Foreword

Summary

Language is not transparent. It conditions our understanding and narration of events. If this can be the case between dialects of the same ‘language’, imagine the extent of the challenge when one writes in a particular language about characters who do not – or who do not only – speak that language?

Unfortunately, to say this in the context of Indian writing in English is to show a red rag to two very different species of bull. The first, simpler, species is the language nationalist, who will usually conflate your discussion of the complexity of English (in India) with a dismissal of it. He – it is often a male – will claim that Indians ‘should only write in Indian languages’, glibly echoing a common colonialist rant despite the fact that English has been around in India for three centuries and is now an ‘Indian language’ – though it is a language that has a different relationship to many Indian realities and to other Indian languages than, say, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu or Bangla.

But to make this ancillary point, while recognizing the place of English in India, is to show a red rag to the other, subtler and more cosmopolitan, species of bull, who would then read it as a dismissal of Indian English writing or an attempt to question the ‘authenticity’ of Indian English.