Multilingualism and Indian Literary Texts Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

First, a story about the encounter between three privates in a line regiment and a newlyarrived visitor, Lord Trig, to the cantonment. Trig has expressed a desire to inspect the troops but has the reputation of afterwards insulting the commanding officer on the appearance of his men. The troops have come to know this and are indignant. The day before the inspection, Trig goes to the bazaar for shopping, and while hes waiting for the colonels barouche to come and fetch him he sees the three privates:
Pristinly, he sthrols up, his arrums full av thruck, an he sez in a consiquinshal way, shticking out his little belly, Me good men, sez he, have ye seen the Kernels broosh!Broosh? says Learoyd. Theres no broosh herenobbut a ekka. Fwhats that? sez Thrigg. Learoyd shows him wan down the street, an he sez, How thruly Orientil! I will ride on ekka. I saw thin that our Rigimental Saint was for givin Thrigg over to us neck an brisket. I purshued a ekka, an I sez to the dhriver-divil, I sez, Ye black limb, theres a Sahib comin for this ekka. He wants to go jildi to the Padshahi Jhil twas about tu moiles awayto shoot snipechirria. You dhrive Jehannum ke marfik, mallumlike Hell? Tis no manner av use bukkin to the Sahib, bekaze he doesnt samjao your talk. Av he bolos anything, you just choop and chel. Dekker? Go arsty for the first arder mile from contonmints. Thin chel, Shaitan ke marfik, an the chooper you choops an the jildier you chels the better kooshy will that Sahib be; an heres a rupee for ye! The ekka-man knew there was somethin out av the common in the air. He grinned an sez, Bote ache! I goin damn fast.

In the work of the Indian writer in English, the linguistic traditions of the subcontinent, ironically, are not always as visible on the page as they are in Kipling. But non-visibility does not mean absence. At the age of seven, Adil Jussawalla has said in an interview,
I knew how to read and write Urdu. I had a tutor who reinforced this. And yet, that is one language I seem to have completely blotted out of my mind. That has been replaced by Gujarati and Hindi, so there are various languages crawling around inside my head, and the different scripts as well. If one tried literally to represent the different elements of world culture of which ones mind is made, one would write a language no one would understand. I have tried to suggest this chaos in Missing Person.

The various Indian languagesUrdu, Gujarati, Hindicrawling around in the head led Jussawalla to chaos, to having an identity crisis. Turned away from home and sent back from abroad, his protagonist becomes a Missing Person:

Turn left or right, theres millions like you up here, picking their way through refuse, looking for words they lost. Youre your countrys lost property with no office to claim you back. Youre polluting our sounds. Youre so rude. Get back to your language, they say.

(Missing Person) One mans poison is another mans relish. A very different view of the same linguistic prospect, or to keep to the metaphor, of the same dish, is Agha Shahid Alis, the Kashmiri-American poet who died in 2001. Ali spoke for many of his contemporaries when he said,
I think we in the subcontinent have been granted a rather unique opportunity: to contribute to the English language in ways that the British, the Americans, and the Australians, also the Canadians, cannot. We can do things with the syntax that will bring the language alive in rich and strange ways, and though poetry should have led the way, it is a novelist, Salman Rushdie, who has shown the poets a way: he has, to quote an essay I read somewhere, chutnified English. And the confidence to do this could only have come in the post-Independence generation. The earlier generations followed the rules inflicted by the rulers so strictly that it is almost embarrassing. They also followed models, especially the models of realism, in ways that imprisoned them. I think we can do a lot more. What I am looking forward toto borrow another metaphor from foodis the biryanization (Im chutnifying) of English. Behind my work, I hope, readers can sometimes hear the music of Urdu. Of course, all this has to do with an emotional identification on my part with north Indian Muslim culture, which is steeped in Urdu. I, as I have grown older, have felt the need to identify myself as a north Indian Muslim (not in any sectarian sense but in a cultural sense). And I do not feel that this culture is necessarily the province of the Muslims (after all, Firaq Gorakhpuri was a Hindu) and many non-Muslim Indians can also consider themselves culturally Muslim. . . I think I am among the very few of the Indians writing in English who is identifying himself in these terms. However, I do not want in all cases to be straitjacketed by these remarks; I want this to be a prominent but not exclusive element in my work.

Rushdie and chutnification; Ali and biryani: when it comes to describing the language of Indian literature, it would seem that gastronomy is the metaphor of choice. Interestingly, despite Alis enthusiasm for chutnified English, there is a world of difference between Rushdies English sentences larded with Hindustani words (and Hindustani phrases in literal English translation) and what Ali himself is attempting do. Whereas in Rushdie the presence of the other language, delightful though it is for those on the inside, becomes an instance of the empire writing back, in the poet it is, as Ali says, behind the work:

Behind my work, I hope, readers can sometimes hear the music of Urdu. They may both be
chutneys, but one is more subtly flavoured.

After Kipling, Jussawalla, and Ali, my fourth quotation comes from an essay On Bharati and his Prose Poems by A. K. Ramanujan, in which he says,
After the nineteenth century, no significant Indian writer lacks any of the three traditions: the regional mother-tongue, the pan-Indian (Sanskritic, and in the case of Urdu and Kashmiri, the Perso-Arabic as well), and the western (mostly English). Thus Indian modernity is a response not only to contemporary events but to at least three pasts. Poetic, not necessarily scholarly, assimilation of all these three resources in various individual ways seems indispensable. Neither Tagore in Bengali, nor Vallathol in Malayalam, neither Bendre in Kannada nor Bharati in Tamil (all of them similarly patterned, in their many-sided literary self-images, probably through the Tagore example), and among a younger generation neither Buddhadeva Bose in Bengali nor Adiga in Kannada, would be what they are without a strong presence of all three. The malaise and feebleness of some modern Indian poetry (in English as well as in our mother-tongues) is traceable, I believe, to the weak presence or total disconnection with one or another of these three resources. The strong presence of the three is certainly not sufficient, but it is necessary.

The question that now arises is: How do languages tenant the multilingual mind? Here we need models, and one model was provided by R. Parthasarathy in a letter he wrote Jayanta Mahapatra. It was published in Chandrabhg #2 (Winter 1979). Speaking of Ramanujans poems, Parthasarathy says that they are
the heir of an anterior tradition, a tradition very much of this subcontinent, the deposits of which are in Kannada and Tamil, and which have been assimilated into English. Ramanujans deepest roots are in the Tamil and Kannada past, and he has repossessed that past, in fact made it available, in the English language.

The languages inherited by the multilingual Ramanujan may not conform to Parthasarathys geological model. For it to hold, we have to agree that Ramanujan arranges Tamil and Kannada in the lower strata, English in the upper, and each time he chooses to write he descends, caged canary bird in hand, into the thickly-seamed coal pit of the mother tongue. Unless we know more about how languages are positioned in multilingual sensibilitiesdo they always keep this inflexible, stratified order?and how writers relate to them, it is premature to dogmatize about the anterior tradition. A radically different model is proposed by George Steiner in Extraterritorial.
It would by no means eccentric to read the major part of Nabokovs opus, Steiner says, as a meditationlyric, ironic, technical, parodisticon the nature of human language, on the

enigmatic coexistence of different, linguistically generated world visions and of a deep current underlying, and at moments obscurely conjoining, the multitude of diverse tongues. And, We need really detailed study of the quality and degree of pressure which Russian puts on Nabokovs Anglo-American. How often are his English sentences meta-translations of Russian? To what extent do Russian semantic associations initiate the images and contour of the English phrase . . . Is a good deal of Nabokovs English a piece of smuggling, an illicit conveyance across the frontier of Russian verse now captive in a society he contemns? . . . We also require careful analysis of the local and literary background of Nabokovs English. . . All these would be preliminary lines of inquiry toward getting right the strangeness, the polysemic nature of Nabokovs use of languages. They would clarify not only his prodigious talent, but such larger questions as the condition of multilingual imagining, of internalized translation, of the possible existence of a private mixed idiom beneath, coming before the localization of different languages in the articulate brain.

Borges and Samuel Beckett are the other new esperantists in Extraterritorial. Though Borges writes only in Spanish,
His intimacy with French, German, and, particularly, with English is profound. Very often an English textBlake, Stevenson, Coleridge, De Quinceyunderlies the Spanish statement. The other language shines through, giving to Borgess verse and to his Fictions a quality of lightness, of universality. He uses the vulgate and mythology of Argentina to ballast what otherwise be almost too abstract, too peregrine an imagination.

Steiner writes in After Babel that Borges moves among languages with a cats sinewy confidence. Though he has, Steiner says, a keen sense of the irreducible quality of each particular tongue, his linguistic experience is essentially simultaneous and, to use a Coleridgean notion, reticulative. Half a dozen languages and literatures interweave. You will remember what Jussawalla said about languages crawling around inside his head, what Ali said about how he would like his readers to hear the music of Urdu behind his poems. The work of Indian writers, and not just that of Indian writers in English, should perhaps be seen, so far as multilingualism is concerned, alongside the work of the new esperantists. ****