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 ...

In all the celebrations about the arrival of the flat world, we somewhat forgot, that Globalisation has a reverse gear. This was indeed the point made by Joshua Cooper Ramo in his 2012 Fortune article ( see here ). If that sounded alarmist then, some events recently would reconfirm the death of the flat world that we thought we were living in. So, at this particular time, the frontier of globalism really messy right now. Consider these few things 1. There are refugee boats floating on the sea in Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, caught in storm and running out of food and water. Countries like Indonesia are refusing to take them, letting women and children die. Britain is doing even better, with Murdoch Press proposing to send gun-boats to meet them, as immigrants are like cockroaches, they say. 2. Russia has more or less exited the Power system established after the Second World War and is trying to re-establish the old empire. It has dismembered a neighbouring nation ...

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...

Since I wrote about Lord Macaulay in 2008 and praised the brilliance of his scheme, I have been engaged in the debate about Macaulay endlessly. If anyone has any doubts about how profound the effects of an education reform can be, Macaulay is a case in point. He used English Language as a weapon of empire building, and helped dominate a much larger country, India, through the creation of a franchise of privilege based on the language. Indeed, India was divided and had no sense of nation, as John Stratchey would later say. With the breakdown of state power, the indigenous education system was dying. These factors made Macaulay's passage rather easy - he did not have to engineer any full scale cultural revolution. Besides, his scheme was not an original invention as some would like to say. An education system based on the language of the state was an established way of dividing and governing a society, somewhat since the Roman time. In all fairness, Macaulay was only applying the l...

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...