Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

Activity 6.1
Unit 6 Language and place
Section 2 Language variation

Each of the two passages below is concerned with finding a language to convey a specific ’Indianness’ of Indian life. One describes a scene or ’setting’; the other presents thoughts on how an Indian use of English may represent - or misrepresent - a specific notion of ’Indian identity’.

Text A

The painted streets alive with hum of noon,

The traders cross-legged ’mid their spice and grain,

The buyers with their money in the cloth,

The war of words to cheapen this or that,

The shout to clear the road, the huge stone wheels,

The strong slow oxen and their rustling loads,

The singing bearers with the palanquins,

The broad-necked hamals sweating in the sun,

The housewives bearing water from the well

With balanced chatties, and athwart their hips

The black-eyed babies; the fly-swarmed sweetmeat shops,

The weaver at his loom, the cotton-bow

Twanging, the millstones grinding meal, the dogs

Prowling for orts, the skilful armourer

With tong and hammer linking shirts of mail,

The blacksmith with a mattock and a spear

Reddening together in his coals, the school

Where round their Guru, in a grave half-moon,

The Sakya children sang the mantras through,

And learned the greater and the lesser gods.

(from Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia, 1879)

Text B

    I am Indian, very brown, born in

Malabar, I speak three languages, write in

Two, dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said,

English is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave

Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,

Every one of You? Why not let me speak in

Any language I like? The language I speak

Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses

All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half

Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,

It is as human as I am human, don’t

You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my

Hopes, and it is as useful to me as cawing

Is to crows, or roaring to the lions, it

Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is

Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and

Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech

Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the Incoherent mutterings of the blazing

Funeral pyre.

       (from Kamala Das, ’An Introduction’, Collected Poems, 1984)

1 For each passage, make a list of words and/or grammatical constructions that are not part of your own dialect. In the case of individual words, do you know what these words mean or refer to? How far do such words appear to be associated with a particular place or way of life?

2 Which of the two passages contains more locally specific vocabulary?

3 Do the two passages give equal attention to the problem of finding appropriate language in which to represent a sense of place or a sense of belonging to a place? If not, which focuses on this issue more?

4 In the light of your answers to Questions 1 and 2, does your answer to Question 3 surprise you? If so, why? If not, why not?

5 Sir Edwin Arnold was a (male) nineteenth-century British Orientalist scholar, as well as a poet; Kamala Das is a contemporary (female) Indian writer. How far do you think the different historical, geographical and cultural locations of the two writers may affect how they try to represent their relationship to India?

Reading

Crystal, D. (2005) The Stories of English, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Gifford, T. (1999) The Pastoral, New Critical Idiom Series, London: Routledge.

Kachru, B. (ed.) (1982) The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures, Oxford: Pergamon. McCrum, R., Cran, W. and McNeil, R. (2002) The Story of English, London: Faber. Williams, R. (1985) The Country and the City, London: The Hogarth Press.