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Commonwealth and the literary imagination of English: Amitav Ghoshs letterAmitav Ghoshs letter to the administrators of the Commonwealth Writers Prize is a text that

questions the need and validity of the category of Commonwealth literature. In expressing

his wish to withdraw The Glass Palacefrom contention for this award, Ghosh instigates the

problem of labeling and classification, especially in literature, and encourages us to think aboutthe politics inherent in this particular category. Ghosh draws the attention of the reader towards

some manifestation of the politics behind the Prize and the English language- the meaning of

Commonwealth literature, its relevance in the world today, the functions it fulfills, the role of

English language in this grouping and the position of other languages in these countries.

Ghosh refuses to be labelled and categorized by somebody else, to be given an appellation that

he did not choose himself. He is all too aware that names, and language in general, define

people in the process of describing them. He implies that the very terms of the debates are set

by outside forces, indicating a lack of what Richard Lyons called rhetoric of sovereignty.

The rhetoric of sovereignty may broadly be understood as the right of a people to construct

their identity through language. Lyons describes this right as a sovereign one, and like other

sovereignties, it is an independence from and among other sovereign peers. The imposition of

an identity, as Ghosh tacitly accuses commonwealth literatureof being, is a denial of this

rhetorical sovereignty. A politics of identity creation is embedded into the act of naming, which

in turn restricts the named into a particular, and rigidly defined, category. This

compartmentalization implies a particular kind of interpretation of literary works and restricts

the ability of writers like Ghosh to determine the nature of their textual representations. The

idea of rhetorical sovereignty is a useful one to keep in mind as one further explores the

problems Ghosh implicitly raise in his letter.

What does Commonwealth literature mean? It is very simply understood as the literature

produced in the countries of the British Commonwealth, or the countries that were formerly

colonies or protectorates of the British Empire. This act of branding immediately creates a

connection, real or otherwise, that binds together these countries and their cultures. It assumes

that these far flung territories have something inherently common, a comparable quality that

continues to define or significantly influence their cultural production. It is interesting to note

that Ghoshs novel was selected from the Eurasia region, a category that includes among its

members India, Cyprus and Singapore. The naming of these literatures as Commonwealth thus

assumes a collective identity and inscribes a commonality to cultures that are diverse and

different.

Ghosh explicitly questions the relevance of Commonwealth literature in his letter when he

describes it as being removed from the realities of the present dayor any conceivable future.

Further, he sees it as an appendage of the past, where these lands were yoked into this

association through violence. Ghosh is ready to accept the role of the Commonwealth as a

political entity or humanitarian agent. However, he does not see its relevance as an agent in

influencing contemporary cultures or their literatures. While accepting that the colonial past

engenders the present, Ghosh presents the historiographic metafiction of The Glass Palace

as an alternate to the colonial narrative.

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It is obvious that the function of Commonwealth literature is to create an identity. What ends

do this identity achieve? An interesting feature of the Commonwealth Writers Prize is that it

does not consider writers from Britain, a country one would assume holds the stellar position

in the organization. Is British literature then not Commonwealth literature? Evidently not. The

idea of Commonwealth literature is a fiction created to house writers in English from the formercolonies, whose literatures are not worthy enough to be included under the rubric of English

literature. Rather, it is the literature of the Anglophones, the phony Anglos, whose English

and writing are not quite up there with those of Britain or the United States.

Commonwealth literature is thus a ghetto constructed to keep out the other English speakers

from the sacred halls of Anglo-American literary production. Its realized function is to veil the

imperial episteme that still holds up the idea of English literature. The invention of the

Commonwealth literature helps to prevent the broadening of English literature to actually

include all literature written in English. It is this politics of identity and exclusion that Ghosh

challenges when he withdraws from a prize that values him for his place of origin than whatand how he can write. The term is not used merely to describe, but to divide literature written

in English on colonial and even racial terms. It creates a hierarchy, where the writers of the

Commonwealth are necessarily inferior to those of Englishand propagates the idea that the

place of writers like Ghosh is in the Commonwealth rather than in a larger cosmopolitan

understanding of English literature.

Commonwealth literature does not even fit the description of literature of the former colonies.

The primal role of the English language in defining this category is the caveat Ghosh points

out. Implicit in this is the privileging of English as the language of modernity, as the language

that best captures contemporary reality. The idea of this identity is thus further narrowed toexclude the thousands of other languages in which cultural expression takes place. The

privileging of English automatically demotes other languages, from Afrikaans to Urdu, to a

secondary role in the cultural production of nations where millions use them. Commonwealth

literature thus loses even its simplistic claim of being the literature of the nations of the

Commonwealth.

Amitav Ghosh encourages us to interrogate the premises upon which the idea of

Commonwealth literature is founded. He questions the importance given to political and

linguistic boundaries over the imaginative in the realm of literature. He explores and exposes

the politics of identity that operate behind the act of naming. It might please him to know thatthe Commonwealth Book Prize, one half of the re-launched Commonwealth Writers Prize, has

been discontinued from this year.

Aju Basil James

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