Raja Rao ( Kanthapura)

‘One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one[']s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word “alien”, yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up-like Sanskrit or Pakistan was before - but not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.’ (Quoted in Dennis Walder, Post-colonial Literatures in English, Oxford: Blackwell 1998, p.43.).