"Indian Fiction in English Language: Politics of Decentering"

Indians writers writing in English explore the parameters of cultural identity, ideology and language. A consistent political factor of this new literature and language lies in its strong impetus towards decentering existing hierarchy.

Thomas B.Macaulay presented in his famous “Minutes on Education” that one of the most efficient ways for colonial authority to legitimize its cultural ideology was to perpetuate the myth of English high culture through valorization of specific kinds of texts. Through this educational theory, the language and thereby the culture of the colonial origin was filtered down to percolate in the minds of the colonized subjects, thus establishing a hierarchy.

The early nineteenth century also prompted the founding of a Standard English language which was used as an emblem of a bond that brought together otherwise disunited cultural factions. This striving for uniformity culminated in linguists such as Daniel Jones advocating the educational pronunciation as a standard against which other forms are judged as being deviant, uncouth and educationally sub – normal. His English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917) was a case in point. Such linguistic dictates functioned to exclude people from power and influence of dialect and pronunciation. So much for the politics of centering a standard.

Now for the politics of decentering by the authors of other cultures and non standard ‘englishes’. In this context one is reminded of Seamus Heaney who in his Government of Tongues pointed out that to use Standard English is to commit an act of linguistic perjury.

This paper argues that the Postcolonial writers and critics writing in English are mimicists - who take on – that is both confront, challenge and put on or assimilate the unique energies of the queen’s language in their effort to use it to body forth their own feelings, thoughts, perceptions, judgments and realization.

Indian writers in English have opened up the far more contested space of what is now being called hybridity, a phenomena which according to the writers of Empire Writes Back involves a dynamic interaction between European hegemonic systems and peripheral subversions of them.