Mr. Peer does not mention a single work written in a language other than English. This is remarkable, considering that he discusses democracy in a country in which, according to a letter that "National Knowledge Commission" wrote to the Indian Prime Minister on October 20, 2006, "no more than 1 per cent of [Indian] people use [English] as a second language, let alone a first language." Mr. Peer quotes Mr. Guha's verdict that Indian democracy is "phipty phipty" proper and sham. Last fall on "Bill Maher," Salman Rushdie, another Kashmiri, was a little more charitable when he stated that "the reason that India survived as a democracy after the British left is that the British left a civil service, a road system, a railway system, [and] a secular constitution."
Evidently, Mr. Rushdie, a man who once criticized the Raj in works such as "Outside the Whale" has come to believe in what might be called a civil engineering theory of colonialism, a nuanced update on la mission civilisatrice. It would seem to Mr. Rushdie that the British had this neurotic compulsion to build roads and railways, and the only reason why they went to India was that they had run out of places in their tiny little island for roads and railways.
Only a minuscule proportion, if any, of the research in humanities, social sciences and cultural studies, even on those issues that deal with Indian polity, society, history, culture and civilization, is conceived and carried out in Indian vernaculars. Scholarly tomes on Hindi films and Indian pop music and culture are conceived and written almost exclusively in English. Drugs and pharmaceuticals worth billions of dollars are made and sold in India. Here in the US, I have occasionally come across instances in which information on the contents, dosage and directions for use on a drug package is in a language other than English. I have never found a single instance in India in which this information is in any language other than English. The textual contents of cigarette packets including the statutory warning are exclusively in English. The statute that mandated the warning was written in English, and enacted by a government that obviously didn't care whether or not the non-Anglograph among the Indian smokers were made aware of the hazards of smoking. It is the roman script that is seen more often than the script for all Indian vernaculars put together on the packaging of DVDs VCDs, audio CDs and audio and videocassettes, even when the contents are entirely in an Indian vernacular. Most if not all modern Indian painters sign their work in roman rather than an Indic script. What is even more strange about this state of affairs is that nobody finds it strange.
In 1947, in a speech conceived, written and delivered in English, Jawaharlal Nehru referred to a "tryst with destiny" and heralded the arrival of a time "when we shall redeem our pledge not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially." He went on to suggest that independence from the British was a time "when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance." Some sixty years after that day, it appears that this utterance found by the somnolent soul of the Indian nation happened to be in clipped accented English, the accent having been doubtless acquired when the aforesaid national soul was "long suppressed." This soulful national utterance, I am sure, is music to the ears of Nehru's biological and intellectual descendents, the Anglophone Indians that Nehru's "we" in "we shall redeem our pledge" referred to. I think it remains unintelligible to the non-Anglophone Indians, who not only remain excluded from whatever chimera of nationhood Nehru had dreamt up, but also disenfranchised not merely politically, but also economically, academically, culturally and intellectually.
Kanchhedia Chamaar
Austin, TX
11/24/2007 @ 4:56pm
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