CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Rukmini Bhaya Nair (Linguistics and English, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi), October 24, 2003.

"A Chat Room of One's Own: Youth Culture, Technology & the Evolution of English in India"

One measure of the vitality of technological revolutions consists in their capacity to foster new genres. Just as Gutenberg once 'democratized' Europe and provided a key condition for the rise of the novel, a crucial question today is: will computer technologies similarly generate 21st century textual styles with radical epistemological consequences? Neo-literary genres already in the making obviously include the revival of the 'epistolary form' via email; 'interactive' writing, where readers can influence the shape of a text as it is being made; and simple automated 'story-generators'. In this paper, I consider another theoretically salient genre - the Internet 'chat'.

Tantalizingly poised between writing and speech, and - in India - between the twin tongues of Hindi and English - actual downloads of these conversations demonstrate the flexibility with which they have redesigned - and re-designated - public space in the service of private intimacy, and vice versa. My paper explores the dimensions of this space with special reference to discourse patterns on the Indian subcontinent. Making partial, but not exclusive, use of the methodologies of conversational analysis and speech-act theory, I explore the potential of this genre for both code and topic-switching and its capacity for meta-representation in writing of various illocutionary acts and/or perlocutionary effects such as laughter.

Most of all, however, I am concerned with the wider sociological implications of internet genres of this sort, including the way in which they allow communication across political borders (Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India), apparently privileging 'youth bonding' over national identity. Therefore, while I begin with 'chat', I deliberately seek to link this nascent genre to other parallel 'texts' such as a self-reflexive essay by my students on their own language use, as well as, for example, advertisements in Indian English specifically aimed at Indian youth. In this connection, the paper also presents a lexicon of current bilingual youth argot on the subcontinent.

The manner in which two large and dauntingly amorphous categories, namely 'Indian youth' and 'Indian English', intersect at the present time via technology is a central concern in this paper. For much of the 20th century, the extent of the Indian contribution to the English language was estimated in terms of the servile formations generally known as 'babu' and 'butler' tongues. This sort of English, although grammatically adequate, was perceived as imitative and lacking in linguistic and literary self-confidence. Part of the goal of my paper is to trace the shifts in cultural consciousness being signaled as these old modes are replaced today by new and very subversive forms of 'postcolonial' English. The 'bakra' and 'bakwas' (meaning 'goat' and 'nonsense' respectively) modes of English coined in college campuses and transmitted via internet, television music channels and so forth, have by now spread like wildfire and are in use not only among the metropolitan young but in a great many other settings. My argument in this paper is that the stylistic interest and formal sophistication and of these forms is thus matched by their cognitive and political implications. Over the next century, in contrast to an aging population in the 'developed world', India is likely to be among the world's most populous and IT-savvy 'young' nations. That is why a reconfiguration of certain traditional notions of 'youth', for and by the youth of the Indian subcontinent, may be of some general interest today.