Writing almost non-stop for over seven decades, Ruskin Bond opens up about his roots and his thoughts on English as an Indian language.
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00:00being more of an Indian language today than it was before independence.
00:08We print and publish more books than they do in the United Kingdom today. From my mother's side, the family goes back even
00:14further than my father's as far as. –But they were of pure British descent?
00:19No, no, I wouldn't, from my mother's side, I would say Anglo-Indian. –So, it was a mix, in the sense of a mixed heritage.
00:26It definitely was. And father's side, probably British because his father came out as a soldier. –Right. Yes.
00:33In the 1890s. And he did marry in India. Again, he might well have married an Anglo-Indian girl.
00:41It was somebody he met in Jabalpur and he married there. But don't know much about her. Father was born in India.
00:49So, I mean, both my parents were born in India. All of my four grandparents, including grandmothers,
00:58three were born in India. Only one was born in England. And on my mother's side, they go back,
01:04her father was born in a place called Dera Ismail Khan, which is now in Pakistan.
01:13And he worked in the office of Mr. Durand, who created the border, who drew up the
01:18border between India and Afghanistan, which has caused so many problems over the years.
01:24Some people consider English to be an Indian language as well and others are sort of
01:30opposed to this way of thinking. When I spoke to Shashi Tharoor,
01:34he said that, you know, English has been on Indian soil since around the year 1600.
01:41And it was the language of Indian nationalism and it's a language that
01:45knits this country together. So, I would like to know what your take is on this.
01:50Well, of course, what he says is true. But I also think of English as perhaps being more of an Indian language today
02:01than it was before independence. It's a language that we have in a way, what's the Hindi word?
02:09Kabza karo, taken from the British and made our own. Because today, just look at the hundreds of thousands of schools
02:20which teach through English and the hundreds of writers that we have working in English.
02:29And they weren't there before independence. You know, we just had half a dozen writers like
02:34R. K. Narayan and Mulk Rajanand, you know, who wrote in English and they had to publish in England.
02:40Because we didn't have publishers here. And now all our writers or at least the majority of them actually publish in India.
02:48And they read in India. When I wrote my first book in 19, published in 1956, it only sold a few hundred copies.
02:57But that same novel, The Room on the Roof, is today selling in thousands. 70 years later, because there are more readers in English.
03:06So, while I would say, in those periods that Shashi Tharoor talks about, it was the language of, I would say, the aristocracy,
03:17you know, of freedom fighters like Nehru or Motilal Nehru, his father. It was the language of the law courts.
03:26And it was certainly the language that was used by, I think, those who fought for independence.
03:33Because they also had to go to England in order to put their case very often. But it was, I would say, important but it was a minority language.
03:44And today it's no longer such a minority language. I think a very high percentage of the country is reasonably fluent in it.
03:55And we print and publish more books than they do in the United Kingdom today. – That's quite an extraordinary thing.