STRING OF EMAILS BETWEEN KANCHHEDIA CHAMAAR AND SIR CHRISTOPHER ALAN BAYLY, VERE HARMSWORTH PROFESSOR OF IMPERIAL AND

NAVAL HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE AND A TRUSTEE OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 1. KC to CB Dec 10, 2011 Dear Professor Bayly, My daughter, who is an undergraduate at Berkeley, is thinking of doing graduate work in Indian history. Like most second generation Indian immigrants to the US, she doesn't know a word of any Indian vernacular. She has never been to India. I am trying to persuade her to spend a semester in India, and in preparation for her stay in India, take such courses in Indian vernaculars as are available at Berkeley (I understand that Hindi, Sanskrit, and Urdu are). She says that it is entirely unnecessary to know any Indian vernacular for doing good research in Indian history. In support of her claim that one need not know any Indian vernacular to do research on Indian history, she cited statistics that I find difficult to believe. She said that there are more books on Indian history in the US Library of Congress that were originally written in any one of Russian, Japanese, or Korean, than those originally written in any Indian vernacular taken together. She also said that all important research on Indian history is being done outside India, and that most PhD dissertations on Indian history in Indian universities are written in English. I would be grateful if you would please confirm whether what she says is true. In particular, I would be grateful if you could let me know if there are academic journals on Indian history in Indian vernaculars that you consult for your research, or academic colleagues doing historical research in Indian vernaculars with whom you collaborate. I cannot say how much I want my daughter to know something of the Indian culture I left behind, but I would much rather she was exposed to Indian culture on account of her academic interest than merely to please me. Thank you very much Best regards Kanchhedia Chamaar 2. CB to KC Dec 10, 2011 Dear Mr Chamaar, Your daughter is at least partly right. Indian history at the national and international level is almost exclusively conducted in English, not least because the vast bulk of useable records, newspapers, pamphlets, etc. since the eighteenth century are in English. The key journals used by Indian academics are the Indian Economic and Social History Review, the Indian Historical Review, etc. and the great Indian historians from Irfan Habib, through Om Prakash, Dharma Kumar to S. Gopal and Sunil Khilnani have all written in English even if some of their source material has been in Farsi, Urdu or Tamil. I am not aware of any important journal in Hindi, though I have used newspapers such as Hindu Pradip, Aaj, etc. and some biographies to the best of my ability. I believe there has been some good historical work in Bengali, but the Bengalis, of course, are past masters in English and it is they who predominate in the US academy. Incidentally, a great deal of important work on Indian history is, in fact, being done in India,

though some of the major historians have a habit of disappearing to better paid jobs in the USA and Europe! On the other hand, and this is a big 'but', I do feel it is important for young Indian historians today to have a foothold in Indian languages, not only for the cultural reasons you mention, but because one constantly comes across vernacular words in English language works (e.g., rajdharma, Advaita Vedanta, munsiff, mahajan, etc. etc.) and because there are always some valuable works in indigenous languages for any piece of research. Although I know some Hindi, I have always regretted the fact that I have only the most minimal grasp of Urdu. So we have a compulsory language requirement in our South Asian Masters course in Cambridge and urge our PhD students to continue with a language. Especially if she is going to do a postgraduate degree your daughter probably should begin to learn a vernacular language. I hope this helps, Best wishes, Christopher Bayly 3. KC to CB Dec 10, 2011 Dear Professor Bayly, I have been thinking about what you wrote, and am troubled both by the statistics my daughter adduces and by what you said. May I bother you again? I am a mathematician by training, and have never had more than a superficial exposure to humanities in general, and history in particular. Research in mathematics, to the extent that it serves any larger social purpose at all, is justified in my mind at least by the applications it finds in physical and social sciences. Few mathematicians are expected to be public intellectuals. The mental image that I have of historians is somewhat more exalted. I would have thought that in a democracy such as India, research in history would have some meaning beyond the academia for the Indian society at large. Arent there Indian historians who bring the benefits of their deeper understanding of Indian history to bear on public discourse on current issues in a language that is intelligible beyond the elite? I believe that there are more than a three hundred universities in India, most of them publicly funded. Can they be turning out research in a language that a vast majority of Indians do not understand? To the extent that a societys past is key to understanding its present, what are the political ramifications of the fact that Indians lack linguistic access to understanding their own history? I understand that these are large questions, and as someone who left India more than 31 years ago at an age when my career mattered more to me than anything else, I cannot wrap my mind around them. You perhaps understand India better than I do, and I would greatly appreciate your thoughts. Also, I would be grateful if you would refer me to research on this aspect of Indian history, published in academic journals or otherwise. Thank you for your indulgence, Best regards

Kanchhedia 4. CB to KC Dec 10, 2011 Dear Mr Chamaar, As a foreigner, I can't change India; and it would be inappropriate as a foreigner for me to pontificate on what Indians should do. However, if Indians want to conduct their major intellectual and political discussions in a language which has been 'bedded down' in the country for two hundred years, even if it is 'foreign', it is not my job to tell them otherwise. After all, the Indian elite used Persian and Arabic, 'foreign' languages, for the best part of half a millenium. They also used Sanskrit, a language that less than one percent of the population (far less than the English-knowing population) could understand in which to embody their most profound thoughts. Yet I have always thought that India is a society in which intellectual ideas are quite quickly disseminated into vernacular and popular media and I think that still happens, so that the majority of Indians are by no means excluded from these debates. There is a vibrant Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, etc. public sphere. Perhaps you should start with on-line journals in these languages. Best wishes, Chris Bayly 5. KC to CB Dec 11, 2011 Dear Dr. Bayly, Thank you very much once again for your prompt and gracious response. I agree with everything you say, but that agreement doesn't somehow leave me at peace. Not only am I even more of a foreigner to India than you are, I am also something of a fugitive, for I chose to escape to the US over staying behind and seeking to change India. I think your voice on this issue is more likely to be heard. You mention that English, while foreign, has been bedded down in India for 200 years. It was when I came to Delhi University as an eighteen-year old for my master's degree that I realized how much of a handicap my Hindi-medium upbringing was. It wasn't until much later that I came to think of English as having been instrumental in excluding, disenfranchising, and cheating me. At that time in Delhi, I did not think of it as a foreign language. Without articulating it quite as eloquently as you do, I somehow bought into the argument that having been bedded down in India for 200 years, English was legitimately the language not only for all intellectual discourse in India, but also a valid prerequisite for finding a job in the corporate India or in Indian bureaucracy. I faulted myself when my English accent, or telltale shibboleths in my unidiomatic English diction, gave me away in job interviews and kept me unemployed for three years. I started thinking about the status of English in India somewhat differently when years later, reading James Joyce's Portrait, I came across the tundish passage in which Stephen Dedalus thinks of English as both "familiar and foreign," and as an "acquired speech." I wondered why Dedalus should find that his voice holds English words at bay and that his soul frets in the shadow of English, and yet English, or its shadow, should cause no discomfiture to whatever it is that Anglicized Indians have for a soul. I also discovered that in

1905 when Joyce wrote Portrait, English had been bedded down in Ireland far longer than 200 years and that a much larger fraction of the Irish population was more comfortable with English at that time than is the case with India today. I know only Hindi and cannot say much about the Bengali and Tamil public sphere that you mention. Prominent among what I have found in the Hindi public sphere are works by such eminent Hindi writers as Khushwant Singh, Kuldip Nayar, MJ Akbar, and Chetan Bhagat. The newspapers and magazines that publish these luminaries do not find it necessary to inform the readers what language these words of wisdom were originally written inthe readers are supposed to guess the provenance by the abundance of unidiomatic neologisms. I entirely agree with what you say about Sanskrit Persian and Arabic. I would go further and say that the Indian elite is perhaps unique in its ability to use language for barricading itself. However, the situation at present is surely somewhat unusual even by historical standards because at the time when Sanskrit or Persian was used by it as a tool of exclusion, the Indian elite wasnt in the habit of strutting about on the world stage claiming to speak for the most populous democracy in the world while at the same time disenfranchising most of its people. I am convinced that it is a deeply innate xenophobia, congenital moral obduracy, and inveterate parochialism that keeps a majority of parents in India from sending their children to Englishmedium schools. However, I suspect that there are some parents who choose a vernacular education for their children because they are deceived by the promise that the lofty narrative of the Independence movement held out of ending the injustices not only of the British Raj but also of older regimes, and of ushering in democracy, right to self-determination, and a modicum of equality of opportunity. Surely, historians and sociologists, rather than mathematicians, might have something to say on this? None of the voluminous tomes on India by historians such as Guha, economists such as Amartya Sen, and journalists such as Patrick French mention the issue of language as an oppressive tool of disenfranchisement. Again, I would be grateful if you would let me know if there is a strain of literature anywhere South Asian studies in any language that addresses this issue. Thanking you again for your indulgence Best regards, Kanchhedia 6. CB to KC Dear Mr Chamaar, What actually strikes me about your recent email is the way that you express your view that the use of English 'disempowers and disenfranchises' in such superb polemical English! I quite understand your worries about this phenomenon. I would say that it was an extreme example of something more widespread, namely the ability of all elites to exclude others by linguistic means, whether this is the old English elites using the 'public school' to hone children to a high

degree of linguistic competence well before they know what they are really reading and saying, while their peers in government schools can really put together a good English sentence. One of the problems, as far as I know with 'Hindi', to take an example, is that created as a new nationalist language at the end of the nineteenth century, it is either a residue of a much richer language, Urdu, or that it draws on Sanskrit to such an extent that it denies ordinary people any understanding, ie, it is also fundamentally elitist in the way that it is now taught. It is not really my role to say how things should proceed, but I think it is clear that rather than seeing the use of English, or for that matter 'shudh Hindi' as disenfranshising, one should hope that the ability to use different linguistic 'registers' can be made into an advantage in the globalised world. Last week I was lecturing in Copenhagen. Many university courses across Denmark are taught in English. The students' command of it is, if anything better than that of British or American students, and many of them also know German. So the issue, as in 'caste reservations', or anything else is to turn the disadvantaged into the new elite by insisting on multi-skilling. Anyway, it has been an interesting debate and I hope you (and your daughter) find ways of resolving the issues positively. Very best wishes, Chris Bayly