After Independence, we heard constant complaints against the use of English in India. Some states banned it from primary schools and government offices. Politicians found there were votes in anti-English rhetoric. But English would not be put down, and sometime in the 1990s the carping seemed to stop and quietly English became one of the Indian languages. More and more Indians are becoming comfortable with English, and one of these days India will become the largest English-speaking nation in the world according to experts. Today, we are more accepting of English, I think, because we are more relaxed and confident as a nation. The minds of our young have become decolonized and one of the symptoms of this liberation is the increasing use of ‘Hinglish’.
The purists disapprove of this uninhibited hybrid of Hindi and English but most of us accept it with a shrug. Mixing English with our mother tongues had been going on for generations. Earlier it had been a language of mobility but this time around Hinglish is both the aspirational language of the lower classes and the fashionable idiom of upper-class drawing rooms. It is the stylish language of Bollywood, FM radio and television. Advertisers, in particular, have been surprised by its resonance. Who knows, maybe a hundred years from now, Hinglish will also produce its Shakespeare.
I taught myself to write with a tiny, eighty-five-page paperback called The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.1 As far as I know there is no better book on writing English and, astonishing for a composition rulebook, it made the New York Times bestseller list in 1962 and has stayed there for years. The second of its two authors is the great American essayist E.B. White, whose literary style is as pure as any in the English language. In these unheroic times in India, I find solace in E.B. White, who was a sceptic and preferred to view life from a deliberately mundane and irreverent perspective. I learned from White to write in a way that comes easily, but not to assume that because it has come naturally your product is without flaw. I write by ear, often with difficulty and seldom with an exact notion of grammar, but it hasn’t put me off this book. Blaise Pascal, the French man of letters, would have agreed with me about the virtue of writing naturally. He said that when ‘we come across a natural style, we are surprised and delighted; for we expected an author and we find a man’.
I am also attracted to the Upanishads, which teach us to speak to others in a language that one speaks to oneself when one is alone, as Mahatma Gandhi did when he spoke to the goatherds on the banks of the Sabarmati. He did not adjust or speak down, because he knew that there is only one question, the same for everyone. And the goatherds breathed his vibrant words. Unlike university graduates who are filled with learning and analysis, the goatherds were just and sensitive (as we must all try to be), for they were accustomed to the voices of the fields. The language that I speak to myself when I am alone is the language I aspire to write in. It is, I feel, the Indian English that has blossomed in the Indian subcontinent in the past 150 years. It is also the language that actors who perform in English in India must use in the theatre when they are performing. Only then will the audience be willing to lose itself in the play and not think about how they are speaking. Only then will the audience forgive their mistakes.
Writing Larins Sahib
I began to think of Larins Sahib in the bazaars of the Punjab when I was learning to sell Vicks Vaporub. I was reading at the time a history of the Punjab, in which I came across the unusual Lawrence brothers. Henry Lawrence was the most interesting and the least imperial. His brother George was a soldier in the North-West and John was an empire-builder who went on to become Lord Lawrence, the Governor-General and Viceroy of India. We used to call the latter ‘Tunda Lat’ because his statue in the Lawrence Gardens in Lahore lacked an arm.
Henry was unusual because he formed easy friendships with the Sikh nobility. I was fascinated by his warm and affectionate relationship with Sher Singh, the scion of the Attari family, the fiery Rani Jindan, the widow of Ranjit Singh, and her son Dalip, who was taken away from her when he was young and who became the tragic ‘black prince’ at Queen Victoria’s court. I don’t quite know why I thought of it as a play. It could have been a novel. But it was fun doing research over the next twelve months. Reading the history of the Punjab was for me a search for identity. I was drawn to the events in 1846 because that is when the British first arrived in the Punjab and the first reactions of the Punjabis to the English and vice versa determined how we would behave with each other over the next hundred years.
The events in
