Nilanjana S Roy: Gamchas and frangipani: bilingual worlds

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Brave Raj de Coverley sallied forth/ Armed with sword and chillum-chee/ With him went young Gingham/ The new Griffin from Bingham/ And their muggers three.

A Hindoo lass in distress they spied/ In the arms of a cheroot foul was she/ Raj drew his khansama, he steeled his calico, Gingham girded up his khichdi;/ The two bandicoots/ Spurred on their oonts/ And rescued the fair Suttee."

This mishmash of Hobson-Jobson and Raj argot is, thankfully, all that survives from a community effort during my college days at writing a parody that would lay the ghost of bad Anglo-Indian fiction to rest.

Since it ran to about 30 stanzas in its original form, you may infer that we did a thorough job; and given the sample above, let no one lament that it never was published.

What we were inveighing against was the kind of writing, now to be found only in the darkest corners of libraries in the hills, where a red-faced colonel would set down his Raj memoirs, mixing together fiery chutneys with equally fiery maharanis, with a few feuding tribes and trusty daffadar thrown in for good measure.

The bungalows and bandicoots, cheroots and chillum-chees that overran this prose were there, we suspected, to add authenticity and exotica in equal portion.

There was an in-between phase where Indian writers struggled with English in what some of us irreverently referred to as the frangipani tree problem.

Suppose you mentioned a frangipani tree because there was one outside your window "" but you knew it would leap out at a reader who knew only oaks and ashes.

So you attempted to soften the blow by expounding on the idea of a frangipani tree, so very different from an oak, thereby incurring the wrath of Indian academics who would take you to task for "pandering to the West".

Either you risked bewildering one set of readers, the ones who had never seen a frangipani tree in their lives, or irritating readers at "home", who wondered why you were wasting your time and theirs describing something you could all visualise without any assistance.

There was a third option: write about the frangipani tree only if the book at that stage requires a description of frangipani trees. Proust described his tea-soaked madeleine in detail because his journey into memory began with that particular confection, not because he had in mind readers from Africa or India who wouldn't know their madeleines from their crumpets.

The debate over how Indian writers should write English might be intensified by Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide. Set in the Sunderbans, it brings together a marine biologist in search of dolphins, a young call-centre professional in search of family history, an almost-forgotten massacre of the local fishermen and an eccentric Englishman's long-buried attempt to create a utopian society in the archipelago.

Language connects some of his characters; Piya, the biologist, speaks only English "" she remembers Bengali as an alien language, the tongue in which her parents spoke. But Ghosh also sees the Sunderbans as a point where migrants' languages mingle in the waters lapping at the shores of the islands: "Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese and who knows what else?"

Krishna Datta raised an interesting point when she took Ghosh to task for taking 400 words to describe a gamcha "" which she defines as "a light piece of chequered material used mainly as a towel". It looked contrived, she said.

Read that specific passage in The Hungry Tide and whether it looks contrived or not is an issue of perspective, a question of whether you think Ghosh enlarged on the gamcha in order to explain the idea to a foreign audience, or whether he was being legitimately descriptive, expounding on the gamcha in the same way, say, Barbara Kingsolver dwelves lovingly on mushrooms and their spores in Prodigal Summer.

Datta's objection arises from the fact that most Indian writers inhabit a bilingual world. Her protest stems from the resentment most of us who are bilingual experience when we have something that is obvious to us explained at tedious length.

It's like being told that our entire world needs a glossary in order to be understood by anyone who comes from elsewhere. But this doesn't always apply to writers like Ghosh, or to many of the other writers from India who use English today.

Some are awkward; some struggle to express the language they're thinking of in the language they're writing in. But many more flip back and forth between Hindi or Bengali or Telegu terms and English in the same way that they do in real life.

And some, like Ghosh, when confronted with the challenge of how to describe an all-purpose garment like the gamcha (I use one when travelling as a scarf, a towel, a turban, a hairband, a water filter and in extremis, as a skirt), stop to take a closer look at what they've taken for granted all these years, and describe what they're seeing with a fresh gaze.

A recent study suggests that being bilingual actually changes the way the brain processes information and increases the ability to compartmentalise, to filter out distractions; it might even offer some kind of protection against Alzheimer's.

These benefits don't translate directly into literature. I like the idea, though, that as more and more words of Indian origin, from yaar to awara, enter the English language through the front door of the Oxford English Dictionary each year, writers like Ghosh hold the back door open wide enough so that words like gamcha can either sneak in or become more familiar to a larger audience.

The global publishing scene may never understand the multilingualism we take for granted in India, but they're going to get used to the idea that we speak in tongues. Many of them.

nilroy@lycos.com