CHALLENGING LINGUISTIC IMPERIALISM: R.PARTHASARATHY’S ROUGH PASSAGE

Language and empires exist in close proximity to regularise the project of colonisation which requires not only political, legal control over other countries but also a cultural genocide. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s speech in 1835 on the Government of India is indicative of this process of linguistic imperialism where he justifies the supremacy of the English language thus:

Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said, that the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. (Ashcroft 428)

This avowed superiority of English language is not only a pretext to make semi-educated interpreters but also a superstructural imposition on the natives to annihilate the cultural legacy of the native people.

        Postcolonial writers harbour a love-hate relationship with the language of the erstwhile rulers. Some thinkers like Ngugi Wa Thiong’o called for complete relinquishment of the English language. In Decolonising the Mindhe notes how the colonial rulers in Africa prohibit the use of native language Gikuyu in school and introduce English language to culturally remodel the natives. Ngugi writes categorically that the choice of a language defines the cultural life of people and it is through the device of language that the colonial power operates and hegemonizes the native Africans. That is why he articulates that language and culture have a symbiotic relationship. But for a colonial mind this link between culture and language is always in a state of jeopardy as the colonial rulers unleash the ‘cultural bomb’ to wipe out the innate harmony. As a form of counter-discourse Ngugi demanded the use of Gikuyu language. Bhalchandra Nemade also championed the use of native language against foreign language when imported customs and languages play havoc with native culture.

This dilemma of linguistic choice haunts the poetry of Rajagopal Parthasarathy. As a postcolonial poet he finds his inner psyche oscillating between two choices of language. During his early years in life he was attracted by the glory of English language that resulted in a cessation of ties with his native roots. He imbibed the foreign culture and language and became a British Council scholar at Leeds University. However, his journey to England was punctuated by sheer disillusionment. He found contemporary England defiled by racist prejudices and felt himself like a fish out of water. The erroneous choice of language and the resultant hankering after English culture created in him a deep remorse which occasioned the writing of Rough Passage, a semi-autobiographical poem that charts the spiritual journey of the poet’s mind.

Rough Passage is collection of thirty-seven poems. Like T.S.Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Landthe thematic similarity provides unity to the work. In his preface to the volume the poet writes:

This is a book where all the poems form part of a single poem, as it were. By revision and elimination –so that more than one text of the poem exists- I have at last composed, but not completed it. Rough Passage is that book. It should be considered and read as one poem. In it twenty years’ writing has finally settled.

In course of the book the poet tries to overcome the dilemma of using the colonizer’s language and resurrect the annihilated cultural ethos of his Tamil community. Through the tripartite structure of the volume (Exile-Trial-Homecoming) the poet undergoes a journey from self-imposed exile through manifold ordeals to reach a native space where he can commune with his own culture. In his essay ‘Whoring after English Gods’ Parthasarathy documented unequivocally his fascination for English culture and language and the resultant tempestuous encounter with English.

      The first section ‘Exile’ which comprises 8 poems juxtaposes the culture of England with that of India revealing the heinous aftermath of the British rule on India. Having spent thirty years of his life in England the poet introspects into his inner self and finds his psyche traumatized by the clash of two cultures. His guilty feeling is found manifested in the following lines:

That language is a tree, loses colour

Under another sky. (15)

We are reminded of an incident from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manwhere Stephen articulates the burden of using the language belonging to another culture:

      The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home,Christ,ale,master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (Joyce189)

Despite his endeavour to overcome colonial hybridity in the poems of the first section the poet is unable to triumph over his exilic condition.

The creation of a persona helps the poet look at the burdensome journey with an objective stance. The poet reveals his return to his own culture through the image of a man returning to his lover. The following lines indicate his deep sense of attachment to his native culture in terms of sensual images-

All night your hand has rested

                      On her left breast.

                      In the morning when she is gone

                     You will be alone like the stone benches

                      in the park, and would have forgotten

                      her whispers in the noises of the city. (15-16)

Despite his endeavour to overcome colonial psychosis the poet, in the first section of the poem, is unable to triumph over his exilic condition as ‘Nothing can really/ be dispensed with. The heart needs all.’ Though he is returning to his beloved Tamil like a jaded traveller, the smell of ‘gin and cigarette ash’ still casts shadow over his mind. Having wasted golden years of his life craving for western culture he has gleaned a shaft of wisdom and like Coleridge’s the ancient Mariner, has become a sadder and wiser man. With this wisdom the poet is ready to ‘give quality to the other half’ of his life. Thus, unlike an average man who generally settles himself within the age of thirty, the poet is eager to undergo trials and tribulations to expiate for his mistakes.

    In the second section (Trial) the poet shows development as the persona created by the poet goes through ordeals and charts different periods of growth. This section, as Bruce King observes, ‘covers approximately the next fifteen years, from the age of thirty to forty-five, picks up some of the previous imagery while giving more emphasis to the fingers, smell, taste, breast, tongue as symbols of the senses achieving oneness with another, the closeness missing in exile which he will seek in ‘Homecoming’ through a return to the culture and language of Tamil Nadu and the senses of his childhood.’
(King 240) The opening poem describes the vulnerability of the protagonist:

Mortal as I am, I face the end

                         With unspeakable relief

                         Knowing how I should feel

                         If I were stopped and cut off.(29)

The subsequent poems of this section are replete with intense scenes of love-making. Through sensuous love scenes the poet allegorises his identification with Tamil. The language of love offers him momentary bliss and a creative space to transgress the circumscribed zone of aridity. The abundance of sensual images speak volumes for his connectedness to his traditional culture. The comparison of his love to the ‘stones of konark’ lends a primitive touch to his cultural inheritance. The poet acknowledges that his penchant for foreign culture is over-:

            in a corner, an umbrella

            now poor in the ribs. (37)

The umbrella is a metaphor for his earlier craving for the British inheritance which, though once found useful, now stands in a dilapidated condition. However, he is sharply aware of the fact that he cannot totally do away with his colonial legacy which reasserts itself sporadically. The events of the past ensnare him alike an octopus giving him little room to utilise his present condition.

           In the final section, Homecoming, the poet treats the theme of language and culture point-blank. Gone are his earlier hesitations which hitherto stopped him from embracing his traditional culture. The opening poem sets off by making a comparison between two cultures:

My tongue in English chains,

 I return, after a generation, to you. (47)

As Bijay Kumar Das aptly points out, this worry about language is reminiscent of Eliot’s inability to master the use of words as seen in the following lines:

      So here I am, in the middle way, having had

twenty years—

      Twenty years largely wasted, the years of

l'entre deux guerres—

 Trying to learn to use words (East Coker 172-174)

However, his homecoming is not at all easy as the poet faces rough ambience in his native world. He finds classical Tamil defiled by films:

Now, hooked on celluloid, you reel

 Down plush corridors. (47)

Tamil language which had its heyday in the time of Nammalvar and Valluvar now exists in a decaying state. That is why Parthasarathy’s condition is more complex than that of Michael Madhusudan Datta who also, having undergone hostile treatment in England, repudiated English language in favour of his native language. Unlike Parthasarathy, Madhusudan on returning home did not have to face the degenerated condition of his native language and found the ambience conducive to his poetic taste. But Parthasarathy encountered equal degeneration is his native culture that has vilified his native language. Therefore, he writes:

                  I fear I have bungled again.

                  The last refinement of speech

          terrifies me. The ballon

         of poetry has grown red in the face

                  with repeated blowing. (61)

Therefore the poet realizes the fatuousness of employing ancient Tamil for his poetic creation and the effectiveness of ‘humble newspaper’ to carry out his creative urge. He will have to invent a new language out of the remnants of an emasculated literary tradition and redefine his traditional heritage that will not play a second fiddle to western culture operating through the hegemony of language. Sivaram Krishna in his essay ‘That Last Refinement of Speech’ writes:

Rough passage is in this sense a departure from the usual stance perceptible in contemporary Indian poetry in English – for it suggests that the discovery of cultural roots is inextricably linked not with the choice of one’s language but also with the corresponding responsibility, as a creative writer of cleaning the language of his tribe.(163)

The ending tone of the poem does not suggest that the poet will give up writing in English for Tamil as some critics have expressed. He wants to acclimatize his native language to the English language creating a mode of resistance that will not imitate the foreign language but create a language imbued with native flavour. He takes inspiration from the poems of A.K.Ramanujan who, earlier, tried to fuse Kannada and Tamil tradition with the English. His poem ‘A River’ stands as a supreme achievement of this exquisite confluence. Parthasarathy’s Rough passagealso becomes a manifesto for tolling the death-knell of linguistic imperialism and parading a rich cultural tradition that will not lose colour under another sky.

   In a postcolonial country like India, thus, complete disavowal of English, the lingua franca of the world is hardly feasible. In order to challenge the linguistic imperialism Raja Rao attempted an indegenisation of the English language by infusing local colour which found culmination in Kanthapura. R.K.Narayan also endorsed his concept of a Bharat brand of English which will evince a swadeshi stamp. Parthasarathy,too, tried to indegenise English by channeling the exilic condition into an ensconced place of belonging. In his essay ‘Whoring after English Gods’ Parthasarathy articulates his vision clearly:

               One of the basic problems for the poet is to find an adequate, and above all a personal language. In spite of one or two commendable efforts, it has not been possible to extend the resources of the English language or even indianise it, although it is used with distinction for literary purposes. (81)

Works cited

1.     Philip, Marlene Nourbese.  She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly       Breaks. Prince Edward Island: Ragweed, 1989. Print

2.     Ashcroft, Bill et al. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge,   1995. Print

3.     Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1916. Print.

4.     King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. New Delhi: Oxford, 1987. Print.

5.     Sivaramkrishna, M. ‘That Last Refinement of Speech-The Poetry of R. Parthasarathy’. The Literary criterion,xii:2, 1976. Print

6.     Parthasarathy, R. ‘Whoring After the English Gods’ in Writers in East-West Encounter. Hong Kong: Macmillan, 1982. Print.

7.     Das, Bijay Kumar (ed.). Perspectives on the Poetry of R.Parthasarathy. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1983. Print.

8.     Parthasarathy, R. Rough Passage. Delhi: Oxford, 1977. Print.