At the Sahitya Akademi

In 2000, Kiran Nagarkar’s novel Cuckold won India’s top literary prize for best original work in English, yet the accolade seemed to alienate him further from his most prized readership in his home state of Maharashtra.¹ The novels and plays that had initially established Nagarkar as an acclaimed author were written originally in the Marathi language. He went on to write more Marathi plays, but then made the “mistake” of writing two novels in English, Ravan and Eddie (1995) and Cuckold (1997). How might we characterize the competing loyalties and claims to authenticity in India’s contemporary multilingual literary field? This essay argues that postcolonial English has come to have less to do with the relationship between colonizer and colonized and much more to do with internal language politics and competing nationalisms.

In February 2001, I listened as the winners of the 2000 awards each addressed a packed lecture hall at the Sahitya Akademi (India’s National Academy of Letters), an institution set up by the government of India in 1954 and now housed in a multistory concrete building in the heart of bureaucratic New Delhi. Besides Cuckold, twenty-one other literary works (one for each officially recognized Indian language) were given the Sahitya Akademi Award that year.² In his address, Nagarkar focused his remarks on why the Marathi literary establishment saw his switch from writing in Marathi to writing in English as a kind of betrayal. When his first English novel, Ravan and Eddie, was published, he explained how

the publisher sent thirty-six review copies to various Marathi newspapers and journals. Not a single review of the book has appeared in the four and a half years that have gone by. No author interviews, etc. were published, even though the interviews were undertaken. . . . It slowly became clear to me that I must have committed an unmentionable crime, a crime that was beyond forgiveness and beyond the imagination of men and women, though I had no idea what it was, and why I was being punished for it. I had broken a covenant with my people. . . . for if you don’t acknowledge an author’s work, it ceases to exist.³

Nagarkar’s tone was dramatic and somewhat self-righteous. He was clearly unnerved by what had happened or, more accurately, by what had not. He then explained that the “covenant” he had “broken” was an implicit agreement between author and audience: if you are a celebrated Maharashtrian writer, you should be writing in Marathi. Nagarkar went on to describe an exchange he had had with “a top editor and doyen of Marathi publishing,” who had initially congratulated him on his recent award for Cuckold. But then, Nagarkar told us, the editor added that he had “a grievance”: “Why don’t you write in Marathi any longer?”

Nagarkar gave the audience at the Akademi a sense of the kind of disciplining an author must endure by critics, readers, and editors, while he also addressed his apparent “crime” of having written in English. He confronted the question, and seeming incongruity, of his own linguistic and regional identity head-on by explaining how writing in English was a “natural” turn of events for him. He said, “Barring the first four years in a Marathi school, my entire education was in English. My parents were Westernized liberals, and conversation at home was mostly in English. Marathi is then my mother tongue because I was born in a Marathi family, but for better or worse English is my second mother tongue.”⁴

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Nagarkar’s predicament, and his forefronting of it at the Akademi, is a fairly straightforward example of the way literary writing in English is seen not only as being less authentic than vernacular, or bhasha literature,⁵ but also, more specifically, as a betrayal of a particular linguistic community by one of its own. Writing in two languages raises important questions of readership, audience, and community that ultimately destabilize singular notions of identity and cultural authenticity.⁶ Despite his national acclaim, for instance, Nagarkar is not willing to forgo his regionally based Marathi mother-tongue readers, critics, and editors. At some level they, too, are the locus of his identity as a writer. And yet, from the purview of most bhasha literary communities, to write in English is to reject willingly (and perhaps willfully) part of one’s Indianness. There is a linguistic but also an ideological divide between English and all of the other Indian languages. In the balance are various interpretations and permutations of Indian “culture.” By saying that “for better or for worse” English is his “second mother tongue,” Nagarkar is asserting that it is not a matter of choice to write in English, but is part of his Indian identity.⁷ Nevertheless, Nagarkar’s story typifies the kinds of resentments bhasha writers and literary communities have against literary English in an Indian context.⁸