What makes Rukun Advani a great editor is that he understands language, and he understands thought. No other editor I have worked with has a PhD from Cambridge. In Rukun’s case, that early training in academic rigour was enhanced, while in the OUP, by working with historians and social scientists in shaping their books. When presented with a complex argument in sociology or political thought, Rukun can come to grips with it – and tell you how to refine it. By the turn of the century, I had begun writing books for trade presses, which were edited for publication by editors other than Rukun Advani.
However, as I have noted, since I trusted him so much, I continued to ask Rukun to comment on my writing, such as essays on subjects I was dealing with for the first time. One such essay began as a lecture in memory of the historian of Indian publishing, B.S. Kesavan. I had chosen as my theme ‘The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual’. I started with a personal example: both B.S. Kesavan and my own father had been multilingual, whereas their children were effectively monolingual, fluent in English alone (albeit with some sort of conversational Hindi to go along with it).
I argued that this was emblematic of a larger trend. In the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, the most influential Indian writers and thinkers had been able to express themselves equally well in two or more languages. Thus Rammohan Roy wrote original works in Bengali and in English, Mahatma Gandhi in Gujarati and in English, V.D. Savarkar in Marathi and in English, Ram Manohar Lohia in Hindi and in English.
This literary bilingualism was not the preserve of politicians and social reformers alone. Creative writers like Rabindranath Tagore and sociologists like Irawati Karve also wrote both in their mother tongue (Bengali and Marathi respectively) and in the language of the ruler, English. This ability to effectively communicate one’s thoughts in more than one language carried on to the next generation of Indian writers, such as (for example) Mahasweta Devi and Girish Karnad.
In recent decades, however, the ranks of bilingual intellectuals had been steadily depleted. While Stephanian writers like Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan, and Shashi Tharoor were operating only in English, the so-called bhasha writers were expressing themselves in their mother tongue alone. There were still a few bilingual scholars and writers, but they now ran thinly on the ground.
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They were the exception rather than what they once were, namely, the rule. There had thus occurred a separation of discourses, one conducted by so-called ‘cosmopolitan’ intellectuals in English, the other conducted by so-called ‘vernacular’ intellectuals in the mother tongue. There was no meeting ground, no overlap, no conversation or cross-pollination between these discourses – unlike in the past, when there had been.
Why had this once flourishing tradition of bilingual writers and thinkers declined? My lecture argued that there were three fundamental reasons for this. The first was the creation of linguistic states, which gave every major Indian language pre-eminence in the state in which its speakers were in a majority. The second was the elite preference for English education and for living in enclaves, which meant that children born in middle-class homes had little connection with the language of the street or of the market. The third was the rising incidence of inter-regional marriages, which meant that, for example, the child of a Tamil-speaking mother and an Odia-speaking father would end up speaking neither language, but English (or, more rarely, Hindi).
I wrote up a draft of my B.S. Kesavan lecture for delivery and sent a copy to Rukun for his comments. He wrote assuring me that ‘the lecture will go down well, it’s nicely anecdotal and conversational’. Then he added:
However, it may at present be too strongly focussed on personalities in modern India, and not enough on social and political issues that seem strongly connected to bilingual politics and bilingual cultural life in India. It’s really a question of emphasis – I think the lecture would seem a little more ‘serious’ and intellectual if you shifted the focus a little in favour of the issues.
To help me make my argument more rigorous, Rukun sent these detailed suggestions:
1. The origins of bilingualism must surely lie in the need for a people, any people, to be able to communicate in at least 2 languages for either their very survival, or for enhanced livelihood prospects; and therefore the origins of bilingualism must lie first in the history of invasion and conquest, and second in the history of trade and travel. The figure of the ‘dubash’ or interpreter is much discussed by [Bernard] Cohn (Language of Command and elsewhere), but of course the colonial dubash was preceded by the Kayastha dubash . . . who worked as go-between for Persian and the Hindavi-related vernaculars, and whose linguistic proficiency was perhaps the direct cause of his semi-Brahmanic status. For the conqueror and the conquered to communicate, someone had to speak both languages, and this being an uncommon skill, the origins of superior status for the figure we now call ‘the bilingual intellectual’ must, in the Indian context, lie somewhere in this primordial domain of uncommon language acquisition.
2. Given India’s multilingual context, the bilingual intellectual here has quite possibly been far more abundant than in most other regions of the world, because in our context when we use the phrase bilingual intellectual we surely mean not just someone who is fluent in English and an Indian language, but equally someone who is fluent in more than one Indian language. Examples of this in the recent past may be Dharmanand Kosambi and Shivaram Karanth.
Their knowledge of English was of some importance to their work and subsequent fame, but what was more central to their form of bilingual skill was their understanding of the cultures and histories that lay embedded in more than one Indian language. For the pre-Macaulay* past there may well be records also of similar savants who communicated across regional cultures and the North–South divide.
Also, the people that historians of colonial India refer to as ‘native informants’ must constitute a body of bilingual intellectuals that we have forgotten about simply because the records of the conqueror favour the conqueror, not the conquered: so, we know William Jones and William Carey as great bilingual intellectuals, but we do not know much about the possibly considerable bilingual skills of people like Ram Gharib Chaube and the Sanskrit Pandits of Fort William College.
3. The modern bilingual intellectual naturally arrives post-Macaulay, with Ram Mohan Roy, and the distinguishing thing that makes him modern is fluency in English. Arvind Mehrotra, alongside Alok Rai, a good instance of the translator and bilingual intellectual, begins his Concise History of Ind Lit in English, appropriately, with Ram Mohan.
4. We cannot get away from the fact that both social reform pre-1857 and nationalism post-Gokhale and Ranade are perhaps the central preoccupations of bilingual intellectuals. There is a two-way interpretive task going on now, following the tradition of Ram Mohan, and the bilingual intellectual is absolutely the key person in this reformist-nationalist enterprise: namely, convincing the English-speaking conqueror of the need for social change, and convincing the conquered of the need for acquiring the modernity that can only come with English. Bankim’s first novel Rajmohan’s Wife is in English and Tagore strains himself excessively to translate himself into English post-Nobel.
5. Why are you forgetting Sir Syed and Maulana Azad, the Muslim modernizers-secularists, as bilingual intellectuals? The fact seems to be that neither within the Hindu community nor within the Muslim could you make much headway as a politician without being perceived as some kind of bilingual intellectual (though Jinnah and Nehru look like possible aberrations here).
6. Can the current disenchantment with politicians and the decline of cultural cosmopolitanism in India (as in any country) not be more closely linked to the relative absence of bilingual intellectuals in these spheres, given that such people have tended to espouse a more progressive or visionary kind of political and cultural life? Jayalalitha (Brahmin), Mulayam Singh Yadav (OBC), and Mayawati (Dalit) are very conspicuously NOT bilingual intellectuals.
Given the pull towards European modernity of large sections of the country, we are in unspoken ways acutely conscious of who among our leaders are NOT bilingual intellectuals. Periyar, Madan Mohan Malviya, R.M. Lohia, Gandhi, Rajaji, Namboodiripad, M.N. Roy, and Ambedkar in this sense contrast sharply with those seen as grounded in monolingualism, because monolingualism equals regionalism and in some ways chauvinism . . .
7. Are some regions of India more conducive to the bilingual intellectual or have we had a more or less equal spread of such intellectuals throughout the states? The presidency capitals [Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras] naturally generated more such folk because of the first universities and colleges being there. Bengal, because of the East India Co being centred first there most strongly, does seem to provide an exceptionally high number of bilingual intellectuals, possibly more than Bombay–Pune–Maharashtra, and Madras.
And this is manifest not just in the NUMBER of such people, but in devious psychological ways: for example, one can think of at least two modern Bengali novelists who write their novels only in English, but who evince the hugest anxiety to be seen as citizens of Bengal in the fullest sense – i.e. people as proficient in Bengali as in English. Let us not name such novelists, because it may be untrue to suggest there are only two of them. This is probably true of every Bengali who writes a novel in English, and indeed of any Bengali intellectual who writes any kind of thing at all in English.
Just as the economist knows he can never be seen as a proper economist unless he is first a mathematician, the Bengali bilingual intellectual knows that he will remain a prophet without honour in his own ‘desh’ if he is seen as not equally grounded in both Bengali and English . . .
8. Do we have bilingual intellectuals only in the literary and social science areas? Do they exist to a lesser degree in the world of Indian science, medicine, and computers, simply because the equal importance of two languages is far less relevant in the technical domains than the simple monolingual mastery of the languages of science–medicine–computing?
9. Bilidextrous–OK I guess, but phonetically not such a great coinage. It could also be linguidextrous – phonetically, that may convey the sense of the word more happily.
I do not now have the original draft of my article, which was written on a computer long discarded. But I do have a copy of the lecture as it finally appeared in print. The paragraphs quoted below appeared in my name; yet they do clearly bear the marks of Rukun’s urgings:
Between (roughly) the 1920s and 1970s, the intellectual universe in India was – to coin a word – ‘linguidextrous’. With few exceptions, the major political thinkers, scholars and creative writers – and many of the minor ones too – thought and acted and wrote with equal facility in at least two languages, one of which was the mother tongue, another usually (but not always) English. It appears that this is no longer the case. The intellectual and creative world in India is increasingly becoming polarized – between those who think and act and write in English alone, and those who think and write and act in their mother tongue alone.
A distinction must be made here between reading a language and knowing it through and through. There are those who are functionally bilingual; and yet others who are intellectually and emotionally bilingual. I use letters and news reports written in Hindi for my research, raiding them for facts and opinions. But I do not read Hindi for pleasure, nor could I think of writing an essay in Hindi in a quality journal. In this I believe I speak for many other social scientists of my age or younger. These too may be able to use an Indian language as source material, but – unlike their predecessors N.K. Bose and Irawati Karve – cannot see themselves as contributing to literary or academic debate in that language. They, and I, are admittedly cosmopolitan, but in a somewhat shallow sense, knowing the world well without knowing the locality much – or at all.
At the same time, at the other end of the linguistic spectrum, many – perhaps most – of the best poets and novelists in Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, Oriya, Gujarati, etc. are likewise completely comfortable in one language only. They may occasionally read a novel or tract in English, but most of their reading – and all their writing – is confined to a single language. No Kannada novelist of the younger generation has anything like the acquaintance with Western literature and social theory once commanded by U.R. Anantha Murthy. The Hindi writers I meet are all deeply rooted in their environment, yet few follow Nirmal Verma in his curiosity about, or knowledge of, the wider world.
This excerpt from Ramachandra Guha’s ‘The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir’ has been published with permission from Juggernaut Books.