“Language is the skin of my thought”
Language Relations in Ancient Promises and The God of Small Things
In: The Politics of English as a World LanguageSearch for other papers by Christine Vogt-William in
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Abstract
In this essay, I will be looking at two novels written in the last decade of this last century by two Indian women writers: Ancient Promises by Jaishree Misra; and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. In my reading of these works, I propose to look at how the authors demonstrate that their (female) protagonists have been deprived of their rights through the adroit use of language on the part of their persecutors, who, sadly enough, are members of their families. The languages being used and even manipulated in given key situations in the two novels are English and Malayalam. A second and pertinent question is whether both Misra and Roy wrote these novels with a view to catering for a mainly English-educated audience, both in the East and the West. A connected issue is if they used English as a matter-of-fact instrument which is accessible to the majority of their readers, while at the same time operating on the premise that English was so much a part of the Indian Weltanschauung that it would not offend anyone’s sensibilities as regards the authenticity of the presentation of the diverse socio-cultural situations depicted in the novels.