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Vernacular Englishes: Language and Democratic Politics in Post-Liberalization India A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Akshya Saxena IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Shaden M. Tageldin June 2016 © Akshya Saxena 2016 Acknowledgements I am grateful to all my committee members for always, as the expression goes, keeping it real. Through my graduate years at the University of Minnesota, they encouraged me, provided transformative ways to develop my idea, cheered me on, asked me to slow down, posed incisive questions, and demanded clarity and nuance in my responses. At the end of the first full draft of this project, it is their questions that I see as the surest sign of their faith in this work; an honor and a gift. John Mowitt, Simona Sawhney, and Ajay Skaria have written countless reference letters for me, met me in person and on Skype at very short notices, responded to concerns from near and far, and remained flexible across incredible schedules and conflicting time zones. For all this and more, they will always have my gratitude. Shaden Tageldin has been the most extraordinary dissertation adviser. In ways big and small, she has shown a tireless attentiveness to this project and to my scholarly career. Her intellectual rigor, enthusiasm, patience, and generosity will forever be an inspiration for my work, as they have been its most enabling beginnings. This project has been made possible by the timely and generous support of a number of grants and fellowships. A Graduate School Fellowship, Graduate Research Partnership Program, and an Edward W. Said Memorial Language Fellowship allowed me to prepare for dissertation research in the early stages of graduate school. An Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship, an International Dissertation Research Fellowship funded by the Mellon-Social Science Research Council, and a Global Spotlight Doctoral Dissertation International Research Grant funded by the Global Policy and Strategy i Alliance provided valuable opportunities to travel to New Delhi and Pune for library and archival research. The Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship was a wonderful gift this past year. Through the opportunities it provided, I was not only able to devote myself to writing the dissertation, but also met an inspiring community of scholars. For their kind assistance in locating and retrieving a variety of materials, I am also grateful for the support of staff members at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, the Microfiche Section of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the Library at National Film Archives of India, Sahitya Akademi Library, the Dainik Jagran Office, and the Newspaper/Microfilm Collection at Doe Library, University of California, Berkeley. I wish to extend my sincere thanks to everyone at the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Robin Brown, John Archer, Cesare Casarino, Tony Brown, Laurie Ouellette, Kate Gallagher, Barb Lehnhoff, and the office staff, especially, have been most helpful. Thanks are long due to my teachers at Lady Shri Ram College and at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who introduced me to many of the texts and ideas that I pursue in this dissertation. Their contribution to this work is central. My graduate student friends in the departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and Asian Languages and Literatures, as well as at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, have filled our years together with timely distractions, excitement, and an uplifting sense of purpose. Thorn Chen, ii Emily Fedoruk, Courtney Gildersleeve, and Sara Saljoughi deserve special thanks for their unflinching support. Without them, this work, and my time doing it, would have been much less memorable. I am grateful to my family in New Delhi, Kanpur, and California: my sister and brother-in-law, Harsha’s parents, all my aunts, uncles, and cousins, who have taken care of so much at home so that I did not have to. They keep me grounded and remind me of what is important. Finally, my most joyful debt is to the three people who, in different ways, have given me the conviction to do most things, including this dissertation project: to Harsha for his exhilarating optimism and idealism, to my father for having shared the most important thing during his brief life—his love for music, and to my mother for teaching me to trust the hours. iii Abstract This project is a comparative study of twentieth and twenty-first century Indian English novels, Hindi novels, diasporic and Bollywood films, hybrid Hindi-English prose of Hindi newspapers, and India’s language policy. The field of world literature thus far has upheld two problematic divisions of “world” and “literature”: first, it has positioned the world against the “provincialism” of national and local contexts; second, it has engaged with globally circulating literatures as unrelated to globalizing media cultures. In contrast, I show that to fully grasp the cultural hegemony of world languages and literatures, scholarship must reckon with their heterogeneous linguistic environments and their political and economic ambits of circulation. Through an expansion of literary space, “Vernacular Englishes” recasts debates in world literature and postcolonial studies that rely too neatly on the vernacular to challenge global, transnational, and national frames of analyses. I argue that meanings of a colonial and global “English” are forged within an interplay of translatability and untranslatability with “the vernacular.” To this end, I highlight the legislation of English as India’s associate official language: one that appeases linguistic minorities (who have protested the upper-caste Hindu bias of Hindi, India’s official language) and secures the (neo)imperial democratic character of the postcolonial state. I also draw attention to the fact that marginalized castes, classes, and language groups have routinely used the “elite” language of English to make political demands on the state. This representative power of English in postcolonial India, its imagined and desired capacity to speak for other vernaculars, in effect, vernacularizes iv English itself. The growth of mass media after the 1990s neoliberal economic reforms in India has further popularized English words and phrases in Hindi language media. In its recent availability outside of traditional privileges of class, urbanism, and education, the English language accumulates meaning as both a globalizing and a vernacularizing force. v Table of Contents List of Illustrations ............................................................................................................ vii Chapter 1: Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: India Demands English ................................................................................... 52 Chapter 3: Illegitimate Speakers ..................................................................................... 104 Chapter 4: Between the Home and the World ................................................................ 160 Chapter 5: Cinematic Englishes ...................................................................................... 203 Coda: Narendra Modi’s English and Rohith Vemula’s English ..................................... 274 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 285 vi List of Illustrations Figure 2.1. Cartoon. “The dilemma of newly independent India…” (1958). .................102 Figure 2.2. Cartoon. “The boy can’t read English either.” (1965). .................................103 Figure 3.1. Photograph of a woman praying to the statue of the Dalit Goddess English in Lakhimpur-Kheri Village. (2010). ...................................................................................157 Figure 3.2. Photograph of the statue of the Dalit Goddess English. (2010). ..................158 Figure 3.3. Photograph of the concept image for the Dalit Goddess English. (2010). ..159 Figure 5.1. Film still. “My name is Anthony Gonsalves.” Amar Akbar Anthony. (1977). ... ..........................................................................................................................................260 Figure 5.2. Film still. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.” Purab Aur Paschim (East and West). (1970). ..................................................................................................................261 Figure 5.3. Film still. “C.O.O.L.” Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something Happens). (1998). ..... ..........................................................................................................................................262 Figure 5.4. Film still. “Doctor Mani’s visit.” Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. (1996). ......263 Figure 5.5. Film still. “Doctor Mani’s visit: ‘examining, examining’-I.” Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. (1996). ........................................................................................................263 Figure 5.6. Film still. “Doctor Mani’s visit: ‘examining, examining’- II.” Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. (1996). ........................................................................................................264 Figure 5.7. Film still. “Pepsi.” Fire. (1996). ...................................................................265