In India, a New Heyday for English (the Language)

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes, December 14, 2003

In India, a New Heyday for English (the Language)

By AMY WALDMAN

     PATNA, India It seemed an unorthodox, even risky, career move when
Birbal Jha, then a 21-year-old with a master's degree in economics,
started the British Lingua, an English coaching center, 10 years ago.
There was only one other English-language coaching institute in this city
in Bihar, a state that is a center of Hindi nationalism. Today, there are
an estimated 150 such centers, their advertisements elbowing for space
along Ashok Rajpath, a main street here. The Language Lab, Modern Spoken
and Written English, BBC English - all are here, even a copycat to Mr.
Jha's enterprise called the British Lingua Center.

Mr. Jha's classes are full of young Hindi men who want to get an M.B.A. or
enter the army or police force, young Muslim women in black hijab aiming
for the civil service, housewives who want to follow new English programs
on television and gain the status that speaking English bestows. Most are
middle class or the upper end of poor. They are not the great masses of
India's very poor, who still primarily speak the subcontinent's many
regional languages, which in some ways are flourishing too. But the new
English speakers are also far removed from the few privileged Indians who
once perfected English at Eton-like schools as a way of separating
themselves from India.

In the past decade, English has moved from being the gatekeeper of the
elite to being a ladder up for the masses, or as the writer Mark Tully
puts it, from "being the language of status to being the language of
opportunity." As India's economy has opened to the outside world, and as
the Internet and television have brought in the outside world, English has
become a passport to everything from jobs in information technology to
scholarships abroad.

"Today, young Indians in the new middle class think of English as a skill,
like Windows or learning to write an invoice," Gurcharan Das wrote in an
essay in Outlook Magazine in August. Many mix Hindi and English -
Hinglish, it is called - often switching in midsentence. Anjoo Mohun of
the British Council in New Delhi, said: "As an Indian, I find the change
rather curious. At one point, to us, English was the language of the
colonials. Today, it is the language of international business."

Or as an industrialist, Mukesh Ambani, noted in an interview last year,
the British curse "has become the British blessing." More than a
half-century ago, the movement for independence from British rule was also
a movement against English, although the movement's leaders happened to
express themselves quite eloquently in it. When the Indian Constitution
was written in 1949, it allowed the use of English in government work
until Hindi could take over, a period meant to be 15 years. Fifty-five
years later, the actual takeover has never taken place, and not just when
it comes to court judgments, bureaucratic files and other official
discourse.

In part, that is because southern states, where hundreds of millions of
people speak languages like Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, rejected
efforts to impose Hindi, deeming it as much a colonizing force as English
was. India's upper classes, meanwhile, who sometimes seem to have picked
up where the British left off, complete with "saheb"-spouting servants,
never relinquished their attachment to English. Many still turn up their
noses at learning any Indian language at all, proudly professing their
ineptitude in Hindi. Entrepreneurs like Mr. Jha, a Brahmin whose English
blends a Bihari and American accent, have also helped stoke Indian
strivers' aspirations. His company's CD-ROM's play to dreams of flight,
flashing names of American cities, then walking users through arrival in
America: immigration, the foreign exchange booth and so on.

Since most government schools still teach in Hindi or regional languages,
the urge for English is changing the educational system, prompting an
enormous growth in private schools that teach in English, and even
prompting some states to introduce it as the medium of instruction in
government schools. States like West Bengal, which had defiantly banished
English decades ago, have now invited it back. James Tooley, a professor
at the University of Newcastle in England who has studied the growth of
private schools in the slums of Hyderabad, India, said interviews with
parents suggested that the desire for English as the language of
instruction was by far the strongest reason for seeking out such schools.
"It has lost all its connotations with the British Raj," he said. "It is
seen as the language of jobs, of progress."

In Bihar, a poor state where most people seem eager to leave, English is
seen as a ticket out. In Hyderabad (or Cyderabad, as it is known in its
guise as information technology hub) English is seen as a way into jobs at
the growing number of call centers that deal with Americans, Mr. Tooley
noted. Paradoxically, the acceleration of English has been presided over
by a Hindu nationalist-led government. Despite token stabs at reversing
the tide (the "need of the hour is to give up unnecessary affection for
English," one government official proclaimed recently) even Hindu
nationalists no longer make much noise about English.

"Hindi has political significance, English has economic significance, and
status goes with economy," said Krishna Kumar, a professor in the
department of education at Delhi University. Official efforts to promote
Hindi soldier on, through the Department of Official Language in the
Ministry of Home Affairs, which has 85 bureaucrats in Delhi and an
additional 1,500 around the country. Its purpose was to help Hindi replace
English as the language of government work, in part by teaching Hindi to
civil servants.

"I don't think this takeover business ever happened," conceded M. L.
Gupta, a joint secretary in the department. "But if you want to understand
the real India, you have to use Hindi." That is because, for all the Mr.
Jhas, most Indians, who live in villages and in poverty, still have no
access to any English education. The elite has grown and become ever more
elastic, but it remains an elite.

"If you know English, it is a passport to success, entree in a circle,"
said Yogendra Yadav, a respected political scientist. "Absence is a
guarantee for failure." Mr. Yadav called it "linguistic apartheid,"
arguing that no elite had so thoroughly turned its back on its country's
native languages as had India's. The result, he said, is that many
important debates never reach the masses because they take place only in
English.

But no one is writing off Hindi just yet, nor Gujarati, Marathi or the
other regional languages, not least because they remain the language of
home and the bazaar, and in many cases, of rich literature. Hindi is
spoken by about 300 million people by most estimates, putting it among the
world's most-spoken languages. The proliferation of Hindi news channels
(there are now eight), the success of Bollywood films, even the growth of
a Hindi-speaking middle class, have given the language a national, and
natural, reach as never before.

And the Hindi propagated through culture and the media is a much earthier
form, Mr. Kumar said, closer to what people speak than the Sanskritized
version officially promoted. "The market has come to the rescue of the
spontaneity - the variety - of Hindi," Mr. Kumar said.