Commonwealth and the literary imagination of English: Amitav Ghoshs letter

Amitav Ghoshs letter to the administrators of the Commonwealth Writers Prize is a text that
questions the need and validity of the category of Commonwealth literature. In expressing
his wish to withdraw The Glass Palace from contention for this award, Ghosh instigates the
problem of labeling and classification, especially in literature, and encourages us to think about
the politics inherent in this particular category. Ghosh draws the attention of the reader towards
some manifestation of the politics behind the Prize and the English language- the meaning of
Commonwealth literature, its relevance in the world today, the functions it fulfills, the role of
English language in this grouping and the position of other languages in these countries.
Ghosh refuses to be labelled and categorized by somebody else, to be given an appellation that
he did not choose himself. He is all too aware that names, and language in general, define
people in the process of describing them. He implies that the very terms of the debates are set
by outside forces, indicating a lack of what Richard Lyons called rhetoric of sovereignty.
The rhetoric of sovereignty may broadly be understood as the right of a people to construct
their identity through language. Lyons describes this right as a sovereign one, and like other
sovereignties, it is an independence from and among other sovereign peers. The imposition of
an identity, as Ghosh tacitly accuses commonwealth literature of being, is a denial of this
rhetorical sovereignty. A politics of identity creation is embedded into the act of naming, which
in turn restricts the named into a particular, and rigidly defined, category. This
compartmentalization implies a particular kind of interpretation of literary works and restricts
the ability of writers like Ghosh to determine the nature of their textual representations. The
idea of rhetorical sovereignty is a useful one to keep in mind as one further explores the
problems Ghosh implicitly raise in his letter.
What does Commonwealth literature mean? It is very simply understood as the literature
produced in the countries of the British Commonwealth, or the countries that were formerly
colonies or protectorates of the British Empire. This act of branding immediately creates a
connection, real or otherwise, that binds together these countries and their cultures. It assumes
that these far flung territories have something inherently common, a comparable quality that
continues to define or significantly influence their cultural production. It is interesting to note
that Ghoshs novel was selected from the Eurasia region, a category that includes among its
members India, Cyprus and Singapore. The naming of these literatures as Commonwealth thus
assumes a collective identity and inscribes a commonality to cultures that are diverse and
different.
Ghosh explicitly questions the relevance of Commonwealth literature in his letter when he
describes it as being removed from the realities of the present day or any conceivable future.
Further, he sees it as an appendage of the past, where these lands were yoked into this
association through violence. Ghosh is ready to accept the role of the Commonwealth as a
political entity or humanitarian agent. However, he does not see its relevance as an agent in
influencing contemporary cultures or their literatures. While accepting that the colonial past
engenders the present, Ghosh presents the historiographic metafiction of The Glass Palace
as an alternate to the colonial narrative.

It is obvious that the function of Commonwealth literature is to create an identity. What ends
do this identity achieve? An interesting feature of the Commonwealth Writers Prize is that it
does not consider writers from Britain, a country one would assume holds the stellar position
in the organization. Is British literature then not Commonwealth literature? Evidently not. The
idea of Commonwealth literature is a fiction created to house writers in English from the former
colonies, whose literatures are not worthy enough to be included under the rubric of English
literature. Rather, it is the literature of the Anglophones, the phony Anglos, whose English
and writing are not quite up there with those of Britain or the United States.
Commonwealth literature is thus a ghetto constructed to keep out the other English speakers
from the sacred halls of Anglo-American literary production. Its realized function is to veil the
imperial episteme that still holds up the idea of English literature. The invention of the
Commonwealth literature helps to prevent the broadening of English literature to actually
include all literature written in English. It is this politics of identity and exclusion that Ghosh
challenges when he withdraws from a prize that values him for his place of origin than what
and how he can write. The term is not used merely to describe, but to divide literature written
in English on colonial and even racial terms. It creates a hierarchy, where the writers of the
Commonwealth are necessarily inferior to those of English and propagates the idea that the
place of writers like Ghosh is in the Commonwealth rather than in a larger cosmopolitan
understanding of English literature.
Commonwealth literature does not even fit the description of literature of the former colonies.
The primal role of the English language in defining this category is the caveat Ghosh points
out. Implicit in this is the privileging of English as the language of modernity, as the language
that best captures contemporary reality. The idea of this identity is thus further narrowed to
exclude the thousands of other languages in which cultural expression takes place. The
privileging of English automatically demotes other languages, from Afrikaans to Urdu, to a
secondary role in the cultural production of nations where millions use them. Commonwealth
literature thus loses even its simplistic claim of being the literature of the nations of the
Commonwealth.
Amitav Ghosh encourages us to interrogate the premises upon which the idea of
Commonwealth literature is founded. He questions the importance given to political and
linguistic boundaries over the imaginative in the realm of literature. He explores and exposes
the politics of identity that operate behind the act of naming. It might please him to know that
the Commonwealth Book Prize, one half of the re-launched Commonwealth Writers Prize, has
been discontinued from this year.
Aju Basil James
14HEHL10