Samir K. Dash.
Personal
Research-Paper3
25 October 2002
English
as a medium for Indian-writer
In a
paper at Regional Conference of the Association of Commonwealth Literature
and Language Studies Held at India International Centre ,New Delhi on
February23-6,1975,R.Parthasarathy , while exposing the position of Indian
writers in English reffered to the comments of American poets Allen
Ginsberg ,Gary Snycler and Peter Onlovsky: "If we were gangster poets we
would shoot you"(1), his threat was direct against the Indian writers’
failure to take risk with the English language.
To
explain the reason behind this R.Parthasarathy says that there at least
two problems which prevent Indian writers to take the risk.First is
related to the kind of experience he would like to express in English .
Indian
who use the Emglish language gets in some extent alienated . This
development is superficial and this is why many blame ‘Indian Writers in
English’(IWE) as writers who present India in a foreign view-point .There
work doesn’t contain a deep analysis of the Indian realities and Indian
characters .
Many
regional writers (many of who are even Jnapitha Awardees) say writing in
English in India is a severe handicap as it tends to make their writing
export oriented .Hindi writer Rajendra Yadav puts it as : "The IWE take a
tourist look at India , like Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics , where
he is simply a tourist who does not know the inner psyche of people or a
more clever device Vikram Seth uses in A S uitable Boy ,the pretext
of looking for a bride-groom ,which takes him to different locales and
professions . It is a creatively written travelers’ guide .They travel
into our culture , describe a bit of our geography ; their total approach
is a westerner’s :a third rate ‘serpant-rope trick’"
Many
believe that IWE is circumscribed by what only westerner can appreciate
:either exotica or erotica .Both these elements are visible in Ruth Prawar
Jhabavala’s Heat and Dust .There is description of shrines , Sadhus
,Nawabs ,Princes and their castles along with sex and gay-parties and
Hijraas .Jhabvala’s picture of princely India is extremely un realistic
,quixotic and pseudo-romantic .Similar is the case of Arundhati Roy’s
The God of Small Things . B.Jaya Mohan in a recent interview to Out
Look magazine (February 25 , 2002) said :"Writers like Roy are
superficial and exotic .When Roy uses English to express a Malayalam idiom
, it might be exotic for westerner , but for Indians it is not very
exciting ."
Still
there are writers in English for whom a little praise is made ,but that
even by another English writer.In an obituary to R.K.Narayan in Time
magazine ,V.S.Naipul writes :"His people can eat off leaves on a floor in
a slum tenement ,hang their upper clothes on a coat stand ,do all that in
correct English ,and there is no strangeness ,no false comedy ,no
distance" But still regional writers believe ; " …but any Tamil writer
would have put more life into his novels than R.K. did".
The
battle of the first kind of problem guides us into the second and this is
‘ the quality of idiom the writer uses’ .R .Parthasarathy says that "
there is obviously a time lag between the living , creative idiom and the
English used in India .And this time lag is not likely to diminish".
It is
because the historical situation is to blame .Besides there is no special
English idiom ,either .English in India rarely approaches the liveliness
and idiosyncrasy of usage one finds in African or West Indian writing ,
perhaps because of the long tradition of literature in Indian languages .
This is
explained by Kannada d Oyen " writers in Indian language have a rich
back-ground -- centuries old literary traditions,flok tales and life all
round them -- the IWE only have frontyard".That’s why Rushdie draws fom
the ethos and Hindi of Mumbai,while writers like Narayan draws from Tamil
and Raja Rao from Kannada .But still the idiom they use lacks in
liveliness, because "it’s impossible to transfer into English the cultural
traditions and the associations of language".This is why it is not
surprising that writers in English tend to over emphasize their Indianness
. This also explains why Michael Madhusudan Dutt after publishing thesis
first book The Captive Lady(1849) in English turned to Bengali to
become the first modern Indian poet .
While a
regional writer can directly concentrate mode of writing the IWE has to
face a complex problem---‘he has to go through the tedious explanations of
the idioms he uses in his book ,leaving little space for creative
writing’.
Perhaps
Narayan was the only writer who never cared for such explanations .Naipul
writes (Time,June 4 ,2001) :
"There
is or used to be a kind of Indian writer who used many italics and for the
excitement ,had a glossary of perfectly simple local words at the back of
his book .Narayan never did that .He explains little or nothing;he talks
everything about his people and his little town for granted".
But
this is not possible for every IWE writer who wants to perform an
experiment in creative English writing .R.Parthasarathy explains in the
context of his own position as an English poet with Tamil as his mother
tongue . "English is a part of my intellectual, rational make-up Tamil my
emotional ,psychic make-up"Hence it is he believes that every IWE feels
that he has an unnecessary burden to do the explanation of the idioms he
uses ,and My Tongue in English Chain is a theoretical statement of
this problem.
Russian
scholar E.J.Kalinikova in Problems of Modern Indian Literature
(1975) also refers to this problem in G.Byol’s words :
"National colouring is like naivete’ ,if you realize you have it ,then you
have already lost it […] Conception of the Indian through Indian eyes is
natural,and this only determine the scope of literary subject", where as
an English writer ofIndia tries to give .The elements in a foreign
language for which the whole experience of that element is strange and in
the end what is produced is in Kamala Das’s words:
"It is
halfEnglish,half Indian
Funny
perhaps, but it is honest" [An Introduction]
To
provide a compromise M.R.Anand writes in his essay Pigeon—Indian:Some
Notes on Indian English Writing : "The real tests are different The
first test is in the sincerity of the writer in any language .The second
test may be in the degree of sensitiveness or individual talent".
And in
what this talent lie ?Anita Desai has the answer :
"I
think I have learnt how to live with English language,how to deal with the
problems it creats –mainly by ignoring them"
This
view is supported by Henery James –"One’s own language is one’s mother
,but the language one adopts as a career, as a study ,is one’s wife[…] she
will expect you to commit infidelities .On those terms she will keep your
house well"
Perhaps
that’s why IWE like Raja Rao have justified their own stand as :
"We can
write only as Indians[…] Time will alone justify it"
[Introduction to Kantapura]
Every
writer (especially poet) ,as many believe ,sooner or later suffers from
‘Aphasia’ or ‘loss of poetic speech’ .His poetry ought to ,from the
beginning aspire to the condition of silence.This is similar to Rene’
Wellek’s notion on Endgame of Samuel Beckett :
"Samuel
Beckett in Endgame has been looking for the voice of his silence"
But
Wellek’s view is applicable to the living force that still move the Indian
English writers’ pen on paper .
"The
artist,s dissatisfaction with language can only be expressed by language
.Pause may be a device to express the un expressible ,but the pause can
not be prolonged indefinitely".
So, in
spite of the problems related to language and diction in use , the writers
must keep on trying their best in carving out on them ,their creativeness
on experimental basis ,because that may one day lead us to where we are
now caving to reach.