PAST & PRESENT
The rise and fall of the bilingual intellectual
RAMACHANDRA GUHA
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`Like most of their contemporaries, Narayan and Anantha Murty were effortlessly bilingual. Which cannot be said, alas, for most writers and scholars of the present generation.'
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RABINDRANATH TAGORE is revered as the greatest of Bengali writers, but he could, when he wished, turn a fine phrase in the language of the colonisers too. Never more effectively than in his little book Nationalism, published in 1917, and consisting of the text of lectures delivered in Japan and the United States. In the middle of World War I Tagore asked his audience to take heed of this expression of destructive nationalism. Japan and the U.S., he hoped, would not succumb to what he called "the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship".
Tagore's Nationalism should be on the reading list of every literate Indian. Here, however, I am concerned less with the force of its arguments than with the eloquence of its prose. Allow me to quote two extracts:
"The Nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches, and the literary mock thunders of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that the Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation .... "
"With the growth of power the cult of the self-worship of the Nation grows in ascendancy, and the individual willingly allows the Nation to take donkey-rides upon his back, and there happens the anomaly which must have such disastrous effects, that the individual worships with all sacrifices a god which is morally much inferior to himself".
This is saying important things, saying them well, and saying them in a language not one's own. In these respects Rabindranath Tagore was hardly unique. For the other giants of the Indian freedom movement were likewise completely bilingual. B.R. Ambedkar wrote major works of political criticism in both Marathi and English. Mahatma Gandhi wrote his autobiographies originally in Gujarati, but much of his journalism — which, unlike the journalism of you and me, was timeless — was written in English — very good English. C. Rajagopalachari was an acknowledged master of English prose, and also a pioneer of the Tamil short story.
What was true of these giants was true of the lesser folks too. The Indian intellectual who grew up under the British learnt to love the language of his ancestors, and to have a healthy appreciation for the tongue of the rulers as well. The best of these intellectuals were bilingual, in keeping with the cultures they lived and worked in.
The real flowering
The real flowering of intellectual bilingualism in India took place around the 1920s, when, under Gandhi's leadership, the Congress became a countrywide mass movement. Popular patriotism generated an intense excitement among the thinking classes. The prospect of Independence generated debates on deep questions of politics, economics, faith, and social reform. Should free India follow the Soviet model of socialist dictatorship or the Anglo-American path of democracy based on universal adult suffrage? Should it industrialise after the manner of the West or instead focus on rural reconstruction? Could it become a secular state, or must its state instead be dominated by members of one religion? How would previously disadvantaged groups, such as women, low castes and tribals, be guaranteed the equality of opportunity that history had for so long denied them?
Through the 1920s and 1930s, these questions were intensely discussed in English, and in most of the other Indian languages too. The participants in the debates were, for the most part, bilingual. Like Gandhi, Tagore, Ambedkar and Rajaji, they wrote in their own language and also in the language that best allowed cross-cultural (and pan-Indian) communication.
The centres
Arguably the most developed of these bilingual cultures were located in Bengal and Maharashtra. This is where the most sophisticated conversations were taking place, simultaneously in two languages. Here, the scholar had a real choice as to which language to use for what purpose. Thus the Bengali anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose wrote his important works on Gandhism in English, but published his pioneering analysis of the structure of Hindu society in Bengali. His Marathi counterpart Iravati Karve chose to print her landmark studies of kinship and caste in English, yet wrote marvellous, and equally enduring, essays on myth and pilgrimage in her own tongue.
Between 1920 and 1980, or thereabouts, Bengali and Marathi were the only bilingual intellectual cultures in the world. The French write, think and speak exclusively in French; the English, in English. Yet in Pune and Calcutta, original works of scholarship were being written and discussed both in English and in the language of the bazaar.
The historian and social scientist can make best use of this bilingualism — he, and she, can operate simultaneously in more than one tongue. The creative writer, however, is forced to choose one language over the other. With the historian or critic, it is the message that is more important; for the novelist or poet, it is the medium. Creative writing calls for an attention to language that is total. Thus Tagore never wrote fiction or poetry in any language other than Bengali. Likewise, when they switched to writing in English, Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov were compelled to discard their mother tongue. Theirs was a choice forced upon them by exile and migration. The choice facing the creative writer in mid-20th Century India, however, was a voluntary one. R.K. Narayan could have written in Tamil; he preferred to write in English. His fellow Mysore novelist U.R. Anantha Murty taught English literature, and even had a Ph.D from a British university; yet he chose to write in Kannada.
Like most of their contemporaries, Narayan and Anantha Murty were effortlessly bilingual. Which cannot be said, alas, for most writers and scholars of the present generation. The Indian novelists who write in English now might have a working knowledge of their mother tongue; they can speak it and sometimes read it, but they cannot, I believe, make a career, or name, writing in it. Some Bengali historians of my acquaintance do write occasional essays in Bengali as well as books in English; but they are the last of a dying breed, for they are all the wrong side of 50. There is an increasing separation of discourses: with some speaking and writing in English, and many others doing so in their own tongues. Few are the scholars now who can travel between these very separate worlds. One of these exceptions is the brilliant social historian A.R. Venkatachalapathy, who writes fluently in English and more fluently in Tamil, and is yet less than 40 years of age.
Notably, while effective bilingualism is on the decline among the intellectual class, urban India on the whole remains a multilingual universe. Peasants in the countryside often speak only one language, but in the cities, workers, clerks and artisans are often conversant with three or four languages. I want here simply to state this plain fact, not to draw the unpleasant conclusion, namely that Indian intellectuals today are less in tune with popular sensibilities than they were when we were ruled by the British.
Ramachandra Guha is a historian and author based in Bangalore. E-mail him at ramguha@vsnl.com
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