The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  Ice cream at India Gate from the Kwality carts were a big treat; my mother, Sunanda Roy, would drive us out in the ancient big black Ambassador with as many of the neighbourhood children as could be fitted into the back seat, where we squirmed and fought and bounced up and down like puppies. It was the kind of city where people spread white cotton bedsheets over the lawns on hot summer nights and slept outside—no one, not even the President, had air-conditioning. It was also the kind of city where when a family left for vacation, to a reasonably humble hill-station or for a tour of the dak-bungalows (no one could afford the few five-star hotels in existence, except for ‘business people’, a phrase uttered with the utmost darkness), they bolted the back door but did not lock it, just in case their neighbours might need to check on the house or borrow something from the kitchen in their absence.

  Our government house in Delhi did not resemble the Kolkata house in many ways except for one crucial particular. Government houses were built like prisons designed by a very kind architect—enormous lawns and back gardens made up for the structure of the houses themselves: concrete barns with cement floors and to heighten the prison feel, iron-barred windows.

  But like the Kolkata home, my parents’ Delhi house swarmed with people, and the dividing line between a guest who stayed for dinner and a guest who crashed on the divan for weeks was very blurred. Uncles, cousins, the children of my parents’ friends, anyone in need of a billet would find one under my mother’s roof. My mother and the man who ruled the household, the chef Harilal, would go from the bedrooms to the drawing room to the back verandah to the small lawn outside just before main meals, counting the heads, and then cut the potatoes smaller or water the dal or in extremis, raid the kitchen garden. The unspoken rule of the house was that no one would be allowed to leave hungry, and that anyone in need of a bed would be offered it, even if the definition of a ‘bed’ could stretch considerably.

  My architect-uncle suffered several shifts in his time as a house-guest; he began well, with a proper bed and bedroom until another uncle arrived pellmell with his family. He was demoted to the big divan in the drawing room, but then my Thakurda and Thakurma, who spent their years shifting from one brother’s house to another so that no one felt left out, arrived a little before they were expected. So my uncle was shifted to the other divan, which was little more than a slender plank with an equally slender mattress plunked on top; if he breathed out with too much emphasis, he would fall off, and there wasn’t much question of turning over in a space so reminiscent of the cramped upper bunk in Indian railway trains. He survived; there was an easy, bustling hospitality about my parents’ house that made it possible for everyone to do the quintessentially Indian thing and ‘adjust’.

  All would have been well if it hadn’t been for two things: my father had to be sent out from time to time to do the shopping, given the pressure on my mother’s time, and aside from his early experience of book hunger, he also had an eye for life’s little luxuries. The background raga to my childhood was the sound of the parents’ bickering. ‘Tarun!’ my mother yelled, exasperated. ‘Where did you put the groceries?’ ‘On the table,’ my father said, shaking out The Statesman.

  My mother inspected the dining table and found chocolate cake, figs, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in paperback. ‘But where are the dals and the masalas?’ My father would treat the query with surprise: surely my mother could see that there were more important things in the world? ‘But what are we to have for dinner?’ my mother, with Harilal nodding in assent like a Greek chorus of doom, would ask. My father would point out with impeccable logic that he had, technically, come back with food. (The figs were of good quality, and in those days, frightfully expensive.) This was usually the point where my mother flew into a rage and stormed off to see what would be cobbled together from odds and ends, but she was in a minority. The rest of us were on my father’s side, especially after I began reading Garcia Marquez: the dal could always be watered, it did no harm to anyone to eat khichdi for a few days, but Macondo, and Fermina Diaz, and the banana companies, and shipwrecked sailors, could not wait.

  And then one day, my father came back home with a set of the most beautiful books my sister, my baby brother, and I had ever seen: the Time-Life collection of books on the history of the world, on scientific discoveries, and a full, new set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  There were versions of these sets in the Rowland Road house, but when I went up to the row of books and inhaled the scent from their brand-new leather spines, it was an experience of the most sacred and the most carnal of loves at the same time. These books were different, because they were new, and because—perhaps my father had intuited this—we did not have to touch them gingerly, worrying that the pages would fragment and fall apart. They changed my life, and my sister’s life, and perhaps my brother’s life too, though he was more an outdoors person than we were: they brought the wider world of Mayan cultures and contemporary America, of Enlightenment Europe and the great African oral storytelling heritage, right into our bungalow.

  There were not that many ways, in that time, for the world to come to your doorstep. All India Radio’s calm, reasonable, muted newsreaders gave us the government line on the news. In the verandah of the Rowland Road house, my Didima would twiddle the dial on her ancient radio, until the hissing of the vintage tubes gave way to the tinny, cheerful strains of Radio Ceylon and more distant, whispering Australian radio stations. The boxwallahs and royalty travelled; government servants on deputation to the UN travelled; diplomats travelled; the rest of India stayed mostly at home, and we treasured blue airmail letters as though they were the rarest of rare documents.

  Those who did go abroad came back with gifts for the ones marooned at home, and the nature of those gifts is both poignant and telling: plastic ABBA and Beatles badges, tins of yellow Kraft cheese that tasted like dyed plasticine, blue-eyed, thick-lashed, white-skinned dolls draped in clothes that were completely incomprehensible to us. In a slightly later time, after television had arrived in the late 1980s, some travellers brought back videocassettes onto which foreign ads from UK and Australian television had been seamlessly recorded. They were the wistful equivalent of mixed tapes, playlists of products that Indian households did not need, did not have, and coveted anyway.

  We grew used to having the world at our fingertips, and to looking it up, without questioning the authority of these encyclopedias. We saw them as the foreign equivalent of the panjikas and almanacs in their comfortable pink wrappers that told us the cycles of the moon and kept non-resident Bengalis informed of the dates of important festivals that shifted according to the lunar calendar; these books allowed us to keep a distant, shifting world straight in our heads.

  Often, when I met scholars or writers in later years, I would find that they had grown up with the solidity of libraries of reference in their homes, and were so used to being able to consult their bookshelves for information in several Indian and European languages that they did not see how rare and precious the owning of reference books could be. It seemed to me to be a stroke of luck, to see the slow accumulation of knowledge on our shelves, so much more satisfying (and often far more easily available) than money in the bank.

  The names on the spines of the Encyclopaedia Britannica form a litany. As a child, I browsed my way from Baltimore to Braila, Extraction to Gambrinus, with a special stop at P-R: Plants to Raymond of Tripoli.

  That was from the fourteenth edition, with sombre dark blue spines instead of the brown, blue and gold of later editions; the music of the Britannica’s spines would change through each edition. (The first, issued in just three volumes in 1768, went from Aa-Bzo and Caaba-Lythrum to Macao-Zyglophyllum, for those who were wondering.)

  For many Indians, the Britannica stood for unassailable authority. The aspiring brown sahib bought a set for his fledgling library, though secretly he envied those who’d inherited theirs, complete with age spots on the pages. The Britannica was the caste mark of the new
ly Anglicised Indian; a generation later, it would signal the owner’s interest in the wider world, stamp him or her as an aspiring global citizen.

  Nirad C. Chaudhuri captured the solid place that the Britannica had in many Indian—all right, Bengali—homes in the days when knowledge was pursued with the same acquisitive fervour that we reserve for Gadino white diamond bags or gold-leaf ceilings these days.

  ‘In 1914, I was able to surprise my acquaintances by chattering about the German General Staff, General Briamont and his fortifications, artillery and aeroplanes. To no one did this showing-off of mine give greater pleasure than to an aged uncle, Mr Das . . . who was the father of the cousin who owned the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’

  The edition Niradbabu would have read had very few entries by Indian contributors, though in keeping with its imperial spirit, the Britannica included many entries on India. By the 2000s, this had changed, but the first few editions bristled with entries on Benares, Indian currency and the Frontier tribes, most written by retired British generals and old India hands.

  One of the early exceptions was the wonderfully named Sir Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree (Knight Commander of the Indian Empire), one of the very few Indians in the 1890s to be elected to the British House of Commons. Sir Bhownaggree’s expertise allowed him to write entries on Aga Khan, Sir C.J. Readymoney, Jeejeebhoy and Takhtsinghji. It was a respectable list, if not quite as interesting as the one curated by George Cordon Coulton, an expert on celibacy, concubinage, indulgence, knighthood and chivalry.

  The insistence on the wisdom of experts set the Encyclopaedia Britannica apart from more modern rivals, such as Wikipedia. The Britannica’s approach to knowledge is a curated one: the board of editors picks experts on different subjects, and the early bias towards a British, masculine, Christian view of the world has yielded to a more broad and inclusive understanding of history.

  The rise of Wiki as an accepted people’s encyclopaedia in the last eleven years was unexpected. Few thought that an online open-source ‘encyclopaedia’ in which entries were contributed and edited by ordinary readers rather than experts would be successful; yet, in its eleven years, Wiki has become as ubiquitous as Google.

  But neither institution is free of problems. Many Wiki entries focus on issues of ephemeral value or amplify the present obsession with celebrity. The editing battles on Wiki may be its eventual downfall—entries on more controversial subjects read like constantly overwritten palimpsests. If Wiki can’t scrape the barnacles off its hulk, it may not survive. The Britannica is likely to thrive online, if not in print; but the question of who gets to select its panel of experts is likely to become more fraught. Wiki catalogues everything, arriving almost accidentally at accuracy; the Britannica’s utility is that it promises to select only the most important.

  That is not how the Britannica began, though. The first edition advertised the Encyclopaedia as ‘A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences compiled upon a new plan in which the different arts and sciences are digested into distinct treaties and systems’. It was compiled by ‘a society of gentlemen in Scotland’, and William Smellie, a young scholar, wrote most of the articles. He used a curiously modern method, listing the key sources from Alston’s Tyrocinium Botanicum to Ulloa’s voyages and Young on composition, liberally borrowing from all of these books.

  It was very much the cut-and-paste method that journalists and students use these days, and Smellie made no bones about it: ‘With paste pot and scissors I compose it.’

  I know that last quote is accurate, because it’s there on Wikipedia. But I have no real reader’s relationship with the Wikipedia; the information on it might be useful, but it cannot be held in your hands. Though I’m used to virtual reading, my first relationship with books was inescapably tactile (you cannot, for instance, eat a Wiki page), and that perhaps explains some of the love for old things, for the ancient pink almanacs that remind me of my Thakurma, the black-and-gold leather-bound Britannicas that bring back my Didima’s house.

  For many bibliofetishists, the thistle-stamped bound volumes were inseparable from the content. In 2012, when it was announced that no further physical editions would be printed—the Britannica will now be available only online and as an app—I went to my bookshelves and looked with some concern at the row of encyclopaedias.

  These ones were inherited from the Rowland Road house in Kolkata, not my father’s house. They were fragile when I was a toddler, and they are positively frail now. Touching these books is like meeting people you knew in the prime of their lives and realizing that you must now take their papery hands with care, lean forwards to speak so that they can hear you clearly: you must acknowledge that they have grown old.

  And as I gently handled the volumes with their peeling leather spines, the delicate, powdery pages, it suddenly seemed unbearable to me to know that someday the pages would fragment and fall apart. Unlike many book lovers, I am not in love with the physical form of books, any more than I like my friends for the clothes they wear or the fashions they adopt; the words matter more than the page.

  And yet, kneeling in front of the bookcase, there was that stab of protectiveness, the certain knowledge that if the Britannica was no longer to be printed, something solid and essential would be lost. One small fragment of that loss was there in my hands, in the dust left when I closed the old thistle-embossed volume and part of a sentence crumbled into nothingness.

  (Written in 2012)

  7

  English, Vinglish

  How long have Indians been arguing about language? For centuries, in some style.

  Shankar Gopal Tulpule, the historian of Indian literature and compiler of a dictionary of Old Marathi, records that it was roughly seven to eight centuries ago that Mukundaraja prefaced his great work, Vivekasindhu, with a defiant excuse for using Marathi instead of Sanskrit:

  If common trees can bear fruit on par with the wish-tree,

  Why should they not be planted with growing zeal?

  So also, even if here the language is Marathi,

  The content is the same as that of the Upanishads,

  Why should it not, therefore, be stored in the recesses of the heart?

  This was a radical argument, guaranteed to offend the purists with its placing of a local language, Marathi, on the same elevated plinth as Sanskrit. He had, Tulpule writes, ‘already anticipated the displeasure of the orthodox Sanskrit pundits’ of the day—in their eyes, Indian regional languages were not considered refined enough to be used for serious work. That argument over hierarchy and power between languages ran fiercely in the thirteenth century, some declaring that Sanskrit was the only language that a serious writer would use, others fiercely spurning it in favour of their own regional tongues.

  Another story Tulpule tells is of the time Kesiraja asked the great Mahanubhava preceptor Nagadeva a question in Sanskrit. Nagadeva snubbed Kesiraju: ‘Please, I do not follow your asmat (‘for this reason’) and kasmat (‘why’). The Master preached to me through Marathi. So, ask me in the same language.’

  When language wars break out today, with angry arguments and sometimes riots over the question of whether English should take a backseat to Hindi, whether Telugu has received its due, or whether Hindi is cannibalising less prominent local dialects, I think of the long history of these clashes, stretching all the way back to Nagadeva and Mukundaraja.

  In many of the present-day arguments over language, English and Hindi dominate the discussion. The arguments over English have not substantially changed over the two centuries that it has been an adopted Indian language: it is an alien tongue (not after 230-plus years), it is unfairly the language of power and jobs (as true of English as it once was of Sanskrit, Persian and sometimes Hindi), it is the carrier of class privilege (an increasingly inaccurate claim as the language spreads, adapts and democratises), it divorces Indians from their root language (this ignores the very large number of Indians who are comfortably bi- or multi-lingual).

  The imposition of
Hindi is a tricky subject: claims made for the dominance of Hindi speakers often club together the speakers of allied dialects—G.N. Devy, the formidable linguist, points out that over 100 ‘feeder’ languages surround the Hindi belt, and act as the ‘roots’ of Hindi. And opposition to Hindi as the national language rests on the fact that it is an alien tongue, just as much as English, for large swathes of the country. On the plus side, Hindi is easy to learn, and is considered one of the fastest-growing languages in India today; it has also become more adaptable in the sense of assimilating words from other Indian languages.

  But all of the English versus Hindi (or English/Hindi versus The Rest of India) debates in the mainstream, if not in academia, ignore a far bigger question: could India’s dominant languages strangle the rest? G.N. Devy and his colleagues conducted the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), working over a four-year period to track the number of languages still in existence and the number threatened. The Census of India names 122 languages, of which twenty-two are scheduled; the PLSI found over 780 different languages and sixty-six different scripts. In the past fifty years, they discovered that India had lost about 250 languages.

  What India should be concerned about, more than the reductive and frankly useless Hindi/English versus The Rest of India debates, is an environmental issue. Given that this is such a radically, almost magically, multilingual country, preserving language diversity is more important than lingering over the angst of the Indian writer who uses English as his primary publishing language.

  In a fascinating 2002 paper for UNESCO, Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande offers a simple way to assess power equations between Indian languages: how many domains do they cover? In her analysis, English emerges as powerful because it is used across several domains—business, education, national/international communication and technology. Regional languages, especially state official languages, also have power: they cover private domains (home), but also education, government, law. Tribal languages emerge as the weakest because they are only used in the private domain, and as their power wanes, they are used less and less often at home.