Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India

Abstract

Paradoxes abound in this sentence, which provides an intriguing entry point to the key impulses of Akshya Saxena’s Vernacular English. This book posits English as a vernacular and purposefully moves the language away from a singular embeddedness in the coercive history of colonialism. Saxena takes the reader through a wideranging array of texts and sites to think ‘language again—not at its limits but in its proliferation with bodies, media and languages’ (21). The book puts forward a practice of reading that makes us attentive to the energies that shape English as a sensory field in India. There is a stark difference in the approach to English here from earlier postcolonial articulations of disjuncture. As I was reading the book, I was reminded of Jamaica Kincaid’s fictional depiction of a post-colonial subject’s animosity and rage when she sees daffodils for the first time because of its associations with the estranging poetry of Wordsworth, which was part of her education under the shadow of the empire. Such impassioned binaries do not shape the life-world that Saxena maps as she deftly demonstrates how the story of English in India ‘cannot simply be the story of oppression’ (180). Saxena’s narrative of English is also replete with sensory dynamics, but she makes us traverse the multivalent and contested trajectories of the language. While language is often conceptualised via practices of reading and comprehension, this book explores the ways in which the life of a language exceeds the domains of the pedagogic. From the home to the street, cinema screens to slogans, debates on poetry to a temple for the Dalit Goddess of English, there is a multisensory field that the book assembles in order to trace the quotidian and contested textures of English in India. Chapter 4 begins with an anecdote about the author’s pedagogic encounter with English as a child. She received her earliest lessons in the English language from her mother, who is in no way comfortable with inhabiting the skin of the language, though she does have functional competency. Yet this scene where a mother passes on not a familiar or familial tongue, but one that is marked by a ‘distressing foreignness’ (126) is not cast as a moment of loss, violence or failure. Rather the author’s attempt is to demonstrate the many manifestations of English in India that make it a malleable tool in the hands of many stuttering speakers. The five chapters of the book are organised around the rubrics of ‘Law’, ‘Touch’, ‘Text’, ‘Sound’ and ‘Sight’. Chapter 1 examines how English functions as a language of bureaucracy and governance in post-colonial India and becomes integral to the nation-state by giving democracy its ‘form of address’ (36). Chapter 2 analyses how Dalit literature in English and Hindi and the mobilisation of English in Dalit intellectual and political history