Vidoushi 1

Vidoushi Ramjheetun

Professor GJV Prasad

Literature in Indian English

ES 440 E

‘In Custody’ by Anita Desai: A novel about languages.

‘In Custody’ is a novel about languages. It puts forward the shades of difference between

Hindi and Urdu framed within the rise of English. Coincidentally, the year the novel was

published was the year the Urdu literary legend, the master lyricist, Faiz Ahmad Faiz passed

away. The presence of Urdu in India is a powerful souvenir of the itinerary of history dogged

by a heritage which came down from the Moghals Empire.

Language to start with is a culture carrier in a way, as Ngugi Wa Thiongo puts it in his essay

entitled ‘From Decolonising the Mind’. According to him, language performs a dual role,

firstly that of communication and secondly as a carrier of culture. We see that language and

communication are the products of each other. Culture is created by communication and

culture is a means of communication. It is a collective construction. Self fashioning is always

in language. Language makes the link to the mainstream of culture. It is indeed a means of

self expression.

Desai in writing this particular novel shows the decaying nature of Urdu. She voiced out in an

interview that “I was trying to portray the world of Urdu poets. Living in Delhi I was always

surrounded by the sound of Urdu poetry, which is mostly recited. Nobody reads it, but one

goes to recitations. It was very much the voice of North India. But although there is no such a

reverence for Urdu poetry, the fact that most Muslims left India to go to Pakistan meant that

most schools and universities of Urdu were closed. So that it’s a language I don’t think is
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going to survive in India. There are many Muslims and they do write in Urdu; but it has a

kind of very artificial existence. People are not going to study Urdu in schools and colleges

anymore, so who are going to be their readers? Where is the audience?”1

The partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 resulted not only in the separation of two states

but also to a repartition of language. Long before partition, the northern part of India was the

cultural capital of the Moghal Empire. Urdu grew out to be a distinct language during the

Muslim reign dated around 1526-1858. It was also revered as the official language of most

Moghals states; as is mentioned in the novel, “Urdu- language of the court in the days of

royalty...”2 Anita Desai laments the loss of Urdu language which “now languishes in the dark

lanes and gutters of the city. No place for it to live in the style to which it is accustomed, no

emperors and nawabs to act as its patrons.”3

Ahmad Ajiaz outlines the history of Urdu language and literature from 1947-1965 and states

that there are in fact three aspects which contributed in the breakdown of the language. First

of all was the massive exodus of Muslim Urdu speakers to flee to Pakistan which took place

and the resettlement of religious communities across the newly born border. Secondly, there

was the increased communalisation of the Urdu language as one solely for the Muslim and it

was made the official language of Pakistan, and thirdly, was the abandonment of Hindustani

in favour of Hindi as the official language of India. India was then naturally taken to belong

to the Hindu and the Muslims were considered outsiders. Steps were taken in order to stop

the widening gap between these two languages. First and foremost by encouraging

Hindustani, which is a mixture of bits of every language in India, was proposed by Mahatma

Gandhi. Hindustani was a recognised language by the Indian National Congress in its 1934

constitution. However, there was a problem with the script and that was impossible to

overcome. Hindustani was regarded as a lingua franca; it acted as way of bridging the gap

between Urdu and Hindi, which sadly enough was being lost. This resulted because, Urdu
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was stuck to the Perso-Arabic script while Hindi to Devanagari lipi. Hindus assert Hindi as

their linguistic identity while Muslims maintain theirs with Urdu.

The novel opens with Deven, a Hindi teacher who loves Urdu poetry but is forced to teach

Hindi to “earn a living”4 and since it has more market value than Urdu. Murad his childhood

friend visits him to persuade him to interview Nur Shahjehanabadi, an old Urdu poet for an

article for his magazine. It is therefore seen that language is not only linked to one’s

communal identity but also to one’s vocation. When Deven asks permission from the Head

of department, he is mistreated and humiliated and threatened to be transferred to the Urdu

department. This highlights the obvious fact that Urdu has indeed not the same respectful

place in India; it is looked down upon.

Desai portrays the decay of Urdu literature through Nur. The latter is the representative of

Urdu literature in the novel. The surrounding of Nur’s place is “as gloomy as a prison.” 5 The

decaying and sickening image of Urdu literature is further shown metaphorically through

Nur’s ailing and ageing body. The hospital and the prison referred to in the novel while

describing the surrounding and the state of Nur’s house can in fact be related to Foucault’s

spaces of regimentation and control. These two spaces lay emphasis on the fact that the

language is not only neglected but it is also within control and is continuously being rendered

ineffective. These two institutions exercise their respective power on the language almost

suffocating it and making it a handicap. Urdu has lost its glory of the past days and can no

longer exert hegemony over others around. It is now relegated to a subordinate position.

Art is related to social existence of man. The relation between art and ideology is to affront

ideological challenges and to go hand in hand with it. According to Antonio Gramsci power

operates through two sets of apparatuses, political society or state. The Repressive State

Apparatus consists of the government, the police, the army, the hospital and the prison which
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works through oppression and ensure the formal domination of a class. While the Ideological

State Apparatus comprises the educational system, culture, religion in which the intellectuals

work to certify harmony and natural submission and real domination of a class. The

Ideological State Apparatus needs to work in collaboration with the Regressive State

Apparatus to ensure harmony in the society but here; obviously it is not the case. And that is

why conflicts arise.

The “semi-darkness”6room in which Nur is resting is also appalling. The dilapidated status of

his house is symptomatic of the actual state of Urdu. The silence which reverberates in his

house echoes the slow death of Urdu, which Salman Rushdie likewise laments; “The slow

death of my mother tongue, Urdu is much further advanced than it was two three years ago,

and much that was beautiful in the culture of Old Delhi has slipped away forever.”7

This statement is echoed and further reinforced when Nur advocates and questions; “How can

there be Urdu poetry when there is no Urdu language left? It is dead, finished. The defeat of

the Moghuls by the British threw a noose over its head, and the defeat of the British by the

Hindiwallahs tightened it. So now you see its corpse lying here, waiting to be buried.” 8

Deven’s desire to promote Nur’s poetry is put adjacent to a criss-cross of cultural gap which

exists. For Deven it is the love for Urdu poetry which drives him but for Murad it is for his

business sake. “If Nur Shahjehanabadi produces any poetry after fifteen years of silence,

which will be a great event certainly, in this small world of poetry. He is a whale in a pail of

water...”9Urdu poetry is seen in economic terms, where the dying language entails more of a

commodity value. Hence, it is obvious that the difficulties to destabilize the battle of

language are not only political, and social but also economical. Besides, Nur’s second wife as

well sees Nur’s poetry and fame in economic terms.

Siddiqui is another representative of Urdu in the novel. However, he too is a figure of the

declination of the language. He is a very quiet teacher and symbolises the imminent silencing

of the language and culture.

The loss of one language is pitted against another language, and this gains political

undertones. The need for attack and vengeance crop in and the matter takes on religious

ground. It appears as such, that the survival of one language is at the cost of the erasure of the

other. These languages at a specific point of time appear to take human attributes and fight

for their respective survival. Urdu losses the battle making Hindi the victorious one, but

Hindi will always carry the burden of the dying Urdu language with it.

The violence which prevails between the Hindu and Muslim community undertakes a

linguistic violence and this deteriorating relationship is also shown to be in parallel with the

disintegrating husband-wife relationship between Deven and Sarla. Theirs is symbolised by

their unsuccessful love and the former is a love-hate relationship because, both spoken Hindi

and Urdu are similar, it is simply the scripts which are different and yet there cannot be a

compromise, unlike in Deven and Sarla’s relationship there is scope for improvement.

Nur’s house acts as a deceitful platform in literary terms and functions as a terrestrial territory

to stage the on-going tensions between the two languages, just as Nur puts it; “There was the

India camp and the Pakistan camp, the pure-Persian camp and the demotic-Hindustani camp.

They quarrelled and mocked and taunted and lost their tempers, but as if acting assigned

roles. There was no evidence of anyone persecuting anyone else or of winning anyone over to

his side through argument or persuasion.”10

Moreover, the conversation between these two important embodiments of languages is

characterised as to be “stale as the rice and the gravy lying on tin trays all over the terrace” 11,

hinting at the obvious, that this effort might be just be futile. All the nauseating imageries of
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the hospital, the prison, the stale food mirror the state the language is in .Nur makes an

important point about the concept of time in which the new generation is trapped and that is

most probably why nothing productive is being done; “Wrong, wrong, for thirty years you

have been wrong. It is not a matter of Pakistan and Hindustan, of Hindu and Urdu. It is not

even a matter of history. It is time you should be speaking of but cannot – the concept of time

is too vast for you...”.12 The gap between these two generations has widened up too much that

Nur is of the opinion that nothing can be done now. He has lost faith and time has made him

weary. Actually his very name ‘Nur’ is ironical since it means ‘light’ but he himself is

growing dimmer and dimmer day by day, Urdu language can no more shines under his

custody. Just as the Urdu language is waiting out there to be dead, likewise he is awaiting for

his turn. His sarcastic tone and humour all hint at his great disillusionment. There is no

zealousness left in Nur anymore; he speaks without showing any spontaneity. To add to it,

the narrator’s tone as well is neither a promising nor an affirming one, it is rather full of irony

which foreshadows that the conflict will be a perpetual one.

At a particular point of time, one of the man sitting crossed legged present at Nur’s place says

that “Here we live as hijras, as eunuchs.”13 This statement cannot be overlooked, it shows the

extent to which Urdu language has been impoverished and resulted in linguistic impotency.

By stating that this language has now become effeminate, the concept of gender crops in.

Between the male and the female, the female counterpart has always been looked down upon

in society, and is considered to be weaker of both sexes. This allusion sheds more light on the

fact that Urdu represents the female counterpart and Hindi stands for masculinity, since it has

more power and thus dominates over the latter. This male gaze at language is evident. At

every point of the novel Desai keeps reminding us about the pathetic loss of the Urdu

language and its heritage.

This gender struggle pertains more to who gets the custody of Urdu. Deven being a Hindi

teacher is significantly made the custodian of the Urdu language instead of Murad. Desai

significantly wants to educate the people that there is a need to look back at the cultural

division and she clearly affirms that she is against linguistic chauvinism. Viney Kirpal states

that “In taking someone in custody, one has to surrender oneself to the other’s custody that is

to possess without being possessed. The dedication towards this trust thrust upon has to be a

two way for both party”14. “He had accepted the gift of Nur’s poetry and that meant he was

custodian of Nur’s very soul and spirit. It was a great distinction. He could not deny or

abandon that under any pressure.”15It underscores power politics. Deven’s attempt to preserve

Nur’s poetry is simultaneously linked to the memory of his father who introduced him to

Urdu poetry.

Deven is manipulated and Nur exploits him a lot, this can symbolically be interpreted as the

dominant nature Urdu has and which is being lost; and Deven allows himself to be exploited

and ridiculed strengthens the overriding Urdu power. Though old, Nur is able to control

Deven and make him do what he wants. This can also be interpreted as the fact that Nur is

taking out his frustration of Hindi taking over the world on Deven. Urdu if given the space to

rise can find itself a place but it is just being weakened. Hindi is portrayed in a negative way

throughout the novel. This is because it is that very language which caused the doom of Urdu.

Hindi is seen as a villain trying to eliminate Urdu. Murad at the very outset of the novel

belittles Hindi openly; as “that vegetarian monster”, “That language of the peasants” and “

That language which was raised on radishes and potatoes.”16

Finally it can be argued that throughout the novel Anita Desai has not only lamented the slow

death of Urdu and portrayed the pain of loss but she has also tried to question the very

essence of why should languages be the repository of cultural conflicts when after all they are

human construct. Instead language should be a binding force. Urdu is indeed the language of
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India’s ancestors and hence forms part of the Indian history, since it locks in it memory of

partition. It is India’s heritage. Another important matter is, if this is what happen between

Indian vernacular languages then, what happen with the colonial imposition of their foreign

language is simply worst. There is no better way of ending this paper that a rhetoric question

posed by the Urdu poet Rashid Banarasi:

“We understand a lot about the prejudice

Of this age

Today languages too are Brahmins and

Shaikhs? We don’t understand.

If Urdu too is under blame for being an outsider

Then whose homeland is India? We don’t

understand.”17

References

1
Costa;M. 2001, Interview with Anita Desai,

http://www.umiacs.umd.eduusersawwebsawnetooksdesai-interview.html

2
Anita Desai, ‘In Custody’, first publishes by Random House India in 2007 p8

3
Ibid p8

4
Ibid p40

5
Ibid p34

6
Ibid p37

7
Ibid p ix
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8
Ibid p39

9
Ibid p106

10
Ibid p53

11
Ibid p53

12
Ibid p53

13
Ibid p52

14
Viney Kirpal, ‘An Image of India: A Study of Anita Desai’s In Custody’, Critical

Perspectives, edited by Devindra Kohli and Melanie Maria Just, 2008

15
Anita Desai, ‘In Custody’, first published by Random House India in 2007 p233

16
Ibid p8

17
Rashid Banarasi, quoted in Lee 2000

Sources

1. Anita Desai, ‘In Custody’, first published by Random House India in 2007

2. Viney Kirpal, ‘An Image of India: A Study of Anita Desai’s In Custody’, Anita Desai

Critical Perspectives, edited by Devindra Kohli and Melanie Maria Just, 2008

3. Sharmila Sen, ‘Urdu in Custody’, , Anita Desai Critical Perspectives, edited by

Devindra Kohli and Melanie Maria Just, 2008

4. Dr. Rita Garg, Meerut , ‘Language and Postcolonialism: Anita Desai’s In Custody’

5. Supriya Bhandari, ‘Anita Desai’s In Custody: Dynamics of Motive and Mode ‘

6. Hager Ben Driss, ‘Politics of Language, Gender and Art in Anita Desai’s In Custody’,

Journal of South Texas English Studies 4.1 2013

7. Bhasha Shukla Sharma, ‘Remnants of Urdu poetic culture and politics of language in

Anita Desai’s ‘In custody’ 2012

8. Amina Yaqin, ‘The Communalization and Disintegration of Urdu in Anita Desai’s In

Custody

9. J.P Tripathi, ‘Anita Desai’s In Custody; A Study in Thematic Design and Motive,

Journal of South Asian Literature, Vol. 21, No. 2, Essays on Premchand (Summer,

Fall 1986), p 204-207 Asian Studies Centre, Michigan State University