Speaking Volumes: The English India wants

(I began writing Speaking Volumes around 1996-97. Tony Joseph, who was then the features editor of the Business Standard, suggested a weekly column on books after it became glaringly obvious to the paper that I was challenged, to put it politely, where number-crunching was concerned.
Since then, the column has run without a break for years, except for a week in 2005 when I was travelling in Sri Lanka and had no access to the Net, and a three-month time out in 2008-2009 because of health problems.
It's been wonderful writing Speaking Volumes, but I'm taking the next six months off to work on a personal project. Thanks for all the mail and all the support over the years, and I hope, when the column comes back, that it will be the better for the break.)


What is your definition of good English? For a certain generation of Indians, Macaulay’s children and grandchildren, “correct” English was defined by clear markers.

The BBC accent and the Oxford accent were prized over an American or a local Indian accent. The Booker Prize was followed with more zeal than the Pulitzer, though Indian interest dropped sharply in years when subcontinental authors didn’t feature on the list. We were supposed to read Nobel-winning literature laureates, Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, and the Latin American authors dominated our imaginations far more strongly than, say, contemporary writing from the US.

And we dreamed about having access to English the way we dreamed about owning real estate. In both cases, the markers for what we wanted would change sharply over time. The yearnings of property owners shifted from the ersatz British country house nestled in a corner of the hills to the defiantly faux-American mansionette in Gurgaon or Ludhiana.

English as a language still stands for many things in the Indian mind—access to more and better jobs, a sign of modernity, a way of announcing one’s aspirations to be a global citizen. But the kind of English we think of as acceptable has changed.

This week, the Vodafone-Crossword book award shortlists were announced. The Crossword is now over a decade old, and has been grappling with the problem of which writers to include in the pantheon of Indian English writing--only Indian citizens or only persons of Indian origin. This year was no exception, as the Prize left out some of the best and most original books of the year, especially in the field of non-fiction—too many good authors were disqualified because they held the wrong passport. This is likely to damage the Crossword in future—no prize can continue to ignore the best literature produced in the year, no matter how pure its motives.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Crossword shortlists was the wide gulf between the literary fiction shortlist, and the popular fiction shortlist. In previous years, the literary and the popular have often overlapped, as when Namita Devidayal’s acclaimed memoir The Music Room won the popular award. This year, the books that featured on the popular award shortlist included works by Ashwin Sanghi, Amish Tripathi, Karan Bajaj—there was absolutely no overlap with the literary fiction list, which included novels by Upamanyu Chatterjee, Omair Ahmad and others.

Tripathi, Sanghi, Bajaj and company are part of a larger trend of home-made bestsellers. The Indian Express dubbed some of this writing “aliterature” in a story the paper did on the success of books like Love Via Telephone Tring Tring and similar works. And the Indian English-language publishing industry, after years of hunting for local crime and pulp fiction bestsellers, is more than a little taken aback at the new wave of writers, for whom a racy plot matters much more than either intelligible story-telling or good grammar.

One way to understand the phenomenon of the new bestsellers is to put them through the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale. The Flesch-Kincaid scale was developed to judge levels of comprehension difficulty, based on factors like word length and sentence length. While not foolproof, the scale provides one way to measure intangibles such as reading ease.
Authors like Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie tend to come in at a Reading Ease of 56 % or lower. If you don’t have a long history as a reader, or you came to English late, in other words, these books might be challenging. Chetan Bhagat and Aravind Adiga weigh in, surprisingly, at similar levels—Bhagat has a reading ease of 86 %, Adiga 76 %.

Unlike more literary authors, Bhagat, Tripathi, Sanghi and other authors use almost no passive sentences in their work, making their books much easier for the reader whose English is a functional, acquired second or third language. The pure pulp bestsellers excoriated by critics, including Love Via Telephone Tring Tring, have an almost uniform reading ease score in the 90th percentile—meaning that they could be read even by those who have very limited English and who experience difficulty with the language.

The Flesch-Kincaid test is only indicative, not definitive. To me, what these scores suggest is the obvious: that we’re producing bestsellers the way the Victorian pulp fiction market once did, to cater to thousands of readers for whom English is a functional, usable but still alien tongue. The Victorian penny dreadfuls were written for readers who had literacy, and who had imagination and a love for storytelling in plenty. What they lacked was a history of reading, and a home-grown canon. In that absence, they turned, as Indian readers are now doing, to pulp fiction as comfort food and junk food, rather than literature. And the gap between them and readers who think of books as literature, rather than a bag of chips, is likely to become even wider over the next decade.

Slutwalking

The really dangerous part of Slutwalk Delhi is dodging media cameras and avoiding the mikes thrust in your face. When it starts, the media-aam junta ratio is 3:1, which leads to the spectacle of a reporter trying to persuade a younger colleague from another magazine to give her soundbytes. "You're marching too, no? Say something as a woman, na?" The younger reporter declines.

By 11 am, the pace has picked up; I'm estimating a conservative 500 or so people--young girls, a healthy and heart-warming number of men, auntyjis and several stalwarts of the gay rights movement in Delhi--have joined in. Depending on when they join in with the Slutwalkers, the media has the numbers at 200--far too low, even if you subtract the organisers and Asmita's street theatre troupe--or at 700, which seems optimistic. I see a young lesbian couple wade through the crowds, swatting TV mikes like flies.

The media is all over Slutwalk, which is turning out to be a plain vanilla, sedate Jantar Mantar protest. Most of the marchers are carrying banners with slogans attacking Delhi's history of violence against women: "Soch badal, kapre nahin", "I have been HARASSED at least once in my life", "Ab toh bol", "Proud to be shameless". One woman, carrying a banner that speaks of child abuse, is stopped several times. "I've lost count of the number of women who say this happened to them too, who were 12 or 14 the first time they experienced harassment and abuse," she says. "It's amazing, sharing our stories."

This is so different from the skimpily-clad marchers dreamed up by the media and by the kind of leering men who've been trolling Slutwalk's FB page. These few hundreds are nowhere near the kind of turnout Toronto had, with thousands of women taking to the streets in anger, but being here feels surprisingly good. The women police officers guarding the march tell me and another young woman: "Do this every year, then maybe the men will start to listen."


The boys marching quietly, banners raised, watching politely as Asmita performs a street play, listening to Slutwalk's young organiser, Umang Sabharwal, speak, are very clear about why they're here. "It's an issue for us," says Deepak, a young college student. "Delhi men have the worst reputations, and many of us are here to say we're not like that, and men shouldn't be like that."

The mothers marching in Slutwalk, two of them side-by-side, are bemused by the media. "They only want to photograph the foreigners and that one woman in small clothes," says one of them. They're here because a) they're sick of being pushed around on buses and the Metro and b), because as Mrs Kumar says, "Why should only the young women march? We can also come out, this issue affects all of us." Were they not put off by the name--Slutwalk, Besharmi Morcha? Mrs Kumar glares at the reporter who asked her this question. "You have time to waste thinking about names. Think about why Delhi is so unsafe for women, no? National capital, and look at the crime rates!"

The young women melting in the heat as we do the ritual march around Jantar Mantar, escorted by bands of police personnel, are clear about why they're here, too. "I'm tired of the TV shows saying think about female foeticide first, think about dowry deaths first," says Rina. "We have to live in this city and move around and you know, our fathers aren't rich men that they have chauffeured cars. Doesn't our safety matter? Look at the rapes, look at the harassment, aren't Indians ashamed of what women have to face in Delhi?"

The men from the Greater Cooch Behar Association, on hunger strike in the cheerfully open-to-all protest bazaar that Jantar Mantar offers, are being steered back to their own tents by a reproachful minder. One of them is arguing that he should be allowed to join in the Slutwalk, but he's being accused of wanting to sneak off to have an illicit ice cream on the side. Unfortunately for his protestations of innocence, his mouth is stained orange from a Kwality's Orange Bar.

I'm thinking of the first Blank Noise protest in Delhi, a walk at night for which less than 20 women showed up, where a police escort was necessary to ensure the safety of that small, tentatively activist band. This is just a start, and the debate over the name and the meaning of Slutwalk almost hijacked the issues behind the walk. But it seems like a good start, to me, and to the people who've gathered here in the July heat. I'm reminded, by the numbers and by the conversations in the crowd, of the early, tentative beginnings of the Gay Rights parade a few years ago. There, too, there had been fears that the movement would be too insular, too self-referential and too niche. Here, the crowds are very different from the media's expectations; this isn't just the usual South Delhi protest veterans crew. "Where are the celebs, yaar?" a TV reporter is demanding. "There are no celebs, only ordinary-shordinary people. How will I get my bytes?"

I get stuck between two streams of marchers. One woman, to my right, is carrying a banner protesting female foeticide. She catches my slightly startled eye and shakes her head: "I didn't make that," she says. "I'm just carrying it for a friend, and no, I don't know what it has to do with Slutwalk."

To my left, though, is a hand-drawn banner that has drawn attention all through the march with a particularly baffling message. "Boys just eat grape and stop Girl Rape," it says.

Despite the intensity of the media scrutiny, the number of police personnel who've thrown a cordon around the marchers because of threats from a Hindutva rightwing group, and the quietness of the march, this is a good way to begin. "I want to come back next year," says Samira. She's 27, and has had enough of Delhi. "It's not about the clothes I'm wearing, it's about the violence we face every day in this city. I'm so sick of it, but I'm here because it's my city, and if I want things to change, then maybe I have to be here and be part of the change instead of just whining." Would she want the name of the march changed? She shrugs. "Call it Slutwalk or anything you like," she says. "So long as we have a regular protest, does it matter?"