Prateek Shankar

In reviewing this exchange, consider: what compels Lamar to interpret on both men’s behalf? One would assume they are speaking the same language. Yet, Lamar chooses to translate the Black man’s African American vernacular (AAVE) to a version of English that his white companion can understand. There’s a relative ease in the way he carries out this translation: this role is clearly not new to him. In fact, one could argue that his translation isn’t even linguistic: it’s sociocultural and heteroglossic, telling of the epistemic imaginations that both men inhabit. One man’s “wager” becomes another’s “dice”, meaning transferred across signs even as its extra-linguistic value (Tupas) is not, demonstrating a hybridity and internalized hierarchy within the English language and an unequal demand for translation amongst its variegated users. Ask yourself: how often are you compelled to translate your English? And, by contrast, who is?

Put simply, all Englishes are not made equal; their social implications (and applications) are marked by distinct ethnoracial histories, haunted by vestiges of colonialism, feudal stratification, and slavery, that pervade into the contemporary moment and inform a divergent constellation of subjectivities and material realities. To borrow from Derek Gregory (6-12) and Braj B. Kachru, this colonial present informs the appropriation and pluricentrification of the English language into multiple World Englishes (WE), fractured across an unequal exchange of linguistic centers and peripheries.

These English Masks, Those Colonial Roots

English, framed by Alastair Pennycook as “the global language of miscommunication” (5), is particularly emblematic of the asymmetricalities I have outlined thus far. In Masks of Conquest, Gauri Viswanathan reveals the co-development of British political and commercial interest and the establishment of English literary study in India using the Gramscian model of hegemony. The British colonial enterprise in India, while predicated on its central mission of economic gain, masked its exploitative practices in the guise of moral intervention through English literary education (20). From the vigorous efforts of secularized institutes in imperial South Asia to the more uneasy attempts of Christian missionary schools, the propagation of English literature among the ‘natives' was ultimately carried out to ensure the authority of the British government and to create a stable state in which British mercantile and military interests could flourish. This was as much an imperial effort to police native subjects as it was its own citizens. As Ashis Nandy points out in The Intimate Enemy, the early colonizers (roughly between 1757 and 1830) were largely opportunistic mercenaries from the East India Company with little to no intention to govern and were often willing to assimilate with the natives: 

[...] while British rule had already been established, British culture in India was still not politically dominant, and race-based evolutionism was still inconspicuous in the ruling culture. Most Britons in India lived like Indians at home and in the office, wore Indian dress, and observed Indian customs and religious practices. A large number of them married Indian women, offered puja to Indian gods and goddesses, and lived in fear and awe of the magical powers of the Brahmans. (Nandy 5)

Amassing huge fortunes in India, these early colonizers became self-styled nawabs whose extravagant excesses attracted the ire of the English Parliament (5-6). One speaker in the House debate, Henry Montgomery, is said to have remarked, “If we wish to convert the natives of India, we ought to reform our own people there, who at present only give them examples of lying, swearing, drunkenness, and other vices'' (Vishwanathan 24). The institutionalization of English literary education, in this context, becomes one of a number of imperial strategies to regulate this omnidirectional cultural leakage, gaining synonymity with notions of morality, virtue, and—most prominently—truth. Between 1817 and 1835, the growing conflict between Orientalists and Anglicists on the value of native languages and literary practices “was not simply over language or literature, but the status of knowledge itself” (101, emphasis mine). Here, languages’ claims are raised from the simple interpretation of meaning into an embodiment of truth. Take, for instance, the excerpts mentioned below. First, Macaulay writing in his infamous Minute of 1835:

[...] I have never found one among them [the Orientalists] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. [...] [The English language] stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us [...]. Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations.

Writing in response to Macaulay, Orientalist John Tyler demanded that the study of indigenous language, history, and culture be promoted in tandem with European knowledge:

If we destroy it [Oriental studies] we shall degrade both ourselves and the people we undertake to improve. A history of the successive systems of Science and philosophy though it may not teach the true nature of things will yet afford much valuable information of another kind. It will teach what mankind have thought and how they have reasoned about these things and the successive steps by which they have arrived at Truth. It is in short the history of human opinions and this is at least as important as that of human actions.

The debate was conducted in terms that “transformed the choice between languages into a choice between the promotion of truth and the propagation of error.” (Vishwanathan 101, emphasis mine). Here, theories of curricular policy are raised into binary evaluations of the truth claim of knowledge, with nativity constructed akin to error, falsity, and dogma, and English – with its Biblical associations and post-Enlightenment brand of intellectuality – bearing the ultimate claim to truth. By a fairly simple leap of imagination, the logic of this binary evaluation is extended to its respective language (mis)users, mirroring the xenophobic discourse on racial purity, traces of which now inform the hierarchization of World Englishes in the continued contestation of language and ontology.

Authored Subjectivity: An Extralingual Reading of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi

It was the eve of Indian independence. After fourteen years of service in varying capacities as a scholar, teacher, diplomat, and novelist, the Urdu literary icon Ahmed Ali found himself at Nanjing University in China. He had just been appointed a Visiting Professor by the ruling British government of India and would spend two years teaching English at the behest of the British Council. Ending his tenure in 1948, Ali sought to return to his native New Delhi in India. However, the India he had left behind two years ago was not the one he hoped to go home to. In the time since his departure, his country had endured an unstable mitosis, splintering the subcontinent into two conjoined twins in a violent partition of land, livelihood, and language. One colony became two free nations, and yet, Ali became a new kind of prisoner. Having never stated his preference as a government employee, the then Ambassador of India in China K.P.S. Menon refused to let him return to India, arguing that as a Muslim he would have to go to Pakistan instead—which is where he would live until the day he died, never again returning to the streets he called home.

Eight years prior, at the height of the Progressive Writers’ Movement (PWM), Ali would write a prescient novel about his home. Written in 1940, Twilight in Delhi is the story of an Indian father struggling to negotiate the complex forces shaping Delhi in the wake of English colonialism, parallels that Ali would personally experience not even a decade later. Set between 1911 and 1919 in a newly-colonized New Delhi, the novel is book-ended by two revolutionary moments of change: on one end, the Coronation Darbar, which was an Indian imperial-style mass assembly that commemorated the proclamation of King George V as Emperor of India; and on the other, World War I. At the center of the novel, however, are its two protagonists, each embodying a specific sociocultural imagination: the father, Mir Nihal, and his nostalgic celebration of lost Mughal glory, and his son Asghar’s embrace of English notions of modernity in defiance of familial traditions. Albeit not stated explicitly, these two imaginaries capture a central tension within the novel, a loose binary negotiation of tradition and modernity, as understood and embodied by these two characters. I explore the negotiation of these subjective ideals through the metaphor of twilight (borrowed from the title of the novel), of a waning day slowly melting into the purple embers of a new evening, the slow middle between an end and a beginning. Reflecting on the novel, Sumatra Baral writes:

Twilight indicates in-betweenness and liminality – the position of Delhi between two languages – English and Urdu and two empires, the Mughal and the British. [……] Twilight, which usually hints at a transition between day and night, here posits itself between life and death, tradition and change, orthodoxy and progression.

This half-light semi-darkness speaks to the bilingual (if not plurilingual) colonial speakers’ experience of the in-between, of a sort of double consciousness engendered by their oscillation between linguistic traditions. To clarify, my concern here is not what Monica Schmid has described as language attrition or “the loss of, or changes to, grammatical and other features of a language as a result of declining use by speakers who have changed their linguistic environment and language habits” (11-17). Instead, I point to the psychological motivations and aftereffects informed by this linguistic dissonance, further heightened in the case of Twilight by Ali’s choice to write the novel in English, despite local criticism and constant rejection from British publishers. The novel was part of an enormous body of controversial work produced by Ali and his peers in the Progressive Writers’ Movement. These were Urdu literary dissidents, attempting to shake the foundations of religious and social orthodoxy through a radical retelling of North Indian lived experience, most notably in a collection of Urdu short stories titled Angaaray that would ultimately be banned. Yet Ahmed Ali chose to write Twilight in English. Could we read this as the author mirroring his younger protagonist’s English aspirations? Ali offers some clarification in a 1975 interview with the Journal of South Asian Linguistics:

I have been wondering why I write in English. [...] It was not because, as some people have said, that I wanted to curry favor with the British. That's nonsense. It was an escape for me from many things. I could not express myself in Urdu when I was young, so I had to express myself somehow and English was all right for them [his family] ~ it was the ruler's language, the baré sahib's [big officer’s] language, so they couldn't take objection to that in their minds. Their outlook was very orthodox, very narrow-minded. My older cousins had such an outlook, my aunt as well. [...] Urdu had been taken away from me because of the great resentment people—my uncle's family—had toward my writing in Urdu (JSAL 122-3).

His comments point to the position English held (and continues to hold) as a marker of social mobility and intellectual progress in Indian society. Could this explain the motivations behind his choice to write in the language of the colonizer? Speaking to that effect, David D. Anderson notes in his 1971 review of Twilight in Delhi:

That the novel was written in English was of significance in 1939, in those last days of the British Raj, as Ahmed Ali sought a publisher and a wider audience than the Muslim population of India could provide (81).

Ali himself lamented similarly about his novels, “If presented in Urdu, their [his characters] concerns would die down within a narrow belt rimmed by Northwest India” (xvi). However, others have argued that English offered Ali a way to avoid the reactionary violence of his fundamentalist Urdu-speaking critics, especially considering the public outcry against prior work like Angaaray and the PWM as a whole.

Within and beyond the novel, we encounter transitory subjectivities, author and character reflexively experiencing and redefining themselves within a marked discontinuity. Twilight, in this context, becomes a mode of knowledge, an in-between that resists description, a liminal (un)becoming that transgresses two imaginaries of seeming incompatibility, conjuring a discontinuum that is as generative as it is inertial. In the context of my work, twilight is a metaphor for language’s inherent in-betweenness and the centrality of miscommunication and cultural incompatibility in not only the mediation of existing subjectivities but also the creation of new ones. I locate my research within this linguistic twilight, investigating the transitory subjectivities that emerged and (d)evolved in response to English at the turn of Indian independence as well as the powers, specific sites—be it caste, class, or gender location—and motivations that informed this transfiguration. Twilight in Delhi is a powerful example of this transfiguration, of a markedly non-English family engaging, countering, and coming to terms with the subjective possibilities of a “modern” English imagination.