Cultural Critique

INTRODUCTION

Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, was one of the most influential advocates of the English language in India. He championed English as the language of science and technology and likened it to the link between the people of India and the rest of the world. English was central to Nehru's vision of postcolonial nation-building and third-world solidarity. Speaking and writing in the wake of two hundred years of British rule, Nehru rarely made a reference to the colonial provenance of the language. Instead, he maintained an interest in it only as an object that could be utilized to produce whatever effects one desired. At an inauguration event in New Delhi in 1961, Nehru baldly referred to English as "the key that would unlock the vast treasures of all scientific and humanistic knowledge" (Nehru in Mathai, 59, my emphasis). What Nehru likely meant was that as a key or a link, the English language was something predictable, serviceable, and familiar. It could be controlled and wielded by any human hand to produce a desired result on another object. As a key or a link, the English language was not steeped in a colonial discourse but was a machinic object with a specific contained role in a newly independent [End Page 110] India. As a key or a link, the English language remained firmly in the hand of the one using it.

Figurations such as Nehru's can seem rather hackneyed and unsophisticated. Never mind how seductive, they seldom receive critical attention. It bears saying at the outset that a language is neither a machine nor a machine nor an object of any kind. Nonetheless, this essay takes seriously the remarkably common tendency among several twentieth-century Indian political and literary figures to conceptualize the English language as an object—itself and part of a machine. By marshaling a language instrumentally and strategically, these figures exercise an agency that begs close attention. For instance, Nehru does not simply use the English language. By comparing language to a key or a link, he also manufactures the illusion that English can be desired and controlled with no attachment to either its colonial past or its postcolonial reverberations. This illusion stems from a desire to reimagine intersubjective relations forged under colonial rule. The objectification of the English language accords its users and speakers the role of builders or engineers of a new nation, a role much different from that of good colonial subjects. How do we understand the efforts to articulate a new use for English in India by discounting as immaterial the political asymmetries of the language? What do we make of the instability of ownership in uses of English that are imagined unhinged from colonial history and power?

It is with these questions in mind that this essay brings together two texts that imagine the English language as a literal or metaphoric machinic object: Mulk Raj Anand's famous novel Untouchable (1935) and a lesser-known polemical pamphlet by Isaac Mathai called India Demands English (1960). Together, these texts bridge the worlds of everyday caste-marked aspiration and state legislation, respectively, as they foreground ways of being in a language beyond the literary. Untouchable is an English-language novel about Bakha, an outcaste—an un-touchable—who wishes to secure respect in society and deliverance from the Hindu caste system by learning English.¹ But, when he does not find anyone to teach him the language, Bakha transposes his faith from the English language to English as a material discourse of clothes, machines, and aural and sound objects. Bakha's way of being in language before knowing how to read or write or speak it is especially poignant given Anand's enthusiastic advocacy for English in another [End Page 111] polemical pamphlet, The King Emperor's English (1948). If, as...