mit international journal of english language &...

MIT International Journal of English Language & Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2015, pp. 11–16 11ISSN 2347-9779 © MIT Publications

The Politics of Language: Decolonization of Indian English

Devendra Kumar Sharma Dr. Pashupati Jha Dr. Nagendra Kumar Research Scholar Department of Humanities Department of Humanities IIT, Roorkee, U.K., India IIT, Roorkee, U.K., India IIT, Roorkee, U.K., India

A critical enquiry into the intellectual trajectory of literary criticism, theory and aesthetics, explicates the fact that there have been three major strands in the process of identifying and illuminating the reality of the world. These strands are viewed through metaphysical realities, realist enterprise, and aesthetic discourse. The existence of the realist discourse has addressed the question of ideology and consciousness, which are ineffably embedded into its concept. Further, it explains the fact that identity is a construct, which is the result of linguistic determinism because it is the linguistic reality, which controls and constructs the processes of epistemological constructions and ontological realities. The present paper intends to look at the phenomenon of the politics of language; and it also aims at elaborating some viable reasons, encouraging some Indian novelists to employ the Indianized version of English, which is right in its own form, as has been explained by Braj Kachru in his Indianization of English (1983). In addition, the paper seeks to find out how they debunk the colonial tradition of language of the select novels of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga. The present research paper is confined to the texts of Midnight Children (1981), The God of Small Things (1997), The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and The White Tiger (2008).

The history of the world reflects the fact that the colonial interventions in different parts of the world have ensued an unsettling antinomy between the colonizer and the colonized. The colonizer has controlled, ravished, and subjugated the economic, cultural, linguistic, and historical realities of the colonized. The excessive repression and antagonism of the colonizer against the colonized has brought out the genealogy of an emancipatory and libratory discourse, which is often termed as Post-colonialism.

But for post-colonial writers, who use English language to suit their creative purpose, English is no longer a coloniser’s language for it has become a tool of decolonisation. In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (TPCSR), Bill Ashcroft et.al. are of the view that:

Language is a fundamental site of struggle for post-colonial discourse because the colonial process itself begins in language. The control over language by the imperial centre-whether achieved by displacing native languages, by installing itself as a ‘standard’ against other variants which are constituted as ‘impurities’, or by planting the language of empire in a new place-remains the most potent instrument of cultural control (TPCSR 261).

Culture cannot define history without the help of language. Language is a species, specific, differentiable, and a distinct tool for human existence. It reflects and refracts the consciousness and identity of a person. Language mediates between man and his environment. It does not only bring human beings together, it also brings them into relationship with the external world.


Language is a power which decides the reality of standard, which becomes a linguistic benchmark for the speaker of that particular language. It can aptly be explained by the reality of ‘Englishes’ in the world. The world speaks several varieties of English but the domain of English pedagogy, linguistic performance and communicative competence force the speaker to speak either the British or the American form of English which is precisely because they define power and standard. As in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature Ngugi Wa Thing’o says, “…language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner. The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of spiritual subjugation.” (1987: 9).

Language seems to be an alignment of the capricious signs and symbols which are infused with thoughts and feelings, aiming at communication; but the apparent and vague nature of language, indeed, postulates some invisible yet astonishing boundary as has been demarcated by Jacques Derrida through his ‘logocentrism’. Literature connotes some other meanings on the profound layers of the text. Hence, the rubric of language is more important than the usual rationalization of it. The language of literary canon is far more intricate than the oral form of the language, because it maintains Barthesian systems of signification and Bakhtin’s dialogism.

Decolonization is a term, being used for the ruin of colonialism, where a nation establishes and retains liberated territory of its own. It is used as a counter discourse so that the indigenous people can search their own subjectivity. As Helen Tiffin designates the importance of decolonization in post-colonial writing in (Post-Colonial Studies Reader) “Post-colonial Literatures and Counter- Discourse”:

Decolonization is process, not arrival; it invokes an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist systems and peripheral subversion of them; between European or British discourses and their post-colonial dismantling. Since it is not possible to create or recreate national or regional formations independent of their historical implication in the European colonial enterprise, it has been the project of post-colonial writing to interrogate European discourses and discursive strategies from a privileged position within (and between) two worlds; to investigate the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in the colonial domination of so much of the rest of the world. (99)

It can be understood politically, through the Indian content and context, as Sawraj of Mahatma Gandhi depicts. Adding to it, but irony is that, politically, we are decolonized but are still using the language of the colonizer. Frantz Fanon terms it ‘Lactification’ (Black Skin White Masks, Foreword ix) in the African context. Wathing’o stresses the need for a perfect decolonization in his book, ‘Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature’. The Indian writer, Kiran Desai, portrays this notion very perfectly in her novel, The Inheritance of Loss (TIL), as the following excerpt suggests:

“Good night. Good-bye. So long” – not Indian sentences, English sentences. Perhaps that’s why they had been so happy to learn a new tongue in the first place: the self-consciousness of it, the effort of it, the grammar of it, pulled you up; a new language provided distance and kept the heart intact. (TIL 208)

Chinua Achebe (1965) rightly says that English must be changed to overcome the cultural differences of language. He writes:

Can an African ever learn English well enough to be able to use it effectively in creative writing? Certainly yes… if on the other hand you ask: Can he ever learn to use it like a native speaker? I should say, I hope not. It is neither necessary, or desirable for him to be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in communication with its ancestral home but to suit its new African surroundings. (The Empire Writes Back, 1989; 143).


In The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon conferred the three phases of retrieval of Post–Colonial writers. The first phase is ‘The period of unqualified assimilation’ in which the indigenous people adapts the culture of subjugating authority. The second phase is ‘to recollect and represent his ancient culture’ so in this period they look their culture in the light of clichéd aestheticism. The last phase is ‘fighting phase’, which is very decisive phase because now they want to fight to find out their own identity and subjectivity and they want to express themselves by their own dignity i.e. by their own language. As most of the Post-Colonial Indian writers used their writing as a textual violence to show their anger against the colonialists. As Chrish Tiffin and Alan Lawson in De-Scribing Empire: Post- Colonial and Textuality says:

Just as fire can be fought by fire, textual control can be fought by textually…. The post-colonial is especially and pressingly concerned with the power that rides in discourse and textuality, its resistance, then quite appropriately takes place in- and from- the domain of textuality, in (among other thing) motivated acts of reading.(10) In the beginning, the earlier Indian writers were aware the consciousness of colonial structure of writing but later the novelist like R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand etcetera employed the language in their own respective ways. They have created a new perspective of language which touches the Indian panorama or linguistic system. They start the Indian lexicon, colloquial forms and code-mixing and code- switching etcetera of Englishes, which perfectly suit the tangible life of the character. These three are also called the ‘Big Three’ and the credit goes to them for the decolonized form of English language in India. Now a days, the major feature of decolonized English is growing in a very huge way. The tendency of code-mixing and code- switching, or the hybridized form of English language, is very common in everyday life.

Salman Rushdie (1982) foregrounds the necessity of decolonization of English, and hence he says: Something of the unwashed odour of the Chamcha lingers around its (English language) cadences. The language like much else in the newly independent societies needs to be decolonized, to be remade in other images, if those of us who use it from positions outside Anglo-Saxon culture are to be more than artistic Uncle Toms. And it’s this endeavour that gives the new literatures of Africa, the Caribbean and India much of their present vitality and excitement. (p.7).

Raja Rao in the Forward to his novel Kanthapura (1938) says that English is not an alien language for us. One day it will prove that it is just like the American or Irish English. I think he was perfectly right, because of the Indian Writers in English who are writing in their own style of language and debunked the old established order given by the colonizers. While pondering over the use of English language, Raja Rao writes:

I use the world ‘alien’, yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up—like Sanskrit or Persian was before—but not our emotional make-up... We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will someday prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it. ((p. v).

Referring to the Indian ‘Style’ of English he continues: After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move. We move quickly. There must be something in sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. (p. 35).

The language is unique in nature, so it can be realized in different strata, let it be in lexico-grammar, phonetics, phonology or semantics. As Kiran Desai has written in her novel: “They all said powder puff in English, for,


naturally, there was no Gujarati word for this invention. Their very accent (emphasis is mine: supra-segmental features of phonetics) rankled the judge. “Paurvder Paaf,” sounding like some Parsi dish” (167)…Colonial India, free India – the tea was the same, but the romance was gone, and it was best sold on the word of the past. (TIL 133)

The politics of language can vividly be observed in the novels of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children (MC), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (TGST), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (TIL), and Aravind Adiga’s, The White Tiger (TWT) for example:

1. Hindi words in English spellings, for example– huzoor (TIL 7), mithai (TIL 12), puja (TIL 13), Namaste (TIL 50), kamala hai (TIL 24), Hota hai hota hai (TIL 179), Raksha (TGST 59), Aap (MC 16), bhagwan (MC 27), abba (MC 150), chutney (MC 456), ghat (TWT 16, 18), pooja (TWT 100), paan (TWT 105), Namaz (TWT 109), Ramadan (TWT 108) etcetera.

2. Use of Hindi words with English suffixes like– fried pakoras (TIL 6 &MC 32 & 170), congresswallahs (TIL 56), goondas (TIL 218 & MC 35), lathis (TIL 225), shikaris (TIL 225), gullies (MC 35), sahibs (MC 17), samosas (MC 239) etcetera.

3. Mix of Hindi-English words– lathi charge (IL 236), congresswallahs (TIL 56), chaprasi-hand (MC 33), paan-shop (MC 39), pathan turbans (MC 354), cobra-walla (MC 86) etcetera.

4. Compound words by using the hyphens– crick-crack (TIL 17), Mitten-shaped (TGST 82, 96, 300), “Deep-dimpled” (TGST 109), bottomless-bottomful (TGST 109), “paan-and-spit man (TWT 29), “bus-company-issue” (TWT 31), “sister-fucker” (TWT 34), “water-lily-covered”, “Country Mouse” (TWT 201-2), “paan-chewing” (TWT 200), betel-chewers (MC 39), haddi-phaelwan (MC 241), nimbu-pani (MC 58), glossy-skinned (TWT 20), cardboard-backed, golden-haired (TWT 23), rickshaw-pullers (TWT 27), gun-smuggling (TWT 97), dark-skinned (TWT 100), tea-coloured (TGST 10), far-apartness (TGST 85), spit-bubbles (TGST 84), pigeon-toed (TGST 95) etcetera.

5. Use of italics in the part of a sentence or a full sentence– “Why should she?”, “An I’m sorry, Colonel Sabhapathy, but I’m afraid I’ve said my say,” (TGST 21 & 63), ‘Porketmunny’ (TGST 102 & 105; without italics, 107), Malayalam (TGST 60) etcetera.

6. Writing words together– Yesyesyesyesyes, this way and that, Porketmunny, Ofcourseofcourse. Orangelemon? Lemonorange?, moonwalked (TGST 56, 107 &109) etcetera.

7. Pruning style of playing language with word Nictitating membrane as– Nictitating

ictitatingtitating itatingtatingatingting

ing (TGST 188-9)

8. Use of code mixing and code switching language like– “Never mind with all this nakhra. Get them.” (TIL 5), “No hang-ups, na, very friendly.” (TIL 131), the cook broke into a loud lament: “Humara kya hoga, hai hai, humara kya hoga,” he let his voice fly. “Hai, hai, what will become to us?” (TIL 8) etcetera.


9. Repetition of the words and sentences like– Shame shame (TIL 30), phata-phat (TIL 131), Omar, Go! Go! Go! (TIL 96), sweet sweet cheeks (TIL 213), goody-goody (TWT 201), servant-servant (TWT 208), harder, harder (TST 37), Take me! Take me! (TWT 55), Them! Them! Them! (TWT 58), house to house, house to house, house to house (TWT 59), tack, tack, tack (TWT 107), that, that (TGST 4, 99), DUM DUM (TGST 119) etcetera.

10. Inflectional and derivational suffixes at the same time like– congresswallahs (TIL 56) etcetera.11. Use of phrases– Health is wealth (TIL 18), Ah, old war best war (TIL 23) etcetera.12. Honorable suffixes like– Babyji or saibaby (TIL 19), respected pitaji (TIL 14), sadhuji (MC 113)

etcetera.13. Slangs– “Pigs pigs, son of pigs, sooar ka baccha” Biju shouted. “Uloo ka patha, son of an owl, low-

down-son-of-a bitch Indian.” (TIL 23), you rascal! (TWT 199) etcetera.14. Use of acronyms– ambulance passed the NYPD (TIL 79), JPP (TIL 171) etcetera.15. Phonological features like– “it was haat day in Kalinmpong” (TIL 83), “laet me tell you, you canaat

pay me to go to that caantreey again!” (TIL 138), “beeeg man, reech man” (TIL 147), “Goozerat” (TIL 110), “daaller” (TIL 278), Mrs. Sen pronounced potato “POEtatto,” and tomato “TOEmato,” (TIL 131), the phonetic transcription of these words are: /pəʹteitəʹ/ /təʹma:təʹ/, Paaaaaawww! (Rising tone), (TIL 49), “taaalk to my relateev…” (TIL 138), “Vhaat deeference does that make? I haeve already taaald you,” he spoke s l o w as if to an idiot, “no taleephone caalls …” (TIL 138), lay Ter (TGST 334), Yooseless (TGST 312), yesyesyesyesyes (TGST 86) etcetera.

16. Capital letters in the middle of the sentences, as– “But they LOVE me! Her mother, she LOVE me, she LOVE me.” (TIL 122), A Free Cold Drink. Come. (TGST 103), The God of Loss (TGST 265), ….his Terylene armpits. (TGST 272), the Man of the House (TGST 272), For Men of Action Satisfaction (TGST 302) etcetera.

A close reading of all the novels in the context represents the fact that the Indian English writers employ language, not only to debunk the colonial structure of language but also to find out their own unique identity. It is a fact that English language came to India through the Britishers, but it has evolved and emancipated itself. In the process, it has also lost its original identity through the process of language contact and language borrowing. As a consequence, it has mixed itself with other local languages in India and emerged as a new decolonized form of English language, which has become not only acceptable in Indian subcontinent, but largely all over the globe.

Works Cited

Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers, 2009. Print.Ashcroft, Bill et al. The Empire Writes Back, London: Routledge, 1989. Print.Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2008. Print. Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Mask.Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.1952. Print.Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin Books, 2001. Print.Payne, Robert. “Saturday Review in The Twice Bourn Fiction.” Quoted in Meenakshi Mukherjee, 2010, p. 22. Print.


Rao, Raja. Kanthapura. New York: New Directions 1967. Print.Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2002. Print.Rushdie, Salman. The Times. London, October 1982, p. 7. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s children. London: Vintage. 2013. Print.Sapir, Edward. Ed. Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology. New York: Harper Row.

1964. Print.Tiffin Chris and Alan Lawson, eds. De-Scribing Empire: Post- Colonial and Textuality. London: Routledge. 1994. Print. Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe Publishing House Ltd, 1981. Print.

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