Sunday Posts

The use of the English language has always been a contentious subject in independent India.  It was after all the language of the colonialists, imposed on a subject people by force. It was then, as it is now, spoken by a tiny minority of Indians. It never became the Lingua Franca that some claim it to be. In fact, it never could attain, despite Macaulay's dream, the status of Sanskrit or Arabic, as those languages shaped the religious and spiritual lives of Indians the way English never would. In that sense, it was never the equivalent of Latin in England: It was rather like the French of the Normans, a symbol of a scandalous subjugation. The argument that colonialism civilised India has been long debunked. The import of English education in India was the cultural side of de-industrialisation, an act of destruction rather than creation. It was no mere coincidence that abolition of East India Company's monopoly on India trade moved lockstep with the introduction ...

English is fast becoming the world's language. While some Frenchmen are perturbed, and call the language penetrating even their universities 'American' rather than English, the Tower of Babel seems to be reaching a final solution.  Why does this matter? The apologists of English do not see this as an imperial project but a triumph of pragmatism, a natural corollary of globalisation and rise of an uniform consumer ethics. And, indeed, there is one view that it is the 'democratic' nature of English - the language can be molded and adapted to its host cultures infinitesimally - that makes it so popular. They claim this is not about English or American, but the story of many Englishes. So, you can speak any language as long as it is called English, which means an expansion of what some observers will call an Anglosphere. This is a sphere of influence of a certain kind of rhetoric, enabled by the unity of media and thinking. In one way, this is a function of te...

From Wikipedia : Globish is a subset of the English language formalized by Jean-Paul Nerriere . [ 1 ] It uses a subset of standard English grammar, and a list of 1500 English words. According to Nerriere it is "not a language" in and of itself, [ 2 ] but rather it is the common ground that non-native English speakers adopt in the context of international business. [For more, see HERE ] Now, Globish has its own book : Jean-Paul Nerriere and David Hon has written a book in Globish , on Globish . [This book is not available through Amazon in the UK, my first port of call for such projects, which lists instead Jean-Paul Nerriere's Parlez Globish , in French]. Robert McCrum, of London Observer, has now written a book on Globish , though he chose to write in English, and The Economist has recently reviewed it . So, as they say, Globish has the momentum! The idea is, as stated above, a platform for non-native speakers of English language to adopt and use the language, with...

I was prompted to write about Lord Macaulay because of a hoax mail forwarded to me. Eventually, I was surprised to find how widespread the hoax is, as I recently found Amitabh Bachchan , rather carelessly, putting it up on his blog . I know writing a blog is very different from writing a piece for a published journal, and on that count, Mr. B's indiscretion is forgivable. But he being who he is, his views will be counted - and therefore, one would wish he is more careful about what he writes, even in a blog. But, obviously, since I wrote about him, I seem to have acquired a connection with Lord Macaulay. I did not think I was writing about him, though; I found the quote sent to me full of contradictions, not just because of its rather modern language, but also because its public cynicism, which is not Victorian, and certainly not British. Coming on the wake of several famines, the comment that Macaulay did not see a poor man in India [before he decided to introduce Engl...

A friend has recently forwarded me a quote from Lord Macaulay's speech in the British Parliament on 2nd February 1835. I reproduce the quote below: "I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation." The email requested me to forward me to every indian I know. I was tempted, but there were two oddities about this quote. First, the language, which ...