Book review: Akshya Saxena,Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India

Stating that ‘there have been no wars or riots in India about English’ (p. 126), Saxena highlights that English occupies an omnipresent, consensually popular status in the Indian linguistic and quotidian contexts, characterised as multilingual. She uses this all-pervasiveness to present the multifarious ways in which English gets politicised in India. Writing on ‘Vernacular English’ is not suggestive of India’s attempts to derive a local variation of standard English. On the contrary, Saxena reiterates that English is already provincialised in India and needs to be studied based on its materiality (p. 8). She punctures the concept that postcolonial writers traverse a space of liminality between ‘the imperial and vernacular cultures’ (Ashcroft, 2015: 84). Additionally, she divests English of its imperial traces by emphasising the counter-discursive meanings that English proliferates in India.

The book offers a peculiar way of reading vernacular English in India, which is against meeting English at the juncture of linguistics and imperialism. The introductory pages locate English as a signifier of the lived experiences of Indians who witness the politics of caste, gender, religion, languages and education. The book widens the horizon of English in India to include how language is felt and used by people of varying literacies. It counters the postcolonial lens that is accustomed to reading English ‘through colonial compulsions as hegemonic and elite’ (p. xvii). India’s preference for an official language placed amidst regional and religious considerations is bullied and belied by English, which frequently destabilises and problematises such concerns.

The book’s five chapters follow English as it moves through the multifaceted scenarios onto which Indians tie their lives. Chapter 1, titled ‘Law’, traces the evolution of bureaucratese English in India as a conveyor of decolonised India’s modernity. As English is foreign to India, it dilutes the linguistic hegemony of Hindi, the major medium of communication. The chapter refers to essays written by upper-caste diplomats to underline their elitist efforts to own English, but contrasts their demands through novels of Sri Lal Sukla and Upamanyu Chatterjee to expose how English is doubly vernacularised in India’s villages, as the villagers’ or common Indians’ English - learnt through advertisements and pornography - is different from the English crafted in the ‘administrative vernacular’ (p. 52).

Chapter 2, ‘Touch’, unravels the prismatic nature of English through people’s lived experiences of caste, specifying the caste politics of English in India. Saxena indicates that Indian Anglophone writing has always sidelined caste issues, thereby distinguishing itself from Dalit writing, an observation she extends beyond this chapter. Given India’s diverse linguistic landscape, English is not the everyday language of everyone in India, but Dalit writers often choose to write in English. With an intended pun on this chapter’s title, Saxena implies that when Dalit writers share English with upper-caste writers, they transgress the façades of untouchability through writing. While English could reflect its casteless modernity through Dalit writing, the Hindi Dalit writings of Ajay Navaria insinuate that terms like ‘socially backward’ and ‘at least slipped down a little’ (p. 96) show that English cannot completely elude casteism while in its vernacular state in India.

Chapter 3, ‘Text’, interestingly continues to discuss how the language of Dalit characters penned by mainstream Indian Anglophone writers is predetermined and curtailed to signify their low status and a lack of education in English. As characters personifying different zeitgeists, Bakha in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable of 1935 can only dream of speaking English, while Balram Halwai in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger of 2008 dares to speak English, appropriates the language and Western culture, and establishes a firm social standing for himself (pp. 103–21). Furthermore, the caste politics in Anglophone writing get exposed as the English dialogues spoken by these characters are of course dictated to them by the authors, making the language its own other. These Anglophone novels not only represent the Dalit’s caste-marked desires and aspirations but also reveal them through an upper-caste gaze.

Chapter 4, titled ‘Sound’, depicts the oral/aural life of English in India through Northeastern Anglophone literature. As a geopolitical area often ravaged by insurgencies and atrocities, the protests led by women in the Northeast are discussed to reveal the gendered experience of language and the transformation of English in post- linguistic moments. When words fail, the human body becomes a site for language, to express meanings and demonstrate dissent. Apart from the protests, literary works by Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy, Ibomcha and Temsula Ao are discussed here at length to show how sound, without words, becomes language (pp. 136–47). Correspondingly, when people who are molested and dispossessed of their identities retaliate through English, the language of colonial and state-sponsored oppression takes the persona of resistance and perseverance.

Chapter 5, ‘Sight’, discusses the pervasiveness of English in Indian films as a popular site where this language becomes a prominent vernacular in India. For Indian audiences, English embodies a buoyancy through the characters’ lives and appears to exist beyond films. The characters in Slumdog Millionaire (2008) speak English and treat English instrumentally to secure money (p. 168). However, the idealisations and idolisations of English in the foregoing chapters are deconstructed when the protagonist in the Bollywood movie Gully Boy (2019) refuses to speak or fetishise English (p. 170). The play of English in Bollywood films, where the language is structurally bilingual, is discussed regarding Purab Aur Paschim (1970), where the English spoken by the Indian hero encodes Indian culture, but the Londoni heroine’s speech invariably reflects her decadence (p. 173). Similarly, when dubbed into Hindi, the English expletives in Kama Sutra (1996) were silenced, while the accompanying visuals went uncensored (p. 176). Here, English appears to embody the propriety of Indian culture, devoid of the degeneracy associated with its foreign culture.

Vernacular English weaves the intersubjective relations that English forges across different genres in India and cleverly suggests its paradoxical quality to attest to the contradictory possibilities of English in India. The book appears to adopt an anti-postcolonial approach to English, as Saxena joins Bill Ashcroft (2009, 2015) to view the coloniser’s language not as a language that debilitates, but as a language that gets transformed by India’s rich diversity. English in India cannot be monolithic and needs to be seen from the perspective of various Indian languages, literacies and practices.

Fortified by academic soundness, rich references and a peek into how women, like her own mother, use English, Saxena’s maiden attempt is a marvellous read for those who are intrigued by the status of English in India. At a time when Indians consider education in English as integral to success, the book appears to annihilate the possibility of English ever having any singularity in India. The book rightly justifies that it is only a perfunctory feat to study English in India solely from postcolonial vantage points, as English is always relative to its subjective use, what Ashcroft (2015: 81) calls ‘inner translation’, informed by the variegated political milieu of the country and the respective positon of the language user.