Unforgetting English
In a 2018 article, Arundhati Roy raises the question of “what is the morally appropriate language in which to think and write” (2018: n.p.)? Unsurprisingly, the Indian writer, critic, and activist does not provide a straightforward answer to this sweeping and possibly misphrased question. As a matter of fact, the terms “moral” and “morally” do not crop up in the article any further, suggesting that language, even in postcolonial contexts, is not inherently imbued with “moral appropriateness”.
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Contrary to longstanding traditions in postcolonial studies and literature, Roy rigorously decouples the English language from British colonialism and its coercive educational system to claim that “[w]riting or speaking in English is not a tribute to the British Empire […]‚ it is a practical solution to the circumstances created by it” (2018: n.p.). Along such pragmatic lines Roy argues against one-sided understandings of English as an imperial language and highlights its broad range of socio-political functions within India as “the language of mobility, of opportunity, of the courts, of the national press, the legal fraternity, of science, engineering, and international communication, […] of privilege and exclusion” (2018: n.p.).
Still, her pragmatism notwithstanding, Roy does not completely dismiss the link between language and morality. Importantly, for her, morality materializes in the ways in which language is employed rather than in the choice of a specific language. With an eye to the linguistic make-up of her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), a multifaceted mosaic of modern Indian society, she claims:
It is a story that emerges out of an ocean of languages, in which a teeming ecosystem of living creatures — official-language fish, unofficial-dialect mollusks, and flashing shoals of word-fish — swim around, some friendly with each other, some openly hostile, and some outright carnivorous. But they are all nourished by what the ocean provides. And all of them, like the people in The Ministry, have no choice but to coexist, to survive, and to try to understand each other. (Roy, 2018: n.p.)
It is the coexistence of different languages, the exchange between them, and the difference within them, as staged by Roy’s second English-language novel, that interest me in this article. Roy’s eloquent statement about the “ocean of languages” indeed provides an apt characterization of the concerns of several contemporary Anglophone literatures, which foreground multilingual configurations and fluid linguistic entanglements spurred by various forms of colonialism, transcultural exchange, and migration. These linguistic experiments, inventions, and interventions are not primarily committed to appropriating or subverting the English language. Rather, literary texts from across the Anglophone sphere, such as Edwidge Danticat’s The Framing of Bones (1998), Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013), Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019), probe connections between different languages and entangle English into multilingual networks of exchange. These novels bring various languages, small and hegemonic, into contact to question standardized notions of “a” language as a countable, bounded, and discrete entity (see Young, 2016), and to discard the idea that language can be owned. Moving between languages, they energetically illustrate Aamir Mufti’s claim that “English […] is never written or spoken out of the hearing range of a number of its linguistic others” (2016: 160).
Different forms of linguistic dispossession, of living in multiple languages and using “borrowed tongues” (Karpinski, 2012: 2), lie at the heart of much Anglophone postcolonial, diasporic, and transcultural writing. What they share is the predicament of “languaging” (Chow, 2014; following Becker, 1995), which primarily results from racialized and oppressive encounters with the English language. Enfolded with colonialism, English, under the uneven impact of globalization, continues to exert hegemonic influences upon different places and peoples across the world.
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The hyper-centrality of English as the language of global capitalism, print cultures, academe, and entertainment inevitably reproduces some of the inequalities of the colonial past, while sparking many new ones. It rigidly regulates the mobility of people, ideas, and literatures across the globe, and, according to some (for example, Innes, 2007: 98), it privileges western worldviews at the expense of alternative, non-Eurocentric knowledges. Getting to grips with “English” today therefore requires an acute sense of its historical complicity with European colonialism and neocolonial structures of global capitalism (see Helgesson et al., 2020: 1–2).
But understanding English today also requires cognizance of its distinct local and culturally particular manifestations. Crucially, the hyper-centrality of English as a global language is countered by an opposing force at work, namely its pluralization and concomitant “provincialization” (Gikandi, 2014). The imposition of English on various colonized peoples across the world and its subsequent circulation within transcultural networks have given rise to highly diversified linguistic inflections, which testify to the transformative power of locality. As the world’s leading second language, English does not operate “in its own presence” (Pennycook, 2008: 44). Rather, it interacts and grapples with other languages within what Francesca Orsini calls the “multilingual local” (2015). The form, meaning, and status of English are therefore not only determined by some far-away colonial, neocolonial, or global influence but also by its multifaceted and historically changing relations to other, locally co-existing languages.
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Placing English within the “multilingual local” provides an opportunity to counter the equation of English with globality and to interrupt some of the monolingual “self-sufficiencies” of the Anglosphere (Simon, 2012: 1). Simon Gikandi makes a similar point when calling for a “provincialization” of English to strip it of its presumed power and decouple it from its “compulsory Englishness” (2014: 13, 11): “An effective way of dealing with the anxieties that English generates is to deprive the language of the ecumenical status of the global and to represent it as one language among many, to provincialize it, as it were” (Gikandi, 2014: 13).
To be sure, a consideration of the historically strained relations between English and other languages within the multilingual local holds particular urgency for India and its long and complex Anglophone literary tradition. As illustrated by Thomas Babington Macaulay’s infamous “Minute” (1835), English in colonial India was posited as the language of civilization and authority and pitted against the inferiority of the colony’s so-called vernaculars (see Tageldin, 2018: 115). Leaving aside the vexed question of whether English, over the centuries, has become an Indian language or not (see Cowaloosur, 2013; Saxena, 2018; Srinivasan, 2020), “the historical life of English is inevitably political” (Ch’ien, 2004: 176). Speaking English fluently goes hand in hand with a number of privileges which causes a serious socio-economic dividing line within Indian society (Sadana, 2012: 4). Many Anglophone writers, whether living in India or abroad in the diaspora, explore such political resonances by confronting English with elements of India’s other languages, such as Urdu, Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Malayalam, and so on. Authors such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, and Preti Taneja inscribe into English a sense of difference afforded by local linguistic regimes to highlight cultural particularities and to explore how languages intersect with class, caste, gender, and other socio-political categories (see Sadana, 2012: 8).
While some critics have celebrated these linguistic experiments as a major step towards decolonialization and pluralization (see Tageldin, 2018: 116), others have been more sceptical about their socio-political effects. One of the most elaborate examinations of the global–vernacular dynamic has been presented by Aamir Mufti in his seminal study Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (2016). Tracing the emergence of the South Asian Anglophone novel back to the colonial educational system and Orientalist studies, Mufti understands the recourse to vernacular speech forms in contemporary fiction as indicative of a more pervasive “Orientalism-Anglicism” (2016: 172). Orientalism-Anglicism results from the symbolic and economic pressures to assimilate the literary systems of South Asia into an Anglocentric world literary sphere. Against this backdrop, the use of vernacular speech is an ambivalent gesture, which uneasily oscillates between a “claim to authentic national expression against the alien presence of English” (Mufti, 2016: 172) and an “‘ethnicized’ assimilation [to a global cultural system] that gets recoded and reproduced as linguistic diversity” (2016: 171). For Mufti, the vernacular is therefore not world literature’s thorny other that contests Anglophonic dominance. Rather, it is an effect of the global aspirations of South Asian writing in English, in other words, of its cosmopolitan outreach, which invests in the exploitation of vernacularized authenticity for the voyeuristic or Orientalist pleasures of largely Western readerships.
Of course, Mufti has a point in being suspicious about the use of vernaculars, which some critics hail rather too hastily as a cure for the aesthetically flattening “oneworldedness” (Apter, 2013: 83) of contemporary world literature. Still, as indicated above, the fairly static distinction between what Mufti calls “India’s vernaculars” and English as a global language hypostasizes both linguistic boundaries and the dichotomy between the local and the global. English has, over the centuries, irreversibly become part of India’s linguistic regimes and it is therefore as much a “supranational” language as it is a local one (Mufti, 2016: 149).
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In other words, English, in contemporary India, is required to be conceived in heterogeneous, open, and at times even conflictual ways. It is, as Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan remarks, “a vexed colonial bequest, and at the same time, a vehicle of upward mobility for lower-caste and class communities formerly barred access to educational and vocational institutions for English-language acquisition. English is imperious and enabling” (2020: 475). Conversely, many of India’s “vernaculars” have, through various forms of exchange, migration, and translocation, become part of locally dispersed contexts and therefore frequently point beyond the local and the native.
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Any study of language-use in South Asian literature in English must account for this plurality through nuanced and contextualized readings, which uncover the ways in which English is put to use and how it is positioned within a multilingual environment. I share Srinivasan’s claim that “the problem with postcolonial Anglophonism was not the hegemony of English as such, but rather the tendency to read Anglophone literatures as if English were not a language at all” (2018: 313–314). It is therefore necessary to “unforget” English (Walkowitz, 2015: 23) and to examine how English is configured and how it organizes specific experiences. This is all the more important since English in South Asian literature frequently relies on acts of translation, namely of the translation of “non-Anglophone and vernacular […] life-worlds into the novelistic discourse of English and its cultural system more broadly” (Mufti, 2016: 171). In other words, translation is an enabling condition for the evocation of India’s multilingual imaginaries. As such, it can either be highlighted and acknowledged or disavowed and invisibilized. Either way, the translated nature of South Asian literature in English raises aesthetically and socio-politically relevant questions concerning the conditions and effects of translational acts. Who is translated for and how do acts of translation bear on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion on a multilingual scale? Which admittedly unstable links are forged through the performativity of translation and how does the latter reflect on what Gayatri Spivak calls the “burden of English” (2012: 35)?
With these thoughts in mind, I want to turn to Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, analysing how it imagines the relations between English and other languages within India’s multilingual environment. How is English construed and posited as a language and how does it exist, coexist, and persevere within “the ocean of languages”? And how does The Ministry mobilize the relation between languages to reflect on the dynamics between the local and global? My claim is that the use of English in Roy’s novel is marked by a peculiar ambivalence. While the use of English might be a “practical solution”, it is nevertheless a solution that comes with considerable uneasiness and introduces multiple frictions into the novel’s poetics.
Language and community-building: “Binding together worlds that have been ripped apart”
Roy’s long-awaited second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is a sprawling narrative which loosely interweaves personal stories with India’s recent history, an abundant “supermarket of sorrow” (Roy, 2017: 327).
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It opens with the story of a Muslim transgender woman, Anjum, who has made a new home for herself on a small Delhi graveyard, hoping to escape further violence. The novel quickly moves on to introduce a large cast of mainly marginalized, underprivileged, and vulnerable characters, among them women, children, transgender people, Dalits, Muslims, and political activists. All of them are affected in different, though interrelated ways by the political and religious conflicts ravaging contemporary Indian society, and most of them are haunted by the unresolved legacies of India’s past. The injustices of India’s caste system intermingle in frequently toxic ways with growing right-wing populism and excessive neoliberal forces, producing many precarious exclusions (see Mendes and Lau, 2019). According to one critic, the novel is “an […] unsettling, artistic cry against injustice. It is a polyphonic protest” (Felicelli, 2017: n.p.).
To trace the stories of India’s unconsoled and “dispossessed” (101), Roy has created a style that thrives on mixture, transgression, fragmentation, and association. It oscillates between multiple characters, including, most centrally: Anjum (born Aftab), the enigmatic Tilo, a former architecture student, and Musa, a militant freedom fighter in Kashmir. It jumps in an often achronological way between contemporary India and its post-independence history; it draws on multiple languages; and it combines novelistic and at times lyrical modes of writing with essayistic passages, which testify to Roy’s long-standing political activism. Indeed, as one critic phrases it, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is “a curious beast: baggy, bewilderingly overpopulated with characters, frequently achronological, written in an often careless and haphazard style” (Clark, 2017: n.p.).
Somewhat more positively, one might say that the novel is obsessed with plurality and entanglement: the plurality of individual fates, of loss and suffering, the plurality of history, the plurality of multispecies entanglements, as well as the plurality of languages. In a 2011 interview, Roy, reflecting on the challenges of returning to fiction, states: “I’ll have to find a language to tell the story I want to tell. By language I don’t mean English, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, of course. I mean something else. A way of binding together worlds that have been ripped apart” (Kumar, 2011: n.p.). The language that Roy has finally “found” is one that emerges from various multilingual strategies, and multilingualism becomes a major generative principle of the novel’s poetics. That is to say that multilingualism in the novel is a genuinely imaginative configuration that creatively fuses multiple languages to explore the intersections between language use and community-building. Primarily written in English, the narrative includes numerous words, phrases, and poems from India’s bhashas or vernaculars, most importantly from Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, and Kashmiri (all of which are transliterated into the Latin alphabet). Roy’s poetic idiom energetically evokes India’s polymorphic make-up, showing that the country “belongs not to Punjabis, Biharis, Gujaratis, Madrasis, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians”, as one character phrases it (168). Importantly, the community modelled by the novel transgresses narrow, anthropocentric notions of conviviality to include non-human agents and to foreground entanglements between different species. At the same time, the novel, through its multilingual idiom, consistently points beyond India’s boundaries, integrating words and phrases from, for example, Pashtu, to question any given, seemingly natural relation between language and territory and to undo sentimental nativism. Epitomizing relational, lateral, and transversal ways of thinking, the story’s multilingual realities have broader implications for imagining new, transcultural, translingual, and multispecies forms of kinship.
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The novel’s engagement with the politics of language, which is at the same time a politics of community-building, is manifest from the beginning. In a poetically dense passage, Anjum, whose first language is Urdu, contemplates a meeting with “a Man Who Knew English” (4). He
told her that her name written backwards (in English) spelled Majnu. In the English version of the story of Laila and Majnu, Majnu was called Romeo and Laila was Juliet. She found that hilarious. “You mean I’ve made a khichdi of their story?” she asked. “What will they do when they find that Laila may actually be Majnu and Romi was really Juli?” The next time he saw her, the Man Who Knew English said he’d made a mistake. Her name spelled backwards would be Mujna, which wasn’t a name and meant nothing at all. To this she said, “it doesn’t matter. I’m all of them, I’m Romi and Juli, I’m Laila and Majnu. And Mujna, why not? […] I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering.” (4)
The novel’s preoccupation with hidden affinities and unexpected transcultural exchange is highlighted by the links between the Arabic story of Laila and Majnu and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which provides the framework for the encounter between different languages. Dating back to the seventh century, the story of the ill-fated lovers Laila and Majnu has been continuously retold, rewritten, and translated across cultural, spatial, and temporal borders, illustrating Sheldon Pollock’s claim that world literature often precedes vernacular and national literatures (2000: 590). It found an artistically sophisticated expression in a narrative poem by the well-known twelfth-century Persian poet Neẓāmi of Ganja and was celebrated by British Romantic poet Lord Byron as “the Romeo and Juliet of the East” (1814: 61). In this decolonial comparative scenario, which dismantles the alleged belatedness of non-European literatures, it is Anjum who establishes a tertium comparationis, and it is clear that both her transgender identity and the fact that her name is spelled backwards usher forth a number of twists. The border-transgressing energies of the passage congeal in the word khichdi, a popular Indian casserole dish. The Hindi term refers to a simple recipe of rice, lentils, and vegetables, eaten all over South Asia by diverse communities. Khichdi accents the localized, resistant dimension of Roy’s idiom and, as a dish that leaves its various ingredients more or less intact, it hints at a vision of language that acknowledges plurality and difference. The term’s distinct status is marked typographically through the use of italics, an established, but not neutral means of flaunting linguistic difference.
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It is at this point where the peculiar ambivalence towards Anglophonism, which pervades Roy’s novel, becomes manifest. While the italicized Hindi term puts into relief that which cannot be integrated into the cultural imaginary offered by the English language and is turned into a sign of unassimilable difference, it can also plausibly be read as an instance of a politically resonant exoticism and “Orientalism-Anglicism” (Mufti, 2016: 172). From the latter’s perspective, the khichdi, tied as it is to local food cultures, imbues the passage with a sense of reified and consumable authenticity. Possibly catering to a metropolitan desire for the exotic (Huggan, 2001), the visibilized vernacular ultimately bolsters, rather than subverts, the centrality of the Anglosphere.
In the passage quoted above, the integration of the Urdu mehfil introduces a new, politically relevant dimension into Roy’s multilingual poetics. From a partisan point of view, Urdu and Hindi are frequently conceived as opposed languages, one “belonging” to India, the other to Pakistan (Mufti, 2016: 171). These putative national differences have been harnessed in various ways to orchestrate inter-religious and inter-caste relations, predominately those between Hindus and Muslims. Considering India’s cultural, linguistic, and religious reality, such an oppositional understanding of language as a bearer of one culture and one religion is untenable; and both Roy’s novel and her article “What is the morally appropriate language?” do a lot to contest facile opposition (not least through the transliteration of Hindi and Urdu). Roy stresses that Urdu, written in the Persian–Arabic script, was, up until the nineteenth century, “the formal language of literature and poetry for Hindus and Muslims alike” (2018: n.p.). The separation between Hindi and Urdu along ideologically charged lines only picked up pace in the aftermath of the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, when British colonialists exploited differences to justify the restructuring of power relations. The Hindi nationalist movement has given additional weight to these differences by harnessing the Devanagari script for the Hindi language and by strategically purging Hindi of Arabic and Persian influences. Although today Urdu is one of the country’s 22 official languages, Hindi nationalists have, with increasing vehemence, stigmatized it as an “un-Indian” language as they try to graft their “‘One nation, one religion, one language’ vision” (Roy, 2018: n.p.). In many respects this ideologically charged process illustrates that the invention of languages, including the making of boundaries between them, is implicated in political interests and forms “part of a broader project of ‘governmentality’” (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007: 2).
Throughout the novel, Urdu is imbued with considerable creative value, which bespeaks a fascination with Urdu and Persian literary cultures and which contests the status of English as the prime language of literature. From early on, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness undoes the common notion of English as the language of creativity, education, and innovation by exposing the intellectual limits of “the Man Who Knows English”. As Anjum creates a series of associations between English, Hindi, and Urdu names, he is deeply impressed: “He said he’d never have thought of it himself. She said, ‘How could you have, with your standard of Urdu? What d’you think? English makes you clever automatically?’” (4). Obviously, English does not automatically entail cleverness and his “standard of Urdu” does not suffice to reach creative heights either (4).
Such acts of redistributing creative value and of negotiating the symbolic prestige of languages are of course perfectly valid within postcolonial literatures. However, they sit somewhat uneasily with Roy’s claim that the “story [.…] emerges out of an ocean of languages […] in which a teeming ecosystem of living creatures swim around” (2018: n.p.). Roy’s “ocean of languages” is riven by invisibilized undercurrents and is frequently shaped less by principles of “companionship” (Roy, 2018: n.p.; emphasis in original) than by conflict and hierarchy. More to the point, on one level, English, in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is discredited as a language almost alien to India. In Roy’s fictionalized multilingual postcolony, knowing English appears to be such a rare competency that it can supplant a man’s proper name. The replacement of the proper name causes a paradox, a split, for it is precisely English that turns the “proper” name into a marker of alterity.
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On another level, however, English in The Ministry of Happiness is posited as a literary and linguistic mediator, which makes possible the encounter between Urdu, Hindi, and other Indian languages in the first place. Conversely, the mediating function of English turns Urdu and Hindi into languages of finite reach and hence into “vernaculars”.
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Through italicization, the vernacular becomes a highly visible sign of localized difference, now directed towards the outside. Here, the symbolic function of the vernacular takes precedence over its communicative function. It is this peculiar interplay between the novel’s use of English and the integration of vernaculars oscillating between the local and global that positions The Ministry of Utmost Happiness within the international Anglophone literary sphere, understood as that sphere in which the English language reaches towards the outside and acquires its global dimension (see Steyn, 2020: 164).
If, therefore, English in India is not “a given”, but “a position of speaking and writing that must continually be created, marshalled, and defended”, as Srinivasan concisely notes (2020: 475), then in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness this position is marked by a considerable anxiety. Indeed, the lingua franca is fended off and at times even discredited as alien precisely to make possible its use as a mediator for India’s multilingual realities. Or, to put it differently, as English is both used and negated, the novel’s multilingualism navigates possibilities (and impossibilities) of producing a literature that espouses alternative, ex-centric, and small worlds in a hyper-central language.
This linguistic tension is complicated by the interplay between the visibility and invisibility of translation that structures Anjum’s utterance. According to Roy, “The Ministry is a novel written in English but imagined in several languages. Translation as a primary form of creation was central to the writing of it” (2018: n.p.; emphasis in original). For the larger part of Anjum’s speech, the act of translation remains unmarked, and it is only with the translation of mehfil into the English “gathering” that readers are made aware of the centrality of translation. As Naoki Sakai notes in Translation and Subjectivity, translation always “structures the situation in which it is performed” and therefore entails a specific “social relation” (1999: 3), which entangles a translator, a translational enunciation, and specific addressees into a mutually transformative network. Anjum’s translation of the Urdu word mehfil is obviously not performed for her interlocutor (after all, the man “who knows English” is also a speaker of Urdu), but for the (implied) readership. As an instance of what Karin Barber calls an act of addressivity (2007), the translational scenario reminds readers that the fictional world, despite the predominant use of English, is shaped by the energies of other, local languages. Simultaneously, the translation overcomes the finite reach of Urdu to align it with the global aspirations of English. Considering the demands of the international book market, such translational acts can, as noted above, be seen as forms of exoticizing linguistic and local difference, designed to appeal to Anglophone readers “in terms […]they have come to expect” (Julien, 2006: 683). However, this understanding fails to account for the complexities of postcolonial literatures in English. Translational acts between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan are also a subtle, politically urgent reminder of the inequalities between languages that structure possibilities for articulation, including access to the world literary sphere. Performed by a subaltern character to the benefit of an Anglophone readership, translation underlines that the vernacular is “an index of unevenness” (Claesson et al., 2020: 304) and that the burden of translation is unequally distributed, typically shouldered by non-native speakers of English, be they fictional characters or postcolonial writers.
English, the language of global aspirations
In what follows, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness does a lot to imbue the invoked languages with literary, creative, and even moral value. Just as some of the characters appear at times somewhat flat and represent “an identity or allegiance” rather than the potential complexities of subjectivity (Lahiri, 2017: n.p.), so too are languages often classified as either good or bad. As indicated in the opening passage, it is the triangulation between English, Hindi, and Urdu in particular that the novel capitalizes on. This triangulation, we will see, changes the status and meaning of all languages involved.
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But, most importantly, it transgresses the unidirectional centre–periphery model between a world language and a localized vernacular to accentuate the centrality of trans-vernacular relations and to gauge their impact on the hegemonic English language. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, English is almost consistently depicted as a language whose links to various forms of Euro-American capitalism are inimical to India’s local plurality. It is the language of business, mobility, progress, self-help, and aspiration. As illustrated in the following quote from the novel, English is, as Rachael Gilmour and Tamar Steinitz claim in a different context, “language that aspires to be any language: the language equivalent of the empty, placeless space-time of modernity” (2017: 3):
The newly dispossessed, who lived in the cracks and fissures of the city, emerged and swarmed around the sleek, climate-controlled cars, selling […] business magazines, pirated management books (How to Make Your First Million, What Young India Really Wants), gourmet guides, interior design magazines with colour photographs of country houses in Provence, and quick-fix spiritual manuals (You Are Responsible for Your Own Happiness… or How to Be Your Own Best Friend…). (100)
It is the English-speaking population that benefits from and drives India’s increasingly rampant capitalism, producing an ever-larger number of the dispossessed through the international division of labour, which here translates into a division of language. But English in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is also a language that hints at the inauthenticity of characters and which renders them susceptible to masquerade and double-standards. English is spoken when characters are drunk; it is spoken by those who entertain close links to India’s corrupt government (336); it is the language of characters who cannot be read and who appear to lack roots (152); and, finally, it is the language of the secret service (176). The few positive references to English are largely related to Shakespeare’s writings. But even in those instances, English is steeped in alienation: “Tilo closed her eyes and recited her mother’s favourite passage from Shakespeare to herself. And at that moment, the world, already a strange place, became an even stranger one” (413). The passage in question is taken from the famous St Crispin’s Day speech, part of Shakespeare’s historical play Henry V, and a topical call for resistance against those who seem invincible.
While Roy’s novel illustrates that English is “never written or spoken out of the hearing range of a number of its linguistic others” (Mufti, 2016: 160), the link it entertains to other languages frequently has negative implications. In most cases, English is directed towards the outside, towards foreigners, and associated with various forms of oppression and homogenization. The Kashmiri–English alphabet, “some kind of dictionary, a work in progress” (208), lists an array of largely military terms in both languages, apparently designed to help tourists communicate with locals. It evokes the brutal and repressive dimensions of boundary-making. Moreover, in many instances, the English is linked to Hindu patriotism, manifesting in various slogans that celebrate “India”, the “world’s favourite new superpower” (96). The shifts between English and Hindi create a web of associations, which brings to the fore the exclusionary logic underlying the so-called “People of the World”:
Across the city, huge billboards jointly sponsored by an English newspaper and the newest brand of skin-whitening cream (selling by the ton) said: Our Time is Now. Kmart was coming, Walmart and Starbucks were coming, and in the British Airways advertisement on TV, the People of the World (white, brown, black, yellow) all chanted the Gayatri Mantra:
Om bhur bhuvah svaha
Tat savitur varenyam
Bhargo devasya dhimahi
Dhiyo yo nah pracodayat
Oh God, thou art the giver of life,
Remover of pain and sorrow,
Bestower of happiness,
O Creator of the Universe,
May we receive they supreme sin-destroying light,
May thou guide our intellect in the right direction.
(And may everyone fly BA.) (97)
Here, the Sanskrit Gayatri Mantra does not introduce the kind of untranslatability that, as Emily Apter has it (2013: 2), works against neoliberal models of equivalence, transfer, and commensurability. Rather, placed within the mediating potentials of (global business) English, it indexes translatability, interlingual transparency, and seemingly effortless mobility, perfectly epitomized by the airline BA. English, within this ideologically fraught context, is not just a language. Rather, it is a “cultural system” (Mufti, 2016: 12) and an apparatus that incessantly assimilates diverse life-worlds on a global scale and that propels the commodification of linguistic and cultural difference for the benefit of the economically privileged.
Urdu: A localized alternative to English?
In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the Urdu language is mobilized to evoke the richness of non-European literary cultures and to reflect on the shifting hierarchies between so-called cosmopolitan and vernacular languages. The boundaries between these languages are constructed within institutional frameworks, and it is one of the novel’s aims to fluidize such boundaries in order to free the notion of “a” language from its repressive function. While Urdu serves as a springboard for contemplating the role of regional languages within India, it also consistently transgresses the local and resonates with different spaces. Most importantly, the evocation of Urdu spans the distance to Pakistan, where Urdu is the national language (along with English), raising politically resonant questions concerning acts of linguistic, national, and cultural “bordering” (see Sakai, 2009: 83). Presenting Urdu as an alternative cosmopolitan language, the novel vindicates linguistic plurality. Yet, as this kind of plurality is filtered through the hyper-central language English, in both its global and localized dimension, it unfolds contradictory effects.
In Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Anjum’s father, Mulaqat Ali, is one of the characters who is identified with Urdu and Persian literary traditions. He is introduced as “a hakim, a doctor of herbal medicine and a lover of Urdu and Persian poetry” (12). To make ends meet, he works for another hakim, Hakim Abdul Majid, who has made a name for himself as the founder of a popular brand of syrup, “called Rooh Afza (Persian for ‘Elixir of the Soul’) […], made of khurfa seeds (purslane), grapes, oranges, watermelon, mint, carrots, a touch of spinach, khus khus, lotus, two kinds of lilies and a distillate of damask roses” (12–13). The many different ingredients of the drink, rendered in Urdu, Hindi, and English, metonymically activate the richness of Urdu and Persian cultures, associating them with excess, multitude, creativity, and irreducible diversity. Step by step, the novel turns the drink into a complex trope by means of which India’s political and religious conflicts and loyalties are negotiated. The trope’s multiple semantic layers provide a rich vocabulary for the experiences of war, exile, prosecution, and partition:
Then came Partition. God’s carotid burst open on the new border between Indian and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred. […] Old families fled (Muslim). New ones arrived (Hindu) and settled around the city walls. Rooh Afza had a serious setback but soon recovered and opened a branch in Pakistan. A quarter of a century later, after the holocaust in East Pakistan, it opened another branch on the brand-new country of Bangladesh. (13)
In the end, it is not nationalism, war, and secession that deal a deathblow to Rooh Afza but global capitalism, coming in the form of Coca-Cola: “But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola.” (13) The plainness of the word “Coca-Cola” contrasts sharply with the opulence of Rooh Afza and, as US-American capitalism is configured as a homogenizing force, English is posited as a “killer-language”.
Urdu, in this Anglophone novel, offers a Southern and Eastern alternative to the imperial idiom of English, highlighting that the latter has not always been the language of globalization and literary transfer. And while the novel makes clear that Urdu is firmly implicated in India’s varied linguistic and literary traditions, it rigorously displaces national understandings of language by foregrounding that this language belongs to several places, peoples, and cultures at once. The so-called vernacular, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness illustrates, cannot be contained within the local or nativist. Mulaqat Ali is proud of his family’s lineage, and whenever he has visitors he describes how “his ancestors had ruled an empire that stretched from the countries that now called themselves Vietnam and Korea all the way to Hungary and the Balkans, from Northern Siberia to the Deccan plateau in India” (14). He habitually ends such conversations with a quote from “one of his favourite poets, Mir Taqi Mir” (15), an eighteenth-century Urdu poet who considerably influenced the development of the Urdu language and who is famous for his ghazal poems. The ghazal, a lyrical genre that dates back to seventh-century Arabia and has travelled across cultures, underlines that the relational hierarchies between languages and literary traditions are unpredictable:
Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka
Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka
The head which today proudly flaunts a crown
Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown (15)
While these lines thematize degeneration and hint at the demise of the Mongol Empire, they simultaneously testify to Urdu’s continuing influence as a latent world literary tradition. By thus reflecting and deflecting the ghazal, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness also signals how this English-language novel is indebted to Urdu verse, possibly attempting to counter what the narrator calls the “ghettoization” of Urdu (15). The quotation of Urdu verse can therefore be understood as an expression of exchange and solidarity that curates Urdu as a shared literary heritage entangling multiple cultures, places, and periods. The paradox that pervades the novel derives from the complex interplay between transformation and confirmation. Even as The Ministry of Utmost Happiness confronts the global language English with its potential vicissitude and weaves into it a sense of linguistic and cultural otherness, it confirms the resilience and adaptivity of English. Or, to phrase it in the words of Srinivasan, the Indian Anglophone novel is haunted by “the specter of English’s ultimate metabolism of its vernacular others” (2020: 478).
From global English to small English: “A language to come”
“Akh daleela wann”, tell me a story, implores a three-year-old Kashmiri girl in Roy’s English-language novel (316). She thus expresses the need not only for ever new stories but also, implicitly, for a greater variety of languages in which such stories can be told. This demand indicates an intriguing dilemma: how to reach out to an Anglophone readership without cementing Anglocentricity? In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the discrediting of English as an alien and shallow language of global capitalism is marked by a contradictory pull, namely by the attempt to indigenize the language. That is to say, the use of English as a form of localized expression that defies unitary orders. Time and again, the novel invests in multilingual strategies to pluralize English and to turn it into a “small” language (see Ch’ien, 2004: 171), which counters the shallowness of global English. It is the direct and seemingly immediate confrontation of English with Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, and so on, that works to decentralize the global idiom:
[A]t the age of fifteen, only a few hundred yards from where his family had lived for centuries, Aftab stepped through an ordinary doorway into another universe. On his first night as a permanent resident of the Khwabgah, he danced in the courtyard to everybody’s favourite song from everybody’s favourite film — “Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya” from Mughal-e-Azam. The next night at a small ceremony he was presented with a green Khwabgah dupatta and initiated into the rules and rituals that formally made him a member of the Hijra community. […] Though she never visited him there again, for years, Jahanara Begum continued to send a hot meal to the Khwabgah every day. The only place where she and Anjum met was at the dargah of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed. (25)
The novel proffers this radical multilingualism, which renounces easy translatability and the kind of commodification of difference that the use of italics might be said to entail, as an alternative to the global aspirations of English. The inherently multilingual English cannot be tied back to single and bounded languages; it is palpably marked by the rhythms and syntactical structures of Hindi and Urdu, notable, for instance, in frequent repetitions of words and phrases (5, 92, 96) and in vernacularized variations of copula and auxiliaries (for example, in the phrase “Because Miss Jebeen, Miss Udaya Jebeen, was come” (437)). The border-crossing energies of Roy’s idiom also manifest in the occasional change of word classes — nouns become verbs (for example, “warehoused” (58), “ghettoized” (15), “double-deckered” (319)), and adjectives are turned into nouns (for example “stupidification” (371)). The strategy suggests that Roy’s idiom is already translated — in other words, that it emerges from translational exchange between languages, where such changes are frequently performed due to lexical incompatibilities and morphological gaps. Together with other linguistic and stylistic variations, such as the bending of standard syntax, parallel constructions, as well as the frequent use of upper-case characters (see Kalpana, 2018: 19), the inscription of India’s vernaculars into English makes ex-centric, often ignored characters audible, thus enabling more open understandings of the world. Mediating between unequal languages and undoing the boundaries between them, the novel’s idiom renders standard English foreign to monolingual readers, while bringing it closer to India’s multilingual realities. And yet, neither the foreignization of English nor its appropriation adequately captures the multiple effects and resonances of this poetic idiom. It is rather what Rey Chow calls the “condition of more-than-one” (2014: 59), or the fluid co-existence of multiple languages, that the poetic idiom espouses. In order to come to an acceptance of English as an Indian language, it seems, the novel needs to destroy its global aspirations and strip it off its flattening, exclusionary, and homogenizing effects.
Importantly, the multilingual and “small” English that Roy imagines for her subaltern characters and their imagination is not one that is spoken by the characters themselves. Rather, it is an imaginative construction that emerges from the total of the novel’s diversified speech acts and that testifies to the creativity of fiction. This construction is shaped by past histories of polycentric entanglements between different minor and major languages. It is however also oriented towards the future: it is “a language to come” (Derrida, 1998: 67), a dream, rather than a reality, making available new, more open, and possibly more egalitarian ways of imagining the world. The novel’s poetics appreciates the work of language, imagination, and translation in making worlds, enfolding both continuities and differences with past forms and idioms. While implicitly and explicitly capturing the anxieties that English as a hyper-central language causes for postcolonial writers, it also yields possibilities of turning a global language into a small, pluralized, and localized idiom that accepts its multilingual environment. Written in a moment in which the world literary sphere has become a market-driven Anglosphere, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness makes clear that Anglophone literature can no longer be understood in terms of the “monolingual paradigm” (see Yildiz, 2012).
