English studies at the crossroads

ENGLISH STUDIES in India, as a genre, is at the crossroads today. Despite its indelible stigma of colonial associations, English continues to be relevant in India and seems to be destined for a more significant role in future too. However, the field of English studies in the country is faced with new challenges and new responsibilities, and its future will be largely dictated by the degree of success it achieves in meeting them. The concerns of a bygone age have to give way to the changing agenda of the present.

Paradigmatic shifts, necessitated by historical factors occur in English studies in the natural course. However, it is to be admitted that the English teaching community of our country have by and large remained indifferent to the dynamics of these shifting emphases in their own profession. The attention of English teachers at the university level has had its focus conventionally on the minimum requirements of teaching as a vocation. Their attempts to problematise the profession in the light of its essential parameters have been glaringly inadequate. Recent research has, however, become alive to this pitfall, and English studies has now emerged as a major field of critical inquiry. The search for a self-perspective, in terms of the changing orientations in the profession in its larger historical context, has now produced a commendable body of work with inputs from a number of erudite academics.

The contemporary debate has thrown up diverse approaches to the issue of English studies. However, there is one thing that remains with undiminished emphasis - the realisation that English will have to stay in India. The conventional notion about English alone being the link language in a country of such linguistic plurality as ours is relevant even today. The demand of our democratic polity for the development of regional languages and their literatures cannot in any way mitigate this role of English as a link medium. And this situation again tends to reinforce the other traditional notion that English remains our window to the world, howsoever some may try to play it down. Again, the recognition that English has won as a medium of creative expression in India, with its well-acclaimed literature, has secured for it a place integral to the country's cultural life, strengthening the belief that English is one of the Indian languages. Add to these the fact that English as a language is no more Anglo-centric, that there are many Englishes indeed, and that greater literature in English is created often in nations outside England, the argument for English as an Indian language becomes all the more irrefutable. Parochial centres of political power as well as growing powers of revivalism, which often join hands to overthrow English, fail to make much headway in the country primarily because, for historical reasons, this language has become inalienably integrated to the living culture of India, although its mass basis still remains relatively uncertain.

English is, it is true, undeniably a part of the colonial legacy but its role in the shaping of our country has been paradoxical. It is our experience that English has acted not only as a powerful tool of colonial hegemony but as a weapon for the cause of decolonisation. No doubt it was instrumental in the gradual conquest of the subcontinent by the colonial power. English education was a means by which the governors of imperialist establishment sought to achieve their subtle designs. Macaulay's `infamous' Minutes of 1835, the Woods Despatch of 1854 and the establishment of three British-model Universities in 1857 - all these and their consequential developments point to the imperialist underpinnings in the introduction of English education in our country. But, notwithstanding this genesis, it is also true that this same alien language, in the Indian soil, tended to release those energies, and help those forces, which gathered strength to destroy the foundations of the same colonial power.

Let us remember here Rammohan Roy's famous letter to Lord Amhurst in 1823 and the entire Orientalist - Anglicist debate which indicate the growth of a new perception in India at that time of English language as a welcome modernising influence. The reformist movement served as a cradle for the emerging spirit of freedom in different ways. The liberal ideas released through English education in turn helped in concretising the yearnings for freedom. It is only natural that many leaders of the freedom struggle - Gokhale, Gandhi, Nehru, Rajaji and others - not only used good English but used it in strategically significant ways in the fight against colonialism. This is a grand instance of what Soyinka calls in the African situation as ``the conversion of an enslaving medium into an insurgents' weapon''.

This, however, is not to give undue importance to the role of English in India's freedom struggle, but to emphasise that the role of English as a language should be understood with all the complexities involved in it. In the post-Independence situation, decolonisation, again, is our major agenda since the old ``colonial structures of subservience'' persist in every walk of life. The colonial world-view has permeated our ideas, education, jurisprudence, customs, economic life, and our intellectual and cultural transactions in general. The age of cultural imperialism, with its process of globalisation and massive manipulation of media, tends to strengthen and consolidate these colonial value systems. In combating the negative value systems, English as a language still has its role to play. English is one of the Indian languages today; it has learnt to co-exist with our regional languages, and it is for us to use it effectively, both in battles and across the tables, in facing the many challenges posed by the present epoch. To shut it off on the ground of its alien lineage is to forget the history of languages like Sanskrit and Persian, which have become part of our legacy.

However, a democratic redefinition of the role of English is necessary today, especially in the context of India's transformation into a democratic society. We should, first of all, learn to repudiate that inflated notion of an inherent superiority attached to English studies traditionally. To cast off attitudes in a hierarchical society is more easily said than done; yet there should be a growing realisation that such a notion of superiority is a creation of the colonial psyche and that it is tantamount to a negation of the popular roots of culture. Nowhere does this attitude manifest itself as badly as in the area of comparative literary scholarship, where we are yet to learn to speak on equal terms. G. N. Devy rightly points out that comparative literary study in India is ``the study of a `dynamic' literary culture by a society whose own literary culture is `tired'. It is the study of a so-called superior culture by a people who have acquired an inferiority complex about their own literary culture'' (1993: In Another Tongue, 167). It is high time we gave up the habit of accepting alien totems uncritically. The present trend of imitating and reproducing western canons in critical theory, disregarding indigenous and regional traditions in critical thought, is a manifestation of this subservience.

Second, English literary studies in India should get rid of its present propensity for being exclusive. Students of English language and literature often find themselves in a world of alien realities, divorced from their own native traditions and live cultures, and even tend to consider it a privilege to be indifferent to the environment around. Courses and curricula are often framed without any relation whatever to the living cultures of their own milieu. This will not only alienate them from their immediate environment but also weaken their perception and understanding of the very subject of study. Gayatri Spivak's observation in this regard is pertinent: ``the teaching of English literature can become critical only if it is intimately yoked to the teaching of the literary or cultural production in the mother tongue(s).'' (1987: Rajeswari Sunderarajan, The Lie of the Land, 295).

The divorce between English studies and mother tongue literature is perhaps one reason for our relatively poor achievement in the field of translation - a field of vital significance in the context of Indian multiculturalism.

The crucial issue involved is how to produce quality translations on a major scale. English study programmes in our country are seldom planned - though there are exceptions - to meet the requirement of translation expertise.

No wonder, even the best writers in our vernaculars are rarely known outside their language, both within and outside the country, with the result that, even to those literary enthusiasts abroad, Indian literature means the work of a few writers like Tagore, R. K. Narayan, Arundhati Roy or Vikram Seth! It is Equally important to note that Indian Literature in English Translation (ILET) has not yet achieved any respectability in Indian academic circles and, barring a few isolated instances, the English study programmes in our universities are yet to give it due recognition.

Third, English as a language, with its true internationalist propensities, breathes a broad cosmopolitanism, which is of great relevance in our contemporary context. Revivalism is at active work in India today, on a scale seldom seen before, abetted by political and cultural forces. Pre-renaissance value systems seem to be staging a big come-back, with the resurrection of decadent beliefs, superstitions and rituals and the progressive weakening of our secularist ethos. Countering this ominous process is the need of the hour, and obviously, in any such confrontation, language has to be a powerful medium. In the Indian context, English is a language that has the potential for offering effective resistance to this new revivalism.

To sum up, English studies in India today should aim at facilitating the national agenda of democratisation and decolonisation.

History shows that English language is capable of playing this role in its own way. Dynamic as it is, the language and its literature have been undergoing radical changes over the years. English is adequately meeting the changed requirements of the Information Age even as it readily absorbs radical shifts in literary culture, incorporating feminist, dalit and other new preoccupations.

What is needed is to shed the psychology of subservience and use English as a tool of transformation; to respect our own regional cultures and mould English studies in active relation to them; and also use it as an effective antidote to the rising dangers of revivalism. If only we are good masters, the language cannot afford to fail us.

P. K. RAJAN

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