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

Vidoushi Ramjheetun
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 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 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 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 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 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
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
Anita Desai, 'In Custody', first published by Random House India in 2007
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
Sharmila Sen, 'Urdu in Custody', , Anita Desai Critical Perspectives, edited by Devindra Kohli and Melanie Maria Just, 2008
Dr. Rita Garg, Meerut , 'Language and Postcolonialism: Anita Desai's In Custody'
Supriya Bhandari, 'Anita Desai's In Custody: Dynamics of Motive and Mode '
Hager Ben Driss, 'Politics of Language, Gender and Art in Anita Desai's In Custody', Journal of South Texas English Studies 4.1 2013
Bhasha Shukla Sharma, 'Remnants of Urdu poetic culture and politics of language in Anita Desai's 'In custody' 2012
Amina Yaqin, 'The Communalization and Disintegration of Urdu in Anita Desai's In Custody
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



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