What is the role and place of English in India's multilingual literary world? How do Indian readers, writers, translators, literary critics, and institutions situate themselves vis-à-vis English and India's regional languages? To explore these questions, Rashmi Sadana embarks on an ethnographic journey through Old and New Delhi, mainly, and introduces her readers to English and bhasha (regional language) authors, Hindi and English publishers, and a national literary institution. Along the way, she discusses a variety of texts and their translations along with debates surrounding literature and its institutionalization in the Indian literary sphere.
There is no doubt that English has functioned as a language of social empowerment since colonial times. And yet, such a statement does not suffice as explanation or as the determining factor for why authors and readers from multilingual linguistic and cultural backgrounds choose one language over the other. There may, however, be tendencies to favor one language for the expression of certain intellectual ideas and another for the expression of emotions, such as those expressed by the writer Geetanjali Shree (p. 123).
While, as the title of the book suggests, there is no doubt of the linguistic intersections of English and Hindi (as well as other Indian regional languages’) literary fields, there is also striking evidence for the linguistic and cultural divide between both languages. Sadana sets the stage of her study with a reminder that those who sell English books on the streets are seldom able to read them and those who learn English as a subject in Hindi-medium schools may not have the same opportunities to excel in postsecondary English-language institutions. At the same time, Hindi publishers choose Hindi-medium educational institutions for their children notwithstanding the implications. How then do English and Hindi, which both claim a status as cross-regional vernaculars and national languages, negotiate their shared grounds in the postcolonial literary world? How do they assert cosmopolitan (Hindi) and global/transnational (English) identities on the Indian soil with its specific colonial history and postcolonial realities?
Sadana's premise is that English is becoming not only less colonial and more global, but also more complex, contended, and diverse than it was during colonial rule. English, she argues convincingly throughout her monograph, needs to be grasped from within the Indian multilingual context as well as in its role as a mediator between Indian languages. And while the postcolonial paradigm allows for tackling the global and transnational contexts and aspects of postcolonial literary production in English, it is insufficient for scholars who wish to move beyond “an East-West dialectic” and center-periphery narrative (p. xv). Sadana therefore develops as a new analytical frame an anthropology of literature, “one that outlines the literary field, delves into its production, and analyzes its individuals and institutions ethnographically” (p. 7). The sweeping presence of English in the Hindi heartland (and beyond) has forced Hindi publishers to redefine their mission for Hindi. Despite the fact that the total number of books published in Hindi exceeds that of English publications in today's India, Hindi remains contested as a national language; publishers respond to this resistance not only by attempting to consolidate Hindi as a regional literary language, but also by making it a language for discourse and ideas, supporting Hindi publications from Indian diaspora writers and claiming for it a “literary nationality” (p. 73). This reminds one of the Hindi literati in colonial times, who considered sahitya seva, the service to literature, as their indispensable contribution to the nationalist struggle. In a similar move, the contemporary Hindi writer Gagan Gill claims her language of literary production in regional and national terms, as “a badge of specificity, authenticity perhaps, that unlocked the door to national recognition and belonging” (p. 73). It is the act of claiming languages that emerges as a feature of modern Indian identity, argues Sadana.
The politics of language also impinge upon debates surrounding cultural authenticity. In an exploration of the debates surrounding the Hindi and Bengali translations of Vikram Seth's acclaimed English novel A Suitable Boy, the question arises whether a translation has the potential to serve as an “act of cultural recovery,” as suggested by the Hindi literary critic Harish Trivedi (p. 142), or whether the translation itself is manipulated to attend to the religious sensibilities of a “largely vegetarian [upper middle-class Brahmanic] audience,” as posited by the Bengali translator of the novel, Enakshi Chatterjee (p. 145). In spreading out the layers of the enticing debate, Sadana uncovers its “political variables” (p. 8) and strengthens her claim that “English becomes defined, molded, and nuanced by its often complex relationships to other Indian languages, especially Hindi” (p. 177).
This innovative ethnographic study of literature is conducted in an impressive array of multilingual literary fields. By means of its appealing writing that also situates the author in her study, the reader is invited to join the journey into Delhi's and India's intellectual and literary worlds. By virtue of its focus and methodology, it complements the canonical readings on English and postcoloniality and should be of interest to a varied group of readers in the social sciences and humanities as well as those interested in the diverse “grounds” of postcolonial literary production.
