Make your feet come back the way they went,

make your legs come back the way they went,

plant your feet and your legs below,

in the village which belongs to us.⁵⁷

The past and the present speak to us in languages we refuse to hear.

9 THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE

An injured monkey regains consciousness, and begins typing the story of his past life.

The past retelling itself in the present — it seems like an obvious enough image, but the image came to me first, not its suggestiveness. Did I create the image, or did the dhvani make it and I find it? Writers are full of themselves, and therefore ask these kinds of annoyingly mystical questions, but they are also full of echoes of what is not in themselves. On my good days I feel like I can hear and catch these fleeting reverberations. Bind them into language before they disappear.

Sometimes the sheer vastness of what I want to put into fiction terrifies me. I survive by not thinking about the whole. I write my four hundred words this day, and then another four hundred words the next. I find my way by feeling, by intuition, by the sounds of the words, by the characters’ passions, by trekking on to the next day, the next horizon, and then the next. I pay attention to the tracks of narratives I leave behind, and I look for openings ahead. I make shapes and I find shapes. I retrace my steps, go over draft after draft, trying to find something, I am not sure what until I begin to see it. I am trying to make an object, a model, a receptacle. What I am making will not be complete until I let go of it.

When I write fiction, I create an object that I hope will be savored by an imagined someone, somewhere. I show my ongoing work to my wife, my friends, my family, but my real collaborators are always the sahrdayas of the future, the same-hearted ones who will allow my words to reverberate within them. And each person who reads my story will inevitably read a different story, or rather, will create a different story. Anandavardhana insists that

In this boundless saṃāra of poetry,

the poet is the only creator god.

…

A good poet can transform insentient things

into sentient,

and sentient into the insentient, as he likes.

In poetry the poet is free.¹

But I am only half a god.

Perhaps this is why I have always turned to coding with such relief: I can see cause and effect immediately. Write some code, and it either works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, re-factor — change it, rewrite it, throw it away, and write new code. It either works or it doesn’t.

Poetry has no success or failure. Poetry waits to manifest.

And then there is language itself, malleable, slippery, all-powerful and yet always inadequate. Or perhaps it is my craft that is incapable of manifesting completely the reality of the worlds inside me. I am always translating, always bringing from one realm to another, and always there is something left out, something that drifts outside my reach.

I write in English. The language of the conquerors is the language of my marga, and it is one of the languages of my interior. English — sprinkled with Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati — is what my schoolmates and I spoke to each other during recess, what we used to call out to each other, to curse and to cajole. Some of our great-grandfathers learned Persian, perhaps, in their pathshalas. And before that, their ancestors chanted Sanskrit.

And so, in Red Earth and Pouring Rain, my poet tries to speak in English:

Sanjay moved his head, shut his eye, tried to speak but found his throat blocked tightly by something as hard as metal; he did not know what it was he wanted to say but knew that he couldn’t say it, what was possible to say he couldn’t say in English, how can in English one say roses, doomed love, chaste passion, my father my mother, their love which never spoke, pride, honour, what a man can live for and what a woman should die for, can you in English say the cows’ slow distant tinkle at sunset, the green weight of the trees after monsoon, dust of winnowing and women’s songs, elegant shadow of a minar creeping across white marble, the patient goodness of people met at wayside, the enfolding trust of aunts and uncles and cousins, winter bonfires and fresh chapattis, in English all this, the true shape and contour of a nation’s heart, all this is left unsaid and unspeakable and invisible, and so all Sanjay could say after all was: “Not.”

And yet, even if “Neti, neti” is enough for philosophers, a poet cannot only say “Not this, not this.” A poet must say, “This, this, and also this.” And by speaking, make English say things it cannot say.

I grew up in a Brahmin family, but without Sanskrit. During the second millennium CE, many of the Sanskrit-speaking Hindu regimes that patronized scholarship and poetry were replaced by Muslim kingdoms that used Persian as a court language. This did not necessarily mean neglect — many of these new rulers continued to sponsor poets, schools, and translations; the immense prestige of the language and its role in the sanctification of kingship and power were attractive to the new establishments. Muslims wrote scientific and poetical works in Sanskrit. Many of the Prakrits developed their own thriving literary and critical cultures, but these regional flowerings in the desha were engaged in a vital and mutually revivifying conversation with the marga. During this “vernacular millennium,” Yigal Bronner and David Shulman write:

the peculiar expressive power of Sanskrit [is] still vital and available … True, Sanskrit is now but one of several literary options. But it brings with it unique assets such as the direct verbal and thematic continuities that transcend local contexts and that, for that very reason, enable a powerful articulation of the regional in its true fullness … Interacting with these vernaculars, Sanskrit is itself continuously changing, stretching the boundaries of the sayable, thinking new thoughts, searching for ways to formulate this newness.²

So on the eve of colonialism in the early eighteenth century, there was still a thriving — if diminished — cosmopolis. Sheldon Pollock writes:

The two centuries before European colonialism decisively established itself in the subcontinent around 1750 constitute one of the most innovative epochs of Sanskrit systematic thought (in language analysis, logic, hermeneutics, moral-legal philosophy, and the rest). Thinkers produced new formulations of old problems, in entirely new discursive idioms, in what were often new scholarly genres employing often a new historicist framework; some even called themselves (or, more often, their enemies) “the new” scholars (navya).³

This ancient, widespread transmission was finally fractured by the establishment of English as the language of colonial politics and commerce, and the institutionalization of new dispensations of morality, knowledge, and power. The upper castes — especially the Brahmins — devoted themselves energetically to adapting to the new networks of wealth and meaning, to converting their social capital into economic capital. Many in the colonial legislative systems thought that Indian knowledge was flawed materially and morally, and that the only “cure” for the ills of the culture was the enforcement of change through European education. The early awe with which the eighteenth-century Orientalist scholars regarded Indian thought and art gave way, Vasudha Dalmia tells us: