What exactly is 'perishable' in The Perishable Empire? In his speech on the 'Government of India' in 1833, Thomas Macaulay pointed out that the only imperishable aspects of the British Empire are the arts, morals, literature and laws of England. Everything else is perishable. In the brief extract from Macaulay's speech that serves as an epigraph to this delightful volume, the only thing that is not mentioned, ironically, is the English language.
The Perishable Empire is arranged in two parts with five essays each that address the colonial and postcolonial predicaments of Indian Writing in English. The colonial predicament is the impossibility of writing in English. The postcolonial predicament is the impossibility of writing in anything but English. These are the two ways in which the English language mediates the trauma of literary production in India. The novel is the site, and the bhashas the victim, of this trauma.
Is there a way out of the anxiety generated by this trauma? How can the Indian writer avoid the 'false starts' of choosing between English and the bhashas? How can we ensure that Indian writers read each other in the bhashas without the mediation of Englishas a lingua franca? Given that there are no easy answers to these questions, these essays attempt to develop an ethical position rather than suggest a readymade solution.
Meenakshi Mukherjee's achievement in these essays lies not in having written yetanother account of 'nation and narration', but in situating precisely the role of gender in the rise of the novel in India. Sexual differences are analogous in her thesis to the relationship between English and the bhashas. The woman was the guardian of the bhashas in the colonial period. The colonial novel itself was but a response to the 'suffering of women'. The enclosed space of fiction wasn't unlike the sacred space of home that was her domain.
Unlike the English-educated male who ran down his mother tongue, the colonial woman resisted the desire to identify with the aggressor's language. Is it a surprise then that Bankimchandra Chatterjee's maiden effort in English, Rajmohan's Wife (1864), should fail to make an impact? Despite a willingness to represent feminine sexuality, argues Mukherjee, the fear that women might pose a threat to the social order by a free expression of their sexuality prevents Bankim from making a break with the mores of patriarchy.
In her essay on Sarojini Naidu and Toru Dutt, the author says that women in colonial India have been kept away from the English language because of its emancipatory possibilities. But then access to the English language was only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for women's liberation. Where was the guarantee that even women of privilege would not squander the opportunities presented by the English language?
Is it not precisely this sort of trivial engagement with English that Mukherjee sets out to critique? For an example, we need but turn to the career of Sarojini Naidu who dropped poetry with abruptness despite being dubbed 'the Nightingale of India' by Mahatma Gandhi. Mukherjee states that Naidu was only interested in poetry as a way of constructing her public image. She quotes from a letter to Arthur Symons where Naidu confesses: "I am not a poet really. I have the vision and the desire, but not the voice."
Mere access to English does not necessarily translate into a 'voice'. The attainment of an authentic voice should be the political goal of Indian writing. But such a literary project is not reducible to the narcissistic lure of the Indian writer merely 'hearing her own voice'. Otherwise, we will merely replicate in a postcolonial idiom, the 'defective acoustics of colonial India.'
