When Bhalchandra Nemade sharply devalued Salman Rushdie’s contribution to literature at a recent event, he may not have expected such a swift and angry Twitter retort by Mr. Rushdie. What is surprising is that neither of them seems to have anything new to say in a debate on regional literature and English which has been going on since the very beginning of the 20th century, when fine modern literature in regional languages was first produced. Thankfully though, many sane voices have spoken against the need to polarise English and regional literature. Indeed, the Ministry of Human Resource Development has declared February 21 as ‘Matribhasha Day’ in honour of mother tongues. However, the debate as it stands is still at a limited level, and overlooks many crucial dimensions.
First, it must be conceded that today’s regional literature has mostly been derived from European forms. The claim that it has descended more from the medieval or classical history of the language has to be intellectually made, not just on the ground of literary nationalism. It would be hard to make a case that Mr. Nemade, for instance, descends, uncorrupted by Western genres, from a purely Marathi or Sanskritic tradition. And why is this kind of genealogy meaningful at all, beyond an arid, insular nationalism?
It is equally true that Indian novels have matured and evolved into distinct voices. There might be a space where a healthy, fair competition between the regional languages, and with English, could take place. May the best novel win. However, as this is too politicised a matter, I cannot quite imagine a truly non-partisan prize.
There are further complications — language is not the only issue; location can be equally divisive. The Indian writer who writes in English and lives in India feels compelled to take sides, but this is precisely what must not be done. Rather, the accent should be on a proper literary and aesthetic accounting of the many achievements of English and regional novels up to the present.
Linguistic identityOne of the unfortunate aspects of the unseemly controversy is that the literary issue hardly seems able to hold on to its autonomy vis-à-vis the question of linguistic identity — Mr. Nemade brought this up directly. Just as at one time it was believed that one had to write in Sanskrit to write anything considered literary or scientific, today it would seem that some people feel that English is disqualified in some intrinsic sense: language, not literature, is the ultimate ground. In saying this, a door is opened to the entire arena of language politics in this country. The endless controversy over education in regional languages never seems to abate.
Perhaps the debate is no more around progressive values or literary merit. If it must be about language politics, then we must acknowledge that language politics can hardly be said to be an unblemished account of the striving of the underdog language/people. As much scholarship has patiently shown, the language that is assumed to be the underdog vis-à-vis English offers a similar relationship of dominance to other more regional languages (the dominance of Marathi or Kannada vis-à-vis Konkani and Tulu, for example). Besides, many large regional languages can hardly call themselves underdogs in good conscience — thousands of crores of rupees have been spent by State governments for their nurture. In the name of numerous regional nationalisms, whole universities and neighbourhoods have been named after writers.
Besides, if there is a need to project an Indian sense of the regional, isn’t there a relationship of nurture to be gifted to the less privileged regional languages — what has the dominant regional literatures have done for, say, Kashmiri, or Northeastern literature? The vexed relationship between Hindi and Urdu, or Hindi and Tamil, serve as salutary reminders.
A major impedimentBut perhaps the chief point of the vulnerability of regional literatures is the lack of a supporting cultural and intellectual ecology. Unlike in Europe where, by the 17th century, French and English had broken with the dominance of Latin to create not just literature, but also philosophy, historiography, sociology, science etc in their tongues, in India the achievement of regional languages beyond the crucial (and yet also limited) domain of literature is a major impediment. Regional languages have not been able to break out of the stranglehold of Sanskrit (and perhaps Arabic) for this larger intellectual ecology — today, English replaces Sanskrit and Farsi. This makes them less sensitive to the latest global developments in knowledge, and this is the key edge that English has. The literary cannot be kept sealed from all the other domains, and since we are today forced to accept the poor international rankings of even our best universities, it may be a little wishful to think regional cultures are unaffected by the general rot of our intellectual culture. Despite the occasional traditional pundit of genius, arguably the most sustained, thorough and creative scholarship on Sanskrit and literary medieval India today is done in English.
While the middle classes represent this as the necessity of English to get good jobs, votaries of the regional language deride it as pure consumerism. While there is truth to this derision, the truth on the other side of the coin is overlooked — that regional languages may also have a responsibility to generate knowledge, despite the admittedly unfair privileges English is heir to. This knowledge is not only of literature but of economics, medicine, political and ethical thought. Regional literature and languages cannot afford to be just the language of the everyday, or of the family, or the neighbourhood.
There is much study of great regional literatures in scholarship in English. Regional literature is, unfairly, under-appreciated globally, but there is a concerted effort to prove the case of its genius. The historically contingent and undeserved, power of English understandably generates linguistic nationalism.
No doubt up to now, Indian literature has served us greater fare than literature in English. As Mr. Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul function as a sort of shorthand for English, let me wager, in similar shorthand, that in all of the regional literatures that I am familiar with, there have been far more indispensable voices to a global literary self — Agyeya and Krishna Sobti (Hindi), Manik Bandopadhyay and Mahasweta Devi (Bengali), Urmila Pawar and Mahesh Elkunchwar (Marathi), Na. Muthuswamy and Mauni (Tamil), Devanur Mahadeva and Vaidehi (Kannada) Basheer (Malayalam), Ismat Chughtai and Hyder (Urdu). Taken as a totality, there is no competition, and certainly many of the regional literary cultures even today are stronger than English. Yet, though the 20th century belonged to regional literatures, it is not certain that the victory (in a healthy competition) will always belong to them. The larger, long-term threat is the lack of the aforementioned drive for a broader cultural and intellectual ecology.
(Nikhil Govind is Assistant Professor at the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities.)
