ISSUES
English in the wake of NAAC
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There is a `crisis' in English departments all over the country, following the National Assessment and Accreditation Council's directive to frame courses that cater to contemporary (corporate?) needs. HIMANSU S. MOHAPATRA looks at the possible ways ahead in this scenario.
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IN this essay I would like to put together some of my thoughts about `doing' English in our college classrooms, which will, hopefully, show our willingness to adapt to changes and to get on top of things. But before that I shall sketch in the changed scenario of English in India in the wake of NAAC. This is a convenient shorthand for certain important developments which have impacted English studies in India.
Lang-Lit face-off
I would like to start with the popular story of the fat dog and the lean wolf, which was in circulation during my student days in Sambalpur in Orissa in the late 1970s. It was a story that was routinely used to beat pretenders to socialism with. The story went like this. A fat dog and a lean wolf met one another at the border separating the communist East Germany and the capitalist West Germany. The dog, though well fed, was looking sad, while the wolf, though starved, was in high spirits. The wolf asked the dog the reason for its unhappiness despite its very full belly. The dog famously replied that it had no freedom of speech in its country. But it was equally curious to know why the lean and starved wolf was in such high spirits. The wolf now revealed the great secret behind its happiness: its much-valued freedom of speech and movement, which compensated for its lack of food most of the time.
It may be appropriate, now that communism has been declared dead, to find other symbolisations for the fat dog and the lean wolf in the Indian society today. I am inclined to locate them in the field of English studies. The fat dog for me symbolises the language-wallas, while the lean wolves are clearly the literature-wallas. The latter are, however, not at all happy because their so called free speech is of no avail while their movement has been drastically cut down due to the chronic lack of funds in the college budget to support their flights of poetic fancy. The former are, of course, having a field day.
The declining importance of English literature as a "humanistic" discipline and pursuit in India today has been matched only by the rising importance of the English language in the present Mc-World economy and culture. This tendency has in the recent years been reinforced by the policies towards English teaching being followed by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), an independent and autonomous body set up by the University Grants Commission for ensuring both quality and need-based pedagogy and research in higher education. NAAC peer teams, on their reconnoitring tour through the Indian universities now, are pulling up the "old fogies" in the English Departments of colleges and universities short for not being able to offer "Functional English", "Communicative English", "Spoken English" and "Business English", to name some of the buzz words doing the rounds in the country at present. The Departments of English are being threatened with closure in the event of their failure to make the grade on this count.
The worst sufferers have been the English Departments of semi-provincial and semi-urban places which a state like Orissa is so full of. Charged first of all by the metropolitan bureaucrat, albeit of fictional make, with a total lack of relevance, as in Upamanyu Chatterjee's English August (1988), these semi-urban, semi-provincial English Departments of Orissa and other similarly placed States feel themselves, thanks to this NAAC fiat, to be almost doomed to obsolescence. Literature was never their strong point earlier. Now in the face of the renewed offensive from the language side, these centres can only complain of a Hamlet-like world-weariness. In the present face-off between English literature and English language the balance has been heavily tipped in favour of the latter.
The case against Literature with capital `L'
Take the case of the Call Centres, which, flourishing across the country as part of the outsourcing drive on the part of the multinational corporations, are out to transform India into a hub for the English language users. A well-known American critic named Susan Sontag has recently written an incredibly complimentary article about this new India in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement (June 13, 2003), celebrating the arrival of India on the world stage. The article is significantly titled "The World as India."
Sontag's article has, of course, provoked a blistering rejoinder in the same Times Literary Supplement (June 27, 2003) by the eminent Delhi University English professor Harish Trivedi, equally at home in English literature and language. Trivedi has chosen to take the gauntlet on behalf of literature with a capital `L'.' Calling the Call Centre recruits "cyber coolies", he has tried to shame them into an awareness of the sorry predicament that their newly indentured status creates for them in terms of loss of identity, local history and tongues even as he has tried to pour unmitigated scorn upon these young men and women who have simply been rising to the new challenges facing them in the 21st century. He has reiterated the point in a recent piece in Times of India (September 28, 2003). But he is bound to have few listeners in the present situation.
The thing is, the likes of Trivedi do not realise that their metropolitan location gives them a privileged access to the "lifestyle English" which is a distant and unrealisable dream for their moffusil others. The debate over "cyber coolies" has since raged in the mass media with people like Gurucharan Das (Times of India, September 7, 2003), Kiran Karnik (Times of India, September 28, 2003) and others joining the fray on the side of English as a lifestyle, but by no means unpatriotic, choice for the new generation. Trivedi's is a lone voice now, which will probably find an echo among the greying literature faculties in our colleges and universities, swearing by literature with a `L'. It is anybody's guess whose side our young men and women will be on. The overfed dog of the story or worldliness can be said to have been revenged on the underfed wolf or other-worldliness, as has necessarily to be the case in real life. So this, in sum, is the situation facing English in India today.
The case against theory
There have been speculations galore about how to get out of the present rut. One of the most widespread tendencies amongst teachers of English in advanced metropolitan centres has been to reinvent literature through a "theorification" drive. This is, of course, literature in its "anti-humanist" avatar. Look at the following brave words featured in the course description of a recently concluded Refresher Course in English at the Central University of Hyderabad, identified by the UGC as one of the centres of excellence:
The view that literature is dead or doomed is somewhat premature! In fact, as critic Gerald Graff points out, the crisis in English Studies is nothing new. ... Buoyed by some of the most exciting development — theoretical, pedagogic and cultural — some of the avant garde English departments today have become part of a new school of interpretative communities cutting across disciplinary barriers. They have lent literature a new cutting edge, and new ways of relating texts with contexts. They foreground a set of issues that make literature central to the current episteme, a site for radical thinking.
What follows this is a long list of new schools and theories which have been sweeping the field since the 1960s and the promise that the experts will enlighten the participants on these developments. The point, of course, is that these and such other brave words featured in other similar course descriptions elsewhere are an attempt at preaching to an already converted audience, namely the sanitised members of the English faculty in the advanced centres from whose ranks the resource persons are usually and largely drawn. The participants, a large percentage of whom teach in colleges where the priority is on the functional aspects of speaking and writing English and on a somewhat vague admiration for literary style, generally emerge shell shocked from such courses.
In the words of a sensitive and well informed commentator, the "radical thinking" that we are setting such store by can be, and often is, a cloak for "hypocriticism". By this he means the bizarre, flagrantly ironic behaviour of English professors who think they must know more criticism because they know so little actual literature. To me "hypocriticism" is the self-defeating tendency to bandy about jargon and technical terms as if these can pass for real knowledge and insight. It means stealing from our nature, "by abstruse research", as a Coleridge would say, all the natural men.
Reading the NAAC text against the grain
What then is to be done? What is called for now is a view of literature as language. This might seem like conceding vital ground to the language-wallas whom I have portrayed in not very flattering terms earlier in this essay. But there need be no such apprehension if "functionality" does not involve the sacrifice of the deeper and wider reaches of language use. No, I am not trying to smuggle in the earlier "humanist myth" through the backdoor. Nor am I carrying a brief for "anti-humanist" theory. Both the humanist and the anti-humanist versions have failed to address and redress the schism lying at the heart of English studies in the college classrooms of India, which is the unbridgeable gap between production and consumption of texts, between literature and criticism. The way past this dichotomy in English studies then is to re-gather them around the idea of "textuality" which tends to equalise different kinds of language use even as it tries to stress, in the manner of the ancient discipline of Rhetoric, the passage from competence to performance as the very goal of a language-based pedagogy. English is after all a skill-based, not a knowledge-based subject.
There is as much space, under this rubric of textuality, for the popular icons of the day as for Shakespeare, the greatest among the canonical authors. The high literary use has had its day. Let the Nobel laureates dabble in it, agonising, as Elizabeth Costello does in J.M. Coetzee's eponymous novel, over their inability to write a line on a subject which can rival that by Shakespeare on the self-same subject. It may be mentioned that the line Ms. Costello cites is the one on sleep ("the sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care") in "Macbeth".
There is another use, a demotic use, in fact, to which Shakespeare can be most profitably put. This use, somewhat resembling the use of the "bard in the boardrooms", pioneered by Ken Adelman's U.S.-based company "Movers and Shakespeares" (reported in Times of India, January 12, 2000), is meant to extract from the author a "system of civil and economic prudence" in the manner of a Johnsonian common reader so as to ground it in life and experience. To this we might add interpersonal relations, embodied in suitable verbal behaviour, which is the quintessence of the modern "managessence", and which Shakespeare's writing so richly exemplifies. The best example that comes to mind here is the letter written by Antonio to his friend Bassanio in "The Merchant of Venice" after he falls into Shylock's trap.
My dear Bassanio,
My ship have all miscarried; my estate is very low; my bond to the Jew is forfeit. Since in paying it it is impossible that I should live, all bonds between us is dissolved if only I might but see you once at my death. Nevertheless, use your pleasure. If your love does not persuade you to come, let not my letter.
Now this letter, in its matching of size and sense and in its marshalling of cognition (miscarriage of ships, lowness of estate, forfeiture of the bond) and emotion (longing of the addresser to see a dear friend, not to mention communing with him) to work together for affective purposes (the inescapable effect of the letter on the addressee), is the very model and paradigm of "how to do things with words" that modern users of English, or, for that matter, of any language can learn much from.
My point is that this use suggests to us the possibility of doing English in a way which will reconcile the now separated spheres of language and literature. This will also mean saying "yea" to NAAC outwardly, while saying "nay" to it inwardly, or, which amounts to much the same thing, reading this NAAC-inspired version of English against its grain.
(This is a slightly revised version of a talk delivered at the English Department of G.M. (autonomous) College, Sambalpur, Orissa.)
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