II
Let me move now from the personal to the historical, to an argument on the question of language between two great modern Indians. In the month of April 1921, Mahatma Gandhi launched a broadside against English education. First, in a speech in Orissa, he described it as an ‘unmitigated evil’. Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Rammohan Roy would, said Gandhi, have ‘been far greater men had they not the contagion of English learning’. In Gandhi’s opinion, these two influential and admired Indians ‘were so many pigmies who had no hold upon the people compared with Chaitanya, Sanker, Kabir, and Nanak’. Warming to the theme, Gandhi insisted that ‘what Sanker alone was able to do, the whole army of English-knowing men can’t do. I can multiply instances. Was Guru Govind a product of English education? Is there a single English-knowing Indian who is a match for Nanak, the founder of a sect second to none in point of valour and sacrifice? … If the race has even to be revived it is to be revived not by English education.’
A friend, reading the press reports of this talk in Orissa, asked Gandhi to explain his views further. Writing in his own newspaper, the Mahatma clarified that ‘it is my considered opinion that English education in the manner it has been given has emasculated the English-educated Indian, it has put a severe strain on the Indian students’ nervous energy, and has made of us imitators. The process of displacing the vernaculars has been one of the saddest chapters in the British connection …’ ‘Rammohan Roy would have been a greater reformer,’ claimed the Mahatma, ‘and Lokmanya Tilak would have been a greater scholar, if they had not to start with the handicap of having to think in English and transmit their thoughts chiefly in English.’ Gandhi argued that ‘of all the superstitions that affect India, none is so great as that a knowledge of the English language is necessary for imbibing ideas of liberty, and developing accuracy of thought’. As a result of the system of education introduced by the English, ‘the tendency has been to dwarf the Indian body, mind and soul’.
One does not know whether the Mahatma’s anonymous friend was content with this clarification. But someone who was less than satisfied with Gandhi’s views was the poet Rabindranath Tagore. He was then travelling in Europe, where he received, by post, copies of Gandhi’s articles. Tagore was dismayed by their general tenor, and by the chastisement of Rammohan Roy in particular. On the 10th of May 1921, he wrote to their common friend C.F. Andrews, saying, ‘I strongly protest against Mahatma Gandhi’s depreciation of such great personalities of Modern India as Rammohan Roy in his zeal for declaiming against our modern education.’ Gandhi had celebrated the example of Nanak and Kabir, but, as Tagore suggested, those saints ‘were great because in their life and teaching they made organic union of the Hindu and Muhammadan cultures—and such realization of the spiritual unity through all differences of appearance is truly Indian’.
In learning and appreciating English, argued Tagore, Rammohan Roy had merely carried on the good work of Nanak and Kabir. Thus, ‘in the modern age Rammohan Roy had that comprehensiveness of mind to be able to realize the fundamental unity of spirit in the Hindu, Muhammadan and Christian cultures. Therefore, he represented India in the fulness of truth, and this truth is based, not upon rejection, but on perfect comprehension.’ Tagore pointed out that ‘Rammohan Roy could be perfectly natural in his acceptance of the West, not only because his education had been perfectly Eastern—he had the full inheritance of the Indian wisdom. He was never a school boy of the West, and therefore he had the dignity to be the friend of the West. If he is not understood by modern India, this only shows the pure light of her own truth has been obscured for the moment by the storm-clouds of passion.’
Tagore’s letter to Andrews was released to the press, and read by Gandhi. His answer was to say that he did ‘not object to English learning as such’, but merely to its being made a fetish, and to its being preferred as a medium of education to the mother tongue. ‘Mine is not a religion of the prison-house,’ he insisted: ‘it has room even for the least among God’s creation.’ Refuting the charge that he or his non-cooperation movement were a manifestation of xenophobia, he said: ‘I hope I am as great a believer in free air as the great Poet. I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off by any.’
These words are emblazoned in halls and auditoria across India, but always without the crucial first line: ‘I hope I am as great a believer in free air as the great Poet.’ In truth, despite this argument in theory, in practice Gandhi and Tagore were more or less on the same side. Gandhi wrote his books in Gujarati, but made certain that they were translated into English so as to reach a wider audience. And when required he could use the conqueror’s language rather well himself. His first published articles, that appeared in the journal of the Vegetarian Society of London in 1891, were written in the direct and unadorned prose that was the hallmark of all his work in English, whether petitions to the colonial government, editorials in his journals Indian Opinion, Young India and Harijan, or numerous letters to friends.
In writing in more than one language, Gandhi was in fact merely following in the footsteps of those he had criticized. For, Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s mother tongue was Marathi, a language in which he did certainly publish essays. On his part, Rammohan Roy had published books in Persian and essays in Bengali before he came to write in English (he was also fluent in Sanskrit and Arabic). As for Tagore, this man who shaped and reshaped the Bengali language through his novels and poems, made sure that his most important works of non-fiction were available in English. His major political testament, Nationalism, was based on lectures he wrote and delivered in English. His important and still relevant essays on relations between the East and the West were either written in English or translated by a colleague under his supervision. Tagore understood that while love and humiliation at the personal or familial level were best expressed in the mother tongue, impersonal questions of reason and justice had sometimes to be communicated in a language read by more people and over a greater geographical space than Bengali.
By writing in English as well as their mother tongue, Gandhi and Tagore were serving society as well as themselves. They reached out to varied audiences—and, by listening to other people’s views, broadened the bases of their own thought. This open-mindedness was also reflected in their reading. Thus Gandhi read (and was influenced by) thinkers who were not necessarily Gujarati. The debt he owed to Ruskin and Tolstoy was scarcely less than that owed to Raychandbhai or Narsing Mehta. Gandhi was also enriched by the time he spent outside Gujarat—the several years in England, the several decades in South Africa, the millions of miles travelling through the Indian countryside.
On his part, Tagore was widely read in European literature. When he visited Germany in the 1920s at the invitation of his publisher, Kurt Wolff, his host remembered the ‘universal breadth of Tagore’s learning’, their conversations revealing ‘without doubt that he knew far more of the West than most of the Europeans he encountered knew of the East’. Tagore had spoken, among other things, of the works of T.S. Eliot. ‘It is quite remarkable,’ said Wolff, ‘that someone born in India in 1861 should display such an interest in and grasp of an Anglo-American poet thirty years his junior.’
III
For Gandhi, and for Tagore, the foreign language was a window into another culture, another civilization, another way (or ways) of living in the world. For them, the command of a language other than their own was a way of simultaneously making themselves less parochial and their work more universal. Their readings and travels fed back into their own writing, thus bringing the world to Bengal and Gujarat, and (when they chose to write in the foreign language) Bengal and Gujarat to the world. Bilingualism was here a vehicle or something larger and more enduring—namely, multiculturalism.
In these respects, Gandhi and Tagore were representative. Before them there was Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, who moved between Urdu and
English as he strove simultaneously to make the British more sensitive to Muslim interests and the Muslims more willing to engage with modernity. After them there was B.R. Ambedkar, who wrote in Marathi for a local constituency; and in English for the rest of India and for the world. Ambedkar knew his Tukaram, but also his John Stuart Mill. To take another example, C. Rajagopalachari is still admired for his English style; but few now know that he was a pioneering essayist and short-story writer in Tamil. He knew his Kural, but—as he once reminded an interviewer—he had also read the works of Henry David Thoreau well before he met Mahatma Gandhi. Rajaji’s contemporary V.D. Savarkar also wrote books in English, as well as plays and polemical tracts in Marathi. From the other end of the political spectrum, consider the Communist E.M.S. Namboodiripad, who was a prolific writer and polemicist in both Malayalam and English.
(Possible exceptions to this trend are M.A. Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose, who were also all thinker–politicians, albeit of a monolingual variety. Jinnah, as is well known, was not exactly fluent in Urdu. Nehru could give a public lecture in Hindustani, and Bose in Bengali; however, their major writings, like Jinnah’s, are all in English.)
A thinker–politician who, at first glance, may seem to have been an aberration is Ram Manohar Lohia. To be sure, Lohia called for the abolition of English from educational institutions and in public life, and, at the same time, for the countrywide promotion of Hindi. However, Lohia advocated not monolingualism but multilingualism. He asked for school instruction to be provided in the mother tongue, but insisted that children must, in addition, learn two other languages—Hindi, and either a foreign language or another Indian language. He saw the need for an international language, to be used in communications between nations, but was not convinced that this had necessarily and for all time to be English. The role had been played by French in the past; and would, he thought, perhaps be played by Russian or Chinese in the future. Lohia himself knew excellent German (he had taken his PhD at the University of Berlin), while some of his finest polemical essays against the use of English were written in that language itself.
So in fact, Lohia was not an exception after all. Bilingualism and multiculturalism came naturally to him, as it did to the other leaders of his generation. It also came naturally to the social scientists who were their contemporaries. Of those active in the 1940s and 1950s, the anthropologists Nirmal Kumar Bose and Irawati Karve, the economist D.R. Gadgil, and the sociologist D.P. Mukerji—all made a name for themselves for their work in English as well as for their writings in their mother tongue. They tended to publish academic papers in English, and more popular or literary essays in Bengali or Marathi. Sometimes their work in the mother tongue was translated into English, and made a considerable impact (as, for example, with Karve’s re-rendition of the Mahabharata, Yuganta.) As with Gandhi and Tagore, the process of enrichment was two-sided—they themselves became less parochial, while through their writings they allowed their parish to feel palpably part of a wider world.
The bilingualism of the politicians and scholars was matched by the writers and critics. It was, I think, Harish Trivedi who first noted that many of the finest creative writers of the middle decades of the twentieth century were professors of English, yet wrote their poems and stories in other languages. His essay is not at hand as I write, but among the names Professor Trivedi may have mentioned were the poet Gopalkrishna Adiga and the novelist U.R. Anantha Murthy in Kannada; the poet Harivanshrai Bachchan and the short-story writer Nirmal Verma in Hindi; and the poet Firaq Gorakhpuri in Urdu. All taught English literature; some even had PhDs in the subject from the best British universities. Literary historians could doubtless add many other names to the list—of established writers in Assamese, Oriya, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, etc. who made their living teaching English yet wrote in the mother tongue in order to live.
Here, too, facility with more than one tongue was a matter not just of skill but also of sensibility. The writer, his work, and his audience, all benefited from the fact that the person in question was in command of more than one linguistic or cultural universe. Surely, Bachchan’s Hindi verse must have at some level been influenced by, or been a response to, his doctoral work at Cambridge on W.B. Yeats. By the same token, his classroom teaching and the occasional essays he wrote in English must certainly have been enriched by his immersion in the world of Hindi letters.
(Perhaps the most striking instance of this bilingualism concerns the crafting of Premchand’s Godan. This work, published in 1936, is considered the very archetype of the modern Hindi novel, yet the author first outlined the plot in English!)
In the inter-war period, no Indian town better expressed this multilinguality than the town where B.S. Kesavan spent some of his best years: Mysore. Among the town’s residents in the 1930s and 1940s were the Kannada poet K.V. Puttappa (Kuvempu), who wrote political essays in English; the English novelist R.K. Narayan, who was equally fluent in Tamil and Kannada; and the journalist H.Y. Sharada Prasad, who thought and wrote in Kannada, but whose command of English was later put to good effect in the very many speeches he ghosted for successive prime ministers of India. A somewhat younger resident was A.K. Ramanujan, who later recalled that, growing up in Mysore, he was equally familiar with the language of the street (Kannada), the language of the kitchen (Tamil, spoken by his mother), and the language of the study upstairs (occupied by his father, who liked to converse in English). Ramanujan was an accomplished poet in both Kannada and English, and achieved undying fame for his translations into English of Kannada and Tamil folklore and folk poetry—work that was enabled, in the first instance, by his growing up in the multilingual intellectual universe of Mysore.
Mysore was here representative of other towns in colonial India. The intellectual culture of Dharwad, Cochin, Allahabad, etc., was likewise bilingual, with writers and professors operating both in English and in the language of the locality or province. There was a cultural continuum that ran between qasba and mahanagar, between the smaller urban centres and the great cities of the Presidencies.
The bilingualism I have described was a product of a particular historical conjuncture—namely, the advent first of colonialism, and later, of nationalism. The British required some Indians to learn English, to interpret between them and their subjects, and to assist in governance and administration (as well as in commerce and trade). However, over time the language of the rulers also became a vehicle to demand equal rights from them. Thus, from being an accessory in the process of conquest and control, English became an ally in the process of protest and profanation. It was the language in which Indian nationalists chastised the British for not living up to their own best traditions. Simultaneously, it also became the language in which intellectually or politically minded Indians could communicate across the different linguistic zones of the Empire. Notably, even as they acquired a working knowledge of English (or better), these reform-minded Indians continued to operate in their mother tongue. The latter served best for creative literary expression and when focusing on the abolition of reactionary social practices; the former was necessary for nurturing or deepening cross-provincial networks of political action.
It is worth noting, however, that unlike in the case of social scientists and political activists, the bilingualism of the creative writer did not necessarily mean ‘English and another’. It was once not uncommon to find a novelist who wrote stories in both Konkani and Marathi, or a poet who composed his verses in Bengali as well as in Maithili.
IV
Between (roughly) the 1920s and 1970s, the intellectual universe in India was—to coin a word—‘linguidextrous’. With few exceptions, the major political thinkers, scholars and creative writers—and many of the minor ones too—thought and acted and wrote with equal facility in at least two languages, one of which was the mother tongue, another usually (but not always) English. It appears that this is no longer the case. The intellectual and creative world in India is increasingly becoming polarize
d—between those who think and act and write in English alone, and those who think and write and act in their mother tongue alone.
The state of West Bengal appears to have held out longest against this separation of literary and intellectual discourses. At least in Kolkata, there are still very many intellectuals who are properly linguidextrous. In 2009, Ranajit Guha was awarded the prestigious Ananda Puraskar for a book on Tagore in Bengali. Coincidentally, his collected essays in English were published in the same week. Ranajit Guha is of course a prabasi, but of those still resident in Kolkata, Supriya Chaudhuri, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Partha Chatterjee and Swapan Chakravarty are all world-renowned scholars for their writings in English—and they have written first-rate essays and books in Bengali as well. These scholars are all on the wrong side of fifty, but there are, I am reliably told, some Bengali men and women now in their thirties and forties who likewise move effortlessly between the language of the world and the language of the locality.
In a life lived in between the interstices of the academy and the press, I have had the privilege of knowing many linguidextrous intellectuals. Some are Bengalis, such as those remarkable prabasi couples Tanika and Sumit Sarkar, Kalpana and Pranab Bardhan, and Meenakshi and Sujit Mukherjee. Others have come from more subaltern linguistic zones, for example, Kumar Ketkar, Madhav Gadgil, Dilip Chitre and Rajendra Vora (Marathi), Shahid Amin and Krishna Kumar (Hindi), Girish Karnad and D.R. Nagaraj (Kannada), C.V. Subba Rao (Telugu), Jatin Kumar Nayak (Oriya) and N.S. Jagannathan (Tamil). Like me, all these writers have written a great deal in English; but unlike me, they have published important work in their other language too. In countless conversations down the decades, I have been to them what the readers of Gandhi and Tagore were to those great Indians—namely, a grateful recipient of knowledge and understanding derived from languages that I do not myself speak or read.
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