64 / 152
64
E
UR
A
MERICA
home with his parents, tends to speak more standardized English,
the desi rudeboys in the novel use a hybrid form of language.
According to Sarah Brouillette, their hybrid language blends “foul
language, cockney slang (‘innuit’) and text-message shorthand (‘b’
for ‘be’ and ‘em’ for ‘them’)” and “in later pages incorporates
vocabulary and locution from a global hodgepoege of hip hop,
reggae, and South Asian street cultures” (2009: 3). Actually, it is
not uncommon to find subversive use of patois in post-World War
II Asian and Black British novels, such as Sam Selvon’s
The Lonely
Londoners
(1956) and Victor Headley’s
Yardie
(1992). Malkani’s
creation of the patois in this 21st-century urban fiction is, however,
unique in two aspects. First of all, instead of claiming authenticity
by mimicking realistically the way that Indian immigrants talk in
Britain, the urban creole in the novel is actually carefully
constructed by the novelist himself. The hybrid language is so
intricate that the novel provides a glossary in the end for the
reader’s reference. On his own website, Malkani explains his
reasons to construct hybrid language in the novel:
What I didn’t want to do was capture an exact picture of
the way people talk by writing it just as I was hearing it
[. . .] because slang changes all the time and words and
phrases would’ve been out of date by the time the book
was published (if it ever got published). Creating a kind of
futureproof, timeless slang
—
instead of taking a snapshot
at any particular moment in time
—
basically meant taking
popular words from different years that have already stood
the test of time and then stitching them together. [. . .] So,
just, like every other aspect of the characters’ identities,
their seemingly random slang is actually carefully
constructed and contrived. (2009)
This “linguistic performance,” to quote Graham (2008b: para. 19),
adds another dimension of inauthenticity to the novel. Most
obviously, it echoes the inauthentic identities of the desi characters
as well as the inauthentic ghetto that the rudeboys pretend to
inhabit, and that certain race-biased reviewers expect the enclave