A few years ago, when I sat down with Sumanto Chattopdhyay—known and loved by netizens as “The English Nut”, the friendly neighbourhood English language obsessive—I quickly realised that he is no snob in matters linguistic, nor is he an Anglophile. All too often in India, loving English is looked upon as a sin worthy of perdition: You love English and its literature? Well, then you are likely to be sneered at and, through gritted teeth, told that you are a relic the British left behind to look down, as they once had, on those of your fellow Indians who cannot speak English as well as you. Such derision is all the more strident and searing if, instead of belonging to an elite section of Indian society, you happen to be middle class. Because what right, then, have you, or so the logic goes, to be proficient in English or claim to love its literature? Also, as eyes narrow and brows furrow, you are charged with being deracinated—because, surely, you must be cut off from your roots and disdainful of your national and civilisational heritage if you love English, right?

Wrong. As an Indian writer of both fiction and non-fiction in English, I have argued for as long as I can remember that language is largely a vehicle, meant to carry your readers to the destination you wish to transport them to. Just as a car designed and manufactured in Germany or the United States or Japan can bestride Indian roads with aplomb, so too can an authentically Indian tale—or voice—transmute itself into English and spill forth onto the page, to be comprehended as unmistakably Indian, as wholly desi, as the works of many post-colonial Indian authors writing in English, including mine, have been. Lest we forget, this is also a tongue in which we wrested our country back from British thraldom, marshalling English in our crusade against Englishmen and striking back at the Empire in its own language.........

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