Agastya and Srivastav Discuss the English Major

If you don’t study economics in college, you could always study English. Here, Agastya Sen, in the boondocks on his first assignment as a trainee in the Indian Administrative Service, reviews curriculum with his boss, Srivastav:

“What was your discipline, Sen, in college?”

“English, sir,” said Agastya, and wished that it had been something more respectable, Physics or Economics or Mathematics or Law, a subject that at least sounded as though one had to study for its exams. Many times in those months, in myriad forms, he was to feel embarrassed about his past, and wish that it had been something else. Sitting in Srivastav’s drawing room, he remembered Pultukaku’s objecting to his choice of subject in college, just as he had earlier, and for the much the same reasons, objected to Agastya’s schooling: “Chaucer and Swift, what are you going to do with these irrelevancies? Your father doesn’t seem to think that your education should touch the life around you?”

“A useless subject,” said Srivastav, “unless it helps you to master the language, which in most cases it doesn’t. “ He scowled mysteriously … “The English we speak is the English we read in English books, and, anyway, those are two different things. Our English should be just a vehicle of communication, other people find it funny, but how we speak shouldn’t matter as long as we get the idea across. My own English is quite funny too, but then I had to learn it on my own.” Agastya began to like Srivastav then; he was honest, intelligent and satisfied with life; he was rare. “In Azamganj, where I come from, I studied in a Hindi-medium school. Now people with no experience of these schools say that that’s a good thing, because we should throw English out of India. Rubbish, I say… When I went to College in Lucknow I felt completely stupid. So I began to read English on my own. I had to, because English was compulsory for the Civil Service exam. So I read Shakespeare and Wordsworth and people like that, very difficult. It’s still important to know English. It gives one,” he fisted his hand, “confidence.”

Srivastav had the pride of a self-made man. … [Agastya] could picture Srivastav too, an obscure and mediocre college student, sweating with incomprehension but determinedly wading through The Prelude because he wanted to get on. …

—Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August 69-71 (NYRB ed. 2006)