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purposes. He has made a useful distinction between ‘the higgledy-piggledy spoken English in our country ’ and ‘the imaginative use of the same language in the hands of the creative writers in Indian English." 6 The former is ‘Pidgin-English’, and the latter he describes metaphorically as ‘Pigeon-Indian’, in which ‘the words soar in the imagination like pigeon,’ in flight.’ 7
    Analysing ‘Pigeon-Indian’, he says:
    The psychology of Indian English is rooted in the Indian metabolism. Most Indians, who speak or write English, even
    when they have been to Oxford and Cambridge… tend, naturally, to bring the hangover of the mother-tongue, spoken in early childhood into their expression… the pull of our mother-tongue leads to a heavy sugarcoating of ordinary English words. 8
    Regarding the creative process involved in his own writing, Anand declares:
    I found, while writing spontaneously, that I was always translating dialogue
from
the original Punjabi into English. The way in which my mother said something in a dialect of central Punjab could not have been expressed in any other way except in an almost literal translation, which might carryover the sound and sense of the original speech. I also found that I was dreaming or thinking or brooding about two-thirds of the prose-narrative in Punjabi or in Hindustani, and only one-third in the English language; 9
    True to his creed, Anand’s style almost aggressively sports peculiarities which make the Indian origins of his English unmistakably apparent. Colourful Indianisms permeate diction, idiom and imagery in the dialogue. Anand employs in his fictions expletives like’ Acha,’ ‘ohe’, ‘ wah’, ‘jaja’, ‘areray ’, honorifics such as ‘huzoor ’, ‘sardar ’, ‘Maharaja’ preserver of the poor’ and ‘sahib’ while these are the authentic article, the use of (‘sire’ in
A Kashmir Idyll
. and
The Power of Darkness
is clearly seen to strike a foreign and therefore false note); words used in a complimentary sense in a peculiar Indian fashion, such as ‘they ’ and ‘their’ used by a wife while referring to her husband, and phrases hallowed by custom such as ‘the wife of my son’ as a form of address while talking to a daughter-in-law; terms of endearment such as ‘My life’; colourful swear-words and imprecations reeking of the soil, as for instance,‘budmash’, ‘sala,’ ‘rape-mother’, ‘seed of a donkey ’ and ‘eater of you masters’. (The use of the phrase ‘sun of a gun’ in “
The Tractor
and
the Corn
,
Goddess
" is a jarring exception) and Indian vernacular idiom literally translated into English as in ‘Don’t stand on my head’, ‘there is something black in the pulse’, and ‘Darkness has descended over the earth’.
    Anand’s English in the narrative portions, though correct and idiomatic on the whole, also shows distinct peculiarities which make its Indian origin clear viz., its oriental opulence, its passion for adjectives, its tendency to use more words than are absolutely necessary, and its fast, galloping tempo. Thus, Roopa in
The Tamarind Tree
has her nose ‘bedewed… with jewels of perspiration’; ‘little virulets of sweat trickle’ through deep fissures of old age’ which line Rukmani’s face in
The Parrot in the Cage
; the agitation of old Bapu’s nerves produces ‘the aberration of a phantasma, like the red stars over a toothache’; and Lajwanti finds that ‘Destiny spread(s) the length of dumb distance before her ’, and ‘descending into the pit of confusion’, she is ‘lost in the primal jungle of turmoil’. Though this kind of stylistic opulence is almost overpowering for modern taste, it is a moot point whether it is not, in a way, typical of the Indian ethos shaped over centuries by the ornate utterances of Sanskrit and Persian literary modes. It would be as unreasonable to expect Anand to write like Hemingway, as it would have been to expect Faulkner to write