Multilingualism and Hybridity

Thus, empires created syncretistic possibilities for writers. Some of the Latin works in the Spanish Americas combine Latin with words from Amerindian languages such as Nahuatl.^[839] The earliest example of Latin produced by a native author in New Spain in 1541 uses Nahuatl terms for some commodities, and an illustrated herbal of 1552 uses Mexican vocabulary where there were no European names.

In texts like these, the writers provided Latin glosses or explanations of words they incorporated from their own languages, and Latin expression was itself sometimes determined by Nahuatl formulae and protocols.^[840] Empires opened up creative possibilities and choices for writers and thinkers, not least in the choice of language to write in. The parameters of such a choice depended on the imperium in question. In his “sociolinguistic biography” of Sanskrit, Sheldon Pollock has shown how Sanskrit's relationship to local speech types was hyperglossic. Local languages achieved written expression through the mediation of Sanskrit and, as a result, developed in ways that led to its supersession. Across the Sanskrit cosmopolis, scripts asserted a regional individuality to the extent that in the eighth century ce the same language was written in a range of alphabets that were distinct from each other.^[841] Sanskrit was not dependent on a military-political project as such for its dissemination, although as Romila Thapar has stressed, it was an elite language, and its political and cultural hegemony often led to sharp distinctions between high and popular culture. As a language of power, inscriptions in Sanskrit often listed conquests and the epics glorified kingship. Moreover, as in the case of the term barbaros and ‘ajam, used by the Greeks and Arabs, respectively, to refer to barbarians who could not speak Greek and Arabic properly, the term mlechcha originally referred to those who were unable to speak Sanskrit properly, and later to those who were outside the pale of caste society and therefore impure.^[842]

Similarly, within the Persian cosmopolis in India from the eleventh century onward, Persian coexisted as a trans-local idiom with a uniformity of register alongside locally rooted and sacerdotal languages.

India was one region among many in Persian's spread as an international literary language from the ninth century onward. In part, its inclusivity can be attributed to its direct ancestor at the time of the Arab Muslim conquest being a language devoid of immediate religious associations.^[843] Its “nonsectarian catholicity” made it amenable to the demands of Mughal kingship in the Indian context, hence its choice as the administrative language in the Emperor Akbar's reign (1556-1605).^[844] A substantial part of the administration was carried out by Hindu communities who adopted Persian and whose literary achievements in it were considerable. The development of a complex Indo-Persian literary culture is just one example of the inclusivity of Persian as a transnational literary language, although this inclusivity was also dependent on a complex, learned form of the language, which distinguished its users from the rest of the population (analyzed by Kinra in chap. 27, vol. 2).^[845]

Latin, too, was not imposed by force or through law as an official language, and the Romans did not make an “aggressive attempt to impose their language in any part of the Empire,” nor was there an explicit policy that subject peoples should learn Latin.^[846] The Roman Republic and Roman Empire were bicultural and bilingual creations from the start, and the Romans were not monolingual in the administration of empire because they operated in two languages, namely Greek and Latin.^[847] Greek had a prominent place in the upper-class Roman education system (as outlined earlier) and had prestige because of its literature. Mullen discusses elite and non-elite Greek and Latin bilingualism,^[848] and there is evidence for other forms ofbi- lingualism too, such as the graffiti uncovered at the site of La Graufesenque in southwest France, mostly of firing lists inscribed into pottery, where there are inscriptions in Gaulish, Latin, and a mixture of the two, analyzed at length by Adams.^[849] Just as Vedic Sanskrit was affected by borrowings from other languages, including those of groups who were designated mlechcha,^[850] so too there is evidence of the influence of languages other than Greek on Latin in provincial areas of Italy and further afield in the west.

Languages in outlying parts of the Empire made more of a contribution to the Latin lexicon, with examples evident from Africa, the Germanic regions, Spain, and Egypt.^[851] In Italy, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, local languages receded before Latin and eventually died, but it was the esteem in which Latin was held and the need for self-advancement which determined this language shift, not an imperial language policy or a military-bureaucratic project as such. This is not to say that Latin was not used at times to assert the power of Rome symbolically; the connection between Latin and citizenship came to the fore in Egypt, where certain types of legal documents had to be in Latin even if the citizens concerned did not know the language. However, this also led to complicated mixed-language texts rather than monolingual Latin texts alone (see further Bang, chap. 9, vol. 2).^[852]

Within the modern English-speaking world, the issue of which language to write in and the colonial associations of English have been a source of contention among writers. The differing positions of Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongo on writing in English exemplify this. Achebe acknowledged that writing in English can feel like a “dreadful betrayal [of one's mother-tongue] and produces a guilty feeling,” but he adds, “I have been given this language and I intend to use it.” The English language can, he argued, “carry the weight of my African experience,” and it will therefore be a “new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings,” without losing its value as a “medium of international exchange.” The very existence of English as a world language means it is amenable to different kinds of use.^[853] In response to Achebe, Ngugi stressed the linguistic and epistemic dimensions of colonial violence; as he puts it, when referring to the Berlin conference of 1884, “the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard.”^[854] He emphasizes, as some historians have done, that colonialism is not a political or economic process alone, but also involves cultural domination, and the “domination of a people's language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised.”^[855] In his view, this domination was especially evident in the cultural identity of a comprador bourgeoisie who were intermediaries between the European metropolis and the peasantry and working classes.^[856] This multilingual dimension to the politics of difference in empire, and the predicament it creates, are the subject matter of R.

K. Narayan's novel The English Teacher (1945).

Here the angst-ridden linguistic and pedagogical choices of the central character and their consequences are also dramatized in gendered terms; Tamil, as opposed to the English he tries to teach, is associated with a feminine Indian presence, in this case his wife. The gendering of Tamil in the novel reflects the processes that underlay the personification of Tamil as a goddess for Tamil activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was paralleled by a similar imagining of other Indian languages in gendered terms.^[857] The novel therefore reminds us of how imperial and postcolonial politics of difference were also imbricated with gendered representations, ranging from the imagining of colonized lands to the conceptualization of languages as feminine.

The fact that Achebe and Ngugi could debate the significance of their linguistic choices shows that whatever the hegemonic weight and official prestige of English in the British Empire, it did not eliminate all local languages in its sphere of influence. In India the relationship between English and Indian languages was complex, with different strands of colonial policy promoting English in certain spheres and Indian languages in others.^[858] Paralleling these policies were the social mechanisms enabling English to migrate from its community of migrant native speakers to groups of potential Indian users in zones of interracial contact and acculturation.^[859] The extensive production of grammars, glossaries, manuals, dictionaries, and editions of Indian texts was a crucial part of the colonial production of knowledge about India and in the expansion of English in the sub- continent.^[860] Lexicography was a key genre in the negotiation between English and Indian languages; in this context the opening up of languages to each other, the slipperiness of transferring meanings across languages, and different styles of lexicography generated their own cultural and ethnological politics.^[861] In general, lexicography played a key role in defining relationships between different languages in multilingual imperial environments. In the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, missionaries' artes or manuals of Amerindian languages were normally in Spanish or Portuguese.

Some, however, were also in Latin, and others were trilingual, as in a Spanish-Latin-Nahuatl manuscript dictionary of circa 15 3 0-15 5 5.^[862] In the Sanskrit cosmopolis, dictionaries and lexicons had an influential role to play in the relationship between Sanskrit and local languages, especially in South India. In the late tenth century, for example, the first dictionary of Kannada (ca. 990) offered synonyms of rare Kannada words by way of the local lexeme or Sanskrit derivatives and supplied definitions in Sanskrit of Kannada words. The main purpose of the Sanskrit-Kannada lexicons that followed in the succeeding centuries, modeled on Sanskrit lexicographers, was to make available to Kannada poets a range of Sanskrit vocables and their synonyms. An important lexicon in the relationship between Sanskrit and local languages is Hemacandra's Desinamamala (Dictionary of the Words of Place, ca. 1150), which reflects the growing prominence of localized culture in theoretical reflection.^[863] However, lexicography also performed other functions in multilingual empires. In the Persian cosmopolis of India during the medieval period, some Persian glossaries compiled in the tenth and eleventh centuries were motivated by the need to gloss difficult dialect words or archaic vocabulary used in the earliest literary works in New Persian, especially the Shahnama. The glossaries compiled in India between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries had as their principal object the creation of a manual for reading and understanding this poem, and were also commentaries on the classics of Persian literature. They were addressed to readers of Persian poetic texts, enabling them to appreciate the lexical ingenuity of writers, and they catered to poets by expanding lexical options and facilitating the selection of rhymes. The citation of supporting verses from the early Persian classics is the rule in the definition of entries, so that many of these glossaries were also de facto anthologies of verse.^[864]

The creative promise and pitfalls of cosmopolitan and syncretistic cultural, literary, and linguistic imaginations fashioned in the crucible of empires are captured by Chinua Achebe when he writes of how “we lived at the crossroads of cultures...

the crossroads do have a certain dangerous potency; dangerous because a man might perish there wrestling with multiple-headed spirits, but also he might be lucky and return to his people with the boon of prophetic vision.”^[865] The bringing together of different languages within empires meant writers could experiment with mixing languages in their creative works. This is an important technique in some works of imperial and anti-imperial literature produced during and after empires. The incorporation of Igbo lexical items in Chinua Achebe's (1930-2013) novel Things Fall Apart (1959) dramatizes the narrator's double consciousness, as both detached observer, reflected in the ethnographically distancing effect of such statements as “Darkness held a vague terror for these people,”^[866] and knowledgeable insider and wise tribal elder of Igbo society; ethnographic distance is combined with “autoethnographic” intimacy. The linguistic creativity of the novel both frames and compensates for the way key Igbo protagonists are silenced at the end by the central character's suicide (“He could say no more. His voice trembled and choked his words”^[867]), and recreates at another level the eloquence that is shown to be prized in Igbo society, which makes such a fall into silence doubly poignant. The imperial politics of difference produced multilingual and cross-cultural sensibilities which are dramatized in the narrative voices, eclectic styles, and linguistic textures of other novels such as Amos Tutuola's The PalmWine Drinkard (1952) with its mixing of Yoruba and English, G. V. Desani's (1909— 2000) All About H. Hatterr (1948), and Salman Rushdie's Shame (1984). In Desani, the exhilarating enactment of the “middling messy” of interpenetrating languages and cultures produced by the legacies of empire is foregrounded by the narrator's provocative statement that “I am debtor both to the Greeks and the Barbarians,” appropriately calling attention to the primary linguistic meaning of the latter's onomatopoeic evocation of babbling. In Shame the playful and destabilizing ironies produced by post-imperial sensibilities are reflected in the narrator's selfconceptualization as both insider and outsider to multiple cultural and linguistic worlds using the terms of translation:

I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion... that something can also be gained.^[868]

The complex personae of narrators in texts such as these emerge from the legacies of the politics of difference in empires. Roberto Schwarz discusses how in Jose de Alcenar's (1829-1877) novels the narrator speaks with different voices, sometimes as a social chronicler, at other times a wise commentator, a strict moralist, an educated man aware of Brazil's provincial status, and a respecter of local social practices. The use of diverse terms of reference produces realist fiction that is inconsistent but also valuable because of its “mimetic accuracy” to Brazilian social life as a post-imperial society caught between liberal political ideals and the “rule of favour”; these contradictions are also articulated in the “alternation between incompatible ideological presuppositions” in his novels.^[869]

Thus, authors like Achebe, Rushdie, and many others writing in English and other ex-imperial languages, enact multilingual and cross-cultural sensibilities in their narrators' personae as part of a repertoire of techniques to reframe and subvert imperial legacies and their ideological binaries. But imperial texts like Kipling's Kim (1901) also evoke the cultural and linguistic mixing of empire by using a range of techniques from phonetic interference to hybridized and hyphenated linguistic items.^[870] At the same time, though, it tries to contain this mixing in order to safeguard the cultural and racial differences crucial to British imperial authority in India, hence the impossibility (for its author) of having its central protagonist being of English ethnicity, as opposed to a malleable Indianized orphan of Irish ancestry, who is thereby suitable for the role of an imperial intermediary—a role, though, which takes its psychic toll in terms of the periodic crises of identity Kim is shown to suffer in the novel. The novel's narrative voice, so closely aligned and yet ambivalent toward Kim as its focalizer, is simultaneously linguistically and culturally creolized and imperially distant and belittling, reflecting the unstable politics of difference in the novel. This kind of ambivalence also characterizes the British Indian glossary Hobson-Jobson (1886), which enacts the split identity of the British in India as linguistically creolized in their everyday dealings in the subcontinent while trying to maintain a cultural and social distance from it.^[871] As such, it reproduces a defining imperial tension between a high-status language and the linguistic mixtures required for the practicalities of everyday life in imperial territories. Pearl Buck's The Good Earth (1931) is similarly characterized by a divided mode of identification (in this case with China); it destabilizes cultural affiliations, while rehearsing an imperial perspective and dramatizing antiimperialist possibilities in its narrative. Colonial and neo-colonial novels such as these blur the cultural and linguistic binaries produced by the politics of difference in modern empires, while disavowing this blurring because of the threat it poses to an imperial authority grounded in the supposed stability of cultural, racial, and linguistic differences.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press,2020. — 584 p.. 2020

Multilingualism and Hybridity

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