The Vast Sargasso Sea of Indian English
The political rhetoric of marginal fundamentalist groups who pose as dominant groups holding the country and its people to ransom appears most sharply when it attacks individuals for being aliens.
The question of time and history are central metaphors which push back the question of the past, the recognizable past to a point of no return. Oddly the contestation of how this past is constructed is the central question of modernity. When a landscape is destroyed by natural or social means a new metaphor is forged in concrete terms. The landscapes of modernism arising out of war and technological revolution have all communicated their idiom of rationality which may be contested by others. Today I am concerned with how political ideologies can leave their imprint upon the mind upon forms of writing and literature. As Kevin Lynch would say ‘What time is this Place?’
In 1990, Ananthamurthy the Telugu litterateur spoke at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,Delhi of ‘the co-existence of time’. He argued that every individual lives many different kinds of social lives which overlap and conflict with one another – some modern and rational, some feudal and caste based. Today the domination of caste based behaviour in national life organizes the presence of an orthodoxy of tradition in its oppressiveness. And citizenship and writing become two indexes by which this oppressiveness is to be analyzed.
If the idiom of political hegemony centers the substance of its attack through the method of alienation, then it can only be a short lived, violent and ugly mode – as all fascist programmes are. State and rule, even in the forms of patrimony and kingship have always depended on the consensus of the people to be ruled. If lathi and cannon are the mode of legitimating coercion, in a democracy the ability to protest will emerge and forge new modes of dissent. The politics of domination, however pervasive the cogs that operationalise the hegemonic core, cannot govern, it can only annihilate, and its rule is entrenched only for the private profit of its mercenaries – money, status and power. Landscapes of memory will continue to express the varieties of ways in which human beings have solved the problems of discord – of lust for coercion and the destruction of the humane. Without a belief in the future, the presence can have no meaning.
‘Disaster, preservation, renewal, growth, revolution’ are different modes of this transformation of the landscape and they ‘connect our hopes and memories and sense of time flow.’ (Lynch 1995:28) So also human consciousness of time and events of peace and prosperity are not stable. By idealizing the past we cannot serve the present or future, nor deny that the substantial presence of poverty has been the lot of the people. The wealth of India has lain in the faith of the poor, an optimism which Gandhi understood only too well, surviving the avarice of the ruling classes.
The theme of my essay is thus to analyse what it means ‘to be a foreigner in one’s own country’. The term alien could be located in terms of those familiar concepts of Sociology – to be a stranger, to be excluded, to be alienated, to be a non-citizen though one my have a Pan card or a ration card. It could apply to beggars, the poor, to people like me who had suddenly in the 90s of the last century been marked out by the right wing Hindu fundamentalists as alien for political purposes, to those who as foreigners accept citizenship and request that they be seen as that in order to marry, bear children, be buried here or to stand for elections.
Before 11 September 2001, an estimated 38,000 according to media reports, migrated to America every year on one kind of visa or another. In the land of chewing gum and rock, belonging depended upon the acceptance of the language as both monosyllabic and homogenizing. In that context it is interesting to note that a variety of separatist movements had their origin in America. Whether it is Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism or Christianity, the substance of this financial support from fundamentalist expatriates to drive the separatist wedge into India needs to be analysed.
Much of the political rhetoric of Hindutva’s philosophy comes from asking the question ‘When did you come’ and ‘What makes an alien.’ Obviously this could apply to an idea, a community, a party – any fact of identity that blurs questions of belonging as it is codified by the constitution. It seems apparent too that if this question was really posed by the dasyus of India who have been colonized now for millennia, the political imperative of throwing half the population out would be apparent and frightening. There is of course the recently propagated American laboratory and Indian media myth that upper caste men are Aryans (whatever that means) and lower caste men and all women are dasyus. The speculation around invaders, travellers, settlers is the stuff of archaeology and ancient history – all that we can do is analyse the masses of information that is put across and try to understand the contexts of its interpretation in objective or political terms. It’s been made amply clear to sociologists that to be objective, rational and analytical is also now a self-conscious political act.
Now the central task of Sociology remains singularly clear – that is to ask why people do the things they do. If the rhetoric of homogenization has never worked except amongst political lobbyists then the risks of diversity are interesting in themselves. The rights that human beings have are well defined in various charters, and embodied in the welfare state. Michael Ignatieff has clearly pointed that,
It is because money cannot buy the human gestures which confer respect, nor rights guarantee them as entitlements, that any decent society requires a public discourse about the needs of the human person. It is because fraternity, longing, belonging, dignity and respect cannot be specified as rights that we ought to specify them as needs and seek, with the blunt institutional procedures at our disposal to make their satisfaction a routine human practice (Ignatief 1994:14).
If we are to understand what human needs are, then the production of literary fiction is one of the key spaces where desires and possibilities are fully suggested or left tantalizingly unresolved. The writing of expatriates becomes significant because each creates an imaginary world through words, but yet, communicates the immediacy of events. The then of myth and legend, of the past as tradition or as history becomes substantially offered as Here and Now. It is the here and now of literary fiction that makes each work survive long periods of time – decades or centuries, rather than the combustible conflagration of the time of the bestseller. Work written in 1930 or 1980 would appear in the year 2000 as fresh and open to interpretation.
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Amitava Ghosh’s The Glass Palace are three memorable moments in the development of Indians writing in English which has been analysed by many literary critics. Why they interest me is because all three authors have made their home outside the subcontinent but visit often and see themselves as expatriates. If each of these three styles of writing are so far removed from one another, then it is interesting for me to locate within the sociological imagination how being a diaspora Indian can contribute to the writing of literary fiction. Ghosh’s command over historical data and the ability to bring it closer to the reader, Rushdie’s playful rebellious jibes at politics and hypocracy, Seth’s sensuous and intuitive control over the emotional worlds of human beings – these have been celebrated over and over again in the literary world, as well as in the greatest index for authors – the sale of books.
The expatriate has house, friends, occupation, income in a country, but he dreams of home. He lives in a comfortable metropolis or university town – London or New York, has access to libraries, concert halls, museums, accessible to him in the sense that friends and critics are always around. Yet there is a searing loneliness about their lives which appear in the things they sometimes say, or the unguarded melancholy of their faces on camera. The problem of course lies in the oscillation between the loneliness and solitude of writing. All crafts people understand the chiselling of an object as a singularly lonely task and the moment of sunburst when camera’s flash and the stage is set for what is euphemistically called the ‘book release’. The fact that a book may bomb or that critics hate it does not deter the author – each of these authors has written what are thought to be good books as well as a few over-rated books. Now the survival of the author depends on his or her ability to withstand criticism and to write again.
Whether writing is biographical or not depends upon the author’s ability to acknowledge the reservoir of memory he or she draws from. Researched, the novel becomes the key word by which the success of the intellectual frame of the novel is acknowledged. Many writers would spend a lot of time reading and the sources of that reading might or might not be acknowledged. The self-conscious author today documents his journeys, proves Barthes essay The Death of the Author to be a lie. The author seems continually available to defend his or her story. There has never been a time when the pressure to conform has not been imposed upon the author. How he or she deals with it is defined by the accidents of temperament and circumstance. How much of the love and death in the novel is autobiographical is left to the coterie of friends who gleefully or with melancholy recognize themselves. But then does not every reader find resemblances in whichever book they read, to people they have known or glimpsed? In 1928, Gorky wrote,
God has been created in the same manner as literary “types” have, in accordance with the laws of abstraction and concretization. Characteristic exploits performed by a variety of heroes are condensed or “abstracted” and then given concrete shape in the person of a single hero. Traits peculiar to any merchant, nobleman or peasant are similarly “abstracted” and then typified in the person of some one merchant, nobleman or peasant – in other words, now a literary type is created’ (Gorky n.d.: 31, 32).
Earlier he had argued that it is not enough to create a person, for this would have neither social or educative features.
‘If however the writer proves able to summarise the most characteristic class features, habits, tastes, gestures, beliefs and manner of speech peculiar to twenty, fifty or even a hundred shopkeepers, civil servants or workers, proves able to epitomize and condense them in the person of a single shopkeeper, civil servant or worker, he thereby creates a type, and that is art’ (ibid p. 30).
Yet Gorky was always clear about the functions of literature – to inform, to educate, to entertain not in malice but through humane and generous anecdotes. This moral pressure was best conveyed in his critique of the ‘sponge like existence of younger modernist writers.’ In an essay called Talks on Craftsmanship, he wrote,
Indeed I met quite a number of young people of the merchant class, and I envied them their knowledge of foreign languages and their ability to read European literature in the original. There was nothing else in them to envy. They spoke in polished language, but in a way that was obscure; their words were unimpeachable, but below the surface there seemed to be nothing but cotton wool or sawdust… Though they did not drink in excess and grew drunk more on fearful words than on liquor. They spoke of the “horrors” in the work of Poe, Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky, but they thought they were speaking of the horrible things within themselves. I could see that there was nothing horrifying about them; some of the ruffians I knew were more awe-inspiring.
He goes on to say that public duties were integral to a writer’s life.
If you sweep a courtyard you will prevent harmful dust getting into children’s lungs, if you bind a book in good time, you will extend its terms of service, helping to make it of greater benefit to people, and saving paper for the state. Rough treatment of books causes tremendous losses to the state, because so many books are being printed, and after all, we are the State (ibid 153).
Why I quote at length from Gorky is because of the biographical experience of having been given Gorky’s ‘Mother’ to read when I was in Class III and all of Shaw’s plays when in Class V (I rebelled against reading Shaw’s Prefaces in Class VI). Certainly I had no idea that my father who did not like Anna Karenina was setting out the agenda of what kind of literature I should be reading. Even now, the contempt that my father had for elitist emotions – philosophizing about pain – is still hard to bear. Like Gorky, Marxist intellectuals like my father could not bear the rift between the intelligentsia and the people – and it is exactly in this rift that Indian writing in English is located The strikingly banal but brutal critique of elitist writing by M. Prabha in The Waffle of the Toffs is easily available – funny, crude, authoritarian – it sets a norm more clumsy than Gorky’s well-crafted idealism. But every writer unlike every critic, knows that writing has its will to power, and existentialist writers who are primarily record keepers, rather than transformers of the world, understand the impetus of their quill. Take away their implements and they will invent another – but the work will get written.
It is here that I wish to analyse the work of a woman, Jean Rhys, whose book, The Wide Sargasso Sea remained alive inspite of her efforts to destroy it, forget it, evade it. The book appeared in 1962, though its first draft had been typed in 1938.
Wide Sargasso Sea is an unnerving study of race and caste relationship in Creole society, of colonialism and accidents of history which one day would surely be the subject of detailed symbolic analyses. My problem is more specific. How does Jean Rhys understand her existence as a foreigner in England? Her father was a Welsh doctor and her mother ‘white’ Creole. She was born in Dominica in 1890 and came to England when she was sixteen and spent what was a conventionally bohemian life moving between various frivolous positions. Suzanne Rouvier (in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge) the artist’s model, not quite a whore, but a practical companion to various aspirants in the Paris art scene would be an approximate analogy. But Rhys, encouraged by Ford Maddox Ford who had also discovered D.H. Lawrence, was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant women writers of the 1930s. Then she fell out of sight. She lived for decades in obscurity, and even had an unwitting obituary notice written for her. She died in 1979, having received acknowledgement when, as she said, ‘it was too late’. She had received the W.H. Smith Award in 1966, made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in1966 and made a CBE in 1970.
I’m unable to engage with a biographical sketch of Rhys in order to answer my question. I will try to approach it through textual analyses. Why the problem seems evanescent to me is because so many of us who have never doubted that we are Indians are now being continually pounded with the question ‘Who are you?’ Asked often enough it can push a person beyond the edge. If asked as anthropologists do, in a mode of dialogicity, I see no problem with the question. Asked in psychoanalytical therapy or in the quest for mystical resolution, this space can be one of the most profound arenas of creative encounter. Yet the political negotiations of identity are a fact of history, an emblem of social change, and fictional narratives sometimes capture this with a power of representation.
Wide Sargasso Sea lies between the West Indies and the Azores, in the North Atlantic Ocean. Ships could become entangled in its weeds. It is the metaphor for calm and danger, for the ability of encroaching weeds which strangulate the beleagured ship. The West Indies become a complex battling ground where indigenous, black, tribal, native, colonized, white, colonizing all become fraught with multiple meanings as do the relationship between those who have mixed or pure French or English ancestory.
Rhys was in England and writing about Dominica or Jamaica which she blurred with artistic license. So let us use West Indies or the Carribbean as an artificially organizing term though the specificities of history and topography for the islands and its cultural landscapes may infact differ substantially. After all terms such as Bharat, Hindustan or India have been variable terms for a diverse and polyglot land, and ‘subcontinental’ identity is an even more problematic term.
So in Rhys’ text which begins with the assertion by the heroine Antoinette that ‘the Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother not just because of her beauty but because she was a “Martinique” girl.’ Black people jeered at the mother and daughter but as servants in the house they had tremendous power over their half caste masters. It was the house and the garden that communicated a great sense of power – the power of land, the power of the past, the power of memory.
Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered – then not an inch of tentacle showed. It was a bell shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see. The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it.
Sitting in England, such a para was written – the intensity of the past surfaces and much of diaspora writing actually captures what are seemingly visible details of topography to actually communicate how haunting the past and its dreamtime seems to the writer. But what is diaspora, and who is diasporic? As a Malayali who was born in Delhi and who often writes about Kerala, this chatter about diaspora as alien in empty for me. The diasporite makes himself or herself at home, is at home, she or he sends out deep roots in less than a month of his arrival and is here to stay. People are pushed out, have their heads bludgeoned in – but they fight to stay or they fight to return.
Antoinette’s mother is driven mad by a holocaust of hate – the slave owner attacked by night, her retarded son by her first husband killed, her house burnt down, her second husband helpless as the house burnt down. Antoinette remembers,
But now I turned too. The house was burning, the yellow red sky was like sunset and I knew that I would never see Coulibri again. Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses, the rocking-chairs and the blue sofa, the jasmine and the honeysuckle and the picture of the Miller’s daughter. When they had finished, there would be nothing left but blackened walls and the mounting stone. That was always left’(p. 24).
If ruin and the memory of a foundation is all that the survivor has, and the memory of things that once had a pattern of normality, then the tragedy of the present lies in that continuing absence which like the ghost of an amputated limb thrashes in the victim’s memory. As Rhys writes in the second paragraph of the first page, ‘My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed – all belonged to the past.’ The tragedy of the colonizer is the moment of seduction – when the native, the Creole, or the woman has been lulled into a state of secure concupiscience. Rhys uses the imagery of sexual love as represented by the white male in relation to the Creole woman to understand this peculiar form of submission. The violence of seduction lies in its mutual pleasure and the shattering quality of boredom annihilates both. Significantly the colonizer and the colonised blame one another, seeing their autonomy either in the past or in the future as an obliterated dream.
‘Why do you hate me?’ she said.
‘I do not hate you, I am most distressed about you, I am distraught.’ I said. But this was untrue, I was not distraught, I was calm, it was the first time I had felt calm or self possessed for many a long day… I watched her holding her left wrist with her right hand, an annoying habit.
‘Then why do you never come near me?’ she said, ‘Or kiss me or talk to me. Have you any reason?’
‘Yes,’ I said ‘I have a reason’ and added very softly ‘My God.’
‘You’re always calling on God’ she said ‘Do you believe in God?’
‘Of course, of course I believe in the power and wisdom of my creator’ ( Rhys 2000 : 81).
Having driven his wife to insanity the colonialist Rochester leaves her in England.
When I first came I thought it would be a day, two days a week perhaps. I thought that when I saw him and spoke to him, I would be wise as serpents, harmless as doves. I give you all I have freely I would say, and I will not trouble you again if you will let me go. But he never came (p. 116).
All the people in the house become ghosts for the mad woman in the attic, voices and memories without substance.
All the people who had been staying in the house for the bedrooms doors were shut, but it seemed to me that someone was following me, someone was chasing me, laughing(p. 112).
In the end there is a conflagration,
On the second floor I threw away the candle… I knew how to get away from the heat and the shouting, for there was shouting now… I don’t know how long I sat. Then I turned around and saw the sky red and all my life was in it. I saw the grandfather clock and Aunt Cora’s patchwork, all colours. I saw the orchids and the stephanotis and the jasmine and the tree of life in flames. I saw the chandelier and the red carpet downstairs and the bamboos and the tree ferns, the gold ferns and the silver and the soft green velvet of the moss on the garden wall.
Homesickness so terrible that nothing is real only the past beckons. Amitava Ghosh’s consummate obituary on the Indian born American Shahid Aga, captures it in almost Sontagian detail. The corollary to such homesickness is madness and death. Yet many of us live in this strange, beckoning world of the past or another land – it is not merely the stuff of expats longing. The Maccaulayised Indian fictionwriter knows the bylanes of Bloomsbury as well as the galis of Chandni Chowk – not very well, but the map is real and haunting. Sitting in Delhi or Brooklyn, Calcutta calls forth. No human being can be devoid of this intense longing and that has always been the stuff of literary fiction. Claiming citizenship, identity, home, nation is always a tenuous and self-conscious task.
English is certainly the language of colonialists. But so are Sanskrit, Persian, French, Portugese and Computer. Ask any illiterate tribal or peasant. The history of India has been a long and chequered history of crossings and wanderings and conquest, by sea or water or by air or by ideas. Our vocation, as sociologists, disallows the possibility of engaging with fiction or speculation, unless they appear as collective representations. Indeed the debate around hierarchies and the complexities of language and dialects will always continue. Sociologists are generally wary of nondualism, just as much as theologians. If everyone believed in the possibility of inclusion, then many people, particularly theologians and empirical anthropologists, would be without a trade. Sociologists glean off the gatherings of diversity and resilience.
If English is seen merely as the language of power, uncontested power, then the reality of the Indian subcontinent would fail us completely. The truth is that English is alive and kicking inspite of boards painted by local painters which might leave one breathless by their spelling.The reasons for this are three.
English is a language of power, because it has the power to mediate. It belongs to no one, so it can be used by all. There are hilarious confrontations recorded by our scribes, where Hindi wallas send letters in Hindi to Tamil wallas who reply back in Tamil. So often English intercedes as a third language. Further it is a language which has colonized the world, so that American dictionaries exist in computer software, but American is only a dialect of English like the pidgin spoken in many parts of the world. Emily Dickinson wrote in English, just as did Henry James, or Mark Twain ,Poe and Melville and Thoreau. They were Americans writing English, a similar status which many of us in our country have in a way – Indians writing in Englsh The language of State and Statecraft are in the hands of those who rule. When the French left India, or the Portuguese did, some small enclaves like Pondicherry, Chandernagore, Goa, Daman and Diu remained behind as symbols, museumising in time, the urban, linguistic and culinary significations of a robust slice of history. In 1989 at a public lecture given at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Raimundo Pannikkar asked an audience in Delhi, “If French colonialism had survived or Portuguese colonialism had, what are the ways their language and culture would have affected us?” The accidents of history – premeditated sometimes, though that sound like a malicious contradiction – left the British as a master race for four centuries. But the interesting thing is, that the resilience of the Indians has come from accepting the institutional regimes that were imposed upon by them, whether by force, custom or consent, and to actually continue to carry on their lives as best as they could. This is a history of millennia and it is about a culture of poverty. Yet, would one accept the tenuousness of rule, if there is injustice. The Indians have made an art of maya, which allows them to imagine better worlds wherever they are. So English has survived, even with the poor, because it is the language of opportunity, it is the language of globalisation. The Malayali nurse, the UP bhaiya, the Baul singer……the list is endless, who has not made it good in a globalised multicultural world with the rudimentary knowledge of the English language?
The second reason for the survival of English, is that it is a language of Commerce. This is independent of it being a colonizing, imperialist language of state machinery in it’s global interactions. Banking, Trade and e-commerce have united the world in a form of capitalism that survives on hedonism. Advertisements have used the English language in the most remote villages and obscure towns to sell what they have to. E-commerce means that spellings and grammer are not primary, a heart warming dyslexia has overtaken the world. Young people understand that visuality and orality are more compelling than grammar – the meaning is the message and the form is to spit at the erudite and literati. These are some of the grand gestures of modernity and not to be frowned upon in a ferment of rage over what constitutes the pure form. Democracy is about the market place, the forum is still dominated by young healthy and wealthy males, or older stable powerful established males, but it looks like the brevity of words and the simplicity of the message –power, money, sex – remains the uniform code. Women when they push into the system must either camaflouge intention or behave like the boys. Earnest Hemmingway well known as a great hunter, always had a young healthy huntress traveling by his side. He was the boss and he wrote, she carried the guns and communicated that she could shoot. English as a language of sport –( everything’s CRICKET, but ofcourse as the British have always communicated football is another game altogether. French television described the English footballers as “good defenders” with characteristic gallic courtesy, when the rough play at a tournament on 26th February 2011, had to be seen to be believed) – or of business has made it’s compelling legitimacy known to the world. The colonial self conscious sense of guilt about the past has recently been blown by their consummating support to USA in ridding Iraq of it’s dictator as well as it’s natural and cultural wealth.
The third problem is that which directly pertains to us, English as a literary language. Multinationalism implies that today people belong to many different worldviews simultaneously. It is impossible to belong anymore to a compartmentalized world. I am sure this has been the history of the world if not of groups or individuals for centuries. In 1930, after the collapse of the Pepper Tade with the West, following the First World War, my grandfather’s business went awry. He was a man given to sharp and compulsive dealings, a self made scholar of sorts. My grandmother told me when I was ten or twelve years old that Grandfather had an English pen-friend, a woman who sent him books from England. Perhaps I had asked her where those blue and brown calf leather gold embossed volumes of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Browning had come from. In 1968 when my grandfather had suffered a near fatal stroke, he would have been 80 of more – he returned home for a brief while prior to dying. He was hopelessly in a state of senile dementia, but he recognized his family, was shaved and tonsured by his barber every day and would lie quietly in bed. Yet, whenever it began to rain he would get up, take a wicker shelf with a dozen or more English books and put them out in the rain. My grandmother who would frequently check on him, while he lay serenely on his rosewood couch watching the rain would suddenly notice the English works of prose and poetry out in the verandah catching the rain. Then throwing a towel over her head she would rush out and drag them in. Was my grandfather saying something about Macaulay’s shelf of English books? It was my grandfather who had made my sister and me sit next to him on the verandah while a wood pecker rapped a home for itself in the thoon or column of wood holding up our roof. We recited “A lily of the day is fairer far in May” over and over again till we knew it well. I had been eight years old when he taught me that verse, a grand gesture from a man who didn’t like children over much and was by nature strict and careful with time as he was with money.
Now while the debates go on about multinational companies, bhasha writers, awards, “Rushdie’s opinion” – I am very puzzled. A love for language when rural or forest peoples singing songs to the seasons or to their gods or wives or crops comes from the contexts of their life. A love for English or Sanskrit or Greek or Telugu comes from just such specifics of contexts. For me there was no reincarnational sense at six when I thought to myself, “I know when I use a word wrong in English. I just know.” It was my third language in early childhood, not as decreed by the State – but by the contexts of my upbringing. Malayalam was first, since my parents, my sister and my Ayah (chedathi – or classificatory older sister) all spoke Malayalam at home. Hindi was equally significant and most loved because it was the mother tongue of most of my friends in the neighbourhood. English was my third language learnt at school – a parrot language that went “Ann sing to mother.” And “Mother sing to Ann” , “ Father comes home.” Ann sings to Father” and on for pages and pages with water cress, pianos and heaven knows what else. Was it divorced from my reality? Ofcourse it was – but children are not skeptics, and we were as trusting of the English language text as we were of the Hindi language, one which said that Shastriji who would be a revered prime minister extolling the jawan (soldier) and the kisan (farmer), known to the world as a very simple wonderful man, had swum a river to reach his school. Children believe in the other and the plausibility of many worlds. So I learnt the English language and in time it became the language of greatest significance. My paternal grandfather had an English penfriend perhaps, but my maternal grandfather had learnt English by traveling for 11 kilometres in a bullock cart every morning as a young man to the nearest town to learn English at a missionary college in the later part of the 19th century. He was a village school teacher who taught Malayalam to sixth formers (or 15 year olders), as they were known then.
My point is that languages when alive cannot be hierarchised. Langue and parole are conceptual tools – in reality the symbiosis between speech and grammar is as woven as tongue to palate. Distinctions only allow for greater interlacing and greater power. For users like me, English is a bhasha language, and I am a bhasha writer. Hierarchies of language or dialect, of great and little tradition are festoons of the State. Like Timon of Athens, the State feeds the chosen ones – trips abroad, feasting and awards – and when the money dries up no one is happy. Writers may or may not get money, and radical writers and bourgeousie writers are equally pleased when patronized. Writers never scoff at money. Why should they? It is that which allows them to live, gives them the pleasures of autonomy and generosity. Yet, I am drawn to the idea that there are thousands of writers and singers of tales in all parts of our country who continue to write and sing, invent and perform, even when the resources of welfare or patronage fail them. Writers and storytellers do not choose to be poor, hungry, dying, miserable – but if they are forced into situations like those then they would still try to write.
English language writers rarely suffer abysmal poverty. What they fear is lack of press. It seems mandatory to be recognized (even notoriety as a bad writer seems alright) in order to be seen as a professional writer. These are self created hierarchies and not as dangerous as state crafted ones where the Indian writer of English language fiction is always a Diasporite. There is a tragedy to that stance. Success as a writer in English, for the State comes from one’s distinction as an Indian writer domiciled in a foreign country, Conclaves held will list NRI writers as the most significant contributors to literature in India. One can well understand the angst of bhasha writers. Yet, we know that most people do the work they do because it helps them make a living (pay the rent etc;) or because it is a job and everyone must be employed according to their status or their family’s expectation, because they like the work that they do, or because they are forced to engage in some gainful employment. Why must writers feel that they absolutely must achieve awards, distinctions, large sums of money, or feel that they’ve lost out? Most probably this feeling is an artificial hunger, induced by a globalised society. How could we hunger for coffee if coffee bushes hadn’t come our way, or tea, or vanilla bushes or chillis or tomatoes or potatoes or gulmohars or jacarandas? One could extend it to the horse and cow I suppose if it one didn’t feel one was treading on some politically dangerous ground, like that of the Harrapan horse. One should “Chipko Neem Azadraktha” (hug the indigenous margosa as a political act) and hope for the best.
I think the new preoccupation with being recognized is as new as television coverage and media attention. The masses of our people can’t read yet and don’t have the money to buy a newspaper for themselves. It is these shocking contrasts that make us what we are.
If we look at Amitava Ghosh’s In an Antique Land some of these existential problems I have raised are dramatically and sociologically posed. Ghosh is confronted with the possibility that the subjects of his study are more curious about him than he could have imagined. Yet although they are ‘ simple peasants’ they are amazingly perspicacious. They ask him a stacatto of questions which leave him completely dumbfounded, and they ask these questions over and over again, centring around “the divinity of the cow among Hindus’ and “the cremation of the dead”. What happens to this research scholar from a British university is the sudden realization there there are categories of translation that have to take place when one tries to decipher a culture. His secular and now suddenly fore-grounded Hindu identity, his understanding of language, English, Bengali, Egyptian, his modernism, his return to the archives to decipher the relationship of Arab trade and commerce with the Malabar coast all suddenly leap through print. It’s puzzling that the language of time asserts itself here - modernity and tradition, the past interfaces with the present in cunning ways. Would Arab traders in early medievalism use the Western calendar while corresponding to one another, to date their missives?
Sociology and Literature
What is literature? All writing that lasts, and is relevant over large spans of time without seeming out-dated, constitutes a body of literature. Sociologists have produced great Literature. It is impossible to read Marx’s German Ideology, for instance, without coming to terms with the sheer brilliance and clarity of his style. Even with the crumbling of communist states here and there, Marx’s writing is read the world over, both for its understanding of capital as well as the way in which the narratives of history and peoples is articulated. There may be fewer takers for the view that Emile Durkheim or Max Weber provides the same quality of colour and vibrancy. Yet, as a body of literature that survives time, the resilience of Sociologists as litterateurs cannot be denied. To write about marriage and children, property and death is the subject of sociological recording. To write well about the everydayness of existence, that is another talent entirely. But to be a sociologist one must be a writer. To teach, one must write. One must read great works of sociology and be in a position to want to write – to change the world one must wish to write, and one must wish that everyone else can read and write as well.
Feminist Theory is a distinctive type of Sociology which produces its own literature. Many of the criticisms that come from those who call themselves objective, or biased in some other time-honoured way, are significantly around the questions of the sociology of emotion or affect. Is Sociology equipped to study affect? Anyone who reads Max Weber would immediately respond to the questions of rationality, values and ethics (and the varieties of combinations of these) to say that indeed this is possible. The Protestant Ethic arises out of the regulation of desires, as does modern bureaucracy. Yet the empirical Sociologist’s questions arise from the maverick nature of social life and activities. Providing an order to reality is only our second methodological task, the first is to observe, to record and compare. Feminism uses the method of bringing that which was silenced, to the fore. It contributes substantially to the ways in which a kind of recording takes place that allows balance to be restored. If sociology is the science of combining wisdom and community, then objectivity demands that we see women’s voices as crucial to the endeavour of describing what reality is. Sociology, though abstract, is concerned with realism. While we are indebted to the Founding Fathers of Sociology, the search for the voices of women continue in loyalty to the objective pursuits of our art. This is no shifting canvas, there is a certain structuralist paradigm that comes alive: that is the search for meaning. In that sense, recording the voices of women is not significantly or merely a women’s task; men are as much part of the venture, and the solidarity and support of men in the task of reconstructing the fabric of sociological narrative is integral. Women’s names, women’s work, women’s contribution, and the deficit in the structure which contributes to their oppression must be high lighted. It is in this contest, that one is grateful to the Gender Studies Programmes in many Universities where the shared tasks of analyses has been made evident to men and women faculty as well as students. If there are dangers that men will again speak on behalf of women, it is a risk that we must take, and some of us as women scholars feel that we can safeguard these risks by recording in newspapers, journals or women’s meetings the dangers of assimilation.
The writing of fiction, I find, is one of the most interesting metalanguages that Sociology can use, and that it is a legitimate form of writing Sociology, has never been doubted by Universities, wherever sociologists have appeared as writers of fiction. I first began to write fiction because of boredom and the fear of death. These are sociological principles which are catalysts to human behaviour, active and creative. The Sociology of fear, boredom, corruption, and Pandora’s gift to the world, curiosity and hope…these are difficult to handle through the statistical method. To write prose, poem, essay or play that delineates the human condition, that is easier to do. Yet, unlike writing Sociology, this kind of writing demands an empty mind. Its creativity arises out of fallowness. This particular condition is available only to the wealthy, the protected or the renunciant. I fall into any of these categories, only marginally. Like Seasonal Labourers who go out to harvest a crop, the Season of work for me as a writer comes into being only when I’m on a paid holiday from teaching, scripts, doctoral submissions of students. Such times of fruitful pleasure are rare for me. So I enjoy my busman’s holiday, when I go on fieldwork, or recuperate from nervous exhaustion, or go on a seminar tour. The chances are that after a break like that I will write forty pages. I am fairly committed to writing, so somehow that one short story or that chapter out of a novella does get written.
A lot of the work that I have done focuses on record keeping as a form of social criticism. I believe that the task of the sociologist is as radical critic, and that in description which compels verification as it’s accompaniment, much can be achieved. Those who wish to read what is clearly stated, can act upon its assumptions. With fiction the task is much more subtle, and a lot is said between the lines. This sets up a great deal of controversy, because people read texts of fiction very differently from each other, each according to his need, and often each according to his whim. No fiction writer believes that his or her work can be standardized through critical readings. We all form part of concentric rings, each one with a job to do, and our responsibility to our differing audiences is hard to gauge.
As a Sociologist I have been interested in working with the Weberian idea that we are actors, we are agents, that we can transform the world. This creates a methodological space for the analyses of biography. Much of the work I have done presumes, against the generally held sociological idea, that any one person can change structures. I feel hesitant to say this, because I am not sure how it works myself. It draws from the idea of the exemplary hero. I believe that the catalytic agent is able to draw from various sources within him or herself to actually take on situations where pathologies have become “normal”. This presumes then that loneliness is an acceptable human and social condition.
It also presumes that such individuals are well able to understand the relationship between themselves and society, while being detached, they are also interventionist.
All my reading has led me to believe that there is no one point of view and that we are enriched by these ambiguities and differences.
In the next chapter, I will draw the attention of the reader to mission history debates to show that it was the Danish Mission which first began the substantial introduction of English education, and through the Church Missionary Society, the relationship between English education and the Indians became compounded. The relation between English education, mission history and secular education has been dealt by me earlier in several essays on sociologising missionary history ( 1998,2000, 2007).In this paper, I discuss the biographies that went into the pioneering work of translation and compounding of grammars and dictionaries in local languages, where now forgotten figures appear in dramatic detail, when the sociologist or the historian abstracts lives from the archives.
The curious thing about writing fiction, or in this case “probable history” as Natalie Zemon Davis calls it is that total historical veracity is never a focus or a prescribed virtue. This is a very different mode of history writing from the Collingwood pespective of the detective historian, where accuracy is the ultimate objective goal. Probable histories work with the assumption that subjectivities are actually archetypes. What is more centrally focused is that ideas should be paramount – new ways of thinking about the past and the present are demarcated. Nothing more is expected.
