Do Not Make English The Villain

The language wars are all around us—the imposition of Hindi on non-Hindi-speaking states by stealth, the war between the ancestry of Tamil and Kannada, speakers of multiple regional languages in the north upset at being subsumed into Hindi and so on. Into this cauldron, an inflammatory stick was added by Union Home Minister Amit Shah when he declared at a book launch that "in this country, those who speak English will soon feel ashamed… the creation of such a society is not far away.” Of course, it does not behove the position and stature of the second-most important man in the Government of India to utter such words, but the issue is more than one of propriety.

The rant, or threat as some have defined it, can be dismissed as yet another attack by a person not conversant or comfortable in English with the “Macaulayputras”, as those who prefer English have been derisively called. The term is meant to invoke the colonial legacy, specifically that of Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, who played a seminal role in introducing English and Western-style education in British India in the 1830s. For decades after, the knowledge of English and higher education in English meant a passport to coveted jobs both in the government and the private sector, mobility to cities or to foreign destinations, and fashionable lifestyles. English, unfortunately, came to be associated with superiority of knowledge and influence.

This stranglehold has been broken in the past few decades, especially in the post-liberalised, socially engineered India of the 1990s, in which Bharat—as opposed to the English urban India—came into its own in various fields. The advent and expansion of the internet and social media have amplified the existence and popularity of languages across India. Today’s India has, for instance, Gujarati film aficionados watching the best of Malayalam films and Bengalis grooving to garba-dandiya rhythms. Translations have done us proud too, with two authors—Geetanjali Shree in Hindi and Banu Mushtaq in Kannada—bagging the International Booker Prize in the past three years. The English translation of Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp was also awarded the Booker.

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In the large spread of India’s self-assured languages that now comprise 22 official and a staggering 19,000 languages and dialects, which makes India the most multilingual country in the world, English has its own place. This is not the Queen’s tongue but the Indianised—sometimes highly localised—version. Like any living language, Indian English has expanded to include uniquely Indian idioms, words, grammar and sentence formations. A classic example is the word ‘rail’ or ‘railway’ used across the country, even by Hindi speakers. India’s software industry and scientific breakthroughs are almost exclusively English driven. Indian English has its own place; there is no need to villainise it or its users. Far from shame, English speakers, except a handful, can justifiably hold their heads high.