Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  Not felicity, but competence, often at very basic levels, was the acquisition of the overwhelming majority of the new English-speaking Indians. A very small number could be held up for having learnt the language to some degree of eloquence. And the idea that English-language skills would filter down to the masses was not really feasible, and, in any case, was never implemented seriously. What did emerge was an English-speaking elite, largely restricted to the administrative and professional classes. Of these, the most ubiquitous was the babu, still defined in the Webster’s Dictionary as ‘A native clerk who writes English’. The Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote caustically in 1873: ‘The baboos will be indefatigable in talk, experts in a particular foreign language, and hostile to their mother tongue … Some highly intelligent baboos will be born who will be unable to converse in their mother tongue … Like Vishnu they will have ten incarnations, namely clerk, teacher, Brahmo, accountant, doctor, lawyer, magistrate, landlord, editor and unemployed … Baboos will consume water at home, alcohol at friends’, abuses at the prostitutes’ and humiliation at the employer’s.’ 32

  As more and more educated Indians persevered to pick up English, it took a perceptive Englishman, Lord Curzon, who came to India as governor general in 1899, to understand what had really happened. The emphasis on rote, he observed, was the result of making English the condition for government employment. He noticed too the ensuing contempt for the vernacular languages, and deplored the decline of elementary education in the mother tongue. All this, he said, was due to the ‘cold breath of Macaulay’s rhetoric’. Curzon’s remarks were not official British policy, of course. His concern was that of an acute and informed observer, and it was expressed as an obiter dictum, not as a resolve to reverse Macaulay’s vision and the policies based on it. As an imperial power, Britain had no reason at all to question Macaulay’s triumphant assertion to the British Parliament in July 1853 that his minute had indeed ‘made a great revolution’.

  3

  Macaulay’s Legacy

  In the decades that followed Macaulay’s triumph, a small cluster of middle-and upper-middle-class Indians diligently cultivated the English language. The early members of the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885 by an Englishman, A.O. Hume, were largely from this background. When they met to discuss public issues, such as the desirability of greater representation for Indians in administrative and legislative bodies, the conversation was in English, in settings reminiscent of a British drawing room. Nehru attended the Bankipore session of the Congress in 1912 and recalled: ‘It was very much an English-knowing upper-class affair where morning coats and well-pressed trousers were greatly in evidence. Essentially it was a social gathering with no political excitement or tension.’1

  Outside the ‘politics’ of the Congress, for those Indians who found employment in the sarkar, particularly in the slightly elevated echelons, a noticeable feature was the manner in which they tried to model themselves on their English superiors. It is once again Nehru who hits the nail on the head: ‘This official and Service atmosphere invaded and set the tone for almost all Indian middle-class life, especially the English-knowing intelligentsia … Professional men, lawyers, doctors and others succumbed to it. All these people lived in a world apart, cut off from the masses and even the lower middle class.’2 As always, the emulation of the British was accompanied by a denigration of what was one’s own. Nehru wrote that even in a relatively small city like Allahabad, his father, Motilal, ‘was attracted to western dress and other western ways at a time when it was uncommon for Indians to take to them except in big cities like Calcutta and Bombay … He had a feeling that his countrymen had fallen low and almost deserved what they got … He looked to the west and felt greatly attracted by western progress, and thought that this would come through an association with England.’3

  The advent of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi gave to India’s freedom movement a more radical agenda and a mass following. Nehru became his devoted lieutenant, and with his leftist leanings sought to steer the nationalist upsurge towards structural change in favour of the urban poor and the peasantry. The more pragmatic Gandhi was often a check on Nehru’s revolutionary zeal, but both of them were in complete agreement on the role of English in the free India for which they were working. In a remarkably strong and reasoned statement Gandhi spoke his mind as early as 1921:

  It is my considered opinion that English education in the manner it has been given has emasculated the English-educated Indians, it has put a severe strain upon the Indian students’ nervous energy, and has made of us imitators. The process of displacing the vernacular has been one of the saddest chapters in the British connection. Ram Mohan Rai would have been a greater reformer and Lokmanya Tilak would have been a greater scholar, if they had not to start with the handicap of having to think in English and transmit their thoughts chiefly in English … No doubt they both gained from their knowledge of the rich treasures of English literature. But these should have been accessible to them through their own vernaculars. No country can become a nation by producing a race of translators. Think of what would have happened to the English if they had not an authorized version of the Bible. I do believe that Chaitanya, Kabir, Nanak, Guru Govind Singh, Shivaji and Pratap were greater men than Ram Mohan Rai and Tilak … I refuse to believe that the Raja and the Lokmanya could not have thought the thoughts they did without a knowledge of the English language. Of all the superstitions that affect India, none is so great as that a knowledge of the English language is necessary for imbibing ideas of liberty and developing accuracy of thought. It should be remembered that there has been only one system of education before the country for the past fifty years, and only one medium of expression forced on the country. We have, therefore, no data before us as to what we would have been but for the education in the existing schools and colleges. This, however, we know, that India is poorer than fifty years ago … The system of education is its most defective part. It was conceived and born in error, for the English rulers honestly believed the indigenous system to be worse than useless. It has been nurtured in sin, for the tendency has been to dwarf the Indian body, mind, and soul.4

  Gandhi’s views did not change, for, in 1944, just a few years before Independence, he spoke in a similar vein, but this time with a sense of foreboding about the consequences for the future: ‘Our love of the English language in preference to our own mother tongue has caused a deep chasm between the educated and the politically minded classes and the masses. We flounder when we make the vain attempt to express abstruse thoughts in the mother tongue … The result has been disastrous … We are too near our own times correctly to measure the disservice caused to India by the neglect of its great languages.’5 Nehru was, if anything, as emphatic: ‘Some people imagine that English is likely to become the lingua franca of India. That seems to me a fantastic conception, except in respect of a handful of upper-class intelligentsia. It has no relation to the problem of mass education and culture. It may be … that English will become increasingly a language used for technical, scientific and business communications, and especially for international contacts … but if we are to have a balanced view of the world we must not confine ourselves to English spectacles.’6 And, even though as a result of many years at Eton and Cambridge, English had become Nehru’s first language, he was perceptive enough to note why this had happened. ‘The British had created,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘a new caste or class in India, the English-educated class, which lived in a world of its own, cut off from the mass of the population …’

  But in spite of such strong views, both Gandhi and Nehru were defeated by Macaulay’s legacy. As early as 1925, the Congress had adopted a resolution that its proceedings shall be conducted as far as possible in Hindustani. But, given the linguistic predilections of the pan-Indian leadership of the freedom movement, little progress was made in the implementation of the resolution and English remained the official language of the Congress. In fact, the depende
nce on English of those who were at the forefront of the freedom movement only grew over the years. This was partly understandable, because their interlocutors were the British, and the memorandums and petitions had to be in English. But it is significant that Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy in India, thought that they often came across as even more British than the British. Delivering the second Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture in 1968, Mountbatten reminisced: ‘They were all professional lawyers steeped in the law and especially in British constitutional law. In this respect they were almost more British than the British. They were all masters of the English language, indeed of a clearer and purer prose than many of our British politicians. It was not only Churchill who carried on the traditions of Gibbon and Macaulay. The classical polish of Nehru’s written and spoken word was truly memorable.’7

  And so it was, that at the stroke of the midnight hour on the night of 14 August 1947, when India finally broke the chains of British bondage, Nehru’s first words to the millions across the country waiting with bated breath to hear one of the most towering leaders of the freedom movement, were in English. ‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny,’ he said. ‘And now the time has come to redeem that pledge …’ He spoke with eloquence and passion and a transparent sense of destiny. But, unfortunately, only a minuscule elite could understand what he was saying. Even the intermediaries created as a result of Macaulay’s policy could not really be trusted to understand or spell ‘tryst’ correctly. It was truly an ironic situation: an Indian leader choosing to speak to his own people at the very moment of freedom not in his own language but in that of the ruler, fully aware that most of his compatriots would not understand what he was saying, and yet, nobody—not those who listened without understanding, nor those who listened but understood only partially because their comprehension was limited to their clerical knowledge of English, nor the handful who, like Nehru, could speak the language with fluency and felicity—thought this to be unusual. Had Nehru spoken in Hindi, large numbers in the southern or eastern or some other parts of India may still not have understood all that he would have said. But at least the language would have been of the soil, of a country they could now truly call free and their own, rather than the language of the very conquerors whose departure they were celebrating—a language whose idiom and emotional quotient could hardly touch them.

  To be fair, the Constituent Assembly that met in 1946 to draft a Constitution for free India understood the importance of a national language for a newly independent nation that had been held in servitude for close to 200 years. But, once again, the legacy of Macaulay was not easy to overcome. Dr Rajendra Prasad, the Chairman of the Assembly, himself acknowledged this: ‘Whatever our sentiments may dictate, we have to recognize the fact that most of those who have been concerned with the drafting of the Constitution can express themselves better in English than in Hindi.’8 After interminable drafts and discussions, a compromise was arrived at. Hindi in the Devanagari script was to be the official language of the Union. However, English would continue for a period of fifteen years to be used for all official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before the adoption of the Constitution, and if need be its lease of life could be further extended beyond the period of fifteen years through Parliamentary legislation.

  The intention of the Constitution-makers was crystal clear: English was to be progressively phased out to make way for Hindi as the national language. Article 351 laid out the policy guidelines framework through which this was to be achieved: ‘It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India and to secure its environment by assimilating, without interfering with its genius, the forms, styles and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule, and by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.’

  The charge against the English-knowing members of the middle class in the higher echelons of the Union administration and in the states, and their supporters in the professions, the armed forces, and in the corporate world, was that they had no intention of seriously implementing the stipulations of the Constitution. As so presciently predicted by Macaulay, they had become used to English as the language of usage; for many of them English had replaced even their mother tongue. In Nehru, whose first language was English (and he had the honesty to admit this), they had a powerful patron. The result was that many of the policy measures that could have been taken to facilitate the acceptance of a national language in the early years after 1947, when patriotism was high and memories of the freedom struggle still vivid, were either ignored or implemented indifferently. The violent protests that erupted in the mid-1960s, most vociferously in the southern state of Tamil Nadu (where the majority was Tamil speaking), against the imposition of Hindi, could perhaps have been pre-empted by a more persistent and imaginative handling at the very outset. The cynical could even argue that the hardening of positions between those for and against Hindi was a rather convenient development for the small but powerful group that had always remained unconvinced of the need to replace English.

  It is true that the often excessive zeal of the propagandists of Hindi alienated many of their fellow citizens whose mother tongue was not Hindi and made the implementation of the language policy difficult. But it is also true that influential bureaucrats, in collusion with their mentors in politics, did little to counter the chauvinisms on both sides of the divide through resolute policy initiatives. There was little incentive for those who had been trained to dispose of their files in English, and whose knowledge of Hindi was minimal or inadequate, to devote time to the implementation of Article 351, or dwell overtime on the formulation of a three-language formula, or ensure the allocation and optimum utilization of grants for the teaching of Hindi in non-Hindi-speaking states. The one point on which the proponents of English were united was that Hindi was being made into an unspeakably difficult language by the ‘narrow-minded’ experts entrusted with its development. The criticism was partially valid, but for the wrong reasons. The motivation behind the plea for Hindustani, made forcefully and pertinently by people like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, was not to maim the development of Hindi, but to enrich both Hindi and Urdu through the retention of a language which had become the lingua franca of the common man, especially in large parts of northern India. However, the essential sentiment of the English-speaking upper middle class was not for an enriched blend of these languages but for an anaemic by-product which could be easily understood by them.

  To make Hindi ‘simple’, and not to creatively extend its reach and enrich its texture, was the simplistic demand of the entrenched elite. The humiliation inherent in such an approach for a newly independent nation, proud of its culture and heritage, was largely unfelt by them. What would be the reaction in England—and indeed of Macaulay, were he around—if an influential lobby seriously argued for the deliberate pauperization of the English language! Hindi is a language with centuries of evolution and a sophisticated and extensive vocabulary. It could not be crippled or retarded simply to make it more comprehensible to those who had developed a greater facility in English. The same was true for the other great languages of India, whose development was also held to ransom by the preference for English of the ruling elite in the different states of the Union. None of this, of course, was of much concern to the self-assured world of the English-speaking classes. For these successful progeny of Macaulay, there was little reason to displace a language which provided them effortless social standing, access to the best educational institutions and the best jobs.

  It is important to emphasize that this is not a diatribe against the English language. English has for historical reasons become a language spoken by a great many people in the world. It is an indispensable tool to interface with a globalizing world. More
over, as a language, it has a beauty and dexterity of its own. Languages by themselves are not guilty of cultural domination, their usage is. For Indians it is relevant to introspect on what the imposition of English has meant to them, as a people, a society and a nation. Even as more and more Indians queue up to learn English, we are witness to the most unacceptable linguistic shoddiness in a nation with an inestimably rich linguistic tradition. Anyone who sees the quality of English prose in government files will be left with no doubt about the truth of this assertion. English-medium schools may proliferate, but the entire country is dotted with examples of the shockingly inadequate grasp of the language. Spellings are an approximation: ‘danting’ for denting, ‘panting’ for painting, ‘break’ for brake, ‘nodels’ for noodles. Grammatical mistakes abound: smart young airline stewards and hostesses will invariably ‘look forward to serve you again’; every second overworked person will complain about ‘so much of work to do’; few people ‘will let you know’ instead of ‘would let you know’. Syntax, too, is mostly wrong, and pronunciation is often ridiculous.

  Those who think they know the language speak it in a typically over-adjectivized and stilted manner. Former prime minister Vajpayee is reported to have once quipped that the British finally left India not because of the freedom movement but because they could not bear any more the massacre of the English language! Even the best English-language newspapers have routine mistakes of spelling and grammar, and except for columns by a handful of people who have an enviable command of the language, the rest of the writing is wearisome in its mediocrity. The comparison with the newspapers in England is stark. The effortless literary felicity in evidence there should have prompted most Indian newspapers to opt out of English long ago.