Punning in Punglish, Sounding ‘Poreign’

Abstract

This essay explores Daljit Nagra's poetry – Look We Have Coming To Dover! (2007) and Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger-Toy Machine!!! (2011) – in the context of contemporary British language politics. It argues that Nagra's approach to language – combining heteroglot, multivoiced experimentalism with an etymological attention to the historical constructedness of language – offers a riposte to monolingual ideologies, which also resituates English as a product and residue of colonial history. While Nagra's poems sometimes come close to regarding the histories enfolded within English as a linguistic and poetic impasse, they continue to invest in the notion of resistance and individual agency in language; and specifically, they revel in poetic dramatization of the accommodations and convivialities of everyday multilingual language practice.

• multilingualism
• Nagra Daljit
• poetry
• politics of language

Acknowledgement

My great thanks to Daljit Nagra, and to Faber, for permission to quote at length from his work.

Notes

1 It is beyond the scope of this essay to consider the different statuses accorded to so-called ‘indigenous’ and ‘immigrant’ languages, but the Act does in fact enshrine both Welsh and Scots Gaelic, alongside English, as alternative languages of national belonging.

2 The OED gives the first English usage of ‘bhaji’ as 1832; by 1888 it had made its way into the Wife's Help to Indian Cookery: being a practical manual for housekeepers.

3 On questions of marketing and commodification, see (Huggan 2001).

4 On Hindi as the dominant language of Bollywood, see Bose (2006).