So I am back for my second post in my second incarnation on Sulekha (VGR 2.0?). Though I said in my first return to life post, Back to Sulekha After 7 Years, that I thought I could post once every 2 weeks, circumstances and the demands of my own blog are slowing me down. Still here we go. Let me tackle a subject that I've wondered about for years: Indian English.

Writing English While Brown

I have written online in various forms for nearly 10 years, and experimented with nearly all genres (here at Sulekha, on my personal blog www.ribbonfarm.com, and as an avid inside-the-Intranet blogger where I work). Poetry, short stories, introspective essays, observational pieces, sci-tech commentary, philosophy. You name it, I've done it. Maybe not well, but you can't accuse me of not trying.

Consistently, and quite apart from my own skills or lack thereof, I find that one of the hardest things about writing is being Indian. Like black Americans have their little joke about 'Driving While Black', Indians, given our peculiar relationship to the English language, might well say, 'Writing English While Brown.'

Actually that's not quite fair. Some of the problems we face are shared by non-English speaking Europeans too. So it is not so much brown-as-in-once-oppressed-and-colonized-nation aspect that interests me, but simply, brown-as-in-culturally-alien.

Note for the Terminally Clueless!

This shouldn't need saying, but just in case, here is a note. Remember, unless you are making up a Euro-Christian nom de plume, no matter WHAT you write, your Indianness will be part of the piece. A piece of writing is never received by itself. What the reader knows about the writer (be it just the name or an entire personal relationship's worth of information) informs how the piece is received. Even if it is nothing more than a name, cultural connotations change the reading. The exact same short story written by a Venkat as opposed to a Jason, will be received differently.

The Postmodern Distraction

Now, this bothers a lot of people. In fact, among politically-oriented postmodernists, there is a whole academic discipline around questions like this. So I have to at least comment on it, even though it does not interest me.

There was, as some of you know, that whole Subaltern (technically "poor bloody postcolonial") movement in literary analysis started by Gramsci, which lead to that famous essay by Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak (uber-Bong of the English-translation-of-Derrida fame) called Can the Subaltern Speak? You can look up these interesting matters on Wikipedia. They mostly concern the part of the difficulty of Writing English While Brown that arise from the fact that we were colonized once, which leads to a whole thing about power dynamics and how postcolonial writers end up accepting the stances and frames of white writers, so they really aren't breaking free at all, so much for the Empire Writes Back.

Yada yada yada.

It isn't that I don't appreciate the postmodernists, it is just that I think they read race, power, and oppression into everything. Not that those things aren't important, or that they don't affect our ability to write authentically in English, but there are a lot of aspects of Writing English While Brown that are simply due to us being members of one culture writing in the language of another very different one with a very different history, grand narrative, backdrop of available references, and idiomatic structure. These aspects are just as likely to affect a hypothetical white writer wanting to write in Hindi.

The Problem

The problem is this. How do you write a piece in such a way that when it is read, with your Indian name attached, it leads to a coherent aesthetic experience for the reader?

Some genres aren't as affected by the Writing  English While Brown effect as others. Poetry and short stories are a lot harder than history, which in turn is a lot harder than nonfiction that doesn't have as much of a cultural footprint, like say Java programming.

Responses also differ author to author. Some combine an incredible naivete with a lack of self-awareness and cheerfully write pastiches of their favorite English authors (say Muthuswamy Chandrasekharan writing a Ludlumish thriller with a hero named Jack Bauer, with no sensitivity to the fact that his name changes the reading of the story). Others are painfully oversensitive and self-conscious to the point that they invest all their creative effort into countering the Writing English While Brown effect, to the point where it ruins the actual intent of the piece.

Somewhere in between is a happy medium where you can Write English While Brown and be aesthetically successful with respect to your intent (not necessarily commercially). We just haven't discovered it yet. The Subaltern can't speak, but you and I can, if we try hard.

So what are the types of responses available for you to choose from? Here are ones I've encountered. I won't call them solutions because they aren't. They are responses to the problem, with varying levels of effectiveness, all short of 100%. If you know of more, do post in the comments.

Responses to the Problem

In this top 10 list, I'll mainly use fiction writers as examples, because they are familiar to the widest audience, but keep in mind that these responses appear in nonfiction writing too, ranging from history to, like I said, books about Java by Indians. Of course all this analysis is only deserved by otherwise good writing, but note that these are not necessarily correlated with writing skill. The finest word smith may use the intellectually shallowest response.

1. Unawareness: Like I said, some people aren't even aware of the problem. Mostly this leads to terrible writing that makes you cringe. Sometimes, magically, it works. Mostly it doesn't, and you see endless waves of high school and college level writers succumb to the temptation to just write with zero introspection. The sorts of things beginning writers like to try when young: poetry, romance or adventure for example, are the usual places where you see this. The 18-year-old gets started on page 1 of a Secret Agent short story with a hero named Ram Kumar, realizes it jars somehow, shifts to Jason Bond (naming culturally alien characters is a whole other issue, and we usually end up with silly ones like this -- James Bond plus Jason Bourne), and moves blithely on, unaware of the train wreck he is creating. Sufficient capacity for irony leads to moving to Bollywood scriptwriting.
2. Cultural Localization: This is best exemplified in my mind by Upamanyu Chaterjee's English, August. Just write really really well, but for Indians only, who'll get the context and therefore the whole impact. R. K. Narayan also fits this mold, but pushes the approach less. If non-Indians read this stuff, they can fend for themselves or enjoy an outsider-looking-in fishbowl experience rather than a participatory/identification experience.
3. Alien Marginalization: Nirad Chaudhari is the classic of course. Accepting your fate, and writing as a marginal voice in the idiom of, and against the cultural context of, an alien culture. A more interesting recent example from film is Jay Chandrashekhar.
4. Despair: a.k.a V. S. Naipaul. I found Naipaul so unreadably drenched in a stance of sour, tragic conflict, that despite the clearly fantastic quality of the prose, I had to stop reading. He thinks he is brutally honest. Everybody else thinks he is terminally dyspeptic. Rather like the movie Crash, in which everything in L.A. is about race.
5. Gladiatorization: Black intellectuals often characterize black athletes as no better than gladiators of the Roman era. This category to me contains writers who've accepted commercial success and a label of 'diasporic voice' or 'postcolonial voice' without making any legitimate intellectual effort to deserve that label, push its boundaries or challenge its assumptions. To me, all this work lacks authenticity and can be rudely dismissed. There are many names we could all name, but I'll only name the most egregious gladiator: Arundhati Roy. Don't want to be flamed for calling out other specific authors.
6. Translation: This style involves painfully translating and explaining every Indian contextual reference. From parenthetical word translations, to expository paragraphs explaining Diwali. Rather like science fiction, in that you must explain both background and foreground, and for the same reasons, limited. No longer popular, I think.
7. Untranslation: A favorite of Indians, Agatha Christie, liberally peppers her writing with untranslated French, leaving readers without a traditional British education to fumble. Writers like Rushdie return the favor. A phrase like chand-ka-tukda, even when translated as piece-of-the-moon, drifts into the prose without much explanation, exposition, or idiomatic translation (which would be something like "sweetie pie" in culturally "English" idiom).
8. Quitting: This is a legitimate and authentic response, especially for writers who mainly rely on the quality of their thinking rather than the quality of their language. Attacking the Writing English While Brown challenge is simply tough creative work, especially in domains like fiction, where the sentence-level craft work is already hard. Even if you don't quit altogether, you might retreat to genres where the problem isn't as hard. This, frankly, is what I've done, though not entirely for this reason: I've abandoned fiction and poetry and retreated to non-fiction, where the problem is easier, and also because non-fiction interests me more.
9. Globe-Warriorization: Pico Iyer sort of is at the head of the line here. Rather than accept a position as a Voice of the Diaspora, he adopts the posture of Global Citizen. This has only recently become a viable stance, and mainly non-fiction writers have adopted it. I'd like to see this approach brought to fiction and poetry. Jhumpa Lahiri isn't it (she might be the last gasp of the diaspora-style writer).
10. Escapism: Write about anything other than the real world, or about the real world mired in so much of the fantastic that only a literature PhD can figure it out. Salman Rushdie, M. Night Shyamalan. Enough said.

Of course, this whole discussion may be moot. As our own favorite public catharsis figure, ixedoc, demonstrates, as writing is increasingly dominated by a hyper-personal journaling style, these larger issues become less relevant. (I have to admit I love the guy -- my Kannada is rusty, but the Udaya TV interview on his profile is surreal)

Non-Sequitur Endnote

Of course, this piece is mainly yet another thinly-veiled attempt to promote by personal blog, so you can check out how I personally deal with (or smartly avoid) this question over at www.ribbonfarm.com. You can find a summary post about recent articles here.

Okay, not quite a non sequitur. I actually intend to tackle this Writing English While Brown theme on ribbonfarm, but written around an academic idea from linguistics called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I'll be doing a Sapir-Whorfish analysis of the song sab kuch seekha humne, na seekhi hoshiyari,  which a comment on Ixedoc's blog reminded me of. Hope that's enough of a carrot to entice you guys to check out Ribbonfarm. Newsflash: Dec 31, 2007 -- the promised article on ribbonfarm.com has been posted, check out  Sapir-Whorf, Lakoff, Metaphor and Thought. 

Cheers!

Venkat