Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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...

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. Qualifie...

Some (or maybe all?) schools teach kids to associate sounds with letters of the English alphabet; and then use that association later on to teach them spelling. Try doing that second part (spelling by sound association) in your head and you’ll be wondering how anyone who knows English thought that this idea could possibly work! After all, as John McWhorter wrote in this great article : “For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.” But wait, continues McWhorter, spoken English is no less weird: “It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet.” But we Indians can surely appreciate that part. Take gender association with objects in other languages, says McWhorter: “We think it’s a nuisance...

I remember this old joke from the pre-Internet-is-everywhere era about how German (the language) could eventually rule the world if we gradually started improving the horrible no-method-in-the-madness spelling used in English. Some of the proposals in that joke were: -          use "s"  instead  of  the soft "c" e.g. "Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy"; -          replace the hard "c"  with "k" to "klear up konfusion"; -          replace "ph" with "f" thus making words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter; -          remove double letters, something that has "always ben  a deterent  to akurate  speling"; -          remove silent letters; Add a few more similar such rules and "ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl", the...