Why are we not studying Indian English, asks Upamanyu Chatterjee at annual Sahitya Akademi lecture

New Delhi, Mar 9 (PTI) Having studied the "difficult prose" of "Naked Lunch" by William S Burroughs, a number of "strange texts" in English, and "incomprehensible Greek text in translation" as part of his English literature course at Delhi University, author Upamanyu Chatterjee on Sunday asked why Indian colleges and universities didn't teach Indian English.

The former civil servant was delivering Sahitya Akademi's Samvatsar Lecture during its annual Sahityotsav: Festival of Letters.

"In all colleges and universities across India, instead of the fundamentally irrelevant English literature course, why are we not studying Indian English, or why are we not studying English in India?" he asked.

"What is English in India? What is the study of a language without the study of its roots, its growth, its development? A three- or five-year course in English in India would cover its literature, its language, its influences, its eccentricities and, most of all, its history," the "English, August" author said.

The 65-year-old added that UK politician and historian Macaulay could not be ignored when he proposed the creation of a class that "may be interpreters between us the millions who we govern, a class Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect".

"...neither can be the stalwarts of the nationalist movement who were educated both here and in England in English, nor can we ignore the fact that the medium of the nationalist opposition was English… My idea for a course in English in India will cover the syntax and grammar of global English," he said.

The English programme, he added, should have a course on Indian English, "not to correct its idiosyncrasies but to understand them, their roots and their necessity" as well as a class on contemporary competitive literature.

"The students will also opt for an Indian language and study it with as much care, for three years, for five years. We are all bi-, tri-, sometimes quadrilingual, why lose the advantage? Each of those languages is a window to a mansion of riches and it is yours to live in," he argued.

The 2004 Sahitya Akademi Award winner quoted author Raja Rao to say that there existed several gradations of English in India and an "immense gulf" between the basic use of the language and the use of literary English to write fiction -- "to create image and metaphor and convey some complex thought".

"'One has to convey in a language that is not one's own, the spirit that is one's own, one has to convey various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word alien, yet English is not really an alien language to us, we are instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and English. We cannot write like the English. We should not'," Chatterjee said, quoting Rao.

He added that Rao must have meant that "the second literary version of the language is fundamentally alien to the country".

"I find that literary language facilitates the use of irony, it provides detachment, it produces a distancing effect, all of which, but only for a particular bent of mind and particular kind of story, are essential tools," he said.

The author, who studied at St Xavier's School in Delhi, picked up a book in his mother tongue Bengali for the first time at the age of 45 after his parents died and left a shelf of Bengali books.

He started reading, "armed with two dictionaries, Bengali to English and English to Bengali and whenever possible an English translation of the text".

"It is difficult to try and describe the experience of reading in your mother tongue for the first time at the age of 45 and approaching its books with your head weighed down with the baggage of an occidental literature," he recalled.

Chatterjee said he tried to find a comparable voice in the English books that he had read, only to realise that looking for "influences that leap across oceans and generations can be hazardous".

"The layered irony of Rabindranath's genteel 'bhadralok' voice in 'Gora' that the translation did not catch made me wreck my brain trying to pin down a comparable voice in the English books that I had read," he said.

"Even though I have seen 'Gora' being compared to 'Middlemarch' in juxtaposition that does little justice to either, it took me a while to realise that each literature and each language has its own cultural tradition," he added.

However, he found himself snatching a similarity of voice and tone with the English authors he had read during his reading of seminal Bengali texts.

"...which itself was an enormous pleasure but perhaps misleading, thus Bibhutibhushan's 'Pather Panchali' immediately was for me an 'Intimation of Immortality' from recollections of early childhood, and it's actually 'Paradise Regained' through memory," he said.

"That kind of comparison, even if it doesn't do justice to the book, gives you focus when you are reading. A book in which you have almost no experience of the tradition," the author added.

The Festival of Letters will conclude on March 12. PTI MAH MAH SZM SZM