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Mehrotra’s introductory chapter, although it covers the
oft-travelled ground, is a necessity because it takes the
readers from the days of the British Settlement in India through
the battles of Plassey and Buxor to the Orientalists, to Macaulay’s
Minute and the Gandhian influence over Indian writing.
Several pages are devoted to the beginnings of English
literature in India in the early 19th century, to writers like
Lal Behari Day, Krishna Mohan Banerjea and Kylas Chunder Dutt,
to the very first strains of subversion within Indian English
writing, to Indian writing in the native language marked by both
an upsurge of English and the assertion of nativism.
Mehrotra develops
his argument as such to the establishment of a proto-nationalist
point of view and the subsequent emergence of the dignity of
national tongues. As Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj later
on, "To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave
them. The foundation that Macaulay laid of education has
enslaved us." But he also said, "A universal language
for India should be Hindi." Although Gandhi had possibly
meant Hindustani, yet the ultimate "official" language
to be enshrined in the Constitution was a pristine version of
Hindi replete with its Sanskrit associations. This language was
later to pose the most visible divide between the North and the
South, a problem Nehru, himself, was much preoccupied with.
The Introduction
is hackneyed for an academic who has regurgitated over
statements about Indian writing in English as being either
"Matthew Arnold in a sari" or "Shakuntala in
skirts" over and over. But if this anthology is for the new
entrant, then certainly, all such material should be there. The
inclusion of Nemade, Marathi novelist and critic, particularly,
is significant because it brings in contemporary analyses about desivad
into the fold with the inevitable accusations of retrograde
parochialism from the English-writing brigade. Another useful
inclusion is the commentary on the commodification of the Indian
English novel, which flourished mainly under new conditions of
global advertising. Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy are a case in
point. The God of Small Things, according to U. R.
Anantha Murthy, is an example of "writing for export",
being sold only because of market forces and cultural politics,
which is an unfair remark for genuine achievement.
The first few
chapters are about the early writing in India with a strong
Bengali bias (naturally) — the Roys, Dutts, Tagores and
Aurobindos are all there, the three exceptions being Behramji
Malabari, Govardhanram Tripathi and Kipling. A chapter on
Cornelia Sorabji and Sarojini Naidu by Ranjana Ash is a mere
sketch with scarcely any insight. Whereas many women were
writing in their native languages in the 19th century, such as
Rassundari Devi, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai, English
women writers fade away by comparison. Khilnani’s essay on
Gandhi and Nehru is lucid and worth reading in terms of the
language debates: "Each in their own way had shown, by
their distinctive uses of English, the infinite adaptability of
the language of the colonisers." The Nehru-Gandhi theme
continues into Leela Gandhi’s "Novelists of the 1930s and
1940s" where the "three chachas"—Narayan,
Anand and Rao, as Mulk Raj Anand once referred to them—are
examined through the paradigms of nationalism.
What is bothersome
is that none of these essays are critical; they are biographical
pieces of the authors with summaries of the chief concerns of
their works. Leela Gandhi and Sunil Khilnani have done excellent
work earlier but their talents do not shine forth in their
accounts here. Perhaps Mehrotra’s enterprise is too huge, his
canvas too large to find a focus, although the problems relating
to language hold the book together. Chapter 16 onwards, we move
to expatriation and exile, to more contemporary themes and
issues, as the anthology wakes out of its stupor. Naipaul’s
account by Suvir Kaul is racy and gossipy: it has to be, Naipaul
being Naipaul. Kaul makes a discerning contribution as he keenly
interrogates Naipaul’s cynicism and questions his desire to
exorcise India from his psyche, connecting it with the anxieties
of the diasporic ‘Indian’ that result from ‘a homecoming
to a place that is not home.’
Interspersed
between essays on Indian poetry, drama and English translations,
the book then moves on to exciting new areas, the contemporary
diaspora: Bharati Mukherjee, Farrukh Dhondy, Rohinton Mistry and
the inimitable Rushdie, whose concerns fluctuate between
wholesale absorption and wholesale rejection of the new culture;
and the post-midnight fascinating works of writers such as Mukul
Kesavan, Vikram Chandra and Rukun Advani. In sum, Mehrotra
undertakes a well-mapped journey, beginning with the English
sojourns of the Indian writer where the English tongue was
indigenised and concluding with the Indian (?) writer’s new
‘migrancy’ between two cultures, distanced from both.
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INDIAN
literature in English is no longer an oxymoron. Works in English
have always assumed the status of national literature while the
regional languages occupy a less national character. The influence
of English continues to be irresistible even though we belong very
much to a ‘polyglot’ tradition of bi- or tri-lingualism in a
country where the use of English has also never been seen to
markedly jeopardise or displace indigenous languages.
