Asian Writers in English

by Jatinder Verma

The human senses are said to be five in number. In the case of Asian writing in English, it's best to think of a sixth: translation.

Let me explain by way of a little tale on the origin of English language education amongst South Asians. In 1835, a man called Thomas Babington Macaulay was invited by the Governor-General of British India to arbitrate between the relative merits of English and "native" languages as the medium of instruction in British-run educational institutes.

In the same year, Macaulay - who knew no language other than English and Latin and had been in India only a few months - produced a "Minute on Education": a report that was to have momentous consequences. In this "Minute" he pronounced that "a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia". He went on, obviously, to argue the need for English as the medium of instruction. His reasoning went as follows:

"We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect…"

In other words, an educated class of subject Indians who could act as translators between the rulers and the ruled. Soon after the adoption of this Minute as official policy, in 1844, it was decreed that henceforth only English-educated persons would be eligible for employment in public services. Since the latter were the most prestigious, and lucrative, form of employment, the law was obviously designed to encourage more and more Indians away from "native" languages.

Translation necessarily occupies a space "in-between": that space created when one goes from one language or world to another language or world. And this "in-between-ness" is echoed in the ambivalence with which English came to be regarded during the Raj, and to some extent still is amongst us Asians. The sense of evident pride in being well-spoken or read in English is tinged with envy … and a vague sense of being a traitor - certainly of being "beyond the community". The translated person, in other words, is a "coconut", literally in the sense that Macaulay was suggesting: "Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect…"

Over a century-and-a-half after Macaulay's introduction of the translation sensibility, what is the status of Imperial English ? It is now quite definitely an Asian language, as much as it is an African and an American one. The works of people like Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Farroukh Dhondhy himself and, above all, Salman Rushdie have ensured that Macaulay's "Minute" has been turned on its head. It's as if these writers, like Caliban in Shakespeare's Tempest, have said, "You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse." - "Curse" applied not necessarily in the literal sense - with the exception perhaps of the politicians who fought and overturned British rule over India 50 years ago: Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru had all used the language of the sahibs that they'd learnt so well in London against the very same sahibs. But the contemporary writers are "cursing" in the sense of bringing other voices, other worlds, other stories - our voices, worlds and stories - into what had hitherto been considered English Literature.

Consider how Amitav Ghosh, in his latest novel, The Calcutta Chromosome, re-writes the story of Empire from the other end of the telescope:

"Picture this: here's this guy, a real huntin', fishin', shootin' colonial type, like in the movies; plays tennis and polo and goes pig-sticking; good-looking guy, thick moustache, chubby pink cheeks, likes a night out in the town every now and again; drinks whisky for breakfast some mornings; wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life for the longest time; sort of thought he'd like to write novels; had a go…then said to himself, "hell, that isn't working out like I thought, let's try writing poems instead." But that didn't pan out either and then Pa Ross, who's this big general in the British Army in India, says to him, "And what the fuck do you think you're doing, Ron ? Our family's been out here in India since it was invented and there's no goddamn service here doesn't have a Ross in it, you name it, Civil Service, Geological Service, Provincial Service, Colonial Service … I've heard of them all, but no one told me about no Poetical Service yet. You need to dry out your sinuses, kid, and I'm going to tell you where you're going to do it so listen up: the Indian Medical Service. It's got your name on it, written so large you can read it from a space shuttle…"

This Ronald Ross became eventually the Nobel-prize winning scientist who discovered the malaria puzzle in Calcutta in 1898. Characteristically, Ghosh suggests in his book that the discovery was actually made by Indian assistants of Ross.

Such twists I think are characteristic of the present generation of "translators". Meera Syal, in her first novel, Anita and Me, performs a twist on the established territory of the rural English childhood novel - the format hitherto perfected by Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie. Growing up in one of the small coal-mining villages of the Midland valleys, she describes in humourous and loving detail the little haven of Asia that her parents had created, complete with adult sing-songs on week-ends. Invited to participate in one such, she found do her embarrassment that she "sings Punjabi with a Birmingham accent !", as her Auntie Shaila put it. Unable to carry on, she's finally encouraged by her father to sing one of her own songs.

"Okay", I said, took a deep breath and launched into a rendition of 'We wear short pants', complete with the gyrating dance routine I had seen Pan's People do to it on Top of the Pops. I flicked my hair and kicked my legs as papa and Uncle Tendon gamely tried to match a key and rhythm to my show stopper, although their complex minor key riffs on the harmonium and passionate drum solos on the tabla did not altogether complement the song. I finished by shouting "Yeah, man !", and doing the splits, accompanied by a loud ripping noise and after a moment's pause, a round of enthusiastic applause…. "Hai, such a performer !" shouted Auntie Shaila above the din. "So sweetly done, so er modern ! Where did you learn this song, Meena beti ?"

"Off the radio", I preened. "It's my all time favourite song at the moment", and then added, "It's so brilliant I could shag the arse off it".

There was a sudden terrible intake of breath and then complete silence, broken only by the harmonium emitting a death rattle as papa's fingers fell off the keys. In a split second, my beaming admirers had become parodies of Hindi film villains, with flared nostrils, bulging eyes and quivering, outraged eyebrows. They only needed twirling moustaches and pot bellies straining at a bullet laden belt to complete the sense of overwhelming menace that now surrounded me. These writers, it seems, are gloriously creating a world after their own image: a right or a duty, certainly a necessity incumbent on all "translated" men and women: in other words, on all migrants. It is this "in-between-ness", this multiple, conflicting, diverse sense of what Salman Rushdie calls the "hollow booming words, land, belonging, home" that is creating the most exciting literature of our times.

Rushdie himself, in his latest book, The Moor's Last Sigh, takes the story of Sheherzade, familiar to all through the Thousand and One Nights, and weaves the most powerful novel I know on the sensibility of being "translated". Not least, as one would expect from a writer of such genius, he does this through language itself. Describing the godown of the family that is the centre of his novel, the da Gamas, he writes:

"There were clergy in this temple too: shipping clerks bent over clipboards who went worrying and scurrying between the coolies loading their carts and the fearsomely emaciated trinity of comptrollers - Mr. Elaichipillai Kalonjee, Mr. V S Mirchandalchini and Mr. Karipattam Tejpattam …"!

No one who eats Indian food can fail to recognise these 3 characters !!! The brilliance of his word-play is only one of the attributes that makes Salman Rushdie for me such a genius of the language. Consider his version of the Theory of Relativity, as applied to Indian politics:

" Everything is for relative. Not only light bends, but everything. For relative we can bend a point, bend the truth, bend employment criteria, bend the law. D equals mc squared, where D is for Dynasty, m is for mass of relatives, and c of course is for corruption, which is the only constant in the universe - because in India even speed of light is dependent on load shedding and vagaries of power supply."

This version of the Relativity Theory is as applicable in England today as it is for India.

In his Midnight's Children, Rushdie had used the very eloquent image of "leaking": stories, people, situations leaking into each other. It is this "leakage", I think, which best describes our contemporary reality: bits of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India "leaking" into England. This image Rushdie brings to a moving conclusion in the last pages of The Moor's Last Sigh: Moraes Zogoiby, trapped for most of the novel like Sheherzade in having to tell the story of his family, comes finally to Grenada in Spain, to bring his story full-circle: there is Moorish blood in this family of South Indian spice merchants. "And so I sit here in the last light, upon this stone, among these olive-trees, gazing out across a valley towards a distant hill; and there it stands, the glory of the Moors, their triumphant masterpiece and their last redoubt. The Alhambra, Europe's red fort, sister to Delhi's and Agra's - the palace of interlocking forms and secret wisdom, of pleasure-courts and water-gardens, that monument to a lost possibility that nevertheless has gone on standing, long after its conquerors have fallen; like a testament to lost but sweetest love, to the love that endures beyond defeat, beyond annihilation, beyond despair; to the defeated love that is greater than what defeats it, to that most profound of our needs, to our need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers, for the dropping of the boundaries of the self…

" This sensibility of flowing together, of leaking, Rushdie captures in book after book. Take as an example his memorable character of the Rani of Cooch Naheen (the Queen of Nothing !) in Midnight's Children, who was going progressively white as Independence drew near: "I am the victim", the Rani whispers, "the hapless victim of my cross-cultural concerns. My skin is the outward expression of the internationalism of my spirit." ! Here Rushdie has literally stood Macaulay's description of the class of interpreters on its head and given it a wholly different meaning !

What for me comes through the work of such writers is an accurate sense of our own "in-between-ness" or coconut-ness. I see in the image of the coconut not traitors, but mongrels full of diverse narratives, languages, forms and histories - through whose bodies English flows as much as Urdu or Punjabi or Gujarati, who see Humm Apke Hain Kaun as much as Eraser or any other popular Hollywood film, who sing to the tune of the latest pop song be it from London, New York, Bombay or Birmingham, who celebrate Christmas as much as Eid or Diwali - if they celebrate these at all ! - who speak Mancunian English as much as Mirpuri Punjabi.

What also comes through, coincidentally, is that English is now a thoroughly Asian language !!! "Translation" has come full-circle: these writers are translating England itself.