Twilightest stars

The British may have introduced English to the Subcontinent, but it took Nehru and Gandhi to make it stick.

By : Binoo K John

Every now and then, statesmen around the world, and certainly Indian leaders, recall the contributions of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas K Gandhi. In what has become something of a fixed ritual, heads of state regularly make the perfunctory trip to Rajghat. Monarchs from the Gulf, dictators from Africa, Marxists from Venezuela, benevolent autocrats from various banana republics, military coup-masters from near and far – all wend their ways in traffic-stopping cavalcades through New Delhi’s most crowded streets to shower rose petals on Gandhi’s memorial platform. In fact, considering the role that both Gandhi and Nehru played in getting Indians hooked on the English language after the foundation laid by the British, a more meaningful way of paying tribute might be to read aloud some of the lucid and simple prose written by these two men.

For millions of young Indians, their first encounter with meaningful writing about their own country – as opposed to poems of imagined arcadia written by British poets – is one of three books: Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth, and Nehru’s autobiography and letters to Indira. To this day, these works are prescribed for study in primary classes in government schools all of the way up to postdoctoral studies in universities. This early encounter helps non-English-speaking students to relate to India for the first time through the medium of a foreign language.

This almost did not take place at all. Gandhi’s initial view of English, after all, was that it was the language of slavery. If these proud, nationalistic men had instead chosen to do all of their writing in Hindi, English would not have acquired the level of legitimacy that eventually allowed for it to emerge as the working language of India. Most of Gandhi’s and Nehru’s books were written well before Independence – the latter’s autobiography, written in jail, came out back in 1936. For holding such an important place vis-à-vis the written word, it should be pointed out, Gandhi, unlike Nehru, was not a great writer. His early writings were not only quite archaic, but also clearly involved a struggle to achieve lucidity.

In the long run, however, this hardly hampered his impact on India’s use of English, as the mere Gandhi-Nehru stamp of approval was a crucial incentive for the masses to take to the language. Apart from inadvertently influencing many Indians to try writing novels (R K Narayan and Mulk Raj, for instance, wrote novels with a Gandhi theme), the national movement that these two figures oversaw produced an enormous amount of literature in English, which further contributed to the spread of the language.

Superlative superlatives
The levels of penmanship of these two personalities will have to await another day, but a slew of writers of poor English, glorifying Gandhi and Nehru, certainly helped to solidify the base of the language in Imperial India. First and foremost, there is a plethora of largely unnoticed writings in ‘Indian English’ praising Nehru and Gandhi for their leadership of the national movement. Many of these monographs and biographies were written, very poorly, by jingoistic writers and professors who did not have the requisite skills to write on subjects of such gravitas. But, with their strong yearnings for national readership, they chose the most widely read subjects – the national political leaders. They utilised the English language in the hopes that it would carry their thoughts to a larger (and more elite) readership, which a regional language could not have guaranteed.

The Indian Printing Works of Lahore was among a handful of small publishing houses in the region that printed many of the fledgling attempts of writers who tried to become part of the national discourse by writing in the Queen’s tongue. Nearly all such books can today be seen as excellent, if sometimes hilarious, advertisements of the nascent form of Indian English. The epic titles of these works could be considered indicative of the bombast therein. When it was not ‘Nehru, the Humanist’, it was ‘Nehru, the leader of East and West’. And, if no larger-than-life aspect of Nehru’s personality presented itself to the publisher, then out came a book called, simply, ‘Nehru, the Man’.

But each of these works, even while paying its utmost respects to Nehru or Gandhi, blissfully forgot to pay the same homage to the language in which it was written. Take, for instance, Hussain Khan’s flowery tribute to Nehru in his Immortal Men:

Jawaharlal Nehru would ever shine as one of the twilightest stars in the firmament of human race because he had in himself the priceless virtue of soldierly spirit combined with statesmanship. It would suffice without contradiction to immortalize his name, to carve out his living picture in the hearts of ours and to accord him a place in the world with the great benefactors of humanity … Both of them [Gandhi and Nehru] like two facets of the same coin acted and reacted in company with others with the then prevailing situations in India.

Khan’s writing, as with many other early users of Indian English, was replete with clichés, literal translations from Hindi or Punjabi, and the liberal use of superlatives. An irrepressible writer, similar to other practitioners of this genre, Khan wrote three additional works: Pandit Nehru: The jewel of the world, The Eternal Flame of India and Dr Radhakrishnan and His Message to Mankind. Undoubtedly, Khan also aspired to be the ‘twilightest star’ in the firmament of Indian English.

K A Abbas, the scriptwriter of such Hindi cinema classics as Awara and Shree 420, also paid tribute to Indian English in a mock letter that he wrote soon after Partition. His imagined letter to Gandhi, written from the perspective of a child, gives short shrift to rules of English grammar and spelling. Although the “letar” is baffling in many ways, since Abbas could well have made an adult write the same epistle, the piece is nevertheless poignant.

We herd on radio you were fasting unless Hindus of Delhi bekum olrite with Muslims. When she herd it teers came in grandmothers eyes and she did not eat for one hole day and even father sed if there is one good man in Hindus he is Gandhi. Trying to copy grandmother I also fasted one time but before evening I was in bad condishun and my hart was not in play or school work but only in fud and oll time I think of poulao and shami kababs. And I think how you can fast for such long time and not eat anything.

Another instance of the copious garnering of superlatives can be seen in Jagat S Bright’s 1945 booklet Jawaharlal Nehru: A biographical study, published by the Indian Printing Works. A caption accompanying a picture of Nehru in a fedora reads: “Every inch a statesman! From beneath the shades of his felt hat, the eyes of Jawaharlal glint like a rapier into the devildom of Western diplomacy.” In his introduction to the book, Bright gets downright incendiary with his adjectives and metaphors:

The career of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru has been an embodiment of ‘Service above Self’. His has been a statesmanship of selflessness and self-sacrifice. He remains unfaded and unfading in the whirling bursting world in which we live today. Pandit Nehru is a live figure when the very notion of the abiding seems a myth. He is a scholar, a patriot a lover of truth, an unflinching opponent of whatsoever things are debasing. He has given his life to the country. His devotion to internationalism has lent to him an added glory. His ideas and ideals like the snows of the Himalayas, convert themselves into the melted floods which fertilise the globe.

One way or another, the rush to pay compliments to Nehru and Gandhi led to the inadvertent creation and popular spread of a different – sometimes rather comic version – of the English language. Indian English, which today flourishes in its own right, has also made it possible for India (and Southasia) to gain better access in this age of globalisation than other developing regions of the world. Most importantly, Nehru and Gandhi introduced Indians to English, while also teaching them to read a form of the language that Indians liked and understood, even if it was clearly in contrast to the English written by the British. The Raj, of course, saw a wealth of literature based in the Subcontinent, but it required a Gandhi and a Nehru to help India finally take to English, albeit in their own way.