daruwalla, Anurag Mathur, Rajni Kothari, Mohit Sen, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Sitakant Mahapatra, Prem Shankar Jha, and O. V. Vijayan. Two publishers of this period, Ravi Dayal and Tejeshwar Singh, deserve special mention because it was under their leadership that a space for academic publishing in India was created and British presses such as Oxford University Press (OUP) and Macmillan evolved into publishing houses that finally began to serve the interests of the writers and readers in the country where they were located. When Ravi Dayal became the managing editor of OUP, he went out of his way to search for new authors and to reach out to authors previously rejected by his publishing house, such as T. N. Madan and Irfan Habib (Karnad 2008: 73). Unlike other major transnational publishers, Dayal also published English translations of regionallanguage writings, including the English translation of Karnad’s play Tughlaq.6 In 1972, very few Indian writers were part of the Indian curriculum, but Dayal was confident that Indian writers were what Indian students needed and wanted to read, so he persuaded Karnad to publish his play. Dayal had gauged his market correctly, and when Tughlaq was introduced into the syllabus, the Kannada playwright writes, “It spoke of a world with which … [Indian] students were familiar and … universities [in India and Pakistan] turned to it with relief” (Karnad 2008: 75).7 Under Dayal, some of the authors OUP published include Khushwant Singh, Ashish Nandy, Sudhir Kakar, Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, André Béteille, J. P. S. Uberoi, T. N. Madan, M. N. Srinivas, Veena Das, Ranajit Guha, Gyan Pandey, Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, Keki N. Daruwalla, and Arvind K. Mehrotra. In order to try something different from academic texts, Dayal left OUP in 1987 and started his own publishing firm, Ravi Dayal Publishers. One of the 6

It is only recently that both Penguin and HarperCollins ventured into translation. 7 It should be noted that regional-language writers like Karnad were wellestablished in the Indian literary scene long before their works were translated into English. Their writings were also translated into many regional languages, often times by other regional-language writers.

92  What Are You Reading? first authors he published was Amitav Ghosh. Dayal’s death in 2006 was an enormous loss to Indian publishing, and almost every obituary to the publisher echoed Rukun Advani’s thoughts: Not wholly perhaps, but in substantial measure, it was Dayal who created Indian academic publishing by local academics in history, sociology, politics, economics, and literature, as well as — as in the words of Ashish Nandy — being the man who gave Indian authors and writers, for the first time, a self-respect and confidence in their own abilities that they had never before possessed. (2006)

A similar tribute was paid to publisher Tejeshwar Singh when he died in 2007. Singh started off as an editor at Macmillan and eventually became vice-president; and just as Dayal had transformed OUP, Singh changed Macmillan into a publisher of excellent Indian academic works. Impressed by his reputation and vision as a publisher, Sara and George McCune, founders of Sage, who had gone to India to form an alliance with Macmillan, entered into a partnership with Singh, and Sage India was founded in 1981.8 Like most new businesses, Sage India started small, “with two employees, a portable typewriter and a room above the garage” (“Tejeshwar Singh was known for Baritone Voice”). Committed to serving the needs of higher education, Singh endeavored to bring the best of academic scholarship to Indian students. When Singh retired as managing editor in 2006, Sage India “had grown into a company with three imprints, SAGE India, Response Books and Vistaar Publications, 150 employees, over 1,300 books and 28 journals in print” (ibid.). In addition to his duties as a publisher, Singh was also a consultant for Independent Publishers Distribution Alternatives (IPDA), a collective of eight small progressive Indian publishers,9 established to find marketing and distributing solutions for independent publishers marginalized by publishing conglomerates. Recalling Singh’s achievements, Srinivasa Raghavan writes, 8 The McCunes had also been former employees of Macmillan, before they started Sage. Sara McCune, who founded Sage in 1965 at the age of 24, along with her husband, built the firm into one of the finest spaces for academic publishing. The move to enter into a partnership with Tejeshwar Singh is particularly significant in the world of mergers and alliances, because Sage is one of the few publishers established in the 1960s, to still remain a privately owned enterprise. 9 The eight Indian publishers are LeftWord Books (Delhi), Navayana Publishing (Pondicherry), Samskriti (Delhi), Stree-Samya (Kolkata), Three Essays Collective (Delhi), Tulika Books (Delhi), Tulika Publishers (Chennai), and Women Unlimited/Kali for Women (Delhi).

The Transnational Publishing Industry  93 “By developing Indian academic publishing in the way he did, and thereby altering the way we Indians regarded monographs published in India, TS [Tejeshwar Singh], along with Ravi Dayal of OUP and a few others, gave India a new publishing paradigm” (2007). In a business environment that was rapidly being restructured by corporate rules and practices, both Singh and Dayal remained publishers catering not to corporate interests, but to the needs and interests of Indian students, authors and educational institutions. By the 1980s, India’s English literary publishing industry had expanded further, with several independent Indian publishing houses emerging, a trend which continued in the next two decades. Many of the new presses were started by women and editors who had worked for British presses. Editors who left OUP and started smaller presses include Urvashi Butalia (Kali for Women; launched Zubaan in 2003), Dayal (Ravi Dayal Publishers, 1987), Esha Béteille (Social Science Press, 1997), Rukun Advani (Permanent Black, 2000), and Arpita Das (Yoda, 2005). Mandira Sen launched Stree in 1990, and Samya in 1996, after leaving Orient Longman. Pramod Kapoor and Indu Chandrashekhar left Macmillan to start Roli Books (1978) and Tulika (1995), respectively (Datta 2008). Other independent presses include Geeta Dharmarajan’s Katha (1988) and Navayana Publishers (2003). Each of these publishers targets different markets. Presses such as OUP, Macmillan, Tata-McGraw Hill, Wiley Eastern, and Prentice Hall continue to concentrate on textbook publishing, while SAGE, Penguin, and independent Indian publishers focus on Indian authors writing in English. Inspired by Ambedkar, Navayana publishes socially engaged writers (Navayana Publishers 2009); and feminist presses publish both Indian women authors in English, and English translations of regional-language women’s writing. Echoing Virginia Woolf’s sentiment that in the patriarchal world of publishing, women need a publishing space of their own if they are to grow as writers and publishers, Ritu Menon says that it was important for women in India to start their own presses to be visible because men controlled “the levers of power” (qtd. in Datta 2008). It is important to remember that 70 years after Woolf expressed these sentiments, her arguments were relevant not only to India but also to the West. Despite their economic advantage over postcolonial countries, colonial nations have made little social progress as “free” nations as far as the rights of minorities are concerned, and First and Third World nations often grapple with similar issues today. For instance, publishing avenues for women and minority writers were limited in the West too, and it was only in the 1970s, just a decade before Kali for Women was set up in Delhi, that the feminist press Virago was established in Britain.

94  What Are You Reading? Today, the issue is not just about acquiring a room of one’s own, but keeping that room open in a competitive market dominated by large corporations. Kali for Women, unlike Virago, was founded to serve a national market, and Indian feminist presses took risks that their global counterparts did not dare take by investing very early in experimental writing and in women writers who had long been marginalized or unrecognized by the literary world. In addition to the writers mentioned earlier, Indian authors published by independent presses of the 1980s include Indrajit Hazra, Shama Futehally, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Mukul Kesavan, Rukun Advani, and Vandana Shiva, to name just a few. It is therefore misleading to claim, as many scholars and critics do, that Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, published by Jonathan Cape in 1981, paved the way for Indian writing in English to flourish. Those wheels had already been set in motion by publishers such as Dayal, Singh, Menon, Butalia, Dharmarajan, and Davidar. When these publishers entered the publishing scene in the 1970s and early 1980s, Indian book publishing was still a small-scale, highly personal enterprise, and most writers were not name-brand authors. This still holds true for independent presses. Sensitive to the needs of writers and readers, it is the aforementioned publishers who created a “vital literary environment,” which Chinua Achebe remarked could be accomplished only when the publisher operated “in the same historic and social continuum” as the writer (1975: 44). Thus, at the end of the 1980s, Indian readers in English finally had what regional-language readers had had for a long time — an impressive long list of their own authors to choose from. The 1980s became a turning point in several ways for Indian writing in English. With the gains made by Indian publishers in English and the literary success of many published authors, Davidar rightfully refers to this decade as “the richest years in the history of Indian writing in English,” when writers in English not only “established themselves on the Indian stage … [but also] found a place for their work in the annals of contemporary world literature” (1995: 146). It is also the period, nevertheless, when the success of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children overshadowed any work written before it. Described as “the forerunner of a new genre of writing from India, other Asian countries, and Africa” (Oxford Companion 1996: 448), Rushdie’s 1981 Booker Prize novel, as the New York Times review had predicted, redrew the literary map of India (Blaise 1981). Although Midnight’s Children brought much-deserved international attention to Indian writers in English, it also reduced the study of Indian writing in English into pre- and post-Rushdie categories, and drew a clear dividing line between

The Transnational Publishing Industry  95 authors who made their reputations in India and those who gained prominence abroad. According to Davidar, with the publication of Midnight’s Children, a tremendous blow was struck in the cause of Indian literature in English by a Bombay-born writer, Salman Rushdie. For the first time, Rushdie showed in his ambitious, fecund, brilliant second novel Midnight’s Children how India and its unique brand of English could be harnessed to the service of literature. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in its year of publication and was deservedly awarded the Booker of Bookers recently. Its importance cannot be underestimated. It opened up the world market to Indian writers and also proved that Indians no longer need restrict themselves to the narrow tradition of “heat and dust” novels that had until then been the hallmark of fiction from the subcontinent. (1995: 146)

One thing was clear from the accolades that the “Booker of Bookers” received: developing countries and minorities had entered the consciousness of the West. The “Other” had been discovered. Overnight, Rushdie’s status shifted from expatriate to Indian writer, and he was hailed as “the most important writer that Anglophone South Asia is yet to produce” (Gorra 1997: 4). “In Salman Rushdie,” Pritchett wrote in The New Yorker, “India has produced a glittering novelist — one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling” (1981: 84; emphasis mine). Maybe Pritchett meant that Indian history provides a perfect background for storytelling, because Rushdie lived in India only until the age of 14. In 2004, Rushdie’s ethnicity was not included in the reviews or blurbs for his first work Grimus (1975), a novel with few readers which, as Peter Kemp notes, “nosedived into oblivion amid almost universal critical derision” (1999). Grimus, written with the intention of competing for the Victor Gollancz Prize for Science Fiction, nearly won the award, but British publishers withdrew the book at the last minute, not wanting the novel on science-fiction shelves. Brian Aldiss, British science-fiction writer who, along with Kingsley Amis and Arthur C. Clarke, was on the committee that judged Grimus as the best sciencefiction novel, believes that if the novel had won the award, Rushdie “would have been labelled a science-fiction writer, and nobody would have heard of him again” (qtd. in Appleyard 2007). The postcolonial literary world would have surely continued to ignore him had Rushdie persisted in setting his novels in imaginary geographical locations around characters who were not from the Indian subcontinent. But Midnight’s Children is about India and that has made all the difference to the careers of Rushdie and other Indian writers in English.

96  What Are You Reading? India was the new global market in the 1980s. The establishment of English as the lingua franca of the global marketplace; social movements like the women’s movement and the civil-rights movement, which opened an academic environment for women, people of color, nonWestern voices, and disciplines such as Black studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies; and the elections of Margaret Thatcher in Britain (1979) and Ronald Reagan in the US (1980), whose governments pursued a neoliberal “free trade” agenda, forced Western scholars and corporations to pay serious attention to India. For global corporations, India was all about cheap labor and a huge consumer market. For publishing giants, the emergence of English as the language representing economic mobility and the most sought-after medium of education, and the fact that for over 80 years, British publishers like OUP, Macmillan and Longman had dominated the educational market, guaranteed them an Indian audience which was receptive to English-language publications and foreign publishers. Moreover, the role played by theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Helen Tiffin, and Chandra Mohanty in institutionalizing postcolonial studies as a principal discipline of research in English studies in the West shifted the literary canonical position of non-Western texts from the periphery to the center. It is within these institutional diversifications fostered by historical, political and economic changes, and the West’s recognition of Indian writers in English, that the success of Rushdie’s novel is situated. This is a context which even Davidar who was part of Penguin’s expansion plan in India in the 1980s’ forgets when he writes that Midnight’s Children “opened up the world market to Indian writers” (1995: ; emphasis mine). By “world,” the publisher means the West. There is no “world market” for Indian writers. The market that exists outside of India for its writers is only for a select group of authors who write in or are translated into English; a market that has grown even bigger with India’s economic reforms of the 1990s. The decision by the Narasimha Rao government to liberalize the economy in 1991 permitted foreign publishers such as Picador, HarperCollins, Random House, and Cambridge University Press to form transworld chains and partnerships with local publishers and firmly establish themselves in India. While in India these alliances marked a new phase in book publishing, which emerged as a mega business, in the US and Europe, the process of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers in publishing had started in the 1960s and rapidly accelerated during the Reagan era of deregulation in the 1980s. “Between 1984 and 1988,” Albert Greco notes, “there were 151 mergers, almost as many as

The Transnational Publishing Industry  97 in the entire 1960s, with 213 mergers and acquisitions in this decade” (2005: 54). Restricted by neither capital nor language, the buying and selling of firms across the Atlantic continued in the 1990s, and by the end of the century, publishing houses had shed their “national labels” and acquired a global identity (de Bellaigue 2004). For example, Pearson no longer identifies itself as a UK publishing firm, but as an “international media company,” since it also owns Viking, Penguin, New American Library, Dutton-Signet-Plume, Putnam-Berkeley, Macmillan USA, Grosset/Putnam, Dorling Kindersley, Tarcher, Jove, Ace, Addison-Wesley Longman, Prentice Hall, Que, Sams, Peachpit Press, Harper College, Scott, Foresman, Simon & Schuster education (“About Pearson”). With two-thirds of its business outside Germany, Bertelsmann now thrives on its “transnational” status with an ahistoric past. Under its umbrella are Bantam, Doubleday, Doubleday Broadway, Dell, Anchor, Dial, Delacorte, Random House, Knopf (includes UK’s Everyman), Fodor’s, Modern Library, Vintage, Pantheon, Crown, Schocken, Ballantine, Del Rey, Golden Books, Prima Communications, Fawcett, Books on Tape (the largest publisher of unabridged audio books). As for News Corporation (or News Corp.), its global image starts with its owner, the Australia-born, England-educated and US-based media baron, Rupert Murdoch. Publishing houses owned by Murdoch are HarperCollins, Access, Eos, Perennial, Quill, Basic Books, William Morrow, Avon Books, Greenwillow, and Fourth Estate (British). Spread across Australia, the UK, the US, and the Asia Pacific regions, News Corp. describes itself as the “world’s most diverse, creative, global media company” (“Who We Are”). There is little doubt that acquiring a faceless global identity helps Western corporations to reposition themselves in the market not as profit-driven enterprises consolidating their empires, but as companies creating a Friedmanian flat world, wherein all its citizens are equally empowered. More importantly, the polycentric configurations10 of global companies create the illusion that they are not hegemonic entities, and are instead democratically organized networks. Although Indian publishers are well aware of the stratified nature of these alliances, many of them see the prospect of being part of a global chain as the only solution for an industry that has long been grossly underfunded. It has been widely acknowledged that joint ventures with Western conglomerates have benefited only English-language publications 10

Transnational systems are defined by their polycentric structures, as production centers are no longer located in the country of the company’s origin.

98  What Are You Reading? because the question of globality in such transborder operations, which are first and foremost business transactions, is really a question of what is commercially viable. With English being the language of the global marketplace, partnerships were not formed with regional-language publishers or with publishing regional-language writing in mind. These deals, which resulted in a surge of Indian writing in English in the literary market and vaulted the low-profile Indian English publishing industry onto the international scene, also changed modes of literary production, and created a hegemonic bloc of publishing houses, writers and language. In the pecking order of publishers and writers, Penguin and Indian writers in English who have won international awards occupy the top spot. Founded in 1935 by Allen Lane, Penguin, a UK company, acquired its corporate status when Pearson, the London-based media conglomerate, bought the company in 1970. Penguin India’s tie-ups thus include Pearson, Dorling Kindersley, Bloomsbury, Time Warner Books UK, Faber & Faber, Ladybird, Rough Guides, as well as the Penguin Group. The Penguin Group, now located in the UK, the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and China, is only one of the operations of the publishing conglomerate Pearson. An alliance with Anandabazar Patrika, a well-established newspaper company, enabled Penguin’s expansion into India in 1986, a time when there were few avenues for trade publishing. The Indian branch began as a liaison office for importing books, with a $10,000 investment and three employees, one of whom was the 26-year-old, David Davidar, who later went on to become the CEO (Khan 2008). While at Harvard, doing a course in publishing, Davidar met Peter Mayer, chairman of Penguin worldwide, who asked him to head the new branch, just because the young man was Indian. Davidar was happy to take up the offer, but the first few years were a struggle, says the publisher, because books did not sell (ibid.). In 1992, Davidar struck gold when he convinced Vikram Seth to sign a contract with Penguin for his second novel, A Suitable Boy. The literary success of A Suitable Boy (the novel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1994) gave Penguin India enormous publicity and helped build Davidar’s reputation as a publisher. Davidar successfully courted both well-established and new writers in English, and soon authors like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Amartya Sen, Githa Hariharan, Kiran Desai, Rohinton Mistry, Shashi Tharoor, and Vikram Chandra became part of Penguin’s publications list. By the end of the following two decades, Penguin India had transformed from

The Transnational Publishing Industry  99 a company with six publications in 198711 to a multimillion-dollar industry publishing over 200 titles a year (“Penguin Books India”). Speaking of Penguin’s success, Davidar acknowledges it was a winning situation for the publishing firm because their publishing activities coincided with Indian writers becoming global superstars, “global” being the operative word (Khan 2008). The Indian publishing industry had certainly come a long way from 1936 when R. K Narayan was ready to throw his manuscript of Swamy and Friends into the Thames because he could not find a publisher; by the end of the 20th century, the issue was no longer the lack of publishing avenues for writers in English, but about competing as global players, a goal that was accomplished by the entry of a successive chain of transnational publishers following deregulation. The first transnational trade publisher to take advantage of the liberalization policies of the 1990s was HarperCollins, which entered India in 1991 after a tie-up with Rupa and Co., one of India’s largest publishers, established in 1939. The partnership, however, did not last long and their contract dissolved after two years. The publisher suffered another major loss when the Indian branch lost its 27- year-old author–editor, Pankaj Mishra, over a disagreement regarding Mishra’s choice to not secure exclusive rights to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In Mishra’s opinion, it was “the most important Indian novel since Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” and he suggested sending the manuscript to British publishers (qtd. in Bhandare 2008). Within a week, a bidding war for The God of Small Things started and publishers offered Roy unprecedented advances for her novel. It was the author who stopped the auction and decided to go with Random House. The rights for the novel were withdrawn from HarperCollins India, but not from UK — and it still remains one of HarperCollins UK’s top literary bestsellers. In India, the publisher entered into another joint venture in 2002, this time with The India Today Group, an Indian media conglomerate whose “portfolio includes fourteen magazines, three radio stations, two TV channels, one newspaper, a leading classical music label, book publishing and India’s only book club” (“Living Media-The India Today Group”). The alliance not only helped secure new writers but also attracted two former Penguin top executives, V. K. Karthika and Krishan Chopra, to join their editorial

11

Penguin’s first collection was P. T. Usha’s Golden Girl, followed by Pupul Jayakar’s Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ranga Rao’s Fowl Filcher, Shiv K. Kumar’s Nude Before God, Anees Jung’s Unveiling India, Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Arjun, and Dom Moraes’ Collected Poems (N. Roy 2007).

100  What Are You Reading? staff, which strengthened the publisher’s presence in India. Under the new editors, HarperCollins India has also accumulated an impressive list of Indian authors, which includes Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Nagarkar, Khushwant Singh, Kuldip Nayar, Nayantara Sehgal, and Tarun Tejpal. Paralleling the trajectory of British publishers that followed Macmillan into India a century ago, Random House, Picador (a Macmillan imprint), Parragon (publishers of children’s books), Hachette (formerly Little, Brown and Co.), Dennis (magazine publishers), and Simon & Schuster (a CBS enterprise) shadowed their global counterparts and also set up offices in India’s metropolitan cities. The difference between the entry of international companies during the colonial era and today is that the Indian government orchestrated the second movement. No longer seen as colonial enterprises, transnational corporations are welcomed as part of the nation’s agenda to go “global;” and consistent with development patterns that accompany global operations, the transnational publishing network benefits only a select group — those who write in English. Despite their polycentric locations, India being one of them, these business enterprises are primarily English-language publishing houses whose profit markets lie in the US and Europe, where their holding companies are based. Indian writing in English, therefore, is their prime investment, and the literary market, subsequently, saw a surge of new Indian writers in English. With the growing territorial occupations by transnational publishers, the Indian publishing world witnessed English literary production evolve into a mega-business industry, and the changes that followed included the rise of star authors, literary agents, bidding wars, and five- and six-figure advances offered to unknown writers and unwritten books in English. The age of million-dollar advances for Indian writers started with Seth’s A Suitable Boy, when his literary agent, Giles Gordon, negotiated a 1.1 million dollar deal for the book. In 1992, the author described the amount as “ludicrous,” but he now believes that his “track record” warrants a big advance (qtd. in Reddy 2005). The author received £1.3 million for Two Lives and £1.7 million for the unwritten A Suitable Girl. Arundhati Roy was the next author to be courted with a huge ad-vance in the Western world. Interestingly, in 1997, her literary agent, David Godwin, told Roy that he was sure British publishers would buy the book but was unsure if there was a market in the US for “books set in India” (Sanghvi 1997). The literary agent couldn’t have been more wrong. US educational institutions and commercial industries had already begun the process of adopting “global” visions and missions, and non-Western writers fit their newly

The Transnational Publishing Industry  101 acquired agendas; and just as in Europe, a bidding frenzy for The God of Small Things began in the US. The offers were not less than six figures. Roy eventually settled for half a million pounds and Random House. The commercial and literary success of Roy’s novel (also a Booker Prize winner) lifted both agent and author out of relative obscurity. Prior to The God of Small Things Godwin, who had been fired by Jonathan Cape, had set up his own agency, but he was broke and living off what he had sold. The god of big money transformed him into an influential agent who is taken seriously when he sends a manuscript to a publisher. Describing himself as “a literary Robin Hood,” Godwin’s goal is to see money change hands, from the publisher to the writer (Bhandare 2008). As for Roy, she might be the most well-known Indian writer in the West, and publishers have already lined up at her doorstep to snag her second novel. The author is amused but maybe not surprised that a bidding war has started for “a non-existent book” (Ramesh 2007). What is ironic is that the very systems that Roy distrusts and critiques in her political writings — capitalism and corporations — have engineered her success as an author. To her credit, the author has gone with independent presses like South End and Seven Stories to publish her non-fiction books, but it is the hint of a second novel that is causing a flurry in the publishing world. In her political writings and speeches, Roy has repeatedly stressed that the public needs to exercise agency in the age of empire. She now has a chance to follow her own prescription: “Boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe” (Roy 2005) and choose a smaller press to publish her next novel. Since Roy, a few more Indian writers in English have been made similar or bigger offers; two recent deals by Penguin that created a sensation are the $120,000 advance given to Vikram Ghosh for a trilogy, and the purchase of Ramachandra Guha’s seven-volume book on Mahatma Gandhi for $27,714 per book. Guha sees the money as “a welcome acknowledgement of the imbalance between fiction and non-fiction” (“Big time for non-fiction writers”).12 Surely, even Guha knows that getting a piece of the pie does not correct imbalances, which in any case are not between 12 Less than 50 per cent of transnational publications are fiction, the rest being non-fiction. Guha is one among other recent Indian administrators/journalists/ entrepreneurs/artists-turned-authors, such as Tyeb Mehta, Gurcharan Das, N. R. Narayana Murthy, K. R. Narayanan, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, and Nandan Nilekani, to be courted by transnational publishers, who agree that the future of the publishing market lies in non-fiction.

102  What Are You Reading? fiction and non-fiction authors, but between writers published by transnational publishers and indigenous ones, English-language and regional-language writers, Dalit writers and other Indian writers. Around the same time that Indian writers in English were being offered mega advances by transnational publishers, in Britain, a similar advance demanded by Martin Amis for his 1994 novel, The Information, created a furor in the literary circle (Lyall 1995). Amis had instructed Pat Kavanagh, his literary agent, to get him a deal for half a million pounds, but when Kavanagh wasn’t able to do so, he fired her and hired Andrew Wylie, the “Jackal” (one of the kinder nicknames he has earned for his business practices) (ibid.).13 Not surprisingly, Wylie was able to secure Amis a £450,000 advance from HarperCollins. The deal left the British literati, including A. S. Byatt, enraged, explains Peter Straus, editor of Picador, because of the traditional demarcations between literary and commercial writers. “Commerce and literature are still meant to be separate in England,” is Straus’s point of view. “If you’re writing mass-market fiction, it doesn’t matter your price: you can be as vulgar as you want in terms of money. But somehow that isn’t the same for literary fiction” (qtd. in ibid.). There is no denying that the inextricable relationship between capitalist production and book publishing has changed attitudes towards literature, but there are very few literary writers who can demand and secure four- and five-figure advances. In India, only English-language writers can demand big advances, and Davidar believes that this fosters an encouraging environment for new writers “to take the plunge” (Reddy 2008). Nabaneeta Dev Sen, however, finds it problematic to associate monetary profits and motives with writing: Since 1993 onwards [sic], I feel that money has become an important consideration. I am not saying that writers are writing for money; that is a crude and insensitive way of putting it. Who wouldn’t want to earn as much as they can if they had the ability? But in India, the whole idea of becoming rich and becoming a writer, did not go hand in hand. A writer was always one who was struggling — a struggling poet, a struggling novelist. In regional languages it is still the same way. You didn’t expect a writer to live in luxury. But suddenly we discovered that astronomical sums were associated with creative writing. Publishers were offering enormous amounts for Indian writing in English. So young people who had the creative ability, 13

Salman Rushdie also left his agent Deborah Rogers in 1987 for Andrew Wylie, who secured him an $850,000 advance for The Satanic Verses (1988).

The Transnational Publishing Industry  103 or who write in English started writing. Each one of us has at least one novel in us, but you cannot write your first novel and become a second Arundhati Roy. (2006)

Since the 1990s, the Indian literary scene has witnessed a boom in Indian writers writing in English, and whether or not these new writers hope to be the next Arundhati Roy, publishers are investing in them, hoping that they will find another Roy. In many ways, Roy, Seth and Rushdie have come to represent the pot of gold, and although the motive to become wealthy has driven people across continents, it is only with globalized capital that the idea that a literary writer can also make a fortune through writing emerged. Surprisingly, it is none other than Martin Amis who casts doubts about money helping an individual to achieve set goals. In his 1986 novel, Money: A Suicide Note, the author refers to money as a drug, an addiction that everyone willingly seeks: “Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction. The great addiction, too: we’re all addicted and we can’t break the habit now. You just can’t kick it, that junk, even if you want to. You can’t get the money monkey off your back” (1986: 354). It is evident that Amis did not want to be rid of the monkey, and neither do the new millionaires of Indian literature. The astronomical advances that authors receive and their new star power, according to Simone Murray (2008), have much to do with the rise of literary agents, who have emerged as the new powerful dealmakers between the publisher and the author. Prior to the publishing mergers of the 1980s, editors were the negotiators and mentors for many authors; they were also the people who controlled and made publishing decisions. But with the corporatization of the publishing industry, “it became a question of two businessmen, agent and publisher negotiating, while the editor-and-author relationship with the publisher [became] more and more removed,” says John Tebbel (qtd. in Goldman-Price and Pennell 1999: 6). Large publishing firms also have a multiple editing process, and it is not uncommon for an author to be contracted with one editor but to often times have moved through four or five editors by the time her/his book comes out. In a business environment that is continually changing and being driven by rational economic decisions, agents, Murray (2008) points out, slipped into the vacuum and became the constant point in an author’s life. They now serve as the essential intermediaries between the writer and the publisher and their role includes advising, editorial work, securing the best contractual terms an author can get for her/his work, and managing book rights (ibid.).

104  What Are You Reading? The growing relationship between the entertainment industry and book publishing has given rise to agents such as Paul Levine, who had been practicing entertainment law for 27 years before he started a literary agency which specializes “in the representation of book authors and the sale of motion picture and television rights in and to books” (“Literary Agent Leverages Literature”). Examining an agent’s role in controlling trading and rights, Murray notes that the literary agent is “no longer seen as just a back room presence or an author’s quiet adviser, but a force to be reckoned with” (2008). It is agents who have pushed up the asking price for a book, and although publishers are irked by this situation, they are not entirely unhappy because unsolicited manuscripts now go through agents, freeing up time and resources for the publisher. Today, agents drive the sales by sending manuscripts simultaneously to different publishers, waiting for the best offer. There’s a Faustian arrangement here, but authors have voluntarily signed up for this deal, because both agents and transnational publishers offer them the possibility of fulfilling their wishes. Having changed the old school of thought that big money couldn’t be made by literary writers, many gate-keepers of contemporary publishing, such as Andrew Wylie, Giles Gordon and David Godwin, have become media celebrities. And it is no coincidence that Indian authors who get big advances and media attention are represented not by Indian but by these Western literary agents.14 As Ritu Menon says, “What makes a writer successful in the literary marketplace today, is a powerful literary agent located in the UK or US — whether that writer is Indian, African, British or American, male or female” (2008). Like transnational corporations, the territorial associations of European and American agents give them an advantage over Indian literary agents to negotiate transnational deals, and they help Indian authors bypass national borders. With the entry of foreign agents into India, book auctions have become commonplace. Chief editor of HarperCollins India, Karthika, recalls that earlier agents were happy if a publisher wanted a manuscript by an Indian author: “Now they say, ‘you want it, wait, let’s see who else wants it’” (qtd. in Reddy 2008). 14

The Indian client roster of some of the Western literary agents are: Gill Coleridge (Ramachandra Guha), Barney Karpfinger (Amitav Ghosh), David Godwin (Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai), Andrew Wylie (Salman Rushdie and Nandan Nilekani), Mark Parent (Tarun Tejpal, Suketu Mehta, Kiran Nagarkar, Pankaj Mishra, Rana Dasgupta and Gurcharan Das), Cathryn Summerhayes (Arvind Adiga), Giles Gordon (Vikram Seth), Jenny Bent (Vikram Chandra).

The Transnational Publishing Industry  105 European and American agents recognize that India is a new betting market, but none of them accepts offers from indigenous publishers. Marc Parent, French publisher and literary agent, admits that Indian publishers approached him with “pre-emptive” bids for Tarun Tejpal’s second novel, The Story of My Assassins (2009), but he chose to auction the book in order to get a lucrative deal (Reddy 2008). Only transnational publishers have the capital to make big offers, and the two top bidders in India were Penguin and HarperCollins. In Tejpal’s case, HarperCollins won the bid for about $50,000. Cathryn Summerhayes also would not “bite” when offers were made for Arvind Adiga’s White Tiger. A heated bidding war ended with HarperCollins winning again after Penguin withdrew (ibid.). The fact that Tejpal’s first book was not a commercial success or that Adiga was a first-time author did not discourage agents who have seen similar unknowns like Rushdie, Seth and Roy metamorphose into literary stars. Parent claims that publishers who sign up new Indian authors “are no longer looking for validation from the West before deciding whether to buy a book or not” (qtd. in ibid.). Parent is either reluctant to admit or just ignores the fact that had Indian writing in English not been validated by the Western literary market, even he would not have ventured into India. The motivating force that draws foreign agents and publishers to India, as it did colonial merchants, is undoubtedly capitalism. As Marx described it, it is “the need of a constantly expanding market for its products [which] chases the bourgeoisie” to nestle, settle and establish connections over the entire surface of the globe (1848). The growth of Indian writing in English in the literary world market and its inclusion in the annals of world literature are but accidental consequences of these capitalist enterprises. Even the concept of world literature, Marx pointed out, is a result of market expansions: The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal

106  What Are You Reading? inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (Marx 1848)

Although the phrase “world literature” suggests a sort of an ecumenical space free of hegemonic divisions, the fact that the canon of world literature is constructed primarily around European-language texts or translations into European languages, produced by transnational publishers, tells us that while certain kinds of hegemonic boundaries have been broken down, new ones have also been carved. Jan Art Scholte calls the new territory carved by globalization the “supraterritory,” which is a global space where “territorial distance and territorial borders” have been relatively erased by advanced technologies, globalized capital, transterritorial industries, and transnational networks (1997: 431). However, this does not imply that the supraterritory is not territorialized, since the forces that enable deterritorialization have also created a new boundary around the supraterritory, thereby limiting participation in this space to only a select group of actors around the world. Amazon is an example of such a supraterritory. Headquartered in Seattle, this wired world is a cyber-space retailer of a vast array of commercial items, not affiliated to any particular production industry, with shipping locations in every continent. On the surface, Amazon presents the illusion that it is possible for anyone located anywhere in the world to be a buyer and seller on Amazon since activities on this site are not constrained by territorial frameworks; however, the new restrictions come in the form of the prerequisites an individual requires to be a member of Amazon — literacy, a computer, an Internet connection, and capital. Addressing these new systems of control in their theory of reterritorialized deterritories, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari demonstrate in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1980) how these territorial shifts have also transformed the process of book production. Deterritorialization, the authors point out, which is always accompanied by reterritorialization, is fundamentally rooted in the idea that older organizational structures are no longer the optimum arrangements for expansion and they are dissolved in order to inscribe new ones (ibid.: 54). For instance, it is more commercially viable for a corporation such as General Motors to free its production units from its domestic labor force (the US), and by reterritorializing their factories “wherever labor costs, taxation rates, regulatory frameworks and other variables are most favorable to them,” both labor and production not

The Transnational Publishing Industry  107 only become mobile but also more profitable (Scholte 1997: 434). Deterritorialization can therefore be defined as a process of delinking activities from fixed territories. Territories, nevertheless, are still important for both marketing and production, and advantaged by deregulation policies and global capital, corporations can choose the countries in which they wish to locate and relocate. An example of this new de/reterritorialized corporation is Penguin. No longer identified as just a UK-based company, the publisher is regarded as a “worldwide” corporation since its locations are spread across the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and China. This polycentric configuration has made it possible for books, like other commercial products, to be produced, designed, translated, and marketed across the world. Thomas Friedman views this decentered business model, which allows authors and their works to bypass national boundaries and permits a reader in the Czech Republic or Japan to pick up a copy of a book the day it is out in print, as one of the 10 flatteners which levels the playing field between people of the global North and the global South. Other flatteners, such as the Internet, software, diverse workforce, and out-sourcing, make it possible, says the journalist, “for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world” (2005: 8; emphasis mine). Friedman’s myopic perception of transterritorial communications and operations which ignores the vast majority of the world’s populations for whom this wired, technical, corporate world holds little meaning, and also overlooks the socio-economic disparities between those who control the transnational network and those who are a part of it, is the central issue surrounding contemporary discussions on globalized literatures. If the global visibility of Indian writers is a significant consequence of de/reterritorialized corporations, its most adverse effect is the hegemony of these corporations as the prime global producers of Indian writing. Every sector of international book production, from outbidding indigenous publishers for book rights to dominating marketing activities within and outside national borders, is controlled by transnational publishers who are backed by global capital and are part of transworld publishing chains. Faced with the option of serving a domestic or a world market, many independent Indian publishers such as Ravi Dayal, Zubaan, Yatra, Tara, Mapin, and Roli Books have chosen to team up with their transnational counterparts in order to reach a

108  What Are You Reading? wider audience. Considering the “unequal muscle and economic power against the biggies,” Zubaan’s publisher, Butalia, views collaborations with “the big guns” as necessary practical arrangements (2009). The publisher dismisses any apprehension that these mergers signal an end to independent publishing, but at the same time admits that deregulation, which “is skewed in favour of the large publisher,” has left smaller houses struggling “to keep hold of their staff and their writers” (ibid.). The founder of Tara, Gita Wolf, also affirms that “surviving in Indian publishing is tough,” and only tie-ups with US and UK firms “will bring in the money” (qtd. in V. Roy 2002). These publishers agree with Emily Apter’s observation that distribution problems remain “an insuperable impediment to transnational exchange” (2006: 98). Despite an abundance of fair-trade literature produced by Western academics encouraging direct networking with producers in developing countries, there has been little initiative to implement policies in their institutions facilitating book acquisitions directly from publishers in developing countries. Universities have deals with bookstore chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, or allow independent purchasing of course texts only through sites like Amazon, so unless Indian publishers have an arrangement with these transnational sites, the authors they publish do not make it into course lists. So, although territory in the traditional sense of geographically identifiable locations no longer prohibits Indian authors from being read outside of their borders, it is misleading to believe that literature itself is no longer territorialized. In today’s deterritorialized world, the new territories in English studies are defined by language, agents, publishers, and academics. Several critics have pointed out traceable connections between the rise to stardom of a select group of Indian authors and economic structural changes, particularly when US corporations cashed in on new markets and new writers. Modes of cultural production, commodification of texts, star authors, the death of the author and of disciplines, and the business of books are therefore some of the topics of research examined by academics in the last decade. But what is the role that Western academics themselves have played towards creating these concerns that they critique? Since “a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (Damrosch 2003: 4), the issue is as much about academic practices as it is about the publishing industry. Alongside transnational agents and publishers, academics are some of the most powerful cultural gate-keepers defining Indian literature in the West. After all, as Djelal Kadir notes, “literature

The Transnational Publishing Industry  109 is a product of practices with identifiable practitioners and definable consequences” (2004: 2). While the fact that transnational productions have become the prime source for acquiring literary texts partly explains why a selective group of Indian writers constitute the literary canon in the Western academy, another explanation is that for many Western scholars, their entry into the field of postcolonial literature began post Rushdie or post Roy. As we saw earlier, by the 1980s, the Indian publishing industry had significantly addressed the lack of publishing outlets for Indian writers in English. Yet, except for the triumvirate of Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan, and a few other writers such as Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, Nayantra Sahagal, and Bharathi Mukherjee, Western academics remained blissfully unaware of the growing body of works published prior to Midnight’s Children. Even writers like Shashi Tharoor, Shashi Deshpande, Allan Sealy, and Upamanya Chatterjee, who are now included in the postcolonial literary canon, entered the Western consciousness only after the era of big-cash advances and international prize awards, leading postcolonial critics such as Spivak, Dirlik, Ahmad, Lazarus, Huggan, and Ghosh, amongst others, to turn the critical lens towards examining the close relationship between postcolonial studies and global capitalism. This critique, however, also implicates these very scholars, who like Rushdie, Seth, Roy, Mistry, Lahiri, and Chandra are also published (and located) in a similar privileged capitalist terrain.15 With First World and transnational publications dominating the canon of postcolonial studies, there is little chance of scholars and writers published in non-Western and non-corporatist spaces being read in the Western academy. Although the work of multicultural US scholars and the inclusion of texts by feminist, minority and non-Western writers, as Gauri Viswanathan points out, “has forced the field of ‘English’ to rethink its accepted parameters,” it has not deterritorialized “the national implications of English literature,” because English studies, like the subaltern, is linked to geographical, socio-economic and institutional positioning (1996: 57). For Indian writers in English, their language alone presents them with the possibility of being located within the curriculum of English studies, and a transnational stamp guarantees that positioning. The perks that accompany an alliance with a publishing empire cannot be undermined, especially for first-book authors seeking a 15

If Rushdie is the most referenced postcolonial writer, then Spivak is the most referenced postcolonial theorist.

110  What Are You Reading? larger audience. Young writers will affirm that being published by a transnational firm “is the beginning of a successful career,” says Shashi Deshpande: It also means a quicker recognition in India: the writer becomes visible and the writing given significance which one has to struggle for years to get, if published in India. And, our dependence on Western approval ensures that a favourable review by a Western critic catapults a writer into a different category. Indian writing in English has the dubious honour of being a literature in which recognition outside the country of its origin matters most. And therefore the caste system in Indian writing in English, writers published abroad having a higher status, as a recent literary festival in India made very clear. “The Empire strikes back” has become a phrase loaded with irony; there is now a larger empire of money out there. (2007)

It is our quest for this new empire which has made society “surrender to the logic of corporatism,” writes Douglas Rushkoff in his most recent book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (2009b). Yet this established writer chose Bertelsmann’s Random House to be his publisher. “We need corporations to navigate through a corporate world,” was his response when he was questioned about his choice (Rushkoff 2009a). For two decades Michael Moore has also critiqued corporations, but even he sought out Paramount to produce his film Capitalism: A Love Story, despite the fact that he has a guaranteed audience regardless of the production company. The critiques presented by Moore and hundreds of other scholars and writers about lives being restructured by capitalist enterprises are imperative to an understanding of the diminishing control individuals have in constructing alternatives to conglomerates, but isn’t there an onus on artists, academics and publishers, who have the power to not only “recount the story of how life became corporatized,” but also to do something about it, as they advocate (Rushkoff 2009b: xxv)? Is it possible with “the lines of contact between imperialism and decolonization on the one hand, and the march of world capitalism on the other, constituting the most encompassing crisis of narrative today . . . [to produce] plausible stories so business can go on as usual”? (Spivak 1999: 340). The response is a resounding “yes” from writers such as Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Caroll Oates, Studs Terkel, E. L. Doctorow, and Erica Jong, who protested the editorial censorship of Pantheon’s titles and the buyout of Random House by Bertelsmann in 1990. In letters sent to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Robert Pitofsky, both the Authors Guild and Writers National Union voiced their concerns about the effect that the corporatization of the publishing industry would have on literature and authors. “Writers must be able to market their works without fear that a worthy manuscript

The Transnational Publishing Industry  111 that offends the political sensibilities of one publisher cannot find a home elsewhere”(“Authors Send Warning”), read the letter from the Authors Guild. Particularly remarkable about this solidarity of writers is the fact that many of them boycotted the giants and took their work to independents. Kurt Vonnegut left the Bertelsmann group and went with an unknown independent press, Seven Sisters, which was started in 1995; and all, except two, of the hundreds of authors André Schiffrin published went with Schiffrin’s New Press, established in 1992 after he resigned from Pantheon (Goodman 2007). In the wake of contemporary large-scale international publishing mergers, alliances and takeovers, the anxieties that writers expressed in the 1990s about free speech, the commercialization of literature, and the lack of diversity have only grown. Nevertheless, the support of Vonnegut and other writers offers a beacon of hope for the bookpublishing industry, for independent publishers, and for literature to coexist in a corporatist world. But it also makes a statement: writers need to take a stance if they believe that literature is not just tied to economic gain. In India, although much has been achieved since the early years when the monopoly of British publishers seemed impregnable, solutions to address the economic and dissemination problems that have always beleaguered the Indian publishing industry have taken the form of endorsing the current monopoly of transnational publishers. It is laudable that some writers can command million-dollar advances, and some publishing houses have grown into billion-dollar industries; and the natural inclination is to celebrate the success of this small group. But to claim that the Indian literary scene has expanded in the global marketplace is incorrect, says Ritu Menon, mainly because it only pertains to work produced in English. None of the other 21 languages in which significant literary production takes place, is represented. As such, its impact is felt primarily on the English language market, and its main beneficiaries are multinational publishing houses. (2008)

Writer Amit Chaudhuri agrees with Menon’s point of view that “the literature of communities that are not directly linked to globalization,” gets little attention and wishes “Indian writing in English were less triumphant” (qtd. in Phalnikar 2006b). On the other side is Vikram Seth who, blindsided by his own position of power, wishes “more writers would fight for a big advance” (qtd. in Reddy 2009). I wish the triumphant million-dollar award-winning Indian writers would take this opportunity to publish with independent Indian publishers who are struggling to compete with their transworld counterparts.

112  What Are You Reading? The core of the issue here is not about corporate and non-corporate publishers, but about socio-economic disparities enhanced by global capitalist structures. In the Indian publishing world, there is clearly a wide gulf between supraterritorial and territorial writers and publishers. Outside the world of letters, there is a starker contrast between the 26 per cent of the Indian population who live on less than $1 a day and the richest 36 Indians who are worth $191 billion. Gurucharan Das, author of India Unbound and former CEO of Procter and Gamble, is emphatic that India’s billionaires are an inspiration — they “let us believe we can make it” (qtd. in Perry 2004)! A similar logic is used to argue that the millions a few Indian writers in English have made is an inspiration for others to take up the pen. But those who propagate this idea, implying that individual successes can evolve into a systemic pattern, completely dismiss the reality of hierarchical orders and social inequities and promote a false and abstract notion of a levelplaying field. Putting the issue in perspective, Pankaj Mishra (2010) points out that an individual’s location in society largely determines his success. Writer-columnist Chandrabhan Prasad connects the dots even further: “Amartya Sen could win the Nobel prize because more than four generations of his family were literate. People who are first generation literate like us don’t even inhabit the same universe as winners of Nobel prizes” (qtd. in Sagarika Ghose 1998). For brief moments, writers from polarized worlds coexist on a common platform as artists, but when the dominant producers of the literary canon are representatives of hegemonic institutions and practices, only a few “earn the institutionalized consecration of academics and official honors, as well as money” (Bourdieu 1993: 84). Amis (1986) suggests that an individual is deprived of free will since he is enclosed in a capitalist world where money is the motivating factor, but Gramsci (1978) reminds us that the sanction of hierarchical structures is dependent on the relationship between dominant groups and their audience — and the latter is equally accountable as those in power for maintaining the status quo. Like Amis, scholars, writers and readers indulge in moral outrage against the pervasive nature of capitalism in fictional worlds, but seem reluctant to actively do anything about or beyond it in their own lives. If we cannot connect the political and social functions of literature to practice, we need to ask ourselves: what purpose do elegantly fictionalized stories about unequal worlds serve?

J

4

India Shining: Territories and Translation I hope the Indian market grows large enough to absorb our literary output and enthusiasm. Right now it doesn’t – we still look westward for our markets, our advances and for approbation. — K. R. Usha

There is an abundance of literature on translation activities: the role of the translator; aesthetics, functions, and the limitations of translation; and the relationship of culture, power and capital to language and translation. Also widely available are theoretical models suggesting ways to address some of the problems surrounding translation, particularly unequal literary exchanges. To further an understanding of these discussions on inequities within and outside the literary world, this chapter focuses on the opinions and perspectives of writers and publishers on translation, representation, the homogenization of literature, the domination of a monolingual culture, and the production of the “global.” I draw from published interviews of writers and publishers, and also from my interviews with Ammu Joseph, C. K. Meena, K. R. Usha, Geetanjali Shree, Shashi Deshpande, Anita Nair, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, late Mallika Sengupta, Mahasweta Devi, Nongthombam Kunjamohan Singh, Heisnam Kanhailal, Ratan Thiyam, Ritu Menon, and Simon Prosser. In an effort to retain their voices, I have avoided paraphrasing excerpts from their interviews. “For me, fiction can only be written in Malayalam, however underexposed the language is,” Malayalam writer O. V. Vijayan tells N. S. Madhavan1 when asked if he would start writing in English (qtd. in Madhavan 2005). To the same query, Rajasthani poet and playwright Arjun Deo Charan replies that writing in his mother tongue is important to him because thought comes in that language. And nowadays there are more readers for regional writers. For instance, there are more readers for Bengali, Marathi 1

Madhavan is also a Malayalam writer.

114  What Are You Reading? and Malayalam than English in their respective States. It is the strength of the regional languages that has forced the world to come to our doorstep. (Qtd. in Salam 2008)

An explanation is also sought from Hindi writer Geetanjali Shree for writing in Hindi: [M]y exposure as a child to the Hindis spoken by people from different regions, classes, professions — from the classical to the colloquial, from the humdrum to the poetic — made it a richer language than English. The educated, sober, middle-class, well-mannered English which we learnt in school was one-dimensional. The realisation, much later, that in the contemporary world Hindi was “politically” weaker in comparison to the more “snobbish” and market-affluent English, made me happy with my decision. The challenge of writing in Hindi seemed that much greater. Both these factors have led to my choosing — or being chosen by — Hindi. (2011)

The language question is also raised with English-language poet, writer and translator Meena Kandasamy, who believes that the query is posed to her because “English, a language of privilege and (within India) a status symbol” is not associated with Dalit writers (qtd. in Anand 2011). However, regardless of caste, region and language, no writer is exempt from this line of questioning. In almost all interviews, Indian writers are asked to justify their language choices. The contentious and competing spaces languages occupy in India have particularly led Anglophone writers to think that their loyalty towards the nation is questioned for writing in English: We have to just stop feeling guilty. It is time we realised that English is an Indian language as legitimate as any other regional language. Of course, it has an urban, middle-class, elitist ring about it. So, rather unfairly, all the writing in the language also gets classified as that. But the content is our experiences in our milieu. Instead of feeling guilty, we have to think of ways of writing our experiences in English . . . But regional language writers tend to be very cutting about those who write in English. That puts English writers constantly on the defensive. (K. R. Usha, qtd. in Bageshree 2009)

Kiran Nagarkar, an acclaimed Marathi writer, who also writes in English, would attest that Usha’s observations are accurate. In his address at the Sahitya Akademi award presentation,2 Nagarkar told the audience that although he had sent reviews of his first English-language novel 2

Nagarkar won the award for his English-language novel Cuckold in 2000.

Territories and Translation  115 Ravan and Eddie to Marathi newspapers and publishers, and interviews were conducted, nothing was published. The Marathi audience, he felt, was letting him know that he had committed “a crime” and “had broken a covenant” with his people for writing in English. While congratulating the writer for his award, a Marathi publishing editor asked Nagarkar: “Why don’t you write in Marathi any longer?” (qtd. in Sadana 2007: 308). These queries and responses illustrate long-existing language, class and caste tensions in India, and also indicate more recent pressures on Indian writers brought on by the disproportionate international visibility between English-language and regional-language writers. The issue of visibility underscores concerns that Indian writing in the West is largely represented by English-language authors. A general opinion held by writers, critics and publishers is that the translation of regional-language writing into English could resolve this problem. Yet we know that translation work from English to Indian languages and vice-versa has been going on for decades in India. Many writers, such as O. V. Vijayan, Krishna Baldev Vaid, P. Sivakamy,3 Girish Karnad, and Manoj Das, have also provided English translations of their works, but except for books originally written in English, translations have not received the kind of international critical attention and acclaim awarded to Tagore’s English translation of Gitanjali. The issue of visibility, therefore, is not so much about translation as about the economic viability of certain books, authors and languages. India’s long history and its complex multilingual, multicultural and socioeconomic structures defy any identification of Indian literature within a particular literary tradition. Bilingual writers such as T. P. Kailasam, Kiran Nagarkar, A. K. Ramanujam, Rajeevan Thachom Poyil, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, and Arun Kolatkar, who all write in English and an Indian language, also pose a challenge for someone attempting to categorize Indian writers linguistically. In Western renditions of Indian writing, however, the body of its literature that largely gets represented is Anglophone writing and a few English translations. Although a few translations of Indian-language texts are included in courses, the number of translated books available in the West is negligible since “translation accounts for only 2 or 4 per cent of books published in the United States and United Kingdom” (Pym and Chrupala 2005: 27). With the increase in transnational publishing activities, debates about constructions of a canon of Indian writing have further intensified in recent years. 3

Sivakamy’s Pazhaizhana Kazhidalum (1989) is the first Dalit Tamil novel written by a woman.

116  What Are You Reading? Indian writers agree that today there are more Indian writers included in Western literary courses, but the concern is that only writers who have gained international success get featured in the “post-liberalised avatars of literature” (Kothari 2008). Addressing scholars in the West who teach Indian writers, Bengali writer Nabaneeta Dev Sen remonstrates: Those of you abroad, who teach Indian literature, will only teach Indian literature in English because that is what is accessible, that is what is available. And that makes me sad and angry. It makes me angry because Indian literature is now confined outside India only to Indian writing which is written in English, published in English, and if possible published outside India in English. If I am outside India, and if I am trying to look for Indian literature, and I go to a shop, and if I go to the section which has Indian literature, I will only find Indian literature in English. I won’t find anything in Hindi or Tamil or Marathi or Bengali or Kannada. We might find Girish Karnad, and for that, I’m glad. But we will mostly find Indian writers who do not write in any regional language, but who write only in English, either outside India or inside India, published mostly outside India. That way they are available; they are accessible and they are already on a plateau where they do not need to be translated. (2006)

Sen’s views are supported by English and Malayalam writer Rajeevan Thachom Poyil, who points out that European, Chinese, or Latin American writers did not gain their reputations because they wrote in English but because we read translations, and yet this does not seem to be the case with Indian literature: [T]he Indian writers who are known outside India are only the ones who write in English, be it Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth or Amitav Gosh. I am not underestimating the quality of their works. But, at the same time, there are equally good, perhaps more outstanding, writers in the regional languages, like Mahasweta Devi in Bengali, Asokamitran in Tamil and Uroob in Malayalam. I think there ought to be conscious initiative to translate such writers into English and other international languages. (“Three questions”)

This disparate representation of Indian writers was also an issue that concerned Rushdie in 1991. In his edited collection Imaginary Homelands (1992), Rushdie wrote that the focus on English “distracts attention from much else that is worth our attention,” and despite all the major work done in regionallanguage writing, there is little interest in these writers. “Indo-Anglians seize all the limelight. Very little is translated; very few of the best writers — Premchand, Anantha Moorthy— or the best novels are

Territories and Translation  117 known, even by name” (1992: 69). Rushdie’s concern, however, did not seem to last very long, and just five years later, the writer negated his own observations, claiming: The prose writing — both fiction and non-fiction — created in this period [1947–97] by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 “official languages” of India, the so-called “vernacular languages,” during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning “IndoAnglian” literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. ( Rushdie and West 1997: xiv)

What were the changes from 1991 to 1997 that might have caused Rushdie to change his perspective? The triumph of capitalism? India’s adoption of liberalization policies? The national and international critical appreciation and commercial success of Midnight’s Children and a few other Indian Anglophone works? The shift of nomenclature in literary studies from Commonwealth to Postcolonial Literature? Or is it simply that regional-language writers are no longer worthy of Rushdie’s attention? It is not an issue of being “politically incorrect,” as Rushdie argues, to say that “there are no major writers working in those [Indian] languages to compare with the writers working in English” (qtd. in Hitchens 36). It is incorrect and it is clear that the author is indifferent to the political implications of his statements. As Nabaneeta Dev Sen points out, we have heard this before in the voice of Macaulay (1997: 4), and Rushdie seems to be continuing a colonial tradition of constructing and controlling the “Other” through vacuous literary claims. Making sweeping assumptions about regional-language writing, Rushdie says: The besetting sin of the vernacular language [writing] is parochialism. It’s as if the twentieth century hasn’t arrived in many of these languages and the range of subjects and the manner of the treatment of them is depressingly familiar: village life is hard, women are badly treated and often commit suicide, landowners are corrupt, peasants are heroic and sometimes feckless, disillusioned and defeated. The language is a kind of Indian equivalent of what, in the Soviet Union, was called “Tractor Art.” When the attempts are made to take notice of some of the developments in the rest of the world, the clumsiness is sometimes embarrassing. (Qtd. in Hitchens 1997: 36)

Once again, Rushdie nullifies his own defense against generalized critiques that ignore the diversity in Indian writing, and also misrepresents the issue. The fact that Indian writing in English has broken

118  What Are You Reading? “into world literature” is not contested. The problem lies in Rushdie’s idea that it is Indian writers in English who have made it possible to hold a conversation with the world (qtd. in Hitchens 1997: 36). This not only suggests that English alone is and can be a medium of international communication, but also bestows a false autonomy on writers which denies the influences of various forces that permitted the “break-through” of select Indian writers in English. Literary canons, as lists to be taught in literature classes, certainly cannot represent all writers, but if language reflects a culture, then what is the culture represented in the concept of world literature, a field which is defined within the perimeters of the English language? Although English can no longer be associated with only colonial Britain, the center–periphery dynamics that this language promotes cannot be ignored. This was the reason that Amitav Ghosh rejected the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2001. Drawing attention to the cultural and political implications of using English as a criterion for the prize, in his letter to its administrators, Ghosh wrote: As a grouping of nations collected from the remains of the British Empire, the Commonwealth serves as an umbrella forum in global politics. As a literary or cultural grouping, however, it seems to me that “the Commonwealth” can only be a misnomer so long as it excludes the many languages that sustain the cultural and literary lives of these countries. (2001)

Paradoxically, at the same time that scholars applauded the writer for his stance, they were also celebrating the realignment of the discipline of English, from a nation-based focus to a language-centered field. Have imperialistic overtones been removed because the term “Commonwealth” has been replaced by “Literatures in English” or “World Literature?” Don’t the new terms still exclude “the many languages that sustain the cultural and literary lives” of even the US? The real curriculum battles, Gauri Viswanathan says, are not so much about the inclusion and exclusion of writers (and languages), but about how curriculum defines our understanding of the world. Our reading material, whether Western or non-Western, the scholar argues, should comprise books that indicate how traditional Eurocentric views and structures are collapsing (1996: 60). It is true that a curriculum is not simply about the canon, and today it is notably less Eurocentric. The overwhelming issue with the world literature we have, however, is its entanglement with capitalism and power. It is a problem that still needs to be seriously addressed. Like the market, the canon has been de- and re-territorialized, and outside the new territory lie a number of works that do not circulate “beyond the culture of origin, either in

Territories and Translation  119 translation or in their original language” (Damrosch 2003: 4). While First World academics recognize that the world literary system is unequal, the mechanisms and practices employed to acquire texts are of little use in understanding the innumerable changes taking place in literary systems in India. Identifying various factors that influence Indian literary production and circulation, many Indian writers point to the correlation between the kind of writing from the subcontinent that circulates in the West and imagined, diasporic, or exotic notions of India. Books that reach publication are tailored for Western readers, asserts Englishlanguage writer Shashi Deshpande in a talk given at Yale University: [T]o be published in the US, the book will have to be shaped for the American market. For example, the theme of the immigrant experience is a safe bet. Or, if set in India, it needs to be an India that is attractively different, yet not different enough to create problems for the American reader. The complexities of Indian social/cultural life are out, but stereotypes and images that this reader is comfortable with are welcome. The demands may not be so baldly spelt out (though an agent is supposed to have stated “exotica is out, global is in”), but an agent who accepts a promising manuscript will make the writer rework until it is just right for the American market. (2007)

Likewise, K. R. Usha,4 editor and English fiction writer, observes that “‘epics spanning generations and continents and histories with recognizable post-colonial resonances, stories of diasporic migrations or polemic tracts featuring oppressed communities and individuals are favoured” (2008). C. K. Meena believes that it is because her work is not “ethnic enough” that she had a hard time getting published (2007). 5 On the other hand, her counterpart from Bangalore, Anita Nair, who made “a painless and an almost dream like entry into the literary world,”6 says, “there isn’t a formula as to why some books sell better than others” (2008). But this widely read novelist acknowledges that “large advances, big prizes etc. can help put a book in the book store 4 Usha’s first novel, Sojourn (1998), published by Manas, an independent publisher, has been reprinted by Penguin, the publisher of her subsequent novels. Her second novel, A Girl and a River (2007), won the Vodafone Crossword Award 2007, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, 2008, and the Golden Quill Award, 2008. Her third novel, Monkey-Man (2010), was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary prize. 5 Meena is published by Dronequill, an independent publishing house started by Jamuna Rao in 2001. 6 Published first by a small Indian press, Har-Anand, Nair’s subsequent novels have been published by Penguin and Picador.

120  What Are You Reading? which is why some Indian writers are more widely available worldwide while others are found only in niche book stores” (A. Nair 2008). Meena’s opinion that publishers follow market trends (2007) is seconded by Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai’s agent, who told the author that “India is the ethnicity of the moment” (qtd. in Kara 2008). Nabaneeta Dev Sen agrees with these Anglophone writers that Indian literature is seen as an article of exotic merchandise: Indianness has become a commercial commodity which you can sell. And Indian literature is also selling ethnic India. I mind being sold. Indianness is now being used. I feel that India and Indianness are being exploited for commercial purposes. And it is being exploited by being written with commerce in mind, with money in mind. (2006)

Whatever suspicions all these writers might have had that it is still a fascination with the “orient” that continues to lure transnational publishers to India is confirmed by former president and CEO of HarperCollins, Jane Friedman: Fine tales are popular everywhere, but that said, there is a certain curiosity, an exotic charm that intrigues the West. We are still fascinated by Indian stories and their touch of the orient, even when it is writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, who is fairly assimilated. And we are looking for more such authors! (Qtd. in Tarafdar 2006)

Simon Prosser of Hamish Hamilton says that he is merely “looking for the best writing from the best writers around, whether from India, Canada, Australia, the USA or Britain” (2008). The question as to why transnational publishers’ choices of “best writing” are largely books by Indian writers in English remains unanswered. Analyzing the asymmetrical representation of regional- and English-language writers in literary canons, literary critic Meenakshi Mukherjee contends that since Western publishers often look for writing that includes certain words, objects and concepts popularly associated with India, there is a tendency among Anglophone writers to deliberately “essentialize” India in their narratives. Such “shifts in representation” are inevitable, says Mukherjee, especially when the audience is no longer regional. The critic suggests that the temptation for English-language authors to use “standard signifiers” could be an outcome of the “anxiety” of having to establish their “Indianness” to foreign readers (2000: 200–201). But Anglophone writers are not the only ones who are perceived as exoticizing their writings. In his essay entitled “Politics of Indigenous Theatre: Kanhailal in Manipur,” writer and critic Rustom Bharucha questions the aesthetic practices of some

Territories and Translation  121 regional-language writers and the ways culture is manipulated and produced in India for export: [T]he Orient has not been thrust on us entirely from the outside. Rather, a certain complicity among the dominant forces in our society has made its consolidation possible. If we have been represented as the Other, it is because we have allowed ourselves to be slotted in such a way. Naively, and at times knowingly, we have connived in our own capitulation for material and essentially short-term gains. (1991: 747)

Such critiques, unfortunately, have devolved into arguments about authorial intentions, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and authenticity, with writers and critics laying claims to who may or may not be “real” representatives of India. Mukherjee and Bharucha argue that writers such as Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Heisnam Kanhailal, unlike Vikram Chandra, Chitra Divakaruni, and Ratan Thiyam,7 do not edit and design identity for “exotic spectacle” (Mukherjee 2000: 183–5, 199–200; Bharucha 1991: 747). While India-based Marathi writer and activist Ganesh Devy8 asserts that “It is the regional or the so-called vernacular authors who represent the real India. My man, or character, lives in a village” (qtd. in Salam 2008), Chandra, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, responding to Mukherjee’s criticism, authenticates his own position, arguing that he too is “a regional writer” since he (also) lives in Andheri (2000). Chandra is right that the term “regional writer” is clumsy and does not reflect the deeply stratified structures of India, and that these categories are further complicated by writers who write in more than one language. It is important to note that the word “regional” merely denotes physical boundaries, borders that are difficult to dissolve because some languages are region-specific, and does not refer to particular locations (“dusty” town or villages), as the writer argues. The term is problematic when used to construct a pan-Indian identity, which is exactly what Chandra does. Defining collective identity only in terms of cultural and linguistic heterogeneities, Chandra underplays the economic, social and power inequities between different groups, and claims that “everyone” who lives in Andheri, from diamond merchants who travel to Africa, Belgium and Holland to “maids from 7 Kanhailal and Thiyam are two of the most visible (nationally and internationally) playwrights from Manipur. 8 Along with Marathi writer Laxman Gaikwad and Bengali writer Mahashweta Devi, Devy established “The Denotified and Nomadic Tribes Rights Action Group.”

122  What Are You Reading? the Konkan coast,” is cosmopolitan like him (Chandra 2000). The “anxiety of Indianness” that Mukherjee talks about is apparent in Chandra’s attempt to position himself beside other poor migrant and refugee populations of Mumbai, but the issue is not about a writer’s national or cosmopolitan identity, choice of language, or the different ways authors “extend the frontiers” of language (Achebe, qtd. in Killam 1975: 12). What critiques of exoticism call for is to pay closer attention to the various components of production (publishers, readers, capital, and academics), components which determine the value of books and influence literary canons. One of the pitfalls even in some of these efforts to challenge processes of legitimacy is that scholars seem to fall into the trap of stamping labels of authenticity. For example, Mukherjee draws a dividing line between writers who are/are not “genuine” (genuine defined as a refusal to “fall into predictable models”), and argues that “Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy may have been an international bestseller, but it became so entirely on terms set by the author, not the publisher” (2000: 183). If cultural capital, however, is one of the inescapable determinants that influences the value of texts, then the social and economic capital of all the agents and institutions involved in the production of A Suitable Boy is evidence enough that Seth, like his peers, does not operate in a condition of “total autonomy from the laws of the market” (Guillory 1995: 339). Additionally, aesthetic value judgments such as Mukherjee’s run the risk of not only marginalizing authors, but also denying that historical and socio-economic factors have shaped and continue to shape writers and their works. All writers are caught in the interplay between commerce and literature, and the struggle to disentangle the two cannot be reduced to subjective evaluations of authorial intent. The propensity to isolate a single factor to evaluate writers is most evident in discussions about translation. Assuming that the social capital of English suffices for cross-border mobility, writers, publishers and critics point towards translation as a possible solution to resolve the problem of uneven literary exchanges. This argument is misleading at multiple levels: First, not all Indian writers in English prevail in the transnational circuit; those who do are mostly authors who have received international accolades and have been published by transnational publishers. Second, there are numerous English translations already available in the market. I am not arguing against translations, but all the advantages of translation are undermined when such arguments call for only English translations. Rightly or wrongly, translation efforts even in the literary world are tied to political events and changes. For instance, as Emily Apter points out in

Territories and Translation  123 The Translation Zone (2006), it took an act of violence for the value of Arabic to go up in the US. Realizing that their monolingualism would work to their disadvantage when they (the US) stormed into Iraq, there was a scramble for translators (ibid.: 12). In India, the currency of English along with the need for international recognition seem to be the motivating factors for promoting English translation activities. We rarely get it right, says German critic and linguist Rudolf Pannwitz: “Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Greek, Hindi, English” (qtd. in Biguenet and Schulte 1992: 81). For Pannwitz, the purpose of translation is to “expand and deepen . . . [one’s] language by means of the foreign language” (ibid.). Such issues about language and the task of the translator, however, do not appear to be the main concern of transnational publishers, for whom literature and language is about expanding markets. “Western publishers,” says Urvashi Butalia, are “never slow to sense when a market is ready to open up” (2009a), and their new target, not surprisingly, is the Arab world. With its liberalized economy and an international community that has been enormously receptive towards some writers in English, India remains one of the favorite markets for the transnational publishing industry. Using the multilingual publishing milieu of India to their advantage, transnational publishers have teamed up primarily with Indian publishers producing English-language books to capture the Englishlanguage market in India and abroad. As chief executive officer of Cambridge University Press, Stephen Bourne, puts it, transnational publishers operate “under a dual-brand system where one global partner together with a national partner would tap every country individually” (“Cambridge University Press Eyes Local Allies”). This selectively “tapped” partnership, however, is not with regional-language publishers. Bourne’s plans involve setting up more offices and stores in addition to the six they already have in India, but not “entering into printing or publishing books in regional languages” (ibid.). Citing their lack of success with publications in Spanish and in other languages as an example of people not associating Cambridge with anything other than English, “it makes more sense,” he says, “to focus on work in English” (ibid.). What Bourne is really saying is that the regionallanguage market is not likely to help Cambridge recover its 3,000 pound investment in India. Like any other industry, publishing houses need capital to make investments and expect returns on their investments. If these investments are in dollars, pounds and euros, to make a profit or to break

124  What Are You Reading? even, the returns have to be in the same currency. The advantage transnational publishers have over independent publishers is that they can afford to make bigger investments on books in the hope that such investments will pay off. While presses like Cambridge recover their costs through India’s English-medium educational institutions, Penguin, Random House and others rely on “perennial-sellers’’ and ‘‘best-sellers” to make a profit. ‘‘It’s not so much the almost sure-fire bestsellers by the well-known authors,” Shira Boss speculates about investment risks, “because those cost so much to acquire and market, but the surprise best-sellers” (2007). This quest for bestsellers, says Prosser, guides his publishing choices: In the eleven years I have been Publisher of Hamish Hamilton, my rationale for buying books hasn’t really changed; I want us only to publish books which will win or be shortlisted for prizes, receive serious review attention — and I hope be read in many years to come. Obviously this sets the bar high — and we don’t always get it right — but I wouldn’t be happy with our having any other aims than these. It is also essential that the HH list is profitable, which means focusing very carefully on acquiring only what seem to us the very best books, from the best writers, and publishing them as passionately and creatively as we can. (2008)

The novels by Arundhati Roy, Hari Kunzru, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Rohniton Mistry, and Arvind Adiga became those surprise bestsellers publishers wished for, but Prosser’s response that “instinct” helps him identify books that will be successful does not adequately answer the persistent questions: Why are all the above-mentioned writers only Indian writers in English? Won’t translated regionallanguage books from India be bestsellers? Publishing translations, however, are also not Prosser’s priority. Language barriers, he says, prevent him from investing in translations: I do publish work in translation, but relatively rarely as I do want to read the work myself before acquiring it, and the only foreign language I have is French. But sometimes I am lucky enough to have read a writer already published in English in some form — such as W. G. Sebald — who we then go on to publish. As most English-language editors and publishers like (for perfectly good reasons) to be able to read the work they take on, it is harder, though not impossible, for non-English-speaking [authors] to find publishers in English-language territories. (It is similarly hard for, say, Croatian writers.) I think a good first step is for more non-English writing from India to be translated within India itself — then this writing may be picked up and published more widely in the English-language world, as is indeed starting to happen. (2008)

Territories and Translation  125 A possible solution to what Prosser says is the language impediment could be appointing editors who are fluent in non-Western languages. Yet, given the facts that transnational publishing houses located in India do have multilingual Indian editors (and still do not publish regional-language writing or translations), and that India has an active translation scene, Prosser’s explanations for his publication decisions might ring somewhat hollow. Unlike his corporate peers, David Davidar, founding editor of Penguin India, admits that the market drives his decisions and that he is interested only in English-language publications: The Indian publishing scene in 20 years will be the second or third largest in the world overtaking Canada and Australia. I’m talking about Englishlanguage publishing. I’ve heard there are about 300 million Indians using some form of English, so they’ve already taken over the US and UK, but for the publishing industry you need to use English as first language or frequently because otherwise you’re not going to go to the bookstore to buy a book. You might go to a street fair, but you’re not my market. That’s going to take a while. I think today there are 7 to 8 million Indians who use English effortlessly, so that’s about the size of New Zealand, but because you have next generation teenagers and young people learning English at the speed of light, they are going to join the market in another 5 to 10 years; this generation will continue to be the market, and there’s going to be bit of the previous generation also in the market, so from about 7 to 8 million India will go to 30 to 40 million in the space of 15 to 20 years which means it’s just going to explode. It’s already the fastest growing market in the world and it’s a huge market. (Qtd. in Khan 2008; emphasis mine)

The publisher’s excitement about the growing market in India for English-language publications is tempered by the recognition that very few English-language writers are stars and superstars, and most Indian writers remain invisible in a Western market. However, Davidar makes one glaring omission. Although English-language authors might be transnational publishers’ target source, English-language readers are not their only target audience. Seth’s A Suitable Boy, for instance, was translated into more than 25 languages, and Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998) into 15 (Hauzel 2006). Both novels are Penguin publications, but while they expend resources on translating Indian authors for international audiences, transnational publishers ignore Indian regional-language readers. The population criterion is also misleading because regional-language speakers outnumber many Western populations, a fact that Davidar acknowledges. Publishing decisions regarding language choices, in the original and in translation, therefore, seem to revolve around the value of currencies. What else

126  What Are You Reading? could have been the deciding factor in translating Roy’s God of Small Things into Finnish and not Malayalam, when Kerala, the setting of the novel, has a 31 million population, while Finland has a population numbering only 5 million? Publishing English-language texts in India also generates more profit because the price of English-language books is much higher than that of regional-language publications. Publishers need to sell at least twice the number of regional-language books to make a comparable profit with English-language titles. In 2009, at a reception organized by the Kerala Dalit Sahitya Akademi, Arundhati Roy invited the Akademi to publish a Malayalam translation of her novel in an expression of solidarity with the “the Dalit struggle for justice and equality in a society wracked by caste prejudice.” The writer made it clear that she was not being patronizing. “This is not a gift,” Roy said. “It is an invitation to enter into a working contract with me. I hope you will publish it, sell it and use the royalties from the Malayalam book to help Dalit writers to tell their stories to the world” (qtd. in R. M. Nair 1999). If, like Roy, more writers supported national publishers, and if we stopped relying on translational publishers as a prime source of texts and seeing them as arbiters of recognition, some of the tensions and anxieties accompanying literary production might partly be alleviated. In recent years, admittedly, transnational publishers have made some attempt to publish regional-language authors and translations of their books. The editors of Penguin and HarperCollins, Ravi Singh and P. Sukumar, acknowledge that they have been ignoring the regionallanguage audience, and identity shifts, they say, triggered their decision to turn to this market. According to the publishers, Indian readers are not “embarrassed” any more that they also know or only know an Indian language (qtd. in A. D. Mahapatra 2008; Gentleman 2005). This claim is debatable, but what the new development certainly indicates is that the Indian branches of Penguin and HarperCollins “now no longer shy away from identifying themselves [with] a Hindi-speaking mass” (A. D. Mahapatra 2008). Hindi writers such as Zia Imam and Vishwanath Tripathi view this shift as a positive change, particularly because of their bad experiences in negotiating contracts and royalties with regional publishers. Tripathi believes that “big publishers with a global footprint” are more “professional” and that their entry into the regional-language writing scene will “clean up the industry” (qtd. in A. D. Mahapatra 2008). Such blanket statements are unfair and undermine the efforts of hundreds of regional-language publishers who have struggled against odds to serve their audiences. Writers may get better contract deals from transnational publishers, and a few may

Territories and Translation  127 also gain international visibility, but as in the past, without Indian publishers, the majority of the writers, especially those writing in regional languages, have little chance of getting published at all. Even with their limited resources, the literary output of Indian publishers of English and regional languages is far greater than that of transnational publishers. Given the capital of the big players, there ought to be more Indian books published in the US and UK, says Chad Post of Dalkey Archive, one of the few US presses to increase its translation publications. The statistics for 2008, however, reveal that “only five works of fiction and poetry originally written in Indian languages were published in the United States. And of those five works, two were from a Tamil Nadu based publishing house” (Post 2009a). Post reasons that the dismal effort in publishing translations could be because conglomerates are unwilling to take greater risks since the stakes are higher in a “typical blockbuster-centric corporate publishing model” (2009b). Both Post and Davidar point out that when writers are paid million-dollar advances, publishers expect them to become “literary sensations,” but only about 10 per cent of the books “earn out the advances” (Post 2009b; Davidar, qtd. in Khan 2008). “It’s the way this business has run since 1640,” says Albert N. Greco, a business professor at Fordham University, and gives as an example the translation of the Bay Psalm Book. “It was a [profitable] gamble, because it sold out of the print run. And ever since then, it has been a crap shoot” (qtd. in Boss 2007).9 According to Post, such arguments by publishers about flops, successes and casino-type business models ignore the “disconnect between publishing thoughtful, long-selling literary translations and a system that thrives on the HUGE HIT and is willing to spend millions to make that hit happen IMMEDIATELY” (2009b; emphasis in the original). Shyam Sunder, senior manager of the Hindi publishing house Prabhat Prakashan, describes this process of publishing succinctly: “Books never sell. They are sold” (qtd. in Bahal 1996). At this point, it does not look like multinationals are willing to invest a million dollars on marketing an Indian-language title, or a translation. Even if they do, one has to ask if Bengali writer Bani Basu is correct in his prediction that it “would only take nepotism in publishing a notch further” (qtd. in A. D. Mahapatra 2008). In contrast to conglomerates, one of the biggest problems that plagues independent presses is lack of capital and institutional support. This adversely affects the quality of translation, says Nabaneeta 9 I would argue that the success of this first book to be printed in the US, a decade after the Puritans arrived, also needs to be judged within the context in which it was produced.

128  What Are You Reading? Dev Sen, whose advocacy for translation stems from a concern that future generations might not learn Indian languages, and would therefore be unaware of their heritage. English translations, the writer hopes, might make readers interested “to go the original and then further back to the roots. That is how we learned foreign languages. First, we read in Bangla, then we went to German. It is an old story. It can now happen the other way round” (2006). Sen does not translate her own work into English and she stopped the publication of five of her translated novels, because the translations were sloppy. Antara Dev Sen, editor and founder of The Little Magazine, an online Indian literary magazine10 that publishes a large number of translations, does not agree with her mother’s decision, and is of the opinion that a mediocre translation is better than none. Nabaneeta Dev Sen, however, believes that it is not a translation if the meaning is lost and if it doesn’t capture the essence of the original. There is no consensus on what constitutes a good translation, but most writers and critics would concur with Sen that bad translations are a result of lack of capital, trained translators, language proficiency, and effort (2006). The role that capital plays in the publishing industry is not a reality that most people want to accept, says Urvashi Butalia: As a publisher, I have come to believe that publishing does not and cannot exist in isolation in a pure realm of ideas, divorced, in some magical way, from the material world around it . . . While they may be willing to acknowledge that labour shortages and price rises of things such as paper and ink do impinge on the production of books, they are less willing to admit that such gross things can actually affect the selection of manuscripts to publish. (1993: 186)

Ritu Menon also agrees that publishing (particularly translations) is “a question of economic viability. Long gestation and slow returns are seriously inhibiting factors” (2008). In India, the publisher points out, “there is a very strong literary culture that supports regional writers, but not one that supports translations” (ibid.). Neither regional-language publications nor translations, however, make much profit. The Indian government has done its best to foster and promote Indian literature. As early as 1954, the Sahitya Akademi, a Government of India enterprise, was established to undertake publishing and translation work. It has also instituted 24 awards for books written in any of India’s major languages; and in 1989, the Akademi set up 10 Atlas is another Indian literary magazine that publishes translations from Indian and other langaguages.

Territories and Translation  129 a separate prize for translations. Additionally, the Akademi holds regional, national and international literary seminars, lectures and symposia to encourage literary activity (Sahitya Akademi: National Academy of Letters). Other prestigious national awards that recognize the contributions of Indian writers, translators and publishers include the Jnanpith and the Padma Shri awards. Some of the more recent efforts by independent bodies to create an encouraging climate for Indian writers, translators and translations include instituting the Katha and Vodaphone Crossword awards for translation, and setting up publishing houses such as Blaft, Katha, Women Unlimited, and Zubaan. Since 1996, Kannan Sundaram’s Kalachuvadu Publications, an independent press in Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu, has published over 300 fiction and non-fiction Tamil writers. They translate not only Tamil books into English, but also publish Tamil translations of writers such as Paulo Coelho, Stephen Hawkins and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Sundaram is no stranger at international book fairs, but he is well aware that he needs English translations of Tamil books to trade copyrights (“Focus on Copyright Sale”). A point that every independent publisher makes is that without more public patronage and support it is impossible to sustain and expand these various initiatives. Disparities in the publishing world of India are not just between independent and transnational publishers or between English- and regional-language publishers, but also between regional-language publishers located in cities and those located in small towns. Most regional-language presses in towns rely almost entirely on state governments and their readers to support them, and cannot afford to pay their authors book advances. The relationship between geographical locations and access to information creates a further divide between writers, says Sundaram, drawing attention to the fact that it wasn’t until 1994 that some Tamil authors became aware of copyright laws, prior to which they did not receive royalties on their books. Additionally, he says, most Tamil writers cannot make a living from writing, and even books by well-known authors such as Kalki are sold only for ` 10 or about 20 cents (“Spreading the Word”). For most of these writers, literary magazines remain the prime medium for publishing. We often forget the invaluable role that literary magazines have played worldwide in nurturing literatures and launching literary careers. Had the academic community been more supportive, and not privileged one publishing space over another, literary magazines and the authors they publish would not be as undervalued as they are today.

130  What Are You Reading? If we examine the careers of prominent Tamil and Malayalam writers, we find that like many authors within and outside India, they first started writing in regional-language literary magazines. Jnanpith laureates G. Sankara Kurup, S. K. Pottakkad, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, and M. T. Vasudevan Nair gained initial visibility through a Malayalam weekly called Mathrubhumi (Mathrubhumi). Sahitya Akademi award-winner Jayakanthan’s writing career began in magazines such as Saraswathi, Thamarai, Grama Uzhiyan, and Ananda Vikatan (Vaasanthi 2005). Before being published as books, R. Krishnamoorthy’s historical novels — Parthiban Kanavu, Sivakamiyin Sapatham, and Ponniyin Selvan — were first serialized in Kalki, a weekly magazine he edited (S. Viswanathan 1999). Ananda Vikatan also launched authors such as Kalki Krishnamurthy, Devan, Kalaimani Kothamangalam Subbu, and Nadodi. According to Sahitya Akademi award-winner Indira Parthasarathy, seeing his stories published in Ananda Vikatan, under the title Muthirai Kadhaigal, a series that included works by Jayakanthan, made him confident about his “ability to write”; and it was after his story “Thandhira Bhoomi” appeared in Na. Parthasarathy’s Dheepam magazine, that he “earned the credentials as a serious writer” (qtd. in V. Sundaram 2010). For Tamil women writers such as Salma, Sugirtha Rani, Kanimozhi, Malathi Maithri, Thenmozhi, and Anar, magazines such as Kalachuvadu, Uyirmai and Puthiya Parvai provided an outlet for publishing (Baskaran 2006). Even today, Tamil writers such as C. Virudhachalam (aka Pudumaippithan), Jayakanthan, Sundara Ramaswamy, Ganani, Sujatha, and Madhan continue to publish in magazines such as Kalaimakal, Jothi, Sudantira Chanku, Oozhiyan, Thamizh Mani, Dinamani, Manikkodi, Kumudam, Ananda Vikatan, Kalki, and Dinamani Kadir. These regional magazines obviously remain a sturdy vehicle for publication. Although Indian regional-language literary magazines might not have accumulated the same kind of social capital as publishing houses to be taken seriously in literary circles, their accessibility has allowed writers to connect with their audiences. Similarly, writers say that regional languages also reduce the distance between the reader and the writer. The personal space that regional languages create, however, has its drawbacks, especially for women writers. At a 2001 colloquium, organized by Indian women writers of all languages, some of the multiple agents of censorship identified by writers and publishers include the state and the street, family and society, faith and ideology, the literary establishment and the market, and language. According to these writers, one of the advantages of writing in English is that English, unlike regional languages, offers women greater freedom

Territories and Translation  131 to talk about sexuality (Storylines11). For example, referring to her poem entitled the “Emperor’s New Clothes,” Nabaneeta Dev Sen argues that it could not have been written in Bangla: When you are writing in English, you are walking into a different cultural milieu with different value systems where a joke like this translates into an image. But you cannot write this in the regional language. This was written in 1959. The idea of a constant state of erection could not be written by any woman of dignity in those days. Maybe it can be written now. (2006)

However, even today, says Tamil writer C. S. Lakshmi, women writers face the relentless scrutiny of their readers. Women are not expected to talk about sexuality and are heavily criticized if they do so (2002: 39). Although women writers in English are not above such scrutiny, a general consensus is that regional-language women writers are expected to operate only within established gender norms, religious traditions and patriarchal structures. With the bulk of Bengali writer Mallika Sengupta’s writings published in literary magazines, she had to face a lot of criticism, but did not shy away from it. “It is important for women to write about sex and sexuality,” the author said, “because literature is never complete without women’s perspective. In literature, we get mostly a male perspective as far as the issue of sex is concerned, though that could be because there have been more men writers than women” (qtd. in Sarkar and Mitra 2006). Sengupta successfully transcended gender challenges and established herself as a feminist writer, but the English language, she said, was her biggest hurdle to reach to a wider audience. According to the writer, only translations can bridge local and global spaces (2006). In an attempt to close the gap slightly, Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha edited a collection of translated writings by Indian women, Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Early Twentieth Century (1991), so that English-language readers in India and around the world could read a groups of works that had not until then been a part of the literary market. A similar effort was made by women writers and publishers 11

Edited by Ammu Joseph, Vasanth Kannabiran, Ritu Menon, Gouri Salvi and Volga, Storylines: Conversations with Women Writers (2003) features interviews with Nayantara Sahgal (English), Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Bengali/English), Dhiruben Patel (Gujarati/English), Sara Aboobacker (Kannada), Bama (Tamil), Mangala Godbole (Marathi), Rukmini Bhaya Nair (English), Volga (Telugu), Pradnya Lokhande (Marathi), Anamika (Hindi), Sarup Dhruv (Gujarati), Jameela Nishat (Urdu), Vasireddy Seeta Devi (Telugu), Ilampirai (Tamil), Shafeeq Fatima Shera (Urdu), T. Sunandamma (Kannada), and Mridula Garg (Hindi), (Hyderabad: Women’s World India, 2003).

132  What Are You Reading? who participated in the colloquium mentioned earlier. Very much aware that space is not neutral and is marked by gender, sexuality, class, and caste, a project called Women’s WORLD12 was launched to build a network of women writers; to facilitate alternate forums for women’s writing to be published; and to resist any form of censorship or threat to freedom of speech. The entry of multinationals, however, has adversely affected many of these efforts. Tracing the history of feminist publishing in her article “Dismantling the Master’s House . . . the Predicament of Feminist Publishing and Writing Today,” Ritu Menon asserts that unlike conventional publishing, feminist publishing was a platform for the feminist movement, for women writers, and for activism, but today, it’s been co-opted by mainstream presses, globalization, and hierarchies of economic and political power . . . Since the 1980s several feminist presses all over the world have either closed down or been bought by mainstream publishers; and of the three new ones that I know of that came up in the 1990s, only a couple publish more than 10–12 books a year. (2001: 183)

The presses which have been shut down or taken over by transnational publishers are only English-language publishing houses. Since the profit margins in regional-language publishing are relatively low, publishers such Ashok Maheshwari, director of Rajkamal Prakashan, are confident that they can carry on business as usual: We will be playing at different levels. They may bring big names into Hindi, but we’ll continue to address grassroots issues which our regional readers are more interested in, and that’s where we have an edge over English publishers. We’ll still sell 7,000-plus copies of books like we always have (Qtd. in Mahapatra 2008).

Because of this vibrant regional-language market, therefore, it is mostly the writers contracted by the big players who perceive their foray into the Indian literary scene in a positive light, whereas the majority of Indian writers agree with the assessment that the contributions of the transnational publishers, although significant, constitute only a very small part of the mosaic called Indian literature. The shifts and pressures in the Indian literary scene outlined thus far do not cover the various colonial, neocolonial, class, caste, and language entanglements in the field of literary studies. But even the selected 12

WORLD is an acronym for World Organization for Rights, Literature, and Development.

Territories and Translation  133 examples of inequities and power differentials between writers explored in this book illustrate why an argument about translation is deceptive if predicated on an assumption that it will gain writers international visibility. Not all Indian writers would agree with Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Usha and Meena that the visibility of regional-language writers in India is not a point of dispute. A notable difference between the emphases these writers and Manipuri writers place on translation is that for the latter, English translations are necessary not only to bridge the gap between India and the international literary community, but also to connect Manipur with the rest of India. One of the ways Manipuri poet Nongthombam Kunjamohan Singh attempts to make these connections is through his translations of Bengali writings into Manipuri. But it cannot just be one-way traffic, the writer says. More translations are required to provide greater exposure to Manipuri literature (2006). Even in a collection such as Storylines (Joseph et al. 2002), where editors have made an enormous effort to include writers from all regions, Northeastern writers are noticeably absent. One of the reasons that Manipuri writers might concur with Usha regarding translations being a secondary concern for regional-language writers is because the political battle between the Indian government and Manipur is their primary focus. They do not have the luxury of writing in a battle-free zone. For Mahasweta Devi too, literary conflicts are a non-issue since the struggle for tribal rights is her main concern (2006). Arundhati Roy is another writer who does not lose any sleep over questions about “the renaissance of Indian-English writing.” Her political activities which have taken her to small towns and villages have resulted in Hindi becoming her medium of communication. It ‘‘isn’t my language,” the writer says, and “even that [Hindi] has to be translated depending on where the meeting is being held” (qtd. in Kumar 2011). Roy’s battles are also with the Indian government. She rejected the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of political essays entitled The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2001) in 2006 as an act of protest against the government for “violently and ruthlessly pursuing policies of brutalisation of industrial workers, increasing militarisation and economic neo-liberalisation” (“Sahitya Akademi Award”). For Roy, the award was meaningless without necessary structural changes. There’s a double standard adopted by Indian writers and critics when it comes to the politics of Roy. Mahasweta Devi, Laxman Gaikwad, Ganesh Devy, Pankaj Mishra, Ashish Nandy, and numerous other writers also publicly criticize and protest various policies of the Indian government, but as we know, Roy is singled out and labeled

134  What Are You Reading? an unpatriotic dissenter. Seth’s fight for gay rights; Ghosh’s rejection of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; and the petition signed by hundreds of intellectuals demanding that Tasleema Nasreen be granted Indian citizenship might to some appear less contentious or fall within personalized perimeters of justice. Nevertheless, the political stances adopted by these writers, not unlike Roy’s, ask us to engage with issues of prejudice, constitutional rights, and myopic definitions of nationality. All discussions surrounding linguistic hegemony, the silencing of subaltern voices, uneven representation, and global forces are related to the ways communities and nations are constructed or visualized. If literary conflicts are symptomatic of larger struggles outside the world of letters, then we need to bear in mind that the problems identified by writers, critics and publishers are partly a result of locating the success and the future of India and its literature in relation to the West and cross-border activities. As important as they are, global spaces are not the only sites for literary growth. India has a vibrant literary culture that needs to be supported, encouraged and appreciated. To the question, “Where do we go from here?” I suggest we pay careful attention to the concerns expressed by writers and publishers and to the recommendations offered by English-language writer Binoo John and publisher Urvashi Butalia. Addressing Indian writers, John asks them to stop looking towards the West for affirmation and recognition: We have a history that goes back and beyond Sangam literature. All newspapers, be it in Hindi or Malayalam, sell over a million copies. Telugu and Oriya papers sell about half a million. In Malayalam, a literary weekly magazine sells over a million copies, for a readership of one into five — five million readers a week read short stories in Malayalam! Regional readership may be in pockets, but if a writer has 10 million readers reading his story, what more can he ask for? You are looking at numbers, why do you want a man in London to be reading it? Why do we assume that literature becomes big only if someone in the West reads it? . . . How many people will read my book if it is translated to Spanish, when I can have a million readers reading it in one of our regional languages? (Qtd. in Kapur 2007)

By foregrounding the numbers of readers, John also calls attention to yet another way we privilege certain languages and readers. Transnational publishers admit that they have, for far too long, ignored the regional-language audience; let Indian writers not be guilty of also doing the same.

Territories and Translation  135 On the issue of literary representation, Butalia asks academics to be the agents of change: Publishers are now increasingly aware, largely because of the work by smaller and lesser-known houses, that there is a rich literature that exists in the Indian languages. Some of this is now available in translation. Thus, in publishing terms, the conditions for change are now in place: New kinds of writing are being discovered, publishers are more interested in exploring new areas because they can see there is a market. If the stranglehold of the erstwhile colonial races is to be broken, the time is now. This cannot, however, be done by publishers alone. Change to be effective must come from within the academy, from writers and teachers, curriculum developers and publishers and students from within the so-called Third World. (1993: 188)

While John and Butalia are speaking to writers, readers and scholars in India, it is up to the literary community outside its borders to decide if they are willing to construct, imagine and teach Indian literature differently. If expanding the canon is one of the goals of English studies, readers and scholars have to start acquiring texts from non-dominant presses in and outside India. If we do not want to read only the same star authors, we must look beyond the same old star publishers. Let us remember that the 2004 election verdict against the Bharatiya Janata Party was a verdict against the party’s attempt to identify India only with its “shining” citizens.

J

Conclusion: Academic Imperialism The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator. — Antonio Gramsci

When I was sending out my book proposal, I was encouraged to send it to as many presses as possible. I was excited that a few responded positively. But for the first time, questions that are central to this book were posed to me by my colleagues: Who is the publisher? Where is the press located? My inclination to go with a publisher located in India was received with concern; their concern was for me, a junior faculty member working towards tenure. An unwritten rule, not stated in any faculty manual is that a book contract with certain academic presses legitimizes the scholar’s work and is essential for securing tenure. This rule also applies to scholarly articles, and academics who publish in journals or other publishing outlets that are not endorsed by the academic community face the prospect of being denied tenure and promotion. Threatened by these realities, junior faculty are often advised to follow the beaten path to avoid their scholarship being challenged, dismissed, or remaining unrecognized. Despite numerous critiques of academic hierarchies and invidious evaluation practices, the unfortunate reality is that imperialism remains alive and well in academia. The stratified world of academic publishing, analogous to other hierarchical social orders, is an institutionalized structure which is endorsed and accepted as normative by most academics. Theories about power (Michel Foucault), legitimation (Max Weber) and hegemony (Antonio Gramsci) are all useful to analyze academic publishing norms. In fact, all scholarship on marginalization, inequality and privilege also provides relevant theoretical frameworks to examine the subject. Academic publishing, like commercial publishing, is not apolitical, and they both gain legitimacy because of prevailing cultural and literary practices. Similar to “established classics,” articles and monographs

Conclusion  137 published by highly ranked journals and university presses also “gain a degree of protection by their cultural prestige” (Damrosch 2003: 24). The issue, however, is not just one of trying to understand disciplinary hegemony, but concerns the lack of a connection between theoretical examinations of hegemonic structures and praxis. How do scholars expect their intellectual critiques of social, economic, cultural, and political hegemonies to lead to a more equitable society when they perpetuate a hierarchical system of their own? The underlying argument present in all my inquiries questioning institutional hierarchies is that individuals first need to critically examine their own roles in systematizing unequal social orders. Legitimation of hierarchies, several theorists point out, is achieved through a consensus amongst a group of people who accept social orders as reasonable, necessary and just. Gramsci divides this group into “the governed and the governing, leaders and led,” who collectively form a “hegemonic bloc” (1971: 171). The sustenance of power structures, according to Gramsci, rests upon the capacity of the dominant group to demonstrate that their ideas serve the best interests of the people they dominate. Weber’s views are grounded in formally legitimized structures, such as democratically elected governments, and he argues that mass compliance with legitimation stems from a “belief in legality” (1978: 36). Foucault, on the other hand, saw power structures as systemic. His emphasis is less on ontology and divisions between the rulers and the ruled, and more on the pervasive mechanisms by which power “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (1980: 39). Expanding on Gramsci and Foucault, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory highlights how meaning is socially constructed, articulated and disseminated. The successful institutionalization of social orders, says Laclau, “is not a result of having proved its case in an apodictic way,” but because dominant discourses redefine systems “in a more convincing manner” (qtd. in Bowman 1999: 94). Departing from the view that the socially reproduced process of legitimation is imposed on the masses by the ruling class, Richard Della Fave identifies the locus of legitimation “within the socially generated identity of the human being — the self” (1986: 480). Linking his self-evaluation theory to unequal distribution of resources, Della Fave (1986) posits that the normative acceptance of stratified structures is a result of individuals internalizing their own positions in society. For example, the notion that those who make greater contributions are “deserving of greater rewards” legitimizes a normative code (Della Fave 1991: 22).

138  What Are You Reading? In contrast, social exchange theorists such as Linda Molm (2006) argue that individuals endorse hegemonic orders in order to obtain personal benefits from such structures. Mass compliance, therefore, not only legitimizes hierarchies, but also those individuals who support them and give them a group identity (ibid.: 24). Although writers differ in their approaches and analysis of hegemony and power, they all agree that individuals who willingly participate in legitimizing social orders believe them to be necessary and rational. It is within the theoretical framework of hegemony and power outlined above that academic disciplinary hegemony also operates, and the process of validating scholars and scholarship is governed by the same rules that legitimize social and institutional stratifications. Normative administrative assessment practices — such as rankings of journals and publishers, peer reviews, citation counts, and grants received — which are used to endorse scholarship and justify tenure and promotion decisions, also emerge from ideologies defined by “rationality” and “necessity.” Although scholars might agree with Laclau’s view that “the progress of knowledge is ‘hegemonic’” (qtd. in Bowman 1999: 94), the general consensus is that such performance measurements are the most effective means to qualify the merit of the research and its impact on any scholarly field of study. At the same time, the numerous critiques of evaluatory practices indicate that scholars recognize that the methods used to legitimize scholarship are arbitrary, subjective and fallible. These critics also admit, however, that academic procedures are a game that must be played to further one’s career, and that there is no place in the academe for anyone who does not know or follow the rules and the logic of the game (Wellington and Nixon 2005). If the game is deeply flawed (Cope and Kalantzis 2009) and no longer worth playing (Macdonald and Kam 2007b: 640), and yet we continue to play it, is it because we are caught in a professional, epistemological and practical bind? Or are we afraid that dismantling or changing quantifiable units that measure the value of knowledge might unseat us from the positions we occupy in academe? Locating the dilemma facing academics within systems that reward the quantity of publications, Mark Bauerlein et al. argue that since promotions are tied to publications, there is an “avalanche of low-quality research” (2010). Some of the suggestions they offer to increase “highquality publications” include not focusing on grants, getting “rid of administrators who reward faculty members on printed pages and downloads alone, deans and provosts ‘who can’t read but can count,’” limiting the length and number of publications required for tenure, and “making more use of citation and journal ‘impact factors,’ from

Conclusion  139 Thomson ISI” (Bauerlein et al. 2010). These professors assume that citation counts are valid empirical units to judge scholarship. Therefore, they also suggest that libraries stop subscribing to all low-cited national and international journals to counter financial strains. On the surface, these academics seem concerned about increasing administrative intervention in scholarly production, but their solutions alarmingly indicate an attempt to limit knowledge, to shut out new national and international scholars, and to appease disgruntled “established figures” (ibid.). What their argument also does not take into account is the circular logic that is used to determine the idea of “quality.” Synonymous with terms such as “premier, key, core, flagship, top rank, and top tier,” Stuart Macdonald and Jacqueline Kam (2007b) point out, the notion of quality is defined by authors, schools and journals. Quality journals, for instance, are determined by the top schools that publish them, but those schools get a high-ranking because of the journals they publish. Similarly, depending on the reputation of authors and journals, the title of “quality” is conferred on the journal, scholar and the paper (ibid.: 641). Likewise, scholars William Starbuck, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis challenge the presumption that indices such as citations and rejection rates are valid units to measure “quality” and that established peer-reviewed journals produce “high quality” papers. Citations of a scholar’s work also create a circular causality, says Starbuck, because when articles appear in prestigious journals, they “receive more citations . . . and journals gain prestige because they publish articles that receive more citations” (2005: 183). All that citations do, Cope and Kalantzis assert, is count the number of times an author or article is mentioned; they “measure academic network positions,” not the “intellectual quality or social impact of a text” (2009). It is a misconception that only prestigious journals produce quality work, Starbuck argues, for there is ample evidence to prove that all journals produce both “excellent” and “pedestrian” articles. “The belief that high-status journals publish excellent articles, whereas low-status journals publish poor articles,” the scholar contends, impedes “the development of knowledge” (2005: 197). Although the insistence on publication in top-tier journals might benefit universities in retaining their status and recruiting scholars, this practice adds “randomness into the personnel decisions of most departments and schools” (ibid.). Nick Bontis and Alexander Serenko agree that it is the projected image and prestige of a journal “rather than its actual rigor, innovativeness, contribution, and value to the field that form journal ranking lists” (2009: 18). The same circular

140  What Are You Reading? logic that ranks journals and citations also legitimizes academic presses and their authors. While academics may believe that these processes of legitimation are based on a principle of fairness, many conveniently ignore the selective application of guidelines to evaluate scholarship. Second monographs receive less scrutiny than the first, and a third does not even have to be sent to reviewers for scholars to sign a contract. Similarly, articles are solicited from well-established academics for journals, and before such articles are printed, there is little, if any, editorial involvement. The academic world of publishing, like its corporate counterpart, is about networking. If people can successfully “work networks . . . they can find their way into journals with wider circulation” (Cope and Kalantzis 2009) because even in a blind review system, editors can overrule referees (Wellington and Nixon 2005: 648). Blind peer reviews are further flawed, say Cope and Kalantzis (2009), since the “rubrics of knowledge” are arbitrarily defined by individuals who may or may not have personal agendas. For the most part, scholars perceive themselves to be collegial and benign, and defend their roles in the review and editorial process as gate-keepers, facilitators, shapers, and mediators under the argument that they help maintain quality, define the direction of fields, and stop “academics from making fools of themselves” (Wellington and Nixon 2005: 646–51). However, as Macdonald and Kam accurately note, the academic world is anything but benign, and “self-interest” has and continues to be the foremost priority of academics: No collegial responsibility deters them [academics] from exploiting their position to ensure that the indicators incline towards what the winners produce. It is the ultimate in gamesmanship to be able to control the rules of the game. Reminiscing about a golden age when academics published to improve the lot of mankind is as pleasant as it is deluding. There never was such a golden age. Academic publishing has always been ridden with selfinterest, and academics have always schemed to promote themselves . . . Publication in quality journals has become a currency, representing value rather than having any intrinsic worth, and maintained only by consensus. Papers published in quality journals are money rather than wealth; they are published to be counted rather than read. (2007a: 711–12)

While I disagree with the authors’ argument that academic writing is not intended to address and correct societal inequities, the disconnect between intention and action questions the credibility of scholars who articulately argue against inequality and marginalization and at the same time actively support hegemonic academic practices.

Conclusion  141 Given the numerous critiques1 of academic administrative and publishing practices, it is obvious that many scholars share the same ethical concerns, and do not wish to play the publishing game. So what prevents academics from adopting “a critical stance to the collective game” (Wellington and Nixon 2005: 652–53) or ending the game? In his analysis of legitimated systems, Weber observes that not everyone who adheres to established systems believes in them: “Loyalty may be hypocritically simulated by individuals or by whole groups on purely opportunistic grounds, or carried out in practice for reasons of material self-interest. Or people may submit . . . because there is no acceptable alternative” (1978: 214). Various alternatives have been proposed by scholars, yet in recent decades, the insistence on traditional methods of evaluation has only grown stronger. Young scholars are asked to provide evidence through selective acceptance rates to prove that the journals and presses that publish their work are of “high quality.” As Macdonald and Kam ask: Are we looking at a future where the ultimate “quality” journal is “a journal with a rejection rate of 100 per cent that publishes nothing at all” (2007b: 652)? If the role of scholars is to contribute towards knowledge, broaden disciplines and foster a system that is not exclusive, then they need to reconsider their own affiliations and allegiances to existing hierarchical academic practices. Educational institutions in various countries have their own local/ national hierarchical structures; however, colonial and neocolonial encounters have added to these stratifications, placing First World languages, academic institutions, practices, and scholars on the top of the academic hierarchy. The hegemonic position that the US occupies in the world has further positioned its universities, norms and scholars as the acceptable measures of evaluation. With the cards also stacked against them, European scholars have entered the debate, critiquing the influence that the US academy has on shaping disciplines. Viewing themselves as the “Other,” Susan Meriläinen et al. argue that AngloAmerican academic hegemony marginalizes Finnish experiences and silences Finnish voices (2008: 585). In Ireland, Rob Kitchin also addresses the issue of linguistic hegemony: [P]ressure is being applied to non-English writers to publish in English, the top ‘‘international’’ journals (defined by perception and citation indexes), 1 To name a few: Suresh Canagarajah (2002); Claudio Moreira and Marcelo Diversi (2010); Michel Bauwens (2006); Howard I. Browman and Konstantinos I. Stergiou (2008); Peter A. Lawrence (2008); Lokman I. Meho (2007); William Cope and Angus Philips (2009).

142  What Are You Reading? almost exclusively edited, refereed and published by Anglo-American academics and publishers, actively act as gatekeepers, disciplining and policing modes of communication, ideas, interpretation and foci that do not conform to standards set by themselves. (2005: 6)

Making a similar argument, Italian scholar Claudio Minca says: The boundaries as well as the rules/coordinates of what passes for ‘‘international’’ debate within our discipline [geography] are determined from within the Anglo-American universe. [This universe] is hegemonic precisely because it thrives on a set of concrete principles commonly recognised by the dominant part of the geographical community and endowed with an extraordinary sanctioning power towards any external infiltrations. (2009: 287)

The final irony comes in the form of criticism from the UK. Language, of course, is not an issue with them, but UK scholars are also threatened by the American domination of the publishing game and recognize that “defining scholarship just in terms of publication in ‘A’-rated scholarly journals will trap us even further” (Pettigrew 2001: 69). Although European scholars who are part of First World institutions are now claiming an “Other” status because they do not constitute the “core” (Meriläinen et al. 2008: 593) anymore or are “not getting a piece of the pie” (Spivak, qtd. in de Kock 1992: 46), they forget that even today, it is the body of work by European authors and literary theorists that forms the core canon of literary studies. It is doubtful if Gayatri Spivak would have risen to fame in the First World literary community as quickly as she did had she not translated Jacques Derrida. For decades, postcolonial nations and minority communities have unsuccessfully fought against the dominance and unassailed power of European languages such as Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Portuguese, in addition to English, which have exacerbated class stratifications in their societies. The fact that English has acquired more political and cultural capital than dominant European languages today, therefore, should not blur the reality that there is little opportunity in European universities to study or publish in non-dominant European languages. If the opposition of European scholars to the exclusive hegemony of English is an argument for plurilingual scholarship, then their own academic publications should also open up a space for “Other” languages. Moving beyond linguistic debates, these scholars also need to question the rules that fundamentally govern and limit knowledge formation, and more importantly, ask themselves why they continue to seek intellectual legitimacy through US institutions. To borrow from Foucault, the

Conclusion  143 overwhelming question facing academics is: “How and to what extent . . . might it be possible to think differently [about academic publishing and evaluation practices], instead of legitimating what is already known” (1985/1990: 9)? There have been changes to traditional publishing practices. In the 21st century, most monographs are digitized, many journals are no longer available in print but are online, and web-based scholarship is more acceptable. However, these changes have come about because of limited budgets and technological innovations, leading to an explosion of digital publishing. Other shifts, such as the increasing trend to publish in academic trade presses, are due not only to the financial woes of university presses, but also because well-established scholars started publishing with trade presses, thereby legitimizing these publishing outlets. The opening up of new publishing spaces, therefore, does not always indicate that publishing is no longer hierarchical. As discussed earlier, the entry of a large number of transnational publishers into India has only added a new layer to already existing hierarchies. Global publishers’ interest in publishing Indian literature also does not mean that a world of new opportunities has opened up for all Indian writers. Only writers who are commercially viable in the First World are contracted by foreign agents and publishers. Published by domains that have received their stamp of approval from the academic community (translational publishers are the prime source for EuroAmerican scholars for ordering course texts), these Indian writers are further legitimated when their works are acclaimed and recognized by legitimized actors such as international awards committees and First World academics. These hierarchical structures in academia continue to exist not because there is a dearth of brilliant theoretical formulations of hegemony, but because those theories emerge from legitimated systems of power, systems which even the theorists have not attempted to dismantle. Turning to one of the most influential theorists of postcolonial studies, Gayatri Spivak, I reiterate a question raised by Makarand Paranjape: Why has Spivak not published in India? If theorists such as Spivak and Bhabha “had a real stake in Indian academics,” Paranjape argues, “they would publish in India, ensure that their work is readily available here. But I am yet to find a single essay by either of them in an Indian periodical” (1994). I agree with Paranjape, and it is a question that I also pose to other postcolonial scholars in the First World, people who are genuinely concerned that the representation of only supraterritorial voices and publications is one of the crises facing postcolonial studies. Although US scholars have been successful in

144  What Are You Reading? “bringing the Third World home” (Spivak 1999: 173), they have yet to set foot in the world of Third World publishing. Indian writers in English such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Vikram Chandra have often been criticized for being NRI (non-resident Indian) writers, writing about India from a distance. Equally or even more implicated in this argument are First World postcolonial scholars whose careers have been built around discourses about the Third World, and like the represented Indian writers in Western literary canons, these postcolonial scholars are also published only by First World academic presses. The issue here is not about authenticity or what one chooses to write about, but about the hypocrisy of First World academia. Postcolonial countries like India are legitimate settings as far as First World discourses are concerned, but they are not regarded as legitimate publishing venues. With knowledge intrinsically tied to the locations from which it emerges, S. Sankar argues, it is essential that scholars “critically assess the moral orders which underwrite it” (1994: 482). Strategically framing the story of Ekalavya2 within current postcolonial debates, Sankar illustrates how “scholarship and pedagogical practice remain entangled with political practice” (ibid.). Ekalavya, a tribal prince, despite being denied access to institutions of learning and being rejected by Drona, a guru only to the royalty, masters the art of archery on his own. In Ekalavya’s mind, Drona is still his teacher, and he undertakes his study in the presence of a clay statue of Drona. On learning of Ekalavya’s accomplishment, Drona exploits the practice of guru dakshina (payment given to one’s teacher) and demands that the new scholar offer his right thumb as a fee. Ekalavya complies, but in doing so, is unable to ever use the skill he acquired. This narrative, as Sankar argues, is “about knowledge and power . . . politics and pedagogy . . . resistant scholarly practice” and knowledge control (ibid.). But the story also highlights the reality that in a world where people and nations do not have equal power, the exchanges that take place between those who have and do not have power are never equal. Although today support for globalization, capitalism and the English language does emanate from postcolonial nations such as India, the historical and economic contexts from which this support emerges reveal that all such countries first offered the right thumbs of less privileged communities as payment in order to enter the global arena. Drona’s guru dakshina is also symbolic of systems and policies that are set in place to ensure a domain of exclusivity. Replicating colonial 2

It is one of the stories in the Indian epic Mahabharata.

Conclusion  145 and neocolonial methods of de - and re-territorialization, First World academic institutions have mastered the art of marginalization under the guise of inclusion. On the one hand, we have literary fiction from the Third World making its way into course lists; on the other, these books are all limited to writers who compose in English, and who get published and are acclaimed by the First World. Scholars who migrated from Third World countries have gained recognition in Western academies, but scholars who live in those nations remain invisible. Although the rhetoric of globalization demands the inclusion of nonWestern perspectives, the academic practices of First World institutions only legitimize discourses published within their own borders. This disturbing pattern of decentralizing and at the same time recentralizing the production and dissemination of knowledge undermines and calls into question the efforts of First World academics who address concerns about hegemony. Issues of power, capital, distribution, language, and translation that scholars recognize restrict formulations of nonWestern literature also plague academic scholarship. Neither national nor international works enter into academia on an equal footing. If publishers, translational agents and marketplace values are the gatekeepers outside educational institutions, then certainly within its gates, academics take on that role. A journal editor’s response that editors are necessary to “guard” quality and to maintain “the integrity and identity” of disciplines illustrates the commonly held notion that academics have every right to act as gate-keepers (Wellington and Nixon 2005: 648). In this world populated by Dronas, there is little chance for the Ekalavayas to be a part of academia. According to Foucault, the hierarchical academic world, the domain of “old professors,” is only one of the many institutional sites of power, and he views academic mechanisms of control as the “least dangerous” means of legitimation (1980: 52). Foucault’s own privileged status blinds him to the role that educators and education have played in entrenching colonial empires, erasing indigenous identities, and reinforcing caste and class barriers. It is not surprising, therefore, that his analysis of hegemony excludes a materialist critique of the interconnections between capitalism and power. The direct correlation between economic power and literary production demands, nevertheless, a materialist analysis of the culture of marginalization which starts outside the portals of a university and continues to be actively reinforced inside the ivory tower. In the era of global capitalism, Ekalavya is also a symbol of minority communities and nations, which are necessary for the Dronas to exist. Ekalavya represents the global market and the “Other” that

146  What Are You Reading? Euro-American nations, corporations, academic institutions, presses, and scholars need to expand their empires and to build a global image for themselves. Following the route that corporations have taken, First World academic institutions have modified their mission statements to include keywords such as “global,” “world,” “international,” and “diverse,” and, of course, to also claim that they are all striving to make the world a better place. Like their transnational counterparts, First World scholarly presses claim to be global publishers with global perspectives, reaching out to global communities. Scholarly presses now require authors to identify whether the subject of their manuscripts are marketable to both national and international audiences. Some US presses even go as far as rejecting manuscripts that focus solely on its nation’s issues. In its generous use of the word “global” in many of its publications, the First World academic community creates an illusion of a borderless world, while in reality the border is closely guarded and monitored by its scholars. Like other capitalist entities that have “appropriated” and “assimilated” the slogan “Think globally, act locally” (Dirlik 1997: 72, 93–5), academia has also adapted and literally interpreted the catchphrase by demanding a global vision, but a national publication. This double standard displayed by academia with regard to internationalizing and at the same time nationalizing their publications is apparent in the criteria used to define “tier-1” academic institutions (a title that both universities and scholars are desperate to acquire), one of which is that publications by scholars must be in top-tier, nationally visible journals and book presses. Addressing the issue of scholarship published outside American academic presses being given little credit by tenure and promotion committees, in its 2002 report, the Modern Language Association’s Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing urged American university “administrations to evaluate thoughtfully scholarship that appears in overseas presses” (2002: 184). In practice, little has changed since 2002, and academics remain wary of seeking foreign publishers for fear that such scholarship will be rejected. For scholars such as Spivak, whose academic castle has already been built, publishing in India poses no threat to status. In fact, if she chooses to go with marginalized publishers, as did Kurt Vonnegut, her choice would not only grant visibility to Indian academic publishers, but might also influence others to follow suit, since hegemony in academia follows an “identity-based model” (Tyler 2001: 422); that is, scholars define themselves in relation to others in the group. In “identity-based models,” if a group is defined by a set of practices, individuals also need

Conclusion  147 to conform to the established rules to attain membership in the group. Two crucial factors that influence membership are the status of the group and a belief that the procedures required to gain entry are fair (Tyler 2001: 416). In other words, it is the acceptance of the legitimacy of the actors and their actions that motivates people to align themselves with a group in the belief that this alliance will also grant them the same status and legitimacy. Unlike businesses, where there is a clear distinction between the decision makers and those who comply with the rules, these lines are blurred in academia. This ambivalence occurs not because there are no class divisions between those who have and those who do not have power, but because academics have the opportunity to occupy positions other than that of being teachers, such as those of administrators, reviewers, editors, and mentors, thus allowing them to shift from non-hegemonic to hegemonic positions and vice versa. It is necessary to point out that although the legitimacy of scholars is conferred by endorsement (as opposed to people who gain legitimacy by positions, such as administrators), some acquire legitimacy by simply complying with established norms, while others acquire it through the impact of their scholarship. This distinction is important because it is the latter group that is canonized and has the power and authority to influence and change even canonized academic practices. Also, it is through an affiliation with the canonized group that journals, presses, institutions, and the rest of the academic community acquire identity and prestige. It is “the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production,” Gramsci points out, that sways the masses (1971: 12). Echoing this idea, sociologists Walker, Thomas and Zelditch state that the social position occupied by individuals who make the rules determines their acceptance by the masses: “The legitimacy of an act depends not only on its own legitimacy but also on the legitimacy of the actor performing the act and of the position the actor occupies” (1986: 621). In academia, these legitimized actors include academics located or educated in Ivy League institutions, scholars whose publications have impacted disciplines, editors, reviewers, senior scholars, and administrators. Reforming academic practices is no easy task; and legitimized and influential scholars need to lend their support in order to institute change. The irony here is that counter-hegemony follows the same process as hegemony, and one of the ways to contemplate equitable structures is through the concept of hegemony. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary to design counter-hegemonic strategies within established frameworks, such as legislation and governments. The evolution of postcolonial

148  What Are You Reading? studies and the subaltern studies group in the area of literary studies are examples of counter-hegemony. Maybe it is the recognition that “authorized voices” have the power to influence society that led Ralph Nader to write Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! (2009). The goal, however, is not just to create alternative hegemonies, but to move away from monologic and traditional ideas that are accepted as normative. It is in this light that Damrosch (2003) argues that the literary canon needs to be expanded. “We lose more than we gain,” says Damrosch, “if we confine our attention to ‘the masterworks of the ages,’ or more precisely what we perceive as the masterworks of the ages at this moment” (ibid.: 134). This argument applies to academic scholarship as well. If First World academics continue to focus only on literary work produced in and by First World institutions and presses, all they will be left with is a monolingual, homogenized canon that religiously includes essays on the subaltern. Given the unequal positions that different scholars occupy, Makarand Paranjape accurately notes, “An international academic system does not exist” in the West (1994). If it does, it is only because non-Western scholars choose to publish in American and British journals and presses. While these scholars might not have the same status as their Western counterparts, these publications accord them a higher status within their own institutions, since non-Western academics have also internalized the superiority of Anglo-American/British methods and practices of knowledge production. This dependence on the First World for legitimacy undermines the value of non-Western languages and publications in journals and presses outside the Euro-American world. Scholars and writers who already occupy peripheral positions in countries such as India are thus doubly marginalized. Paranjape argues that it is time for India’s academic community to break away from the “complex web of relationships of dependence and subordination” and find their “own brand of postcolonialism”: [O]ne cannot posit one, universal, international academic discourse; certainly, what passes off for this discourse is, at present, Eurocentric and Western. Suing for better representation and greater space for India in this discourse will not do. We will only be locked into a relationship of continuing subservience if we adopt this path. We need to strengthen ourselves, our institutions, journals, and publication industries. We need not merely attempt to duplicate or copy metropolitan systems, but develop our own alternative systems according to our own needs. (Paranjape 1994)

I believe that Paranjape’s suggestion is also the solution for non-English speaking Western scholars who are concerned that their scholarship

Conclusion  149 and disciplines are being shaped by Anglo-American academic structures. However, since US academics are also unhappy with dominant methods of publishing and evaluation of scholarship, it is apparent that “alternative systems” also need to be developed in American institutions. Ambedkar had pointed out that to enforce structural changes, what is required is not just discontent but a profound conviction in justice and a belief in equal political and social rights (“Thus Spoke Ambedkar”). Since such a conviction is embodied in the wide array of critiques of the academy, what prevents scholars from transforming evaluation and curricular practices? While scholars have little or no control over commercial publishing, within the portals of academe they are the most powerful gate-keepers who influence, direct, legitimate, and define cultural and literary production, and their actions have a direct bearing on current academic debates about the marginalization of voices, the hegemonic flow of power and knowledge, and censorship. The question of postcoloniality and the issues of representation are part of this context of unequal academic power and exchanges. Privileged locations of ivory-tower academics do not reflect the socio-economic–cultural–political inequities faced by indigenous and minority writers and scholars in different parts of the world, who are yet to be accepted by mainstream literary circles. In India, nondescript journals, magazines and presses still remain publishing outlets for many Dalit writers and scholars. If academics persist in endorsing practices that validate only publications in “tier-1” journals and presses, then it is futile to argue that the subaltern or the “Other” should be heard. A question that scholars need to answer is: if a work is valid because of its theoretical or literary worth, why does it matter to those who review tenure and promotion dossiers where one is published? In their response lies either the solution to, or the perpetuation of, the problems of representation and marginalization. Constitutions serve as examples of a structure formulated by those in power at particular points in history, but designed to remain open-ended to new interpretations, challenges and amendments in order to safeguard the fundamental goal for which they were created — to ensure the freedom and equality of all citizens. If academic practices such as peer reviews are premised on the idea that they facilitate a democratic production of knowledge, that premise also demands that the academy stay open to including new methods of constructing scholarship and also of addressing problems of inequity. It has become commonplace to label any attempt to propose alternatives to dominant institutions as an “anti” movement, and proponents who challenge policies and structures that favor particular

150  What Are You Reading? groups at the expense of others are invariably met with opposition, while those who support the “status quo” are favored. The pivotal site of these conflicts is the battle between ethics and economics, between what is just and what is economically viable. “History shows us where ethics and economics come in conflict,” Ambedkar observed: “victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them” (1945: 190). One such victory, after a long and hard-fought battle, was the reinstatement of English as one of India’s official languages. Today, economic considerations drive most of India’s middle class to argue in favor of English over regional languages. Conscious of the inequalities in the power, resources and economic mobility of those who can and those who cannot speak English, non-English speakers in the Third World cannot afford to perceive its dominance as a problem. With the English language having “grown to be independent of any form of social control,” David Crystal predicts it will be “impossible for any single group or alliance to stop its growth or even influence its future” (2003: 190). Scholars in non-English speaking countries are thus justifiably concerned that in addition to promoting only English, US academic practices are fostering a cultural and literary climate that is “almost exclusively Anglo-American” (Garcia-Ramon 2003: 2). With English literature and scholarship defined and divided by language and region, it is apparent that the field of English studies is not as deterritorialized as we imagine it to be. If postcolonial scholars in the West are concerned about the fact that postcolonial studies is merely reproducing the hegemonic voices of the North and the South, then they need to find ways to alter this domination of privileged writers and scholars which is partly a result of the discipline being limited by parameters set by academics themselves. To address curricular problems arising from global inequalities, perhaps academics have to start by becoming Gramscian organic intellectuals seeking counterhegemonic publishing spaces not only for their course texts, but also for themselves. The paradigm shifts that have already occurred in English studies in the West are undoubtedly important changes that have radically transformed the discipline and academic institutions. However, what is more crucial today for academics is the need to intersect theory and practice; that is, to act upon the analysis that their scholarship engages. In their discourses about war, globalization, corporations, capitalism, and economic and social policies, academics call into question the ethical, social and moral responsibility of those in power. But what of their own responsibility? Scholars critique corporate powers

Conclusion  151 for engendering a homogenized world and for fostering unequal societies. Mindful of the intrinsic intersection between colonialism, neocolonialism and knowledge production, they call attention to inequalities in the publishing domain and emphasize the importance of including marginalized voices. Yet, their own academic practices are at variance with their rhetoric because the former is grounded in the very systems they critique. To rephrase an epigram by Ambedkar3: To open or not to open the academic temples they have constructed is a question for First World scholars to consider because if they leave the doors shut, they only damn themselves.

J

3 The original quote is: “To open or not to open the temples is a question for you to consider and not for me to agitate. If you think it is bad manners not to believe in the sanctity of human beings, then throw open the doors and be a gentleman, but if you wish to remain a [sic] orthodox Hindu then shut the doors and damn yourself, for I don’t care to come” (Ambedkar n.d.).

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About the Author Pavithra Narayanan is Associate Professor of English and faculty affiliate of the Centre for Social and Environmental Justice at Washington State University, Vancouver. She is also a documentary filmmaker.

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Index academia 1, 3, 11, 48–49, 76–77, 79, 136, 143–47 academic 4, 44, 48, 149, 151; community 129, 136, 143, 146–48; freedom 49; governance 48, 49; imperialism 11, 136–51; practices 8, 108, 140–41, 145, 147–48, 150, 151; programs 47, 48 Adivasis 3, 25, 53, 65; writer 4 Advani, Rukun 92–94 Affiliated East-West Press 90 affiliations 90, 141, 147 Ahmad, Aijaz 2, 34, 43, 46 Aldiss, Brian 95 Algebra of Infinite Justice, The 133 allegiances 141 alliance 35–36, 58, 78, 90, 92, 96–99, 109, 111, 147, 150 All India Council for Education 31 Amazon 106, 108 Ambai 2, 5 Ambedkar, B. R. 2, 22–23, 27, 33, 36–38, 40, 50, 74, 93, 149–51 American Association of University Professors 49 American literary agents 104 American writers of Jewish origins 84 Amis, Kingsley 95 Amis, Martin 102–103 Ananda Vikatan 130 Anand, Mulk Raj 109 Anglophone colonial discourses 46 Anglophone writers 76, 114–15, 120 Annadurai, C. N. 30; campaign against three language educational policy 31 anti-colonialism 15 Applebaum, Stuart 86 Ashcroft, Bill 45–46 attire 38–40

Béteille, Esha 93 Bharatiya Janata Party 135 Bharucha, Rustom 120–21 Bhopal gas tragedy 58; victims 72, 85 bilingual intelligentsia 38 bilingual writers 115 Black Arts Movement 4 Black Skin, White Masks 9, 35 Black studies 4, 11, 96 Book Clubs 87 Booker of Bookers 95 book-publishing industry 77–78 bourgeoisie 51, 105 Britain’s Charter Act (1813) 52, 79–80 British: administrative strategy to rule India 87; culture 83; domination of publishing industry 83; imperialism 15; presses 88–89, 91, 93; publishers 6, 79, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 95–96, 99–100, 111 Butalia, Urvashi 11, 57, 76, 93, 123, 128, 134 Byatt, A. S. 102 call centers 59–60; workers 63 Cambridge University Press 96, 123 “camp coolie” system 63 Cape, Jonathan 4, 94, 101 capitalism 9, 41, 42, 49, 51, 66, 70, 72, 74, 77, 79, 101, 110, 112, 118, 151; and power 146 Capitalism: A Love Story 110 capitalist slogans 3 caste oppression 3 caste wars 14, 32 Chandrashekhar, Indu 93 Chatterjee, Partha 9, 17, 20, 28, 36, 38

174  What Are You Reading? children: illiterate 6; mid-day noonmeal plan 75; working in MNCs 59 Civil Rights Movement 4, 22, 27, 96 Clarke, Arthur C. 95 class–caste divide, between leaders 38 Clinton, Bill 68 colonialism 4, 15, 19, 32, 34, 43, 44, 46, 51, 62, 72, 151 comic books 89–90 Commonwealth Writers Prize 98, 118–19, 134 communication 45, 48, 69, 133; and technologies 9 Congress Assembly Party 23 copyright 129 criticism: of film directed at Moore’s style 67; Marxist approach 66; from UK Language 142 cultures 60; changes 69; hybridization of 62; identity 38; prestige 137; studies 4; superiority 82 curriculum 4, 11, 47, 81, 83, 89, 91, 109, 118, 135 Dalit Ilakiamum Aarasiyalum 12 dalits 3, 27, 32, 33, 65, 114 Dalit School students 3 Das, Gurucharan 112 Davidar, David 6, 88, 90, 94–96, 98–99, 102, 125 Dayal, Ravi 91–93, 107 Derrida, Jacques 142 Desai, Anita 109 Deshpande, Shashi 109–10, 113, 119 Devi, Mahasweta 10, 113, 116, 133 Dheepam magazine 130 dialects 15, 16, 20, 25, 33, 80, 82 Die Zeit 76 digital publishing 143 Dirlik, Arif 2–3, 13, 43, 46, 70, 109 domestic publishing 57, 91 Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) 30 Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) 30 Dravidian state, creation of 30

East India Company 79–80 economic: imperialism 51; mobility 8, 13, 15, 42–44, 96, 150; neoliberalisation 133; policies 2, 3, 6, 10, 15, 52, 54, 57, 62, 66, 67, 69, 79; reforms 6, 69, 80, 96 education 20, 36, 83; institutions 141 Ekalavya, story of 144–46 employment 42, 52, 70 English language 6, 18, 29, 34, 36, 38, 41, 42, 57, 76, 114, 123; authors 115; books 123; Constitution in 24; for getting lucrative job 42; as lingua franca of the global marketplace 8, 96; numerical predominance of 18; as official language 31; publications 7, 10, 76, 77, 96–97, 100, 125, 132; for science and to communicate 21; writers 76 English Language Act (1835) 79, 81 English Language Book scheme (ELBS) 57 English literature 5, 81–83, 109, 150 English translations 122, 133; motivating factors for promoting 123; necessary to bridge literary community 133; of regional language writings 90, 93; of Tamil books 129 ethnic strife in Sri Lanka 33 Euro-American intellectuals 13 European languages 80, 106, 142 EVR see Naicker, E. V. Ramaswami Fanon, Frantz 2, 6, 9, 35, 46; Black Skin, White Masks 9, 35 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) 110 feminist movement 132 fiction 95 foreign equity investment 52 Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) 58, 90 foreign subsidy schemes 89 foreign trade 52 free trade 66, 68, 78, 87, 96

Index  175 French publisher 105 Futehally, Shama 94

Holtzbrinck, Georg von 86 Hyder, Qurratulain 4

Gandhi, Indira 57–58 Gandhi, Leela 13–14 Gandhi, M. K. 16, 18, 19, 37–38, 51, 52 Gandhi, Rajiv 58 garment workers 63–64 gender 4, 75, 131, 132 General Motors 67, 106 Ghosh, Vikram 101 Gitanjali 115 global capitalism 2, 3, 8, 11, 43, 61, 70, 109, 146 global economy 47, 60, 67, 70–71 global financial crisis 48 globalization 2, 9, 41, 43, 47–51, 55, 59, 61, 62, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 111, 132; economic 47; euphoric vision of 70 God of Small Things, The 99, 101, 126 Gopal, Sarvepalli 34, 42 Gramscian organic intellectuals 8, 150 Gramsci, Antonio 2, 81, 112, 136, 147; concept of hegemony 9, 35, 43 Green Revolution program 57 Griffiths, Gareth 45–46 Grimus 95 Guha, Ramachandra 14, 25, 29, 54, 75, 81, 101 guru dakshina 144–45

Imaginary Homelands 116 imperialism 2, 16, 61, 62, 72, 82, 110 Independent Publishers Distribution Alternatives (IPDA) 92 Indian publishers 6, 76, 89, 92, 93, 97, 109, 111; and English literary production 6; and stratified nature of alliances 97 Indian writers 14, 133; challenges faced by 10; in English 4, 33, 90; global visibility of 7, 107; international attention 94 India: The Emerging Giant 57 India Unbound 112 indigenous presses 77, 88 industry, garment manufacturing 62 institutionalization of social orders 137 institutionalized hierarchies 46, 48 International Monetary Fund 52, 71

Habib, Irfan 91 HarperCollins India 99–100, 104 Hazra, Indrajit 94 Higgins, Henry 60 higher education 3, 13, 40, 47, 89, 92 Hindi 17; in Devanagari script 23; imperialism 29, 31; as national language 23; as official language 23, 29 Hinduism 18, 22, 30 Hindu–Muslim conflict 17–18 Hindu, The 12

Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 18, 21–22 Jnanpith award 26, 129–30 John, Binoo 134 journals 136; editor 145; gain prestige 139; ranking lists 139; rejection rate of 141 Kali for Women (feminist press) 93 Kalki 129–30 Kapoor, Pramod 93 Karnad, Girish 5, 90–91, 115–16 Katha award 129 Kavanagh, Pat 102 Kesavan, Mukul 94 knowledge 144; rubrics of 140; value of 138 Kocharethi 4 Krishnamachari, T. T. 31 Krishnamoorthy, R. 130; historical novels 130 Kurup, G. Sankara 130

176  What Are You Reading? labor practices 48, 62 Lahiri, Jhumpa 109, 120 languages 8; barriers 124; boundaries of states based on 26; of commerce 81; for education 80–81; of the First World 5; included in the Constitution 15, 24; in India at the time of independence 14–15; policies 8, 14, 15, 21, 24, 25, 28, 30, 32, 40, 44; politics of 8, 10, 15; riots related to 26; as tool for fundamentalist Hindu and Muslim factions 17–18; used for writing Constitution 25; wars 8, 14, 15, 23, 32; see also English language legislations 24, 29, 34, 74, 90, 148 legitimation 136, 137, 145; processes of 140 Levine, Paul 104 liberalization 9, 51, 58, 59, 64, 65, 69, 99; policies, negative impacts of 65, 117 libraries 87, 139 linguistics: inequalities 25; neocolonialism 34; reorganization of states based on 15, 26 literacy rate 1, 6, 20, 75 literary 104; agent 6, 8, 100, 102–105; magazines 128–31; sensations 127; shifts 78; status 6, 14 literatures 3, 14, 25, 118; commercialization of 111; commodification of 47 Little Magazine, The 128 Longman 88, 96 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 80–81, 83; political strategy 82 McCune, George 92 McCune, Sara 92 Macmillan, Alexander 87 Macmillan publishing 87–89, 91–93, 96–97, 100 Madan, T. N. 91 Maheshwari, Ashok 132 Malayalam 39, 113; writers 130

Malkani, Gautam 2 Manipuri writers 133 Marathi publishing 115 Marc Parent 105 Markandaya, Kamala 109 Marx, Karl 2, 33, 50, 51, 73–74, 105 Mathrubhumi 130 medical transcription 59 Menon, Ritu 93, 104, 111, 113, 128, 132 mergers in publishing 47, 91, 96–97, 103, 108, 111 metamorphosis 9, 20, 38, 40, 62 mid-day meal scheme 75 Midnight’s Children 76, 94–96, 99, 109, 117 minorities, political rights of 23 Mistry, Rohinton 98, 109, 124 modern temples of India 52 Money: A Suicide Note 103 monographs 93, 136, 140, 143 monolingualism 28, 123 Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices (MRTP) 58 Moore, Michael 67, 110 Mukherjee, Bharathi 91, 109 multiculturation 47 multilinguism 40 municipal schools 75 Muslim community 17–23, 34 Nagarkar, Kiran 4, 100, 114–15 Naicker, E. V. Ramaswami 30 Nair, M. T. Vasudevan 130 Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night 60 Narayan, A. 4 Narayan, R. K. 99, 109 Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) 53 national awards, to writers and publishers 129 National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) 89 National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) 57 national language 8, 16, 18–21, 23, 29, 37; policy 28, 30, 32

Index  177 national leaders 18, 28, 32, 37–38, 88; support for Hindustani as the official language 29 national sovereignty, challenge to 62 Nation and its Fragments, The 9 Navayana Publishers 93 Nazi Flying Club 84 Nehru, Jawaharlal 24, 52, 88 Nehru, Motilal 20–21 neocolonialism 4, 44, 151 neocolonial systems 45 Nobel prize 4, 112 non-dominant European languages 142 non-governmental organizations 64 non-Hindi speakers 29, 31, 34 non-profit publishing house 87 non-western writers 5; in English 33 normative administrative assessment practices 138 Obama, Barack 42, 67–68 Official Language Commission 28 Official Languages Act (1963) 31–32 “one nation, one language” slogan 20, 28 Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 148 outsourced businesses 59 Oxford University Press (OUP) 87–91 Padma Shri award 129 panchayat 75 Parthiban Kanavu 130 partnerships 6, 7, 92, 96, 98–99, 123 Penguin India 77, 88, 98, 125 Persianized Urdu 18 Phalnikar, Sonia 76–78 Pillai, Thakazhi Sivasankara 4, 130 political: democracy 15, 27, 50; equality 50; hegemonies 137; writings 88, 101 Ponniyin Selvan 130 Pottakkad, S. K. 130 poverty line 1, 66 Premchand 116 Prentice Hall of India 90

private publishing sectors 89 publications 7, 45, 83–84; corporatization of 103; giants 96; high quality 139; metamorphosis of 9; for the Nazi regime 85; of popular British novels in India 83–84; production of multilingual texts 44; for regional languages 123; and telecommunications 78; translations 124 Public Law 480 (PL 480) 57 quality journals 139–41 Rajagopalachari, C. 29, 37 Rajkamal Prakashan 132 Ramasamy, Cho 30–31 Random House 4, 7, 84, 86, 96–97, 99–101, 110, 124 Rao, Narasimha 9, 58, 96 Rao, Raja 109 Ravan and Eddie 115 Reagan, Ronald 9, 49, 72, 96 regional languages 5, 7, 10, 24–26, 28, 39, 44, 76, 88, 90, 93, 102, 114, 115, 123, 125 religious fundamentalists 36 Response Books 92 right to education 3 Roli Books 93, 107 Roy, Arundhati 2, 4, 27, 98–100, 103, 124, 126, 133; political essays 53–54; support for Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) 53–55 Rushdie, Salman 4, 10, 34, 45, 76, 94–96, 99, 103, 105, 109, 116–18, 124, 144 Rushkoff, Douglas 110 Sage Publications Inc. 90, 92 Sahagal, Nayantra 109 Sahitya Akademi award 114, 130, 133 Sainath, P. 54 Sanskritized Hindi 18 Schiffrin, André 87, 111

178  What Are You Reading? scholars 2, 43, 45, 48, 139 scholarship 84, 136, 138; evaluation in overseas presses 146; new methods of constructing 150; and pedagogical practice 144 science-fiction writer 95 Sealy, Allan 109 self-evaluation theory 137 Sengupta, Mallika 10, 113, 131 Sen, Amartya 71, 73, 98, 112 Sen, Mandira 93 Sen, Nabaneeta Dev 10, 13, 41, 102, 113, 115–17, 120, 128, 131, 133 Seth, Vikram 98, 111, 116, 121, 122, 124, 144 Shastri, Lal Bahadur 57 “shining” citizens 135 Shiva, Vandana 94 Shree, Geetanjali 10, 77, 113–14 Singh, Manmohan 43, 52, 58, 74 Singh, Tejeshwar 88, 90–93 Sivakamiyin Sapatham 130 slavery 17, 19 Slumdog Millionaire 12 small-scale merchants 65 social: barriers 50; changes 9, 48–49; equity 33, 75; inequalities 32, 50; justice 50; movements 4, 11, 96; organisation 50; revolutions 49, 74, 75; sciences 4; welfare programs 70 socio-economic: disparities 75, 79, 107, 112; inequalities 78; inequities 66, 75; policies 2 software coding 59 software revolution in India 81 Sojourn 119 Solitude of Emperors, The 88 Spiderman 90 Spivak, Gayatri 2, 46, 96, 109, 142–44, 146 Sriramalu, Potti 26 Stalin, Joseph 16 State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERTs) 89

States Reorganization Act (1956) 26 States Reorganization Committee 26 Storylines 131, 133 Story of My Assassins, The 105 Straus, Peter 102 students, in lower and higher education 89 suicides 63; rates 65 Suitable Boy, A 98, 100, 122, 125 Superman 90 supraterritory, concept of 106 Swamy and Friends 99 Tagore, Rabindranath 10; Gitanjali 115 Tamil books, translation into English language 129 Tamil Dalit writers 14, 33 Tamil literary: domain 14; tradition 33 Tamil Nadu 33; two-language policy 31; violent riots 32 Tamil translations 129 Tamil writers 64, 129–31 Tata-McGraw Hill 90, 93 Tejpal, Tarun 100, 105 Terrible Beauty is Born, A 60 Thandhira Bhoomi 130 Tharoor, Shashi 38–40, 76, 98, 109 Thatcher, Margaret 72, 96 Thomson ISI 139 Tiffin, Helen 45–46, 96 Tirupur Exporters Association 63–64 Tirupur People’s Forum 63 Tirupur’s garment workers 64 transformations 62, 73; in English studies 45 translations: of Bengali writings 133; non-traditional models for 8; publications 127, 145 Translation Zone, The 123 translators 7, 24, 123, 128–29 transnational: agents 108; corporations 10, 100, 104; productions 109; publishers 5–7, 10–11, 77–78,

Index  179 87, 90–91, 99–100, 102, 104–107, 120, 122–29, 132, 134, 143 transterritorial communications 107 transterritorial mobility 69 TS see Singh, Tejeshwar Tughlaq 91 Tulika Publishers 92 two-language policy 31 unemployment 67 Union Carbide 85–86 unity in diversity, concept of 16 universities 4, 141–42; bookstores 48; neoliberal restructuring of 47 untouchability 22 Urdu 17–19, 23–24 US Food for Peace Act (FPA) 57 valorize literatures, in regional languages 10 Victor Gollancz Prize for Science Fiction 95 violence 27, 46, 48, 51, 123 Virago (feminist press) 4, 93, 94 Vistaar Publications 92 Viswanathan, Gauri 5, 46, 80, 82–83, 87, 109, 118

Vodaphone Crossword award 129 Volga 5 voluntary immigrants 13 Vonnegut, Kurt 110–11, 147 vulgar economism 51 Wall Street 67–68, 78 web-based scholarship 143 Western academia 76, 108–109; English studies 77 Western industrialization 51 Western languages 72 Western literary 77, 83, 104–105, 144 White Tiger 12, 105 Wiley Eastern 90, 93 women: greater freedom to talk about sexuality 131; and minority writers 93; movement 4, 96; need publishing space 93; writers 132 Words like Freedom 54 working environment 63 World Bank 52, 54, 58, 71 World Trade Organization (WTO) 71 World War II 84 Wylie, Andrew 102, 104 Zubaan 76, 108