Keeping The Faith

But, I realised first hand a couple of weeks ago, when my book (KeepingFaith with the Mother Tongue - The Anxieties of a Local Culture) was beinglaunched, that you can't always subscribe to your idealistic and somewhatunfashionable views. The market forces think otherwise. I was given to believeby some of my friends, as well as the publisher, that the audience at the book-launchawaited a grand statement from the author. I did not muster the courage tocounter this argument for the fear of being perceived as chicken-hearted. So Iwent with a prepared statement that had been rehearsed half-a-dozen times forpauses. Never mind whether or not I read it out fluently, I willbe curious to know if this statement inspires you to pick up a copy of the bookor if it piques your interest. Your vote, I am sure, will go a long way indeciding for or against the tradition of an author speaking on the occasion ofhis or her book launch. So here goes, the speech I made:

"Like most debut authors I feel terribly exhausted to make a speech on theday of the launch. So, I won't get into telling you why I wrote the book, how Idid it and how long I took. All that is amply clear in the fairly longish'introduction' and 'endnotes' that I have written in the book. But I would onlylike to emphasise that it was personally very important for me to put this booktogether. The theme I have chased in this book broadly suggests my own journeyfrom imagining myself as a provincial Kannada boy, growing up in Bangalore'sMalleswaram as the son of a Kannada academic and activist, to reaching thefringes of the so called cosmopolitan world by the virtue of being part of theEnglish language media. My present and this book is about the struggle toreconcile the best of the two worlds that I have experienced.

The theme of this book occurred as a result of a set of questions that werenagging me. Roughly reconstructed, the questions were something like this:Should I read Kannada at the cost of English, as the great Kannada poetGopalakrishna Adiga had once advised me? How much time should I devote to keepmyself up to date in the Kannada world? Is it worth it at all? Will it be of anyuse to spend so much time when most of what I need to manage in this world isavailable in English? Etcetera. All the while, I knew there was something deeplyabnormal about these questions. I soon realised that I too was caught in thedilemma that millions of my generation were facing in a globalised world andthat caused enormous guilt in me.

I clearly knew how richly I had gained from my Kannada milieu and how deeplysecure and rooted I felt sharing the Kannada identity. At the same time I wasalso aware of the fresh perspectives and access that the English languagecreated. I did not want to pursue one at the cost of the other. I wanted to be agood bilingual integrating my reading and writing interests in the twolanguages. Since I constantly travelled between the two worlds, I knew howdubious it was to dub all that was generated by local languages and cultures as'provincial' and 'parochial.' In the everyday sense, cosmopolitanism wasnarrowly defined or equated with the use of the English language and the'benign' global environments it was said to 'naturally' create. This wasn't trueand I started wondering as to how to get the provincial and the cosmopolitan,the local and the global, the inside and the outside, the passion and theprofession to coexist. How do I get the two worldviews to complement each other?To put it a little more pompously, I began my exploration of the middlepath. Itwas a dire necessity for me. Almost a question of survival.

I have sometimes even found myself wondeing if this book is about avenging myfather's humiliations at the altar of English. Despite being so accomplished,learned and creative, I suspect that in some remote corner of his mind there wasthis regret that the world did not open up as much as he wanted to because ofhis limited access to English. Some obituarists of my father have pointed outthat before his silence acquired a meditative temper, the silence of his youngerdays that produced the mime plays were more a result of his shocking encounterwith the English-speaking cantonment world in Bangalore, when he came from smalltown Chikkaballapur to study at the St. Joseph's College. Since English assumesitself to be the world, it has acquired the power to extract regrets from eventhe most marvelously accomplished people. Garcia Marquez in his autobiography Livingto Tell the Tale recalls a debate that took place between his parents overthe school he was to join. He says: "My father would have preferred theColegio Americano so that I would learn English, but my mother rejected it withthe perverse argument that it was a den of Lutherans. Today, I have to admit, tobe fair to my father, that one of the defects in my life as a writer has beennot speaking English." One does not know how to make sense of such regrets.

Perhaps to ensure that his son does not suffer from a similar angst, in myearly teens, the only serious holiday homework I remember my father assigning mewas translation of short stories or poems from Kannada to English. So evenbefore I had picked up the nuances of the two languages, I had become atranslator of sorts. That was the destiny that he was trying to carve out for me- to take my mother tongue to the world. I took the path he showed me seriously.In an altered way, I continue to feel the same even today. As a journalist, I ammerely a translator between two worlds and between peoples. In that sense, thisbook is so much about being my father's son. I have dedicated this book to hismemory and I only wish he was alive today to see it in print."

This statement was followed by a long 'thank you' list. Perhaps you would beglad that I have edited it out here.