Critically examine Anita Desai’s engagement with the language politics in
In Custody.
Answers
Since the beginning of her career as a novelist, Anita Desai has carved a niche for her works. She is known for the exposure of realities by exploring the psyche of the character, enrichment of the locales with natural beauty as well as the human destruction of that and the depiction of social, political, religious or economic dilemma or diversity in contemporaneity. Broadly speaking, the novels of Anita Desai carry all the boldness of a scholar. To be precise, her works are away from classical or romantic galore but definitely maintain Victorian values bordering along modernism because the novelist’s sensibility has the ideal blend of Indian and Western sensibility.
Referring to the question of sensibility at large D.K. Pabby says: “The new literatures in English, namely, Canadian, Australian, African, Caribbean and Indian have amalgamated and are now called Commonwealth Literature because all these literatures have grown out of one common sensibility, i. e.,colonial experience” (32) Of these literatures, one of the most argued is the discourse on Postcolonialism. In Custody, elaborates a generalized language based diatribe where the novelist draws the attention of readers to the past glory of India before the subjugation by the British as then Urdu was “the language of the court in the days of royalty – now languishes in the back 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”(15). The revelation of postcolonialism and imperialism tracks a criss-cross of cultures, traditions, displacement, diaspora, alienations and consequential chain of illusions and disillusions. In this resonant and realistic novel, her endeavour is to link the readers’ line of thought to the bilingual scene of Hindi versus Urdu. This novel has a parallel drawn between fiction and history in relation to the languages.