Whenever attending meetings on Commonwealth or postcolonial literature outside the sub continent, a Hindi writer will invariably be asked this ritual question, 'why do you write in Hindi?', and similarly any other "regional" or "vernacular" writer, even if the name of these other languages may sometimes be confused with the name of the state (Malyalam and Kerala, Kannada and Karnataka, Oriya and Orissa). The wonder of the Western journalist or literature scholar at Indians writing in "regional" languages involves an obvious understatement: why don't you write in English, why did you choose this regional language that no one understands outside India and is hardly translated in international languages, a folk dialect, if you wish to take part in the world dialogue of cultures and belong to the real network of the world story? This question involves an "orientalist" bias, which the paper first explores before developping the difference in conceptualizing the dicible world according to the language of one's deep culture, which is not only a medium

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1

ETUDES ANGLAISES 2009, 62-3

pp. 332-344

But why do you write in Hindi?

Whenever attending meetings on Commonwealth or postcolonial literature outside the

sub continent, a Hindi writer will invariably be asked this ritual question, 'why do you write

in Hindi?', and similarly any other "regional" or "vernacular" writer, even if the name of

these other languages may sometimes sound so exotic that it can hardly be properly uttered

and may be confused with the name of the state (Malyalam and Kerala, Kannada and

Karnataka, Oriya and Orissa). The wonder of the Western journalist or literature scholar at

Indians writing in "regional" languages (or, as they are often called in India, in bhasha-s, a

word meaning 'language' which, incidentally, has long been the usual designation of Sanskrit,

and then of Braj, that is to say, of the changing dominant cultural language) involves an

obvious understatement: why don't you write in English, why did you choose this regional

language that no one understands outside India and is hardly translated in international

languages, why such a bizarre inclination towards a medium vaguely perceived as archaic, or

smelling of dubious revivalism, or dusty, or naïve, a folk dialect, if you wish to take part in

the world dialogue of cultures and belong to the real network of the world story?

Questioning the question…

It is easy to recognize and criticize the never-ending "orientalist" (in Said's meaning)

bias, a colonial legacy, behind the persistent asking of the same question to a 'bhasha' writer

who simply writes in his mother tongue, as if 1) English was unquestionably a better literary

medium and you have to be brave or seditious or uneducated or stupid enough to choose a

minor medium with no entry into the broad market,2) the regional writer was defined

primarily by his linguistic medium: would any journalist ask Proust why he writes in French

or Hrabal why he writes in Czech, not to mention the English writers? And if, incidentally,

one might have asked Kafka "why do you write in German?", it would not have been the first

(and often last) question regarding his literary achievements1.

Geetanjali Shree, a Hindi writer whose novel Mai (1998) was recently translated into

French (2008), experienced a few months ago the agonizing pressure of the ritual question,

when invited to England as a "vernacular" writer, along with another senior Marathi writer

widely acclaimed in India, for a symposium on postcolonial writing and Commonwealth

literature. Both vernacular writers were looked on with a mixture of condescension, surprise

and disdain, by the horde of young Indian English writers, most of them beginners, who had

never heard their names before, but all new each other and playfully exchanged jokes as if

belonging to one and the same world, now ruling the literary field in Western clothes and

idioms, and softly excluding the "vernacular" writers, minor both in their number and in their

literary medium, and their traditional exotic garments. This is how she analyses the question

1 Significantly I could myself witness the reverse of such a ritual question when a Hindi writer was once asked in

College de France in Paris, after a full lecture about what is really at stake in contemporary literature and

particularly in his own creation, why he did not use Hindi as his creative medium. The writer, K.B. Vaid, who

writes exclusively in Hindi although he has been a professor of English and American literature in the States for

more than thirty years, was asked by an Indian Hindi speaking lady at the end of his talk: but Sir, why don't you

write in Hindi? The question is interesting too for our purpose because it shows that the very same persons who

may be strong and sometimes aggressive supporters of the 'Hindi cause' may also be very ignorant of the literary

culture of this language, and that Hindi revivalism often goes hand in hand with a total indifference towards what

is going on in the cultural contemporary or past literature field, apart a few ritualized landmarks such as Kabir or

Premchand, names which act as purely social or political passwords in such contexts. Romila Thapar ?

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Author manuscript, published in "Etudes Anglaises 62, 3 (2009) 332-44"

2

of her "choice" of Hindi for creative language, a question asked in India as well as abroad (2nd

and 3rd §): English I got, from early childhood, through a schooling that reinforced an

unequal relationship between the two languages, giving English the higher status. So

much so that on learning I write, it was mostly assumed that it must be in English!

And on learning it is in Hindi, there was and still is sometimes, amazement and

responses of the following kind – wow, Hindi, how exotic, or Hindi, how stupid when

you can do it in English, or Hindi, good good, be patriotic, or Hindi, how brave of you

to be willing to be isolated and poor. Etc. The point I am making is that it is not seen

as a natural choice that I am writing in my own language! Normally if one is writing in

a foreign tongue there would be this curiosity and surprise. This is the classic colonial

condition!

… There is one more thing about today – the huge pedagogical concern with

postcolonial literature in the West that is reinstating a margin and a centre by putting

up a tableau with English writers, to the exclusion of most others.

…In England last month, I was introduced as a vernacular writer, in Italy as a

local language writer. What is English in England and Italian in Italy? Why do these

epithets not apply to the writers in those countries? (Geetanjali Shree 2008)

…and the distorted relation between English and 'regional' languages…

The last sentence can be better understood if we keep in mind that Hindi is the official

language of the one billion plus Indian republic2, alongside English, initially added as an

associate official language of the Union for fifteen years in 1950 and later maintained in its

status of second official language of the Union after the Tamil populations strongly opposed

Hindi as official language in 1965.

Why was English initially not wanted as the national or official language of free India?

Because, as well interpreted by Gandhi, it was not only the language of the colonizers invited

at that time to "quit India", but the language of colonization itself as a process of (more or less

unconsciously) accepted alienation from the native values and mental frames. The story

Gandhi relates in the paper Harijan's issue of 1938 is exemplary and largely commented in

his book on The Evil wrought by English:

The pillory began with the fourth year; I know now that what I took four years to learn

of Arithmetic, Algebra, Chemistry and Astronomy, I should have learnt easily in one

year, if I had not to learn them through English but Gujarati. My grasp of the subjects

would have been easier and clearer. My Gujarati vocabulary would have been richer. I

would have made use of such knowledge in my own home. This English medium

created an impassable barrier between me and the members of my family, who had not

gone through English schools. (…) I was fast becoming a stranger in my own home. (my

italics).

Ray too, a well-known chemist, tried in 1932 to oppose education in a foreign language,

foreign therefore according to him bound to extinguish all creativity and originality: "Imagine

for a moment what would happen if the English lads were compelled, first of all, to learn

Persian or Chinese, and then had to read through the medium of such a tongue" (Habib: 348-

352). The neglect of vernacular languages and cultures started indeed in the middle of the 19th

century when English started to appear as a key for lucrative jobs (Shukla: 45). The depth of

the ensuing alienation, has been described even by some contemporary Anglophone writers

such as Keki Daruwala:

2 A language deliberately not chosen as « national » yet spoken by 40% of the 1,2 billion population as a mother

tongue and by about 70% as a second language.

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3

The Europeans came to trade, hung on to fight, intrigue and conquer, and stayed on to

instruct. Their colonies became markets for their textiles and their language.

Conversions followed, to another way of life and on occasions to Christianity. When

they went back, they left their language behind, and half-castes. In an alien land,

language itself turns brown and half-caste…Colonial history shows that language can be

as domineering as any occupational army. It supplants myths, whole iconographies,

world-view, ideology. It ushers in its own symbols and its own values. An armada of

new texts sails in. Old dogmas and bigotries are swept away and exchanged for new

ones" (Daruwala 30).

Such reactions help to understand the feeling of a "colonial situation" described by

Geetanjali Shree, in relation to the above mentioned "orientalist bias". The feeling of being

"gazed" at, and the subsequent "refusal of the gaze" (Gupta 2000), are but reactions to the

persistent hangover of the colonial situation. Beneath the gaze, both in and outside India,

always lurks the certitude, once arrogantly stated by Macaulay in his famous 'minute' of 1935,

that the "obscure imbroglio" of the entire amount of the Sanskrit and Persian literary and

scientific productions (which he had not read) did not amount to a single shelf of any

Western library, or, more recently but equally arrogantly stated by Salman Rushdie, that apart

the Urdu short-story writer Manto (which he could read in translation) the whole "regional'

literature in India (which he could not read) had not yet produced works of a quality

comparable to the Indian English writing. No wonder that fierce reactions sometimes

symmetrically echo such imperialist proclamations, with no more argumentation and as much

arrogant stupidity (there are hundred of Rushdies in any regional language), equally blurring

the complex picture of the Indian linguistic and cultural situation. I leave it to the former

Director of the Sahitya Akademi (the Indian Academy for literature), to frame the literary

field in India in a dispassionate way:

Is U.R. Anantha Murthy a "regional" fiction-writer? What about Nirmal Verma,

O.V. Vijayan, Sundara Ramaswamy, Mahashweta Devi, Qurratulain Hyder or Amrita

Pritam? If these writers are "regional" – or at least were so in their first lives before

being reborn in English translations – who are the true "Indian" writers? Kalidasa, who

wrote in the supposedly pan-Indian Sanskrit language or Vikram Seth who writes in the

presently pan-Indian English that has quietly replaced Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic as the

language of power?

The critical tools of the majority of our Anglophile critics, I fear, are hardly

adequate to grasp the civilisational significance of hundreds of rich, complex and

stimulating works of every genre in the Indian languages that they may choose to

qualify either as "vernaculars", a term with implied derision for the "natives" inherited

from the colonial masters or as "regional languages', a term that vainly imagines the

existence of some other "Indian" language and slyly hints at the pan-Indian appeal of

Indian writing in English and silently asserts its hegemonic role"… English (is) a

legitimate product of our historical and existential conjuncture, a genuine expression of

our profound postcolonial crisis. Only I am unwilling to concede to it the centrality it

seems to claim: it is but a peripheral region of Indian literature and there is an obvious

disparity between the publicity it attracts and its literary quality and ability to reflect our

social as well as spiritual lives. It is the politics – the power-knowledge nexus – behind

Indian writing in English that has attracted greater criticism than the writing in itself.(…)

Our postcolonial condition, with all its complexities inherited both from the colonial and

the pre-colonial days, finds its most authentic expression in novels like Gopinath

Mohanty Paraja, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's Coir, O.V. Vijayan's Dharmapuranam,

U.R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara, Phanishwarnath Renu's Maila Anchal, Mahasveta

Devi's Agnigarba, Ananda's Marubhoomikal Undakunnathu, Shrilal Shukla's Raag

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4

Darbari, Nirmal Verma's Raat ka Reporter, Krishna Sobati's Zindaginama and Sundara

Ramaswamy's Oru Puliyamarathin Kathai or in the poems of Muktibodh, Raghuvir

Sahay, Shreekant Varma, Dhoomil, Kunwar Narain, Kedarnath Singh … Faiz, Shubhash

Mukhopadhyay, Namdev Dhasal, Dilip Chivre… or in the plays of Girish Karnad, Vijay

Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunshwar or Mohan Rakesh … The belief that the subaltern can

speak only in English or in Sanskrit (the Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in

English has a long entry on Sanskrit literature, but none on the living languages of India)

is certainly more than a joke since it has disastrous political implications in our context

(Sachidanandan 13-15)

…to grasp at the present predicament:

One of the reasons why the so-called 'regional' masterpieces are largely ignored as such

(apart from the so-called inadequacy of critical tools) in postcolonial literary studies, and in

world literature, is that they are generally so poorly translated, when they are, that their

literary quality is hardly visible. An example to the point is Krishna Sobati's translations,

which she herself used to oppose, and which, once available, were severely criticized, most

recently in Geetanjali Shree (2008). Counter examples too can be found, particularly

Ananthamurthy and K.B. Vaid, who translate their own works or collaborate with their

translator. Another reason is that they often lack the explicit ethnographic (exotic?) content

which could make them appealing to toda's world audience, since they do not explain nor

describe the Indian "culture" for the outsider, they simply live in it, taking for granted a

general knowledge and ethos, which often makes the primary interest of many a

"postcolonial" literary piece.

But the main reason is probably of a different nature. If we come back to the deep

consequences of the "colonial situation" prevailing in the cultural medium of present India,

we cannot fail to acknowledge the persistent status of English as a language of power: it was

first taught in India with the explicit intention of forming a small body of "brown Saheebs"

thinking western, which would inject the cognitive frame of Western modernity into the

masses – the framing of the new nation indeed owes both its major leaders, with the notable

exception of Gandhi, and its administrative and political structures, to this western formatting,

a well studied topic among historians questioning the very notions of nation and state

(Subaltern Studies). English is no longer the privilege of the 'collaborating' Babus, at a time it

was the language of the "service-seeking mania", responsible for a deep "social schism" (Di

Bona 350sq). It is now the language of the quick-money hunt such as jobs in the call centres

which blossomed in all the big Indian cities during the last ten years. English is now the only

door to economic and social success, re-enacting in the 21st century the antidemocratic split

between the haves -- urban, educated- -- and have-nots -- rural masses-- , a deep social and

cultural schism (Montaut 2004a). Education in English medium schools has increased at a

very quick pace during the last years: national enrolment in the upper primary sections

(grades I to VIII) of English medium schools rose by 74% between 2003 and 2006, according

to the National University for Education Planning and Administration (NUEPA). The highest

jump is recorded in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra Being schooled in English most of the time

means being cut off from one's "regional" culture, up to the total inability to read its literary

master- pieces, as sadly acknowledged by an eminent Bengali English writer, Amit

Choudhury, in the latest Paris book fair; moreover, it also means being cut off from the

masses, those masses who made the living culture of India in its various languages, and speak

the languages in which were written its great texts (cf. infra).

One consequence is the rapid decay of knowledge of the wide literate culture in Indian

languages, no longer prestigious since they have no part in the contemporary global market.

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5

Over the past fifty years, however, the ranks of this category of scholar [well

versed in their literary tradition] have gradually diminished – so much so that the

study of South Asian literary archives in their historical depths has lost two

generations of scholars. There is now good reason to wonder whether the next

generation will even be able to read Pingal texts in old Gujarati or riti kavya in

Brajbhasha or ghazals in Indo-Persian. After a century and a half of

Anglicization and a certain kind of modernization, it is hardly surprising that the

long histories of South Asia literatures no longer find a central place in

contemporary knowledge in the subcontinent itself, however much a nostalgia

for the old literary cultures and their traditions may continue to influence popular

culture (my italics) (Pollock 3)

what is threatened in the Indian literary culture…

The blame for the incumbent situation on "a certain kind of modernization" is worth

explaining, because it meets some of the most radical and today popular critiques of the

modern nation state among historians. It also reminds us of the "civilisational significance"

alluded to by Sachidanandan as well as of the Gandhian stand against "modernity". All such

notions – doubting the nation state in relation to both empowering the masses and maintaining

the Indian great culture alive, doubting "modernity" in the shape of a western-like

development grounded in science and technology, "Indian civilisational significance" – are

ultimately linked to the cultural alienation undergone during the 19th century. This alienation

increased during the 20th century with the Nehruvian modernistic model which first came to

shape the new Indian state, then with the economic opening and liberalisation since the

nineties: the present shining India is seen by many as the logical outcome of a cultural and

developmental vision typically born out of the western modernity. Roughly speaking, it

echoes the choices of what Gramsci called the urban intellectuals, like Nehru or Tilak, as

opposed to the rural intellectual, like Gandhi: an intellectual and ethical choice not entirely

determined by the educational formation since Gandhi too received higher education in

England.

The problem is not with the addition of a new culture and language such as brought by

the British in India in the 19th century – India had long been famous for its legendary capacity

of "digesting" new comers and new modes of thinking. The problem lies in the radical change

of the global network accommodating the plural cultures which had always been in a more or

less conflicting and mutually enriching relation in India: from a traditionally fluid network

built on a mosaic of "subcultures" in constant interaction, with no hierarchy, hence no center,

a more rigid architecture emerged; strongly centred, with the new culture of science,

technology and 'progress' as its hegemonic center (Nandy 1980, 2007). In the traditional

pattern, dialectic continuity, with inner criticism as the motor for change and eventually

subversion, was assumed to be the invariant of Indian culture, a continuity made fecund by an

incessant process of exchanges both vertical (time) and horizontal (space): a continuous

dialogue related the various moments of this long history, with for instance the great Sanskrit

epics being rewritten, reinterpreted and sometimes quite "deconstructed" to voice the

changing social and political environment, in all regional languages, from the medieval times

of mystic devotion with Ezhutthachan in Malayam, Pampa in Kannada or Kirtibas in Bengali

to the present days with Dharamvir Bharati in Hindi); on the other side, there has always

been a living dialogue between popular folk culture, local songs and performances, and the

learned "high" literatures. This continuity between what is often called the marg ('high way',

high literate culture) and the deshi (local) is a main feature of Indian cultural tradition:

One of the great things about our regional literatures is the remarkable way in which the

brahminical tradition is acquired by the entire non-Bahmin populace, that is, how it is

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6

acquired, revised, re-worked, made into Puranas, put into all kinds of theatre, and so

on. … While speaking through this tradition and composing his vachana in it, Basava

(the medieval mystic poet, who changed the canons of poetry by using the oral 'folk'

patterns) had access to a lot of words and ideas and concepts which you find in the

Vedas and Upanishads, and these too entered his discourse in a remarkably effortless

manner…Our vernacular languages have survived because the masses speak these and

not Samskruta. And these masses are the carriers of our culture, of our great stories and

epics (Ananthamurthy 360; 380).

With English as the new marg, this continuity has been broken, and the "enchanted circle"

alluded to by Vaid (88-911), banning the majority of Indians, came to impose among Indians

themselves a mode of communication which perverted the way we perceive each other and

similarly the way we and Europe see each other.

and the seminal concepts of Indian civilization ?

The lack of clear-cut categories, the lack of a hegemonic centre, as prevailed in the

traditional architecture of the Indian cultural pattern, has far reaching consequences in

conceptualizing mankind in the world, among which the feature of "non-separateness" has oft

been emphasized (from the psychoanalysts Erikson to Lannoy and Kakar). It has also been

equated with the non colonial non-modern world view (Nandy v-vi, 51-62) which refuses the

following hierarchies: man superior to woman, human superior to animal, to nature, adult

superior to child, civilised superior to 'savage', reason to affects, history to myth, science to

intuitive and empirical knowledge, etc. (such hierarchies legitimately allowing the 'higher' to

impose their will on the 'lower' part of the planet). It results in a particular attitude towards

one's own culture, itself related to a particular conception of time and of the relationship

between part and whole, I and non-I. "My feeling of being part of the Indian culture, says

Nirmal Verma (1991: 70-1), does not only rely on being linked with a piece of ground which

is called India but rather derives from the fact that I live in a time which is eternally

contemporaneous to me", whereas cultural identity has been "given" to the West with

historical conscience, as a collective past objectified in the form of churches, museums, dates,

etc.. He substitutes for the vision of an oriented time progressing from past to future, with

radical changes, what he calls the eternal present: anantar vartamân, non-finite present, a

noun originated from a root meaning 'revolve', in a natural process like a never ending wheel

where past and future are both intertwined with the eternal/never-ending present and which he

equates to prakriti (nature). This does not mean that the distinct categories of time do not exist,

but they are themselves embedded within a smooth global vision where their motion (gati)

can also be called a pause (virâm), with no longer any difference between motion (gati) and

motionlessness (gatihîntâ). The very word gati means motion, speed, and also path, way.

Prehistoric or primeval times are then on-par with the contemporary present, with no one-way

orientation. Similarly, in a 'culture

that you cannot represent from the outside, nor name in an articulate objective manner,

the body is not like a window that opens for the soul on the knowable world as in

western philosophy. "The difference between body and soul is as artificial in the Indian

tradition as is the contradiction between outside and inside. What our ancestors had seen

from the window centuries ago – trees, rivers, a vast unchanging landscape of animals

and men -- is the same as what I see, and I discover that I am not simply a spectator

(darshak ) of this surroundings (paridrishya), rather am I in the middle of them, a non

differentiate part of them" (Verma 72).

There is (or was, before the colonial point of rupture) a feeling of "oneness" or "one-

soul-ness" (ek-âtma-tâ) which according to Nirmal is the key for the alacrity and vitality of

Indian traditional culture because it is supported by the inner feeling of interconnectedness

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7

between the various components of the whole. Non-distinctness between the viewer (drathtâ)

the viewed (drishya) and its environment (paridrisya) and the act of vision (darshan)

accounts for the philosophical as well as for the mystical stand (darshan is the term used to

translate "philosophy" and "religion") and another keyword is empathy or sympathy

(âtmîyatâ ), derived from âtman , "center of the body, then self, soul, abstract cosmic

principle". .

Such perceptions result in a very particular conception, too, of the self and the other.

To start with, the self in the traditional Indian mental framework is both ego (aham) and its

wider form the self (âtman), and this wider form is an all-encompassing form, which includes

nature, animals, human beings, trees and rivers, history and society, and the supernatural

world or supreme cosmic principal. Hence the relative irrelevance of such notions as identity

as formatted in the western modern or postmodern frame, i.e. centered on the notion of

individual, in an ego-centered world. "Individual" according to Nirmal sides along with the

world of separate units, and the word he used for it is vyakti (cut off, articulated, from a verbal

root which is also present in the word for 'grammar', vyâkaran, the systematic organization of

linguistically distinct units). Vyakti is the opposite of manushya, "man", a term derived from

Manu, the primordial Man in Hindu cosmology equitable with prakriti as the force for

creation, and entering the world of manushyatâ, humanity, means getting free from the

individual limitations: the detached or nir-vaiyaktik state (lit. 'un-individualistic') is valued

because it allows the self to interconnect in a non ego-centered universal whole, and not

because it is cut off from the contingent world, as is often understood. Similarly, the other

word used by Nirmal for detachment, tatasthtâ (also "indifference, impartiality"), is derived

from taT, "shore, bank of a river or seacoast", and being taTasth means standing on the shore,

on the limit, therefore neither in nor outside, beyond the very notion of limit and distinctive

categories. As expected, such "seminal concepts" as aham/âtman, darshan, manushya,

nirvayaktik, sampurn, prakriti have often been the cause of deep misunderstandings when

translated in European languages by ego, self, vision or philosophy, detachment,

whole/complete, nature, Nirmal insists after Coomaraswamy. Entering the world of manushya

characterizes the creation of all Indian great artists, and it is like leaving

the world of units to enter the world of relations. Here all living creatures and animate

beings are intertwined, inter-related, and not only those animate beings who breath but

also the objects which externally/superficially seem to be inanimate. In this intertwined

world, the things are linked with the men, the men with the trees, the trees with the

animals, the animals with the flora /vegetation, the flora with the sky, with the rain, with

the air. A creation which is living, animate, breathing at every second, vibrating – …

humanity is not in the center, is not superior to everything, the measure of everything; it

is not the autonomous unit which the individual has been considered to be till now, on

the contrary, it owes its completeness to its connectedness, in exactly the same way as

the other living beings are complete by being connected, and in the same way man is not

the support of creation, similarly the individual is not the support of the human (Verma

26).

This mental frame has undoubtedly been deeply distorted by colonization, as repeatedly stated

by Nirmal Verma and many other writers like Ananthamurthy. The continuity between local

folk culture (deshi) and high learned culture (mârg) has been broken and now English culture

has become the mârg in India, along with the modernistic (westernized) cognitive frame, but

this new marg has not developed beyond 'an enchanted circle' and (still?) excludes the mass

(cf. supra). In this situation, writing in Hindi, or any "regional language" still conveying this

articulation of local and learned culture is not just being patriotic or stupid. Yet cultivating

exclusively the deshi tradition never amounts to real creation if it is not constantly and

reflexively enriched by the dialogic "contention" with the mârg, presently with the English

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8

modern subculture. Without this "contention", the writer will produce not the lived-in Van

Gogh shoes, but the Bata shoes which are only a marketable product, be it written in English

or in some regional language: Ananthamurthy quotes the whole Kannada literature of the end

of the 19th century as an example of a sterile rehashing of the traditional codes, and many

contemporary novels of the progressive or "new story" school in the 'regional' language and

western mental frame, no less sterile and conventional examples of the modernist trend.

Writing in Hindi as one of the possible answer to such threats

If daily habits (food habits, religious practices, etc.) are still deeply 'Indian',

all our models for writing and intellectual thought are derived from the West. This will

come to an end only when we understand why there is a Gulf War. And we do not

understand the Gulf war if we follow the logic and dynamics of global politics: you

have to adopt an altogether different position…. And if you have that kind of a

political frame of mind, that kind of a mindset … then you develop a mode of thinking

which is that of a critical insider, but one who will make a significant contribution to

tradition (Ananthamurthy 373).

Not only, as mentioned above, the notion of a periphery 'writing back' to the center, a

notion deemed crucial in the expression of the postcolonial condition, has little relevance

when we look at things from the inside of a culture which does not allow a center to

systematically categorize and organize its various components. But, as the psychologist of

cultures Ashis Nandy as well as the writer Ananthamurthy repeatedly asserted, this reaction

typically proceeds from the mental frame induced by cultural colonization, with the colonized

fighting the colonizers in the colonizer's terms: a writer like Bankim Chandra Chatterji for

instance in the end of the 19th century succeeded in representing India as potentially as

rational, as martial, as technologically successful as the West (therefore deserving freedom as

a mature will-be entity of the first world. Yet, although Independent India was forged

according to this 'modernist' mind frame, other visions and ways have always existed for

expressing an alternative to the colonial vision of a passive, savage and 'uncivilized' India:

before its major and successful representation with Gandhi, these other visions and ways have

shaped the critical discourse of Vidyasagar, a contemporary of Bankim. Both men were

'critical insiders', deriving their analytical and critical potential (against cast, social inequity;

colonization) from inside their tradition. The creative strength derived from this mind set –

using the exposure to the world outside one's indigenous culture yet speaking from the inside

– is the condition for reaching strong and new alternatives instead of elaborating an inverted

or concurrent system, where margins or periphery reshape their distinctive values and

identities by means of opposition to the 'center'. A farther-reaching 'deconstruction' of the

so-called euro-centric system consists, not in inverting hierarchies ('provincializing Europe')

nor in successfully competing within the global intellectual and power system but in finding

other ways to address the problems humanity is confronted with, today like yesterday and

tomorrow, and not only in a given culture.

Such is the challenge that the 'vernacular' culture may answer in their own terms, with

a unique voice, and certainly in various ways (Gandhi's alternative is certainly not the only

possible one for the progressive developmental model) but all very different from the now

conventional (ized) answers evolved in the world. One of the major differences is the

preserved strength and vitality of the sense of the sacred: hence a certain modesty and

deference in conceiving the relation of mankind to the universe, nature, cosmic world, fellow

men and gods, a sense of the sacred which has nothing to do with the claim for religious

identities so present today in communal antagonisms. We find this quality under the word

tevar ( lit . 'proper behavior' in Anupam Mishra, a major Hindi writer and stylist who devoted

halshs-00549398, version 1 - 21 Dec 2010

9

his work to the description of the ancient and new water techniques in rural India: the way he

deals with this culture by using comparisons, metaphors and legends which every one can re-

appropriate as his own lived-in culture (the book is kept in temples and read at night in

panchayats in hundreds of thousands of villages) is far more than a technical treatise, it voices

the deeply rooted culture, inventing daily answers to contemporary environmental challenges

while emphasizing the crucial importance of having a global perception of the relation

man/environment or man/sacred, and not the usual resource oriented perspective. We also

find this 'insider' perspective in Bharamvir Bharati in a very different area and style: how to

deal with violence? Using modern Hindi verses in the great tradition of high poetry in modern

language to re-write the last day of the Mahabharata fratricide war (Andha Yug, 'In the

Darkness', in 1954), on the unvoiced background of the communal killings during the Indo-

Pakistan Partition, he originally criticizes, against the mainstream vision of such events, both

the universal moral 'humanist' condemnation as well as the commodity of alien's agency, and

the psychological grief and revenge or noble forgiveness, in order to voice a more

philosophical and political viewpoint rooted in detachment (anâsakti), a prerequisite for truth

and compassion (karuna); the enigmatic figure of the absent Krishna, voiced by a similarly

complex messenger embodies such anasakti which is both a condition for a genuine

intelligence of events and a generous realistic response to them, barring the determinism of

the so-called fatality as well as modern history. We find it too in one of the few really

agnostic modern writers, Krishna Baldev Vaid, but a mystic agnostic, in the great tradition of

the paradoxical sant medieval poets yet with a uniquely 'experimental' style full of the lived-

in verve of his native Punjab: within the inside tradition of the Indian critical skepticism (Sen

111), Vaid evolves an original vision where humor and irony allows for the deconstruction of

all and every clear-cut identity, both cultural-linguistic (Urdu Hindi Panjabi) and religious

(Montaut 2004).

It is certainly not the case that similar 'glocal' alternatives to the dominant globalized

knowledge are exclusively expressed in a 'regional' language: Essayists like Ashih Nandy,

great environmentalists who re-shaped the very concept of 'environment' like Anil Aggarwal

or Vandana Shiva do write in English3. But they do so within a definitely non-Western non-

modern (to avoid the ambivalent term 'pre-modern') due to their intense interaction with the

village folk, usually non literate but with a sophisticated culture still linked with a context

where poetry was not read but sung. But for creative writing, vernacular languages obviously

lend themselves better to such critical innovations in continuity with the traditional mental

frame, were it only because of the full access to the full historical continuum of learned and

folk masterpieces. Their deep structure, in Nandakishor Acharya (2007)'s acceptance of the

term in his book on the Grammar of Culture, is distinct from the western one, like that of

Indian languages compared to English, brown or white.

Last, but not least, using one's mother tongue is not simply a better way of ensuring

the conservation of bio-diversity in languages and cultures than making it an official

'heritage'. First, this mode of conservation also ensures accessible new alternatives to the

challenges now met by humankind at large, not likely to be thought of within the

"monoculture of the mind" stigmatized by Shiva (. Then, it does not build on opposition nor

competition or contradiction or aggressive mastership, but a friendly openness: as rightly

pointed out by Ananthamurthy (2007), Gandhi was intellectually hostile to the West but

emotionally friendly to the West whereas Nehru was intellectually friendly but emotionally

hostile to the West.

3 As well as some Western writers have also been able to display a similar perspective, like Thoreau, quoted by

Gandhi, , Giono in France, Toynbee…

halshs-00549398, version 1 - 21 Dec 2010

10

Ananthamurthy, U.R., Omnibus, 2007, . Manu Chakravarthy ed., Delhi: Arvind Kumar

Di Bona Joseph, "Going back to the Educational Future Using Indigenous Ideas to meet the

Challenge of the 21st Century", The Contested Terrain, Perspectives in Education in India,

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya ed., Delhi: Orient Longman, 1998: 357-79.

Dariwala Keki N. "The Decolonized Muse", Creative Aspects of Indian English, Shantinath K.

Desai ed., Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995.

Gandhi Mohandas K, The evil wrought by the English Medium, Ahmedabad: Navjivan

Publishing House.

Geetanjali Shree, "Hellow-how-are-you-I-hope", Pratilipi 8, no pagination, online review,

December 2008 : http://pratilipi.in/2008/12/hello-how-are-you-i-hope-geetanjali-shree/

Gupta Prasenjit , « Refusing the Gaze : Identity and Translation in Nirmal Verma's Fiction »,

Hindi 1 : 233-246, also published in World Literature Today, 2000, 74-1 : 53-69.

Habib, Irfan, "Teaching Sciences through the local languages", The Contested Terrain…,

1998.342-53.

Mishra Anupam, Traditions de l'au au désert indien, Paris : L'harmattan, 1999 [Delhi :

Gandhi Peace Foundation,1995]

Montaut Annie, "L'anglais en Inde et la place de l'élite dans le projet colonial", Hérodote 115,

2004a.

Montaut Annie, « La poétique du vide chez Vaid et la résistance à la violence

communautaire », 81-108, Purushartha 24, 2004b, http://anniemontaut.free.fr/textualites.htm

Nandkishor Acharya, Samskriti kâ vyâkaran, Bikaner: Vagdevi Prakashan, 2007

Nandy Ashis, The Intimate Enemy, Lost and Recovery of Self Under colonialism, Delhi: OUP,

1983.

Pollock Sheldon ed., Literary Cultures in History, Reconstructions from South Asia,

University of California Press/ Delhi: OUP-India, 2003.

Sachidanandan K., Indian Literature : Positions and Propositions, Delhi : Pencraft

International, 1999.

Sen Amartya, The Argumentative Indian, Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity,

New-York: Farrar, 2005.

Shiva Vandana & Maria Mies, Eco-feminism, Delhi: Zed Books, 1993.

Shiva Vandana, Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology and Agriculture, Zed

Press: New Delhi, 1993.

Shukla Suresh Chandra, « Nationalist Education Thought : Continuity and Change", The

Contested Terrain…, 2000: 29-53.

Varma Nirmal, Dhalan se utarte hue, Delhi : Rajkamal Prakashan, 1991 (translated extracts in

Purusharta 24 « L'art et la conscience dans l'Inde d'aujourd'hui » : 39-76).

Vaid, Kishna Baldev, « The Burden of Ambivalence", Bahuvacan 1, 1988: 87-94.

halshs-00549398, version 1 - 21 Dec 2010

... Other answers give the impression that the students are concretely looking into their future and have the desire to become lawyers, a profession which is considered to be a realistic possibility that can offer more job opportunities. In this context, [...] the expansion of English to many professional spheres of life is due to the fact that English is becoming a career tongue, a language with prestige, a key for more lucrative jobs (Montaut 2009), rather than a language that is primarily useful when travelling and socializing with foreigners. (Labokaité and Ludvigsen 2011) Results to Section B show that although the majority of students had studied English for many years, they had no previous knowledge of specific English legal language. ...

  • Annie Montaut Annie Montaut

Introduced by the British colonization and today the official language of the Indian Nation in association with Hindi, English is spoken as a second language by a minority of the educated population of 8% to 11% according to current estimations. A chance for India to converse with the world cultures, in compensation for centuries of domination, or conversely an inherited alienating burden still preventing this conversation from being on equal terms? The paper will dwell on such issues, after a factual evaluation of the role of English in the Indian pluralism, and a study of the consequences of its historical infiltration in the whole system of the State.

  • S. Pollock

A grand synthesis of unprecedented scope, Literary Cultures in History is the first comprehensive history of the rich literary traditions of South Asia. Together these traditions are unmatched in their combination of antiquity, continuity, and multicultural complexity, and are a unique resource for understanding the development of language and imagination over time. In this unparalleled volume, an international team of renowned scholars considers fifteen South Asian literary traditions-including Hindi, Indian-English, Persian, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Urdu-in their full historical and cultural variety. The volume is united by a twofold theoretical aim: to understand South Asia by looking at it through the lens of its literary cultures and to rethink the practice of literary history by incorporating non-Western categories and processes. The questions these seventeen essays ask are accordingly broad, ranging from the character of cosmopolitan and vernacular traditions to the impact of colonialism and independence, indigenous literary and aesthetic theory, and modes of performance. A sophisticated assimilation of perspectives from experts in anthropology, political science, history, literary studies, and religion, the book makes a landmark contribution to historical cultural studies and to literary theory in addition to the new perspectives it offers on what literature has meant in South Asia.

  • Dariwala Keki

Dariwala Keki N. "The Decolonized Muse", Creative Aspects of Indian English, Shantinath K. Desai ed., Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995.

The evil wrought by the English Medium

  • K Gandhi Mohandas

Gandhi Mohandas K, The evil wrought by the English Medium, Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishing House.

  • U R Ananthamurthy
  • Omnibus

Ananthamurthy, U.R., Omnibus, 2007,. Manu Chakravarthy ed., Delhi: Arvind Kumar

« Nationalist Education Thought : Continuity and Change

  • Shukla Suresh

Shukla Suresh Chandra, « Nationalist Education Thought : Continuity and Change ", The Contested Terrain…, 2000: 29-53.

Hellow-how-are-you-I-hope " , Pratilipi 8, no pagination, online review

  • Geetanjali Shree

Geetanjali Shree, " Hellow-how-are-you-I-hope ", Pratilipi 8, no pagination, online review, December 2008 : http://pratilipi.in/2008/12/hello-how-are-you-i-hope-geetanjali-shree/