Interplay of English and indigenous languages

The news of Eva Ranaweera's death would bring sadness to most readers of Sri Lankan literatures. She was a bilingual writer who was constantly searching out new modes of creative expression and forms of communication. As a novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, journalist and social commentator she lived her own time to the full and played a significant role during the last five decades or so in seeking to re-shape the consciousness of people. Her works such as 'Sedona', 'Thani Nothaniyata', 'With Maya' have been commented on extensively. Diverse readers will, naturally, adopt diverse strategies and vantage points from which to assess her work. I wish to focus on an issue that seems important not only for us in Sri Lanka but for writers in many other post-colonial societies - the issue of writing in English.

For many years, I was on the advisory editorial board of an academic journal that came out of Oxford called 'World Englishes'. It sought to focus, among other things, on the diversities of English appearing across the globe. This phenomenon raises a number of issues of great significance. Why should, for example, anyone in Sri Lanka write in English rather than in Sinhala or Tamil? There could me many answers to this question. It may be that he or she has no option but to write in English; that is a valid enough reason. Second, it could be that the writer wants to reach a larger global audience by writing in English; this is an understandable desire. Third, the writer might argue that certain types of experiences can be more cogently articulated through English. Fourth, there may be some writers who are desirous of putting into play an interaction between English and the indigenous language, whether it is Sinhala or Tamil, as a way of exploring new linguistic spaces.

A fifth reason may be that the writer is seeking to de-colonize the language from within. As Salman Rushdie once remarked, "Language, like much else in the newly independent societies, needs to be decolonized, to be made in other images, if those of us who use it from positions outside Anglo-Saxon cultures are to be more than Uncle Toms. It is this endeavour that gives the new literatures of Africa, the Caribbean, and India much of the present vitality and excitement." There are numerous reasons, then, that impel writers in post-colonial societies to select English as their preferred mode of literary communication.

The relationship between English and indigenous languages in specific national and cultural contexts is a topic worthy of serious study. In countries and regions such as India, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka literary works get produced both in English and native tongues. Some years ago, Salman Rushdie made the following comment in relation to the Indian literary scene.

"The prose writing" both fiction and non fiction "created in this period (last fifty years) by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen 'recognized' languages of India, the so-called vernacular languages. Not all Indian critics, of course, concurred with his assessment; some felt that Rushdie did not have the linguistic competence to pass such a judgment. However, it is an indisputable fact that, during the past fifteen years or so, several outstanding writers of fiction have emerged. They have won great acclaim beyond Indian shores. Among them, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Sashi Tharoor, Amit Chaudhuri, Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, to mention some, deserve special mention.

The complex ways in which the works of authors writing in English relate thematically, stylistically, and in terms of the overarching social vision to the corpus of indigenous writings is an area of analysis that should yield interesting results. How do these two sets of writers confront the imperatives of post - coloniality and articulate their variable understandings? If as in the case of Eva Ranaweera, they write in both languages simultaneously, is there a perceptible division of labour and re-arrangement of priorities? How can we productively deploy one set of writings to interrogate the other, given the fact that they both grow out of the same historical conjuncture and cultural geography?

The eminent literary critic Gayatri Spivak once made the following interesting observation in relation to India. "In the post-colonial context, the teaching of English literature can become critical only if it is intimately yoked to the teaching of the literary and cultural production in the mother tongue." Located as these writings are between two cultural spaces, two thought worlds, the pedagogic function alluded to in Spivak's comments can be fruitfully accomplished by investigating them deeply, paying sustained attention to the inevitable shifts between cultural registers, and the tensions of inter-lingual dynamics.

The interplay between metropolitan languages and indigenous languages in literary creativity was given a sharp focus by the two post-modernist theorists Deleuze and Guattari in their highly influential work, "Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature." Here they focus on the situation of the Czech writer Kafka opting to write in German. They perceive the function of minor literature to be the use of a major and dominant language to subvert it from within. As they observe, a minor literature doesn't come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language; they focus on the "impossibility of not writing, and the impossibility of writing" in the dominant language.

The second characteristic of minor literature, according to Deleuze and Guattari is that "everything in them is political. In major literatures, in contrast, the individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background". Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. In their opinion, the characteristic of a minor literature is that in it everything assumes a collective valence. As they observe, "precisely because talent isn't abundant in a minor literature, there is no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that "master" and that could be separated from a collective enunciation."

"Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari has generated a great deal of interest among literary scholars throughout the world. This is a text widely used in university classrooms both in the West and the East. The concept of a minor literature (and its concomitant appendage de-territorialization,) has become a topic of intense debate among post-structuralist and post-colonial theorists. These concepts certainly merit serious investigation. Given our distinctive situation in Sri Lanka, the important task for us is to explore the germaneness of these notions to our immediate situation. Eva Ranaweera, is a bilingual writer, who has in turn chosen both Sinhala and English as her chosen vehicles of creative communication. Therefore, her writings should engender the kind of questions that I have outlined above.

The experience of being a self-exile from one's mother tongue and a house guest in another language can generate complex issues related to literary identity as well as to the very syntax of human imagination. In the best works, as for example in Beckett and Nabokov, they present an allegory of the trenchant power of cross-writing. George Steiner, more than most other cultural critics, has addressed this issue in a focused way over the past five decades. He has repeatedly drawn attention to the, "condition of multi-lingual imagining, of internalized translation, of the possible existence of a private mixed idiom beneath, coming from, the localization of different languages in the articulate brain." The inter-penetration of English and indigenous languages within the vortex of the imagination of a single author opens up fascinating lines of inquiry that could be pursued with immense profit.