Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  On this basis the real question is: how did English ever spread in India at all, beyond the transplanted society of the ‘writers’ (i.e. clerks) of the East India Company, and British regiments serving in the country? The situation, after all, was almost identical with that of the contemporary Dutch in the East Indies, with Persian cast in the role of Malay, Urdu as Javanese, and Portuguese as its very own self. And as we have seen, after a first half-hearted attempt to teach their own language, the Dutch had contented themselves with the linguistic status quo: Dutch never became the language of any but the colonial rulers in the Dutch East Indies (see Chapter 11, ‘Dutch interlopers’, p. 395). If this pattern had been followed, Persian would have remained the preferred common language of India to the present day.

  And there was an extra motive in the back of British minds which drained any enthusiasm for wider use of their native language in India. As a member of the British Parliament put it in 1793: ‘We have lost our colonies in America by imparting our education there; we need not do so in India too.’42 This loss was very fresh in memories in the late eighteenth century: Lord Cornwallis, the very general who had delivered the British surrender to George Washington in 1781, went on to become governor-general of Bengal from 1786 to 1793. Settler communities of Europeans, if they became well established, might follow the American example, and look for independence on their own terms. On this reasoning, India must remain a foreign country, albeit one kept open reliably for British business; it should not be a new British home. Richard Wellesley, governor-general from 1797, wrote to the chairman of the Board of Control in 1799:

  … with relation to powers of banishing Europeans from the British possessions in India … those powers appear to me still to be too limited.

  The number of persons [not in the company’s service] resident in these provinces, as well as in all parts of the British empire in India, increases daily. Among these are to be found many characters, desperate from distress, or from the infamy of their conduct in Europe. Their occupations are principally… at Calcutta, the lowest branches of the law, the establishment of shops and taverns, or of the places of public entertainment, or the superintendence of newspapers… Amongst all these persons, but particularly the tribe of editors of newspapers, the strongest and boldest spirit of Jacobinism prevailed…

  In Madras, the evil resulting from Europeans not in the Company’s service is still greater. The advisers of the nabob of the Carnatic, as well as the principal instruments of his opposition to the British government, and of his oppressions over his own subjects, are almost exclusively to be found among that class of Europeans.43

  British settlement in India, then, apart from activities directly sponsored by the company, was not even seen as desirable by the British authorities. From 1757 to 1856, Kampanī Sahib, as it was known, proceeded to expand its financial, political and military control first across Bengal to Delhi, then across the Deccan, and finally to most of what is now India, Pakistan, Śri Lanka and Burma. The one thing the company hardly spread at all was a body of speakers of its own directors’ language.

  Protestantism, profit and progress

  In the end, the wider spread of English was begun not by the East India Company, but by British Protestant missionaries.* The company was in general suspicious of missionary involvement in its domains, on much the same grounds—and with better evidence—as those on which they shunned other Europeans. The bloody mutiny of their Indian troops in Vellore, near Madras, in 1806 was associated with rants by one Claudius Buchanan on Hindu indifference to Christianity, demanding ‘every means of coercing this contemptuous spirit of our native subjects’; in 1808 the company had speedily to suppress a tract put out by the Baptist Mission Press in Serampore (Śrirampur), near Calcutta, ‘Addressed to Hindus and Mahomedans’.44 India has long been a dangerous place for pressing a religious point, and the company was sensitive to this hazard, which could be highly damaging to trade.

  Nevertheless, there had been churchmen at the company’s settlements from the earliest days. Early on, they had had to work in Portuguese, like everyone else, a requirement made explicit in the company’s renewed charter of 1698.45 But soon they began to found English-language schools, primarily for children—often orphans—of company employees and servants: at Madras in 1715, Bombay in 1719, and Calcutta in 1731. The schools grew in attendance, then multiplied, and became centres of access to English, with attached printing presses and libraries. It was clear to anyone that English influence and power were growing massively throughout the eighteenth century: not surprisingly, ambitious Indian parents increasingly tried to obtain for their children a knowledge of English, to share in this growth. Around 1780 the raja of Ramnad (Ramanathapuram) sent his own son to Schwartz’s missionary school at Tanjore (Thanjavur), south of Madras. Schwartz’s schools were being supported by all the main powers in the region: the English Company, the Muslim Haidar Ali and nawab of Arcot, and the Hindu raja of Tanjore.46

  The market soon responded. By the turn of the century, ‘mushroom’ schools were growing up in all the centres of English power, but especially round Calcutta. The teachers, ‘the broken down soldier, the bankrupt merchant and the ruined spendthrift’,47 were in it mostly for the money, but they included respectable British ladies, such as one Mrs Middleton of Dinapur, outside Patna, and even the celebrated Baptist missionary William Carey of Serampore. They were aimed at prosperous Indians, and the fees charged were high. Nevertheless, the attitudes of the teachers were increasingly patronising. Writing to a military officer on the first day of 1801, the Reverend D. MacKinnon revealed his motives:

  … I could not discover one particle of classical taste, of the knowledge of mathematical truth, or of genuine moral or religious principle in any class nor in any individual of the human species born and educated in Hindostán or even in all Asia. The dark race appeared and do appear to me, buried in darkness, moving like mere mechanism and utterly void of those sentiments which dignify and ennoble our species and entitle us to claim kindred with the Gods.

  All my speculations were at last reduced to two simple propositions.

  1. That the natives of India cannot be illuminated by their own languages, nor by the Books now existing in those languages.

  2. That therefore they must be enlightened by the acquisition of other languages & by reading Books capable of forming their taste & of teaching them useful & solid knowlege as well as genuine moral and religious principles.

  So long ago as the year 1787 after preaching a Sermon on Christmas Day on the field of battle of Kudjuah … I seriously resolved to try the effect of my own feeble efforts. I compiled a Grammar of the English language of which the rules & instructions were written in the Persian language & character. This Book was published in 1791 at the expence and risk of the Proprietors of the Calcutta Gazette Messrs Harington & Morris. I also was at the trouble & expence of causing a Version of the Grammar to be made into the Bengal-language, but that version was not printed.

  You will smile when I mention, that when I resolved to make this effort, I formally applied to Government for permission to let in day-light on the Natives of this country. But I mention it, to observe & testify with gratitude, that in all my applications public and private to Government and respectable Individuals, I met with decided encouragement & approbation.

  It is but too true that these efforts have not as yet produced any visible effect; altho I can produce instances of Individual natives who have acquired a competent knowlege of the English language by the help of my Grammar…48

  As the actions of the East India Company were more and more subjected to scrutiny and control in London, these attitudes—often shared by such influential reformers as Charles Grant, William Wilberforce and James Mill—were becoming the motive force of policy. In 1813 the House of Commons resolved that ‘it is the duty of this Country to promote the interests and happiness of the native inhabitants of the British dominions in India, and that measures ought to be introduced
as may tend to the introduction among them of useful knowledge, and of religious and moral improvement’.49

  In the nineteenth century, as British political control expanded and hardened in India, the old laissez-faire business ethic in dealing with the natives, which had entailed a robust mutual respect, was increasingly replaced by an unashamed belief in European superiority, coupled with a duteous endeavour to bring up ‘the dark race’ to the moral and intellectual level of the Godfearing Briton.

  The company’s Charter Act of 1813 included the provision that ‘a sum of not less than a lac [100,000] of rupees in each year shall be set apart and applied to the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India…’ But at this stage the company’s traditional distrust of missionary priorities was still effective: the funding was explicitly aimed at ‘fostering both Oriental and Occidental science… a reliable counterpoise, a protecting backwater against the threatened deluge of missionary enterprises’.50 The decision on how this small sum was to be applied turned out to be crucial for the language history of the subcontinent.

  The missionaries’ wish to give priority to the English language was all the time gathering support from the home government, and at last from the Indians themselves. In the late eighteenth century the company, following popular urging, had founded a number of prestige colleges for the acquisition of Indian learning: for Muslims the Calcutta Madrassa in 1781, for Hindus the Benares Sanskrit College in 1791, and for incoming civil administrators from Britain the Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800. All of these had some classes conducted in English; and Fort William had little else. In the early nineteenth century spontaneous foundations were also made by eminent citizens, notably in 1817 the Hindu College of Calcutta, for ‘the cultivation of the Bengalee and English languages in particular; next, the Hindustanee tongue…; and then the Persian, if desired, as ornamental general duty to God’.51 Ram Mohan Roy, who is considered its presiding genius, was a scholar of Sanskrit and Arabic, but vociferous in his appeals for greater access to English.

  … we understand that the Government in England had ordered a considerable sum of money to be annually devoted to the instruction of its Indian subjects. We were filled with sanguine hopes that this sum would be laid out in employing European gentlemen of talents and education to instruct the natives of India in mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, and other useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world … We now find that the Government are establishing a Sanskrit school under Hindoo pundits to impart such knowledge as is clearly current in India …52

  Several new government colleges were also founded, often in oriental disciplines, but under pressure from London the oriental ones were offered various inducements to improve their English-language instruction. Then in the early 1830s came catastrophic falls in the enrolments for all non-English subjects, and corresponding surges for English. A public meeting in 1834 protested against patronage of the classical languages, and in favour of English and the vernaculars.53

  In this context, the General Committee of Public Instruction made its long-delayed decision on how to spend the company’s annual lakh of rupees to promote literature and knowledge. Reversing their previous preference, which had followed the hints in the charter, for native learning (and the translation of European scientific texts into Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian), they decided on 7 March 1835 that ‘the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India; and that all the funds appropriated for the purposes of education, would be best employed on English education alone’.54

  This decision, although still controversial at the time, proved fateful.* The number of the government’s English-language schools more than doubled within three years of the English Education Act.55 This was just the beginning. When in 1857 universities were founded in the classic three British cities, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, English would be their language of instruction. And this educational preference was simultaneously reinforced in 1835 by a regulation that English was to replace Persian as the official state language and the medium of the higher courts of law, with lower courts using the local vernacular.56 Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian had hitherto kept a half-practical value, comparable to the survival of Latin into early modern Europe: henceforth, like Latin after the Enlightenment, they would be consigned to purely classic status, symbols of heritage rather than vehicles of learning and research. And English, which had been little more than the mark of a foreign ruling caste, was now going to serve as the means for opening the whole subcontinent to foreign traditions of culture.

  The basic language balance had been struck, and it persisted in India through to independence in 1947. And in practice, although English is now classed as an Associate Official language of India, theoretically inferior to the eighteen official vernaculars, it has persisted right up to the present day. English is universal in South Asia as the lingua franca of the educated: how many actually know it is harder to say, with estimates over the past twenty years rising from 3 per cent to 30 per cent of Indians, but fewer in the other states of the region.57

  Another long-term influence that favoured English, especially in the south, was the absence of any other useful lingua franca: Britain’s domain had always included the south of the country, and went on to encompass the whole subcontinent; but Persian or Hindi-Urdu were never acceptable south of the old Mughal boundary. If India, especially a democratic India, is to stay united, it needs a common language that seems neutral, or at least equally oppressive to all.

  Success, despite the best intentions

  Although Britain had certainly not conquered South Asia in Seeley’s ‘fit of absence of mind’, the spread of Britain’s language which followed on from the conquest was almost fortuitous.

  The success of English here came about by processes totally different from those that worked themselves out in North America; and these processes were different even from those that had put Britons and Indians in contact in the first place. In North America, English spread while remaining quite detached from local populations, simply displacing them over time by overcrowding numbers and overwhelming settlements. In South Asia, English spread by recruiting the local elites. Despite the company’s early fears, English-language immigrants never became very numerous, never stayed for long, and by and large have all now left.

  One essential force driving the recruitment was cultural prestige, definitely a British characteristic by the nineteenth century; and the attractions of this prestige went beyond the early motives of gaining preferment in the government or business. Yet it was not cultural prestige which had made India British, but rather the animal spirits of the men in the East India Company. The one point at which these romantic chancers* drew the line was any thought of meddling with local religions, or the roles of the languages that seemed so closely associated with them. Protestant missionaries, for all their many scruples, did not have this one, and it was precisely on this point that they gradually won the argument back in the home country. The company men at last were forced to take the risk of a prescriptive line on native education: imagine their surprise when it not only did not cause riots, but even proved popular with the (thinking) public. Indian scholars found that English did indeed give them access to a world of thought beyond Indian tradition, in law, physical and social sciences, politics, literature—even, here and there, religion.

  In fact, the only disappointment was felt by the Protestant missionaries, who, having won the linguistic and cultural argument, and accepted the gratifying popularity of English-language education, still failed to find many converts among the new English speakers. By and large, the worldly content of modem European culture proved much more attractive to Indi
ans under British rule than any new and readier access to Protestantism. In that sense, the missionaries, who had confidently predicted that ‘a thorough English education would be entirely subversive of Hinduism’,58 were deceived.

  English has remained all over the region, long after the conquest that made its presence possible has been undone. English will probably continue to spread here, or rather to thicken, with the growth of higher education (and other cultural influences, as we shall see). For this reason, the growth of English in India and the rest of southern Asia provides a far better model for any likely future spread of the language than does the history of English in North America.

  The world taken by storm

  ’North America speaks English.’

  Answer attributed to German chancellor Bismarck, when asked by a journalist in 1898 to identify the defining event of his times

  An empire completed

  These two means to the spread of English—what we may call American sweep-aside and Indian re-education—were to be applied, one or the other, across the whole British empire as it expanded to cover a quarter of the earth. Revealingly, the choice was correlated as much with climate as population: the typical—and ultimately most influential—settler is a farmer, and European farmers only really know temperate-zone crops. In temperate colonies, above all Australia and New Zealand, British long-term settlers became a majority of the population, and so English became the principal language. But in the tropics, where British activities were restricted to government, trade and commercial exploitation, the spread of English was more superficial, affecting local elites, and those in contact with British power centres, through school education and gradual recruitment of the locals into British government and enterprise: this was the pattern in most of the Asian colonies—Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah.