Ignorant of the fact of being ignorant

When was the last time you read an Urdu poet in the original? Or even in translation? Hindi readers will have read Dickens, often in English, but how many English readers have even heard of Kalidasa? In other words, “we” know our literature, and only our literature (“our” referring to language). “They” know our literature too, but they also know their own literature, about which we are not only entirely ignorant - we are even ignorant of the fact that we are ignorant.

Take the Indian author Tabish Khair, who writes in English and therefore probably sees the world more or less like any other English speaker, you might think. But he claims that “my universe is not framed only or largely by English: I see the world though the windows of Hindi, Urdu, smatterings of Bhjpuri, Sanskrit, Farsi, Punjabi, Bangala.”

Such has been the rich context of literary elites at least since the time of the polyglot Roman Empire, when the educated spoke a local language but wrote and read in Latin and Greek. Multilingualism, or at least bilingualism, has been and still is the norm for most human beings, but only in the insular world of native English speakers is it regarded as a handicap, and our cultural lives are consequently impoverished.

Today, the English-speaking world thinks that thoughts that are expressed in English are all that life can afford. This self satisfied attitude of "if its not in English then it can’t be worth saying" is a form of global provincialism, summed up by Milan Kundera, a Czech novelist writing in French, “large nations resist the Goethean idea of ‘world literature’ because their own literature seems to them sufficiently rich that they need take no interest in what people write elsewhere”.

In the words of Esther Allen, “English all too often simply ignores whatever is not English, mistaking the global reach and diversity of the world’s dominant language for the world itself”.

In an article in On Line Opinion (March 12, 2008) John Töns asked “Are we so naïve that we think the only brilliant ideas in the world are produced in English?” Well, I’m afraid that is exactly what we believe.