Almost the Same but Not Quite: The Menace of Domestication in Nissim Ezekiel’s “Very Indian Poems in Very Indian English”

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that mimicry of the local register of English in poetry becomes a device for expressing a resilient and menacing appropriation and domestication of the colonizer’s language. This paper addresses the question: how does mimicry of the Anglophone idiom disrupt the stability of source and target language in inter-lingual translation? While building on Padma Rangarajan’s discussion on mimicry viewed as bastardization of the source language, I argue that the mimicry of the source language in Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel’s poems “Very Indian Poems in Very Indian English” destabilizes both source and target languages, and makes the colonizer-colonized binary fluid. This kind of mimicry is what Homi K. Bhabha calls a “menace” because it is not quite similar, but also not quite different. The speakers in the poems adapt the Anglo-Indian idiom of English to stress not the flaw of mimicry, but the celebration of this menace. In this analysis of Ezekiel’s poems, I contribute to recent conversations regarding the colonial master’s language and the colonial subject’s translation of this language into a local hybrid, thus rendering the Indo-Anglian mimic as the site of menacing appropriation. Indian English is foreignized, while British English is domesticated, and in this dual movement, a new idiom is created, which is the same as English, but not quite.