Give the Readers What They Want: Long, Unfunny Analyses of Linguistic Politics

Before leaving for India, I had a lot of conversations with people about what I was going to do here. One common concern I heard was about the language barrier; would I be able to communicate with the people I was associating with?

My response was to say, a bit dismissively, “Oh, everybody who’s educated speaks English.” This has proved to be more or less true. India’s educated, corporate middle class speaks English very well. But I had no idea just how fascinating and complex the language politics of India would be.

To say that English is one of the two national languages doesn’t begin to explain its cultural importance. The first time I visited the Lake Centre, where I play with five teenagers a few times a week, I told the kids I was learning Bengali. (It’s coming along, by the way, although not too quickly. Given that the people at work and at home are all essentially native speakers, there’s not a crushing incentive to get on the Bangla ball.) The kids’ response was a bit sad. Swarupa, who’s conversant in English, but not much more, said, “Bengali is a very bad language.” Surprised, I said, “I think it’s a very beautiful language.”

“No, no,” she told me. “English is a better language.”

It’s worth noticing that all the billboards for cell phones and new cars are all in English; and CNN-IBN, a national TV news station, has all of its programming in English, cricket updates and all. Furthermore, the ‘best’ schools are all English-medium schools. The national college entrance exams are in English. English is at once a symbol of affluence and social status, and a means of acquiring it. No wonder Swarupa wishes English were here mother tongue; Bengali is the language of the poor, while English is the language of camera phone users.

I can’t stress how weird I think this phenomenon is. Consider the debate about the national language in the US. I’ll just put it out there; I think it’s fascist to try and control the way in which people communicate. But at least, in the US, English is the language most people speak. In West Bengal, English has to be the 4th most common language, behind Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu. And yet, as it all states in India, there is an agreement that if you speak English, it means you are better, smarter, and more important.

Of course, for the people who do speak English, there’s a big incentive to protect the privileged status of the minority language. As long as academic institutions function in English, road signs are written in Roman script, and the advertisements for luxury items are in English, there is a real barrier to gaining social status, political clout, and economic power.. These three are finite resources, and so it’s a game of gaining monopoly power. I spoke to an anthropologist for a while when we were riding around Kolkata, and she actually wrote her thesis on this topic. “It’s the colonial hangover,” she told me. How do you fight that kind of discrimination, the kind that’s no more than a social agreement?

Furthermore, many of the new service sector jobs (like handling American companies’ customer service calls) are only available to those with high ability in English. English is part of the national strategy for economic development. To buck the trend and emphasize the mother tongues of children in education is to deny them a path to affluence. On the other hand, the typical Indian doesn’t have much access to those jobs in the first place. But the question remains—is it economically just to prevent someone from buying a lottery ticket, even if the odds are bad?

But what makes English in India even more intriguing is the way Indian speakers of English think about it. KanuPriya (who appears in episode 2, I think, when she makes me go buy sandals) told me that while Bengali is her ‘mother tongue,’ English is her ‘first language.’ I’d never hear anyone differentiate between the two. What she means is that her entire education occurred in English, from primary school to her undergraduate and graduate studies in the US. All her academic vocabulary is in English. She is quintessentially bilingual. When she is talking with Bengali-English speaker, she will (and this is typical) switch back and forth between the two languages, often in mid-sentence. Her Bengali is punctuated with copious amounts of English vocabulary—and not just because the Bengali language has absorbed so many words from the British (bicycle is ‘saikel,’ office is ‘ophish, etc). Her switching occurs spontaneously, using whatever word comes to mind first, regardless of language.

For two languages as different as English and Bengali, this is a bit surprising. For example, English, like all European languages, is a Subject-Verb-Object language; Bangla, like most (if not all) Asian languages is Subject-Object-Verb. Using foreign nouns isn’t to hard to imagine. But even English verbs get stuck into Bengali sentences, aided by the use of two words (kora, meaning ‘to do’ or ‘to make’ and hoya meaning ‘to get’ or ‘to become’) which are used as super-helping verbs. “Communiate korche” (meaning “communicating”) would be just as common to KanuPriya’s speech as would the Bengali synonym.

English isn’t the only linguistic way that the British made their mark. Shubhradi told me the other day about the origin of Urdu and Hindi. Prior to British involvement in the subcontinent, no such language existed. It wasn’t until the British started organizing armies of Indians that Urdu/Hindi developed as a amalgamation of various tribal dialects. Urdu/Hindi (originally the same language) was the common language of the soldiers, and it spread rapidly.

But the British saw this new common language as a possible tool for Indian unification. There’s a great line in “Passage to India,” where one stuffy British officer remarks “caste, or something of the sort, will keep them from coming together” to oppose British rule. The British came to power in India more or less by playing one Moghul king against another. Spurring divisiveness was a tool of conquest. To restrict the power of this new language, the British carefully advised Muslims to adopt a Persian/Arabic script to maintain their tradition, while they suggested that the Hindus use a Sanskrit-based alphabet, to preserve their cultural heritage, or something. Gradually, the two languages began to adopt more and more words from their respective “ancestral” languages, and drifted slightly apart. Today, a speaker of Hindi and a speaker of Urdu can understand one another entirely: but the two languages are held separate by deep religious and cultural chasms, dug by the British conquistadores.

Ultimately, the British were right to worry about a common language uniting Indians together. The language the freedom fighters eventually adopted was English—the initial home-rule newspapers were in English, and it was English-language education that provided Indian activists to the writings of the Enligthenment thinkers which they used to oppose British rule. It seems like so often, the colonized must resort to the language (both linguistic and rhetorical) of the colonizers in order to confront them; consider Dr. King quoting the Jefferson and Shakespeare on the steps of the Lincoln memorial—he picked the Lincoln memorial, for god’s sake!

In India, the residue of such a strategy was to polarize the nation with the language needed to liberate it. On one level, you can’t mind it too much as a tourist—even the average cab driver knows enough to tell you how much the fare was, using English numbers. But it’s a bit frightening to watch this footprint of British rule fly by you in every single conversation.