Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal

All great imaginative literature is carved out of the highest emotional upheaval in the heart of the poet. A particular emotion catches the soul of the poet and the result is the outpouring of the excessively creative poetry. Poetry is nothing but the drainage/ exit/ gush of the excessive emotions in the poet’s heart. Through this cathartic or therapeutic release, through poetry, a poet receives aesthetic relief from the burden of feelings. Poetry cannot be created, if emotions are dried up in individuals. Poetry lacking the rhythmical vibrations in the poet’s heart will come across as artificial and lack in spontaneous ‘full-throated ease’. Poetry should come as naturally to a poet, as leaves to the branches of a tree. Poetry emerges in a poet effortlessly without any strain. Wordsworth held that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. A great poet is able to universalize his personal sensations. The sage Valmiki had the same experience when he saw the killing of the Krauncha bird. About this episode in the life of Valmiki, G.Mohan writes thus:

When the sage Valmiki saw one of the Krauncha pair shot dead by a hunter, he was overcome by sorrow. But, this sorrow was transformed into infinite compassion for suffering humanity (10).

So, a literary product is the result of an excessive flood of emotions in a poet’s heart. An imaginative poet universalizes his subjective feelings.

Now, the question is—what should be the medium of expression of these intimate emotions of a creative artist? Can these feelings be effectively and suitably communicated in an alien language, which is not the language of one’s emotional make-up? One’s innermost feelings can only be truly expressed in one’s native language. Nostalgic memories of one’s childhood, if narrated in a foreign language, lose that intimate personal touch.

Suppose, my hand is burnt or I fall from a speedy vehicle and get injured—what will be the language of my communication? I will definitely say—Hai Ram Mar Gaya. I will not say : O God, I am injured. The second statement is not from the core of my heart. That cry on being hurt is spontaneously from the deepest recesses of the heart; this outburst is the purest form of poetry and is marked by the Wordsworthian concept that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Most importantly, this inner expression of pain pours out in my first or native language, not in any foreign tongue.

Shreesh Chaudhary, Professor of English at IIT, Madras, has outlined the difference between the first and second languages thus:

…people ‘acquire’ the first language… and learn the second language…After all, the circumstances and results of learning these languages are often quite different for many people….While everybody has abundant exposure to the language to be learnt in the context of first language acquisition (FLA), it is not always so with the second language. Neither does everyone get to learn the second language in ‘natural’ circumstances like one’s first language. People often learn it through instruction (95-96).

This distinction between the first and second languages clearly indicates that the later one is not the spontaneous medium for poetic communication. Here, some issues are doing their rounds in mind. If inner sentiments of one individual are properly conveyed in one’s native language, why have the Indo Anglians chosen English as the mode of their expression? Why have they not adopted the languages of their own region for the free flow of their ideas? Are they not completely unlike Valmiki, who was overcome by the deluge of emotion when he saw the killing of the Krauncha bird? Are not emotions dried up in them due to their employment of a second language? Native experiences can rarely be communicated in an alien language. The ecstasy of Holi and the revelry of Deepawali can best be explained in my mother-tongue; if expressed in the second language, it will smack of artificiality and be devoid of the fragrance of the indigenous soil. My point of view is that Indian Literature written in English (a language, used by Macaulay to rule over India) fails in certain situations because of its non-indigenous nature. Here, it is pertinent to quote certain words from Macaulay’s celebrated Minute:

We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect (qtd. in Krishnaswamy and Krishnaswamy 31-32).

To make a class of Indians British in taste, the English language was employed as a tool - a powerful weapon in the hands of the colonizer to colonize our minds. It was used by the empire for their mission of ‘civilizing’ the backward minds of the natives. Gramsci, a revolutionary thinker, has propagated the view that the ruling class alters the ideologies of the ruled through the mutual consent of the latter. In a way, “the element of coercion is ruled out but the major emphasis is on consent which is obtained by the ruling class through exploiting institutions like the church, the school, the family, the media (Rajnath 78).” Due to this indirect control of the empire, “Indians were so brain-washed by educational, cultural and religious activities of the West that they began to reckon themselves as inferior and developed a propensity for everything Western including administration and governance (Rajnath 78).” The civilizing mission of the colonizer left us to believe in the superiority of their institutions and the inferiority of our own. We may call it the colonization of the mind, which is worse than the colonization of the land. In this process of civilizing the backward minds of the subjects, the tools of English language and literature were employed to strengthen the colonial domination in India. Taisha Abraham has suggested the same idea, “Educating the colonized through the use of the English language and literature was central to colonial rule (68).” When the empire was successful in stuffing our minds with the ideas of their superior rationalism and our inferior backwardness, there began the presence of some authors reproducing their literary works in their language and thus started a literature, the very foundation of which is the imperialistic bias of the Whites.

But the question is—how can this weapon of exploitative oppression become the language of creative expression in literature for the colonized people? How can a writer reveal his inner ideas, feelings, sentiments and the surrounding ethos in this language, while the subconscious/ unconscious layers of our mind deride it as a heinous colonial tool, employed by the colonizer to control us? Why is this mad rush after Indian Literature in English?

Another objection to this literature of the anglicized Indians is—what is the readership of this type of literature? Naturally, millions of Indians cannot be its readers, because of the ignorance of the natives about the intricacies of this language. Of course, Kerala is a highly literate state. I salute the people of this region for their high rate of literacy.  But, that is not the case with the other parts of India. People cannot even comprehend the English newspapers and magazines, not to speak of the masterpieces of the Indo Anglians. The supporters of Indian Writing in English may argue that they target an audience outside India. Even here, there is a problem. Indian Writing in English is imbued with classical mythological references and the writers mostly talk about an Indian ethos. How will an outsider understand all this? Pritish Nandy in his poem ‘Calcutta If You must Exile Me’ has the following expression:

Calcutta they will tear you apart Jarasandha-like… (Prasad and Singh 85).
Besides, mark the following expression from Kiran Desai’s Man Booker Prize winning novel The Inheritance of Loss:

In Stone Town they ate samosas and chapatis, jalebis, pilau rice…. Saeed and Saeed could sing like Amitabh Bachhan and Hema Malini. He sang, “Mera joota hai japani…” and “Bombay se aaya mera dost—oi (53)!”
The whole of Indian English literature is stuffed with these Indian words and names. How will a foreigner follow the references to Jarasandh, samosas, chapatis, jalebis, Amitabh Bachhan and Hema Malini and the songs from Bollywood?

So, for whom are these works of the Indo- Anglians produced? Of course, they are not for the masses.
Indian English Literature is not without defects. Still, every year numberless works are produced by Indians in the English language. What is the target audience of this literature? It is in the main written for the public school bred and English speaking pseudo-intellectuals of India. This literature of the elite class drawing-room idlers caters to the tastes and moods of these people. For these snobs, literature is not an aesthetic realization, rather a tool of social prestige. The classics of the great masters are not works of high imagination for them; they imagine that the mention of a particular work of literature in conversation imbues them with social class. A literary text is no better than a detective piece, as they are not Sahridaya Readers (connoisseurs of art and literature). Here, it will not be out of place to say that literature has two types of meanings—literal and figurative. Only the microscopic eye of a Sahridaya Reader can unearth the latent meaning. Kunjunni Raja, while discussing Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka, elaborates this idea thus:

In the Dhvanyaloka, Anandavardhana establishes his theory that suggestion is the soul of poetry. He says that beautiful ideas in poetry are of two kinds: literal and implied. The latter is something like charm in girls which is distinct from the beauty of the body; this implied sense is something more than the literal meaning. This suggested sense is not understood by those who merely know grammar and lexicon; it is understood only by men of taste who know the essence of poetry. This suggested sense is the most important element in poetry; in fact it is the soul of poetry (287-288).

And so a genuine reader is able to derive pleasure out of literature by exploring the inner meaning of a work, while the mundane types go through just the primary meaning. The elites just take literature at the primary level of understanding, as they discuss literature to exhibit their awareness of culture and civilization. At this juncture, I am reminded of T.S.Eliot’s expression in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’:
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. (3).

What I mean to say is that it is a literature for the elite classes and not for the masses. Even a majority of authors are from the upper strata of society brought up in an anglicized and European atmosphere. Anita Desai was born to a German mother. Salman Rushdie was born of an affluent Muslim family in Bombay. He was educated, first at Cathedral School in Bombay, a classic neo- colonial enclave that ‘groomed’ him, he says, for the exclusive British public school, Rugby. John Mee in his essay ‘After Midnight: The Novel in the 1980s and 1990s’ talks of a group of writers identified with Delhi’s elite St. Stephen’s College. Allan Sealey, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, Upmanyu Chatterjee, Rukun Advani, Mukul Kesavan and Anurag Mathur were all students of this college in the early 1970s. Kiran Desai, the daughter of Anita Desai, spent the early years of her life in Pune and Mumbai. When she was around nine years her family shifted to Delhi. When she turned fourteen, the family had moved to England. A year later, they shifted to the United States. Kiran completed her schooling in Massachusetts. She did her graduation at Columbia University. Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London. She was raised in Rhode Island. Lahiri received a B.A in English Literature at Barnard College, and later received her M.A in English, Creative writing, and Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, as well as a Ph.D in Renaissance Studies from Boston University. Vikram Chandra graduated from Pomona College (in Claremont, near Los Angeles) with a concentration in creative writing.
He then attended the Film School at Columbia University in New York.2

What we see is a literature by the elite class for the elite. But the irony is that these upper class people read and write about social problems they have hardly ever experienced. They are an outsider’s response to these tangling issues of society. Kiran Desai for example writes about the alienation of Biju in The Inheritance of Loss:
They were men; he was a baby. He was nineteen, he looked and felt several years younger (16).

We must know that it is an outsider’s response to the problem of diasporic alienation. Belonging to upper class society as she does, she finds difficulty in understanding the pains of the underdogs of society. Her response to the predicament of the poor Indians in the West will be considered out of place, as she has not possibly felt the same pain, which Biju in her novel feels. Only a person, who has lived through the pain, can describe its intensity as human experience is opaque. Most of the Dalit writers hold the same opinion. They believe that upper class people, even if they do have an emotional bond with the Dalits, cannot delineate the age old scar of caste-oppression, as they have not felt it. The notable Dalit writer J.P.Kardam told me in an interview:

I would like to quote here the words of Dr. Manager Pandey, a renowned Hindi critic, who wrote in the preface to a collection of Dalit short stories edited by Ramnika Gupta that “Only ash knows the experience of burning”. This indicates that Dalits know the experience of burning — burning in the fire of sorrows, hatred, disrespect, injustice, inequality and untouchablity. Non-Dalits do not have this experience.
To be very honest, the feelings of these anglicized Indo-Anglians from the upper strata of society for the bottom dogs of the society are just synthetic. They are not from the core of their being.

In place of Indian Writing in English, we should promote literatures in regional languages as a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. I am not completely against the Literature of England authored by the native speakers of the English language. I mean to say that literature written in one’s native language is better than literature in an alien language.

Here, I must clarify that I have just presented certain issues about Indian Writing in English. I am not against the use of the English language in day to day life. English is a global language and any cultural or social group, without effective communication skills in this language, will lag far behind in technological and scientific fields, as much innovative research is being done in this lingua franca of the world. It is the language for dry scientific and mechanical studies and also for research in various branches of social sciences. English does not lend itself for emotional literary purposes in India, in my view. In the opinion of I. A. Richards, there are two uses of the language—scientific and emotive. In India the English language should be promoted for its scientific use and communication skills. It has no place in the production of literary output.

Notes and References
1.In this paper, I am equating all imaginative literature with poetry.
2.All information about the authors in this paragraph is borrowed from the following sources:
Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, ed. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.
Walsh, William. Indian Literature in English. London: Longman,1990.
<http://www.iloveindia.com/indian-heroes/kiran-desai.html>.
<http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/lahiri_jhumpa.html>.
<http://www.vikramchandra.com/Default.aspx?tabid=129>

Works CitedAbraham, Taisha. Introducing Postcolonial Theory: Issues And Debates. Macmillan, 2007.Agarwal, N.K. “D C Chambial: In Discussion with Nilanshu Agarwal.” Muse India Sept. - Oct. 2008. 13 Sept. 2008 <http://www.museindia.com/showcon.asp?id=1059>.—. “Only ash knows the experience of burning: An Interview with Dalit Writer Jai Prakash Kardam.” thanalonline Sept. 2008. 22 Oct. 2008 <http://www.thanalonline.com/Issues/09/Interview2_en.htm>.Chauadhary, Shreesh. “First Language Acquisition vs. Second Language Learning.” Readings in English Language Teaching in India. Ed. S. Kudchedkar. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002. 94-124.Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. Penguin, 2006.    Eliot, T.S. Selected Poems. Ed. Manju Jain. New Delhi: OUP, 1992.Krishnaswamy, N, and Lalitha Krishnaswamy. The Story of English in India. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2006.Mohan, G.B. The Response To Poetry: A Study in Comparative Aesthetics. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1968.Prasad, Hari Mohan, and Chakradhar Prasad Singh, eds.  Indian Poetry in English. New Delhi: Sterling, 1985.Raja, Kunjunni. “Theory of Dhvani.” Indian Aesthetics: An Introduction. Ed. V.S.Seturaman. Chennai: Macmillan, 1992. 287-309.Rajnath. “Edward Said And Postcolonial Theory.” Journal of Literary Criticism 9.1 (2000): 73-87.This paper was presented at the ‘Language And Identity’ Seminar, organized during The International Literary Festival, 2008, hosted by Kerala Language Institute at Calicut (Kerala, India).Dr.Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal is Senior Lecturer in English at Feroze Gandhi College, Rae Bareli, (U.P.), India. He has his doctorate on T.S. Eliot from Allahabad University. Dr. Agarwal is interested mostly in Indian Aesthetics, Diaspora and Contemporary Critical Theory.