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English in IndiaShreesh Chaudhary
The English ruled India for less than 200 years. But English arrived here much earlier, and shows no sign of leaving. Now English is the language of India's arts, business, commerce, justice, government, sciences, and technology. Whether ! it has been good for India is a matter of opinion. As Angus Wilson says, contemporaries are too close to the event to be good judges. In 1857, the mutinous sepoys had captured the telegraph system, but could not use it. They had no language to link Kamptee with Kanpur, the two main centres of mutiny. Today English links Kohima, on the North-East border of India, with Ko! chi, on its South-West Coast, though their languages and cultures are more different than are those of Manchester, Madrid, Munich and Moscow. English holds whatever remains of India together. Many, like Mark Tully, India-born former New Delhi bureau chief of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), also say that none has divided India like the English. Pakistan and Bangladesh are products of British political convenience. E! nglish has also been the language of India's freedom struggle. Young India, of Gandhi, was published in English. Nehru also published a daily, Indian Herald, in English. Without English, Gokhale, Gandhi, Subhash Bose, Nehru, etc. could not have talked to on! e another. A member in the council of Governor Elphinston of the Bombay Presidency in 1830s had opposed teaching of English here on these very grounds. English education came here not because of the British but in spite of them, through cooperation between non-official British and liberal Indians. In 1776, English became the language of the Supreme Court at Calcutta, but officially the E! nglish were about 60 years away from taking responsibility for its teaching. That came in 1835 when T B Macaulay, Law Member in the Council of Governor General Bentinck at Calcutta, argued for it. Unofficial Britain was already teaching English in India. Many ladies and visiting gentlemen offered courses to people who could pay (Sinha,1978). William Carey, a Yorkshire shoemaker turned evangelist, had set up his college in the Danis! h colony of Serampore in the last quarter of the 18th century itself. David Hare, a watchmaker from Dundee, gave his big house and land in Calcutta in 1801 for what was then called the Hindu College. Today English is India's obsession number one (number two is secularism). For many here, education is synonymous with English - "And do you call him educated? He can't write even two lines of English correctly" is a refrain in India about! people who may have a degree but lack learning. Nearly 99% respondents said in a Ford Foundation funded survey in India in 1983 (Chaudhary, 1985) that English was their best bet for a good career. If their children had to learn only one language, all respondents said, then they would l! ike them to learn English. English has replaced even caste and dowry. "Convent educated English speaking" girls even with smaller dowry and ordinary looks find good husbands now - it means Rs 5,000/- monthly, a university lecturer's salary, extra, for almos! t nothing. "Good" English, i.e. ability to write by the rules of Wren and Martin or J C Nesfield, and ability, or at least a desire, to speak by the norms of Daniel Jones, is essential for a good job in India. People are yet to switch on to Collins ! Cobuild kind of English like the following-"Diabetes is a condition when one has lot of sugar in their blood". Actually, they frown upon it and even fear that the British will destroy the Queen's English! People do not mind mistakes in their mother tongue -! by a bizarre logic, that may actually be the first sign of "good" education. But they fuss endlessly over an English word. The British connection commands prestige. No author, especially if writing in English, is thought much of unless he has published in Britain or America. The Indian edition of Chaman Nahal's The Crown and the Loin Cloth got little a! ttention until the British published it, when it got Sahitya Akademi award, the highest literary award for English in India. English can open any door in India. So all who can (it is expensive) send their children to the English medium "public"/ "convent" schools. Forty years ago there were only three English medium schools in Bihar, the second most populous st! ate in India. Now there is one even in my village, in Bihar, which is yet to have electricity, telephone, hospital, or an all-weather road. English medium "public" schools, usually named St Johns, St Xaviers, St Pauls, St Marys, etc.(now St Gandhi, St Teresa) have come up all over India, and there are over 100,000 of them. The ambitious send their wards here. Others go to sta! te schools. An educated Indian likes to be told that (s)he speaks "good" English, or that it is hard to say from his/her English which part of India (s)he comes from. English in various parts of India has its own features of grammar and pronunciation. Even ! a simple word like tap can have over a dozen pronunciations, eg. /taep/, /teip/, /taip/, /taap/, /tep/, /dap/, /taeb/, /daeb/, etc. Men like Braj Kachru (1983) have spent a lifetime describing these features without exhausting the possibilities. Thousands, including English teachers, here believe that they speak Received Pronunciation (RP), known here as Queen's or BBC English. But their British acquaintances think that they speak "good Indian English". Presumably, it implies no value judgement, though sometimes it can damage one's career in India. India is the second biggest English speaking country. About 200 million Indians use English in their daily lives. Combined circulation of English newspapers in India is around three million as against the 30 million of Indian language dai! lies. But the power of English press here is proportionate not to the size of its readership but to the quality of it. English news and other programmes are broadcast on the national network, Indian language programmes mostly go on the regional. Indian rail! ways, airlines, armed forces, banks, posts, telecom, etc., all use English besides a local language. Computers and internet have further tightened the hold of English on India. One would need at least sixteen fonts for using Indian languages when with one font friends from Chennai can mail those in Chandigarh, or Chicago and Sasketchwan?! Computers have also begun the end of the British English in India. Most spellcheck software in India, as elsewhere, is American. American pronunciation is fashionable but not yet popular - those saying /maltai/ for multi and /aentai/ for anti, etc., and 'd! ifferent than' rather than 'different from' are thought odd and affected. But if words go, can sentences remain far behind? More cargo, people, mails, faxes, phones, and films fly between India and the US than between India and Britain. The love~hate relationship between the two largest democracies thrives on their shared heritage of English. In 50 years, I gu! ess British English (or what remains of it in India) will have become an anachronism here. Indian English has not done very badly. Except where 'native speakers only' is (unreasonably?) insisted upon, Indians have successfully competed. But with close to a million teachers and 140 million students, Indian English has reasons, t! hough no justification, to become complacent. In spite of legislation, riots, hartals, lockouts, etc. English is still the main official language of the union government and of many states, and will continue to be so,as per an undertaking by Prime Minister Nehru, until all people agr! ee to replace it with another language, which means never. So it is still the medium of education at national institutions for science, technology, medicine, etc. It is also the main language of leading business schools and business houses. But the English Language Teaching (ELT) industry in India has not done as well as that even in Japan, where ELT is just about a hundred years old, and not comparable with India in numbers. Japanese English Teachers are among the active pr! ofessional groups, whereas Indians do not necessarily meet even once a year. The reasons for this are many, an important one being the lack of official support. There is no government or private agency to protect or promote the Indian ELT industry. Indian g! overnment does not know that English can be a national resource, like mineral or agricultural produce. The 300-year old tradition of ELT, the experience of learning and teaching English as a non-native language (where, as Henry Widdowson observes, native-speaking teachers of English should not claim expertise), cultural identity with clien! t countries, and cheap manpower here could, with proper marketing, give an edge to Indian ELT at least in the countries of Asia, North Eastern Africa, and the Asia-Pacific rim. But Indians are an indifferent lot. In India itself every year over 75,000 people appear at the TOEFL, and 30,00 at IELTS, BEC, ACCESS and other tests of English as a foreign language. What irony of history for Indians who have used Engli! sh for longer than the existence of the USA! But that is how history goes - blinding us to the diamonds in the dark recesses of the coalmines of the past with the dazzle of the present. Indian ELT has a history. Many methods in ELT were perfected here. The special purpose bilingual glossaries were designed here first. Teaching of MA in English began in Britain in 1857, in India in 1858. The bi-lingual and the grammar-tra! nslation methods have been here for over 200 years. Michael West's "Reading Method" was a product of his long work in Bengal and Burma. The "Direct Method" was also used here first in the mid-19th century by Alexander Duff, a Scottish priest. The Indian tradition of grammar has influenced several Western scholars, such as William Jones, Max Mueller and Noam Chomsky. More recently, the work of men like N S Prabhu and Braj Kachru has been internationally recognized. But there ar! e hundreds of unsung heroes in India who, like the villagers in Gray's Elegy, die anonymous deaths. Things are changing even here. India will recognize the value of its ELT tradition, and may then be a serious competitors for those who have marketing strategies but have little to sell. References
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