Indian writing in english

By Shravan Vats

In the first few years after Independence, most Indian probably thought it right that English should be largely removed from the face of the country, and believed that this would happen within a decade or two. This belief was enshrined in the Constitution which stipulated that Hindi would become the sole official language of the country by 1965. However, the insensitivity, ignorance and brutality of Hindi protagonists has ill-served the language, and, far from attaining the position originally visualised for it, Hindi's position is now being questioned by several of the other language groups in the country. Notwithstanding the antics of some politicians, English continues to play an important role, and, contrary to attitudes some 50- years ago, it is now welcomed and wanted in most regions of India, even as they remain committed to developing and using their mother tongues.

In the heyday of our anti-English bellicosity, a fundamental misapprehension about the role of the language probably sprang from the fact that it was identified with the mannerisms of supposedly effete and microscopic social elite. People seem to have ignored the equally important fact that English had gradually become a major vehicle for the spread of serious thought and ideas in the country; it is difficult to eradicate ideas and their languages of expression once they have taken root, and this is perhaps one reason why English remains very much with us today, even after 50- years of concerted denigration by self-appointed nationalists. Serious scholarship and utterances in the language continued unabated, and a steady stream of creative writers ensured that fiction and poetry in English not only survived, but evolved into something unique and vital.

A generation and a half after Independence, a first-rate crop of creative writers in English emerged on the literary scene of the country; but, while we celebrate their talent and success, let us salute those who kept Indian writing in English alive during the dark ages: that roll of honour includes R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh, G.V. Desani, Ruth Jhabvala, Anita Desai, Nissim Ezekiel, P. Lal and many others - crucial links in the development of a creative tradition, and people who had to face a barrage of criticism purely because they wrote in English. Their worth remained unrecognised for a long time in the atmosphere of false nationalist fervour prevalent in mid-twentieth-century India.

Although Sahitya Akademi awards were instituted in 1955, no award was given by the Akademi for a book in English until 1960, when R.K. Narayan was recognised. Thereafter, awards were withheld from writers in English in 1961-62, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1972-74. Since 1975 the Sahitya Akademi had been giving awards annually for books in English, and it is wonderful that young writers like Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh have been recognised by officialdom so soon after publishing a couple of major works. But authors like Sesani, whose path-breaking All About H. Hatterr appeared in 1948, Ruth Jhabavala, widely acknowledged to be a major writer, and Khushwant Singh, whose moving Train to Pakistan first appeared as long ago as 1956 and who is now something of a national institution, have yet to be regarded by the Akademi. Raja Rao's Kanthapura was first published in 1938 to critical acclaim and marked a major break-though in the successful inventive use of English by an Indian, but he had to wait till 1963 for his Akademi award. Until three decades ago, most of our major creative writers in English, and some who were doing path breaking work in other fields, still to become popular in India (e.g. Dr. Salim Ali in ornithology), faced enormous problems in having their work read and taken seriously within the country. The publishing case-history of Kanthapura illustrates this point.

Raja Rao's Kanthapura was published in London by Allen and Unwin shortly before World War II broke out. Members of the cognoscenti, like E.M. Forster, were warm in their praise of it. Perhaps because the war soon overshadowed everything else in Britain, the novel did not sell well at all, an Allen and Unwin may well have been relieved when their stock of the book was destroyed, with their warehouse, during wartime bombing. Their edition soon went out of print, but in 1947 the OUP in India re-issued 3,000 copies in a very reasonably priced hardcover edition, the year they also published Raja Rao's collection of short stories, The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories. When I joined the OUP in 1961, having recently read Raja Rao's Serpent and the Rope, which received excellent reviews at the time, I was astonished to find that the 1947 printing of Kanthapura had sold less than 1,000 copies, that the OUP still had some 2,000 copies in it warehouse (1,000 of which were unbound sheets): the stock had long been written-off, and only the reluctance of a publishing house dominated by editorial affection for books rather than accounting expediency had saved the stock from being physically destroyed and sold as waste. Cow of the Barricades hadn't done much better, and unsold copies of it, too, were lovingly tended and dusted in the OUP warehouse over perhaps 20- years.

Thanks partly to some vibrant new writers from Africa and the West Indies, the continuing resilience of English in India, and new names from Australia, Commonwealth literature had begun arousing interest by the start of the 1960s. In India this led to renewed interest in our own writers in English, and their works began to be studies in our universities. Prof. C.D. Narasimaiah, always a Raja Rao fan, was in the forefront of getting Indian writers on to university reading lists, and in 1962 Kanthapura was prescribed as a 'non-detailed' B.A. text in Mysore University. The initial market, arising from this prescription, was estimated to require some 5,000 copies, so the OUP quickly printed about 4,000 copies and bound up the 1,000 sets of sheets that had been languishing in their warehouse since 1947.

While publishing creative writing in English was a particularly treacherous affair in India a few decades ago, our writers were frequently reviled for using a foreign language and were constantly dismissed by Indian-language chauvinists as perpetrators of irrelevance. The situation seems reassuringly different in 1990 - even if the horizon still contains the spectre of people like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Yadav. But let us take heart from the fact that the Yadavs loved their sons and send the boys to English-medium schools. Perhaps one day Yadav Juniors will write a publishable novel in English. INAV