Indian Languages #6: Rise of English

In Wanderers, Kings and Merchants, Peggy Mohan explains how and why English became the dominant and preferred language of education in India. Contrary to popular belief, it is not a legacy of the British! How does she come to that conclusion? Even Macaulay, she points out, called for primary education to be in the local language, and suggested the switch to English only for secondary education. And even then, that switch was totally voluntary.

 

Post-independence, she says, it was many Indians who pushed for English for different reasons. BR Ambedkar, for example, supported English since he feared Hindi, esp. the Sankritized version, would be a disadvantage for the lower castes and an advantage for the (northern) Brahmins. South Indians feared the same – making Hindi the preferred medium of language would confer an unfair advantage to the north.

 

While some wanted to phase English out and replace it with either one or multiple Indian languages, they agreed that such a move could only be done gradually. But when they began to evaluate how gradual a transition was practical, the time they calculated was very long (at least 15 years). In a democracy, any move that talks that long had no chance of success.

 

Then there was the class that was part of governance, judiciary, and civil services. The continuation of English in those fields conferred an advantage to them, and they were unwilling to let it go. So the whispering started behind the scenes that Indian languages were “unready” for governance, that adding the relevant words to their vocabulary would take too long and may never succeed anyway, and therefore any move away from English was doomed from the start.

 

At the time of independence, India decided to allow both private and government-run schools, and gave them the power to choose the medium of education from the primary stage itself. The private ones already had English as the medium from Day 1. (Remember - even Macaulay had never called for English as the medium in primary education!) Being a poor country, the government schools were of poor quality, and so pretty much everyone who could afford it sent their kids to private schools for better education. Inadvertently, better education started to mean English medium education.

 

As Mohan sums it up:

“Ironically then, Independence was the great watershed moment for Indian English.”

 

Ever since, we have had a sad situation.

“The children of the aspirational classes would enter these Towers of Babel with no knowledge of English, charged with the mind-numbing tasks of sitting in incomprehension day after day in order to lead their families over the high mountain pass into the Promised Land.”

These sections of society are in a state of diglossia (remember that term? It refers to multiple languages co-existing, but for separate purposes. English as the language of the courts, governance and power. And the mother tongue as the language of daily life. The languages are thus context sensitive). And diglossia, says Mohan, is always a state of flux, a sign of an ongoing transition to a new language (English) and the probable death of the old one.

“You do not end up with two or more healthy, fully formed languages – each viable on its own – but a single invasive species that has engulfed and is bidding to replace the local varieties.”

 

Are Indian languages then doomed to die out, slowly but inevitably? Only time will tell.