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10. Ghosh, Language, and The Hungry Tide
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133 10 Ghosh, Language, and The Hungry Tide ISMAIL S. TALIB ENGLISH IS “almost a default language” for Ghosh (Steger 30). But he is not always satisfied with it. Ghosh confesses that “One of the basic questions I’ve always had to face as an Indian writing in English concerns language ” (Roy 8). He recognizes his ambivalent position, and admits in a letter to Dipesh Chakrabarty (written on 20 December 2000) that “As an Indian who writes in English, I frequently find myself reflecting on what it must have meant for say, Benjamin or Celan to write in German, a language that was often inflected with a hatred for the traditions that they had been born into” (160). This sentiment is also reflected in his novel The Glass Palace, although what to Ghosh is a dilemma is viewed more positively by one of the characters: Dinu gave a hoarse laugh. “Here you are, so full of indignation about the British. And yet you use the English language more often than not . . .” “That’s neither here nor there,” Uma shot back. “Many great Jewish writers write in German. Do you think that prevents them from recognising the truth?” (295) To Ghosh, unlike the character Uma in his novel, even if these writers see the “truth,” it is still the language of their oppressors that they write in. In spite of his use of English for creative writing, Ghosh is thus very much aware of its position as the language of the imperialist, and that it continues to maintain its imperial dominance at the expense of other languages. These 134 ISMAIL S. TALIB are among the reasons for his decision to withdraw The Glass Palace from participating in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2001, although the novel had already been awarded the Eurasia regional prize. To him, the word “Commonwealth” is synonymous with the British Empire (Tom L25), and he did not want to be associated with a prize that, to him, appeared to gratuitously celebrate the English language’s dominance (Ghosh, “Letter”).1 One of Ghosh’s persistent worries about the English language concerns its adequacy to describe the situation in India. He suspects that English “could limit his writing about India” (Steger 30). He wonders, for example, about the simulated presentation of dialects of his native language Bengali in his fictional works. He believes that he should not present any of the dialects as “masala English,” which can be done by dropping in occasional words in the dialect. Although he does drop occasional words in other languages, such as the Bengali words in The Hungry Tide, he does this in order to imbue his fictional works with the appropriate local atmosphere, and also, because some of these words cannot really be translated into English. Ghosh’s belief in the extent and limit of translatability will be discussed again later in this chapter. Whatever it is, a dialect in another language cannot be simply represented by throwing in its words into an English language text, because a dialect, to Ghosh, “is not a failed version of the language” (Steger 30). Ghosh is not only cognizant of dialectal varieties and the need to respect them as linguistic systems in their own right, but also, more generally , of the heteroglossic tendencies of all languages,2 or what has been described, after Deleuze and Guattari (26), as their inherent “polylingualism .”3 As it is, it is difficult enough to present the layers of heteroglossia in a single language like English, let alone to represent, in English, fullfledged dialects in other languages. In effect, to faithfully mirror the heteroglossic layers and dialectal varieties of other language in a text written in English is virtually impossible. In spite of this difficulty, a discerning Bengali reader like Partha Chatterjee (1) could still discern Ghosh’s attempt “to capture the flavour of the Bengali language including the dialects of the Sunderbans” in his novel, The Hungry Tide. However, notwithstanding Ghosh’s dissatisfaction with some aspects and consequences of the use of English, he could not have originally written most of his works in Bengali. Although he has stated that “Bengali is a language that I’m completely fluent in, in which I think a lot, read a lot” (Chambers 24), and he even thought of translating The Hungry Tide into Bengali (Roy 8), he believes that he has not been sufficiently educated in literary Bengali in order to write original works in the language (Steger 30). Nevertheless, he...