If there is a line that divides classes in India, it's English: Tarun Tejpal

By Lakshmi Chaudhry and Sandip Roy Editor’s note: The Jaipur Literature Festival, widely acknowledged as India’s premier literary festival got underway at the Diggi Palace on Friday. The festival made headlines well ahead of its inauguration largely due to the furore over Salman Rushdie’s proposed visit. However the festival also features a star studded line-up with notable names such as David Remnik, Ben Okri, Deepak Chopra and Nilanjana Roy. The panel is titled Inglish, Amlish, Hinglish: The Chutneyfication of English. It  has Gurcharan Das , Tarun Tejpal, Rita Kothari  on the panel. The sesssion is moderated by Ira Pande. In a twenty-eight-year career as a journalist, Tarun Tejpal is the founder of Tehelka, which has garnered international fame for its aggressive public interest journalism. His debut novel, The Alchemy of Desire, was hailed by the Sunday Times as “an impressive and memorable debut”. His second novel, The Story of My Assassins, was published in 2009 to rave reviews. His latest book,The Valley of Masks, has been longlisted for the Man Booker Asia Prize. Gurcharan Das is the author of The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma. His past works include, India Unbound, A Fine Family (a novel); The Elephant Paradigm; and an anthology, Three English Plays. He studied philosophy at Harvard University, and was CEO Procter & Gamble India before he took early retirement to become a writer. Rita Kothari is author of Translating India: The Cultural Politics of English, The Burden of Refuge: Sindh, Gujarat, Partition, and_Memories and Movements: Borders and Communities in Banni, Kutch,_ Gujarat(forthcoming). She has translated the Gujarati Dalit novel, Angaliyat:The Stepchild, and Speech and Silence: Literary Journeys by__Gujarati Women, Unbordered Memories : Partition Stories from Sindh, and is co-translator of_Modern Gujarati Poetry: A Selection,_ and Coral Island: The Poetry of Niranjan Bhagat.  [caption id=“attachment_189584” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Tarun Tejpal says problem with writing in English is that language is not created to carry reality of India. AFP”]  [/caption] Ira Pande’s memoir of her mother, the famous Hindi writer Shivani, published by Penguin-India in 2005, was shortlisted in the best non-fiction category of the Crossword-Vodafone award in 2006. She has also translated Manohar Shyam Joshi’s Hindi novella, T-ta Professor, which was awarded both the Crossword-Vodafone award and the Sahitya Akademi award for the best translated work into English for 2010. 3: 45 pm Tarun Tejpal says problem with writing in English is that language is not created to carry reality of India. English is a language of irony, understatement, cool. The reality in India is opposite — it’s melodramatic and noisy. In that sense Indian cinema is far more in sync with the reality of India. Gurcharan Das disagrees with Tejpal. He says that previous generation was devastated by not knowing English well enough. The new generation does not care how they speak.  He narrates the story of a low caste boy Raju who tells him the secret of life. “First learn Windows. Then 400 words of English. Enough to pass TOEFL.” The average Indian is Raju, says Das. “He does not care how he speaks. English is going down socio-economic ladder. We need to produce a Shakespeare of Hinglish. And that is not Midnight’s Children. Rushdie liberated Indian literature but it is not Hinglish.” Tejpal says, “Too many Rajus were devastated by not knowing English.”  He says English remains an aspirational language. According to Tejpal ambivalence towards English is lessening because it is seen as language of success. He feels that explains why writers who write in English get 50 times the advance than those who don’t and not necessarily  because they are better writers. Rushdie was supposed to be on this panel. He coined the term chutneyfication. But his spirit hovers over the panel. The panelists all refer to him. Tejpal says his (Rushdie’s) later books are more of caricature because when you live so far from sound of street it is hard to replicate, unlike Midnight where his memories of growing up in Bombay served him well.