Being English: Indian Middle Class and the Desire for Anglicisation

205 Pages·2021·1.516 MB·English

by  Sayan Chattopadhyay

BEING ENGLISH
This book critically examines the cultural desire for anglicisation of the
Indian middle class in the context of postcolonial India.
It looks at the history of anglicised self-fashioning as one of the major
responses of the Indian middle class to British colonialism. The book
explores the rich variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings that
document the attempts by the Indian middle class to innovatively interpret
their personal histories, their putative racial histories, and the history of
India to appropriate the English language and lay claim to an “English”
identity. It discusses this unique quest for “Englishness” by reading the
works of authors like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore,
Cornelia Sorabji, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Dom Moraes, and Salman Rushdie.
An important intervention, this book will be of interest to scholars and
researchers of postcolonial studies, Indian English literature, South Asian
studies, cultural studies, and English literature in general.
Sayan Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor of English in the Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
He received his doctorate degree from the University of Cambridge in 2014.
He was the recipient of the 2010–2013 Smuts Cambridge International
Scholarship and was the Baden Württemberg visiting fellow at the South
Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg in 2017. His research has been
primarily in the area of Indian middle-class self-fashioning and its literary
manifestations.
‘I feel privileged to have been an early reader of Sayan Chattopadhyay’s
Being English. This monograph looks set to change the way we think about
Indian writing in English. I recommend this groundbreaking, meticulously-
researched book in the strongest possible terms.’
—Claire Chambers, Professor of Global Literature,
University of York, UK
‘Sayan Chattopadhyay provides fine-tuned, sensitive interpretations of
Indian intellectuals in a colonial set-up and circumspect analyses of their
writings. Smart and well-written, Being English will be a very welcome con-
tribution to the study of Indian English literature.’
—Hans Harder, Professor of Modern South Asian Languages and
Literatures, University of Heidelberg, Germany
‘Sayan Chattopadhyay’s book will be regarded as an important addition to
Indian colonial and postcolonial studies as the critically informed chapters
open up new vistas of perception by foregrounding anglicization as a con-
scious choice of empowerment, through a process of self-fashioning, appro-
priation and abrogation. The book significantly debunks the overwhelming
postcolonial discourse about cultural colonization and mimicry.’
—Sanjukta Dasgupta, Professor of English (Retd),
University of Calcutta, India
BEING ENGLISH
Indian Middle Class and the Desire for
Anglicisation
Sayan Chattopadhyay
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 Sayan Chattopadhyay
The right of Sayan Chattopadhyay to be identified as authors of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-40858-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-15882-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-80949-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780367809492
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TO
BABA AND MA

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Contours of Englishness in colonial India ix
1 Nineteenth-century Bengal and the emergence of Indian
middle-class anglicisation 1
2 Images of Indian womanhood and the “English” self of
Cornelia Sorabji 27
3 The tradition of national autobiographies and Nirad
Chaudhuri’s homeward journey to England 51
4 Anglicisation, citizenship, and Nirad Chaudhuri’s
critique of the colonial metropolis 76
5 Dom Moraes’s anglicisation and the ambiguity of return 103
Coda: Anglicisation and aporia 130
Bibliography 147
Index 158
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book grew out of my PhD thesis and therefore my intellectual debts are
primarily owed to my thesis supervisor at the University of Cambridge, Dr
Priyamvada Gopal. Her exacting standards and critical wisdom have shaped
this book in more ways than I can record. I am grateful to Mr Tim Cribb of
the University of Cambridge for the kindness and insightful suggestions that
I received from him during the early days of this project. I am also grateful to
my colleague, Dr Munmun Jha of IIT Kanpur, for his constant support and
encouragement. Finally, thanks are due to my mother, Dipa Chattopadhyay,
for her faith in me, to my wife, Ishita Basu, for keeping things on an even
keel, and my brother, Sharanya Chattopadhyay, for good cheer.
Some of the chapters in this book are reworked versions of articles that
I have previously published in different journals. I list these articles below
and I record here my gratitude to the publishers for their permission to use
the material:
·· Chapter 2 was earlier published as “Disowning “Indianness”: Images of
Indian Womanhood and the “English” Self of Cornelia Sorabji”. Prose
Studies: History, Theory, Criticism (Routledge). 37 (1): 2–20, 2015.
·· Chapter 3 was earlier published as “Homeward Journey Abroad: Nirad
C. Chaudhuri and the Tradition of Twentieth Century Indian National
Autobiographies”. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (Sage). 49
(2): 157–172, 2014.
·· Chapter 5 was earlier published as “Reconstructing the History of Exile
and Return: A Reading of Dom Moraes’s The Long Strider”. Journal of
Postcolonial Writing (Routledge). 48 (1): 79–91, 2012.
·· The conclusion of this book, titled “Coda: Anglicisation and Aporia”,
was earlier published as “From Indianness to Englishness: The
Foreign Selves of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Nirad C. Chaudhuri,
and Salahuddin Chamchawala”.  The Journal of Commonwealth
Literature (Sage). 53 (2): 412–429, 2018.
Note on translation: All translations from Bengali sources in this book
are my own unless indicated otherwise.
viii
INTRODUCTION: CONTOURS OF
ENGLISHNESS IN COLONIAL INDIA
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, apparently
told the celebrated American economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, “You
realize, Galbraith, that I am the last Englishman to rule in India” (Nehru
quoted in Galbraith 132). Coming from one of the most prominent fig-
ures of India’s anticolonial struggle against the British empire, this state-
ment sounds baffling and perhaps even scandalous if we read it as Nehru’s
claim to be the last of the colonisers to rule over India. However, I suggest
that Nehru in claiming himself to be an Englishman was not confessing his
political affiliation to the colonial rule. Rather, he was foregrounding his
cultural affiliation to “Englishness”. Indeed, trying to be “English” was one
of the most important ways in which a significant number of middle-class
Indians, born and brought up under the colonial rule, sought to fashion
their self-identities. Though such self-fashioning was inspired by a desire
to culturally emulate the British colonisers who governed India, it was by
no means an uncritical endorsement of their rule. Among the anglicised
Indians there were, of course, many who supported the British Raj. But as
the example of Nehru shows, there were also Indians who were staunchly
against the British colonial rule and yet considered themselves to be English.
Even more importantly, there were anglicised Indians who supported the
idea of the colonial rule as a civilising mission but were extremely critical of
how the British rulers treated the colonised Indians in practice. This book
traces the history of such diverse middle-class Indians whose unique efforts
to anglicise themselves remain one of the least explored chapters of India’s
cultural response to the colonial rule.
Indian middle class and the contours of the modern self
Before discussing why and how a section of the Indian middle class sought
to anglicise themselves, it is important to clarify my use of the term “middle
class”. Here I take my cue from Sumit Sarkar who defines the Indian middle
class as a distinct social group that emerged during the nineteenth century
with the spread of Western-style education in colonial India (Modern India
ix