ABSTRACT
Not just across cultures but even within a linguistically and culturally diverse and complex area such as India, language serves as a site, location and locus of enunciation. A linguascape is also an ethnoscape and an ideoscape; linguistic positions, not just historical or geographic, caste or gender locations, are important determinants in the problematic of representing India, which all Indian cultural texts, including literature and cinema, must perforce do. That is why Indian English texts should be read in conjunction with texts in native Indian languages. Such vernacularizing is an enabling way of righting the asymmetrical balance of power between English and the other Indian languages. This involves a conscious process of intervention which translation enables – translation of English texts into Indian languages but also of Indian texts into English so as to vernacularize English itself and its contexts in India. Just as vernacular texts help to destabilize or reorient our interpretations of Indian English texts, cinematic texts help to controvert or redefine the manner in which we read literature. The colonial encounter, I believe, was not just a clash of political and economic regimes, of civilizations, of different ways of apprehending the world, of two or more epistemological and representational styles, but also, for the purposes of my project, of monolingualisms and multilingualisms. Not just centres and peripheries, metropoles and colonies, collaborative and resistant colonial cultures were produced by these encounters but also cultures that can be differentiated as being monoglot and polyglot, uniphonic and polyphonic, orthoglossic and heteroglossic. This chapter works out such a vernacular and polyglot hermeneutics by reading select literary and cinematic texts such as Fire, ‘A Horse and Two Goats’, Gora and The Legends of Khasak.
