WHEN I TRAVEL outside India, my homesickness and sense of displacement are as aural as they are visual. In India it is impossible to miss the chatter and noise of a public space—which I find is often several decibels higher here than nearly anywhere else in the world. And not only do we love to talk, we do it in a thousand tongues—for there are as many documented languages and dialects in India.^ae

The crowds in our streets speak in a rich and varied tongue, a jostle of hybrid and home-grown languages. But across India’s economy—especially in urban India—it is one language, India’s “auntie tongue”¹ English, that seems ubiquitous. In bureaucrat-speak, it is our “associate official” language, and it is the predominant tongue in which business transactions, boardroom discussions and water-cooler gossip take place. In the early days of Infosys, when we were marketing our services outside India, many of our prospective customers were taken aback when they found that we spoke English. And they were even more surprised when we told them that the seven founders of Infosys between themselves spoke five different languages at home, and English was the only language we shared.

Yet, despite our apparent comfort, English is a second language for nearly all those Indians who speak it, and historically our attitude toward the tongue has been quite ambivalent. The language has been in some ways a reflection of India’s relationship with Britain and the rest of the world, and has been a part of a young country’s search for identity and unity. For Indians the language has consequently been, at various times over the last two hundred years, a symbol of oppression, resistance, compromise and, most recently, an economy come of age.

A language of the ships and traders

English came to India with Europe’s ships, and for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was seen mainly as a “port” language, a tongue spoken among merchants. In fact English was just one part of “Firangi,”² a pidgin tongue Indians used to communicate with foreign traders, which was a blend of Hindustani, Portuguese, French, Dutch and English. For a long time, few people used English exclusively, and even as the East India Company expanded its power across India, company officials kept Portuguese dictionaries and Persian translators by their side to help them communicate. ³

One reason the Company did not force the English language in India was, as the historian Nicholas Ostler notes, Britain’s recent loss of a major colony: the Americas. In India this loss felt especially close—Lord Cornwallis, governor general of Bengal from 1786 to 1793, had arrived in India after his defeat in the Americas, having handed over the British surrender to George Washington at Yorktown in 1781.⁴ As Cornwallis’s defeated army marched out, its band, as legend has it, played the tune “The World Turned Upside Down”—Britain was convinced that this loss in the Americas would result in the collapse of its Empire. It was therefore especially wary about bringing English to India, and one governor general remarked that educating Indians in English would result in the British getting kicked out in three months.⁵

But half a century later, with its finances in a mess and facing bankruptcy, the East India Company was forced to think out of the box. In 1828 the governor general William Bentinck was sent to India with the express mandate to cut the company’s administrative costs.⁶ One of his recommendations was to replace British workers in the company’s judicial and administrative jobs with cheaper, Indian graduates.^af To enable this, Bentinck added a clause in the Company’s 1833 Charter Act opening up government posts to qualified persons “irrespective of religion, birth, descent or color.”⁷

But to create enough qualified Indians conversant in English, an English-education policy was necessary, and for this Bentinck had to go through a committee of officials divided on the idea that they could simply transport their language into a foreign country. By the time Thomas Macaulay arrived in 1834 as the new president of the General Committee of Public Instruction (which framed the Company’s education policies in India), there was growing support among the officials for an English-language policy. But Macaulay provided the policy with new, powerful ballast, bringing a righteous passion to the cause of English education in his famous Minute of February 2, 1835. Launching an outright attack on Indian learning, he said that if Indian education continued, “we shall [allow] at public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school . . . and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of butter.” Macaulay supported Bentinck in creating an elite group of English-educated Indians: “We must . . . form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”⁸

For good measure, Macaulay—his stiff upper lip, presumably, trembling for a moment—threatened the council with his resignation if the recommendations of his Minute were not taken up.⁹ There was no risk of that, with Bentinck entirely supportive, and British India’s education policies were soon transformed. English became the lingua franca of the administration, and the number of English government schools more than doubled within three years of the 1835 English Education Act. The Company announced in 1844 that English-educated Indians would receive preferential treatment in public-sector appointments, and in 1857 the first three English-language universities were set up.

The imposition of the English language, the historian Robert King notes, rankled among many Indians as a move against the native tongues, most of which were older than English—Tamil and Kannada, for instance, were centuries older. English was consequently viewed as a tool of imperialism, which the British were using to assert their authority over the country^ag—it symbolized “servility, meekness, bowed heads before the sahib and memsahib, and the topi.”¹⁰

However, a small section of Indians did welcome English-language education, especially the social butterflies, who associated English with cultural prestige and considered it essential to life in the upper circles. The language became an additional accessory for the elite, a pretty bauble to be acquired in the same way upper-crust Indians adopted British dress, tea parties and socials. ¹¹ Alongside this, English also rapidly took on the role of a career language. The Indian colony had been significantly deindustrialized under the British, and an administrative career was the major, and probably only, avenue for the educated Indian.¹² This made British education immensely popular, and by the 1900s India’s education in the arts (the more favored stream) was dominated by 140 English colleges with more than 17,000 students, compared with five Indian colleges, which had a total of 503 students.

The policy also won the support of Indian social reformers such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who saw great advantages in English as a language for spreading literacy and education in India. Roy viewed English as a potentially universal second language, accessible to Indians across castes and communities, “a tongue that would exist outside the control of the native, caste- and religion-based elite—unlike the rarefied Sanskrit under the Brahmins and the courtly Persian of the Muslim elite.” Roy went as far as to remark, “So long as the English language is universal, it will remain Indian.” English was thus in the strange position of representing repression to some, and emancipation and social freedom to others. ¹³

A tool for Indian nationalism

The learning curve for English in India was by no means smooth—English-educated Indians were sometimes unintentionally comic with the language, creating what the British called “babuisms,” coined after the Indian “babu” or civil servant who committed them. One incident that the viceroy Lord Lytton apparently liked to relate was of an English judge asking an Indian barrister why his female client was not at court. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Chandra Ram,” the judge had asked, “but is your client an adult?” “No my Lord,” the hapless lawyer replied, “she is an adulteress.”¹⁴

But English did not remain an alien tongue for long. A unique characteristic of the English language has been its easy ability to absorb cultural influences, and English assimilated an Indian identity with astonishing speed. The Oxford English Dictionary first came out in 1884, and by 1886 the Hobson-Jobson dictionary of Indian English terms had been released, introducing words such as “veranda,” “avatar,” “cheroot” and “typhoon” into the language.

The goal of making Indians who were “English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” also exposed Indians to the work of European writers and brought them closer to the Western ideas of nationalism, liberty and freedom. As the writer Surendranath Banerjea wrote in 1878, “English education has uplifted all who have come under its influence to a common platform of thoughts, feelings and aspirations.” Uplift: this was an unexpected result for an “imperial” tongue.

The chain of events that the English-education policy had set off was clearly moving in unpredictable directions. Increasingly, English-educated Indians were getting angry: Indian graduates who were fluent in English and equipped with the skills of the bureaucrat found that they were denied power and responsibility beyond the lowest levels of administration by the British. And, as the number of English-speaking graduates expanded, the competition for the few junior administrative jobs grew increasingly severe. The shortage of jobs created what is probably the most combustible driver for social change—large numbers of people both educated and unemployed.

Around this time, the English language and the Indian English press were also quickly becoming common ground for a once-fractured Indian community to exchange ideas among themselves and agitate against British rule. An Indian lawyer had told the British government in its early years, “You cannot talk a person into slavery in the English language,” and the British policy soon brought this truth home. During the Congress party’s early demands for political representation, they employed the slogan of eighteenth-century British colonists: “No taxation without representation.” The language did not make Indians more British; instead a shared tongue enabled people from across the kingdom states and British provinces to identify themselves as Indians and unite in resistance.¹⁵ English had made them their own people.

Critically, English literacy also offered Indians the chance to access the English press. Indians, as a result, became increasingly aware of the struggles for independence in other countries—the rise of colonies across the world against imperialism, and the surge of European nationalism by the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ The language was offering Indian leaders a window into movements like theirs, and with it, hope.

The fading favor for English: A “symbol of colonialism”

But as India neared independence, the English language found itself increasingly left out in the cold. For one, with the growing prospect of freedom, Indians had the opportunity to clearly consider the question of Indian identity after the end of colonial rule.

Indian leaders were pragmatic about adopting a constitution with a British heart ^ah and enthusiastic about adopting European ideas of nationalism and democracy. And of course, no one wanted to rip out the railway tracks and lay new ones just because they had been put in place by British administrators. ¹⁷

But when it came to the English language, they balked—it was one of the “colonial relics” that was unacceptable. Language was so intricately linked to blood and community that it was difficult to imagine that you could say “I am an Indian” in English, the colonial tongue, and still feel that was the case. Indian leaders such as Gandhi began to express strong views against the use and teaching of the language in Indian schools. Gandhi believed that “to give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them.” Gandhi wrote, “The foreign language has caused brain fag, put undue strain upon the nerves of our children, made them crammers and imitators, unfitted them for original work and thought.”

The writer Aijaz Ahmad notes that this “either-or” chauvinism that erupted around independence was singularly alien to our attitudes on language. Many Indian leaders and intellectuals, from Nehru to Gandhi, Tagore, Rajagopalachari and Ambedkar, were at least bilingual;¹⁸ Ram Mohan Roy had been fluent in five languages—English was his “fifth language,” after Sanskrit, Bengali, Arabic and Persian. Indian leaders such as Rajagopalachari reflected this egalitarian sentiment, writing that English was “Saraswati’s gift to India.”¹⁹ But in the political mood of the time, people like Rajagopalachari were in the minority and India’s leaders were ready to toss English overboard, as a language that had outlived its welcome.

Strange bedfellows: English, the southern states and the Dalits

However, by 1950 English had become the lingua franca of India’s central government and educational institutions. This sea change in our expectations of the colonial tongue had a lot to do with the early conflicts of the new nation-state.

India in 1947 was a young country whose boundaries were pristine and newly drawn. With no shared political history prior to British rule, it appeared to be a country that had more dividing than uniting it. Independent India was immediately embroiled in multiple arguments over language issues in the Constituent Assembly on the drawing of state boundaries according to language, on the official status for various regional languages and, critically, on the question of the national language.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was himself, as the historian Robert King notes, a man “educated in English ideas but a nationalist when it came to language.” Nehru had written in 1935, “Some people imagine that English is likely to become the lingua franca of India. That seems to me a fantastic conception.” Nehru believed that “this status belonged to Hindi.”²⁰ However, the proposal to adopt Hindi as the official language—favored by many of the Hindi-speaking ministers—met with strong resistance from the southern states, especially Tamil Nadu.

South Indian politicians quickly denounced this idea of making Hindi the national tongue as “language imperialism.”²¹ (Since independence, the charge of “imperialism” aimed at fellow Indians has had a sting with no substitute.) Hindi as a national language, they asserted, was being pushed down their throats by fiat, enforced by a majority who would have the advantages of their native tongue in the competition for education and job opportunities. The Tamil minister Ramalingam Chettiar complained, “The way north Indians are trying to dominate us and dictate to us is galling . . . I have been in Delhi for two years, and no north Indian has . . . invited me even once for social functions, just because I don’t know Hindi.”²²

These ministers offered more than three hundred amendments to the language bill—one went as far as to suggest that Hindi be written in Roman letters instead of Devanagiri.

It was in the midst of this argument that English was brought back from once certain death—as a defense against the threat of Hindi. The southern states suggested that English—a tongue spoken by less than 3 percent of the Indian population and equally alien to the north and the south—be adopted as India’s official language.

Meanwhile, the language was gaining support from the Dalit community. For the Dalits, English was a language exempt from the restrictive conventions of Indian literature, which was imbued with the traditions of caste and untouchability. Hindu texts were ambiguous at best on the question of education and literacy for the lower castes. At worst, they were outright discriminatory—the Manusmrithi (Laws of Manu), the authoritative Hindu text on India’s caste system, said that “molten lead is to be poured into the ears of the ‘low born’ who dare to hear the recital of the written word.” As a result, like many of the early Indian reformers, Dalit leaders viewed English as emancipatory, free of the smudgy fingerprints of Hindu discrimination and the stigma of “untouchable” traditions. The Dalits also came to support English as a language that enabled communication across linguistic regions, giving the low castes a “nationwide solidarity,”^ai and enabling their voices to be heard in the public sphere.

Nehru, watching the falling out and acrimony, got increasingly frustrated. He wrote in a letter to the Tamil minister Gopalaswami Ayyangar, “I am very tired of all this business.”²³ Finally in 1950 Nehru declared a transition arrangement that would permit the official use of English for fifteen years, till 1965—and it would then be replaced with Hindi. He obviously hoped in the meantime tempers would cool and people might even settle into the language.

But by 1965 protests again erupted across the south against the imminent shift to Hindi as the official language. Rallies took place all over south India, and south Indian cabinet ministers threatened to resign unless English was retained. Riots broke out in Tamil Nadu, people burned effigies of the “Hindu demoness” and students and members of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam^aj (DMK) immolated themselves across the state. Police opened fire on rioting crowds, killing three hundred people. In the Legislative Assembly, DMK members made fiery speeches threatening secession.²⁴ At the same time, as the journalist Swaminathan Aiyar notes, “pro-Hindi organizations such as the Jan Sangh launched a violent agitation in favor of abolishing English not only in official use but also in shop and street signs and on number plates.”^ak

The government had thought Hindi would be “the great unifier,” but it turned out that only English would do the job. The Language Act was finally amended in 1967, specifying both English and Hindi as official languages. English has since coexisted with Hindi as the official language and serves as a “linking language” for the north and the south.

In newly independent India, the English language had thus become a touchstone for neutrality and, given India’s minorities—the southern states and the lower castes—some protection from what they saw as the tyranny of the majority. The DMK rode the anti-Hindi wave to election victory in 1967, taking Tamil Nadu out of Congress hands for the first time. Democracy had struck back against forcible language imposition in 1967, just as it would strike back in 1977 against forcible family planning.

There is a pretty good case to be made for not taking sides in a multilingual country, and the importance of English as a neutral player in India’s language debate cannot be exaggerated. It was not rare for polyglot British colonies to address the challenge of the official language by opting for English, an outsider and consequently a language that could bypass the tug of war for political and economic power between linguistic communities. Singapore, for instance, chose English as the language of the government over other local languages such as Malay, Chinese and Tamil. Sri Lanka did the opposite, replacing English with Sinhalese, the majority tongue, a move that helped trigger sectarian war in the country—a powerful and disconcerting example of how the lack of neutrality and compromise in language policy can rapidly alienate minority communities.

The invisible “career tongue”

In the late 1960s when I was growing up in Dharwad, I attended a convent school along with most of the neighborhood kids. The highlight for us was when the stern Father Soares, our principal, invited us to his home to listen to his records. There, he would pull out his treasured old spools of recordings of his favorite English plays and we would sit entranced, listening to Gielgud and Guinness perform Shakespeare. Even then, it was clear to us that knowing English was a high priority for our careers. English postindependence has emerged as India’s main career language—the language of India’s university and college education, central government institutions, as well as the working language of India’s corporations.

In part, my parents’ insistence that I study at English-medium schools was a result of our family background—our community, the Chitrapat Saraswats, were Brahmins who were educated and knew where the opportunities lay. Not many parents, however, knew the trade-offs that came from sending their children to a non-English school. This was because the role of English as a career language in independent India remained for a long time one of the unspoken truths in our politics, something that Indian legislators were reluctant to admit. Tamil students had once painted slogans saying, “Hindi never, English ever,” but the early support for the English language in the south turned out to be half-hearted—it had been merely a way to protect their regional tongues.²⁵ English lost its champions in the south once the question of the national language was resolved, and the language became an orphaned tongue, never regaining the political support it had in the fifteen years after independence.

Instead, when India’s education policy was being prepared, each Indian state in the north and the south clamored to prioritize and preserve its own language in state schools. The 1968 national policy resolution for education faced the bewildering challenge of accommodating the interests of Hindi and national pride, of English as the link language, and of the regional tongues. The education ministry proposed a “three-language” formula, where people from non-Hindi areas were to study their regional language, as well as Hindi and English. Hindi speakers could study Hindi, English and another language.

The three-language formula pitted Indian languages against one another, and states were embroiled in unruly political football. Tamil Nadu’s hackles rose up again—its education minister, Thiru Thambidurai, declared that the formula was “an indirect attempt to impose Hindi as a language on the Tamil people.” Both Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry refused to teach Hindi in state schools, and the northern states cheated on the third language requirement by teaching none of the regional languages, opting instead for Sanskrit. The southern states asserted that the regional language should take precedence over English, while to the Hindi-speaking states English was the pretender to the throne, slinking into a national, dominant role that had rightfully belonged to Hindi.

State education policies thus became a vehicle of either regional pride or Hindi nationalism, with each state out to demonstrate the superiority of its pet mother tongue. In the bargain, Hindi and English were sidelined in some southern states, and English was quite decisively marginalized everywhere. On average—with the exception of the northeastern states—less than 10 percent of state schools in India were English-medium schools, and many of the states passed policies that allowed the teaching of English only from the sixth standard. By the 1960s Gujarat had banned English from primary schools and the West Bengal CPI(M) government did the same in the 1970s. The Maharashtra government even mandated in 1956 that while Marathi would be the compulsory medium for state schools, only Indians whose mother tongue was English could attend English-medium schools. The order was blocked by the Supreme Court, which ruled that “Speaking constitutionally, English is more an Indian language than the other languages . . . it is the language India’s Constitution is written in. It has entered into the blood and bones of India.”

And when English was taught as a subject from the primary level, it was not taught effectively. In India’s state-run vernacular schools students noted that “even the English teachers have trouble speaking in English.”²⁶ While in reality English proficiency was the password for admission to the best careers—the top bureaucratic circles, or a career in the private sector—our state schools seemed oblivious of this fact.

State mandates to make the regional tongue the language of instruction across public schools led to the mushrooming of private, English-medium schools. But access to these schools was limited to the urban areas, and to the people who could afford them. The utopian notion of the three-language policy, of three languages taught equally well, has failed badly and left many students across state schools tongue-tied three ways and illiterate in English.

The Dalit writer and activist Chandrabhan Prasad—The New York Times recently did a profile of him, calling him a “chain-smoking, irrepressible didact,” and I can attest to the fact that he is all three—does not mince words when he talks about the language policy. “We have an English language economy, but our education policy has denied people access to it. It is not an intelligent law, it’s a political one,” he says. “And it has only worsened divides across both castes and classes. Most of the lower castes are poor, and send their children to the free state schools, and eventually many of them struggle to put together a proper English sentence.”

English: The language of upward mobility

The economist Omkar Goswami concurs with the Indian economists I know when he refuses to give in to unbridled optimism on how India is changing since reforms. He notes, however, that the shift in certain attitudes has been unmistakable. “We now rely less on knee-jerk hostility, when it comes to our feelings about foreign things,” he says. This change is especially clear in our attitude toward English, which has undergone a transformation postreform. The change was largely driven by the rise of India’s outsourcing industry. The 1990s had marked the rise of Indian IT companies including Infosys, and our key advantage in competing in the global services market—our purple poker chip—has been India’s large numbers of affordable, educated and English-literate workers.

In the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector in particular, more than 65 percent of jobs are defined as voice-based jobs, and English-language proficiency is the main requirement for these companies. These firms were closely aligned with global corporations, and both productivity and wages were linked quite closely to global market averages. The result was that, through the 1990s, potential earnings for India’s English-skilled graduates surged. In a sense, this Indian industry has carved out a route to the American dream for our workers.

The present number of English-literate, skilled graduates barely scratches the surface of what India is capable of. Even though the number of graduates and engineers in India has more than doubled over the last fifteen years, only 13 percent of India’s youth actually opt for higher education, and English literacy in India remains below 30 percent. Companies in India’s outsourcing industry are attempting to expand the number of English-proficient graduates through training courses for college students in English-language skills.

Not only can the talent pool get much deeper, this industry in India has the potential to absorb large numbers of English-skilled workers. Employment in the sector has crossed 1.6 million, and there remains immense room for more growth—the number of jobs created is set to cross three million by 2015.

This highly visible rise of the outsourcing sector has helped transform Indian attitudes toward the English language. English is emerging as the language of aspiration for the Indian population—as a passport to a lucrative job and entry into the country’s growing middle class. A friend of mine is an entrepreneur who runs Corner House, a popular Bangalore ice cream and sundae parlor. He told me resignedly that he had taught his staff some English so that they would be able to take orders, and they left him to join a BPO company!

In fact, as demand has soared, Indian companies including Infosys now face severe shortages in finding enough English-speaking talent. We recruit engineers who are technically very talented but whose English education started only in their engineering colleges. Often this means a struggle with spoken English, which we have attempted to address with internal training programs. We also launched Project Genesis, a program that presently works with fifteen thousand students in more than 240 colleges to provide training in English and soft skills to make general degree college students “BPOEMPLOYABLE.” The English training in Genesis has apparently become so popular that parents seeking admission in many colleges in the north now inquire if the college “is a Genesis one.”

The rising payoffs of English-language skills across Indian industry are also creating a widespread demand to learn the language. The private sector has been quick in responding—English training in India has surged to a $100 million industry in annual revenues. Sriram Raghavan is an entrepreneur who runs Comat, a company dedicated to building rural IT kiosks across the country, and he says that one in three customers to the kiosks comes for English lessons. “They have a sharp eye for the jobs that are available, and they are quite pragmatic,” he tells me of his rural customers. “I have people coming to me asking for English lessons for their wives, since that can help them get jobs as receptionists and secretaries at government offices.” The language is also popular among people migrating to the city. “They know,” Sriram says, “that if they learn English before they move to the city, they will land much better paying jobs. It’s the difference between working as a construction worker or being the manager of the construction team.” The language is making a substantial difference across levels—people who work as janitors at offices, for instance, find that knowing English means better errands to run. “I run around bringing tea and snacks and cleaning up,” one of them says. “There is another guy who knows to read and write English. He visits banks and clients and gets four times my salary.”²⁷

As a result this aspiration for English is now cutting across income classes—English-medium private schools have mushroomed across rural India and in the slums of the urban poor. Nearly one third of all rural schoolchildren are now enrolled in private schools, and close to 50 percent of these schools are English medium.^al In the slums of Hyderabad, the number of private schools teaching in English now exceeds the number of government schools by two to one. In Bombay’s Dharavi slum and the North Shahdara slum in Delhi, more than half of the schools are English medium. And standardized tests assessing the performance of these schools in English found that children in these mostly unrecognized private schools in slums did 246 percent better on an English test compared with government schools.²⁸

Dalit leaders have also pushed for effective English instruction in schools. Organizations such as the Dalit Freedom Network are establishing English-medium schools to cater to the Dalit community. “I think that our leaders now recognize how important English is for Dalits to access both employment and economic opportunities,” Chandrabhan tells me. In his own irreverent way, he has even initiated a campaign for English by celebrating the birthday of Lord Macaulay. “It helps raise awareness about the need to learn English,” he grins, when I ask about the event. “We’ve now celebrated his birthday three years in a row.”

Rising from below

Increasingly, as English gains economic relevance across India, it has become very difficult to restrict access to the language on ideological grounds without seeming bull-headed. With globalization and the rise of IT/BPO, language policy across Indian states has had to respond to public pressure for English education. In a note on language, India’s National Knowledge Commission ^am also underscored the advantage of English in Indian employment and higher education, and recommended that “English should be taught from Class I across the country.”

Across states, pressure from the people is driving changes in our English-education policy—West Bengal and Gujarat have reversed anti-English policies and made the language compulsory from the first standard, and the Gujarat government has introduced an initiative called SCOPE, to teach English to Gujarati youth in the fifteen-to-thirty-five age group. Jammu and Kashmir also recently made all state schools English-medium institutions. Chauvinistic language policies have become largely ineffective as a political device—in September 2006 the Karnataka government ordered the closure of several elementary schools in the state that had been teaching in the English medium,^an putting 270,000 students out of schools. The order met with severe public criticism and lost credibility when fifteen of the thirty Karnataka cabinet ministers supporting the policy admitted to sending their own children to English-medium schools.

From the beginning, it has been the force of the people that has compelled governments and policy makers to keep English in India. First it was the backlash and anger from the south against Hindi snootiness and hegemony; later it was the aspiration of people who protested against language policies that were limiting access to jobs for the poor. Rather than throwing the English language out, Indians have fought time and again to retain it. In itself, this may be a sign that the language has already become too Indian to get rid of.

The global opportunity

For many years after independence, language policy had largely been held hostage by the perception of the English language as a “colonial relic.” However, English is no longer a British tongue—it is more the language of international business and a powerful key in opening up geographical borders and gaining access to markets. It is the language of science and research, with 90 percent of papers across scientific journals written in English. It dominates the chatter of the Information Age—80 percent of the World Wide Web is in the English language. It has been estimated that within a decade half the world’s population will have some skill in English. A commitment toward learning English was part of China’s bid to host the Olympic Games, to the point that taxi drivers who failed an English test did not have their licenses renewed and hotlines were set up to report incorrect English use in public spaces. Most countries are fast recognizing English’s role as a world language, and besides China, nations such as Japan, South Korea and Indonesia are including English as a compulsory language in their schools and setting up “English-immersion camps” for students.

India has an advantage in the global market in the depth and breadth of its English-language capability. Today Indians have embraced the idea of English as the language of the globalizing Indian economy. Most middle-class Indians speak in at least two tongues—besides their mother tongue, they have at least functional fluency in English for business purposes and to manage communication with different communities.

Over the last fifty years, English has grown deeper roots in the Indian community, beyond purely economic value. Its reach has spread—to print, film, television and ordinary conversation. English has rapidly become the language of creative discourse—and while Indian writers writing in English have remarked that they often face hecklers at their readings who demand to know why they do not write in their mother tongue, such criticism has become marginal in recent years. These Indian writers once called “dissenters” and “mavericks” now include Amitav Ghosh, who has attained a status in English literature that has moved far beyond the exotic value of an Indian writing in the language.

An Indian tongue

Certainly English’s presence in India today can be attributed to a series of chance events in Indian history—Bentinck’s parsimony, Macaulay’s British condescension and a postindependence north-south squabble. This has contributed to the perception of English as an essentially alien language in independent India, and not “authentically Indian.”²⁹

This deep identification of language with culture and ethnicity is, I think, universal. Language is a natural fracture across communities, and it has, across history, formed a big part of arguments around identity and self-expression. Ireland’s struggle to revive the Irish language during its fight for independence, the resurrection of the near-extinct Hebrew language in Israel and most recently the debates over government recognition of Spanish in the United States, all point to how closely people associate identity and community rights with language.³⁰

English, a transplanted, Anglo-Saxon tongue, has survived as a language of power and upward mobility in postreform India. But there has been little sentimentality associated with the language—even among pro-English commentators and activists in India, the perception of English as a “foreign tongue” goes unchallenged. But should the association of English with our years as a colony mean that an Indian identity for the language is impossible? Sanskrit, after all, was also an “alien” tongue to the subcontinent and a language that entered the region with an invading army.³¹ For that matter, linguists such as David Crystal note that the people after whom the language has been named no longer “own” English today. It is estimated that India has more than 300 million English users, which surpasses even the United States and makes us the country with the largest number of English speakers. The “English speaking world” today is certainly very different from what it was a century ago—to the point that the British, U.S. and Australian governments are hiring teachers from India to meet shortages of English-language teachers in their schools.

India has now “remade English in many voices”³² with the rise of not just Standard Indian English but also of pidgins of English and regional languages such as Bengali English, Hindi English and Tamilian English—distinctive variants with a legitimacy of their own. One Kerala university permitted its students to write exams in a mix of English and the regional tongue, Malayalam, and when a syndicate member objected that “a sentence in Malayalam can be followed by a sentence in English, but they must not be mixed” he was dismissed by the others as being too uptight.

English in India has thus come full circle—the language gained a foothold in India as a result of the outsourcing of government jobs from Britain in 1844. Postindependence it was the tongue of exclusion and snobbery, the language of the boxwallahs^ao in their Calcutta clubs, speaking in clipped accents over their cigars and whiskey glasses. It was the password to the most rarefied social and corporate circles, a language connected with other rituals—candidates for job interviews at the most discerning private firms had to sport a flawless accent, and had to bring their wife along to a “lunch interview” so that they could ensure that she knew how to handle a fork and knife.

But after years of decline postindependence, the rise of English in the 1990s has, again, been enabled by outsourcing. And this time around, the rise of the language has been a groundswell.

The transformation of English and its blending with an explicitly Indian identity is something Macaulay did not want from his English-education policy. For instance, he was uncomfortable with the performance of Shakespeare in Indian schools, saying that, “I can conceive of nothing more grotesque than the scene from the Merchant of Venice, with Portia represented by a little black boy.” Clearly we are no longer—to recall an old Indian slur against English-literate Indians—“Macaulay’s children.”