1. Western Impact: Indian Response A Subversion of the Hegemony of the Master's Language
- Dr Anshu Doger Gagal & Dr Shobha Tiwari Ray
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Language is a crucial element in the process of communication as one attains full subjectivity the moment one enters the symbolic order of language. Language is the repository of inherited values, belief systems and modes of experiences and sensibility; thus, it is a cultural process. It plays a vital role in constructing one’s identity. Language helps in constructing epistemological and ontological reality of an individual. Many scholars intend to look at this cultural identity being created by Indian English writers in their works with the help of colonizers’ language i.e. English, which was imposed in order to control, ravish and subjugate the identity of the colonized. In the essay entitled The Language of African Literature Ngugi Thiong'o also expresses the anguish of the colonized subject appropriately: ‘In my view, language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul of the prisoner. The bullet was the means of physical subjugation; Language was the means of spiritual subjugation.’ The Indian English writers do not consider English anymore as a tool of colonization rather they have adopted this language as a means of decolonization. They have adopted certain viable solutions and tried to give this language the new dimensions in order to deal with the politics of English language. The postcolonial writers’ continuous conscious linguistic experimentation has helped in the decolonization of English. This decolonization of English language has made Indian writers confident to use it for artistic penetration. The Indian English writers like R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Salman Rushdie, Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth to name a few have redefined the symbolic process and gave it a new direction in order to carry the essence of Indian culture. These authors have recreated and redefined the various experiences of the people with the help of master’s language. The present paper will focus on how language evolved in the hands of Indian English writers. The postcolonial writers have created a new perspective of language through their experimentation in order to recreate various experiences. This paper is an attempt to highlight that how speech, translation and language confront experience. In reality, the representation of experience does not rely on the language as it has various forms and it is also true that everything cannot be translated between different cultures.
After the official institutionalization of English education in India, it became a new medium of expression. Many Indians chose to write in English. English language and its knowledge deem one superior in comparison to the one who is writing in his/her own language. Meenakshi Mukherjee wrote in The Beginnings of the Indian Novel:
Over the colonial period one of the most obvious markers of power was familiarity with the English language and Western culture, something that all these early writers had in common because of the language they chose to write in. . . . Indian writers in English took care to align with the best in various ingenious ways. Epigraphs from Byron, Scott, Cowper, Shakespeare, and Coleridge were common practice, and quotations and references were generously woven into the narrative, whether the context called for them or not. (qtd. in Mehrotra 97)
The Western impact in the works of the Indian English writers in the nineteenth century was considered as a privilege and a skill which was restricted only to the elite class. Indian writers in English took measures to align English writers in their works. Therefore, at the beginning, Indian writers writing in English used it carefully, with stiff correctness, always conscious, that it was a foreign tongue.
For Ram Mohan Roy and later for men like Tilak, Gokhale and Mahatma Gandhi, English was a more useful medium because it caters to a wider audience. But the liberties one can take with one’s own language cannot be taken easily with an acquired language.Thus, various difficulties were posed in front of Indian writers writing in English. It was not easy to express directly in English the lives of people who do not themselves speak or think in English. Each language speaking community has its distinct and cultural nuances. Historically speaking language has always played a major role in establishing and sustaining empires. By institutionalizing English, the colonizers succeeded in imposing their language and through it, their culture, displacing and devaluing the indigenous one.The damage it caused to the morale of indigenous people was huge, but the imposition of English also did a lot of good to the colonized subject. It brought to the colonized a new and advanced vision of life. The learning of the English language was prestigious and practical as it assured jobs and enabled the natives to participate in the master’s culture. English was frequently used as a language of business and politics but it was seldom successfully employed for creative or imaginative writing. To know English for career advancement was one aspect and to write literature in English was another aspect.By institutionalizing English the colonizers succeeded in imposing their language and through it, their culture, displacing and devaluing the indigenous one.
Chinua Achebe has also rightly said in Decolonizing the Mind that the real aim of colonialism was to control the mental universe of the colonized and to control people’s culture and their tools of self-definition. There was undoubtedly no moral reason to introduce English into India and the real reason was political. The fact cannot be denied as asserted by Achebe in Decolonizing the Mind that, “Language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture” (13). How the Indian writers writing in English will interpret the experiences and culture through the borrowed diction particularly when Indianness lies more in our soul than in our body and our soul lies in our thought, philosophy, culture, and in our way of living.
The challenges posed before Indian English writers therefore were enormous. The Indian English writer is faced with the terrible dilemma of either appearing as a collaborator or a traitor for communicating in another language. Is it possible to forget one’s culture completely and immerse in a new language?
The representation of one’s own culture and one’s own values and beliefs has actually become a difficult task because of this institutionalization of English. The postcolonial writer is therefore forced to make the choice between the two. However, the choice is often no choice because the writer cannot use another language creatively except the metropolitan one, but in using it, one is automatically branded a traitor, a neo-colonialist. An attempt to find strategies that could overcome this dilemma may be found in the writings of African novelist Chinua Achebe. He says:
I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be anew English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings. (8)
The question of whether English is one’s language or one should write literary works in it, are asked not only in Africa but also in another important geographical locations including India. It was not easy to convey one's typically Indian experiences in the master's language.Therefore, a lot of experimentation took place with the master’s language as the writers understand that language is not an end in itself rather it a medium to redefine and reconstruct a new set of meanings. Language is an ever evolving process. English language has undergone a lot of change. Multicultural and multilinguisticcontext of India has a huge impact on recreating the Indian English language. With this continuous experimentation a rich linguistic variety came into existence. According to Anisur Rehman and Ameena Kazi Ansari the Indian English writers have created new signs and gestures of language in order to give strength to their diction. Therefore, vigorous attempts to wield the English language in different ways were constructed. It was with the coming of Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, and R.K.Narayan that the journey of the Indian English writing actually began. In the Foreword to Kanthapura, Raja Rao speaks of his attempt to create a unique language called the Indian English.
One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I used the word ‘alien’, yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is language of our intellectual make-up but not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will someday proof to be as distinctive and colorful as an Irish or an American. (Forward IV)
These writers do not write in conventional style anymore. Rather, they have adopted means to give English a peculiar Indian tone, new range and potentiality. Indian writers writing in English in their own way took liberties with the accepted diction and the syntax of the language.They tried to incorporate the native regional tongues into English. They included Hindi words in English spellings, e.g. ashram, zamindari, Bharatmata, Ganga, Hindu, buk-bukking etc. Indian-English writers invented the compound-words to capture Indian essence like rickshaw-puller, betel-chewers, chokra-boy etc. Indian writers writing in English started the Indian lexicon, colloquial forms as asserted in Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines “Dekho burra-mem, he said again, his thin voice vanishing into a screech” (25) in order to give a new perspective to the linguistic system. Initially, this new methodology of mixing codes and switching codes of English was considered a textual violence to show anger against the colonialists. And at the same time this methodology best portrays the real lifestyles of the natives.
Nissim Ezekiel is one among various Indian writers writing in English who is distinguished for his craftsmanship. His use of Indian speech inflections in his poetry are reflection of his cultural ethos. He has created a rich authentic flavor of India through his poems. The title of his poem “from Very Indian Poems in Indian English” demonstrates that the language can be used as a vehicle for the transmission of the cultural legacy.
Remember me? I am Professor Sheth.Once I taught you geography. Now I am retired, though my health is good.My wife died some years back.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Whole world is changing. In India alsoWe are keeping up. Our progress is progressing. (238-239)The poet has deliberately used hybrid form of the language also known as ‘Babu Angrezi’ in his poems in order to prevent the speakers from becoming a mere caricature. Ezekiel therefore reconstructed a different set of symbols and made the readers believe that English is not prerogative or possession of the English. The language now belongs to those who use it. Such bold efforts of these Indian English writers helped them liberate English language from its British cultural antecedents. The experimentation to make English language value-neutral is a continuous and a dynamic process made both by men and women Indian writers writing in English. Kamala Das also mentioned in her poem “An Introduction”:
I speak in three languages, write in Two, dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said, English isNot your mother tongue.Why not leaveMe alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,Every one of you? Why not let me speak inAny language I like? The language I speak,Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernessesAll mine, mine alone.It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,It is as human as I am human, don’tYou see? (8-16)
Kamala Das has created a new medium of representation in order to explore her own predicaments. These writers by choice used the language in such a manner so that the nuances of the culture can be retained. They have created their own English idioms in order to establish the validity of their literature. Similarly The Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie has also brought a huge revolution in the writing style of the Indian English writers. According to Anita Desai it was only after Salman Rushdie came along that Indian writers felt capable of using the spoken language, spoken English, the way it’s spoken on Indian streets by ordinary people. These writers no more feel English as dominant and domineering language. Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh, Sujata Bhatt, Rukmani Bhaya Nair and many writers have relentlessly contributed to shape a new kind of English. These writers have tried to express themselves naturally through the learnt language i.e. English.
Amitav Ghosh in his novel The Hungry Tide highlights that language does not exist in isolation but it is relatable to varied experiences. Kanai the professional translator one of the important figures of the novel believes that people can speak and be heard across the differences which separates them. According to scholars language has different interpretations and is deeply soaked in the experiences of the people. Language is a medium of representation and to use it as a tool to dominate and annihilate the identity of the people is not appropriate.
Therefore one can easily assess the achievements of Indian English writing and the phases of gradual transformations. It also helps one understand the attitude of the writers toward English and especially the language in general. At the initial stages of the post-colonial period also the writers were more absorbed to talk about the language than talking with its help. The alienation between the speech and experience has disappeared now. The writers now have developed a love for speech and that through the language which was imposed over them.
Works Cited and Consulted
- Bolton, Kingsley, Braj B. Kachru, ed. World Englishes: Critical Concepts in Linguistics. London: Routledge, 2006. Web. 18 Feb. 2018.
- Das, Kamala. “An Introduction.”Kamala Das-Poems.Classic Poetry Series.Poem Hunter.Com, 2012.Web. 12 Apr, 2015.
- Daruwalla, Keki N. ed. Two Decades of Indian Poetry: 1960-80. Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980. Print.
- Devy, G.N. In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature. Madras: Macmillan, 1995. Print.
- Ezekiel, Nissim. Collected Poems: 1952-1988. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989. Print.
- Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. New York: Houghton, 2005. Print.
- ---. The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print.
- Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, ed. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Print.
- Ngũgĩ, wa Thiongo.“The Language of African Literature.” Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.London: J. Currey, 1986. Web. 16 Jan. 2018.
- Rao, Raja. Kanthapura.Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, 1938. Print.
- Rehman, Anisur, Ameena Kazi Ansari, ed. Indian English Women Poets. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2009. Print.
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