Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  The interesting thing is that newspapers in Hindi do not make such mistakes. This is also true of the leading newspapers in Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and all other Indian languages. And yet, the pan-Indian elite rarely read these publications. For them, those who read the news in their native language are inferior to those who read it in English. It is a clear class divide: those in the higher echelons subscribe to and read English newspapers, and those below them take the non-English papers. I used to once write a syndicated column; the people whom I met socially in the evenings had read the column in English; my driver and other staff talked to me about the version in Hindi.

  The truth is that English has become a language of social exclusion: the upper crust of the Indian middle class presides over this linguistic apartheid; the rest of India consists of victims and aspirants. The ability to speak with the right accent and fluency and pronunciation has become the touchstone for entry into the charmed circle of the ruling elite. It is the criterion for social acceptance. Those who can speak it are People Like Us. Those who cannot are the others, the ‘natives’, bereft of the qualifying social and educational background. Almost every Hindi film star gives interviews in English. Even our phenomenally talented small-town cricket stars never really ‘arrive’—no matter how many runs they have scored or how many wickets they have taken—till they can give interviews in English and understand the Australians and Scots and South Africans who will fire questions at them after the match.

  Not surprisingly, a great many in the middle class consider it a matter of pride if their children are poor in Hindi or their mother tongue. It is not unusual to find mothers discussing with a false note of deprecation—tinged with pride—the poor record their children have in their mother tongue. Ashok Vajpeyi, the well-known Hindi poet, once told me that his neighbours in his middle-class residential colony once complimented him on his little grandson’s proficiency in Hindi. ‘I thanked them,’ he said, ‘but I wondered what had happened to us Indians if we needed to be complimented for being able to speak our own language with fluency.’ The children and grandchildren of his neighbours were better in English; his grandson was the only child who spoke his own language so effortlessly. Even Macaulay would have been surprised if he were to see the kind of complex Indians have developed about their mother tongues.

  The proponents of English make the claim that the language is now Indian: more people speak it in India than even in England. Professor David Crystal, who has authored the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, makes this point explicitly. ‘In language, numbers count,’ he said while speaking in India in 2008. ‘There are more people speaking English in India than in the rest of the native-English-speaking world.’ It is true, perhaps, that purely in numerical terms a great many Indians know something of the language, but the total number of those who do so with any degree of adequacy is certainly less than five per cent of the population. Five per cent of over a billion people is still a very large figure. But Professor Crystal is quick to clarify that these large numbers of Indians speak only a ‘dialect’ of English, easily distinguished from ‘Standard English’. The numerical argument is in reality, therefore, a not-so-subtle attempt by those to whom the language originally belongs to perpetuate its hegemony. The argument of the neo-linguistic imperialists runs something like this: We took away your languages and imposed our own; you cannot speak and write it like us, but even if you do so badly, your mutant of our language is still something for you to be proud of, and we are willing to legitimize it and count you among the growing number of English speakers of the world, and nothing pleases us more than when you yourself agree with us. It is pertinent that this logic is never applied to countries like Spain or Russia or Italy or France, where too there are many more people today, than at any other time in their history, who know English. The peoples of these countries are too proud of their own language, and know it well enough, to be condescendingly included in the English-speaking world. But typically, and as one of the most easily verifiable consequences of colonialism, some Indians themselves take pride in saying that English is an Indian language. Or else they argue that its pidgin derivative will do as well because it serves the purpose of communication. A nation that hopes to take its place on the high table of the most powerful nations of the world can hardly afford to hobble into the twenty-first century on the crutches of Hinglish.

  The Kenyan Nobel Laureate Professor Wangari Mathai once told me that it was only the colonial rulers who truly understood the importance of a language. That is why it was the first thing they took away from us. Tragically, the victims are the last to know what they have lost. On 21 December 2004, I was present at an important function to mark the golden anniversary of the Sahitya Akademi, India’s highest literary body, created by Jawaharlal Nehru to promote and reward creative writing in the Indian languages. A postal stamp, quite ingeniously designed, showing the first alphabet of all the country’s languages, was to be issued by the junior minister of communications, Shakeel Ahmed, and handed over to the cabinet minister for culture, Jaipal Reddy. Satchidanandan, the secretary of the Akademi, who is a sensitive poet and a writer of eminence in Malayalam, the language spoken in Kerala, from where he hails, began the proceedings in English. Shakeel Ahmed, who is from Bihar, read out a soulless speech in English, mispronouncing a great many words. Jaipal Reddy, one of the few cerebral politicians in the country, made an intelligent speech, but in English. Sunil Gangopadhyaya, a major writer in Bengali, and the vice president of the Akademi, also spoke in English. The only person who spoke in an Indian language, Urdu, was Gopichand Narang, the president of the Akademi. Sharon Lowen, an American citizen who is one of India’s acclaimed classical dancers, was to give a performance after the speeches. Her brochure was in English. The invitation to a select few to join the ministers over a cup of tea was in English. The lettering on the newly issued stamp was in English. The audience consisted largely of writers in the languages of India, little known and down at heel, condemned to obscurity in a nation that lionizes only the few who write in English. Many of the speakers stressed the need to celebrate and resurrect notable writers in the Indian languages. They made the appeal in English.

  The truth is that whatever illusions people may have or are encouraged to have, English can never be an Indian language. In James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Daedalus expresses the anguish of an Irishman at having to speak English: ‘The language in which we are speaking is his [the Englishman’s] before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.’ There must be very few laments which so evocatively sum up the pain of trying to, or being condemned to, speak someone else’s language in preference to one’s own. Why don’t Indians feel this pain? The answer is again a tribute to the genius of Macaulay. The class of intermediaries he created were programmed to lose respect for their own tongue, even if their grasp of the foreign language remained at best rudimentary. A clutch of Indian authors writing in English have deservedly won international acclaim. But, for the greatest part, Yeats’s observation in a letter of 1835 remains essentially true. ‘Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English,’ he wrote. ‘Nobody can write English with music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever sing the language of his thoughts.’ V.S. Naipaul in An Area of Darkness said much the same thing. Calling English ‘the greatest incongruity of British rule’, he added that a clerk in India using English in a government office is ‘immediately stultified’, since he can never fully grasp the nuances of the foreign language, ‘which limits his response and makes him inflexible’.9 The important thing is to make the distinction between learning a language and claiming it as your own. Many Indians begin to learn
English when still very young, their as yet unformed tongues grappling with ‘Ba Ba Black Sheep’ and ‘Humpty Dumpty’ in mostly shoddy ‘English-medium schools’. But this is not the language in which they can sing their thoughts and their deepest feelings.

  The stultification that the foreign language imposes is not restricted only to the behaviour of clerks. It is an all-pervasive phenomenon, casting a baneful shadow on the most refined areas of artistic expression. I recall in London at the Nehru Centre a performance by the well-known Odissi exponent Guru Gangadhar Pradhan and his group. He was seated on the stage playing the pakhawaj. A vocalist sang beautifully the works of Oriya poets in compositions based on classical ragas. The dancers, resplendent in their finely pleated gold-thread saris and delicate make-up, were completely in step. Their traditional jewellery was in place and their facial expressions in harmony. The male dancer, bare-bodied, with kundals in his ears, did not look at all out of place. The beat of the pakhawaj was in perfect rhythm with the ghungroos on the dancer’s feet as the theme of Krishna and Radha’s eternal love-play unfolded. It was an authentic moment in sync with tradition, heritage, milieu, training, mythology and folklore, making complete sense to the participants, emanating from the soil and from the sap that goes into the making of culture, where expression is as effortless as a child falling off to sleep in a mother’s clasp. The only jarring thing was the commentary by one of the dancers in English. It was an English that sounded like Oriya, full of big words, laboured and hardly comprehensible. The speaker was self-conscious, unsure, in such striking contrast to the sure-footedness of her dance. Guru Gangadhar seemed to be abashed by his awkwardness in the English language, bowing and smiling a little more than what would be the natural self-effacement of a great artist. In those awkward moments he was a very different person to the confident artist playing dexterously on the pakhawaj, calling out the complex beat in perfect sync with the vocalist, the sitar player, the violinist and the dancers.

  I have noticed the same thing in the proliferating FM channels in India. Anchors who speak in Hindi or other Indian languages are far more relaxed, deft and sure-footed, flowing with the language, breaking a word to prove a point, bending a proverb, playing effortlessly with the language, their humour full of an earthiness that comes naturally and creates an immediate resonance with listeners. On Red FM when I hear ‘Khurafati’ Nitin play the fool with an unsuspecting listener, or devise a jingle, or crack a joke which is funny because the context is familiar both to the language and—perhaps for that reason alone—to the lives of ordinary people, I marvel at how language can play such a transforming and liberating role. None of this is evident in the English-language programmes, though the anchors are often good. There’s always something unfinished and a little forced or ‘clubby’ about the anecdotes they tell and the jokes they crack.

  An evening spent with Kapil Dev also brought home this point dramatically. Kapil enjoys an iconic stature as a world-class cricketer of yesteryears, but his fluency in English is poor. Renuka and I met him and his wife some years ago at an elegant dinner at the home of one of the richest Indians in England, the Narulas. A few more Indian guests were present, and the conversation—as is the norm for India’s social elite—was mostly in English. Kapil sat silently, replying in monosyllables when spoken to. But then somebody narrated a joke in Punjabi, and Kapil underwent a remarkable transformation. The earlier reticence evaporated, and he literally came into his own. Freed from the fetters of the foreign language, he relaxed visibly. It was as if he had entered a comfort zone in which he could be himself without the burden of a language which, even if he knew it better, would remain a barrier. He was now a part of the conversation with an effortlessness and a sparkle that was a pleasure to hear. Throughout the evening he kept the entire gathering in splits, narrating one joke after another, mimicking well-known Indian film actors and politicians, his Punjabi full of colloquialisms and robust wisdom and humour.

  It is true that over the years the reach of Hindi and some other Indian languages has grown considerably. The largest circulating daily today, Dainik Bhaskar, is in Hindi, and five more Hindi papers figure in the list of the top ten daily newspapers by circulation. Malayala Manorama in Kerala and Ananda Bazar Patrika in West Bengal, along with some Marathi and Gujarati papers, also sell in very large numbers. The television news channel with the largest viewership, Aaj Tak, is in Hindi, and even Murdoch’s Star News, which planned to come in as an English news channel, decided to switch to Hindi. However, it is a matter of concern that many Indian-language newspapers and television channels have noticeably switched to Hinglish. According to one survey, almost 70 per cent of words in Zee TV’s Hindi news are in English! It isn’t unusual to hear anchors and experts on news shows speak sentences like this: ‘India ko apni strategic priorities aur ambitions ke context mein neighbouring countries se negotiations karni hongi.’ Not a single word of consequence in this sentence is in Hindi. Exactly whom is this news meant for? Those who understand the English phrases don’t need the few Hindi link words, and those who don’t will not know what the learned person has said. This is mindless mongrelization; it enriches neither language; indeed, it serves no purpose at all.

  Neelabh Mishra, who edits the Hindi edition of Outlook magazine, rightly argues that ‘while no one should grudge creative borrowing of vocabulary and terminology from other languages for new conceptual categories, one can’t ignore the fact that the Hindi used in newspapers suffers from the dead weight of indiscriminate borrowing from English that obfuscates information and experience … In the news media, the world of Hindi is qualitatively shrinking, even though it has been quantitatively expanding by leaps and bounds in terms of circulation and revenue.’ Neelabh makes the further point that Hindi is at a discount even in Bollywood, which has done the most to promote it:

  The awkwardness with Hindi of most Bollywood celebrities, even north Indian ones, is obvious when one hears them off screen, sometimes even on screen; it is reflected in an anglicized accent here or an odd, literally translated turn of phrase there. Here’s an industry at great discomfort with the medium it lives off. Hindi films are mostly plotted and scripted in English, the dialogues written in Roman script, the films are marketed in English and the exchange of ideas within the industry is mostly in English. While this may have given the Hindi film industry a cosmopolitan edge, it also points to a crisis that Hindi is facing: it is handing over the reins of conception, execution and control of even its most popular projects to people who are uncomfortable with the language. When a language cedes control of itself, it cedes power—and, in doing so, betrays a deep-seated lack of confidence in its own creativity.10

  Moreover, not all the expanding reach of the media in Hindi and the other indigenous languages has affected the loyalty of the elite to English, and even more importantly, it hasn’t corrected the sense of inferiority still attached to knowing our own languages better than we know English. Every time I travel by the Shatabdi train to Chandigarh I try this experiment: I ask someone a question in Hindi and—expectedly enough—the answer is in English, just in case I thought the person asked does not know English. Advertisements may pour into the Hindi television channels and newspapers, but commercial returns cannot be a compensation for the lack of respect still greatly evident for our own tongues. Bookshelves in most middle-class homes in cities have only English titles. Only English newspapers are available on Indian domestic and international airlines; even in Pakistan, Urdu papers are available on flights, and I have noticed that a great many passengers prefer them to those in English. Henry Chu, the South Asia Bureau Chief of the Los Angeles Times, once asked me with genuine perplexity why the fancy visitor’s room in the office of Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of India’s Planning Commission, had only newspapers in English. ‘Isn’t that a bit odd?’ he asked me. ‘Does Mr Ahluwalia not know any Indian language?’ Chu was still new to India, but he must have found out soon enough that for the anglicized elite and its emula
tors there is nothing odd in this situation. There is no national magazine in Hindi which can compete with India Today or Outlook, and it is in itself a sad commentary that the Hindi versions of these publications are called India Today and Outlook. Recently the Indian Express published a list of the top ten opinion makers in the country; all of them write in English.11 It was as though the thinkers and columnists who write in the several Indian languages didn’t matter at all in a survey of the country’s finest minds.

  The Hindi book publishing industry is dismal, too. Hardly any book in Hindi acquires a pan-Indian readership, and even the successful ones are not read by the elite. The sale of books in the Indian languages is a disgrace. Unprofessional editors continue to publish titles whose sales are minimal and depend on government purchases or other institutional buyers. The production and editing leaves much to be desired, and the publishers appear to be committed democrats because they do not believe in royalties. If a book sells 1000 copies the publisher considers it a bestseller, and there is a great deal of vanity publishing. Sitakant Mahapatra, the soft-spoken poet from Orissa, who won the country’s highest literary award, the Bharatiya Jnanpith, told me that his volume of poems in Oriya sold less than 800 copies in Orissa and is now out of print! If we look at the book industry in other countries, the contrast is dramatic. In the United Kingdom, books sell tens of thousands of copies. Every major newspaper has a voluminous weekly section on books. The same is true of the United States, France, Spain or Japan. Yes, these countries are affluent, but books sell in large numbers not only because of greater purchasing power. I recall that in Russia, at a time when the country was in the middle of a difficult transition after the break-up of the Soviet Union and ordinary people did not get their salaries for months, a new edition of Pushkin sold in the hundreds of thousands. If Russia was in thrall to a foreign language, as indeed was the case at one time when the elite preferred to speak French rather than Russian, this would never happen.