Language arises from our frame of reference: of how we position what we want to communicate. The deduction is apparent. If our chassis of referral is to become all the more efficient, our language needs to reflect that — like a mirror. The matrix of reference, in the past, was that of a presumed, objective, and pre-existent reality. It reflected and imitated such a reality; also, duality. Today, language is increasingly characterised by a major emphasis on rethinking — of its nature, function, and purpose.
Language, according to Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher and seminal thinker, conveys not only information but also commitment. Heidegger reckoned that language was not about describing a separate world that existed out there. His contention, in today’s context, was clear. If we were to eliminate language, for instance, the ubiquitous computer a worker assembled would be reduced to a nonsensical object. This is simply because as Fernando Flores, communications expert and founder of Business Design, put it, “A human society operates through the expression of requests and promises.”
Complexity thinkers Howard Sherman and Ron Schultz contend that most organisations and individuals use language as a simile in the description of narrative, or storytelling. “These language based ways of communicating and feeding back information,” they emphasise, “are in line with pragmatic philosophy.” They also argue that while business and/or management, for example, may not have truly loved stories, all right, science’s novel attempts to lighten language to its simplest form — an equation, so to speak — has now helped it to rediscover the power of the story to convey it..
Flashback. The early works of philosophy and knowledge were all written in a language that was almost metaphorical, mythological, and also evocative. Plato, for instance, didn’t write treatises. He wrote dialogues. The Indian philosopher, Madhvacárya, in a totally different epoch, wrote treatises, not dialogues. This is simply because language as a tool of communication had matured — and, there’s a deliberate effort to liberate it from mythology/metaphorical allegory. Not only that. Language has also now begun to construct a more profound, strong grammar, not to speak of the processes of analyses and conditions of intelligibility for all discourse.
It goes without saying that language is a response to needs that arise from contacts with objects. It’s subjective too. Suppose it’s the other way around — one that was modelled for the world to fit in? Fortunately, in practice, you just don’t have such a paradox. For one simple reason: there is no means of representing thoughts outside of language, except, of course, with the help of some other means of expression, like art, or calculus, which is also a form of language. There it is — as to why everyone is familiar with the timeless idea that it’s your language that determines the way you think.
Language is not just instinct; it is also a divergent tool that powers our mind. What about silence, you may well ask. It’s more than a part of speech — a void of mystical experience, not just formed by language, but also induced by it. There’s also more to language than what meets the eye, ear, or mind. If the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, to highlight a classical exemplar, reduced language to its essences and a whole new possibility for the power of language, the Italian polymath Galileo Galilei made the distinction between primary and secondary qualities in language — one, that had geometric properties, with the other that did not. The rest is history, what with the likes of René Descartes, Isaac Newton et al ‘masterminding’ some incredible ideas in comparison to their predecessors. This brings us to a notable allegory: of today’s thought returning to early sources.
Language today seems to have brought a profound balance, a wonderful analogy between Descartes and Einstein. What’s more, contemporary language, does not, in anyway, reduce anything. Instead, it now includes everything — scientific or not. Maybe, we ought to accept that there is a peculiar dualism at work here. Yet, its profound analogy is ingrained. We are now talking of concepts. We are talking of ideas. We are also talking of experiences, behaviours, sensations, intentions, feelings etc. Most importantly, we are communicating ideas through our experiences and stories. And, the idea — language as similitude — is, doubtless, critical to us all. It is also, in other words, a monumental feat of virtuosity, or vitality, and a magical carpet of the narrative.
You know that, don’t you? That language, like all living things, is continually in a state of flux, where the old rings in the new, and vice versa. Yes — you got it right. And, yes, you’ve got it all perfectly right too. Of what has, quite simply, been a resplendent oracle for Indian writing, in English, the language that blossomed, thanks to British Rule — a language that has made India, Modern India. Call it Indian English, or what you would and/or may — during the last few years — it certainly has cowed Western cynicism with pleasing workability. By way of reference to a definitive context, or web of frame, this purports to extended pragmatism — a relationship that stands for critical acclaim and financial acumen.
The credo, of course, percolates to not just established writers, or old-time wordsmiths like Nirad Chaudhuri and Mulk Raj Anand, not to speak of the likes of Kamala Markandaya or, Dom Moraes, Shashi Deshpande et al, but also emerging writers as well. Not just Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Raja Rao, Alan Sealy, Amit Chaudhuri, Kiran Desai, Jerry Pinto etc., but also others who have made the archetypal Indian, also urbane — the Bombay [now Mumbai] — novel a specialty construct. As author Githa Hariharan epitomises, “… the fabulous, inescapable face of metropolitan India… of polyphonic chutney the modern Indian city is: commerce, myth, technology, revivalism — [which] all add their unique, assertive flavours to its soul.”
The zenith was, doubtless, Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things, now unequivocally canonised as one among the top 20 great novels of the last century, which engineered a major coup — unless, of course, you’d think of Nobel Laureate V S Naipaul as one of our own, albeit, ‘long-lost,’ far-flung, or émigré, Indian writers — and, catapulted the rising status and growing popularity of Indian fiction in the language. All this, may, palpably, be passé to the master of wordplay, Salman Rushdie, who, incidentally, is adamant that prose writing of Indian writers in English “is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most — the so-called vernacular languages…” You couldn’t think of a better, or worse, sweeping manifesto — or, call it what you may.
Rushdie has sanctified Indo-Anglican literature, yes, because the stream represents India’s most inestimable contribution to the printed word, so much so, it has today found its creative voice in the fictional figments of our epoch. Add to this, the reticent and holier-than-thou critics who have all too often denounced Indo-Anglican fiction “for being the literary equivalent of MTV culture, [of] globalising Coca-Colonisation,” and you have Rushdie again propelling perspicacious readers/theorists to recognise where exactly the diction of anti-Indo-Anglicanism belongs: a backsliding and chancy lineage of conventionalists and ‘enlightened’ nationalists who are always trailing a “spiritual dimension essential for a ‘true’ understanding of the soul of India.”
Such a metaphor is akin to what noted academic and publisher Rukun Advani would readily acquiesce to — without fanfare. Maybe, as a paradigm shift of her own polemical matrix, the Stephanian novel, or one that gains its inspiration from the much-celebrated doctrine of the St Stephanian School of Literature, New Delhi. Or, what noted author and politician Shashi Tharoor classifies as “continuing affinity, a sort of literary band of loyalty.”
This does not, however, mean that you don’t have successful, path-breaking non-Stephanian writers of novels. We have had more than a handful of such writers. But, the fact remains: the Indian writer has changed dramatically to become more ‘professional,’ in terms of one’s own commercial programmability, upward mobility, wealth, media-savvy, practical, and cosmopolitan ideals. Inevitably, they now want this self-image to be collated and established in the novels they write, or read.
The entire analogy is simple, also profound: to be able to actively imagine the Indian realm, or ethos, as the epitome of their inclinations. Well, hold your breath, because with the exception of select writers like Ghosh, Seth and Roy, or Siddharta Deb, not to speak of Raj Kamal Jha, and others, the new Indian English novel is seriously constrained by a major conjectural premise: the Englishness of Indo-English fiction. To cull a paradigm. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August illustrates, in more ways than one, the crystallisation of the exclusively opprobrious artist as a young civil servant. Or, for that matter, Chaudhuri’s remarkable ‘Indianness’ running through his classy narratives.
So, there we are. The inference is not ephemeral, but ubiquitous: the standard and cultural principle on the basis of which Indian writers, in English, brand, or position, their fictional software is something management guru Jack Trout would be proud of. The conclusion, therefore, needs to be just as liberal: it would do us all a world of good to reflect on Indian writers, in English, for what they are — not what they were, or could’ve been. For one simple reason. The hugely imperishable R K Narayan, the doyen of them all, wasn’t a Stephanian. He was an alumnus of Maharaja’s College in sylvan Mysore, now Mysuru, or what could, quite simply, be good, old Malgudi, in the eye, and mind, of our own imagination.
— First published in Observer
