On Sunday 03 Jun 2012 12:08:45 pm thew...@gmail.com wrote: > how widely read is PGW today? Does he still attract fresh batches of public > school readers
Not very widely read. Children do read nowadays as far as I can tell but Wodehouse is all but dead. I studied in a "Public School" in India, a school that is now 148 years old (more about that below), that created little brown sahibs - little coconuts who were brown on the outside and white on the inside and we were taught English of a particular upper class genre that spoke in subtleties and understatement. Wodehouse is good only from that angle. If you do not understand English from that socio-cultural angle Wodehouse is useless. This type of education instilled in several generations of Indians a curious schizophrenia in which Indians not only felt "superior" to other "native", non English speaking Indians who were capable of communicating only in "the verncular", but like the Brit uppah class these Indians were also taught to be derisive of American style slapstick humor and spellings. The fact that English speaking Indians often made other Indians feel inadequate was recorded by Booker Prize winning author Arvind Adiga in an interview. But one author who was able to see the ridiculous side of such education in the indian context was Farrukh Dhondy whose humorous book "Poona Company" sums up how such schools and attitudes mixed with the Indian milieu. It took Microsoft spellcheck and a dominant Holywood to set the English mentality right. Indians took somewhat longer to grow out of it. My own "Alma Mater" (what a quaint olde Brit imposed Latin expressionne :) ) is "The Bishop's School" in Poona where my life was closer to the lifestlye led by Billy Bunter rather than Acharya Pathshala where many of my "native" peers studied in "the vernacular". Bishops was started in 1864 under the aegis of the Anglican Bishop of Bombay specifically to educate the children of British army officers. 1864 was in an eventful and tense era. The British crown had taken control of India from the East India company about 15 years earlier. Shortly after that was the military uprising against British rule that is was called the "Mutiny of 1857" but is now referred to as India's first war of independence. The Bishop's school was started soon after that and was an unashamedly British style "public" school. It is worth recalling that around 1854, the British policy for education in India decided that a class of Indians who were British in mind and heart would have to be created in order that they would appreciate the good things that Britain had to offer so that India could then serve as a vast market for goods made by a rapidly industrializing Britain. This is absolutely clear from a speech made by Macaulay around 1854 or so. But the history of that policy goes back earlier and can be gleaned from this link. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1842459?uid=3738256&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=56229603993 Indian appreciation of Wodehouse, and how the Woosters captured Delhi is a curious fallout of this history. I suspect that it will go down as a passing phase in Indian history. shiv
