The Missing Public Searching vaguely for a Community in the Indian English Debate

Jayant Lele
lelej@post.queensu.ca
Queens University
Kingston Canada

      This is intended to be a short and sketchy intervention, by a non-linguist, in the long and complex debate over English in India / Indian English. The relevant debate has ranged over a wide spectrum. Three positions, among many, have intrigued me the most. The first one I shall describe as a sturcturalist position taken by those who assert the claim that a human individual is an autonomous self-contained being, at least as far as language competence is concerned. Hence, through a set of associated derivations, they conclude that the distinction native/non-native, used in describing Indian English as against American, Australian or British, has no structural basis. (This position, if I understand it correctly, has been supported by R. Singh, albeit with some reservations about its all-encompassing claims). According to this view the tendency of those who hold the second position, of those who describe themselves as sociolinguists and claim relative autonomy for many specific varieties of English, but still using British or American English as the yard stick, does not result in granting Indian English the autonomy they wish to confer on it. It only displays their continuing dependence on and subordination to the linguistic criteria of a colonial heritage. The structuralist claim, it is argued, does not bind the Indian speaker of English to such invidious distinctions and gives him/her the technical freedom of being or becoming a 'native speaker' of a structurally undistinguishable one and only English language, with many variations both within and outside the metropolis. Singh of course recognizes that the speaker has to come to terms with the fact that in the real world 'languages are not chosen but distributed'.

      The holders of the second position whom I shall describe here as functional sociolinguists, whom a sturcturalist tends to describe as variationists, seem to claim that they have discovered their own 'irreducible primitives' to account for the bewildering array of variations encountered in languages, including the English in India. For them these primitives are not reducible to rules and norms that the structuralist insists are anchored in the 'language competence' of human beings. That language competence, they insist, is a basic biological attribute of human brain. The structuralists are, therefore, at pains to demonstrate that the 'irreducible primitiveness' claims, about rules that variationists are supposed to have discovered for the varieties of any particular language, are unwarranted.

      Once we leave aside the considerations of irreducibility of their discoveries, the primary purpose behind the linguistic assertions of the variationists, at least as far as the claims about English in India are concerned, seems to me to be quite different. They are trying simply to assert and demonstrate, if possible, the emerging (if not already established) sovereignt y of Indian English, in terms of its independence from the original colonial transplant, with respect to the rules about normal use. They claim that such autonomy is present, not only in terms of some narrow linguistic criteria, but also in cultural, interactional, ideological and political domains. The claim is often extended even further. B. Kachru (1998: 104-5), for example, citing the authority of Wole Soyinka, argues that ex-colonial Englishes, including Indian English, have in fact become the 'weapons of the weak', in the way English of the South Africans was able to explode the myth of white supremacy from within. Asian Englishes have shown, Kachru argues, that they too are capable of 'carving new concepts in the flesh' of white (read metropolitan?) supremacy. Along side such bravado one also finds the valorization of the notion of distinct 'nativenesses' of Englishes. Indian variety of English is said to be distinct in terms of its 'functional nativeness', which, in reality, is still supposed to mean 'non-native' but avoids its 'negative connotation' for the sake of political correctness (see Y.Kachru 1995; 305). The metro-Englishes are granted their very own, distinct 'genetic', nativeness.

      The third position which comes dangerously close to the currently fashionable postmodernist nostalgia for an imagined past, is articulated by Probal Dasgupta. I shall describe it here, for convenience, as postmodernist. It deviates from the first two in some significant ways. It questions the value of engaging native/non-native distinction since the criteria for such determination have remained hazy. It thus distrusts the claims of nativeness that are based on an undefined notion of a native speaker's 'intuition', detached from (extra-linguistic?) issues of standards, norms or prestige. Dasgupta also seems to challenge the second position for not rigourously addressing the questions of standards, norms and prestige. Their tendency to resort to creating new categories, such as genetic and functional, does not seem satisfactory. Attention to the questions of standards and norms must necessarily involve us in the larger issues, claims Dasgupta. His work attempts to articulate some of these issues. It is difficult to see, however, what they really are, from the way he does it.

      Instead, we find him emphasizing the absence of a tradition in linguistics that grants the status of normality to the 'popular' varieties of languages. His reliance on the debates that arose in reaction to the European self-understanding of modernity is somewhat unfortunate. As subsequent critical studies have suggested, this notion of transition was itself based on a profound misunderstanding of the past. Invoking of such reactionary nostalgia for Gemeinschaft leading to its European aftermath already has its sinister parallels in contemporary India (see Lele 2000). Their intentions, as much of Dasgupta's other writing shows, he does not share. In the fashionable postmodernist circles, in India and the West, such juxtaposition of tradition and modernity essentially serves as a ploy to avoid dealing with now unfashionable and ideologically inconvenient questions about the real dynamics of the European transition, that is, the internally contradictory dynamics of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

      Dasgupta wants to bring back 'the romantic option' of community into play so as to question the validity of the existing claims of nativeness for English (and for English speakers) in India . References to the old European dualisms, such as city vs. country or 'Enlightenment rationalism' vs. 'romanticist countermove' are made, presumably to reinstate the superior sovereignty claims of the regional languages. The inherent tension of individual-society relation also seems to be approached through a strategy that seems to, rather strangely, parallel the current postmodern drive to overcome it by valorizing the romantic notion of community. Dasgupta seems to hope that one can thus overcome the current dominance of UG on one hand and reshape the uncritical valorization of 'native Englishes' practiced by a variationist sociolinguistics.

      Here my intention is not to enter the debate along the lines of the nativeness question. on the contribution of today's structuralist enterprise in linguistics to the issues at hand, all I want to do is to reiterate what has been said earlier (see Lele and Singh 1991). UG's systematically cultivated hegemony in linguistics rests not on the absence of some romantic reaction but on an institutional network bolstered by the dominant form of scientism it embraces. I believe that despite its strenuous attempts to close it, through its unsustainable scientistic reductionism, UG still holds open the possibility for an exploration of the various dimensions of human reflexive-creativity and sociality, anchored in the dialectic of body and mind. The differentiated unity of the human individual, as nature and community at the same time, demands that any universalistic theory of language and mind must, at the same time be part of a unified theory of human reflexivity and sociality. UG's dogged refusal to bring together these two dimensions, this differentiated unity, in the study of human language competence provides a welcome challenge as well as a minimal basis for exploring the freedoms that emerge out of the necessity of the materiality of our bodies.

      If my characterization of the three positions on the issue of English in India is acceptable, what interests me about all the three positions is that they all seem to touch on what Dasgupta (1995:319) calls "the big time issues". Rather than joining those issues in a direct confrontation, however, all three seem to prefer to waltz around them through what appear, at least to an outsider, to be innuendos. To put it rather boldly, I think that all three must make their assumptions explicit. All seem to agree that not all is well with the way English is currently positioned in India . They seem to be thinking about one overarching issue, therefore, behind all the banter, and that simply is: what place does English occupy in the contemporary political-economy of India and with what consequences for the people of India . (Here I am using the term political-economy not in the abridged sense one finds in the liberal-conservative social scientific practice but as encompassing the entire life-world of the population under conditions of an all-encompassing hegemonic dominance of a politically articulated capitalist economy.) The likely responses of the three, to the question about the impact of the position of English in India, will reflect the underlying premises they hold about the nature of Indian political economy and their assumptions about the direction in which it is going. My purpose here is to bring into open some of the hidden dimensions of the dichotomies and dualisms on which a great deal of discussion of English in India is predicated.

      In their analysis of English in India all three positions seem to posit, at least implicitly, contemporary India as a relatively autonomous community, as a post-colonial nation; and hence, presumably, coterminous with the territorial boundaries of the Indian nation-state. This means that they must assume, as Anderson (1991:7) shows, that "regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail", a nation is "always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship". All three seem to suggest that language must have something to do with that sense of comradeship, in the face of all the actual inequality and exploitation that so obviously prevails in today's India (and the rest of the world, of course!). One must then face the question: which language, or perhaps whose language, has the capacity to create or sustain that sense of comradeship and in what kind of community/society must this comradeship be anchored. The place of English thus has to be asserted or contested in terms of this capacity. Given the history of English and its current status in the world, all three also seem to recognize that one must look at the place of English in India in the rapidly changing broader, global context. This must alert a linguist to questions about the current world order and the place of both India and of English in it.

      The variationists we are dealing with seem to be greatly puzzled, however, with the strong negative reactions to the use of the distinctions such as native/non-native, inner/outer circles, old/new in characterizing the wide variety of Englishes that one encounters around the world. It is not as though they are unaware of the historical context in which differences attempted to be described through such labels arose nor do they deny the continuing relevance of that history to the contemporary political economy. They seem to claim, however, that their only purpose in devising these classifications is to describe the facts of the matter (Y.Kachru 1995: 305). They justify their unwillingness to take cues from these negative reactions in the name of science and take umbrage at the suggestion that their actions may involve other than a 'pure' scientific interest. Their inability to explore the historical and contemporary forces responsible for the consequences that such distinctions hold for the people makes their enterprise, to say the least, irrelevant to the larger issues that we are confronted with. They fail to understand that such distinctions, by being disembodied of their political power and the power of their reification, in the name science, do in fact help perpetuate their real negative consequences for the people on the peripheries, both in and outside the inner circle. Such insulation from an artificially isolated domain of power and dominance, in the name of science, is matched only by the institutionalized scientism of UG. As sociolinguists, however, they are hard pressed not to ignore such social facts of history. This forces them to take cognizance of some real power relations. These relations are quickly reduced to 'ideological' facts such as English's 'hegemonic implication for the cultures'. Real exploitation and inequalities that result are then quickly translated into an "albatross of mythology". It produces norms of control that function as linguistic chains and their power, it is claimed, leads to such psychologistic and culturalist diseases as 'self-doubt' (B. Kachru 1998:95-96). The materiality of the power that lies behind these chains of control is thus conveniently ignored so as to arrive at a perfectly scientific solution to the problem: let us redefine our concepts!

      The impact on the people, of the way English is used in India , has been central in much of Dasgupta's work on English although in the exchange on which I have drawn primarily for this paper his position remains somewhat opaque. I intend to deal with the problems inherent in his position a little later on in this paper. As for Singh, the most significant point in his poser on the question, in terms of its relevance for the 'big time issues' is not that he takes a step 'in the direction of eliminating the privilege of Native Speakers' Intuitions from the discourse of the linguists, as Dasgupta suggests. Singh seems to aim at a more basic problem of privilege and deprivation when he faults the sociolinguist for the reluctance to take note of the fact that the distinction such as old/new or native/non-native, between Englishes, relate directly to the central-peripheral status people occupy in the political economy. It applies to the differences, not only between those who live in the metropolis as against those living in its international periphery but to the people at the centre and on the periphery within the metropolis itself. This I see as an important step in the direction of making it clear that the peculiarity of English in India , and the odious dualities that Dasgupta associates with it, are in fact symptomatic of the peculiarity of the world that we live in. There are, of course, varieties of Marathi in Maharashtra as there are varieties of English in England . What will we find if we were to turn Dasgupta's dualities of city/country, cognitive/expressive inward? What was the relationship between city and country like on India 's independence? What is it in now in the new millennium? How and why has this change come about? What has happened to Indian Englishes as a result and what role are they being called upon to play in determining the 'larger issues'? What are the textualities within that reproduce themselves in isolation from others? The thrust of these questions is to suggest to Dasgupta, that perhaps the solution to the problems of English in India cannot be found in some sort of strategic planning for language learning and social interactions within India but in critically imagining the possibilities for action that can directly address the really big questions.

      Like Singh, Dasgupta seems to be acutely aware of the pathologies of English in India and also of its links to what he sees as the bigger questions. The concept of center and peripheries does not however feature prominently in his analysis. It seems to have been abandoned in favour of dualities such as elites/masses, city/country, an industrial arena of production of power (political and economic)/ the powerless domain of the production of livelihoods as well as cognitive/expressive sectors. For him perhaps the most important split in Indian society is along the lines of a cognitive-political-economic domain dominated by the speakers of English language on one hand and a distinct and relatively isolated cultural-expressive domain, constituted by the speakers of Indian languages on the other. One must surmise that in this head vs. heart division of society, the 'imagined" national community is presumably anchored in the latter. Dasgupta admits that such distinctions may amount to 'uncritical acceptance' of naïve dichotomies' such as that between cognitive and expressive sectors. However this concession is made, as it turns out, only to point to the confusion generated in this respect by the success of NRI fiction in English. Here Dasgupta wants to counter its purported claim, that cognitive distance lends authenticity to their 'forms of fantasy and fabulation', by directing our attention, for once, to the political economy of the Silicon Valley and the high profile NRI presence in it. He also brings to our attention the high profile of the professional NRIs in the West generally as well as the very visible transformation of official attitude towards the NRIs, as well as that of the professional classes within India . Dasgupta goes on to assert that the literary centre of gravity of the high writing in English by Indians lies, today, in the NRI base of the Indian Anglophone community. He seems to suggest that the initial success of the likes of Rushdies can be attributed to 'the expressive needs of expatriate and other identity-insecure Indians'.

      Dasgupta's attempt to put the users of Indian English in an 'outer circle' by positing an 'inner circle' constituted by the (native?) speakers of Indian languages, as a community, and perhaps even a truly national community, comes under some legitimate criticism in Anand ( 1999). Anand, claiming to be the voice of dalit/bahujans, as the voice of the unprivileged in India , argues that English, as the language of power rather than as a language of resistance, is perhaps the only language capable of establishing a barrier-free communicative environment for the unprivileged in today's India . This had to do, for Anand, with the centuries of brahamanic appropriation of the entire instrumental-cultural domain by the ruling classes of India , using not only Sanskrit but the Indian languages as well. Andand's criticism of Dasgupta's suggestion that the informality of peripheral Englishes in India amounts to a resistance against hegemonic domination (which he seems to attribute only to the English speaking Indians) is perhaps misplaced. The real point of Anand's critique is, however, with respect to an implicitly assumed, linguistically anchored homogeneity of an authentic community of Indian language speakers which is then juxtaposed to a non-community of English users. The point that is of crucial importance in Anand's intervention, the point that Dasgupta seems to miss in his response, is about the insidiousness of the distinction between India and Bharat and the associated valorization of the 'vernacular' as the wellspring of authentic popular culture of 'the people of India', the people of a proud, 'post-colonial' nation. This distinction as well as the associated ones such as public/private or material/spiritual, made globally popular by a bilingual bhadralok, seems to do to dalits/bahujans exactly what Dasgupta claims English does to 'vernacular Indians'.

      There is, however, a point that both Anand and Dasgupta have missed. In post-independence India 's formal democracy the once well-intentioned development planning has successfully spawned a national-regional subaltern elite that claims to speak on behalf of the disadvantaged. It is both capable and willing to use both English and the Indian languages to sustain (perhaps even more skillfully than the traditional brahmanic political/economic elite) the status quo. By appropriating and subverting the castist rhetoric of Brahmanism it manages to challenge and collaborate with the established elite of the traditions ruling classes to thrive on the growing anger of those whose material deprivation continues to grow while enriching only those who have learnt to play the game, be it in English or in a regional language but able to claim the loyalty of dalits and OBCs through mobilization under caste labels. The castist obsession of Western sociolinguistics finds its parallel in the strategies of the new subaltern elite.

      Dasgupta is no doubt aware of the fact that the artificial bisection of the lifeworld into instrumental and expressive domains, or into a 'system and a lifeworld' is a global phenomenon. It most certainly is not an artifact of language acquisition or language use as such. It is fundamentally not even a product of a transition from some past, authentic tradition to some spurious Western modernity either. In stead it is anchored firmly in the increasingly deeper transformation of the material basis of our very existence, globally. The role language plays in these transitions cannot be understood in isolation from or with tangential references to the material basis of that transformation. Celebrating language specific rebellions against this instrumental/expressive divide played out in struggles of 'dignity' is necessary but not sufficient. A linguist like Dasgupta hopeful of the emergence of 'a new (public) space of serious discursive negotiation as to what shall count as productive activities and the 'knowledges' underwriting them' can ill afford to remain satisfied with a discourse about 'the political realities about texts' that conveniently isolates itself from the surrounding larger political-economic reality. While theory no doubt must emerge from practice, the crucial elements of such a theory, that emerged from a critical analysis of a praxis, that has now engulfed practically all domains of everyday existence, do exist. Dismissing them fashionably, as being passé for our postmodern times, may release us from the rigours of systematic analysis and deliver us into a world of brand new theories, a separate one for each new praxis. Such a move hardly advances the cause by which Dasgupta has so firmly stood for all these years.