New Literatures in English Introductory Lecture Atlas of

New Literatures in English Introductory Lecture

Atlas of Colonialism

Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education (1835) • I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. --But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

A Tryst with Destiny

Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech on Indian independence • Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge. . . At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity. • At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us.

Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana, March 1957) • We have awakened. We will not sleep anymore. Today, from now one, there is a new African in the world!

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “The Language of African Literature” • “night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard” • https: //www. bbc. co. uk/news/av/world-radioand-tv-23367692/ngugi-wa-thiong-o-english-is -not-an-african-language

Re-making English • “Many have referred to the argument about the inappropriateness of this language to Indian themes. And I hope all of us share the view that we can’t simply use the language in the way the British did; that it needs remaking for our own purposes. Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the futures within ourselves and the influences at work in our societies. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free”. (Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 1982)

English… • “There are some things that can only be said in English”. Arvind Adiga, The White Tiger

South Asia

The New Yorker The Group Shot celebrating 50 years of India’s independence