How Indian writing became of the people, for the people

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” the pioneering sociolinguist Max Weinreich had observed. English is an Indian language, with its dialects and sub-dialects, from South Mumbai twangs to the distinctive Punjabi Pinglish and so on. Also referred to as ‘English in India’ (IndE), its history runs parallel to the history of colonisation in the sub-continent. It is, along with Hindi, an official language, often serving as a bridge language across the richly diverse linguistic landscape. The renowned Bangla writer Bankimchandra Chatterjee, author of classics like Durgeshnandini and Anandamath, wrote a slim novella, ‘Rajmohan’s Wife’, in 1864. A suspenseful cliffhanger with a classic gothic overlay, it was published in serial form in an English periodical called Indian Field. (I felt especially drawn to this forgotten novel because Rajmohan’s wife was named Matangini, which resonates with the protagonist Matangi in my recent novel, ‘The Blind Matriarch’.)

Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his collection of poetry, ‘Gitanjali’, rendered in English as ‘Song Offerings’. The Promethean genius of the polyglot Michael Madhusudan Dutt had him writing fluently in English and Bangla, and also studying languages such as Latin, Greek, Persian as well as French, German and Italian. Dutt famously introduced blank verse to Bangla. He also leavened the sum of Indian writing with ideas and themes from across the world.
The pioneering Malayalam novel ‘Indulekha’, by O Chandu Menon, was published in 1889. It was translated into English by John Willoughby Francis Dumergue in 1892. Krupabai Satthianadhan’s English novel, ‘Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life’, was serialised between 1887 and 1888 in the ‘Madras Christian College Magazine’. She wrote another novel, ‘Kamala, A Story of Hindu Life’, before her tragic death at the age of 32. The vastly entertaining, prescient feminist novel ‘Sultana’s Dream’, by Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, published in 1905, remains a riveting read.