INDIAN WRITERS WRITING IN ENGLISH – LANGUAGE ISSUES

INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH: SOME LANGUAGE ISSUES AND

TRANSLATION PROBLEMS

Dr Christopher Rollason – rollason@9online.fr

Revised text of a paper given by the author at Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) on 8

March 2006, as part of the event “Writers’ Meet”. It will be published in a forthcoming issue

of JNU’s journal JSL.

The theme of this paper requires that we establish the nature of the object of study: what

precisely is the thing that we are used to calling Indian Writing in English, or IWE? I shall

begin my discussion with some remarks from over three decades ago, by the late David

McCutchion, one of IWE’s earliest and still one of its most pertinent critics. In the

introduction to his eponymous book on the subject published in 1969, McCutchion writes:

“The fascination of Indian writing in English lies … in the phenomenon … of literary

creativity in a language other than the surrounding mother tongue”1, and goes on to pinpoint

some of the characteristics, both assets and drawbacks, of that phenomenon. Notably, he

highlights the particular technical difficulties posed by the use of dialogue in IWE works: “It

would require very exceptional gifts and total bilingualism to express directly in English the

lives of people who do not themselves speak English”2, while noting the very specific

positioning of the Indian intellectual writing in English, in terms which, though today they

require rephrasing for gender, remain perceptive and eloquent: “What the Indian poet or

novelist may present … is his own experience as a man educated to think and feel in Western

categories confronting the radically different culture all around him”3. McCutchion supposes a

surface-and-depth model: under the English-language surface lies a “radically different”

Indian mind.

Recalling McCutchion’s still-valid comments, we may define Indian Writing in English as

original creative writing produced in English by Indian writers or writers of Indian origin,

resident or expatriate, for whom English will normally be a second language but who have in

all probability been educated, even within India, in English-medium schools and universities,

and are likely to write English more fluently than any native Indian language. This very

particular set of conditions, inherited from the Raj but carried on beyond Independence to the

present day, in no way makes these writers any less Indian: in most cases they are

representing the lives, conversations and thoughts of Indian characters who more often than

not are presumed to be speaking and thinking not in English at all, but in a plurality of Indian

languages. It has been said that IWE is already a case of translated literature, in the sense that

it is already the product of a transfer between, schematically, two cultural systems or

polysystems, even before anyone translates the text into a third language. Here we may

connect McCutchion’s surface-and-depth model with the analysis of the contemporary

translation scholar (and translator of IWE into Spanish), Dora Sales Salvador, who, writing in

2001, argues that “Indian narrative in English is a fictional echo of multilingualism and

interculturality”, further seeing such “literature written originally in English [as] a sort of

transcreation where [other] languages and cultural forms … survive, as a co-present

substratum” at the intersection between “diverse linguistic and literary systems”4. This model

constitutes the English-language surface as the visible stratum and the native Indian thoughtpatterns

as the substratum, thus making the IWE work a kind of “palimpsest, where one

“cultural text” is superimposed upon another that it does not completely conceal”5. Thus, as

Dora Sales sees it, Indians writing in English aim to make that language “contain and express

what they feel, carrying the memento of other tongues’ worldview, that somehow survives and

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beats, in that translational passage”6. This is no easy task, for, as she reminds us, “to maintain

the cultural references when moving from one linguistic system to another is extremely

difficult, because we cannot forget that language is the repository of inherited values, belief

systems, and modes of experience and sensibility”7. It will most certainly be useful, when we

examine the translation problems thrown up by IWE texts, to recall that very similar problems

have more than likely already come up for the author in the composition of the original.

As we have seen, Dora Sales invokes the concept of “transcreation”, implying a substantially

transformative form of translation carried out with a high degree of cultural empathy. This

notion is associated above all with the distinguished Kolkata-based scholar and founder of the

Writers Workshop publishing house, P. Lal – whose long-term achievement, indeed, in a

certain sense forms a bridge between the ideas of David McCutchion, with whom he worked

closely, and those of Dora Sales some three decades later. P. Lal’s work is, as he has stated,

based on the credo that “English is a member of the Indian family of languages” and, indeed,

“an intimate part of the Indian cultural psyche”,8 having “proved its ability as a language toplay a creative role in Indian literature”9. Close homage to Lal’s work is paid by both Western

critics. McCutchion, echoing Lal’s own words, declared in his book: “Whenever the ability of

the Indian writer in English to “play a creative role” is called in question, P. Lal is ready with

a manifesto”10; while Dora Sales, in an essay on Lal published in 2005, similarly stresses howthe great scholar “has always shown that his great passion is creativity”11, and praises his

concept of transcreation as implying that “the essence is to keep and transfer the cultural

ethos, through the alchemy of a global language, English in this case”, adding that in her view

IWE itself “is also a sort of transcreation”.12 For these two non-Indian scholars, then, the

endogenous positions of P. Lal help point up both the Indianness and the creativity of Indian

writing, even when the language medium chosen is English.

Some Indian scholars, attentive to the nuts and bolts of textual detail, have proposed a

sociolinguistic approach to literary analysis in general or the study of IWE in particular.

Prakash Chandra Pradhan, in an essay of 2002, proposes a general model of literary study that

would prioritise as tools stylistics, sociolinguistics and the use of extra-linguistic contextual

information. He writes: “A good piece of fictional text is rich in meaning and it has a range of

interesting stylistic / sociolinguistic features … The creativity of fiction is based on the

author’s critical consciousness of the resources of discourse and the practical skill to

manipulate the resources of language to certain aesthetic effect”13, while adding: “nonlinguistic

knowledge about the world is highly important for comprehending the complicated

processes of creation which have been produced by the interaction of language and

knowledge about the world”14. With specific regard to IWE, Jaydeep Sarangi, writing in 2005,

proposes deploying a wide range of sociolinguistic tools with a view to the close textual

analysis of IWE works, paying particular attention to bilingualism or multilingualism as a key

given in multiple language situations in India, including the creation of literary works.

Sarangi marshals a number of basic sociolinguistic concepts, including code-switching

(moving from one language to another), code-mixing (including elements of more than one

language in the same utterance), role-relationships (the structuring of dialogue according tothe speakers’ different roles in society) and

turn-taking (the social conventions governing who

speaks when). He applies these concepts to a series of IWE works by such authors as Raja

Rao, R.K. Narayan, Khushwant Singh, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy15.

With specific regard to Indian English and its literary manifestation in IWE, Sarangi offers a

number of important observations from the inside, which we may place alongside those made,

a shade more from the outside, by the non-Indian scholars David McCutchion and Dora Sales:

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In the linguistically and culturally pluralistic Indian subcontinent English is used as the

Second Language (L2), which is acquired after one has learnt the First Language (L1).

This co-existence … results in interference from one’s First Language in the Second

Language. Through a large-scale socio-cultural interaction with regional contexts

English becomes Indianised. A variety of English albeit non-native, lexically,

morphologically, syntactically, stylistically and sociolinguistically different from the

Standard British form has come to be known as Indian Variety of English …16.

English, as a link language in India, carries the weight of different experiences in

different contexts / surroundings. English is essentially malleable in nature, adapting

its form to suit cultural contexts …17. In the case of literary Indian English, loantranslations or word borrowings from the regional languages of the subcontinent are

embedded in the English text, as markers pointing out a cultural distinctiveness. The

writers of Indian writings in English often refuse to gloss untranslated words /

expressions to be true to their respective roots. Lexical openness is a trademark ofIndian English canon18.

My own analysis will be concerned, bearing in mind the insights of Pradhan and Sarangi, with

the concrete understanding of the words on the page, especially from the viewpoint of

potential translation difficulties. I shall adopt an essentially descriptive and lexical approach,

taking into account the characteristics of Indian English as divisible into a number of lexical

strands, considering both who uses a given word, expression or acronym, and when and why

(the sociolinguistic perspective), and the origin and connotations of the terms (thinking of

both Pradhan’s “knowledge about the world” and Sarangi’s “cultural distinctiveness”).

Considering standard Indian English as a variant of standard International English, we may,

provisionally, identify nine lexical strands specific to Indian English, which we shall now

describe in turn: a) pan-Indian terms, or words from Indian languages absorbed into Indian

English as lexical items and understood throughout India – e.g. lakh; crore; dhoti; dhobi; mali;

b) Indian “localisms”, pertaining to a specific language or cultural area, e.g. to take two south

Indian culinary items: idli; dosa; c) native Indian words that have been absorbed beyond Indiainto general International English – e.g. karma; dharma; swami; sari; d) native Indian words

that have been absorbed, more specifically into British English, either via the Raj or more

recently, e.g. through Indian restaurants or musical styles – e.g. (first type) wallah; pukka;

dekko; (second type) chapati; biryani; bhangra. e) transplanted Britishisms (words, idioms,

acronyms) still used in the UK and recognisable as such to a reader from that country – e.g.

GP (general practitioner); snazzy; culture-vulture; f) “old” Britishisms, that is, terms that now

seem dated or anachronistic to a British reader but are still current coin in India – e.g. GPO

(General Post Office); thrice (for three times); doing bird (= being in jail); chip off the old

block (= like father, like son); g) American or other neologisms pertaining to InternationalEnglish and often associated with globalisation or the journalistic register – e.g.

MBA; startup;

h) coinages or acronyms formed from within the usual rules of English but unique to India

- e.g. scheduled castes; shirtings; in-charge; NRI (Non-Resident Indian); i) cases of suchcoinages that have passed into International English, e.g. Bollywood; Goa trance. In its very

richness and creativity, Indian English emerges from this descriptive analysis as a specific

form of English that may legitimately be considered as important a variant of the international

language as British or American English. It will, therefore, inevitably generate a number of

specific translation problems, whatever the language translated into.

I shall now examine one extract each from four different IWE novels, with a view to

identifying some of the persistent language problems associated with Indian English that are

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liable to produce translation difficulties. For present purposes I shall not have any particular

target language in mind; I shall, however, be assuming a Western language, while of course

being fully aware that IWE works are also, and indeed frequently, translated into Indian

languages. I have chosen four novels, two by men and two by women and three of them by

living authors, that are set entirely in India, and whose characters are entirely or mostly

Indian. They are: The Painter of Signs (1967) by the late R.K. Narayan; In Custody (1984) byAnita Desai; Ladies Coupé (1999) by Anita Nair; and The Hungry Tide (2004) by Amitav

Ghosh. Of the four authors, Narayan and Nair lived or live in India, while Ghosh and Desai

are non-resident (Anita Desai is, in addition, half-German, from her mother’s side). The

characters in Narayan and Desai are Indians one and all; Nair’s are Indian apart from

foreigners in brief cameo roles; and Ghosh’s are Indian other than that one is a Bengali-

American. The location of Desai’s narrative is in and around Delhi; of Narayan’s and Nair’s, in

south India; of Ghosh’s, in Bengal. The dominant Indian language or languages in the social

environments described are, variously, Hindi and Urdu (Desai), Tamil (Narayan and Nair),

and Bengali (Ghosh). In each case and with the hope of at least approximately comparing like

with like, I shall, while briefly explaining the plot, confine my analysis to the opening

sequence of the book. It is obviously not my purpose in the present context to offer a literarycritical

analysis of the novels concerned19, and the analyses suggested will therefore be

essentially linguistic in nature, stressing the lexical, sociolinguistic and sociocultural aspects,

and with a specific orientation towards translation. As we journey through these texts, I shall

from time to time be invoking Hobson-Jobson, the epic Raj-era dictionary from 1885 which,

as Salman Rushdie has said, bears “eloquent testimony to the unparalleled intermingling that

took place between English and the languages of India”20, and remains unsurpassed for wealth

of information even to this day.

R.K. NARAYAN

Our first analysis will concern R.K. Narayan’s novel The Painter of Signs. This novel,

published in 1967, sets its fictional events in 1962, in, as always with Narayan, the imaginary

south Indian town of Malgudi. Raman, the painter of signs, is a bachelor of a certain age who

falls in love with Daisy, a militant social reformer who works at a family planning centre and

is the embodiment of a new type of emancipated, feminist post-Independence Indian woman.

The projected marriage does not happen; Daisy departs Malgudi to take her message to ever

more remote parts of south India, and Raman is left with even less than he had before. Raman

is a native speaker of Tamil, but is college-educated (presumably in English), and is a keen

reader in both English and Tamil: “For browsing in the afternoon Raman hardly cared what

book he chose; it might be Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or [Thiruvalluvar's] Kural - that tenthcenturyTamil classic21“. The signs he paints for a living appear to be variously in either

language, with occasional ventures into others such as Sanskrit. The novel’s cultural codes

thus shift continuously between India and the West, in what might be called a form of

“cultural code-switching”, so that it can, on one and the same page, cite Shakespeare’s

Hamlet22 and go on to recall Krishna’s injunctions from the Bhagavad Gita23.The book’s opening pages, eight in number24, introduce not Daisy but Raman’s daily routine.

This first episode centres on a not entirely successful transaction between the painter of signs

and a client, a just-graduated lawyer who wants his nameboard up outside his family’s house.

The dialogue between Raman and the lawyer presumably takes place in Tamil; the sign,

however, is in English, for when Raman arrives at the lawyer’s house he has to warn the man’s

entourage: “’still not dry. The letter “A” with all that amount of shading on its side will take

time to dry. Don”t touch “A” whatever you may do”"25; and later, Raman warns the lawyer

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himself: “”Careful! Four “A’s are still wet. (…) Thank God you are not a barrister-at-law,

otherwise there would have been three more “A’s”"26.

We shall now consider what words or expressions in these pages of Narayan’s might throw up

translation problems in this hybrid linguistic context. The opening sentence reads: “Raman’s

was the last house in Ellaman Street; a little door on the back wall opened, beyond a stretch of

sand, to the river”: the lexicon here is, the street-name apart, deadpan International English.

We then learn that “Raman had been button-holed by the lawyer”, who wanted his nameboard

“delivered on a certain auspicious day”27, and may note the idiomatic English use of “buttonholed”,

but, at the same time, a use of “auspicious” that derives from very Indian notions of

astrology, a theme stressed several times which serves to highlight the clash between Raman’s

rationalism and the traditional beliefs of his entourage.

The two go to a cheap restaurant to thrash out the deal. Here again, Narayan’s English is

distinctively idiomatic, using a colloquial register that will certainly be familiar to a British

reader – “The lawyer beckoned to a boy who was darting about the tables, and bawled his

order over the din of clattering cups and film music”28 - but encompassing a specifically

Indian reference to “film music”, which could be either pan-Indian from Bollywood or, in a

nod to regional sentiment, the Tamil film industry in Madras29, and is therefore not quite as

straightforward a reference as the non-Indian reader might think.

On the second page, the book’s first specifically Indian lexical item comes up, though proving

to be nothing more difficult than “rupees”: further down, we find an Indian use of an English

word in the form of (as in American English) “kerosene” rather than the British usage

“paraffin”; and, later, “oil-monger”, an Indian coinage, though based on general English

morphology, on the analogy of “fishmonger”30. Colloquial Britishisms, taken over into Indian

English, dot the text too, as in Raman’s “That sounds pretty convincing” and “If a chap wants

to steal …”31. Indeed, no real Indian localism appears until Raman has entered the kitchen of

the lawyer’s family house, with the precious sign in his bag. Now, “the lawyer and his two

cousins became suddenly very active and effusive, and propelled Raman towards the kitchen,

saying, ‘Coffee and idli for this man’”; following which: “Out of the smoke-filled kitchen, a

woman emerged blowing her nose and wiping her eyes, bearing on a little banana leaf two

white idlis, tinted with red chilli-powder and oil”32. South Indianness, a key theme inNarayan, is here connoted not only by the obviously exotic term idlis33, embedded in the

English-language text, plus the localism of the banana leaf, but also, and less obviously to an

outsider, by the apparently neutral reference to coffee as opposed to tea.

Over what remains of this episode, if much of the subject-matter – e.g. the priest’s blessing of

the new lawyer – is eminently Indian, the language is for the most part idiomatically English.

The lawyer’s father shouts at the children: “Get out of the way, brats!”34 The lawyer turns

round on Raman and complains that there are sand particles on the sign, challenging him: “Do

you want me to start my career with dirt on my name?”, which elicits an aside from Raman:

“You are bound to have it sooner or later, why not now?”35 - thus activating a notable feature

of Indian English, its comfortableness with such sophisticated elements as figurative language

and double meanings within the adopted tongue. Raman departs in dudgeon, unpaid and

concluding – ruefully but, again, in most idiomatic English: “He would be throwing good

money after bad money if he tried to do another board for the lawyer”.36 He goes on to reflect

on the general sad state of business ethics in Malgudi, while wondering if he too is not in a

way a willing part of the system he disapproves: “he felt abashed when he realized that he was

perhaps picking his own loot in the general scramble of a money-mad world!”37. Here, “loot”

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points up the historical and cultural complexities of Indian English: this word, which

Anglophone readers will recognise as an informal term for plunder or ill-gotten gains, in fact

came into British English through the Raj and derives, according to the Concise Oxford

Dictionary, from the Hindi word lut; while Hobson-Jobson traces it back further to Sanskrit

lotra, locating its first use in English in 1788 and commenting that it “has long been a familiaritem in the Anglo-Indian colloquial”.38 Narayan’s text here shows Indian English

reappropriating a native term and bringing it back home – a nuance that a translator may find

it hard to convey.

All in all, we may note from these pages of The Painter of Signs two facets of an IWE text

that are likely to complicate the task of the translator: firstly, specifically Indian, and often

local, cultural themes (south Indian identity; rationality versus tradition), whose proper

communication calls for substantial familiarity with things Indian on the translator’s part;

secondly and in a different direction, the strong textual presence of very English idioms,

pertaining either to British or to general International English, whose exact register may be

hard to reproduce in translation without over-naturalisation.

ANITA DESAI

We shall now move from southern to northern India and examine the first chapter of In

Custody, Anita Desai’s Booker-shortlisted novel of 198439. This narrative, though written inEnglish, is about what Desai’s text explicitly calls “the politics of language”

40, focusing on the

rivalry between a dominant Hindi and an embattled Urdu, and, poised somewhere between

elegy and farce, charts the decline of the once-vibrant Urdu culture of Delhi. This is expressed

through the bittersweet encounter between Deven, a Hindu and hard-up teacher of Hindi and

part-time critic and poet, and a fading Muslim cultural icon, the vain, ageing but brilliant

Urdu poet, Nur. Deven lives in Mirpore, a small city – like Malgudi, fictional – located near

Delhi, where he teaches at a low-prestige college: his subject is Hindi literature, but he was

brought up bilingually in Hindi and Urdu. The book opens with Deven receiving a surprise

visit at his workplace from an old college friend, Murad, who edits an Urdu-language literary

journal: Murad asks him to go to Delhi and interview Nur for the journal, and Deven’s

acceptance of this task sets the story in motion.

In Custody’s opening sentence is this: “His first feeling on turning around at the tap on his

shoulder while he was buying cigarettes at the college canteen and seeing his old friend

Murad was one of joy so that he gasped “Murad? You?” and the cigarettes fell from his hand

in amazement, but this rapidly turned to anxiety when Murad gave a laugh, showing the betelstained

teeth beneath the small bristling moustache he still wore on his upper lip”41. This

sentence raises four points, linguistic or cultural, which the non-Indian reader or translator

should be aware of. First, Murad’s name immediately identifies him to an Indian, but not

necessarily to an outsider, as a Muslim. Second, the apparently unproblematic word “college”

could raise translation problems into some languages, given the slipperiness of an educational

term found in British, American and Indian English with varying significations in each, that

does not necessarily mean the same thing in all contexts. In India, an institution called

“college” can be, variously, a secondary school, a subdivision of a university, or, as here, a

non-university higher education establishment, the imaginary, privately-endowed Lala Ram

Lal College. Third, the book’s first embedded Indianism appears in the shape of betel, definedby Hobson-Jobson as “the leaf of the Piper betel [plant], chewed with the dried areca-nut …

by the natives of India” and derived by that dictionary, not, interestingly, from a north Indian

source, but – highlighting India’s hybrid and heterogeneous cultural makeup – from the

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Malayalam vettila, meaning ’simple leaf”42. Finally and perhaps most important, the one word

“You?” raises the question as to what language – Hindi, Urdu or English – Deven and Murad

would be speaking in – a question which Desai’s text does not explicitly answer, and which I

shall attempt to resolve at the end of this discussion.

Further down the first page, Deven is named and thus identified, for the Indian if not the non-

Indian reader, as a Hindu. Deven keeps Murad waiting for lunch as he has to give a class: if

the attitude of the students seems, alas, universal enough and hardly requires cultural glossing

- “boredom, amusement, insolence, and defiance” – a specific cultural note is sounded when

Deven exhorts the class: “Last time I asked you to read as much as you could find of Sumitra

Nandan Pant’s poetry”43, thus identifying himself to the Indian reader as a teacher of Hindi44

but leaving a cultural trail which the translator may wish to explicate. The two friends then go

to lunch, at the cheapest restaurant the impecunious Deven can think of, and Murad’s gibes at

the food – “Raw radish – the food of cows, and pigs” – form a cultural marker, pointing up, via

the implied critique of vegetarianism, the Hindu-Muslim antagonism that is one of the book’s

themes. Deven reflects sadly that “he could not possibly afford a meal in Kwality or Gaylord,

the two best restaurants, both air-conditioned and exorbitant”, Kwality – a case of a standard

English word respelt to create an Indian brand-name – being a national chain of restaurants

which any Indian would recognise, while Gaylord too is an established home-grown chain

whose English name harks back to its two Indian founders45. We are dealing here with

cultural codes which the translator needs to be aware of.

As lunch progresses the two discuss Murad’s proposed deal, namely that Deven, who though a

Hindu learnt Urdu before he knew Hindi and is a lover, indeed a practitioner, of Urdu poetry,

should go to Delhi and interview Nur for Murad’s journal. Murad sharply denigrates the Hindi

language as “that vegetarian monster”, while praising Urdu as the “language of the court in

the days of royalty”: not all foreign readers will be aware of the parallel between

Hindu/Muslim and Hindi/Urdu identities, and here the translator will have done well to

explain these issues and their historical context in an introduction. An embedded Indianism,

“nawabs” – one likely to be familiar to outsiders – now occurs, but is balanced by an idiomatic

Britishism when Deven explains that he could never have made a living by writing at a time

when he had to support his young wife Sarla: “”I was married, Sarla was expecting, you

know”". Here, an unwary translator might fall into the trap of mistranslating “expecting” as

referring to what Sarla might want from her husband, but in fact this very British euphemism

means “pregnant”46. The conversation moves on to Nur, and, in the last Indianism to be found

in the chapter, Murad issues Deven the fateful command: “I want you to track him down in

his house in Chandni Chowk”47. The Hindi-derived term “chowk” is defined by Hobson-

Jobson as “an open place or market street in the middle of a city where the market is held, (asfor example, the

Chandni Chauk of Delhi)”48; and this word, appearing as it does in so many

Indian addresses, already plunges the reader into the Delhi back-street atmosphere that will

dominate Deven’s strange encounter with the poet.

The language in which the two converse in this extract is not specifically indicated, but it may

be the conveniently neutral English rather than either Hindi or Urdu: Murad speaks so

pejoratively of Hindi that he can hardly be using it, while Urdu seems to be the respectfullytreated

object of the discourse rather than its medium (it is also possible, given the objective

closeness of the two rival tongues, that Deven is speaking Hindi and Murad Urdu). At all

events, both Murad and Deven are Hindi-Urdu bilingual (indeed trilingual if one adds on

English), and the apparently monolingual text thus self-reflexively inscribes itself as a

instance of Indian multilingualism. It is the translator’s task to be attentive to the complex

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interweaving of cultural codes from three cultures – British/international English, north Indian

Hindu and north Indian Muslim – that creates the dense texture of Anita Desai’s unsettling

novel.

**

ANITA NAIR

With Ladies Coupé, Anita Nair’s novel of 1999, we return to south India, and to an

environment where, as in Narayan, the two main languages are Tamil and English. Nair tells

the tale of a train journey through Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and the intertwining

life-histories of six women who meet in the ladies’ section of a second-class compartment and

tell each other their stories. They are represented as telling these tales in English, except for

one who uses Tamil. The successive stories are framed by the larger narrative of the main

character, Akhila, whose departure from Bangalore and arrival at Kanyakumari on the Tamil

Nadu coast mark the book’s beginning and end. Akhila, aged 45, a tax-office employee and

still single, is getting away alone, for the first time in her life, from her constrictive, traditional

brahmin family. Her late father was a bookish clerk whose favourite newspaper was an

English-language publication, The Hindu49; Akhila, educated in English and Tamil, is at easein both languages and is an avid reader of women’s magazines in Tamil50, though her teacher

of that language had scolded her for knowing the poetry of Wordsworth better than the works

of Thiruvalluvar51, the classical Tamil writer whom we have already encountered through

Narayan.

In the opening sequence of the novel52, we are with Akhila at the Bangalore Cantonment

station, waiting for her train. The terminology that sets the scene, from the topographical and

transport registers, is already distinctively Indian, despite the English words employed. The

title phrase (“coupé” is actually of French origin, pointing up the hybrid nature of English as

such) refers to a gender-segregated convention, apparently now disappearing, of Indian rail

travel; the Raj-inherited term “cantonment”, scarcely found outside India53, denotes an Indian

city’s onetime military quarter, today generally a residential district for the elite. Both terms

call out to the translator to be glossed. The first sentence itself, however, is in a round,

unvarnished International English, with Akhila’s name as the sole Indian indicator: “This is

the way it has always been: the smell of a railway platform at night fills Akhila with a sense

of escape”. As it unfolds, the description of the station identifies it as quintessentially Indian,

and the second paragraph throws up the book’s first lexical Indianism with an evocation of

“moist gunny bags”, next to “the raw green-tinged reek of bamboo baskets”54 (Hobson-Jobson

derives “gunny”, or coarse jute sacking, from the Sanskrit goni [sack], through Hindi andMarathi gon or goni55, pointing to commerce as a source of the Anglo-Indian lexicon).

Now, Anita Nair’s impressionistic prose focuses on Akhila’s inner life, deploying resources of

language and imagery that deftly fuse International with Indian English: ’so this then is

Akhila. Forty-five years old. Sans rose-coloured spectacles. Sans husband, children, home and

family. Dreaming of escape and space. Hungry for life and experience. Aching to connect”56.

Here, despite the apparently simple incomplete sentences, Nair is in fact using highly

idiomatic International English. The “rose-coloured spectacles” image is an interrogatory

recasting of the cliché “seeing through rose-coloured glasses”; “sans”, a French-derived

alternative to “without”, is archaic and, in a nod to the canon of the former colonial power

such as we found earlier in Narayan, harks back to Shakespeare57; while in “aching to

connect”, the idiomatically intransitive “connect” raises another literary echo – “Only

connect”, the famous aphorism from a British writer to whom India was not unknown, E.M.

9

Forster58. In the next paragraph, attention shifts to Akhila’s clothes, with an obvious Indianismappearing in: “she took time over every decision …Even the saris she wore revealed this”59.

The translator can easily gloss “saris”, or may even not think it necessary to do so: the more

difficult challenge is the task of communicating the flavour of Anita Nair’s eloquent use of

International English, its clichés, cultural codes and idioms.

Attention shifts to Akhila’s family life, and we learn of her conversations (presumably in

Tamil) with Padma, her straitlaced younger sister: “Akhila felt her mouth draw into a line.

Padma called it the spinster mouth”60. Here, while “spinster” is an International English term,

if today decidedly old-fashioned in Britain, its connotations are clearly much harsher in the

south Indian Brahmin context. Anna and Padma are described having breakfast: “three idlies,

a small bowl of sambar, and a piping hot cup of coffee”61: here as in Narayan, idlis (here spelt

idlies) and coffee appear as south Indian markers, alongside the also very southern sambar62.

Once again, the regional dimension appears as a challenge for the translator.

Nair’s narrative now returns to the railway station, and we read of Akhila’s efforts the day

before to get her ticket to Kanyakumari: “Akhila read the board above the line. ‘Ladies, Senior

Citizens and Handicapped Persons’”. The notice would certainly be in English, but reflects an

Indian way of doing things: “there was a certain old-fashioned charm, a rare chivalry in this

gesture by the Railway Board”63. Her ticket had in fact been arranged by a colleague, taking

advantage of contacts to secure her a place on a crowded holiday train at short notice: “The

train is full. There are no second AC sleeper or first-class tickets. What she has got you is a

berth in a second-class compartment, but in the ladies coupé”64. The translator should here

note, not only the culturally specific notion of (some people) arranging tickets through

privileged contacts rather than queuing first-come first-served, but also, lexically, the Indian

term “AC [air-conditioned] sleeper”, a category of carriage unknown to British train

travellers. Her sister had asked Akhila how she would get to the station; her reply, “There are

plenty of autorickshaws”65, would no doubt require glossing, especially for non-Indian readerswho may have seen the film City of Joy and might, most erroneously, extrapolate the Kolkataspecific

hand-pulled rickshaw to all of India. The station reached, we learn how the eager

traveller ’searched the noticeboard for the list of passengers”, this noticeboard being an Indian

railway custom with which, again, outsiders may not be familiar and which the translator will

need to get across accurately. Akhila studies the names of her fellow passengers in the coupé,

the women whose stories will make up most of the rest of the narrative: “The sight of her

name reassured her. Beneath her name were five others. Sheela Vasudevan, Prabha Devi,

Janaki Prabhakar, Margaret Paulraj and Marikolanthu”66. This list holds some cultural traps

for the unwary: the name “Marikolanthu” identifies its bearer as Tamil, while “Margaret”

might, to a non-Indian, suggest a foreign origin but is in fact legitimately Indian, since

Margaret and her husband will prove to be Tamil Christians living in Coimbatore.

We cannot follow Akhila further on her journey, but the pages we have examined are

indicative of the hybridity and complexity of Anita Nair’s apparently simple and direct

language. Highly specific regionalisms and “general Indian” cultural markers such as the

railway terms appear in her writing cheek-by-jowl with a skilful and idiomatic deployment of

the resources of International English. Nair’s tale introduces only a very few non-Indian

characters, preferring to tease out the multiple strands of Indian women’s lives through the

medium of English. With the next and last novel we shall examine, however, we shall be

dealing, via the English language, with contemporary India’s interaction with the wider world.

AMITAV GHOSH

10

The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh’s novel of 2004, homes in on the human and natural

ecosystems of a small, isolated and highly particular area of India, but at the same time

imports the wider world through cosmopolitan outsiders – albeit of Bengali origin – hailing

from Delhi and the American West Coast. Ghosh focuses a magnifying lens on what might be

called a micro-culture within Bengali culture – namely, the “tide country” made up by the

Sundarbans, the islets of the Ganges delta that lie south of Kolkata and just east of the West

Bengal/Bangladesh border.

The story centres on two visitors to the Sundarban community, Kanai Dutt and Piyali (or

Piya) Roy, and their interaction with that community and with each other. Kanai, a Bengalborn

Delhi resident in his forties, is paying a visit to an aunt, an NGO activist who runs a

hospital on one of the islands; Piya, a Bengali-American scientist from Seattle in her twenties,

irrupts into the Sundarban world as less a diasporic Indian than an outsider pure and simple,

“the American”: she was born in Kolkata, but her parents relocated to the US when she was

aged one. Kanai is there to pick up and read a journal left him by his late uncle, an intellectual

in the Bengal rationalist tradition, whose contents will oblige him to delve deep into his

family history; Piya’s journey to the tide country is part of her ongoing research on dolphins.

Piya knows no Bengali, and her ignorance of her own language heritage induces her to take

Kanai on board as interpreter between her and the people she encounters in the Sundarbans.

Ghosh’s novel takes as its task the exploration of a whole field of human communication,

testing possibilities and limits as the characters seek to cross the barriers of language, religion,

class and culture – as well as those between the “old” and “new” India, and between India and

the outside world. As it happens, a central metaphor for communication in a hybrid world is

provided in this text by no less a theme than translation. Kanai is a translator/interpreter by

profession: he knows six languages (his native Bengali plus Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, English and

French67), runs a translation and interpretation agency, and offers to act as interpreter for Piya

with the local Bengali speakers whose knowledge and lore are vital for her research. Further,

Ghosh’s text announces its linguistically hybrid nature to the reader, incorporating a large

number of Bengali terms, mostly italicised on first occurrence and in many, if not all, cases

glossed within the text.

We shall now examine the opening sequence of Ghosh’s narrative68. Like Ladies Coupe, TheHungry Tide begins at a railway terminus, in this case a ’south Kolkata commuter station”.

Kanai, awaiting the train that will take him to Canning, the railhead for the Sundarbans, is

intrigued by the unusual figure of Piya, standing out among the crowd waiting for the same

train. The first sentence reads: “Kanai spotted her the moment he stepped onto the crowded

platform: he was deceived neither by her close-cropped black hair, nor by her clothes, which

were those of a teenage boy – loose cotton pants and an oversized white shirt”. Apart from

Kanai’s Bengali name, this opening sentence is in neutral International English, other than

“pants” for “trousers”, a term not found in this sense in British English but which American

and Indian English have in common – an appropriate enough lexical touch, given Piya’s

Bengali-American provenance. The second sentence offers details that unmistakably

identifies the station as Indian, even without any Indianisms: “Winding unerringly through the

snack-vendors and tea-sellers who were hawking their wares on the station’s platform, his

eyes settled on her slim, shapely figure”. Before the first paragraph is out we have the book’s

first lexical Indianism: “There was no bindi on her forehead”69 - Piya’s lack of a bindi (the

vermilion “holy dot” traditionally indicating a Hindu woman’s married status) pointing to her

in-between status as a “foreigner”, both Indian and not Indian.

11

Intrigued, Kanai wonders why this woman, if she is heading for the Sundarbans, is taking the

train, rather than the ferry as tourists do: “The train was mainly used by people who did dailypassengeri,

coming in from outlying villages to work in the city”. Here, in daily-passengeri

(commute), we have a striking example of code-mixing, with English lexical elements

modified by a non-English morphology to create a new Indian compound noun – which the

translator, rather than trying to formulate something similar in the target language, would do

best to retain and gloss. Kanai watches as Piya unsuccessfully tries to find out from a

bystander which is the train to Canning, and overhears her confess her ignorance of Bengali:

“she stopped the man with a raised hand and said, in apology, that she knew no Bengali: ami

Bangla jana nai. He could tell from the awkwardness of her pronunciation that this wasliterally true”

70 Despite Piya’s lack of language resources, Ghosh’s text here mutates from

code-shifting into fully-fledged code-mixing, thus pointing, even through its matricial

English, to the complexities of Indian multilingualism.

Code-switching returns as Kanai boards the train and – having lost sight of Piya – button-holes

a man reading a Bengali newspaper with a request to change places: “Aré moshai, can I justsay a word?” (the Bengali phrase means something like “Hey, sir”).71 Kanai is equally at ease

in Bengali and English, but given the man’s Bengali newspaper he would no doubt have

addressed him in that language, and Ghosh’s code-switching can be seen as a gesture within

the English text towards the goal of creating an authentic Bengali atmosphere. The move

succeeds – Kanai has done it because he wants to read himself – and for most of the train ride

he is absorbed in a description of the Sundarbans, “a few sheets of paper covered in closely

written Bengali script”. Ghosh’s text then “quotes”, as it were, a long section of this imaginary

article, but, necessarily, in what it offers to the reader as a translation – thus, incidentally,

comforting the position that a postcolonial text has already been translated (or

transcreated)72. The extract includes a number of Bengali terms, all glossed within the text,among them being

mohona (confluence) and bhatir desh (the tide country)73. Here, the

translator would be well advised to retain both the Bengali and the glosses, in order to

communicate the special hybrid quality of Ghosh’s writing.

English has thus far appeared in this narrative as above all a stand-in for a Bengali perceived

as the dominant language in the social and geographical context narrated. However, English

comes into its own when Piya unexpectedly changes seat and Kanai suddenly finds her sitting

opposite him. She has just bought herself a cup of “milky, overboiled tea”, a beverage for

which she has “developed an unexpected affinity” since her arrival in India ten days before.74

This conversion to tea Indian style might look like a sign of an acculturation or hybridation on

the way: but if that is going to happen, English is the only language she can live it in. As the

train jerks and jolts, Piya accidentally spill a trickle of tea on to the Bengali document Kanai

is reading. In the wake of the accident, they strike up a conversation: Kanai identifies Piya as

American, and introduces himself as a translator-interpreter who knows six languages – in

response to which discovery she has bashfully to admit her monolingualism in a multilingual

country: “I”m afraid English is my only language”. Kanai reacts in perplexity: “If you don”t

know any Bengali or Hindi, how are you going to find your way around over there?”75. They

separate at Canning, but their paths will cross and re-cross for the rest of the novel, and indeed

one of the major themes as Ghosh’s narrative unfolds will be, precisely, the communication

difficulties and cultural misunderstandings experienced in the Sundarbans by the monoglot

outsider Piya. After multiple vicissitudes – floods, storms, tigers and more – the novel ends

with Piya’s decision to return and learn Bengali, and at least the hint that she and Kanai may

have found a surprising future in their relationship. A madeover, Bengali-speaking Piya

12

would, indeed, enjoy far greater possibilities of communication and cross-cultural

understanding than the “American” whom the reader met at the beginning.

**

We have now examined, through the openings of these four novels, a cross-section of the

linguistic and sociolinguistic characteristics of Indian Writing in English and the translation

problems that may arise. Our corpus has of course been small, certainly too small to allow us

to extrapolate any generalisations about, say, the diachronic evolution of Indian English or

any inherent differences between men’s and women’s writing (important though such

perspectives of course are). What we have come some way towards establishing through this

work is the essential, indeed the defining hybridity of Indian English. If there are two

challenges that permanently face the translator of IWE works into any non-Indian language,

they are, on the one hand, the presence of lexical Indianisms, embedded in the text, and the

need to find appropriate translation strategies to communicate their sense and flavour; and, on

the other, the strong tendency of IWE texts to deploy to the full the idiomatic resources of

International English, with a marked continuing influence of British English, a characteristic

which forces the translator to decide how far each such idiom should or should not go into a

similar register in the target language. Today, translation of Indian Writing in English, for all

its challenges and difficulties, has a major role to play in communicating, to as wide an

audience as possible, the richness and complexity of Indian culture, in an ever-more

globalised world to which that culture will have a remarkable contribution to make as the

twenty-first century unfolds.

1 McCutchion, Indian Writing in English, 10.

2 McCutchion, Indian Writing in English, 15.

3 McCutchion, Indian Writing in English, 16.

4 Sales Salvador, “Translational Passages”, 1, 2.

5 Sales Salvador, “Translational Passages”, 6.

6 Sales Salvador, “Translational Passages”, 3.

7 Sales Salvador, “Translational Passages”, 7.

8 Lal, Writers Workshop, 1.

9 Lal, Writers Workshop, 101.

10 McCutchion, Indian Writing in English, 27.

11 Sales Salvador, “Beyond the Western Paradigm”, 12.

12 Sales Salvador, “Beyond the Western Paradigm”, 17, 16.

13 Pradhan, ’stylistics of Fiction”, 93, 97.

14 Pradhan, ’stylistics of Fiction”, 97.

15 The works which Sarangi discusses by Narayan (The Guide), Desai (Clear Light of Day and Fasting, Feasting) and Ghosh (The Shadow Lines and The Calcutta Chromosome) are different from those analysed in the

present paper.

16 Sarangi, Indian Novels in English, 17.

17 Sarangi, Indian Novels in English, 18.

18 Sarangi, Indian Novels in English, 19.

19 I have written on Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide from a literary-critical viewpoint elsewhere: see Rollason,

“”In Our Translated World”".

20 Rushdie, “Hobson-Jobson“, 81.

21 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 18. The classic work by Valluvar (or Thiruvalluvar), Kural or Tirukkural

(’sacred Couplets”), has, however, been translated into English: the Penguin Companion to Literature (which,

incidentally, dates it not in the tenth century but in the third or fourth century CE) mentions (4: 324) three such

translations as being in existence in 1962, the year in which Narayan set his novel. It is therefore at least possible

that Raman might be accessing his own cultural heritage through English.

13

22 “What’s he to Hecuba or Hecuba to him?” (Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 105). This is actually a slight

misquotation of Hamlet II.2, 561: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?”

23 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 105.

24 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 7-15.

25 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 10.

26 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 12.

27 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 7.

28 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 7.

29 As Chennai was then called.

30 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 8, 9.

31 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 8, 9.

32 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 10.

33 For the non-Indian reader, idlis are typically south Indian rice cakes.

34 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 11.

35 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 12.

36 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 13.

37 Narayan, The Painter of Signs, 14-15.

38 Yule and Burrell, Hobson-Jobson, 519-520.

39 Desai, In Custody, 1-11.

40 Desai, In Custody, 53.

41 Desai, In Custody, 1.

42 Yule and Burrell, Hobson-Jobson, 89.

43 Desai, In Custody, 5. Later in the novel Pant, the (real) award-winning contemporary Hindi poet, is denigrated

by Nur (53).

44 This is made explicit on p. 8: “Hindi was what he taught at the college”.

45 See www.paloaltoonline.com/restaurants/cgi/food_long_fab.cgi?id=167: the name “comes from the names of

the New Delhi founders, Ghai and Lamba. The two started the Gaylord family of Northern Indian restaurants

under British rule in the “40s”.

46 Desai, In Custody, 8.

47 Desai, In Custody, 11.

48 Yule and Burrell, Hobson-Jobson, 214.

49 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 47.

50 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 53.

51 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 52.

52 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 1-10.

53 Hobson-Jobson: “This English word has become almost appropriated as Anglo-Indian, being so constantly

used in India, and as little used elsewhere. It is applied to military stations in India, built usually on a plan which

is originally that of a standing camp or “cantonment”" (158).

54 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 1.

55 Hobson-Jobson, 403.

56 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 2.

57 The reference is to the line ’sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”, from Jaques’ famous speech on

the seven ages of man in As You Like It (II.7, 166).

58 “Only connect …” is the motto to Howards End, Forster’s novel of 1910.

59 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 2.

60 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 4.

61 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 5.

62 For the non-Indian reader, sambar is a spicy vegetarian preparation typical of south India.

63 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 6.

64 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 7.

65 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 8.

66 Nair, Ladies Coupé, 8.

67 Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 199.

68 Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 3-15.

69 Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 3.

70 Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 4.

71 Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 5.

72 Cf. Sales Salvador, above.

73 Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 7, 8.

14

74 Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 9.

75 Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 11.

**

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