Bilingual Creativity and the English-Language Indian Novel

Date of Award

12-2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature

First Advisor

Maria Luz Elena N. Canilao, PhD

Abstract

Indian literature in English, in particular Indian novel in English has been instrumental in the development and documentation of Indian English (henceforth IndE). This study is an attempt to analyse the representation of linguistic features of IndE in the select two Man-booker prize winning Indian novels: Salman Rushdie’s (1981) Midnight’s Children and Aravind Adiga’s (2008) The White Tiger. First, it sets out to analyse the degree to which the English language has been Indianised at the linguistic strata: speech, lexis, grammar and discourse. Second, it is to determine the degree to which the nativised English language has been creatively used in the select Indian Booker novels.

The study employs the Kachruvian theoretical framework with the view to analysing how the English language in such novels encodes the sociolinguistic realities of Indian experience through the use of bilingual’s linguistic features, and discourse strategies, resulting in distinct linguistic innovations and unique bilingual creativity. The study assumes importance at two levels. First, the study assumes that the distinctive IndE linguistic features represented in the select novels are the foremost candidates for the claim that the English-language Indian novel is a variety of world Englishes literature (WEL). Second, it sets out to demonstrate that it is not the Englishness of the English language rather the Indianness of the English language that provides its creative muladhana (capital) for the global reception and readership of the Booker Indian novels. Thereby, the study is an attempt to debunk the postcolonial theories and its claim to decolonise the English-language literature in India.

The study confirms that bilingual creativity is a major determining linguistic factor in treating IndE varieties not as “deviation” or “interference,” but an innovative variety. It exemplifies that both Rushdie and Adiga have contributed to the enrichment of IndE through their literary experimentation. It is a proof that bilingual creativity expressed in literary works distinguishes and establishes a unique literary alangara (‘renderings’) in a new variety called IndE. In addition, bilingual writers are able to balance the existing sociolinguistic environment and the expectation of linguistic market, by glocalising the English language. Therefore, the study endorses that the Booker-winning Indian novels serve as a “literary architecture” (Mishra 2018) in the history of Indian literary culture in English.

The study affirms that the bilingual writers have appropriated the English language at different levels in their literary representation. First, English has been appropriated in IndE speech which represents the distinct Indian voice vocally and verbally. The analysis reveals that bilingual writers are able to creatively encode the different varieties of spoken IndE in their literary experiments. At the lexical level, Rushdie and Adiga have demonstrated that Indian novels in English have enriched the English language with the heavy lexical borrowing from various language families – Indo-Aryan, Persian, Sino-Tibetan and the Dravidian languages. Between the two, Rushdie has extensively borrowed more lexemes and from many local languages than Adiga. At the grammatical level, the study exemplifies that the bilingual literary works are punctuated with the grammatical structures from the Indian languages. Through their discoursal innovations, the two bilingual writers prove to be linguistically sensitive and successful in representing the multilingual, multicultural and multi-ethnic realities of India; thus there has been an increase in the artistic visibility of India globally.

The study testifies that the linguistic culture of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages and the respective ethos have immensely influenced the Indian literary production in English. However, the influence from other two Indian family of languages (i.e.) Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic is not evident in the novels. More significantly, the study claims that IndE literature (novel) plays a key role in preserving, promoting, and presenting the cultural materiality of India. These cultural heritages are stored for the present and posterity in and through the medium called IndE.

Finally, the study discusses the implications of the study, in particular the conditions of possibility that contributed to the formations of the varieties within IndE and Indian English literatures. Founding on the pluricentricity of the English language and the linguistic nature of bilinguals’ creativity, the study substantiates that English employed in the two Booker novels is very much Indian, and the literatures from the Outer Circle countries are “literatures” in their own merits, and therefore, the English- language Indian novel may be classified as part of world Englishes literature.

Keywords: Indian English, bilingual creativity, world Englishes literature

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