Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

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If the new aristocrats were a departure from the old, their arrival in British Delhi represented a significant departure, also, in their own lives. Their ability to continue getting contracts depended on their successful integration into the new world of British society, and integrate they did, leaving behind what they had previously been.

They had grown up, for instance, in houses built in the courtyard style that had come to north India from central Asia. The empty space of these courtyard houses was not at the edges but in the centre, where there was an open courtyard, often with trees and fountains, which provided a common area for the entire, extended family. Around the courtyard was the house, with private lodgings for different branches of the family, and sometimes separate day quarters for the family’s women. It was an attractive style which still appears in the dreams of some of Delhi’s elders, who were born in such houses but have lived nearly all their subsequent lives in dwellings turned inside-out. But in the 1920s, having to receive the British at their homes, Delhi’s contractors put Asiatic accommodation unsentimentally behind them to build lawn-skirted mansions with large drawing rooms where men and women could consort, unsegregated ‘à l’anglaise’.

The rewards of Anglicisation were great. The British, concerned to cultivate this new aristocracy, awarded them not only business contracts but also knighthoods and other state honours. They gave them membership of their clubs and helped them send their sons to Oxford and Cambridge. And so a new ruling class emerged which rapidly took on Englishness. They internalised the codes of English dress. They played tennis and golf, and went hunting at the weekend. They had picnics on blankets and high tea on polished silver.

But their success depended above all on their ability to re-invent their language. The son of one of the building contractors writes:

My father, Sobha Singh… was way ahead of his times. He sensed that if he had to get on with the English, he must know their language. He advertised for a tutor… Within three or four years, he was able to speak the language fluently. He tried to get my mother to pick up English too. He hired an Anglo-Indian lady, Mrs Wright, to teach her. After months of slogging at it, my mother picked up a few words: good morning, good evening, good night and thank you. And she used to make fun of herself and converted the thank you to ‘thankus very muchus’. Trying to train her how to mix with the English was a near disaster… He gave up the battle to Anglicise her.

My father was a six-footer and slimly built. My mother barely five feet tall. He was very particular about his attire. He wore English suits: coat and striped trousers, bow tie or silk ties and dinner jackets. I never saw him in shervanis and chooridars. The only Indian thing he wore was a tehmat when he retired for the night. He loved to eat and drink well: a huge breakfast of cornflakes, eggs, toast and fruit; a couple of gins and tonic before lunch which was also substantial; tea included cakes or pastry; he liked a couple of Scotches before dinner which was again an elaborate multiple-dish affair followed by a cognac or two. 22

The culture these people had grown up with was the joint Hindu and Muslim culture of north India, which, as we have seen, gave pride of place to fine language. Most of them had grown up speaking and writing several of the related languages of this region: Urdu, which was written in the Arabic script; Hindustani, which was pretty much identical but written in the Sanskrit-derived Devanagari script; Punjabi, which was written in the Gurmukhi script, a cousin of Devanagari — and possibly one or two of several other local tongues. Nor was language, even for businessmen such as they, merely a tool to get things done. They were lovers of poetry and song, and many of them wrote poetry themselves — usually in Urdu which, though it might not have been their first language, was generally considered the best language for poetry. Suddenly, however, they led their lives in their weakest language of all, or one they did not even know: English. They barked at each other in the clubby argot of the British bureaucrats and military men with whom they fraternised (“six-footer”) and their previous culture dwindled within them. English took over, and though they passed on fabulous estates to their descendants they could not pass on their own tongues.

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When you look at photographs of the newly completed British administrative complex, enormous and pristinely modern, and surrounded by miles and miles of nothing, you cannot help feeling there is something delusional about it — as there had been about many other cities built in this place. And indeed, in this sense, the British were entirely traditional Delhi rulers. They were forced to abandon their capital — in less time, in their case, than it had taken to build. In 1947, they hastily moved out, and the administrators of independent India moved in.

Unwittingly or not, these administrators finished what the British had begun: the destruction of north India’s ancient shared Hindu and Muslim culture. In agony after the mutilations of Partition, the new state was determined to eradicate all reminders of its wounds. The shared culture would be forgotten, and its traces of Islam stamped out. Language was an essential sphere of operations.

The 1950 constitution set out as an explicit objective the propagation of a new language, ‘Hindi’. Hindi was a re-invention of traditional Hindustani — the north Indian language of which Urdu, since it had been taken to the highest levels of literary and philosophical exploration, was the most sophisticated version — which would be fabricated by expunging, to the greatest extent possible, all influences of Persian, Arabic and Turkish and by replacing them with words retrieved or coined from Sanskrit. Indian tongues, henceforth, would not produce Muslim sounds. Nor would Indian hands shape Muslim letters: the writing of this language in the Arabic script was discontinued, and Hindi was only written in Devanagari, a script indigenous to India. The Central Hindi Directorate was set up to patrol the back lanes of this language and police its borders. Official communiqués — school textbooks, for instance, or news reports on All India Radio — were manufactured as showpieces of the new language: awkward, academic showpieces whose Sanskritic excess resembled no real person’s speech.

Perhaps one imagines that an independent country is more vocal than one colonised. Perhaps one imagines independence as a moment when previously silent voices burst forth with conversation and song. But in north India the truth was more complex. People no longer read the works of Hindustani’s greatest exponents, which contained too many unapproved elements and which were written in an alphabet which they could very soon no longer decipher. Punjabi households, previously so proudly literary, began to dislike books themselves. Most books, books that did not directly further one’s career, represented an expense without return. They represented, in fact, a threat to the post-Partition household, in which rebuilding the family’s material base was the only legitimate preoccupation: esoteric concerns and fictional worlds were now considered a dangerous influence from which parents should preserve their children. In the new, fearful, ethos of the family, moreover, parents felt uneasy about the self-sufficiency of a child with a book: they wanted their children to need them as they needed their children, and they shut off avenues to solitude and reverie.

Delhi upheld its reputation as a city where languages came to die: for not only did Partition refugees forget Urdu in one generation, they even had difficulty passing on their mother tongue of Punjabi, which few of their grandchildren knew except in snatches. Many members of its middle classes ended up speaking no language well — neither English, which was increasingly, nonetheless, the language of professional life, nor Hindi, which they spoke at home but in which they had little vocabulary outside the needs of the everyday. The care of language was seen as worthless and effeminate, and a certain vagueness of speech, a deliberate ignorance of grammar, became the style. Books and newspapers were full of errors of spelling and grammar, to say nothing of advertisements and street signs. It became difficult to find people to translate between Indian languages; for a high-level command of, say, literary English and literary Hindi, was hardly ever united in the same person. The old broadness of outlook died out. People knew less and less what people who were not like them thought about, and classes and castes became more isolated and suspicious.