Reading Delhi: Englishwallahs, Hindiwallahs, and the politics of language and literary production (India)

This dissertation is an ethnography of publishers, writers, booksellers, and public intellectuals who reside in the city of Delhi, and examines sites of English and Hindi literary production within the geographic and cultural landscape of the Indian capital. The work illustrates how individuals, groups, and institutions, with diverse linguistic backgrounds and loyalties, form a dynamic literary field where notions of cultural authenticity are hotly debated. Language in the Indian context is a barometer of class membership, caste affiliation, gender relations, and religious identity, and the language one writes, communicates, and publishes in is deeply tied to notions of the self and community. What is at stake is no less than how to be 'Indian.'; The field of language and literary production in Delhi reveals a contemporary struggle between Englishwallahs and Hindiwallahs to assert their own cultural agendas as they aim to define the parameters of national belonging, while also solidifying their own political constituencies. The fact that the political constituency of Englishwallahs is more aligned with upper middle-class consumerism than with an identifiable voting bloc has become a rallying point for Hindiwallahs. Language thus becomes a critical factor in the politics of nationalism, and literary language a key site in the articulation of the parameters of cultural citizenship.; Through the analysis of literary texts, essays, and media reports related to the post-1980s 'boom' in transnational Indian English literature, the study also questions the ways in which Delhi has become a 'global' site of literary production. To this end, it probes the 'local' relationships between English-language texts and so-called regional-language texts, such as those written in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, etc. In the process, the dissertation proposes the notion of 'literary nationality' as a fluid set of cultural and political distinctions strategically deployed by writers, critics, translators, publishers, and institutions to mediate India's complex linguistic hierarchies. The work suggests that linguistic self-consciousness, and the specific ways in which it is both practiced and imagined in Delhi's literary field, charts social struggle and historical change in the city and the nation at large.