Doing BA with English Major in India: A Beginners’ Guide

In India, one of the most sought-after degrees in Arts is Bachelor of Arts with English literature major. However, its popularity is largely due to mistaken preconceptions about it rather than understanding what the program actually is. Hence, it is a good idea to look at what is NOT in order to understand what it IS and think about why one should or should not do it.  This blog attempts to lay out the widely prevalent misconceptions about BA with English major in the Indian context and provide greater clarity to the students who want to enter the field or find themselves stuck in it.

Misconception 1: It is ‘a Spoken English’ coaching class.

BA with English major will NOT directly provide you the basic conversational English or basic comprehension skills, grammar or compositional skills, in fact, it actually DEMANDS that you ALREADY HAVE these foundational language skills. This gives a distinctive advantage to the students from the English-medium background over those not from the English-medium, though some students from non-English backgrounds are also known to do well in this program. Nonetheless, they have to put in plenty of extra efforts working on their English.

You are unlikely to be a good speaker by reading a Shakespeare play or a Jane Austen novel prescribed in your syllabus. Hence, if you want to do BA with English to do better in IELTS/TOEFL type exams, or impress your crush with your fluent English, this program is unlikely to be of any great help. We need to keep this in mind because as Indians many of us take bachelor’s degree programs to ensure that we don’t remain bachelors for the rest of our lives (which is also not as bad as it is made out to be).

Misconception 2: It is ‘a Written English’ coaching class.

In case you happen to be from an English-medium background, and know that you suck at writing, it would be an error to take up a BA with English major program to fix your writing skills. You are unlikely to be a good content writer or be an expert in writing emails, memos or office presentations by reading that Shakespeare play or a Jane Austen novel (nowadays ChatGPT can do these things for you).

The need for English for the sake of conversation, comprehension and composition is usually addressed in the foundational, vocational, ability enhancement courses and papers that you can take up even WITHOUT doing the BA with English major program. You can take these courses in your college even if you are doing Bachelors of commerce or science or majoring in subjects like sociology, economics, psychology etc.

In case you think you are a poet or novelist, even then, BA with English can hardly be of any great help to you because it is NOT a creative writing program and you can be a good poet or a writer even without doing BA with English (on that note let me point out that neither Shakespeare nor Jane Austen- arguably some of the greatest writers – held college degrees in English literature as these degrees did not exist in those days!). Consequently, due to these mistaken preconceptions of the students, the Shakespeare play, or the Jane Austen novel prescribed in the BA English syllabus in India remains largely unread, and the exams still cleared.

 

If you are not discouraged enough, here is a third misconception. But this misconception would actually lead us to greater understanding of what it really is.

Misconception 3: It teaches English Literature.

It does NOT teach us English literature (which in very narrow and restricted sense means poems, plays, novels, criticism etc). Some thinkers like Northrop Frye would point out that literature cannot be taught     What it actually teaches instead is HOW to STUDY literature in ENGLISH.

By HOW to STUDY, I mean the study-skills, critical thinking skills, and research skills necessary to study literature. We don’t study poems or novels in our class, but learn HOW to analyze them, study them, critically reflect upon them, research them. We pay special attention to language of literature - literature being a linguistic art, we ask questions about distinctive features of literary language, we ask questions about interpretation and classification of literary texts, we ask questions about the historical, ideological and cultural contexts of production and interpretation of these texts. And as any human activity makes sense only in its context, we lay a great emphasis on historical contexts of literature and culture. In short, papers on genres like poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction, literary history, and literary criticism.

These activities, traditionally belong to the field of literary and cultural criticism and scholarship, and therefore, what you actually sign up for when you sign up for a BA with English program is the introductory course in the field of literary criticism and scholarship in English language.

It should be noted here that what once carried the label of ‘English literature’ has gone beyond the older definitions of the field over the past thirty years: it is no longer merely ‘English’ (it may include substantial amount of cultural material translated into English) and no longer merely ‘literature’ (it may include wider range of cultural narratives: films, graphic novels, or webseries). ‘English Literature’ thus is a field of questions, debates and problems and not a set of texts.

I often begin my first year BA English major classes by asking students why the current class is called a first year BA class and not standard 13 (13 being an unlucky number after all). I try to establish the fact that a bachelor’s degree program in any field provides basic knowledge in a field, a masters program updates our study skills by introducing us to advance knowledge in the field and finally a research degree involves contributing to more specific field by producing knowledge within our broad area of study. In our case, BA with English program, thus would provide us with the basic and introductory knowledge in the field of literary and cultural studies in English, hence it is the beginning of one’s specialization rather than an extension of one’s school education.

In my class, I also point out the woeful colonial history of university English studies in India, how it started first in the colony (India) and only later it was accepted in the UK. I also refer to the infamous Macaulay’s 1835 project of attempting to “form a class” in his words of “who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, -a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. The consequence of such a project was the deep-seated belief in inherent cultural and economic superiority of English and ‘backwardness’ of rest of Indian languages. Hence, the so-called choice made by the students when they chose English majors was already determined to a large extent by history (And well, English major is THE class where we can discuss these things!). 

Besides, this is the reason why 'Spoken English' classes are so often advertised together with ' Personality Development Classes': we think that only those who can speak in English ' have personality' and those who can't , have no personality at all! While the craze for English in India, thanks to colonialism and globalization, comes close to the craze for sex and social media, it so happens that BA with English major program hardly has any true vocational value in the job market today. This, of course, doesn’t mean it is useless.

Some of my nice teachers would say that studying English literature makes us a good human being, or a good citizen or provides us with critical thinking skills. As far as I know, these are things that schools are supposed to do, just as they are supposed to provide us with the basic communication skills. The condition of the world today reveals that schools have not really succeeded in these matters.  A college degree cannot remedy what schools have failed to cure-it is too late.  A college is not a rehabilitation center for badly educated people (and that means most of us). 

This brings us then to the fundamental question: why study it at all.

You may say you opt for it because you love literature, but then you may love literature (as many people do) even if you are studying commerce or science, you can continue reading novels, stories and poems (mostly the ones you like instead of the ones that are forced upon you) as you keep doing other things for livelihood.

A cynical politician may say that we study it because of our colonial hangover (personally I feel that there are other things that give us better hangovers).

A good answer would be more intellectually complicated.  We can say that as modern Indians we are trying to understand ourselves in this rapidly globalizing world. Culturally and historically Indian modernity is deeply influenced by western modernity through colonialism and globalization from past two hundred years and English language and literature have played an extremely crucial role in the process. Therefore, critically studying English language and literature (understood broadly) in India helps us in understanding our ‘own modernity’ and how it is historically different or similar from ‘their modernity’, in short, an act of comparative cultural inquiry.

Hence, using a comparative cultural framework, studying English literature can yield us valuable insights.

And there is a less intellectual, but more interesting reason as well: as Sir Edmund Hillary explained why he climbed Mt. Everest, “because it is there”.

He is also have supposed have told Tenzin Norgay, “We've knocked the bastard off”.

OF AERIEL ROOTS AND THE BANYAN CITY

In the scorching Baroda summer of 1993, a young man from a place called Valsad walks into a smallish room for his viva of MA entrance test. The room is packed with some of the most renowned professors from the Department of English, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.  He finds himself facing Prof. Ranu Vanikar, the then Head of Department, and Prof. G. N.Devy among others. In response to the standard question regarding his favourite writers, he has the audacity of an undergraduate to say, “Sri Aurobindo is one of my favourite writers and I have translated some portions from Savitri into Hindi.” This brings smile on the face of Prof Devy. It is one of those famous Devy smiles which no has managed to decipher till date- whether it is ironical or pleased or both or neither. For Prof Devy, a renowned Aurobindo scholar himself, it was probably all these things. He asked me further questions regarding his poetry and the only answer which I recall after twenty years is that his poetry was ‘metaphysical’ but not in the sense Donne’s or Marvell’s poetry is metaphysical. (I actually got away with it).

Two decades after that curious incident, I will be sitting in the same room listening to such audacious undergraduates appearing for their MA entrance viva in the scorching Baroda summer, this time as a teacher. It is a privilege and a humbling experience to be in the same place where the internationally renowned scholars like Prof Devy, Prof Kar, Prof Joneja, Prof VY Kantak, and Prof Birjepatil or giants like Sri Aurobindo and AK Ramanujan once “professed” literature. Sri Aurobindo and AK Ramanujan are some of the most important names in Indian literature; famous for their fabulous creative writing, translations, sharp and erudite criticism and philosophy. It is the legacy of multilingual creativity, translation, and comparative research which I inherit as a modest practitioner of same activities. I write poetry and criticism in Marathi and English and I translate into these languages. I translate from all four languages I know. I have guts to say this as I seem to have retained some of the audacity I had when I was an undergraduate student.

The person who walked into the MA program of the MS University in the year 1993 was not the same person who walked out of it in 1995. I did my Bachelors from J. P. Shroff Arts College, Valsad.  Valsad is a small non-metropolitan town, where English is not just spoken in Gujarati, but also taught in Gujarati.  What we studied was a standard and astonishingly outdated ‘English Literature’ canon, comprising of the usual suspects:  starting out with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Pope, Dryden, the Brontes, Blake, Austen, Shelley, Keats, Arnold, Tennyson, and Browning and ending with T.S Eliot, with lots of whimper and no bang.  For literary criticism, we had books like English Literature: An Introduction for Foreign Readers by R. J. Rees (published in 1973) and a strange book called The Making of Literature by Scott James written in 1946. The books were in the syllabus ever since they were published or probably ever since Scott-James was born. The reason for their eternal recurrence was the fact that the professors of the affiliated colleges were so much in love with the notes on books which they had inherited ( or made) when they students, that they were unwilling to part with their treasure. The Scott-James book was not even meant as an introduction to literary criticism. It grappled with a specific and rather worthless issue of literary criticism, namely that of whether only writers can be good critics. However, the only thing that can reassure Mr. Scott-James (if he is dead and in his grave) is the fact that no one read it. Most of the students read bilingual ‘guides’ brought out by Popular publication, Surat only, and most of the teachers too did not read it. Most of the teachers and most of the students gave a damn about literature and fancy things like that.  The students selected English as a major subject for their bachelors because they thought it might improve their English, raise their social status, and add some glamour to the BA degree which was groveling at the lowest rung of the Varna-Jati system of higher education in India.

I was obviously an odd man in this set up. I had completed my higher secondary schooling in the science stream, and much to the annoyance of many of our family friends and acquaintances, selected Arts stream with English Major. My dad, a steno-typist and literature lover himself believed that a person who knows English and has a degree in English and knows steno-typing will never die of hunger. So much for parental expectations. When Dr. Madhurita Choudhary, a young, freshly appointed lecturer asked us why you have opted for English major, I bluffed that I wanted to go for journalism. Actually I did not have guts to give the real answer. The real answer was I had scored 53% in my HSC and doing BA with English and doing stenography side by side would ensure that I don’t starve. And yeah, I wrote poetry and yeah, I loved literature and yeah, I loved English literature. But then I loved English and Biology as subjects in my higher secondary education and when the board results were out, I had barely managed to pass in these subjects! I remember scoring 41 out of 50 in English in my internal examination and in the board examination, I retained the score of 41, but this time out of hundred! By then I had fallen in love with Lewis Carroll, Jerome K Jerome,  William Blake,  TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens( whose poems did not make any sense when I had read it then and do not make any sense even today for me, but then who cares for silly things like meaning these days?) in my higher secondary English text books. Come to think of it, my school curriculum was in fact more exciting than my college one! However. The damage had already been done. I was beyond repair.

So when the undergrad college started, I loved Keats and was smitten by Macbeth and Julius Caesar. I even loved Milton. (Imagine!) (While doing my MA, Prof Devy had asked us to read Paradise Lost Book I and was convinced no one would read it. It so happened that I read it and told Devy about it. His comments were typical Devy comments: “Milton has found a reader, at last.”). 

I was so much in thrall of Macbeth that I tried to translate some portions into Hindi! It was the devastating magic of literature and its overwhelming power that turned me into translator.  I translated into Hindi because it was the only Indian language which I could write more or less properly and because I loved Hindi at school too. Yes, I loved literary criticism and actually found Scott-James interesting, because he was looking at the relationship between the creative writer and the critic-the question which was staring me as a writer and wannabe scholar in face. 

When I joined the MS University Department, I was in a strange and exciting world.  Prof Kar was lecturing on Deconstruction and Derrida, almost as if on an auto-pilot.  Prof Joneja was talking about his Greek inheritance while teaching Aristophanes. I distinctly remember him mentioning in the class that his nose showed his Greek ancestry.

 Prof Devy had won Sahitya Akademi prize for his polemical nativist book After Amnesia and was a celebrity. It was the aftermath of the Age of Theory and it was the Age of ‘Crisis in English Studies’ studies debates in our country.  A wide array of theories like Feminism (didn’t hear much of Gender studies much in those days), Deconstruction, structuralism, culture studies and what have you.

The Department had a paper called ‘Politics and Ideology of Teaching English’ in those days,-probably modeled on something similar in the JN University. I read a “radically heterogeneous” canon comprising of writers as dissimilar as Kafka, Holderlin, Faulkner, Stevens, Brecht, Namdeo Dhasal, Ravji Patel, Eliot, Stevens (Yea! Stevens once again, and this time too he made no sense but made me love him even more), Shakespeare and Basheer. And equally “heterogeneous” array of critics and theorists like Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Poulet, Iser, Stanley Fish and the rest of them. The leap from Scott- James to Lacan was indeed a quantum one. The seminars and discussions in the Department were exciting. I listened to the internationally renowned faculties digress from the topics they were supposed to teach with fascination and awe. The juicy digressions and debates opened up a wealth of insights which have shaped me as a researcher and creative writer today. 

Yes, I also realized that plays are meant to be performed on the stage rather than just read in classrooms. The Shakespeare Society staged plays often in those days and I remember watching Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and Mahesh Elchunchwar’s Reflection. I remember enjoying Dr Arvind Macwan strumming on his guitar and Dr. Rani Dharkar, who is a noted novelist today, teaching us Girish Karnad. The program liberated me intellectually and creatively. All these things would not have been possible had I stayed in Valsad. 

I taught Lacan, Fish and Derrida for many years in Baroda. Whether I lived up to the levels of Prof Kar or Prof Devy, I simply don’t know. But what I do know, is the profound impact these teachers and texts have made on me is the one that has made me who I am today as a teacher. Obviously, the two years I spent doing MA are unforgettable not just because of the teachers and the texts, but also due to great friends I made- and yes most of them are on Facebook today. Someday I will write another entry about these things. 

So when the college reopens, I will be sitting in probably the same room where I had faced my MA interviews as a student, and when yet another youngster from some god-knows-which place will walk into the room, I will wonder  about what influence this department will leave on her when she goes out. Frankly, I am scared. I am excited.

Releasing the Erratically Lazy Jarasandha

He is out and is at large. He shouldn't be.He should be long dead, and far off in the world of myths. He belongs to pre-capitalist, even pre feudal hoary antiquity. But then now he is in our midst. He is all over the place. Divided and unredeemable, but alive,contrary to what the Mahabharata says. He is evil. He is a serial killer who aught to be imprisoned. Who released him? Well, Devy released him on 6 th May in the VY Kantak Seminar Room of the Dept.of English, Faculty of Arts, MS University of Baroda. But actually he had released him almost seventeen years ago. In the years 1993-95, to be more precise. I was  writing  in English and even in Hindi. It was mostly juvenellia but it had started becoming more and more modernist. I learned of Devy's Aurobindo scholarship and showed him my Hindi renderings of Savitri and he was impressed ( I guess). I showed him my English poems and he suggested I should try my hand at writing in Marathi and the guy did not know what he was doing. Its like the jailer who finds the face of a serial killer rather innocent,takes pity on him and releases him out of compassion. The killer goes out and the first thing he does is slits throats of five people in the city.  I started writing poetry and entered bad books of almost any senior critics and poets in Maharashtra. People were simply irked and annoyed with me. Who the hell is this guy ?What the hell is he talking about? Where the hell has he come from?and more  importantly why the hell is he here?

I am an upstart writer in Maharashtra. A bug, actually. I cant possibly do much harm to the Establishment ( which is ruined and in shambles due to other reasons) but I can be a bloody pain in neck : consider my vicious and sharp articles in the globalization wars in contemporary Marathi poetry or my tampering with political set up of Marathi poetry by bringing out something like Live Update. Or consider my critical takes on the pet Ideology of the Establishment : Nativism+ Socialism+Realism. The ideology of Devy which is fashionable in English studies is the ideology of Establishment in Marathi: the Sarkari View of Literature which I have attacked in no uncertain terms in my writings.

It is not surprising that the speakers on the occasion: Dr Devy, Prof Kannal or Dr Karogal hardly discussed the book. They were either talking to Sachin Ketkar the critic or like Dr Devy trying to contextualize him.

Prof Kannal talked about the insistence on contemporaneity or the towards the present moment that I have in my critical writing and tried to point out how some  of my poems were not at all contemporary - he did not talk about those which were, obviously, unsurprisingly. I responded by talking about Borges' Pierre Menard who tried to rewrite Don Quixote exactly as Cervantes wrote it two  hundred years ago. He ends up copying passages from Quixote word to word in the same language, but the narrator in Borges says that in spite of perfect copying the texts were different. Contemporariness is not an option, it is only when you are not fully aware of the present that you feel there is something like timelessness. The intimations of eternity are temporary. What I should have emphasized, and this I realized later, was the fact that we treat literature as if it does not have any temporal dimension and a historical context. This is the approach so deeply embedded  in our thinking about literature that we treat Tukaram or Shakespeare as if they our contemporaries. This treatment actually does not do justice to the texts we read. Tukaram's obsession with Vitthal has to be contextualized to be understood. It is this ahistorical way of reading that creates the illusion of the eternal in literature.

Devy,on the other hand,put me in two traditions, when I thought I had none. He said that the Dept of English in the MS University had two major Indian writers in English as faculties who were also bilinguals and translators: Sri Aurobindo  and AK Ramanujan. He also placed me in the long line of Marathi bilingual writers like Arun Kolatkar,Dilip Chitre, Vilas Sarang and Kiran Nagarkar. Devy said this probably with tongue firmly in his cheek.

However,the best thing he said about me was that when I was his student, he suspected me of turning out to be a poet looking at my `erratic laziness''. But he felt looking the girls chasing me ( what girls, which girls,where girls) I might turn out to be a romantic poet who might churn out mushy sugary stuff.

Prof Salat had interesting things to say about my poems. He commented on the all sorts of ordinary and extraordinary `objects' found all over and around my poetry,and how I make a poetic use of them.

 Mangesh spoke with reference to Prof Kannal's views and pointed out that a bunch of my poems in the earlier part of my collection are unprecedented in style, theme and treatment in Marathi and are unique while some of my poems can be considered as extensions of my earlier phase. He read out my Dildopnishad and others to make his point. The programme was fun anyway and had a great time with friends. Ashwini was the master of ceremonies.

The best response came from Amogh. He simply fell asleep in his chair with head on the desk!

RETRIEVING THE SIXTIES:A UNIQUE ACADEMIC EXPERIMENT

We, at the Department of English, MS University, are doing a very interesting and probably unique academic experiment under the aegis of the UGC DRS SAP-I project. Our Dept is granted this project to research the ` Identarian Movements in the Western India in the period 1960 to 2000' by the University Grants Commision. This year we started a translation project called `Retrieving the Sixties: Culture in Gujarati Periodicals in English Translation'. The most interesting part of this project is that around 60-70 undergraduate and postgraduate students of English literature in our Dept are translating articles from Gujarati periodicals which had appeared in the decade of the sixties. The articles range from ones on literary subjects and problems of working women to tatooes, and our students were excited and happy about the idea. The students will work with teachers to finalize their work and we hope to publish it in future.The first stage of the project was the Translation Workshop we had on 29 Aug and it was great fun. The bright idea was Deeptha's and probably what we have on our hands is unique as far as the Dept of Englishes go. The Depts of English are notorious for their lack of direct engagement with immediate cultural environment ( some even complain that they are apathetic towards ANY cultural environment). We seek to remedy it by having teachers and students engaging actively with Gujarati culture.

The Sixties was a culturally exciting decade for many cultures across the globe. Think of the Vietnam War, the Hippies, the Chinese aggression and linguistic formation of the states in India. It was also the moment of Little Magazine Movements of varied sorts.This decade was also momentous in Gujarat. Various issues and debates of this significant phase of Gujarati cultural history are reflected in various periodicals. We felt it is important for the present generation of students to reconnect and reengage with the multiple currents that shaped Gujarati culture of this decade in order to understand some of the key issues of our own time. Translation of articles, which appeared in the sixties, can be a stimulating mode of retrieval and negotiation for the present generation of Gujarati youngsters.

In the post-Globalized world, it is imperative how we `read' the history of twentieth century to understand ourselves. In this light, I think the project becomes a very interesting one.