Writing India, Writing English

Literature, Language, Location

G. J. V. Prasad

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138663893
• eBook ISBN: 9781317809111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The essays in this book look at the interaction between English and other Indian languages and focus on the pressure of languages on writers and on each other. Divided into two parts, the first part of the book deals with the pressure that English language has exerted, and continues to exert, in India and our ideas of connectedness as a nation in the ways in which we deal with this pressure. The essays emphasise on the emergence of the hybrid language in the Tamil cultural world because of the presence of English (and Hindi); on the politics of 'anthologisation'; and how Karnad's Tughlaq deals with the idea of the nation, looking at its historical location. The second part of the book focuses on Indian English literature and deals with how it interacts with the idea of representing the Indian nation, sometimes obsessively, seen both in poetry and novels. The book argues that the writer's location is crucial to the world of imagination, whether in the novel, poetry or drama. The world is inflected by the location of the author, and the struggle between the language dominant in that location and English is part of the creative tension that provides energy and uniqueness to writing.

Part I

India, English, Translation

1

A Minute Stretching into Centuries: Macaulay, English and India

English came to India with the colonial migration of the British. It has not just come to India, as some people are arguing, because of one individual called Macaulay. A language gets introduced in a particular historical context and it shall grow only if the socio-economic conditions for its growth are conducive. English has grown like that in India. Now nobody can throw it away. (Ilaiah 2005a)

English is ‘the language on which the sun does not set, whose users never sleep.’ (Quirk and Widdowson 1985)

Thomas Babington Macaulay arrived in India on 10 June 1834, and while it would be naïve to credit this moment or the man with the entire responsibility for the historic and cultural changes that have swept the subcontinent since the adoption of English as the medium of education in India, it would not be out of place to record the importance of his arrival in India, in south India, in Chennai (then Madras),¹ as the moment that marked the conception of the brown sahib, the English speaking Indian. While it is true that the debate about the medium of education had been well under way when Macaulay arrived in India, it is also a fact that his ‘Minute on Education’ routed the field and planted the flag of English language well and truly in this country. It is a flag that has withstood various storms and outlasted the flag of imperialism and is still flying high and proud in the country of its imposition and immediate adoption.² The continuation of the existence (let alone the dominance) of English has been a matter of debate in India since Independence, but in its new avatar as the language of globalization, English has won over new proponents and brought into sharp focus the division with those who argue for the empowerment of local languages and the (r)ejection of English. Actually, it may be said that the opposition to English is sporadic as only a lost cause can be. Thus, it is of interest to compare the reasons put forward by Macaulay (and by at least one notable Indian, Raja Ram Mohan Roy) for the education of Indians in the English language, with the reasons put forward in the twenty-first century by Indians for its continuance. One could also compare the similarity of the reasons for the opposition to English then and now.

The first thing to note is that Macaulay’s ‘Minute’ was not just about the medium and the need of instruction, but about the system of education itself, about the place of education in good governance. It was a result of Macaulay’s thinking on a broad range of issues about India and Britain’s duty here. What was it that Indians needed and what were the institutions that the British could create in India was a favourite subject of Macaulay’s. One must remember that Macaulay, who was twice elected to the House of Commons before he came to India to serve the British India government, ‘was appointed one of the Commissioners of the Board of Control, which, for three quarters of a century from 1784 onwards, represented the Crown in its relations to the East India directors’ (Trevelyan 1876: 235) and was at the Board of Control for 18 months. It was during this period that Macaulay acquired his knowledge of British accession and rule in India, and formed his opinions about Indian social systems, arts, religions, and sciences. India was firmly his subject matter. In a speech to the House of Commons on 10 July 1833, Macaulay declared:

If the question were, What is the best mode of securing good government in Europe? the merest smatterer in politics would answer, representative institutions. In India you cannot have representative institutions. Of all the innumerable speculators who have offered their suggestions on Indian politics, not a single one, as far as I know, however democratical his opinions may be, has ever maintained the possibility of giving, at the present time, such institutions to India. (Young 1935: 125)

His opinion about the land he was to serve is brought out in the speech, when he goes on to say: ‘We have to engraft on despotism those blessings which are the natural fruits of liberty’ (ibid.: 126). His India was ‘a territory, inhabited by men differing from us in race, colour, language, manners, morals, religion’ (ibid.: 129), a land where ‘society was a chaos’ (ibid.: 133). He also spoke approvingly of ‘the higher classes of natives’ because they paid attention to ‘those intellectual pursuits on the cultivation of which the superiority of the European race to the rest of mankind principally depends’ (ibid.: 141). His reading of the situation was that England had to do its best by the heathenish country it had taken over in an unlikely adventure, and this included the careful inculcation of western mores and values among the natives. He was aware of and welcomed the fact that educating the ‘natives’ in the western intellectual tradition could result in their learning to value liberty and freedom and wanting self-governance, as he said in his speech of 10 July 1833:

We are free, we are civilized, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilization. Are we to keep the people of India ignorant in order that we may keep them submissive? Or do we think that we can give them knowledge without awakening ambition? … It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. … Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all of our own. (ibid.: 154–55)

Macaulay knew what Indians needed and he made no bones about it — Britain had to do its duty by its Indian subjects, regardless of what they wanted, for they were ‘a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition’. The ‘Minute on Education’ was the outcome of the same concern. It was not so much to create servants for the company that Macaulay fought on the side of the English language, but because he felt that Indian knowledge systems were not worth a penny and that a wholesale change in the system of education was needed to move India out of a medieval darkness into modern light. One must recollect here that when Macaulay arrived in India, there was a conflict among the British rulers as to whether to continue their policy of encouraging the study of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, or whether to introduce primary education in Indian languages with the higher branches being taught in English.³ The Committee of Public Instruction was split down the middle (five against five). Macaulay was appointed the President of the Committee soon after he arrived in India but refused to take any immediate part in its proceedings. In January 1835, the two sides put forth their reasons to the Supreme Council and it was as a member of the Supreme Council that Macaulay on 2 February ‘produced a minute in which he adopted and defended the views of the English section in the Committee’ (Trevelyan 1876: 370). The ‘Minute’ was approved and adopted by the Governor General, Lord William Bentinck, on 7 March 1835, changing the education system in India and the hierarchical position of languages for ever (or at least until now).

Interestingly, the ‘Minute’ seemed to answer a felt need among certain Indians, the most prominent being Raja Ram Mohan Roy. In a petition written 12 years earlier, in 1823, to the Governor General at the time, Lord Amherst, Raja Ram Mohan Roy had critiqued the setting up of the Sanskrit College in Calcutta, arguing that it was a waste of money that had been earmarked by the British Parliament under the Charter of 1813 for the education of its Indian subjects. He wrote that the Indians had been

…filled with sanguine hopes that this sum would be laid out in employing European gentlemen of talent and education to instruct the natives of India in Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy, and other useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world. (Roy 1947: 106)

Instead, they were getting Sanskrit in a way ‘similar in character to those that existed in Europe before the time of Lord Bacon’ (ibid.: 106) and this knowledge that they would gain would be of ‘little or no practical use to the possessors or to society’ (ibid.: 106).

Macaulay seems to follow Roy closely. Macaulay argues in the ‘Minute’ that Britain’s intention had always been to introduce English education in India. In his opinion, the Act of Parliament passed in 1813, the Charter, did not prescribe the advocacy of Indian languages and literatures but of English and had been constantly misinterpreted. He writes in the ‘Minute’:

…the Act of Parliament … contains nothing about the particular languages or sciences which are to be studied. A sum is set apart “for the revival and promotion of literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories.” It is argued, or rather taken for granted, that by literature, the Parliament can have meant only Arabic and Sanscrit literature, that they never would have given the honorable appellation of “a learned native” to a native who was familiar with the poetry of Milton, the Metaphysics of Locke, and the Physics of Newton… This does not appear to be a very satisfactory interpretation. To take a parallel case: suppose that the Pacha of Egypt, a country once superior in knowledge to the nations of Europe, but now sunk far below them, were to appropriate a sum for the purpose of “reviving and promoting literature, and encouraging learned natives of Egypt,” would anybody infer that he meant the youth of his pachalic to give years to the study of hieroglyphics, to search into all the doctrines disguised under the fable of Osiris, and to ascertain with all possible accuracy the ritual with which cats and onions were anciently adored? Would he be justly charged with inconsistency, if, instead of employing his young subjects in deciphering obelisks, he were to order them to be instructed in the English and French languages, and in all the sciences to which those languages are the chief keys? (Young 1935: 345–46)

This is his central position: that it was Britain’s intention and duty to lend a helping hand to a once glorious civilization needing to modernize itself through education in the English language. This modernization is possible only through a study of western sciences, which can be accessed only through European languages, English in this case. He clinches his interpretation of the Act through pointing out that

This lac of rupees is set apart, not only for “reviving literature in India,” the phrase on which their whole interpretation is founded, but also for “the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories,” — words which are alone sufficient to authorize all the changes for which I contend. (ibid.: 346)

This precisely had been Roy’s petition, that the money be used to ‘promote a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction, embracing Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy, with other useful sciences’ (Roy 1947: 108). Macaulay could not agree more with Roy, and was so committed to his position that he did not depend just on the Council’s accepting his interpretation, he also had prepared ‘a short Act rescinding that clause of the Charter of 1813, from which the difficulty arises’ (Young 1935: 346). He was certain that he, not the Orientalists, was in the right and that he would carry the day easily.⁴ Macaulay then goes on to argue that even the Orientalists agreed that Indian ‘vernacular’ languages⁵ ‘contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them’ (ibid.: 348).⁶ According to Macaulay, this is the reason that even Orientalists wanted education to be in Sanskrit, Persian, or Arabic. Macaulay is thus able to say with complete conviction that ‘It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be effected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them’ (ibid.: 348). So if the language of instruction is going to be other than the mother tongue in any case the argument can be taken to a different level and this is what Macaulay does. He asks a seemingly simple question: ‘Which language is the best worth knowing?’ (ibid.: 349). This is then followed by a specious argument, perhaps the most specious ever used to determine the course of Indian history. After admitting that he had no knowledge of Sanskrit or Arabic, Macaulay goes on to say that his opinion was based on his reading of translations and interaction with men who knew the languages, and that he knew that the Orientalists agreed with him in his opinion of Eastern literatures. He writes that he had ‘never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted’ (ibid.: 349). This is the stuff of debates and Macaulay was nothing if not an accomplished debater, much like Salman Rushdie, who was to claim that Indian languages had not produced a single piece of good literature in modern times.⁷ From Macaulay to Rushdie is quite a straight line.

Macaulay, however, moves very quickly from his comments on literature to his views on history writing:

But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. (Young 1935: 349)

Many Indians were to agree with him, as well as that most famous of political thinkers, Marx⁸, that Indians lacked an historical consciousness, that they lacked a history.

Having dismissed the claims of both mother tongues and Indian literary languages, Macaulay moves on to state that what had to be decided was how to ‘educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue’ (ibid.: 349). The answer was now simple: ‘We must teach them some foreign language’ (ibid.: 349). Before you even begin to think ‘which’, Macaulay has the answer and the reasons for his choice:

The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; with models of every species of eloquence; with historical compositions, which, considered merely as narratives, have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equalled; with just and lively representations of human life and human nature; with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, and trade; with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man. Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may be safely said, that the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. (ibid.: 349–50)

After arguing that the knowledge of English would give access to European literatures and thought, Macaulay makes the boldest claim on behalf of his language. If he had claimed earlier that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, he now states that literature in English was of greater value than all earlier European literatures put together! Interestingly, Macaulay’s insistence on literature should not blind us to the fact that he does not lose sight of the sciences — even here he says English can give ‘full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man’. This is what Raja Ram Mohan Roy had petitioned for, sciences, and not the study of English literature.⁹ It must be pointed out, however, that though Roy speaks of the content of the instruction rather than the medium, he is clear that education in Sanskrit, a language ‘so difficult that almost a lifetime is necessary for its acquisition’ (Roy 1947: 106), is not the answer.

Then, in another arg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: India, English, Translation
• Part II: Indian English Literature and the Nation
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index