Seeking liberation in a language

GJV Prasad

IT started innocuously enough. Someone said in a party, when he was back from a major literature festival, that we have only English in the literature festivals we hold. We are a multilingual country and we must have multilingual literature festivals, he said. English does not represent India. More and more voices were raised to say that English writers and writing should not be the focus of these festivals. The writers, their writing, and the festivals were just elitist. Of course, everyone was trying to hatao English in English!

Readers of this column will know that I maintain that while not one language alone can represent India, each language spoken in India can represent our nation and does. This may sound paradoxical, but every Indian language does speak in and for its India, while no one language can claim to represent the whole country. In short, English does represent India. However laudable the view that all our literature festivals should be like the Sahitya Akademi’s inclusive Bhopal meet earlier this year, showcasing as many languages as possible, the one condition that needs to be fulfilled is adequate translation/ interpretation facilities. This needs investment in infrastructure and generous sponsors, and also large enclosed spaces where there are enough headphones available to people to listen to the interpretation. But which language would you interpret into? If you need interpretation into all Indian languages represented in the festival, you will have to stretch all your resources. This is beyond most literature festivals right now. So, it is only right that you have literature festivals in different languages, that our festivals proliferate in languages other than English and also in English. You will continue to have literature festivals where English is the lingua franca, which are also inclusive in terms of other Indian languages.

Having said that, I am always surprised by a certain attitude that tends to preserve English for a diminishing elite, ignoring the fact that the language has long been democratised, appropriated and owned by others in the hierarchy. It is a hierarchy that the others want to destabilise, to topple. This has been articulated by many writers over the years but others have simply responded by either ignoring this need felt by ‘ordinary’ people for the English language or by making fun of their use of English — taking photos of signboards, recording their speech and making memes, etc. Some of us see them as poor misguided folks who will be better off in their own languages but have an absurd fascination to speak and write English.

Dalit activists and theoreticians have spoken and written often that English is the language of liberation for them. It is the language of global mobility and of breaking through the barriers of caste that circumscribe them and limit their possibilities. Chandra Bhan Prasad went so far as to plan to build a temple for the English goddess in a small village in UP in 2010. The goddess would be the deity for Dalits since all other deities alienated them. English was the language of their liberation, of their birth as human beings equal in stature to others, not bound to caste-based occupations. This aligns with Ambedkarite politics. Lord Macaulay was their icon, one who made a world of possibilities available to them through the introduction of English language education. Macaulay’s birthday ought to be celebrated every year by Dalits, according to Chandra Bhan Prasad.

Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule stressed on inclusive education in the 19th century. Savitribai wrote poems exhorting Dalits to learn English. Yet, even now, we laugh at the aspirations of our people to learn, to speak and write in the language. We have a history of putting down political leaders who want to signal to their followers that they can now speak in the language of international power and commerce, and of silencing young people who want to learn and use the language to break through their shackles (they can never be good enough).

Many of the above thoughts were occasioned by the award of a major US academic prize, the MLA Prize for a first book, to Akshya Saxena for her book ‘Vernacular English’, which examines the use of English in postcolonial India in different arenas, mainly for empowerment of the marginalised. The irony cannot be lost on any of us — 76 years after our Independence, the battle for a just, equitable India is being fought in English.

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