At Home In India Too

Basically, talent in any language is welcome. When we peer back at the last 200 years, deadened sensitivities abound in a myriad divisive forces — therefore, why make English another insurmountable, insufferable hurdle?

An Illustrated History written by diverse academics and writers is thankfully not meant only for those who feast on academia, but for the daal-roti, sabzi-bhaaji reader who will be caught unawares by the wealth of information concealed within the 24 essays. No doubt, there will be a mild tremor of outrage emanating from those writers who, yet again, have been missed out. But as Mehrotra has swiftly pointed out, the essayists have chosen their own writers, (and any resemblance towards ignoring others, living or dead, is purely accidental).

So while on the one hand we have the usual suspects — did someone mention Nirad C. Chaudhri, Salman Rushdie and the ubiquitous Arundhati Roy — we also get a glimpse of the early authors, many of whom have simply been wiped off our collective literary memories. For instance, Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954), who got a scholarship to Oxford, but, sadly enough, was not allowed to practice law in India. However, she set up her own Legal Advisory Cell and began noting her observations mostly as short stories revolving around the women she dealt with. Love and Life Behind the Purdah (1901) is perhaps one the earliest examples of an Indian woman writing in English.

Similarly, other unconventional names crop up. Ramachandra Guha’s well-researched essay on Verrier Elwin captures the indefatigable, erudite British-born anthropologist whose early writings may have unfairly branded him as a specialist on tribal sex — but who in 1954 became the first foreigner to adopt Indian citizenship. His posthumously published autobiography, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin, won the Sahitya Akademi Award. But how many of us would have read him today?

Other off-beat choices? Sunil Khilnani’s “Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English”. This essay explores how both the politician and the Mahatma used English “as a tool of insubordination and, ultimately, freedom”. Interestingly, the essay documents how difficult it was for Gandhi to enter the circle that wrote and spoke English. Among other painful tortures, it even meant memorising 200 lines of Paradise Lost. But just as Gandhi discovered the usefulness of the language only in later years, in another essay, “The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore”, Amit Chaudhuri notes the similar “boredom and terror” experienced by Tagore as a child grappling with this exasperating language.

The unease haunted Tagore and, even after his Nobel Prize, his stature as a poet and author in the West was diminished by the quality of some of his own translations. If Ezra Pound was openly critical, it took a Yeats in 1935 to state that Tagore “brought out sentimental rubbish, and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English. No Indian knows English. Nobody can write with music and style in a language not learnt in childhood and ever since the language of his thought.”

What these well-researched essays do is to precisely map the distance between those first writers in English to today’s authors who are not only writing with music and style, but also adding to the English vocabulary.

Undoubtedly, had the future course of the unflagging battalions of IWE’s been known to Yeats, a perusal of An Illustrated History would probably have made him rue his hasty judgement.