English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India

Chapter 2: Two Tales of a City

29 chapter 2 Two Tales of a City On family visits to Delhi in the 1970s, South Extension was a sleepy place. It was always summer, and we spent the afternoons under the fan. My cousins and I would quiz each other over world geography, they with their British-inflected accents and spellings, me with my wide American syllables. By early evening one of my uncles would show up with a bag of warm samosas and a few bottles of sweet, sizzling Thums Up. Later, another uncle would whiz me around on his scooter to the market. He would get a paan, and I would stand next to him and invariably be approached by street children for a rupee coin. Once on the outskirts of the city where partition-era refugees bought government-subsidized plots of land, today South Extension is a congested , central, and upscale residential area and shopping hub. Over the years I have watched as the area has become emblematic of the new New Delhi, surrounded by flyovers, jammed with cars, and home to an array of Indian and multinational shops. Land prices have skyrocketed, and today the horseshoe-shaped market looks like a car dealership, its mass of metal gleaming under the sun. My grandmother’s small pink bungalow on B-block, with its open courtyard, has long since been sold and its flowering tree replaced by an imposing multistory house built to the edge of the road. I still visit the market to eat gol gappas standing outside Bengali Sweets, admire the costly fabrics at Heritage, and visit Tekson’s Bookshop, but I lament the passing of time and people more than the place itself. 30 | Two Tales of a City This chapter unearths a cultural history of English, one whose origins I locate in the realm of colonial-era political discourse and in Delhi’s Urdu, sublimely poetic past. In the post-independence era, it has become a truism to say, “English is an Indian language.” And yet its path to becoming one, especially in the literary realm, has been contested at every step along the way. I reflect on the “authenticity” of English by providing a genealogy of it from the political to the literary realm. I argue that it is precisely how English becomes indigenized and compromised in specific instances and discrete contexts that will come to characterize the language and its eventual role as mediator. On the one hand, the back story of any understanding of English as an Indian literary language necessarily involves its role as a language in the nationalist movement and, more specifically, as being integral to India’s political modernity. English was accepted, by necessity, in the political realm because it allowed a pan-Indian movement, one that was at first merely critical of British rule and then eventually anti-British, to take shape. On the other hand, it is not that English came to represent a national consciousness in any holistic sense but rather that the language created a new set of compromises, both emotional and ideological. a very short story about english becoming indian As Indians became increasingly critical of colonial rule in the last half of the nineteenth century, the British started to monitor Indian-language publications; in the aftermath of the 1857 Revolt in particular, they were naturally worried about seditious ideas that could reach the masses in their own languages.1 Amrita Bazar Patrika, a Bengali newspaper launched in 1868, was one such publication; the periodical was known for its support and promotion of Indian nationalist causes. In 1878 the British colonial government in India passed the Vernacular Press Act, which allowed legal censorship of the Indian press. Amrita Bazar Patrika responded by switching to publishing in English overnight , effectively evading a law meant for “vernacular” languages. English, of course, was not a vernacular language, and, in this case, publishing in English turned out to be a safe zone for Indians. The British were not willing to censor the English-language press, among which Amrita Bazar Patrika could now be counted, since doing so would go against their own notions of free speech. In line with their liberal values , freedom of the English-language press was paramount. Freedom Two Tales of a City | 31 of speech for Indians in their own languages—the bhashas—was not. That the editors of Amrita Bazar Patrika switched from publishing in Bengali to publishing...