Contemporary Indian Writers in English (CIWE) presents critical commentaries on some of the best-known names in the genre. With the high visibility of Indian writing in English in academic, critical, pedagogic and reader circles, there is a perceivable demand for lucid yet rigorous introductions to many of its authors and genres. Indian writing in English, in each of its genres – fiction, poetry, non-fiction and drama – has a diversity of themes, forms and styles. CIWE titles explore precisely this rich diversity. Attention to the narrative form of the novels/poems is accompanied by a detailed reading of the central themes in the author. The plan of the series is to provide as complete a survey of an author's oeuvre as possible, within a manageable length.

CIWE seeks to strike a balance between providing an introductory study as well as a critical appraisal of the writer's work. The former serves the informed, non-specialist reader, while the latter suits the academic – with its essay/seminar/assignment projects – in literature classrooms. The theoretical approaches are wide-ranging – from structural analysis of narrative to feminist literary criticism. Every text in the series provides biographical information, close textual analysis, a survey of the author's chief thematic concerns, bibliographic information for those who wish to pursue further reading, and a comprehensive list of topics for discussion.

Introduction

In the course of a number of trips to North East India, I have come to realize that people there often use the words “language” and “dialect” to mean something quite different from the meanings that I usually give them. In some cases, their usage and mine are close enough to let us understand one another, but occasionally we run into trouble. In fact, “language” and “dialect,” are used in three different ways in North East India, each one emphasizing different aspects of communication. I will describe these varying usages in the hope that we can learn to understand each other better.

The linguist's meaning

First is the linguist's definition, and as a linguist this is the definition that I find most useful. Linguists are usually clear that by a “language” they mean the collection of spoken dialects that are mutually intelligible. For example, my native speech is a dialect of North American English, but I can understand people who speak British English and people who speak Indian English, so all of these ways of speaking count as “dialects” of a single language. It is the collection of all these dialects that we call “English.” On the other hand my speech is not mutually intelligible with Assamese, Angami, French, or Japanese, so these count as “languages” that are different from the English “language”. When I use my native speech, I am using a language that is different from Assamese, but I am, at the same time, using a dialect when compared, for example, to the English of London.

Linguistic diversity in India

It is a fact that India is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, with seven language families; namely: Indo-Aryan (of Indo-European), Dravidian, Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman (of Sino-Tibetan), Tai (of Tai-Kadai), Andamanese and Great Andamanese which is newly added by Abbi (2006). The North East can be described as a mini-India because there are so many different communities having various cultures and speaking various mother tongues. For example, from the Dravidian language family, particularly Tamil but also Malayalam from Kerala are spoken by inhabitants in Moreh in Manipur, a small Indo-Myanmar border trade town 109 km from Imphal. They were driven out from Mandalay in 1960 by the Burmese Army. The North East is a garden of various languages and dialects with more than one hundred various mother tongues, especially Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages – most of which are neither fully documented nor scientifically described.

Manipur has officially recognised 33 tribal languages. Besides these, Manipuri (also called Meitei) itself has six dialects, namely, Sekmai, Khurkhul, Andro, Phayeng, Koutruk and Kwatha. All these tribal languages are not yet fully and scientifically described; of these some are endangered, namely, Tarao, Monshang, Moyon, Koireng, etc. Documentation of these languages is, of course, felt to be very necessary; loss of a language goes with the loss of beliefs, culture, ecology and medicinal herbal knowledge. In Manipur there was a language called Chakpa, spoken in Andro and Phayeng; now it was extinct. Documentation was not properly done.

Unlike his contemporaries, Raja Rao – one of the so-called “Big Three” of the 1930s with Mulk Raj Anand and R K Narayan – constructed a more psychological dimension around his portrayals of human life. His writing deeply scrutinises the realm of Indian consciousness and its potentialities through his self-analysing characters, caught in the throes of an anguished existence affected by their sociohistorical contexts. By illustrating their search for truth through Indian mythical parallels such as the stories of Rama, Nachiketa, or Yagnyavalkya, Rao has also touched upon some primeval images and ideas common to the “collective unconscious” of Indian and other ordinary readers.

Rao's artistic interest has constantly been focused on the divine presence in man, and more specifically on the exploration of the world according to the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta.

Introduction

In all of the various linguistic varieties that are grouped under the heading Tangsa, verb complexes are marked by portmanteau morphemes that convey information about person, and tense/aspect or polarity. Consider (1), an example from Cholim Tangsa. Here the reciprocal verb răbom ‘say’ is marked by the 2nd person plural past marker, king. As we will see below in §2 (Table 4), -ing is the marker of 2nd person plural and k- is present on all 1st and 2nd person past forms.

The function of these markers is similar to the ‘sentence final words’ in Jinghpaw and Nocte as discussed by DeLancey (this volume), though much simpler than the system described for Jinghpaw (Jinghpo) in China by Dai (1992), briefly reprised in Dai and Diehl (2003).

We will term these ‘agreement markers’ because they carry person agreement with at least one of the arguments of the verb. In the Cholim and Lochhang varieties (§2 and §3), this agreement is only with the actor, whereas in Moklum, as reported by Das Gupta (1980), and briefly discussed in §5, there is hierarchical marking, in other words 1st and 2nd person undergoers are marked together with the actor in at least some situations. This difference of structure between Cholim and Lochhang on one hand and Moklum on the other has implications for the subgrouping of Tangsa varieties. Although much more data needs to be collected, particularly on Moklum, it would appear that Moklum should be treated as belonging to a different subgroup within Tangsa.

Introduction

Along with number, gender and case, nouns in Assamese and all other Indo-European languages have another important grammatical category, the discussion of which was not found in traditional grammars of olden days of east or west. Nouns, especially class nouns, need to be determined by some devices when they are used in sentences to realize any argument – subject, object or complement. The noun man in English or manuh in Assamese, for example, can refer to all the human beings in one use and in another use the reference of the same noun can be restricted to only one person. The reference of the noun man in former use is called generic and in later the reference is said to be of specific. The specific reference of a class noun can be again definite or indefinite.

One of the reasons behind the absence of discussion on the determinative elements of nouns in traditional grammar may be the absence of a definite article in the older Germanic languages in the west (Hawkins 1978: 13) and any such element in Old and Middle Indo-Aryan Languages in the east (Kakati 1972: 278) to show contrast between definiteness and indefiniteness of NPs. In modern linguistics, however, this feature has been studied by scholars from many different backgrounds and perspectives. Traditional grammarians (Christopherson 1939; Jespersen 1949), philologists (Heinrichs 1954; Hodler 1954), structuralists (Yotsukura 1970), transformational syntacticians (Smith 1964; Higham 1972), and philosophers and logicians (Russell 1905; Strawson 1950) have all contributed to the currently available data and descriptive insights.

This chapter focuses on a specific theme in Raja Rao's fiction that has received little critical attention, the recurring figure of the missing mother. It is remarkable that in Rao's novels many of his protagonists are either orphans or unfortunate witnesses of their mother's death at some point of the stories. In Kanthapura (1938) for instance, the protagonist Moorthy witnesses his mother's death owing to his infringement of caste jurisdiction within the village of Kanthapura; in The Serpent and the Rope (1960) Ramaswamy calls himself “an orphan” (6) while in The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) albeit no clear indication of Ramakrishna Pai's mother is given in the novel, he is obsessed with his metaphysical pondering on the figure of a Mother Cat; in Comrade Kirillov (1976), the third person narrator informs the reader that “Kirillov's mother, now long and happily dead, had an indeterminate name” (59) while in The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988) the protagonist Sivarama laments that “with my mother's death, I was alone” (6).

Introduction

Marma is a dialect of Arakanese, a Southwestern variety of Burmese. It is spoken mainly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (henceforth CHT), Bangladesh, where the population of Marma speaking people is 154,216 (1991 Census). In India, Marma is commonly known as Mogh and the corresponding population is 30,559 (2001 Census). There are hardly any linguistic reports on Marma/Mogh, except for Konow (1903), Bernot (1958; 1966), Huziwara (2003) and Maggard et al. (2007).

Marma has 7 vowels /a, e, i, ɔ, o, u, ə, 27 syllable-initial consonants /p, ph [ph], b, t, th [th], d, c[tc], ch[tch], j[dz], k, kh [kh], g, m, hm, n, hn, ŋ (which also occurs as a syllable final), hŋ, l, hl, r, hr, y, w, θ, ∫, h/ and one syllable-final consonant /?/ with four distinctive tones: the high tone is marked with an acute accent; the rising tone, with a hacek; the stop tone, with a word-final glottal stop; and the low tone is not marked.

The general grammatical information of Marma is as follows. Lexemes are classified into nouns, verbs and particles. Adjectives occur as a subclass of verbs; adverbs, as a subclass of nouns. The most frequent word order in a sentence is SOV, although arguments may occur before or after the predicate, depending on context. Marma has agglutinative morphology, predominantly using suffixes. Temporal/procedural setting and/or modification is accomplished via combinations of auxiliary verbs and predicate markers. Clause chaining occurs with the aid of various kinds of subordinating/converb-forming markers.

Introduction

The Hajong group is one of the scheduled tribes of North East India. They live mainly in Assam and Meghalaya in India and in the Mymensingh District of Bangladesh. Hajong is classified in the Ethnologue as Indo-European > Indo-Iranian > Indo-Aryan > Eastern zone > Bengali- Assamese (Gordon 2005). Although Hajong is classified as Indo-Aryan (IA), several Hajong case markers are not cognate with those of the large neighbouring IA languages, Bangla and Asamiya. This raises the question of the origin of these case markers. Some authors have speculated that the Hajong language has a Tibeto-Burman (TB) sub-stratum. The Hajong people are ethnically and culturally closer to the surrounding Tibeto-Burman people groups such as Garo and Koch than to the Bengali population. The cultural and linguistic similarities could be due either to a common origin or to a mutual influence between the groups who have been living in proximity for generations.

In this paper, I will describe the system of case marking in Hajong – that is, the morphemes which specify the syntactic function of the noun phrase. I will describe the syntactic functions associated with each case form and I will compare the Hajong case forms to their equivalents in four geographically proximate languages. From the IA family, Hajong will be compared to Standard Colloquial Bangla (Dasgupta 2003) and Standard Colloquial Asamiya (Goswami and Tamuli 2003) (both classified as Indo-European > Indo-Iranian > Indo-Aryan > Eastern zone > Bengali-Assamese).

Before embarking on writing novels, Raja Rao explored the short story genre through a few short stories, written between 1933 and 1944. The Cow of the Barricades, a collection of a wide range of stories published by OUP Madras in 1947, gathers Rao's very first writing attempts, some of which preceding – and most importantly anticipating – the writing of his first novel Kanthapura (1938). In the Publishers' jacket of the Champak Library edition the claim that “the short stories collected, for the first time, in this volume belong to the same period of 1919- 1926” associates the collection with the time of the narrated events in Kanthapura. Exception made for A Client, which sprang out from the author's mind in his native Kannada, all stories in the collection were written in English.

The Cow of the Barricades contains nine stories: ‘Javni,’ ‘The Little Gram Shop,’ ‘The True Story of Kanakapala, Protector of Gold,’ ‘Akkayya,’ ‘Narsiga,’ ‘A Client,’ ‘In Khandesh,’ ‘Companions,’ and the eponymous ‘The Cow of the Barricades.’ All of them were previously published in various literary journals such as the American-edited Asia (‘Javni’ in 1933, ‘The True Story of Kanakapala, Protector of Gold’ in 1935, and ‘The Cow of the Barricades’ in 1938), the London-based Adelphi (‘In Khandesh’ in 1934), and the Bombay review Horizon (‘Narsiga’ in 1944).

Introduction

The Boro-Garo (BG) sub-branch of the Tibeto-Burman (TB) language family consists of thirteen languages found in North East India, as well as across the border in Nepal and Bangladesh; these languages include Boro, Deuri, Dimasa, Tiwa, Riang, Kokborok, Kachari, Garo, Megam, A'tong, Koch, Rabha and Ruga. Though much work remains to be done on all the modern languages in the family, this paper attempts an initial reconstruction of the Proto-Boro-Garo (PBG) noun phrase (NP), as well as some NP categories.

Reconstruction of some grammatical NP elements

The sound change patterns from PBG to the modern languages have been adopted from Joseph and Burling (2006), and are used as the basis for the reconstruction. Of the thirteen languages representing the Boro-Garo family, only Boro, Garo, Deuri, Rabha, Dimasa and Kokborok will be examined given the availability of language data. In the instances where data from other BG languages were available, they have been used to aid in the reconstruction. Phonetic transcriptions, specifically those of vowels and tones, have been regularized among the languages following Joseph and Burling's (2006) phonological reconstruction. High tones are marked with ′, while low tones are unmarked. A “∼’ over a vowel indicates nasalization.

The PBG pronouns: Personal PNs and demonstratives

The modern Boro-Garo languages are said to have a relatively shallow time depth, meaning their split from the proto-language occurred more recently in comparison to other Tibeto-Burman languages (Burling 2006).

Manipur is a small state in North East India. Many different communities inhabit the state. The total population of the state is approximately 2,400,000 (Directorate of Census Operations, Manipur 2001). There are thirty-three different tribal communities which are recognized by the state government. They are Aimol, Anal, Angami, Chiru, Chothe, Gangte, Hmar, Kabui, Kacha Naga, Kharam, Koirao, Koireng, Kom, Lamkang, Mao, Maram, Maring, Monsang, Moyon, Paite, Paomai, Purum, Ralte, Sema, Simte, Sahte, Tangkhul, Tarao, Thadou, Vaiphei, Zou, any Kuki and any Mizo (Lushai). They speak different languages, all of which belong to the Tibeto-Burman family. Among them nine different languages are recognized as Modern Indian Languages. They are Thadou, Paite, Tangkhul, Hmar, Rongmei (Kabui), Mao, Zhou, Kom and Vaiphei. There are also Meitei Muslims, called Pangals, in the state.

In addition to these groups are the Meiteis, who comprise the largest community in terms of population. The people of Manipur are collectively known as Manipuri, and this term is also used for the state official language of Manipur, which is one of the Modern Indian Languages. This language, which is in fact the first language of the Meitei people, is also called Meiteirol/Meiteilon. Manipuri/Meiteilon is the lingua franca of the state. The language has been regarded as one of the most important regional languages of the nation and has been listed in the Eighth Schedule of the constitution of India. People speaking the language also live in the neighbouring states of Assam and Tripura and in some parts of Bangladesh and Burma, now Myanmar.