English in India: Like Words from a Dragon’s Mouth

chillibreeze writer — Gautam Raja

When the British planted the seed of English, they had no idea that a virile, tropical beanstalk would explode in the India they left behind. The stalk would reach – if not the sky – far across the ground, and entrench itself firmly in this land of a thousand tongues.

English for all purposes, has been birthed in this country’s heat and dust. What started as a mere tool of babu communication has grown into a major part of the Indian consciousness.

Even an early Indian writer in English, Rabindranath Tagore, wore the language withgreat comfort. English had already gone from mere communication to a vital art form. In later years, the great Indian novel grew so much that it adopted Salman Rushdie’s quote about how “… the Empire writes back …”

So, while many traditionalists looked upon English is a lingua franca of pure necessity, English returned to the West as the expression and framework of Indian identity. But the great Indian novel was an empty fist compared to what was yet to come.

Globalisation, that uber-coloniser, enabled the Empire to not merely write back, but to strike back. English is returning to the Centre not just to populate bookshelves and take the occasional literary award, but to create a new economy and to change the lives of Joe and Janet. Joe, who is just an honest man trying to feed his family, thinks outsourcing is doing more than taking away his afternoon’s catch of fish. He believes it is making off with his fishing rod, hook, line and sinker.

But, as level-headed observers have pointed out, business is all about buying cheap. Why else would Korean cars go across the world to countries that make perfectly good automobiles of their own? And if companies in Joe’s country are getting their information and services at an inexpensive rate, the advantages are more money, more growth, and, in the end, more jobs of a higher quality. Eventually, people on both sides of the argument win.

However, English in India still bubbles in a ferment of art, politics and marketing. For example, Mahesh Dattani, an award-winning playwright in English, has to defend his choice of language even today. At conferences, play readings, apres-performances and book launches, he has to face the question: But why do you write in English?

It’s almost an accusation, and a suggestion that perhaps Dattani has short-changed himself and Gujarati, his native tongue. His answer? “Because I do.” In an age where dreams translate seamlessly into everything from Pali to Java, there is little else to say.

While English as valid art may still face the occasional confrontation, urban India has settled comfortably into its irregular verbs. The English spoken on the top floors of city apartment buildings is not Indian English – a variant considered ungrammatical and unworldly on this level – it is perfect, international English.

The word ‘international’ is important, for it conveys how Indians are at home with both American and British variants (though they use British spelling and lean more towards British English). Wide literary and pop culture exposure also means that concepts such as city blocks, blue cheese, Thanksgiving and Coronation Street are not lost. And a good copyeditor will know the phrases ‘tabling a motion’ or ‘one trillion’ mean different things on different sides of the Atlantic.

This grammatical and cultural fluency is a potent weapon for India, even as its manufacturing industry cowers before the growing Chinese dragon. With Chinese goods everywhere in the region – from Dubai’s Karama market to Bangalore’s Gandhinagar – the beast is reaching mythical proportions. There is the threat of a marketing war between the two nations – a race to see who can colonise the colonisers first. However, the Chinese dragon is missing one crucial part. English is India’s breath of fire.

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—About our writer:

Gautam Raja is a writer and freelance journalist
based in Bangalore. He writes plays, feature stories and essays.

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