There are many advantages of being born and brought up in a bilingual country. One grows up learning, and interacting with, two languages. These advantages, like all good things, come with a few drawbacks.
One usually ends up reading and writing in one language, and conversing with friends and family in another language. This is akin to having a multiple personality. One is led to the fallacy of believing that he is proficient in two languages, while he is good at none. Being good in any language involves a mastery of both the written and the spoken word in that language.
Words of the eminent novelist Raja Rao on the subject stand out, and are worth repeating here. In the introduction to his 1937 novel, Kanthapura, he writes:
One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word alien, yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up – like Sanskrit or Persian was before – but not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be a distinctive and colorful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.
To a great extent, his words have proved to be prophetic. Today the English language has been enriched with many words that are Indian in origin. We are almost at the stage where the world is ready to accept an Indian version of English, in addition to the American and British versions.
Writing for a global audience is, however, still challenging for most people from India and other countries where English is the second language. As Raja Rao has said, it is simply not the language of our emotional make-up, and writing, especially creative writing, has to do more with emotions than with intellect.
In addition, there is the problem of local grammar, and even slang, creeping into the English language. These sometimes results in the most unexpected, and often funny, sentences. I am sure all of us have come across such usage at one point of time or another. (e.g. heard in an office: I am really tired from the long day, time to spread my legs now.)
According to you, is being bilingual an aid or a handicap for a writer who aims to write for a global audience?
What do you think?