English in India

In his book Imagining India, former Infosys CEO, Nandan Nilekani calls English in India the “Phoenix Tongue”, subtitled “The Rise, Fall and Rise of English”! Britain introduced English in India to cut administrative and judicial costs for the East India Company by having the locals do those jobs! It took Macaulay to translate this into reality. (In)famously he declared:

“We must… form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

As can be expected, many Indians resented the imposition of a foreign language. But others saw it as an opportunity for a job and social advancement. Reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy backed the move saying it would be a “tongue that would exist outside the control of the native, caste- and religious-based elite”.

English exposed Indians to “Western ideas of nationalism, liberty and freedom”, writes Nilekani. Qualified Indians began to resent the cap on how high they could rise in the British system. The ability to read the English press also meant more Indians got to know of the freedom movements in other parts of the world.

At independence, the leaders were torn: they didn’t want to throw out most British systems, but what about English? Even as the move to make Hindi the national language picked up, the Southern states, especially Tamil Nadu protested calling it “language imperialism”. The lower castes too looked at English as a language of emancipation, “free of the smudgy fingerprints of Hindu discrimination”. And so English was reluctantly given a national language status. As Nilekani said, it was a wise move:

“Sri Lanka did the opposite, replacing English with Sinhalese, the majority tongue, a move which helped trigger sectarian war.”

While the state governments hated English and avoided using it as the medium of instruction, it was obviously the “career language”. Sadly:

“We have an English language economy, but our education policy has denied people access to it.”

All that changed after 1991: liberalization opened the doors for IT and BPO’s, and English was obviously the “language of upward mobility”. It was also evident that English was the global language for international business, science and research. It was also the dominant language of the Internet.

And yet, even today, Nilekani says English is considered a “foreign tongue”:

“But should the association of English with our years as a colony mean that an Indian identity for the language is impossible?”

After all, we have more English speakers today than even the US!

“Clearly, we are no longer – to recall an old Indian slur against English-literate Indians – ‘Macaulay’s children’.”