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CHAPTER 2

Two Tales of a City

On family visits to Delhi in the 1970 s, South Extension was a sleepy place. It was always summer, and we spent the afternoons under the fan. My cousins and I would quiz each other over world geography, they with their British-inflected accents and spellings, me with my wide American syllables. By early evening one of my uncles would show up with a bag of warm samosas and a few bottles of sweet, sizzling Thums Up. Later, another uncle would whiz me around on his scooter to the market. He would get a paan, and I would stand next to him and invariably be approached by street children for a rupee coin.

Once on the outskirts of the city where partition-era refugees bought government-subsidized plots of land, today South Extension is a congested, central, and upscale residential area and shopping hub. Over the years I have watched as the area has become emblematic of the new New Delhi, surrounded by flyovers, jammed with cars, and home to an array of Indian and multinational shops. Land prices have skyrocketed, and today the horseshoe-shaped market looks like a car dealership, its mass of metal gleaming under the sun. My grandmother's small pink bungalow on B-block, with its open courtyard, has long since been sold and its flowering tree replaced by an imposing multistory house built to the edge of the road. I still visit the market to eat gol gappas standing outside Bengali Sweets, admire the costly fabrics at Heritage, and visit Tekson's Bookshop, but I lament the passing of time and people more than the place itself.

This chapter unearths a cultural history of English, one whose origins I locate in the realm of colonial-era political discourse and in Delhi's Urdu, sublimely poetic past. In the post-independence era, it has become a truism to say, “English is an Indian language.” And yet its path to becoming one, especially in the literary realm, has been contested at every step along the way. I reflect on the “authenticity” of English by providing a genealogy of it from the political to the literary realm. I argue that it is precisely how English becomes indigenized and compromised in specific instances and discrete contexts that will come to characterize the language and its eventual role as mediator. On the one hand, the back story of any understanding of English as an Indian literary language necessarily involves its role as a language in the nationalist movement and, more specifically, as being integral to India's political modernity. English was accepted, by necessity, in the political realm because it allowed a pan-Indian movement, one that was at first merely critical of British rule and then eventually anti-British, to take shape. On the other hand, it is not that English came to represent a national consciousness in any holistic sense but rather that the language created a new set of compromises, both emotional and ideological.

A VERY SHORT STORY ABOUT ENGLISH BECOMING INDIAN

As Indians became increasingly critical of colonial rule in the last half of the nineteenth century, the British started to monitor Indian-language publications; in the aftermath of the 1857 Revolt in particular, they were naturally worried about seditious ideas that could reach the masses in their own languages.¹ Amrita Bazar Patrika, a Bengali newspaper launched in 1868, was one such publication; the periodical was known for its support and promotion of Indian nationalist causes. In 1878 the British colonial government in India passed the Vernacular Press Act, which allowed legal censorship of the Indian press. Amrita Bazar Patrika responded by switching to publishing in English overnight, effectively evading a law meant for “vernacular” languages.

English, of course, was not a vernacular language, and, in this case, publishing in English turned out to be a safe zone for Indians. The British were not willing to censor the English-language press, among which Amrita Bazar Patrika could now be counted, since doing so would go against their own notions of free speech. In line with their liberal values, freedom of the English-language press was paramount. Freedom of speech for Indians in their own languages—the bhashas—was not. That the editors of Amrita Bazar Patrika switched from publishing in Bengali to publishing in English suggested an attempt to alter the language-knowledge-power equation to their advantage.

For Partha Chatterjee, the story of the Vernacular Press Act reveals the true nature of British liberalism and what he calls “the rule of colonial difference.”² He argues that the universal claims of British liberalism were in fact undermined and curtailed by its own racism, since there was one rule for the British and another for Indians.³ In another way, we may also read this event as symbolic of the myriad ways in which the English language, by necessity, ingenuity, and compromise, has become Indian. There was a social and political cost to the Indian editors, who in a move to retain their right to publish, had to turn their Bengali newspaper into an English-language one. There was also a cost to the newspaper's Bengali readers, many of whom were not able to read English. Their “rights”—access to information and ideas in their own language—were surely diminished in the process. It is this kind of process that created a wedge between Indian English-speaking elites and Indians who did not have English, a wedge that would create its own set of problems for the subsequent nationalist movement. And yet if English was seen as the language of whites alone, this was beginning to change.

GANDHI'S PLEA

A year before Indian independence nationalist leaders were necessarily reckoning with what would stay and what would go. In a column that appeared in English on August 25, 1946, in the consciousness-raising journal Harijan, Mohandas K. Gandhi wrote, “I love the English tongue in its own place, but I am its inveterate opponent, if it usurps a place which does not belong to it.”⁴

In Gandhi's view, the English language had come with the English, had become rooted in elite Indian society, and had gone on to become a contributing factor to what divided elite Indian interests from the masses. Gandhi's diatribe against English was part of his larger critique of modernity, most cogently presented in Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) in 1909. In that book, written as a polemic, Gandhi emphasized that self-government (the rule of one's self by the self) was a precursor to home rule and that for Indians to rule themselves they would have to draw on Indian, not Western, civilization. This line of reasoning, of course, required a definition of what constituted Indian civilization. It did not matter to Gandhi that he himself had been educated in London, an experience that enabled his work as a civil rights lawyer in South Africa and his ultimate return to lead the anticolonial movement in India. Gandhi saw his critique of English in India as a critique of the class of people (in India and those abroad, such as the Indian expats in London whom he had met) who spoke English and claimed to represent the nation.

Despite the fact that English may have been one of the factors leading to the very creation of the first pan-Indian national organization, in the form of the Indian National Congress, established in 1885, Gandhi saw English as another example of what divided Indians and argued that it obstructed real freedom, or swaraj (self-rule). The seeming contradiction of what English allowed and prevented fit perfectly with Gandhi's larger critique of the nationalist movement—that it was elitist and out of touch with the masses. In Hind Swaraj, written originally in Gujarati as a dialogue between a newspaper editor and a reader (and then translated into English by Gandhi himself), he writes:

Reader: Do I then understand that you do not consider English education necessary for obtaining Home Rule?

Editor: My answer is yes and no. To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them. The foundation that Macaulay laid of education has enslaved us. I do not suggest that he had any such intention, but that has been the result. Is it not a sad commentary that we should have to speak of Home Rule in a foreign tongue? …

Is it not a most painful thing that, if I want to go to a court of justice, I must employ the English language as a medium; that, when I become a barrister, I may not speak my mother-tongue, and that someone else should have to translate to me from my own language? Is not this absolutely absurd? Is it not a sign of slavery? Am I to blame the English for it or myself? It is we, the English-knowing men, that have enslaved India. The curse of the nation will rest not upon the English but upon us.⁵

English was, however, not only a symbol of class division; rather it actively jeopardized the nationalist movement. Gandhi saw it as an impediment to the winning of independence and self-government. How could Indians come to know themselves in English? For him, it was not a question of English being a window on the world for some Indians but of there being an unbridgeable divide between poor and rich and between rural and urban, a divide along the lines of one's experience and way of life. To be sure, Gandhi did not want to imagine an independent India where English was still entrenched.

What did not fit in with Gandhi's polemic on things foreign and things Indian was that English in India did not exist in a vacuum; it was not something that had been casually set down and was now to be brushed aside. It had not merely usurped a “place,” but had created a place for itself. Gandhi, as much as the more comfortably Anglicized Jawaharlal Nehru, saw the great utility of English as a “link language” among Indian nationalists from across the incipient nation. But even if English had its place during colonial rule, that place would have to change after independence had been won. Gandhi's diatribes against English emphasized the symbolic, class-oriented meaning of English in India rather than its existence alongside other Indian languages. At the same time, his own strategic uses of English, Gujarati, and Hindi, depending on whom he was addressing or in which form and genre he was writing, were in some respects a precursor to how issues of language in post-independence India would unfold. And in this regard, it is also important to note that Gandhi's advocacy of Hindi as the national language was not for the Sanskritized Hindi associated with Hindus but for Hindustani, the common spoken language of north India that was a mix of Hindi and Urdu.

In this chapter, I consider how the meaning and “place” of English changes from being a strategic language to an Indian one and how this shift alters not only the language and its meanings and uses in India, but the urban landscape itself. This shift is not wholesale; instead, as I will show, English comes to take on a mediating role. In considering Delhi's linguistic history as showcased in two novels—Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi and Anita Desai's In Custody—I detail how the process of English becoming Indian is closely linked to its relationship to the other Indian languages. This relationship has to do with the social locations of language—of Urdu, Hindi, and English—and the conflicts that arise therein. Both novels happen to be classics, although that is not why I write about them. Rather, I was struck by the resonances—relating to language, genre, and narrative—between them as I thought about the corpus of writing in English by Indians as a whole. This resonance tells a story about the temporal and political disjuncture between the colonial and the postcolonial and relays a social and cultural narrative of acclimatization.

WHERE THE NOVEL TRUMPS POETRY

In the case of north India, the place of English is moderated by the shifting relationship between Hindi and Urdu. English becomes a way for Indians to reflect on their own society and to speak to different publics but also, most crucially perhaps, to assess the other Indian languages in its midst. The question of genre, of the novel versus poetry, and how the former trumps the latter, is also integral to these two tales; it is a mirror of the place of English vis-à-vis Urdu, whereby English plays the part of the novel, or prose, and Urdu of poetry, or verse. This mapping of genre onto language has, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has detailed, much to do with how prose, rather than poetry, has become associated with political modernity, with its attendant notions of the “real” and an “objectivist engagement with the world.” Poetry, meanwhile, comes to be seen as existing “outside of historical time.”⁶ This distinction plays out in my reading of Twilight in Delhi and In Custody both at the level of genre and of language, as we see the English-language prose novel take center stage.

The work of Ahmed Ali offers a literary understanding of what it meant for English to “usurp” another place, language, and cultural sensibility. His 1940 novel, Twilight in Delhi, brought us Mir Nihal, a Muslim patriarch steeped in the traditions and language of Urdu, living in Old Delhi at the peak of Britain's colonial enterprise in India, from 1911 to 1919. Forty-four years later, Anita Desai wrote another novel about the demise of Urdu; In Custody recounts the tale of a Hindi (and Hindu) lecturer from the provinces who comes to Old Delhi to find and interview one of the last great Urdu poets.

By reading the texts as a pair, one may see how Delhi is transformed by its own linguistic history from the colonial period to a postcolonial one and how the English language becomes central in the reformulation of people's identities as Indians and as Dilliwallahs (residents of Delhi). Read one after the other, the two novels create a surprising narrative of their own. This narrative is not a straightforward sociology or history of the city of Delhi but instead has to do with the kinds of artifice being created by each author. It is also a narrative whose resonance is felt precisely because of the gap in time between the writing of the two texts. English, it turns out, was not about the relationship between Indians and Britons but more about Indians' relationships with one another. Where Ali directs his English prose to English speakers outside India, Desai is speaking to a homegrown audience of Indian English readers, people essentially like herself. Further, both novels recount prose stories about Urdu poetry; in Ali's tale it is the poetic imagining of Old Delhi; in Desai, the tale of a degenerating Urdu poet living in Old Delhi. Both tales highlight a disjuncture in terms of language and of genre, whereby the form of the novel is summoned to explain, as it were, the poetic.

Franco Moretti intriguingly writes of the relation between verse and prose to suggest why prose prevailed “so thoroughly” in the historical formation of the novel. He writes that “a line of verse can to a certain extent stand alone, and so it encourages independent clauses; prose is continuous, it's more of a construction. I don't think it's an accident that the myth of ‘inspiration' is so seldom evoked for prose: inspiration is too instantaneous to make sense there, too much like a gift; and prose is not a gift; it's work.”⁷ The distinction between “work” and “gift” plays out especially, and to great comic effect, in In Custody, where the poet Nur sees his poetic utterances as gifts that can never be returned from a prosaic, Hindi world. Both novels tell tales of how poetry is romanticized, comically and tragically, and how it is ultimately squashed by a less forgiving, prose-dominant world. The lament for language is also a lament for genre.

Ali (1910-94) was part of an earlier generation of Indian English writers, those whose literary consciousness was formed during the colonial period. By writing a history of Delhi in literary form, Ali assumed the role of historian in the colonizer's language, and he achieved this within the temporal space and climate of the British Raj. His novel employs the English language to tell Britons of the emotional toll on their colonial subjects in a language they will not only understand, but uncannily recognize, as it describes a foreign city they themselves have come to dominate. Desai (b. 1937) is closer to the Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) generation of Indian writers. She came of age just after Indian independence but is usually not included in the post-Rushdie Indian fiction boom. In many ways the style and themes of Desai's fiction form a bridge from one generation of Indian English writers to the next, whereas Rushdie's marks a more decisive break.

Desai's In Custody is especially interesting for the way it almost seems to take up temporally where Ali's left off. The protagonist changes from an Urduwallah to a Hindiwallah; Delhi is still the capital but is no longer ruled by the British; most important, the population and character of Delhi have changed considerably after the partition of 1947. Yet, reading Ali's novel and then Desai's, it is also as if the same tale is being passed down and retold. Both novels recount the demise of Urdu literary culture in the city of Delhi, even if the manner in which they do so points to two different moments in what could be called the “localization” of English in India. Ali's is a mournful tale, heavy with despair and dilapidation; Desai fills her pages with sly humor and linguistic caricatures, balancing the personal failures and unfulfilled longings of her characters. In an attempt to locate Ali and Desai on the same map but then chart the distance between them, I will illustrate the shift from one kind of English to another, a movement that illuminates both the fact of Indian independence from the British and the complicated legacy of the social and linguistic upheavals of the partition of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, In Custody may be read as a satirical coda to Twilight in Delhi and an index of how English has gone from dominator to the mediator of other Indian languages in the postcolonial era.

TWILIGHT IN DELHI

Twilight in Delhi was originally written in English by a writer who usually wrote in Urdu, and critics have rightly pointed to the Urdu rhythm of Ali's English.⁸ Ali made an explicit decision to write the novel in English in order to reach a wider audience outside of India. He writes that he saw the broadcasting of the loss of Urdu culture as a “cause” that “deserved a world-wide audience” and feared that “if presented in Urdu, it would die down within a narrow belt rimmed by Northwest India.”⁹ In the historical frame of 1930s India, writing in English is quite literally strategic. Ali admits that he must disavow Urdu in order to highlight Urdu, a move that may appear to us today as a classic postcolonial maneuver. His novel writing begins with self-consciousness about the very language in which he chooses to write. And yet, while there is a certain utility in his decision to write in English, his use of the language also leaves a deep literary impression: it marks the very death of Urdu in Delhi that it laments. Ali writes in English in order to “write back to Empire,” but it is a lonely, isolated voice, far from Rushdie's triumphant literary arrival in 1980s Britain.

Twilight in Delhi chronicles the decline of Urdu culture in the face of colonial infringements on city space and lifestyles. The novel is an elegy to a Muslim cultural sensibility that by the early twentieth century is inextricably linked to the Urdu language but must now adapt to the new spaces of British-inspired rationality. In this adaptation, as Ali poignantly renders it, Dilliwallahs become subject to the built environment of colonial India.¹⁰

The novel is set in 1911, two years after the British shifted the colonial capital from Calcutta to Delhi. It should be emphasized that until the early twentieth century the core and political heart of Delhi had always been Old Delhi, the Old City, or Shahjahanabad, as it is still sometimes called. The British reorganization of Delhi, then, is seen as both an assault and containment of this core of the city and the culture within it, both of which over time will become increasingly peripheral.

At the start of the novel British authorities are implementing a number of changes to the urban landscape and infrastructure: the removal of native trees, the widening of streets into boulevards, new sewage systems. Changes in urban form are accompanied by the pomp and circumstance of the public coronation of George V and the grand architectural constructions of what will come to be called New Delhi. In the opening paragraphs of the novel, the narrator chronicles the broad sweeps of history that have come to roost in the city, in grandiose phrases such as, “It was the city of kings and monarchs, of poets and story tellers, courtiers and nobles. But no king lives there today, and the poets are feeling the lack of patronage; and the old inhabitants, though still alive, have lost their pride and grandeur under a foreign yoke.”¹¹The narrator emphasizes that these alterations to the city's landscape have changed not only the way people live but also the way they feel. The narrator dwells on what was, but even more powerfully, the tone of the novel is such that the reader continually feels as if something is still being taken away. Lament is not a leftover sentiment but something that seeps from the cracks in the soon to be demolished city walls.

These descriptions of early-twentieth-century Delhi are paralleled with flashbacks to the humiliations that Muslims experienced at the hands of the British in the 1857 Mutiny and the First War of Indian Independence. The narrator creates a continuum between these two historical moments to fashion his contemporary despair. But most significantly, Ali creates a narrative of Indian history in English to be “broadcast” beyond the borders of his Urdu-speaking world. The lament begins in 1857 and is literally cemented when the British create a new colonial capital that will be New Delhi. Old Delhi, meanwhile, is home to the historic Muslim quarters of the city, especially in the adjoining by-lanes of the Jama Masjid. This religious containment is mirrored in the Urdu language. Urdu represents a lifestyle through which a cultivated Muslim sensibility is lived. The loss of language as lived in the city is the loss of an entire world.

Ali contrasts the public events and changes to the city with the private world of his protagonist, Mir Nihal, an aging, pigeon-flying, china-collecting Muslim patriarch, “an aristocrat in his habits.”¹² As the colonial power intrudes in the city's alleyways and by-lanes, Mir Nihal's life and spirit are in a state of decline and degeneration. In one passage the narrator describes the alleyways of the old city as “tortuous and winding, growing narrower like the road of life” and terminating “at the house of Mir Nihal.”¹³ Mir Nihal's beloved city is literally closing in on him. He must accept that it is not only a new world that he is no longer part of, but as the narrator describes it, it is a “unity of experience and form” that no longer exists for him.¹⁴ This breakage in the unity of experience and form is paralleled in the form of the novel itself, as Ali renders an Urdu idiom of life in English. While others around him—even members of his own family—adapt and even embrace these changes, Mir Nihal suffers a cultural paralysis that is mirrored by a real paralytic stroke by the novel's end.

Priya Joshi has argued that what prompted Ahmed Ali to write Twilight in Delhi was that he had become (and his protagonist Mir Nihal by proxy) an “exile at home,” a foreigner in his own land.¹⁵ But it might be more accurate to characterize Mir Nihal as dislocated since his tragedy is precisely that there is no possibility of return and no new place to go to. His dislocation goes beyond the colonizing presence of the British; it is indicative of a sea of cultural changes that are occurring within his own family and in his own neighborhood. Further, this dislocation is a mirroring of the linguistic dislocation in the city itself. It comes at a time when the political distinctions and agendas of Hindus and Muslims under colonial rule have grown, and the shared north Indian language of Hindustani has split into a Sanskritized Hindi and Persianized Urdu.¹⁶ Even if Urdu becomes the language of Pakistan (as it does), the strongest Urdu-language communities in Delhi, Lucknow, and Hyderabad, will unravel but not be able to be reconstituted else-where.¹⁷ It is both the city and its language that make the cultural distinctiveness of Urdu life.

In narrative terms, the loss of Urdu culture and its replacement by a crass modernity introduced by the English and their language is most powerfully relayed as a classic generational struggle between father and son. Mir Nihal is increasingly alienated from his son, Asghar, and is resentful of his habits and ways, everything from the English boots his son wears—”You are again wearing those dirty English boots! I don't like them. I will have no aping of the Farangis in my house. Throw them away!”¹⁸—to his son's fervent desire for a love marriage. When, three quarters of the way into the novel, Asghar finally succeeds in marrying Bilqeece, with whom he has been obsessed from the start, the sad disconnect between the newly wed couple epitomizes the kind of emotional disjuncture with which Ali is preoccupied. The narrator explains:

Sometimes when they were alone, Ashgar would put his hand round her waist, but this annoyed Bilqeece. She did not say anything to Asghar, but she felt constrained, and would become silent.

‘Why are you so quiet?’ Asghar would ask her.

She would sit gazing in front of her and say:

‘I do not know what to say.’

He would have liked to hear her talk of love and happiness, her voice flowing like a sweet murmuring stream, talking of sad and beautiful things. He wanted her to kiss him and caress him, put her arms around his neck and whisper: ‘I love you, I love you…’

…

Now and then Bilqeece looked at him with beautiful, furtive eyes. At such moments Asghar loved her more than anything in the world, and smothered her with kisses. But she was not romantic at all. This damped Asghar's feelings. He thought of his Mushtari Bai and other sweethearts. He remembered the warmth of their passion and their loving ways. By contrast Bilqeece looked so dull and insipid. But she was young and beautiful; and Asghar had built most beautiful castles around her lovely frame.¹⁹

As English sensibilities trump Urdu ones, and in the novel's triumph over poetry, Ali seems to be saying, love will be domesticated. It is not a simple question of love becoming an exclusive part of so-called private space but rather that the male gaze turns inward to a love unconnected to the city itself. The imposition of new ways of thinking and being (or, importantly, in the case of Asghar, the yearning for and grasping of those new ways) begins a process of shifting social norms. Ashgar puts his modern desires and expectations onto his new, unsuspecting bride. For Ali, English is the language of his text, but it is also a sign of the intrusions of a Westernized, English sensibility. The mounting tragedy of the novel is that Mir Nihal continually refuses the possibility that he can find a place in this changed world. For him, there is no possibility of a dual cultural consciousness, a world of Urdu and English. But even the younger Asghar, in his grasping of English ways, is stymied in his modernistic impulses. He does not become at home in a new world but instead is completely lost (though not destroyed, like his father) by the end of the novel.

IN CUSTODY

At least three historical developments separate the writing of Twilight in Delhi and In Custody. After the partition of India and Pakistan, Urdu became the national language of Pakistan and hence acquired a nationalistic association for the first time in its own history. This association not only symbolically “consolidated” the newly formed Pakistani nation, with its own host of competing regional languages (Bengali, Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto), but also made official the perception of Urdu as being the language of Muslims. Meanwhile Indian cities like Delhi, Lucknow, and Hyderabad, once centers of Muslim culture and Urdu poetry, lost large sections of their Muslim populations who migrated to Pakistan or were killed in the violence of the partition itself. At the same time, Hindi, though the most widely spoken Indian language, was rejected as the Indian national language (mostly by southern India) despite its majority status. In what could be seen as a sad linguistic farce, Hindi and Urdu, once spoken as a lingua franca of north India in the form of Hindustani, were delinked to represent two nations with two national languages (Hindi and Urdu) that did not adequately represent the people in whose name they were created.²⁰

By this time, English had become a sign of bourgeois India and middle-class aspiration, symbolized not only by the urban conglomerate of government, higher education, and commerce but also by such popular publications as the Illustrated Weekly of India, scholarly publications by Indian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, and the burgeoning canon of Indian English literary texts themselves. That there is and will be cultural production in English became a given, and its contestation became part and parcel of local and regional struggles, with little or no reference to empire. These major sociological shifts created a new linguistic and political culture in the city of Delhi, and In Custody reflects some of those changes.

In Desai's novel, and as distinct from Ali's, English is no longer a sign of Westernization but instead mediates an internal Indian discourse. If Ali's lament of Urdu is focused on the imposition of English modernity, in Desai's satirical portrait, Urdu culture has already become a relic. We may detect farce even in the setup of Desai's novel, which tells the story of Deven, a glum, small-town Hindi lecturer whose real and perhaps sole passion is Urdu poetry. Part of the satiric power of In Custody is that it is a hapless Hindi lecturer who goes to interview and record the poetic utterances of one of the last great living Urdu poets, called Nur. Deven is slight and unsure of himself; the narrator tells us that Deven's early life experience had taught him how to get by: “to lie low and remain invisible.”²¹ The title of the novel refers to Deven's quest to have Nur's poems in his custody, for safekeeping and for the possible revival of the Urdu poetic tradition. As in Twilight in Delhi, the demise of one literary form (poetry) is being told through another (the novel). However, Desai's novel relies on a different spatial order to do so. Where Ali brings to life the public and private spaces of Old Delhi, Desai highlights the space between Old Delhi (seeped in culture) and the new hinterlands of Delhi (devoid of culture). Where Urdu culture was symbolized as being on the decline in Ali's Delhi, in Desai's Delhi it is a nearly dead literary presence. In this regard, her novel is also a post-partition view of the state of literary language in Old Delhi; but, unlike Ali's novel, it illuminates the space of Hindi as much as Urdu. So for instance, Murad, a buffoon-like character in the novel who has started up an Urdu literary journal says, “Someone has to keep alive the glorious tradition of Urdu literature. If we do not do it, at whatever cost, how will it survive in this era of—that vegetarian monster, Hindi?…That language of peasants…raised on radishes and potatoes.”²²

The notion of cultural refinement is central to both novels, but Desai's novel views Delhi from the provinces and structures the relationship between Hindi and Urdu accordingly. The spatial ordering of Hindi, Urdu, and English is not dependent on a distinction between public and private space, as it is in Twilight in Delhi. Instead, it is reflective of an urban-provincial divide. It is a moment in which English takes the place of Urdu as the language of urban sophistication. Mir Nihal views Delhi as the center of his world, and as the city changes, he becomes emotionally dislocated. For Deven, Delhi is the locus of his desires, which from beginning to end is always just beyond his reach. The space of the “countryside” is never the site of action but a space that Deven must traverse in order to travel to and from Delhi, as the narrator describes:

Of course the stretch of land between Mirpore and the capital was so short that there was no really rural scenery—most of the fields looked withered and desolate, and tin smokestacks exhaling enormous quantities of very black and foul-smelling smoke, sugar-cane crushing works, cement factories, brick kilns, motor repair workshops and the attendant teashops and bus-stops were strung along the highway on both sides, overtaking what might once have been a pleasant agricultural aspect and obliterating it with all the litter and paraphernalia and effluent of industry: concrete, zinc, smoke, pollutants, decay and destruction from which emerged, reportedly, progress and prosperity.²³

In this passage, the bucolic ideal is unmasked for the industrial wasteland it has become. And yet country and city are tied by this space, or perhaps tied up by it.

What is the “really rural scenery” that Deven expects and hopes for? Would that landscape redeem his position as a small-town Hindi lecturer? Would it perhaps make his spatial positioning more palatable if he were surrounded by something “really rural”? The narrator continues to probe Deven's spatial past:

As a student he had known the countryside only as a background for an occasional picnic with his friends: they had gone out into it on their bicycles, bought sugar cane from some surly farmer and sat in the shade of a ruined monument to chew it and sing songs from the latest cinema show and talk lewdly of cinema actresses. That countryside had had no more connection with the landscape celebrated in the poetry he read than the present one. Then, after he graduated and married and came to Mirpore to teach, it became for him the impassable desert that lay between him and the capital with its lost treasures of friendship, entertainment, attractions and opportunities. It turned into that strip of no-man's land that lies around a prison, threatening in its desolation.²⁴

In this passage, Deven has discovered the despoilment of the space that Hindi was meant to occupy in his ordering of the landscape. But this spatial setup is further betrayed, since Delhi itself only disappoints. It continually offers Deven the possibilities of poetic exaltation, of cultural renewal amid decay, but takes them away before he can grasp them. Do they exist at all, he wonders?

Where Ali's Mir Nihal was a cultured and romantic gentlemen quoting Urdu verse as part of his daily life, Desai's Nur has let his love for food and drink, the sycophantic antics of his admirers, and the bitter rivalries between his two wives overtake his poetic life. The satiric setup is played out as Deven, longing for Delhi, for its urbanity, and for an Urdu way of life, enters the world of Nur. Deven is longing for a different life, whereas Nur is biding his time until he is released from the one he is in. Deven, like Ashgar in Twilight in Delhi, is of a younger generation and yearns for modernity, even if, unlike Ashgar, he is looking for it in an older, now-lost tradition of Urdu poetry. In Desai's tale, tradition itself is longed for and refabricated with tape-recorded recitations in order to make sense of modern selfhood. But the recording itself shows up the futility of the longing. In one scene, Nur vehemently resists the management of his art by Deven:

Frantic to make him resume his monologue now that the tape was expensively whirling, Deven once forgot himself so far as to lean forward and murmur with the earnestness of an interviewer, ‘And, sir, were you writing any poetry at the time? Do you have any verse belonging to that period?'

The effect was disastrous. Nur, in the act of reaching out for a drink, froze. ‘Poetry?’ he shot at Deven, harshly. ‘Poetry of the period? Do you think a poet can be ground between stones, and bled, in order to produce poetry—for you? You think you can switch on that mincing machine, and I will instantly produce for you a length of raw, red minced meat that you can carry off to your professors to eat?'²⁵

In other scenes, Deven and Nur are able to strike up moments of understanding, but it is a story that will ultimately offer little redemption.

LAMENTING URDU IN ENGLISH

Reading Twilight in Delhi and In Custody in tandem, one is struck by their surface similarities: they are both set in Old Delhi and reflect the waning of Urdu literary culture within a male world of cultural pleasure. A sense of bleakness and loss pervades both narratives, as does a palpable forlornness in the principal characters. For both Ali and Desai, Old Delhi symbolizes the Urdu language as well as a declining Muslim sensibility and culture that came to life through Urdu. Urdu itself is a translated idea in Ali's text; we might sense the meaning of the language to his protagonists, but we never experience it for ourselves. Desai has explained that she wrote the verses that were to stand for Nur's Urdu poetry by “concocting poetry” that she then attributed to him. In the process, a new kind of literary question, and perhaps conundrum, arises: How does one write Urdu poetry in English? Desai's method was to “write verses in English that echoed their Persian origin,” verses that employed “traditional images and metaphors” and followed “Persian verse forms.” She goes on to say that despite their authentic ring to some ears, she saw them as “pastiche, not poetry.” And yet, when Nur's verses (her concoctions) had been translated into Urdu for the film In Custody, directed by Ismail Merchant, she writes: “Hearing the translated lines spoken, I felt myself translated into an Urdu poet—a surreal experience.”²⁶ A concocted language is returned to Urdu to complete the fabrication begun by Desai. Yet her research and writing also come from her own experiences of speaking and living in Hindustani in 1950s Daryaganj, part of Old Delhi. There is both remembrance and resonance in her text, even if it is sociologically—happily so—unsound. It is in this way that Desai's text, and perhaps all literature, “refracts” rather than reflects.²⁷ It is her imagination and vision that achieve “accuracy,” not merely the representation of a single social reality.

In other moments, Desai's narration is more removed from the language. For instance, she writes of “flowery Urdu,” “ornate Urdu,” and “chaste Urdu.” Here, Urdu is object and nothing more. But the meaning of Urdu in both texts—Desai's and Ali's—was perhaps never meant to be the language itself; how could it be in an English-language novel? Instead the idea of Urdu is the locus for drama, regret, discussion, and the delving into dense emotional webs of disappointment. In both novels, language and place are symmetrical, as both narratives continually inscribe the loss of language onto the physical structures and landscapes of the city and its environs. What is revealed is how the politics of language is an intimate affair in modern Indian life. So it is not surprising that the question of language—who speaks what, when, and where and how they feel about doing so—becomes the engine of both novels' narratives. For the principal characters of each tale, it is the very right to create and exist in different languages that is at stake.

In the temporal move from Ali's novel to Desai's, Urdu's decline is mirrored by the greater influence of a Sanskritized and so upper-caste Hindi, a Hindi that is slowly but surely purged of its Arabic and Persian vocabulary. And it is the shifting places of Hindi and Urdu that influence the changing place of English. These “political dismemberments of language”—to use Gayatri Spivak's phrase—have both social and literary consequences.²⁸ The political dismemberment of Hindi and Urdu—whereby vocabulary changes and becomes less representative of average people's everyday speech while also becoming symbols of national and religious difference—allows for English to emerge as a more neutral and secular language. And it is the very process by which English becomes an “Indian” language. The “Indianness” of English, then, is not merely attributable to its being able to represent a national consciousness but instead to its ability to mediate the sensibilities of other Indian languages. It offers something new, yet it is as partial and compromised as they are.

In Ali's text, the demise of Muslim Delhi is a direct consequence of British colonial rule and the way his community reacts to that rule, whereas in Desai's post-partition tale, cultural ruptures have been made more strident by the realities of shifting borders and population exchanges. It is not the case that Indian modernity is captured solely or most ably in English but instead that English takes on a mediating role. It is this principle that may be abstracted from the novel. It is precisely the interlingual dialogue in each text that sheds light on the ways in which language politics has been central to the articulation of Indian modernity. In contrast to Hindi-Urdu's dismemberment, Desai's English prose becomes further solidified, as it offers a seemingly neutral and yet also authoritative rendering of the cultural aftermath of the split of Hindi and Urdu and the trauma of the politicization of religious identity inherent in that split.

A CINEMATIC INTERLUDE

The demise of Urdu as a story line arises not only in literature but also in popular Hindi film. In Manmohan Desai's classic film, Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), the audience witnesses how Urdu can also play a mediating role in the Indian landscape. And yet in this case the language is reduced to being the vehicle of expression for a single religious community. The film's conceit is that the three brothers named in the title are separated in their childhoods and go on to be raised in families of different religious backgrounds only to meet again as adults. Amar is Hindu, Akbar is Muslim, and Anthony is Christian; they are played by three titans of Hindi cinema: Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor, and Amitabh Bachchan, respectively. A pivotal moment occurs near the film's climax when Akbar is being held hostage by the villainous Robert and tries to send out a call for help to his brothers, Amar and Anthony. Robert allows Akbar to send a note to his tailor shop for more materials, which are required to alter the wedding dress of one of the heroines (who is also being held hostage and is about to be forced to marry her former bodyguard turned thug). Instead of writing down a list of supplies, Akbar pens a plea for help to his brothers. In a voice-over, Akbar explains that he writes the note in Urdu so no one will be able to read it except for the Muslim tailor at his shop. A close-up of the note is then shown on camera as having been written in the Perso-Arabic script. In the next scene, the tailor reads the note and then verbally relays the message for help to Akbar's brothers; a rescue ensues, eventually leading to a happy ending uniting all the brothers of differing faiths with their common mother. The message: religious diversity may exist side by side in a single, unified mother India.

What is not reunited is the language of Hindi and Urdu, a matter that brings us to the question of script. Before Hindi and Urdu were distinct languages with Sanskritized and Persianized vocabularies, respectively, they were commonly written in the same script, the Perso-Arabic or Urdu script as it is called. Part of the “collapsing bridge” between Hindi and Urdu occurs when Hindi began to be written in the Devanagari script.²⁹ Harish Trivedi has called this switch to the “Nagari” script a “triumph” that “gave a tremendous boost to the morale of the users of Nagari and Hindi” and thereby “led rapidly to a reversal in the balance of power between Urdu and Hindi, resulting in a virtual rout of Urdu in the public domain of authorship and publishing.”³⁰

It is precisely this loss of literate comprehension of the Urdu script that we see in the film. The change in script signifies a larger linguistic and, in this case, religious divide, cementing the idea that only Muslims read and write in the Perso-Arabic script and Hindus in Devanagari. And yet, in the film at least, Urdu literally mediates in an improbable yet telling way. It supports the premise of the film, that religious cultures are “separate but equal,” the hallmark of the Indian secular ideal. Urdu as a sign of difference enters mainstream Hindi cinema—an industry that is ironically made up mostly of Hindustani speakers. Even more telling perhaps is that in today's Mumbai cinema, the often ridiculed “filmy Hindi” screenplays and television scripts are written in Roman script, since many actors do not read Hindi anymore, whether in the Perso-Arabic or Nagari script.

A SHIFTING LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE

To return to the realm of the Indian English novel, what does it mean for Ali and then Desai to recount the demise of another language? And to do so, not as triumphalist accounts, but as mournful tales? By writing about Urdu in English in this satirical mode, Desai emphasizes her own complicity in Urdu's demise. Her satire is far from the world of Hindi comedy, yet creates its own measure of ironic distance. For lament has turned to satire on the very question of language itself, as Hindi is ridiculed and the desire for Urdu is doomed from the start. English meanwhile has become a normative narrative presence. It embodies a self-consciousness that becomes part of its very definition as an Indian language. In this sense, the novel tells the story of the relationship between English and the bhashas. English enables Indians to look out onto the world (the most common refrain of Indian cosmopolitanism), but in Desai's reckoning, it perhaps even more significantly allows them to reappraise their own linguistic backgrounds and struggles.

Thus, English in India is shaped by internal struggles over language as much as it has been by the colonizer-colonized relationship. This shaping of English goes beyond the interpretation of each text on its own. By reading the texts as a pair, it is possible to see the ways in which English has sparked the social and literary consciousness of modern Indians, of the work that English does on that consciousness, and the effect that English has on lives and livelihoods. Indians who write in English do so not merely because they have been educated in that language. The language has become part of the social fabric, and that fabric includes intersections with and relationships to other Indian languages. Both novels show that to live in a particular language is to inhabit a different cultural world, and what it means for English to “usurp” a place (to return to Gandhi) is really a story of how individual subjectivities change with the adoption of new linguistic sensibilities. In Delhi, and many other parts of north India, English changed the way Urdu and Hindi exist socially and politically. People sometimes speak of “Englishwallahs” and “Hindiwallahs” not to denote which language someone speaks—most people are at least bilingual—but instead to denote the relationship they have to that language, their world-view, the family they come from, the type of education they have had, the beliefs they hold and promote.

In the novels of Ali and Desai, the shifting linguistic landscape changes what people think, believe, and desire. It is this larger social and historical texture of English in Indian society and the meanings of the uses of English for Indians in everyday life that then becomes paramount.