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CHAPTER 1

Reading Delhi and Beyond

THE PAVEMENT BOOKSELLER

I ask a pavement bookseller what he has for sale, and he replies, “Only best-sellers.” I have little interest in best-sellers, but that is about to change. “What makes a book a best-seller?” I ask matter-of-factly. He points to Difficult Daughters, the first novel by the Delhi based writer Manju Kapur. To me this novel is serious literary fiction, and I am happy to hear that it is also selling well. A paperback copy of the book is lying face up on the ground with other novels, magazines, travel guides, and histories about India. Whether for tourists or locals, in Delhi the roadside compulsion to define India is strong.

We are in Kamla Nagar market in north Delhi, near Delhi University. The bookshops here on Bungalow Road mostly sell English language textbooks. Students appear with lists and leave with books, the ones they have to have, the ones they can't get online. One shop in the row sells spiritual texts and guides; it has the most floor space and the fewest customers. The pavements are reserved for best-sellers. Some are re-bound photocopies selling for half the price of the published versions. The print is faded, but you can still read it.

The pavement bookseller explains to me in Hindi that when Amitabh Bachchan asked who the author of Difficult Daughters was, as a trivia question on Kaun Banega Crorepati? (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), the novel started to sell.¹ What became a best-seller certainly also had to do with the perennial best-seller status of the Bachchan brand. If the “Big B” was mentioning the novel and asking who its author was, surely it was worth knowing who she was and perhaps even buying what she had written.

A few years later when I told Kapur about my encounter, she smiled incredulously and said, “Really?” At that time the paperback version of her fourth novel, Home (2006), was just coming out, and she was a bit dismayed by the cover. It was being published by Random House India, one of the new MNCs (multinational corporations) on the block that had launched its Indian venture with Kapur's novel. The hardcover features a curtained window on the facade of a house with a telephone wire crossing the foreground, all overlaid in mustard hues. I told Kapur how I thought the image perfectly captured the essence of the novel, since the reader gets to pull aside that curtain and witness the intimate lives of a joint family in an everyday Delhi milieu, the old neighborhood of Karol Bagh. She smiled and nodded and said, “But Rashmi, you're an academic so you see that.”

Now it was my turn to be dismayed. I said, “But I'm a reader first! It appealed to me naturally!”

She then sighed and explained that she wanted her novel to be seen as serious literature but that her editor thought the book could be both serious and more popular, that is, reach a wider audience. The paperback version had a shinier look: its cover featured a blurred figure of a woman in a colorful sari with a large bunch of keys tied to her waist, as is the custom of the female head of household in the kind of joint family being depicted in the novel; another woman looms in the background, suggesting intrigue and potential conflict. Kapur was happy to have more readers, but she was also hoping the new cover would not diminish the seriousness of the work.

We returned to Amitabh Bachchan, and Kapur told me she had been at home watching the show with her family the night the question was asked. She seemed amused by it, even if reluctant to associate her works with a distinctly nonliterary media hype.

Star TV's Kaun Banega Crorepati? was the most popular Hindi television show at the time and became the vehicle by which Amitabh Bachchan reclaimed his number one superstar status. That the show was in Hindi but also offered up elements of Indian-English culture was no surprise, as the worlds of Hindi and English constantly overlap. Moreover, print and electronic media worlds, especially in the nation's “metros,” or urban centers, have become increasingly multilingual; Hindi newspapers feature advertisements in Hindi and English;Hindi radio, especially stations geared to younger audiences, is peppered with English phrases and words; and popular Hindi romantic comedies feature titles such as Jab We Met (When We Met) and Love Aaj Kal (Love These Days), with Hindi dialogue spliced with English to match.

However, this “mixing” (Hinglish, as it is sometimes called) is evidence not merely of greater linguistic facility among India's cultural consumers; many, in fact, argue that the quality of spoken English in India is becoming worse, not better, as the number of people who know English increases. On the one hand, the urban middle classes have come to define their own identities partly through their association with the English language; English has become more integral to middle-lass identity in the past few decades and has led to the rise of a sizable middle-class readership for English language publications. On the other hand, the desire for the language is greatly expanding as more people further down the class and caste hierarchies see the possibility of adding it, in some form, to their social profiles. What has changed for everyone is that the things people feel they should or have to know—cultural information, trends, and trivia—are crossing the linguistic divide like never before.

On another pavement, in south Delhi, the drama heightens as younger “booksellers” step down onto the asphalt, selling their wares to the calibrated interludes of stop-and-go traffic. They sell paperbacks and glossy magazines, as well as balloons, roses, tissue boxes, and kitchen towels. The scene is replayed throughout the day and into the evening at any major “cutting,” or intersection. An insistent boy carrying a stack of books will try to sell you a copy of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss as you sit in an auto rickshaw or car (as opposed to if you're riding a bicycle or on the bus).² He will also have Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian on offer, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies, and perhaps Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan.3 These are some of the emblems of Indian-English culture, sold alongside international best-sellers by authors such as John Grisham, Paulo Coelho, and Dan Brown.

The boy, it turns out, gives most of his money to his parents, and with the encouragement of a local nongovernmental organization is learning the Hindi alphabet on some afternoons under the flyover. It is sometimes hard to know what the “serious” literature is in this scenario: the boy's life circumstance or the book in his hand?

In Delhi, as elsewhere, the two continually go together, but here what separates the boy from the book and the motorized world of Indian-English cultural production and consumption it represents is not merely the money to buy the book, but a private English medium education that makes his chances of gaining fluency in English and entrance to the jobs and access to the cultural emblems of that world practically nonexistent. The legendary social divides in Indian society—of caste, class, gender, religion, and, perhaps most significant, urban versus rural belonging—work in tandem with linguistic divides. To speak of urban elites is to refer to the class of people (the rich, the upper middle class, and many sectors of the middle classes, who also tend to be upper caste) who are educated from primary school onward with English as their medium of instruction. The rest of India, about 80 percent of Indians have, until recently, tended to be educated in government schools that may teach English as a subj ect but whose medium of instruction is in one of the thirteen other official state languages. The boy may well be represented in the books that he sells, but he probably won't ever read them.⁴

It is this disjuncture—between the language on the ground, of daily life, and literary representation—that is most relevant to the place and role of Indian fiction in English. And it is in fact what raises the stakes of literary debate in the Indian context. English is part of the social scene, but the bulk of conversations and sentiments of fictional characters would in reality take place not in English but in one or more of the other Indian languages. More important, this disjuncture is indicative of a larger schism in Indian society that has to do not only with language as it is spoken but with the disparate thought worlds and hierarchies of language that saturate everyday life. The linguistic divide is sometimes quite stark, especially where poverty and the lack of access to education mark its parameters. However, in many respects the divide is even more insidious for those who “know” English but have not had the opportunity to master it.

This divide came into relief in the tragic real life story of Brajesh Kumar, a Hindi educated twenty-two-year-old who came to Noida (a middle-class extension of Delhi's urban sprawl) and entered the world of English higher education to study engineering at a technical college. Kumar was from Jaunpur, a small city in Uttar Pradesh (the largest state in India and part of the Hindi heartland), and though he studied English as one of his subjects until the tenth standard, his medium of instruction was Hindi. In his suicide note he wrote that he had felt undue pressure from his English language courses and did not want to burden his parents with the costs of English coaching to help him prepare better. This disturbing story, covered in the Hindi and English print media, highlights the long standing divide between students who come from English medium backgrounds and those who come from “vernacular” ones.⁵

Several months after Kumar's suicide, the weekly news magazine Outlook ran a cover story calling this aspect of the linguistic gap the “English speaking curse.”⁶ The story describes the mad rush among the middle and lower classes to get some kind of English any way they can, amid a sea of unqualified teachers at the primary and secondary levels, where funding for English language instruction is extremely limited. Four months earlier, in the same magazine, the same reporter had written another story, “Jab They Met,” about how English words and ideas were increasingly being featured in small Hindi magazines and newspapers published in the heart of the “Hindi belt,” the state of Uttar Pradesh, in cities such as Lucknow, Kanpur, Meerut, Agra, and Varanasi.⁷ It spoke of how young people wanted to “get into the mode” of English. The aim of editors in such a mixing of the languages was to reach “aspirational readers”—defined as people aged eighteen to thirty-five who wanted to live their lives partly in English and be part of the consumer revolution—and to use the English language “especially for descriptions of modular kitchens, cutlery, electronic gadgetry, career options and college festivals.”⁸

Of course, there is nothing contradictory about English being both the language of aspiration and a curse for those not in a position to master it. The issue is not merely one of who speaks English and who does not, but is more substantially about a cultural divide based on the kinds of English that people learn, speak, and write, depending on their access to different levels and kinds of education. As one writer explained it to me, “One was learning English, talking English, but a large part of our consciousness was something else. There was a strange contradiction, which always had to be negotiated.”⁹ In these milieus knowing English is not a question of language fluency alone but says much about one's exposure to different worlds and values. This familiarity with and exposure to English-resides alongside the mother tongues, hence English is at the heart of many social changes, yet exists within the reality and idea of the Hindi heartland. More and more Indians know and aspire to learn English, but the language marks a social, economic, and at times cultural divide that most are unable to cross.

THE PLACE OF ENGLISH

This book is an account of postcolonial literary production, centering on the relationship between language politics—what languages mean and represent—and the literary field. Its premise is that English has taken on a more contentious and more varied role in Indian society than it did during the period of British colonial rule, which formally ended in 1947. After independence, I argue, colonial binaries withered away, as English became a mediator between other Indian languages. English often takes on the role of mediator because of its seeming neutrality, a position that has a logic and new politics of its own. Politically, English becomes less polarizing even as it remains a clear marker—a dividing line really—of certain kinds of elite privilege. Knowing English fluently provides innumerable social and economic advantages, but—and this is key—it always exists alongside Hindi or other Indian languages. I contend that it is the qualities that different languages impart, at times manifesting themselves as veritable ideologies relating to caste, class, gender, and other social and political identities, that become important in a multilingual context, qualities that highlight or detract from various aspects of the identity of an individual, an institution, a community, or even a state.¹⁰ Even for those who do not know English—the vast majority—it is a symbol of what is attainable by Indians in India, and this belief or aspiration is not confined to urban consumers or to the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. It is for this reason that an inquiry into the English language in India can never only be a story of numbers or of discernible public spheres. Most crucially, since English in Indian society is no longer a language of colonization, it must be viewed in the context of other Indian languages in order to grasp the profound effects of linguistic identity on modern Indian life. It is not enough to say that English is a language of privilege, which it is, among other things. English is also a language of globalization, but this fact alone does not tell us very much without delving into the specificities of place, history, and present circumstance. To this end, the process of reading Delhi and beyond highlights the place of English in the multilingual literary consciousness, the work it does as mediator in India's linguistic landscape, and its complex and hierarchical social positioning vis à vis other Indian languages, especially Hindi. What I find remarkable is not that Indians write, publish, and critique in the language of the former colonizer but that they do so in an English that has been infused with the social and political consequences of its own indigenization.

It is in this respect that literature, and specifically what might be called an anthropology of literature—one that outlines the literary field, delves into its production, and analyzes its individuals and institutions ethnographically—can allow us to understand the complexity of English and its relationship to other Indian languages and sensibilities in India today. In regard to “anthropology of literature,” Arjun Appadurai likens the role of fiction to myth, and hence as being part of “the conceptual repertoire of contemporary societies.” He goes on to link fictional content with social mores when he writes, “Readers of novels and poems can be moved to intense action (as with The Satanic Verses of Salman Rushdie) and their authors often contribute to the construction of social and moral maps for their readers.”¹¹ I would take this assertion much further to say that the world of literary production shows not only how authors, readers, and texts but also how the entire nexus of literary producers and discourse create a social and moral framework that at once reflects and interrogates cultural norms. In this regard, I draw on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the literary field; however, I build on it to include the social and political dynamics central to a field composed of multilingual literary production.¹² The multilingual is not a mere feature of the literary landscape, but rather it redefines and makes more complex the very notion of a literary field. My approach, therefore, dwells on the connections between place, language, and textual production in order to show what language comes to stand for in people's lives and in society more generally.¹³

By “literary production,” I do not mean the actual putting together of paper and print, but I do mean the producers of literature, be they writers, editors, translators, or publishers. I also mean booksellers, readers, critics, and others who create meaning in and around texts once they are in the public domain. To write about these figures, connected directly and indirectly to the production of literary texts and the social life of those texts, is to do more than contextualize or even historicize the literary text at hand. By combining textual and ethnographic analysis, this book critically evaluates the problem and promise of the chasm between social reality and literary representation. It mines the paradoxes within this chasm. Thus, literary production is not only about the creation of literary texts but also about the production of social identities and the differences between them. It is in this sense that the anthropology of literature, in the way I have developed it, offers a new analytical frame.

In my approach, literature and novels in particular are significant both as works of the imagination and as cultural emblems that travel across regional and national borders carrying an array of meanings and significations.¹⁴ These meanings and significations reveal the moral uses and dimensions of language. Thus, my engagement with English in India is also an engagement with English in the world, that is to say, how English mediates a set of social and linguistic hierarchies not only in India but also globally. This project is, in many respects, a response to the phenomenon of Indian fiction in English that has swept the English-reading public and its marketplace around the globe since the 1980s. This phenomenon has been mostly celebrated outside India; within India the response has been more ambivalent and varied, largely because of the homegrown politics of language that frame this international attention. The broadest aim of this book is to understand how this debate looks from the Indian side and to delve into the social factors and historical circumstances that have shaped it.

Literary fiction is a modern artistic and cultural form, replete with social values and symbolic meanings. I contend that these values and meanings created in turn generate their own social reality and that this reality has become central to debates about what is deemed culturally and linguistically authentic. I present different aspects of the authenticity question in the chapters that follow, showing it to be an elastic, ever changing set of principles, one that drives debate and action forward in unlikely ways. A principal aim of this book is to show how the idea of cultural authenticity is a political variable—rather than a cultural truth—that comes into play depending on particular social and literary circumstances. These circumstances most often hinge on issues of caste, class, and gender—that is to say, markers of identity formation that have been central to the shifting, unstable articulation of modern Indian selves. English, and the way it is positioned among the other Indian languages, does not represent a fixed pole but rather serves to change political and literary alliances among classes and castes, often in surprising ways.

WRITING IN ENGLISH

Many Indian novelists who write in English about Indian social realities have written or spoken about how in one way or another they cross the linguistic divides of society by literally translating conversations in their heads as they write dialogue. This is not to say that they regret writing in English or believe they are less Indian or lesser writers for doing so. Yet the seeds of cultural debate—essentially about the relationship between literature and society—are planted here. It is not, however, that authors writing in other Indian languages represent monolingual worlds in their novels either. Where there is Hindi, for instance, and its numerous dialects, there might be Punjabi and Bengali too. Yet the literary divide among these languages—social, cultural, and linguistic—would certainly be smaller. There are more similarities between Bengali and Hindi or Hindi and Punjabi than there are between English and any of these languages. North Indian languages share Sanskrit and Persian based vocabularies, a fact that distinguishes them as a whole from English. And even though the north Indian languages are also “modern” languages in that their grammatical and lexical standardizations were formalized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they have been existing in dialect form alongside one another for much longer; there is a shared social history among and between these languages to which English is a latecomer. English exists in a distinct temporal reality in the Indian context, as well as a distinct spatial reality, as it belongs neither to any particular region nor to any “indigenous” Indian cultural tradition. As in much of the world, literary culture—a record of society's practices, histories, and ways of being—has been part and parcel of defining particular nations and the cultures therein. For English, which has long symbolized modernity, its shifting lines of exclusivity create a situation whereby it commands popular recognition as a sign and symbol while largely being an instrument of the elite.

The Indian-English writer Shashi Deshpande, who comes from a Kannada-speaking background and has lived in various multilingual settings in India, puts it this way: “The truth is, that while a great number of people do speak English, it is yet a language that many of the characters we write of will not only not be speaking, it is one they will not be able to speak.”¹⁵

Deshpande's comment captures a central paradox of writing about India in English: the question of the linguistic authenticity of fictional characters themselves. All writing and art for that matter is a representation of reality, even when the language of the text matches the language of the street. English is certainly part of India's social reality; it has filtered in to the most common and basic level of everyday communication, often in the form of phrases, slogans, idiomatic expressions, and advertisements. Yet English is not a sustained presence in most people's lives, and even those for whom it is are surrounded by non-English worlds. As a result, English can at times seem like it is everywhere and nowhere.¹⁶

Deshpande, who has grappled with incessant querying by others as to not just why she works in English, but how she can, writes: “The point is, that, not only was English not born in this soil, it has not grown through the daily use of all classes of people or developed layers like a pearl through years of its association with a particular people.”¹⁷

However, this is only the beginning of the story. Despite Deshpande's assessment of linguistic authenticity, or perhaps because of it, she eloquently defends her use of English in the making of her literary prose and resents being marginalized for it, as she and others often are by the regional literary establishments. In an essay in which she both defines and rejects the notion of being a marginal writer, she writes of the circumscribed quality of her English, of its place in her life but also in the lives of her readers: “I began writing in English, not because I ‘chose' to, but because it was the only language I could express myself in, the only language I really read. Yet, I had two other languages at home, languages I spoke and lived my daily life in. Living in a small town in a middle-class family, life was, in fact, lived mainly in Kannada; English came into the picture only for certain purposes and at certain times.…My readers were people who read English, but lived their personal and emotional lives, like I did, in their own languages.”¹⁸

Although she writes in English, Deshpande draws on different linguistic realities to create her literary world. She is also informed by the thought worlds of those languages and that knowledge, and those realities become part of her literary fiction. What is also significant for Deshpande is that her audience is chiefly based in India. Hers is not a Western based readership but one composed of fellow Indians who have a relationship to the English language similar to hers. Some would say she is less successful because she is not known abroad, while others claim she has a more organic and grounded relationship to things Indian, even though she writes in English.

It is often these gradations of alleged insider- and outsider-ness that animate Indian cultural debates. An Indian author may write in English, but then, what is her perceived proximity to other languages, and by implication, to other social worlds and ways of thinking? Whether a writer has a “foreign” audience often becomes yet another part of the debate over a text's—and often an author's—cultural authenticity. If one has a non-Indian audience, there is sometimes an assumption that one must be writing “further away” from Indian social worlds and concerns. When is one an “Indian” writer, and when does one become an NRI (nonresident Indian) or “foreigner”? The latter term, in popular parlance, connotes someone whose interests, and not only geographic location, may no longer “favor” India.

It should come as no surprise in a world of grossly uneven development that there is a moral dimension and sensitivity to how “India” is portrayed.¹⁹ It is in these circumstances where the English language is at once seen as the language of the world literary stage and as a language that has over time come to represent complex, multilingual social worlds. It is no longer a question whether English is an Indian language; what is at issue is the moral dimension of its use and position.

THE REALITY OF FICTION

In fall 2008 I attended a book club meeting at the Habitat Centre in Delhi. Built by an array of corporations, the Habitat Centre is a major cultural venue for the city's elite. It is a vast, airy space near the India Islamic Cultural Centre, the Ford Foundation, UNICEF, the India International Centre, and other venues linking Indian cultural worlds to those abroad. Auto rickshaw—the ubiquitous three wheel “scooter”—drivers tend to know it only as “vah badi lal imarat Lodhi Road par” (that big red building on Lodhi Road). That night at the book club meeting, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger was being discussed. The novel had won the Man Booker Prize the previous month, and Adiga had publicly dedicated his prize “to the people of New Delhi.”²⁰

The novel was heralded by some critics and derided by others for its recounting of the stark social divides between rich and poor and one poor man's growing resentment of his place in this schema. Adiga is a Chennai born Indian who was brought up partly in Australia and educated at Oxford and Columbia, details that inevitably became part of his “cultural cache” or, depending on his reviewer, evidence of his “foreignness.”

That evening at the book club meeting, about twenty-five people, ranging in age from mid-thirties to mid-seventies, gathered to discuss the novel. After introductions over tea and biscuits in the foyer, we moved to a small auditorium and sat in clusters in the front center section. The two leaders of the group, an older man with short white hair and a woman in her late forties, sat up front facing the small group. They began by reading from Amitava Kumar's review of the novel that had appeared earlier that week in the English daily The Hindu. Kumar criticizes the novel for grossly misrepresenting the realities of everyday life and speech—not because it was written in English but because Adi ga's style distances the first person narrator from the harsh realities of what he sees and describes. Kumar essentially argues that the real people behind Adiga's novel—the underclass that he is heralded for having represented—are in fact disrespected. The book club leaders raised some general questions for the group to consider: To what extent was Adiga's perspective that of an insider or outsider? Was his vision of the “underbelly” of Delhi life authentic or inauthentic? Was Adiga's novel, as Kumar had stated in his review, merely a “cynical anthropology”?²¹

About a third of the group had read the novel, and others said they were planning to, but everyone seemed to have an opinion. The hosts then alternated reading from parts of the beginning of the novel to give the flavor of the text. Written as a series of long letters from the protagonist, Balram Halwai, to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, they explained, the novel begins:

Mr Premier,

Sir.

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.

My ex-employer the late Mr. Ashok's ex-wife, Pinky Madam, taught me one of these things; and at 11:32 P.M. today, which was about ten minutes ago, when the lady on All India Radio announced, ‘Premier Jiabao is coming to Bangalore next week', I said that thing at once.

In fact, each time when great men like you visit our country I say it. Not that I have anything against great men. In my way, sir, I consider myself one of your kind. But whenever I see our prime minister and his distinguished sidekicks drive to the airport in black cars and get out and do namastes before you in front of a TV camera and tell you about how moral and saintly India is, I have to say that thing in English.

They continued for a few pages and then came to another section:

I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and water buffaloes wading through the ponds and chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those who live in this place call it the Darkness. Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well off. But the river brings darkness to India—the black river.²²

For some, Adiga's style and portrait of Indian social realities was a timely unveiling of the real social divides in India, a counter to the “India Shining” slogan of the past decade that has trumpeted the roaring GDP and the rising disposable incomes of well employed urbanites. Others saw the book as a crass diatribe based on Adiga's widely reported journalistic forays into “village India” when he was a reporter for Time magazine. Some said that his use of English did not convey the pain of the oppressed but mocked them by making them sound like American teenagers. Were his perceptions in fact “researched” and based on “truth,” or were they a “foreigner's” view of what one expected “India” to look like?

In what is essentially an amoral morality tale, the servant-driver Balram eventually kills his rich employer, absconds with a bag of cash, and starts anew as an entrepreneur in Bangalore. He is never caught, nor does he feel remorse, he tells us, even with the knowledge that his extended family in his village would have surely been killed as punishment for his own deed.

The crux of the book club debate that evening—for it turned into a debate—was whether the novel revealed something true about the perpetual state of unease between the haves and have-nots in Delhi or whether it was merely sensationalistic. And if it was sensationalistic, as three quarters of the people in attendance seemed to think, why did it win the Booker?

The younger host asked, “Did the Western mind enjoy the sensationalism of an emerging nation? This award was given by a Western agency after all.”

The white haired man posed another leading question when he suggested we compare The White Tiger to other Booker Prize winning novels the club had read, such as J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Yann Martel's The Life of Pi. “What is the literary merit of this book?” He asked. He went on to compare Adiga's novel to another Indian novel that had been short-listed the same year, Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. “Ghosh is a researched writer,” he announced, as if that somehow answered his earlier question. Several people raised their hands, and a lively discussion ensued. One woman started to explain that ever since moving to Delhi she had felt under threat and spoke of how her home had been burgled twice, coinciding with the marriage of each of her daughters. “This book struck a chord with me; this is how it is here,” she said. This statement launched the group into a discussion of the glorification of violence in the novel and whether it merely feeds on “middle-class fears.” Some argued, “Adiga knows his craft”; “It's readable”; “It has a good style.” Others countered with “It is journalistic, not literary”; “There are no real characters”; “It's about marketing”; “He has the formula right”; “It's all about the hype; the timing of the book was perfect.” And then, a chorus of voices: “Sea of Poppies should have won!”

THE POLITICS OF LITERARY GEOGRAPHY

In India, as elsewhere in the world, the social distinction of English has alienated non-English speakers to such an extent that people speak not of “knowing” English but of “having” it.²³ The social reality of linguistic haves and have nots stands in stark contrast to the realm of elite cultural production, where Indian fiction in English has brought writers such international acclaim and prestige that many assume—much to the chagrin of writers in the other Indian languages—that Indian literature only comes in English.²⁴ In this realm of literary production English is often put in contrast to and is often at odds with “the languages” or “bhasha,” the appellations commonly used to distinguish English from the other Indian languages. Bhasha literally means “speech” and is the Hindi word for “language.” Yet the word has now also become part of the English language as spoken among Indians. For instance, sometimes people refer to the “bhashas,” pluralizing the word as if it were an English one, or they use the word as an adjective, meaning Indian language other than English, as opposed to “regional” or “vernacular.”²⁵

If “the bhashas” or “the languages” has a clubby ring to it, it is not because English is not seen as an Indian language in these circles but that English carries a different symbolic meaning in the Indian context. These are the issues—the competing values, ideologies, and identities associated with language—that I explore in the context of literary production today.

English is spoken fluently by close to 5 percent of Indians and is “known” by as much as 10 percent of the population (i.e., about 50 million to 100 million people of a population of just over one billion).²⁶ As the journalist and former Times of India editor Dileep Padgaonkar said to me, “The percentages of English speakers are small, but the numbers are large.” Its numerical strength puts English on par with many of the regionally based languages or bhashas. Its place in the global order of things and the fact that it is entwined with modern, urban culture give English great prestige in the Indian context, while its lack of regional specificity within India often marks it as being culturally inauthentic. Just as there is a global geography that privileges English and its Anglo-American sponsors, there is a linguistic geography within India that recognizes twenty-two official, or “scheduled,” languages, as listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It is this geography that at once confirms and marginalizes the place of each language in its regional context. Sisir Kumar Das links the competition among languages in each region to “the rise of the middle class within each language community” and to its members having “legitimate aspirations to share political and social power.” The result is what he calls “language tension,” which becomes “more acute” in such situations. He gives the examples of the sociocultural power of standardized Hindi over the Hindi “dialects,” of Urdu over Kashmiri, Bengali over Oriya and Assamese, Tamil over Telugu, and Marathi over Konkani.²⁷

MAP 1. Some of the languages of the subcontinent.

English might be irrelevant to some of these interregional linguistic tensions, but it often factors in, either by assuming a more neutral position or by exacerbating class or caste tensions. And it is this linguistic geography that has inadvertently impinged on many regional and national literary and cultural debates. It may be true, as Pascale Casanova has written, that language is the major component of literary capital, but it is perhaps most vital to understand how the nature of that capital changes in different geographic contexts.²⁸

In 1949 the Constitution of India included a proviso whereby Hindi was to be “phased in” as the language of national integration, in order to mark a national “resurgence” in the service of the “ordinary citizen.” English, after all, had been the language of the erstwhile British colonizers. Meanwhile, Hindi was the most widely spoken language in India, even if its speakers were concentrated in the North. During the proposed fifteen-year transition period, English would retain its bureaucratic and political functions, while there would be “the progressive use of the Hindi language for the official purposes of the Union.” The Report of the Official Language Commission, 1956, documents the copious debate and analysis regarding the uses of English in India and imagines its role in the future. It is not that the members of the commission did not see the value of English, especially in the realms of science and technology, and the way in which India had benefited and would continue to do so by using the language. In fact, there were as many proponents of keeping English as the official language of the union as there were those who wanted to switch to Hindi.²⁹ The report itself was in English not only because it was an official government document, but because it was the only language that could link the committee members who came from all corners of the country, north, east, west, and south.

Hindi became a cause and a symbol of national unity, but the language debates pointed to a larger malaise: the Indian languages in general had languished under colonial rule. As one committee member put it, the Indian languages “failed to develop a sufficiently rich and precise vocabulary for the requirements of modern social life, during this period when the progress of scientific knowledge wrought a great revolution in the physical conditions of living in the country.”³⁰ It was perhaps this conflation, of English being not fully Indian and seeing the Indian languages as having suffered under British colonialism, that opened committee members to the idea that Hindi could stand for all things linguistically Indian at the national level, that there could be some postcolonial linguistic redemption after all.

The broader aim after independence, in large part, was in developing not only Hindi but also the thirteen other major languages “so as to make them adequate vehicles of thought and expression” (a somewhat paternalistic attitude to the bhashas that goes back to Macaulay) leading to “the eventual displacement of the English language.” At the same time, for reasons of administrative practicality, the official bureaucracy at the national level could only occur in one language. Where English had previously forged a pan-Indian consciousness, credited with enabling a countrywide nationalist leadership to orchestrate the ousting of the British, Hindi would now take over and spread. There would be a “changeover” to Hindi, especially in the fields of “education, administration, and law courts, so as to bring them in a live and continuous communion with the common people of the country.”³¹ In deference to the other Indian languages, Hindi would not be referred to as the “national language” but the “official language of the Union.”

The long term goal was for Hindi to enable a pan-Indian dialogue and consciousness among all classes of Indians. To this end, the Ministry of Education was charged with creating a new scientific vocabulary in Hindi, organizing the massive translation of administrative documents, teacher training, correspondence courses for Indians in non-Hindi regions, subsidies to Hindi publishers and prizes to their authors, and the elaborate distribution of Hindi books to non-Hindi states, schools, colleges, and libraries. Beyond the rhetoric and debates, what was being called for was nothing less than a linguistic revolution.

But in the decades after independence, the English language was not “phased out,” as had been planned by the first postcolonial government. Instead, the language became even more entrenched in public life and the change over to Hindi never happened. At the same time, governmental programs to promote Hindi have had long lasting effects on institutions such as publishing houses and cultural bodies such as the Sahitya Akademi. This lopsided cultural “development” kept the reins of Hindi in the firm grasp of its cultural elites, who effectively became the custodians of Hindi culture.

The place of English is defined vis à vis Hindi, and also in relation to the other bhashas. In 1956 India's Official Languages Act organized states along linguistic lines, despite the fact that nearly every state has sizable linguistic minorities. So, for instance, although Marathi is the mother tongue of nearly three quarters of those living in the western state of Maharashtra, about 8 percent of Maharashtrians count Hindi as their mother tongue and a little less than 8 percent Urdu. Literature is nevertheless largely mapped along those same state borders to the extent that bhasha literatures are often referred to in English as “regional literatures.” In addition, most of these “regional” literatures serve reading populations larger than those of most European nations. For example, there are close to 80 million Hindi speakers in the state of Bihar alone, 74 million Telugu speakers (largely in the state of Andhra Pradesh), and 83 million Bengali speakers, mostly in West Bengal.³² Hence both the size and the dimensions of a vernacular literary culture become obscured by the idea of the regional. This obfuscation becomes a veritable distortion when regional literature itself is continually juxtaposed with the “global” literature written by Indians in English. In the face of globalized English literary production and the prominence of Indian English writing, the regional has to some extent become a diminutive. Being confined to a limited geographic space has in many respects come to restrict the stature of bhasha literary texts when placed side by side with Indian English ones, as they increasingly and inevitably are.

It had not always been this way. When there were fewer Indians writing in English, in the 1930 s, 1940 s, and 1950 s, for instance, these writers (e.g., Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hossain, Kamala Markandaya, R.K. Narayan, and Raja Rao) were thought to be writing against the grain. They were thusly perceived in part because they were not taken as seriously by the English literary establishment based, naturally, in London. Yet they were also not taken as seriously in India, since at this time English was not an Indian language in the way it is today.

The change in the relationship between English and bhasha literatures is partly due to the shift in how Indian English writing has been received and published abroad, a dynamic that, I argue (in chapter 8), generates a new politics of place. Yet Indian literature in English also has more validity and social resonance because of a thriving Indian English culture in India itself. English is not tied to any region but is the “second mother tongue,” as it is sometimes called, of the urban elite.

Despite all this, the politics of language in India cannot only be understood simply in terms of the position of English vis àvis “the languages.” The languages have their own rivalries and similarities among them and have varying levels of power nationally. This power derives not only from the numerical strength of each language but also from its perceived cultural worth. This “cultural worth,” not surprisingly, is often defined by a language community's elite members in their chosen fields of cultural production.³³ If we consider the language debates and commission report of 1956, we may see, for instance, how English and Hindi were in some ways pitted against each other from the start. They, and their elites, vied for the role of official language (rajbhasha) of the union as well as for the unofficial role as link language. As a result, English and Hindi are in some respects competing national languages.³⁴ This competition exists not only in Delhi, where there is a concentration of elite discourse in both languages, but also in north India more broadly where Hindi is most often recorded as the mother tongue. What we see in the relationship between English and Hindi is a dovetailing of the cultural and the political.

Forty percent of Indians, over 400 million people, are Hindi speakers, though within the appellation “Hindi” are some forty-eight “dialects,” such as Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Marwari, and Awadhi. Hindi is not only a regional language but also, by virtue of being the most widely spoken Indian language, a national language.³⁵ Like English, its hegemonic power is contested but for quite different reasons; for many south Indians, for instance, Hindi is a symbol and arbiter of north Indian cultural hegemony. The major south Indian languages—Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam—are Dravidian based and use different scripts from each other and from the Indo-European languages of the North. This north-south linguistic divide is as relevant to contemporary Indian language politics as the global promises and pretensions of English. Yet English is also implicated in this divide.

The South, especially the state of Tamilnadu, famously opposed Hindi becoming India's national language in a fierce and occasionally violent cultural war. In 1835, during colonial rule, the British made English the language of government (replacing Persian), and knowing English became necessary to obtain coveted government jobs, including those in the railways and the police force. Over a century later, if Hindi were to replace English at the national level in post-independence India, access to government jobs would require knowing Hindi instead.³⁶ In this context, English was curiously a more neutral language and, paradoxically for an elite language, one that promised more equality between north and south Indians. If Hindi was to become the national language, as leaders such as Mohandas K. Gandhi had fervently hoped and planned, the practical consequence would be that south Indians would all of a sudden be at a disadvantage.³⁷ It would be incumbent on them, and not their compatriots from the Hindi belt, to learn an entirely new language (and script) to be in a position to vie for a lucrative government job. For educated, largely Brahmin or other upper caste south Indians, English was already the language of social advancement and cultural comfort. It did not threaten their regional linguistic identities precisely because it was not the language of another Indian region; yet it allowed them a place to assert themselves on an equal footing with English educated north Indians and to excel at the national level.³⁸ The anti-Hindi agitations in the South had the distinction of having the support of nearly all factions of the political spectrum. For non-Brahmins (the overwhelming majority) in Tamilnadu, for instance, Hindi was threatening on at least two accounts: first, it drew away from education in Tamil and represented Sanskrit based north Indian cultural hegemony; and second, if they had to learn a second language, they wanted it to be English, which they saw as a world language and one that Brahmins had already had the opportunity to master.³⁹

Like Hindi, English is able to divide and unite depending on what is at stake; for all its documentation of Hindi and English and its comparisons to other linguistic situations the world over, what the Report of the Official Language Commission fails to stress enough is the relationship and rivalries among the Indian languages themselves. The afterglow of independence and desire for unity did not mean that upper-class Indians were going to change their linguistic priorities if they didn't have to. English thus became more deeply entrenched in the postcolonial government bureaucracy and also became the official language of higher education. The Official Languages Act of 1963 allowed for the continued use alongside Hindi, even after the fifteen-year phasing out period that was to come to an end in 1965. In 1964, when there were more attempts to institute Hindi alone, more protests in the South and elsewhere ensued. By i967 English was officially sanctioned, albeit in reluctant official prose: it would be a “subsidiary official language.” What English became instead, to use Aijaz Ahmad's phrase, was “the language of national integration and bourgeois civility.”⁴⁰

Unlike Hindi, English could never be viewed as representing “the people”; hence its authenticity was always questioned, even after being accepted as an Indian language in a variety of realms. As Alok Rai makes clear in his analysis of the competition between Hindi and English elites in contemporary north India, it is only political discourse and cultural production in Hindi that may “liberate those democratic energies of the Hindi belt.”⁴¹ What Rai is pointing to here is a language's social and political potential in society. Despite its pan-Indian pose, English comes with readymade restraints. Hindi is not only the language of the home, the street, and popular culture (film, radio, television, pulp fiction, comics, music, theater) in north India but also the language of conversation and asides in the very spaces where English is supposedly the most entrenched: government halls and university campuses.

The very fact that political constituencies may be defined in terms of language of course means that these constituencies themselves may be in flux. For instance, English education of dubious quality is increasingly being “sold” to the masses. The widespread opening of “global language institutes” in villages and small towns is just one indication that aspiring to know English is no longer the reserve of the urban middle classes; from construction workers to security guards to domestic servants—everyone wants their children to have English.⁴² What distinguishes these institutes (which may be located in office blocks or, more often, in ramshackle buildings in local bazaars) is that unlike the traditional English medium education available to upper-class and uppercaste Indians by way of convent schools run by nuns, or today, by mostly private Indian trusts and religious societies, these new centers are open to lower-caste and lower-class groups who could not afford private English medium schools. Contemporary language politics in fact hinges on the politics of both caste and class. English, in the meantime, is signified less and less as a colonial remnant and more as a contemporary global attribute.

THE CASTE OF LANGUAGE

The globalization of English has been especially relevant for the most socially disadvantaged, those who are from the lowest castes. In the realm of Dalit (what used to be called “untouchable” or harijan) and Dalit bahujan (which includes a wider group of lower castes) politics, access to the English language has come to symbolize a new political consciousness. In fact, some see the language as the most feasible and direct method of social empowerment. They are less concerned with the so called linguistic authenticity of the bhashas since the “culture” (and specifically, religion) associated with that authenticity is one from which they are already excluded. As detailed in the scholar and activist Kancha Ilaiah's contemporary political tract, Why I Am Not a Hindu, since Dalits were excluded from Hindu society in terms of day-to-day life on the scriptural principle of being “polluted,” why should they embrace a Hindu identity now?⁴³ Ilaiah's tract hit a nerve precisely because he connected the issue of caste to religious identity and practice, challenging the idea of a large, all encompassing Hindu cultural umbrella. In one fell swoop arguments such as his threaten the Hindu vote bank, one that is dependent on lower-caste and Dalit voters.⁴⁴

In many respects, Dalit and Dalit bahujan intellectuals who advocate English are responding to an already apparent desire by urban and rural lower classes to have English education for their children. However, for the English education of “the masses,” there will have to be more than an array of private and unregulated language institutes. The real question has become whether or not government schools, which are administered by each state, will offer English medium education and not just English as one among many subjects. What may seem linguistically expedient to some is a fierce cultural debate for others. Proponents of vernacular, or “mother tongue,” education are opposed to such a measure because they fear the end of the mother tongues in terms of their social and cultural relevance. These proponents tend to be from the ranks of the cultural and political elite, who see language as a key associative symbol in consolidating vote banks; the mother tongues are to be defended from everything from urban elites to the forces of globalization. Most centrally, perhaps, is the notion of what the mother tongues are in the first place. With the standardization of grammar, a more Sanskritized vocabulary, and the choice of script, the bhashas as modern, written languages are also expressions of upper-caste culture.⁴⁵ In this sense, English, even with its colonial past and globalizing power, is in the context of Dalit activism a more neutral language. Its neutrality is premised on more direct access to power, one that bypasses more traditional or engrained social boundaries. Ilaiah and other activists also point out that those same mother tongue proponents, not to mention many mother-tongue-loving politicians who see Dalits as being essential for their own Hindu vote banks, make sure to send their own children to private English medium schools.⁴⁶

Chandrabhan Prasad has been most associated with the promotion of English for Dalits in his column, “Dalit Diary,” which appears in the Pioneer, a national English-language newspaper. His method of instilling this desire and what he frames as a right to the language has come in the curious form of proposing English as a “Dalit Goddess.” Prasad's immediate aim is not historical revisionism but instead to instill the desire for English, a desire that he hopes will turn into a serious demand for the language among Dalits themselves. He wonders why in the past six decades of Indian independence the demand for government sponsored education in the language has not flourished. In line with this cause is what many see as his audacious valorization of Thomas B. Macaulay as a kind of saint for the oppressed Dalits.⁴⁷ Since 2006 Prasad has made headlines for hosting parties each year in Delhi to celebrate the anniversary of Macaulay's birth.⁴⁸ What is unclear at this point is how much of an effect this kind of valorization—to what extent it is a real movement or a gimmick—will have in the actual education of Dalits or even the creation of Dalit literature in English. It is clear, however, that the idea of English education as being the sole provenance of the elite is changing.

For these reasons and others, thinking about English solely as a postcolonial language fails to capture the complexity of the distinctions associated with language in India today. The term postcolonial has come to flatten our sense of a variety of social and cultural changes in over sixty years of post-independence cultural politics, mostly because it relies on the colonizer/colonized model of power and cultural interaction, and it sidelines competing nationalisms and regionalisms and their ideologies. Even in Delhi, where the architectural and governmental remnants of the British Raj are most obvious, English is no longer a postcolonial language. Instead, as I argue throughout, it is a mediator in a variety of cultural and political realms.

THE CITY AS A LITERARY FIELD

This mediation is, perhaps, most apparent in Delhi, a city that is not only the political and bureaucratic capital of India but also the center of English and Hindi publishing as well as home to the country's preeminent universities and a wide array of cultural institutions representing local, regional, national, and international concerns. Recognizing Delhi as the site of the major publishing houses in English and Hindi first enabled me to see the city as a literary field. There would certainly be other places in which to study Indian literary fields, in Mumbai, Kolkata, or Chennai, to name just three important sites of cultural production; however, to understand the nature of Hindi and English as competing national languages in the cultural and political arenas, there is no more significant site than Delhi. In addition, Delhi's role as the cultural capital of north India and as the bureaucratic center of the nation makes it a clearinghouse for a range of cultural production; hence I also contend that seeing literary production through Delhi allows one to understand the relationship not only between English and Hindi but also between those two languages and the bhashas as a whole, thereby allowing an understanding of the most important cultural debates of the past few decades. While my research took me to other places and people in those places, it always brought me back to Delhi. At the same time, this book is not a case study of literary production in Delhi; rather it views questions through Delhi and its institutions.

My inquiry began by focusing on the city as the publishing center for Hindi and English, the two most published languages in India. On the roadside the connection between publishers, distributors, and consumers seemed very direct. I would see the small publishing houses on Ansari Road just within the walls of Old Delhi and often buy books directly from them. This exploration led me to the Hindi publishers Raj kamal Prakashan and Vani Prakashan, with informal chats leading to longer interviews. It was the artisanal bent of these publishers, and also of the English publisher Ravi Dayal, that I found most interesting. They were small operations, yet pioneering ones that had become major cultural institutions. The life histories of the publishers themselves—how they came to publishing, how they related to the various languages they spoke, how the publishing endeavor itself was a way of imagining postcolonial India—said much about Hindi and English from the decades just after Indian independence to the cultural changes that economic liberalization brought from the 1990s onward. I saw that there was a larger significance to Delhi being the center of publishing of these two languages in particular since they are competing national languages. Furthermore, as I soon discovered, other languages—Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, for instance—figure prominently in the story of both Hindi and English. These interests in literary publishing dovetailed with the historic and contemporary site of the city as the bureaucratic center of the nation's cultural institutions and policy making, where discourses around nation and region but also around gender, caste, class, and religion are continually being made and remade. It was in this sense that I started to see certain literary discourses and the multilingual literary field itself as moving through Delhi and its institutions. In this latter case the relationship between Hindi and the other Indian languages and English and the other Indian languages comes into sharp relief. In part, my argument is that what is produced (not only books but also ideas, policies, attitudes, experiences, and discourses) in Delhi, by virtue of its position as the former colonial capital and current, increasingly globalizing cultural capital of India, frames and influences debates regarding other Indian languages in their respective regions. However, rather than merely finding a hegemonic Delhi centric discourse, what I came to see were its obstinacies, fissures, and inconsistencies, spurring me on to unravel what I saw as the decentering politics of identity, language, nationhood, regionalism, and globalization.

Delhi is the place where many writers from regional centers come to work and live, so the interaction between region and nation also plays out in the everyday life of the city and its institutions. Several of the figures I engage with throughout this book come from language backgrounds other than Hindi (e.g., Malayalam, Bengali, and Marathi); yet they are individuals who here in some way contribute to the construction of the regional, national, or global via the prism of Delhi's bureaucratic and cultural worlds. Delhi has, not surprisingly, played a dominant role in defining the parameters of national culture, yet these definitions are more often than not contested in regional milieus. This book explores what is at stake in some of these contestations by positing Delhi not only as a site of literary production but also as a producer of cultural meaning.

People like to say that Delhi has no literary culture of its own. This perception is due in part to the migration of Punjabis (and their language) to the city at the time of partition, in 1947. The language on the street changed forever, as, to the chagrin of many, you now hear a mix of Hindi and Punjabi. Yet the city has the largest concentration of Hindi writers and publishers. Though Delhi is the geographic center of the Hindi belt, where many Hindi writers, publishers, academics, and other elites live, it is not the only cultural center of Hindi. Centers of Hindi culture are also to be found in other places in the Hindi belt, places where Hindi is spoken without as much English (or Punjabi), where fewer people speak English fluently, and where the daily culture is saturated with Hindi rather than a mix of Hindi and English. Most of these Hindi centers—such as Allahabad and Varanasi—are in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which borders Delhi and is the most populous state in India. In the state of Bihar, it is the city of Patna where Hindi books are sold en masse. And in Madhya Pradesh, it is the city of Bhopal that is a cultural center for many Hindi novelists and poets. These other places, not Delhi, are commonly referred to as the “Hindi heartland.” However, the “Hindi heartland” does not only refer to geography; it is also an idea about the place and role of Hindi. In this sense, the Hindi poet and literary administrator Ashok Vajpeyi told me, “Most small towns can't contain Hindi writers.” It is precisely the institutional and cultural offerings of Delhi that have made it a center for Hindi writers and a place where their own ideas have come into contact with those of writers in many other Indian languages, including English.

AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF LITERATURE

The process of English becoming an Indian language, alongside Hindi and vis à vis other Indian languages, is the story that I tell from the perspective of various individuals and institutions in Delhi. My reading of Delhi, my conversations with publishers, writers, and others, and my analysis of texts is meant to suggest how the meanings of a language, from the everyday to the ideological, emerge from the places in which it is located and lived through. In this sense, the individual's feeling for language is a prism through which I analyze contemporary society.

In the chapters that follow I document subjective relationships people have to language and their own linguistic histories. I locate them in particular places and in different paradigms, including the local, national, regional, and global. This book is not a survey of all I saw and everyone I met but instead is organized around key figures and places in the literary landscape that I believe encapsulate the most important features, moments, and problems that have defined Indian literary life since the early 1970s. In this respect the chapters offer three interlinked narratives: the cultural history of English vis à vis Hindi and the bhashas, debates about cultural and linguistic authenticity, and the city of Delhi as a postcolonial and now increasingly globalized literary space. Each chapter moves across the literary field, from text to institution to publisher to author or translator, highlighting and expanding on key ethnographic moments and milieus. My approach is not only a method but also a vision of how to understand English in India and the relationship between literature and politics in the world more generally.

In terms of my day-to-day methodology, I began by visiting publishing houses and bookshops and going to events at the Sahitya Akademi, the Habitat Centre, the India International Centre, and other cultural venues in the city. At first I relied on newspaper listings for cultural events, crunched in extra small type at the bottom of pages in newspapers such as the Times of India, Hindustan Times (in Hindi and English), and The Hindu. Then, as I got to know people, I was invited to events or often just had a sense of where to show up or whom to call. As the writer Pankaj Mishra told me in one of my first interviews in 2001, there was no real literary “scene” to speak of in Delhi. He was right in terms of—and this is what Mishra emphasized—the quality and standards of writing, editing, reviewing, and publishing that one found elsewhere and were essential to creating an informed reading public leading to that somewhat elusive scene. Yet my sense was that there was something to be found and discerned, even if it might not look the same, or feel the same, as it did elsewhere. I started to see English in relation to the bhashas, especially when listening to writers who inhabited multiple worlds, such as Gagan Gill, Nirmal Verma, K. Satchidanandan, Kiran Nagarkar, and Geetanjali Shree. And when I had conversations with publishers such as Ashok Maheshwari and Ravi Dayal, who offered their own linguistic ethnographies of the city, a map of the literary field began to emerge. As I connected my knowledge of texts to places and people, I began not only to read differently but also to see how a variety of literary practitioners were connected to each other and to recurring notions, realities, and moralities of place. Most of all, I started to see how different languages stood for different things to different people and what was being created emotionally, intellectually, and politically—on the page, in their lives, and in society—because of it.

The more research I did, the more my methods adapted to what I was seeing and listening to and the more I saw how language ideologies exist not only in political realms but in everyday life as well. For this reason, I propose the “ethnographic study of literature” as a way to link the practices of literary production to the politics of language in discrete and overlapping literary fields of actors and institutions. Literature reflects and represents, but it is also produced and consumed under particular social and political conditions. An ethnographic approach emphasizes the connection between literary analysis and the meaning of everyday life, even as it interrogates and unravels it. However, the point is not merely to juxtapose the methods of ethnography and literary analysis for some kind of layering effect, interpretation upon interpretation. Instead my method is to intercut between ethnography and the study of literary texts. I use the insights gleaned from one practice or realm to question and inform the analysis of another. It is this intercutting, a practice that emerged from my own experience of research, that is central to the critical perspective I introduce in the pages that follow.