“Has Sartre read Jayakanthan?” - Bilal talks about “third world” literature and the politics of language.

As the 2009 Jaipur Literature Festival comes to a close, something that will no doubt loom large in the minds of many is the status of literature written in South Asia’s many non-English ‘vernaculars’. How does one bring attention to this fascinating, yet neglected body of writing? What, if anything, is being done to prevent the very real dangers of linguicide?

That there are more translators now then ever before, and yet we still face an alarming shortage of translations of world literature into English, is immensely problematic—and not least because ‘world literature in English’ has become synonymous with Weltliteratur. Take Mohammed Hanif’s acclaimed first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008). Is it not worth stepping back for a moment and considering the fact that its author, currently based in London, is the head of BBC’s Urdu service?

But then why should anyone from that part of the world be expected to write in any language other than English? Difficult as it is to get published locally, there is no guarantee that such books will sell more than a few dozen copies. And of course, if that weren’t enough of a discouragement, one need only glance over statistics that suggest that nearly half of the world’s ‘illiterate’ population lives in South Asia.

The problem I am describing here is not specific to this region alone. Algerian writers, for instance, have struggled over the question of whether to write in Arabic or French for decades. The debate over language in Africa, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o reminds us, is far from over. The list of course can go on and on.

It is no longer worth advocating a return to one’s native tongue, whatever that might mean. And it would be silly for anyone to suggest that the vast body of works written in English from places like South Asia, Africa and the Middle East are not worth reading. The much more difficult, and I think necessary, path would be a move away from monolingualism to multilingualism, from the synchronic to the diachronic.

I should perhaps conclude on a less serious note. Those who have read Rajagopalan Radakrishnan’s Theory in an Uneven World (2003) will likely have come across that fascinating moment in the book when the author recalls having once asked the Tamil writer D. Jayakanthan about whether or not he had read the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. To this otherwise innocent question about the shared theme of existentialism, notes Radakrishnan, there came a stunning reply: “’Has Sartre read Jayakanthan?’”¹

1. Rajagopalan Radakrishnan. Theory in an Uneven World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) 150. [↩]