A creative writer is like a lonely traveller, who travels along the path of existing reality but with his eyes fixed far ahead. He tends to see the bifurcations and the by-passes before the main road. Not only that. He has the audacity to venture into them. He sees all that is happening in the obscure pathways, but more than that, he sees all that may possibly happen at a future point in time, all that could have happened in the past and all that has not happened but should. In other words, he sees a reality that he himself creates which does not lie parallel to the existing reality but at an indeterminate and changing angle to it.

Every artist creates in accordance with his personal vision. It may or may not be close to a conceptual idea already expounded by someone but it can never be identical to it.

The fact that a writer grasps reality in its multifaceted form is true of all cultures. But it acquires an almost desperate quality in India, where the social reality is not merely multi-faceted but vitiated and corrupted by the historical process. If we dare face the truth, we have to acknowledge that there is no distinct civilization to which we can claim to belong today, unless we say that we are the inheritors of a synthesis of the Western and the Indian civilization. But to say that is to believe in a lie. Every thinker and writer knows it to be a lie. There can never be an absolute or perfect synthesis of two diverse cultures. All it can at best produce is an attempt at synthesis, which releases two or more equally strong pulls. Pulling the country and the people in opposite directions, it exercises a constant strain on the social fabric and national cohesion. The affluent have the means to propagate their culture. Being rootless, though, they are unable or unwilling to do so. Others who are rooted do not have the means. They have also been taught to envy the rootless for their affluence, so they become as unwilling as they are powerless to absorb the prosperous minority in their fold. We know that we live not in one but two Indias. One is scientifically conscious, technologically ambitious, rich, well equipped and ostentatious. The other is primitive, poor, devoid of the basic amenities of life and fatalistic. One is eager to rule nature, indulging in an untrammeled rape of the environment, in a new rich style. The other is totally at the mercy of nature and constantly subdued and punished by it. One is rootless and clings to material goods to gain some modicum of stability. The other is firmly entrenched in the earth and does not have the wherewithal to seek transplantation in fresh pastures. Yet it is the rooted who are forever being uprooted and forced to migrate and become refugees, because of the greed of those who chose to be rootless in the first place.

This is the reality that a writer in India has to face. And it is this reality that has given rise to a forced bilingualism, which makes him choose between writing in English or his own mother tongue. First let us see what bilingualism is and why I say it is forced. There is a vital difference between being a linguist and being bilingual in the Indian context. To know two or more languages by choice is one thing and to be forced to know two by the exigencies of history is quite another. There are more than 21 languages in India but most people are content to know only two. Of these only one is the language of the majority in that linguistic group; the other is always English. During the British rule it was learned out of administrative necessity; now it is learned out of the desire to earn one’s bread with extra dabs of butter away from those who do not have enough bread. The educated minority, which includes writers, constantly uses the unlettered majority as the dominant character in its creative work, but it does not participate in its struggle to subsist in an economically and politically hostile world. The rootless minority cannot survive culturally without continuous reference to the very people it rejects and oppresses. The majority, on the other hand, cannot survive economically without making compromises with the minority whom it envies but cannot understand. There exist, then, two distinct cultures, two sets of values and two divergent standards of living in confrontation and compromise. The pull of the alien culture strengthens itself mainly by the economic power it commands, while the pull of the slowly eroding old culture derives its strength from the sheer numbers that belong to it—the long history that has bred it and the depth of the roots that attach it to mother earth. Even if the erosion of the old culture continues unabated, it will take ages for the process to be completed. It would then leave behind a vacuum, not a cohesive social entity.

So the two cultures continue to exist without synthesizing. One feeds on the other and at the same time negates it. This opposing tension actually disrupts rather than nurtures the process of synthesis.

Under these circumstances, a writer has two options open to him. One, to create a reality where the oppositions of actual life are smoothed out and a synthesized culture is arrived at. It may then be projected as the Utopian resolution demonstrated for attaining the seemingly impossible ideal. The other is to recognize that it is impossible to synthesize without producing a vitiated synthetic culture. In that case, the writer would have to reject the present-day reality and explore a number of alternatives. To do that he will have to take the readers into confidence. He will have to offer them not a ready-made solution but ask them to come with him on an arduous and sometimes inconsequential exploration of paths, which they have to find for themselves, at least some of the time.

Both options arise from two different ways of looking at reality. They produce two different kinds of literature. I would like to call them literature of the “spectator mentality” and that of the “participant mentality.” Most Indian writing in English is of the spectator mentality. Most, not all. Let us see why.

The pressure to learn English comes not only from the desire for social prestige but also because most higher, scientific and technical education uses it as its medium. It is logical to try to learn it from early childhood in primary schools to cope better with the demands made on its knowledge later in life.

Whenever a plea is made to impart higher or technical education through the mother tongues in India, it is said that English has to be used because enough technical teaching material is not available in the other languages. But no such literature can become available because all those capable of writing it have been educated via English and consider themselves proficient in it.

A time has come when no original work can be done in the mother tongues because the technically trained people are not taught through them. And they cannot be taught through them because no original work has been done in them. Those who say that the government should first provide teaching material before allowing the use of the mother tongues betray the stagnation of their minds. The government can only provide translations of the English works which are already in use and not original works. That will serve no purpose where the ability to think innovatively is concerned.

The use of the mother tongue has to be introduced at the earlier stages with progressive upgrading to higher stages of education if we want to motivate a continuous flow of thought.

Generally speaking, we can say that bilingualism gives rise to two disadvantageous situations. First, it divides the people by creating an artificial barrier of language and hampers free flow of equal opportunity to all. Second, it encourages imitation and obstructs innovation and original thought. It does so in an insidious manner by penetrating the psyche of a child. If it were an onslaught on the adults, it could at least be identified and opposed, but it is the child who is the victim. Bilingualism creates a divide between his emotional affinity with the immediate world around him and the opportunistic expediency dictated by his guardians. In the process it strikes at the root of the future flowering of original thought.

Language should come to the child like air to be breathed and imbibed with unconscious ease. Learning the spoken language is not conscious education for him but a part of growing up like crawling, walking, cutting teeth and uttering the first word. From that first utterance till he knows enough words to give expression to a variety of feelings, words surround him like the buzzing of common household mosquitoes. He learns them with the effortless and joyous sense of being one with his environment. The process leaves him free to experiment with thought, feeling and logic. He does not have to expend his early fund of curiosity and memory on consciously learning a language.

If, however, his early schooling is to be through English, he has to enchain his curiosity and shift to learning a language which is not even close to his mother tongue in idiom and syntax. English requires not only a different grammar but a totally different pronunciation. Even before he has learnt to enunciate clearly, he is expected to make sounds totally alien to his grasp of the way people around him speak. Not only that, he has to come to terms with a new awareness. There is a feeling of anxiety and inferiority associated with learning this language that gets conveyed from the parent and the teacher to the child. They are themselves unsure of knowing or speaking it correctly. But they want the child to speak it faultlessly for in it lies the hope of economic and social advancement. The stress is on learning, speaking and writing “correct” English though no one knows exactly what is “correct.”

The creative writer’s plight is not very different from that of the child. He is faced with a situation, where each accuses the other of speaking and writing incorrectly because, at heart, everyone nurses a secret anxiety that he himself may be proven incorrect. The greatest fear of the experts of the language is that they may be guilty of “Indian English.” Worse than the wife committing adultery. However, nobody quite knows what Indian English is. All too often have I been told by critics, publishers and translators that we must take utmost care to avoid Indianisms. I have never understood this admonition. If Indianism is to be avoided, how can an Indian write? Why should he write? What is Indianism? Is it not the essence of one’s expression as an Indian? Is it something the grammarian or the philologist can dictate or is it an indefinable feeling, a way of life, an expression of one’s being in its diverse avatars? One person’s Indianism may be quite different, even contradictory, to another’s; yet both can be the true expression of their Indianness. Without this Indianism in language, which is the expression of Indianness, what is Indian writing worth? Let us say, writing is a love child born out of the ecstatic union between intense experience and passionate expression. The admonitions of a chaperon for correct behavior may lead to an abortion or stop conception altogether but it can never bring about the joyous birth of a unique being.

Experience is always attached to the soil, and so must expression. There is no such thing as a pan-world work of literature. We all know there is no work that can even be called pan-Indian or pan-American, at the time of its creation. A writer has to draw upon his own experience or at best a finite perception of the reality for his creation. Every literary work is rooted in the individual writer’s geography and history.

Shorn of the intimate minutiae of experienced reality, an idea is just an idea. It cannot become a work of art or literature, unless living beings play it out in life. No living thing can exist without history and geography. Even an idea needs words. A work of literature needs language and it is the only tool the writer has. Language is not a scientifically arranged or erratically chosen jumble of words but the receptacle of the essence of the mores, feelings, passions, sensibility and culture developed over centuries. It is the expression of the identity of a writer, both individually and as a being operating in a definite social and historical milieu. He need not accept this milieu. He may be in violent revolt to it. But he has to operate from within it. To express his revolt, he needs a language that immediately conveys the special meaning associated with the words he uses in his particular historicity. Hence the English an Indian writer uses can never be anything but Indian English, at least an Indian writer who is not reconciled to being an exile. A language can cope with feelings of revolt, it usually thrives on it, but not with bewilderment. Confusion of meaning between the written word, with its historically acquired connotations and nuances, and the sensibility of the writer can only lead to a crisis of identity. So the only real choice an Indian writer has is between writing in Indian English or his mother tongue.

We must remember that a crisis of identity is distinct from a search for identity. A search indicates positiveness. It leads to the forging of new ideas into a coherent body of thought through experimentation with new forms, themes and value systems. It is synonymous with a desire for change, which may lead to active rebellion or a gradual veering away from conformity. The search degenerates into confusion and bewilderment when the visions of the past, the present and the future get fragmented in a manner that there is no hope of integration between them. The crisis comes when one is sucked into the whirlpool of borrowed ideas, adapted themes and stolen experiments. It makes no difference, then, whether one uses a language one was forced to borrow under social, economic and political pressure with an inherent sense of inferiority and inexpertness, i.e., English. Or the language one had grown up with but was taught to despise as inferior by innuendo or outright condemnation, i.e., the mother tongue. In both cases, one is assailed with a sense of inferiority and inadequacy which results either in bravado or apologia. In either case, it leads to a collapse of the roots of identity. Not sure where to begin the search, one gives it up altogether.

But not writing. Writers are resilient beings. They do not give up writing easily. Some thrash around in the thickets of confusion but manage to have brief bursts of vision. Some conjure up paths out of the dreams of old and pierce the darkness with the light of their vision. But such people are few and far between. Most of them stop looking, and assume there is no way out. In fact as soon as one stops looking, there ceases to be a way out. Once the area of darkness is accepted as a given state, people can feel only two things, nostalgia and hopelessness.

Nostalgia is for a past they do not fully remember or comprehend but would like to, in order to overcome their sense of inferiority before other writers in other cultures. They set out to fashion the past on the basis of half-remembered snatches of reality experienced in early childhood. It is built upon by reading the works of people who had also never experienced it but had been fascinated by what they had in turn read. They fondly imagine that they would have been happy in that twilight world of dreams had they gained access to it. Or not abandoned it in early childhood. Such nostalgia is usually overdone, the whole passionate exercise being an escape from the acceptance of a loss of identity. This is most assiduously cultivated by those who write in English, from Raja Rao to Anita Desai. But it is not their sole preserve. We have enough writers in Hindi, who keep crying for the loss of an ideal village community that never was. One has only to read Premchand or Sarat Chandra to realize that the ideal village never existed. One manifestation of this nostalgia is an increasing use of the local dialects in the making of Hindi fiction. The young writers who claim direct descendency from Premchand tend to pick their characters from the villages or the city slums, where the migrants from the villages live. But since their knowledge of their lives stems from a distanced point in time and space, they substitute or supplement it with a heavy dose of the dialect.

The use of the dialect is nothing new. It has been used right from Fanishwar Nath Renu (Maila Aanchal), Krishna Sobti (Zindginama), Himanshu Joshi (Kagar ki Aag), Manjul Bhagat (Anaro) to Mrinal Pande (Patrangpur Puran), Abdul Bismillah (Jheeni–Jheeni Beeni Chadariya), Sanjeev (Panv Tale ki Doob), and a host of upcoming writers. But the reach and depth of the writer’s participation in the lives and times of his characters is different in each case, not only in degree but in kind. Whereas Renu and Bhagat live the lives of their protagonists, Bismillah remains largely a reporter, as do young writers like Shivmurti, Suranjan and many others.

The test I apply is to translate the story into a simple everyday Hindi, (I concede that it can be done only partially) and then see whether it could still move me or was it only the dialect weaving an exotica. On that basis I can say that while Patrangpur Puran remained just as fresh without the dialect, Kagar ki Aag lost most of its novelty. Chitra Mudgal’s stories Bhookh and Lane, Punni Singh’s Morcha or Sailesh Pandit’s Vande Bhagwati would have been more communicable and effective without the overdose of the dialect, which was a deterrent rather than a help. In Manjul Bhagat’s case, while the touches of the dialect add to the credibility of Anaro, in some of her other stories, e.g., Guldupahariya, its use detracts from the effectiveness of the narrative.

It is interesting to note that English phrases are now being used quite as often as those from other dialects in the Hindi text, even when the characters are all Indians. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the phrases used are, more often than not, bookish, unnecessary or overworked clichés that subtract rather than add to the power of the narrative, e.g., “Don’t kill me with kindness” (Ganit Gyan by Raji Seth—cliché); “Excuse me, please, whether bus number triple six is gone” (Ramsajivan Ki Premkatha by Uday Prakash—bookish, though used by a girl who had studied in England!); “She is shocked. It will take time to recover, poor child!” (Ek Asamapt Katha, Sumati Ayyar—unnecessary use of English).

There is nothing right or wrong in the use of dialect per se. But it has both a positive and a negative side.

On the positive side, it leads to an enrichment of the Hindi language. One may well consider English as “it is spoke” in India a kind of dialect, perchance of the elite. But it gets assimilated into the Indian consciousness only when it is Indianized by the so-called illiterate or semi-educated masses. They also manage to absorb it into the local language without breaking its rhythm or undermining the aesthetic quality. Sharad Joshi gives an interesting example of how nervous has become nurbhus in Bihar and “Hindized,” shall we say, to become part of Bhojpuri. “Kaahe nurbhusai rahe ho” (why be nervous) does not allow the word nervous to break the fluidity of the sentence. Whichever dialect we use, it makes a positive contribution to literary evolution and even to a particular work, in that it enlivens the language and helps in establishing the geographical location of the characters.

But it has a negative aspect which must not be lost sight of. It is this side which tends to gain an upper hand, when the writer operates in a vitiated reality. Most present-day writers remain content with the superficial display of empathy for the so-called silent majority, expressed through speaking their dialect. They do not try to go deeper. They fail to explore their psyche or the complexity of their reality and also to experiment with content and form. One reason for their complacency is the unfortunate fact that most Hindi lecturer-cum-critics are quick to hail these writers as socially conscious spokesmen of the silent majority. It is not silent really, only we do not care to hear it long enough to penetrate its words and reach a deeper understanding.

We would do well to remember that Premchand, the father of socially committed realism in Hindi literature, himself wrote a simple Hindi, uncluttered with consciously chosen dialect terms. Nor did he switch from one dialect to another with each of his characters. They were allowed to express differences in traits, social standing and location within more or less the same language. There were differences of nuances, etc., naturally, and a use of a less or more educated form of dialogue but not total dependence on dialect.

The conscious use of the dialect often breeds a false sense of satisfaction at being a rebel. Whether the writer is actually one or not will depend upon whether he suffers from a real or affected sense of hopelessness and disillusionment.

What then is the difference between genuine and affected disillusionment? To my mind it is of vital importance in the making of literature.

True disillusionment is always first and foremost with oneself. A protestation of disillusionment with everything and everyone else but oneself is an affectation.

Affected hopelessness suits those who are afraid of participation. Nirad Choudhery, Naipaul and Ved Mehta are masters of this genre. Others follow in their footsteps. But it is not the monopoly of those who write in English. The Hindi writers practice it just as well. The only difference is that while Hindi writers bemoan the loss of values and national character in the present generation, the writers in English see it in all the generations from the beginning of time, in the dark continent of Asia. Or shall I say brown continent. Particularly those who are happy exiles in safe havens of affluence. They try to pretend that they are different, but they do not fool anybody, least of all themselves. That is why they have to borrow the form for the expression of their hopelessness from the West, which has made quite an art of it since World War II. A genuine feeling of disillusionment with values and oneself has a way of bouncing out of the pit by producing experimental art in its search for something different and new. Hopelessness and hope move in cycles like the Keynesian economic cycle of booms and depressions. We have always known it in India. But it is not very fashionable to behave according to what one has always known. Affectation of disillusionment, on the other hand, pulls one further into the pit by the weight of imitative forms, clichéd idioms and borrowed themes without style that it imposes upon its exponent.

The question then comes full circle to that of the writer being a participant or a spectator. Most Indian writing in English, I feel, is of the spectator variety: All one can say of the literature in the mother languages is that at least some of it is participatory in nature. The dalit literature of Marathi is a case in point. But there are other such works, e.g., Itivrata (novel by Jagdamba Prasad Dixit) or Anayaas (novel by Yogesh Gupt). There are also a large number of novels written on the middle-class woman by women writers, e.g., Anaro (Manjul Bhagat), Tatsam (Raji Seth), Beghar (Mamta Kalia), Aapka Banti (Mannu Bhandari), Ek Apni Zamin (Chitra Mudgal) and so on, in which the writers participate fully in the lives of their protagonists.

I believe that the more one shifts from being a bystander to a fellow traveller, the more meaningful is the literature one creates. That is my value judgment. Each of you is free to make your own. That is the whole point of literature. Everyone is free to interpret reality according to his or her personal vision. Come to think of it, every novel, story or drama is in some way a distortion of reality because it is based on a personal and limited experience and vision of reality. But it is this personal intensity of experience and its interpretation according to a distinct world view which ultimately makes us understand the total reality. There is nothing paradoxical in it. The readers (society) get an intense and participatory knowledge of the total reality by absorbing a number of personal accounts of it, some of which cancel and some reinforce others. The greater the participation of the writer, the deeper is the participatory understanding of the reader.

In conclusion, I want to emphasize once more that there is a crucial difference between choosing to write in a language other than one’s mother tongue, like R. K. Narayan or Manoj Das or Jayant Mahapatra, and being forced to do so because of extraneous factors. The difference is the same as that between knowing two languages equally well and not knowing either well enough to dispel feelings of anxiety about its use. There have been any number of writers who have written in both English and French, from Samuel Beckett to Raymond Federman. Similarly there are Indian writers who write in two Indian languages, such as Bengali and Hindi, or even in English and one Indian language by choice and are equally fluent in it. Even in the case of a writer of Tagore’s reputation, the English versions come nowhere near the Bengali works in lyricism and power. A few bilingual writers in India may also be competent linguists, but they are rare. The large body of them writes with some degree of anxiety, which hampers a free flow of creativity.

What is the solution to the problem of bilingualism? I guess we will either have to settle for an Indian English that can be picked up by everyone or regain pride in our mother tongue. Otherwise, the scenario is bleak.

This article is based on the lectures delivered by the author at a seminar organized by the Center for South Asian Studies, University of California–Berkeley, and Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, in April 1990.