topics: |  fiction | india

Asked to interview India's greatest poet, Nur, Deven sees a way to escape the
miseries of life as a small-town scholar. But the old man he finds deep in
the bazaars of Old Delhi bears no resemblance to the idol of his youth. Deven
is fooled, bullied and cheated, and drawn into a new captivity.

In In Custody, Hindi is not a well-funded, marketable subject at the Lala Ram
Lal College as compared to biochemistry. Deven, the Hindi lecturer, makes
less money than his former colleague Vijay Sud, who had won a scholarship to
study biochemistry in Indiana, USA. In Mirpur, Sud is the epitome of success,
"teaching in a state university, earning a big salary, having a big house,
doing well" (185). Most other Hindi lecturers in Deven's department feel that
they "took up the wrong subject" instead of taking "something scientific,
something American" like physics, chemistry, microbiology, or computer
technology with which they could "have a future" (186). All of these subjects
are equated with the scientific and the technological, capable of inducing
modernizing transformations in society. It is not an accident that these
subjects are taught primarily in English, while Hindi is not perceived in
this novel to be participatory in nation-building activities.
- http://www.languageinindia.com/oct2004/fixinglanguage1.html