A language made our own: The politics of identity and language in Indian writing

This dissertation investigates the relationship between the concept of Indian identity and the English language as reflected in Indian Literature. Questions of identity in this literature are inextricably connected with the issue of using English, the language of the erstwhile colonizers, to portray the non-English reality of the Indian space. I argue that English is today an Indian language, and Indian-English literature can function, like literature in any regional Indian language, as vernacular Indian literature. Critical discourse distinguishes regional Indian writings and Indian-English literature in terms of a basic dichotomy. It is suggested that Indian writing in English intends to hold a "conversation with the world," while regional Indian literatures bring to the attention of a local readership specific Indian concerns. Hence, it is argued that the sensibility reflected in Indian writing in English is a transnational sensibility, while regional Indian literature gives expression to a sensibility rooted in the local. Such a dichotomy is, however, only occasional. It is obvious in a comparative study of Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Tagore's Bengali novel The Home and the World. On the other hand, an examination of the handling of feminist questions by Indian-English women writers and Bengali women writers suggests that Indian writing in English and regional language Indian literature cease to be divergent in terms of intentions and sensibilities when women writers, irrespective of whether they write in English or a regional Indian language, explore issues of gender identity. Indian literary studies, even studies by women critics, have not considered how the concerns of the Indian woman are represented in Indian writing in English and regional Indian literature. Yet, Indian feminist novels highlight most prominently the fact that Indian writing in English and regional language Indian literature are both vernacular Indian literature, written in the different vernacular languages of a multilingual country. The claim that English is today an Indian language and literature written in this language is "authentic" Indian literature is further substantiated by a study of the representation of heterogeneous processes of diasporic feminine identity construction through the medium of English by diasporic Indian feminine writers.