The year 2016 saw many calls for mercy. For refugees and immigrants. For victims of war. And because of the variety and ubiquity of suffering, for all humanity by the Catholic Church in its Year of Mercy. This last is important, because it is easy to think of mercy as something extended by the materially well-to-do towards the materially bereft. While it certainly operates in that sphere, it is not a virtue available only to the wealthy (how obnoxious if it were) but also to the destitute, and it is not intended only for the destitute, but also for the wealthy. So in the new year, here is a fresh call for mercy, for a community close to home, one that many might imagine doesn’t need it: the Indian English-speaking community.
No doubt, we are an elite group. Yet ‘elite’ is only one of the faintly derisive monikers that offer a clue to our condition. Another is the icky ‘people like us’. A third is the historically enlightening but nevertheless pejorative ‘Macaulay’s children’. Names can destroy dignity, and to have nothing but scoffing names available to a people, even and especially amongst themselves, indicates a breathtakingly pariah status, a great downtroddenness.
I am speaking in cultural terms. We all know that Westernised, English-speaking Indians receive many advantages. English in India has remained the language of officialdom. Therefore, we dominate the corresponding professions, the bureaucracy, the legal system, the news media that reports on them, and the NGOs that work with them. These commanding heights also offer a privileged access to the equivalent international sectors. So we are economically well-to-do and, it would seem, professionally well-placed. And for the first couple of generations after Independence, perhaps the rot was not visible. But with my generation, as young, Anglicised Indians have looked towards a wider range of occupations and sought to step down from the towering heights and feel, as it were, the ground beneath their feet, they have experienced instead a sickening fall. It is a tragedy that ought to compel concern.
What we have discovered is a pervasive failure of confidence in our own cultural experience. Not long ago, at the Odisha Literature Festival, a panel was convened over the question: ‘Is English really an Indian language?’ Imagine the outcry if this question were asked of any other language spoken in the subcontinent. But it is commonplace to suspect English, and the same question has been asked at many literature festivals — organised by English-speaking Indians — and in the pages of many leading magazines, written and published by English-speaking Indians. What more radical sign of subjugation can there be than for a community to organise debates over its own right to exist?
But we could also arrive at this result from another angle, and deduce the crisis of confidence from the mediocrity of the works. Put simply, we have an unenviable record. Our fiction, which has long abounded in laments and frivolities, pushed by jaded publishers, has now been essentially overwhelmed by a mass of novels aimed at readers for whom English is not a first language. In cinema, even though the actors and film-makers may belong squarely to our Anglicised community (think of the Akhtar children), the people on screen are mauled into unreality, speaking no language well, reflecting no community accurately.
This mediocrity is by no means confined to the arts, though it is exemplified there. And the defence for it is always careerism. Rahul Gandhi, someone might argue, could not possibly abide in politics unless he became the vice-president of the Congress party. But surely he would have been a better politician in every real sense, if, like the princesses in the fairy tales, he had only lost his entourage. Yet our community, birthed by colonisers, remains trapped at the top.
Therefore, we need mercy, not envy or condemnation. It is short-sighted to see us as a pampered group, full of privileges. It should be beyond doubting that English is indeed the language of our hearts, and that in our hearts, no less, reside the cultural influences of the West. And it is shameful that other, older communities, with the comfort of deep roots in this country, should bully the English-speaking Indian as she looks to put down her own. It’s also foolish — for we have much to offer.
But first, we must show mercy to ourselves, by reaching for help, instead of continually straining to succeed and dominate. Unacknowledged spiritual suffering produces an awful spiritual hardening, which we see in the Indian English community in two chief forms. The first is a self-loathing, which revels in itself, and attempts to manipulate other groups (the foreign, the vernacular) by adulating them, and the second is a megalomania, which declares outright war on anyone that does not share its ideology. I am thinking of rage-filled liberals and social media witch-hunts. But if anyone is tempted by them, they would do well to ask themselves if they are not really being made fools of, and all the while shutting themselves to their most pressing need, which is, first and last, mercy.
The writer has spent the last decade writing novels and wrestling with the things described over the course of this column.
