Poacher! Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies?

It is wrong to pit English writing against the whole regional writing; how can we compare a part with the whole? How can you put a literature that is over a thousand years old against one that is scarcely hundred years old and only finding its true voice?…There is a failure of criticism to put this writing where it belongs, in its right context, relating it instead to literature with which it has nothing in common except the language.

…Why not let me speak in

Any language I like? The language I speak

Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses

All mine, mine alone. It is half-English, half

Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,

It is as human as I am human, don't

You see?…