It all started with my search for books by Irish authors. People at the bookshops were always willing to help. It was probably the most common inquiry made by customers, given Dublin's floating tourist population, and the staff had been conditioned to point their fingers to the "Irish Interest " section. But each time I went there, I returned to make a further inquiry or rather to emphasise the "Irish" segment of my query. Only after a couple of such experiences did I learn to make a distinction between an Irish writer - and an Irish-language writer. My search was for the latter and the former to me, in broad terms, were English writers, that is writers in the English language.
The colonial English language curriculum in the "Orient" had never taught us to make a distinction between Eliot and Yeats, Auden and Dylan Thomas or Joyce and Hardy. They were just presented as masters of the English language. Their regional identities, English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh, were inconsequential to understand the merits of their writing. During my search for Irish authors I was applying the logic I normally applied back home in India. If I went to a bookshop in my neighbouring state of Kerala and asked for Malayalam authors, I would not be led to a section which contained books written by Arundathi Roy or Kamala Das. I would be guided to a section that had books by "original" Malayalam writers such as Shivashankara Pillai, Vaikom Mohammed Bashir or M.T. Vasudevan Nair. The former, Arundathi Roy and others, may have brought in their Keralite experience, but they fall into the category called Indian-English writers. The latter are writers recognised as the writers of the soil, as they write in their native Malayalam tongue and idiom. This would be true of any Indian language, including my own Kannada language, spoken in the South Indian state of Karnataka.
However, this logic does not seem to hold good in Ireland. An Irish writer is an Irish writer because he is born in Ireland or shares an Irish family name or because he brings a component of Irish life into his writing. Unlike in the Indian context, he has to bear no allegiance to the linguistic traditions of Ireland or to the Irish tongue to become an Irish writer.
It is taken for granted that an Irish writer uses only the English language for creative purposes. The weighty tradition of four Nobel laureates plays a significant role in the construction of this perception. At the recent IMPAC Dublin literary award announcement the Irish Minister of State for the Arts, Mr O Cuiv, said the size of Ireland's creative talent was disproportional to its geographical size. I am sure he meant Irish writers who wrote in English - the writers of the Irish language.
It began to seem to me that there was a collective amnesia, an almost conspiring silence, about the Irish language, which I quickly learned had an independent and fertile literary tradition of its own.
This amnesia is instantly recognisable to me because the situation in India is becoming similar. The multilingual diversity of the Indian state faces a threat from the hegemony of the English language. The threat is at the doorstep of every Indian home through the intelligently networked apparatus of economic liberalisation. Sadly, however, it is only a minority of linguists and culture critics who are cautioning the imminent death of local languages and contemplating strategies to retain their vibrancy. The death of languages need not always mean a complete erasure. It may simply mean their levels of utility being drastically reduced in day-to-day life: the clipping of wings. As a renowned linguist at the Kannada University, Hampi, Prof K.V. Narayana, put it: "The imperial power will endeavour to retain the ethno-specificity of the local language, but with an English countenance."
What we fear will happen with the Indian languages, seems to have already happened to the Irish language, with the active users of the language reduced to around 71,000. It is the size of the Indian population (one billion) and the illiteracy that prevails that seems to have saved us, so far.
Ireland has always done a few things first. It was the first to break away from the the Empire and now it is first to allow its native language to slip away. The wry theory has been voiced that Joyce, Yeats, Shaw and other famous writers of 20th century Ireland played the ultimate trick on the coloniser by hijacking its language and using English more brilliantly than the English ever could. By doing so they had expanded the horizons of the English language. Yes, but the haunting question is: did they expand the horizons of the English language at the cost of their own Irish language? The writers mentioned had, I understand, only partial knowledge of the Irish language, if that. At that particular moment of history it may have been a splendid - if unconscious - tactic of subversion for these writers to use the English language as they did, but in the ultimate analysis it was the flourishing of English they contributed to. In other words, the English language appropriated them.
Let us, for a moment, assume that Joyce, Yeats and the other icons of Irish culture had written in the Irish language, one of the oldest written "vernaculars" in Europe. Would they have been equally well known or would they have been relegated to a provincial corner?
It is important for us to understand here that the global position of the English language has been such that it has continuously endeavoured to appropriate less powerful cultures and languages. An interesting case here would be that of Latin American writers, many of whom are known to the world today because of the English language. There is not much of a gap between publication of their English translations and their original works. So what exactly is the role of the Spanish language most of them write in? All this does not happen in a conscious and conspiring way: it is a subtle and subterranean process. As the British author Jeremy Seabrook said: "Capitalism is not a conspiracy, it is a dynamic."
I am not doubting the intensity of the great Irish writers' experience or their ability to communicate it brilliantly through the English language - just trying to draw attention to the politics of their choice. Also, while granting that these writers wrote about their Irish experience, it would be interesting to examine what constituted the Irish component of their writing - especially when some of them were in self-imposed exile during important stretches of their literary careers. Did these writers chase a larger pan-European reality of the modern or did they approach reality from their native Celtic and Gaelic perspectives?
It is here that world-views come in. It becomes important to ask if a writer subscribes to a certain cosmopolitan world-view or a native world-view. A writer who subscribes to a cosmopolitan world-view mostly deals with cultural universals and not with its specifics. He is under the belief that he is conversing with a larger audience. He is facing the outer world and has turned his back against his culture. Cultural roots are not always important for him. On the other hand a writer with a native world-view is engaged in a dialogue with his culture. He is deeply involved in the "politics of the soil" (a phrase used by Isaiah Berlin in a different context) and for him writing is an unending process. The writer with a cosmopolitan world-view thinks that the perceptions of the person with a native world-view are narrow and provincial. If writers like Arundathi Roy and Vikram Seth, in the Indian context, subscribe to the cosmopolitan world-view, the brilliant writers of local languages, who are almost unknown outside India, subscribe to the native one. It is not that they are competing to be known: just that they do not have a global agenda.
Fintan O' Toole, writing about playwright Tom Murphy, recently said in The Irish Times: "Murphy, too, is not merely a great Irish dramatist, but a great European one. His imagination from the very start has been fabulously cosmopolitan. Far from being stuck in a provincial corner of a marginal society, he has re-animated the common heritage of a European myth." According to this literary canon, does it mean that the importance of Tom Murphy would have been undermined had he been "merely" an Irish dramatist? Is it more important to subscribe to a larger European "myth" than to an Irish "provincial" reality. What is the role of the qualifying prefix "Irish" before the word "dramatist"? Is it merely an identification tag in the European or global market?
These are truly questions and not conclusions.
Sugata Srinivasaraju is a journalist on the Features Desk of the Deccan Herald, an English daily printed in South India. He is a Chevening Scholar at the University of Westminster, Harrow