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Felicitations: Sahitya Akademi Chairman Gopi Chand Narang honouring Anita Desai at a function held at Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi on Friday. NEW DELHI: Pointing out that some of the most lively and vital writings in English now come from the erstwhile English colonies, celebrated writer Anita Desai on Friday said there exists a large and thriving readership for Indian writers of English not only in the country but across the globe. Speaking here after being conferred a fellowship of Sahitya Akademi, Ms. Desai -- who is regarded as one of the foremost exponents of the Indian English literary tradition -- traced the long journey of the English language in India. “Earlier, English was an immigrant in a country already rich in languages and literature. Being the youngest and newest immigrant in an ancient land, it would not have been given a place at the table at all if it had not shown typical immigrant tenacity and enterprise, making itself indispensable in the bureaucracy, administration and law courts, the neutral language of ‘babus’ from across the country. Still that would hardly have won it a place in the Indian Constitution as one of the country’s officially recognised languages,” said Ms. Desai, who was thrice short-listed for the Booker prize. Pointing out that English had brought with it an incredibly old and rich literature of its own, Ms. Desai said there were Indian writers who found it a wonderfully elastic, flexible and rewarding instrument of creativity. “It is true that in my early days as a writer of English I and my colleagues were constantly having to apologise for using it rather than Hindi or Tamil or Bengali or Marathi. We were the leftovers of the colonial age, unfortunately educated in what everyone could see was not a native tongue and surely ours was the last generation that would employ it. Yet we were enjoying the challenges of making the language our own, bending and twisting and manipulating it to express our own way of living, thinking and speaking,” said Ms. Desai, whose writings have formed a unique consciousness with the picturesque hill station of Mussoorie. “In those years,” she recalled, “it was practically a matter for jokes as academics argued over what to call this language that refused to go away and remained inexplicably in existence – Indo-English? Indo-Anglian? Indish? I don’t hear those discussions anymore. I find the conferences we used to hold and the debates that raged there no longer rouse such passions. Instead, English has established itself to the point that no one wastes time in questioning its presence any more. Bookshops are full of the work of Indian writers of English.” Describing the event as historic, Sahitya Akademi president Gopi Chand Narang said such fellowships are rare as a great writer had been honoured as a fellow.
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