Her nation-shaped body was first violently assimilated and then violently dismembered by an imperial British quill. (I say alien because there’s not much that is organic about her. My English has been widened and deepened by the rhythms and cadences of my alien mother’s other tongues. What was-is-the politically correct, culturally apposite, and morally appropriate language in which I ought to think and write? It occurred to me that my mother was actually an alien, with fewer arms than Kali perhaps but many more tongues. The night of that reading in Kolkata, city of my estranged father and of Kali, Mother Goddess with the long red tongue and many arms, I fell to wondering what my mother tongue actually was. And obviously, since I’m still talking about them, I’m still thinking about them. The challenges thrown at me were fair and square. And yet I know-I knew-that language is that most private and yet most public of things. That was what I found so hard to countenance. When that happens, as it usually does in debates like these, what has actually been written ceases to matter. However, to reify language in the way both men had renders language speechless. Because those incidents touched on a range of incendiary questions-colonialism, nationalism, authenticity, elitism, nativism, caste, and cultural identity-all jarring pressure points on the nervous system of any writer worth her salt. Notwithstanding my anger, on both occasions my responses were defensive reactions, not adequate answers. And if all of Latin American literature was a tribute to Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. I asked him if he also felt that jazz, the blues, and all African-American writing and poetry were actually a tribute to slavery. The historian was upset, and after the show told me that he had meant what he said as a compliment, because he loved my book. But then I sort of lost it, and said some extremely hurtful things. “Even you,” he said, turning to me imperiously, “the very fact that you write in English is a tribute to the British Empire.” Not being used to radio shows at the time, I stayed quiet for a while, as a well-behaved, recently civilized savage should. The other guest was an English historian who, in reply to a question from the interviewer, composed a paean to British imperialism. Only a few weeks after the mother tongue/masterpiece incident, I was on a live radio show in London. As the era that we know, and think we vaguely understand, comes to a close, perhaps we, even the most privileged among us, are just a group of redundant humans gathered here with an arcane interest in language generated by fellow redundants.
The correct answer to that question today would of course be “algorithms.” Artificial Intelligence, we are told, can write masterpieces in any language and translate them into masterpieces in other languages. My answer to his question made him even angrier. It was delivered at the British Library on June 5, 2018.Īt a book reading in Kolkata, about a week after my first novel, The God of Small Things, was published, a member of the audience stood up and asked, in a tone that was distinctly hostile: “Has any writer ever written a masterpiece in an alien language? In a language other than his mother tongue?” I hadn’t claimed to have written a masterpiece (nor to be a “he”), but nevertheless I understood his anger toward a me, a writer who lived in India, wrote in English, and who had attracted an absurd amount of attention. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation, commissioned by the British Centre for Literary Translation and the National Centre for Writing.
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