The proof came back with two hundred and eleven words in italics. Every one of them was a word I had left in Tamil — foods, kinship terms, two songs, the name of a ritual — and every one had been set roman in my manuscript, deliberately, and had been changed by a copyeditor following a house style that says non-English words are italicised.
She was doing her job correctly. The style sheet — an Indian publisher's, in Chennai, not some imported thing — says what it says. This is not a story with a villain in it, and the interesting part is precisely that nobody in the chain made a decision.
Consider what italics do on a page. They mark a word as not belonging to the surrounding language. That is their function and it is a useful one: a reader hits an italicised word and knows to expect something foreign, in the strict sense of from elsewhere. The convention is old and it is not stupid.
Now ask: foreign to whom.
A novel set entirely in a Tamil-speaking household, in which every character speaks Tamil to every other character all day, is not a book in which Tamil words are foreign. They are the ordinary vocabulary of the world the book takes place in. The English is the foreign language — it is the medium I chose so that the book could travel, and every reader knows this. Italicising the Tamil inverts the relation. It tells the reader that the household is the exotic thing and the reader's position is the neutral one.
That is a claim about the reader, made by typography, inserted by a copyeditor, from a style sheet nobody has revisited.
The counter, which was put to me by an editor I respect and which I did not have a good answer to at the time, is that the italics help. A reader who does not know the word gets a signal that it is a word rather than a typo, that they can keep going, that the meaning will arrive from context. Remove the italics and some readers stumble, and a stumble at page nine loses you a reader who might have finished. There is a real service being performed and it is being performed for the reader who has the least, not the most.
I have come round to a narrower position than the one I started with, which was simply no italics ever.
The service is real. The signal it sends is the problem, and the two are separable, because there are other ways to do the job. Context does most of it if you write for it — you can introduce a word in a sentence that quietly carries its sense, and if you cannot, the word may not be earning its place. A glossary does the rest, at the back, where a reader who wants it can go and a reader who does not is not being told anything about themselves.
What I asked for was roman type and no glossary, and I got roman type and a glossary, which is the compromise a book of that size gets and which I signed off on happily.
The one italicised word I let stand is a word my narrator does not know either. She hears it at a wedding and asks what it means and nobody tells her. It is the only word in the book that is foreign to somebody inside it, and the copyeditor and I agreed about it immediately, in one line of comment each, which is how I know she understood the whole argument perfectly and had simply never been asked.
