Em-boss. That was Baidurya’s caption for Madhav Prasad in the slide show of the party. Boss is right – Madhav radiates an intellectual authority which seems to be recognized all over India. I realized that this was not a local phenomenon when we went to a film conference together in Calcutta. One could hear the hush descend whenever he spoke. I did of course know that he was ferociously intelligent for he had been my student in Pittsburgh. But, I had not fully recognized the breadth of his intellectual engagement. Film was simply one element in his attempt to understand the current political and cultural reality of India. His project of the moment is to analyse the way that English functions politically in India.  On the one hand English is THE language of India. It is the language of all higher education and it is the language of the Parliament. Although there are a huge numbers of Hindi speakers in the North, Hindi is not spoken in the South and , wherever Hindi is not spoken, there is a much greater animus against it as a tongue of a possible dominant majority than there is against English.  At the same time an astonishingly small number of Indians are fluent in English and the vast majority do not speak it all. It thus occupies a position rather like Latin in medieval Europe or classical Arabic in the modern Arab world. Madhav has been working on the political consequences of this and is delighted when I give him Moustapha Safouan’s  Why are the Arabs not free? which argues that the problem of political progress in the Arab countries is that there is a split between the language of education and government and the demotic. We discussed this on my first day in Hyderabad and now we are having a farewell dinner, we discuss it again.  This time it is in the context of a series on projects that might bring me back to Hyderabad.

When I first wrote to Madhav, asking if there was anywhere he thought that I might find a host for a sabbatical visit, I had in mind Delhi, Calcutta or Bombay. I was delighted when he wrote by return inviting me to Hyderabad but I had some reservations about  heading for what seemed an improbable destination.  My reservations were overcome by my feeling that such a generous and immediate invitation should not be refused and by my Pitt student Usha Iyer who had done her Masters at Hyderabad and told me that I would not find anywhere better in India. She was right. As I near the end of my visit I am both delighted that I came to the EFLU campus at Hyderabad and dying to come back.

One feature of Hyderanad I haven’t mastered is the language of Andra Pradesh – Telegu. From my time in Brazil I developed a theory that you only need four words to function is a language. Hello, Sorry, Thank you and Everything’s OK. On one of my first walks with Satya I asked him to provide the requisite vocabulary and was more than astonished to discover that there were no words for Hello, Sorry or Thank you in Telegu. I’m still reflecting on this astonishing linguistic fact, made even more complex by the fact that Telegu now uses all three English words. Madhav and I discuss this and other matters. It is strange how our roles as teacher and pupil have reversed here. On everything that we talk about his knowledge is immeasurably superior to mine. In addition the shaven young man who I knew in Pittsburgh twenty years ago is now both bearded and grey so he seems to personify age as well as wisdom.

We agree on further work on these questions of language and then I raise my current lunatic idea. Everywhere I have gone in India I have heard the impasses of  film and cultural studies sketeched with elegance, insight and historical knowledge largely missing from Anglo-Saxon discussions. Problems with the notions of author, of text , of audience are clearly analysed but it is striking that this anallysis confines itself entirely to Western discourse. Surely it is worth looking at Buddhist and Hindu intellectual traditions to see if they can bring illumination. Madhav is very cautious here. Since Macauley’s minute on Indian education in 1835 where he said that a bookshelf of English common sense was worth a whole library of Hindu vapourings,  there is a long tradition of yar booing from both sides. I argue that what I am suggesting is neither Macauley nor the reverse but a set of specific intellectual impasses to which we want to bring fresh tools. Madhav is still cautious and we order another drink