LET me share with you first a few of my recent experiences in India to assure you that English is indeed, flourishing, in daily life, education, and government — it is a huge, lucrative business.
I taught for a few years at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar . As Chairperson of the Department of English one of my responsibilities was to review applications for admissions to our Master's programme. I noticed quickly that about 95 per cent of the applicants were women.
I asked my secretary to explain the reasons. He said: “All parents believe that they can arrange better marriages for their daughters if they are enrolled for an M.A. in English, even if they do not stay long enough to complete the degree!”
I discovered another aspect of the significance of English in daily life when I landed in Delhi in January. I stayed for a few days with my niece and her husband. I wanted to take a taxi. As my niece phoned for it, she urged me not to speak a word of English to the taxi driver. Why not? The driver will charge me double the rate because he will assume that I speak English and I am rich. Most taxis in Delhi do not go by the meter; you have to haggle over the fare before you get into the taxi.
In February, I went to Mahilpur in Hoshiarpur, Punjab , where I had been born and received my school and college education. As I walked around the town of about 15,000, I counted 12 private schools in addition to the two big state schools for boys and girls. Started since about 1980, all these schools stressed that their medium of instruction was English; they also charged substantial amounts for tuition.
I met several of my close relatives and other friends, all of whom said that their children would have no future without going to an English-medium school. My nephew, who holds a high position as part of the Indian Administrative Service, has placed his 10-year-old daughter at a famous school in Dehra Dun . “If you go to any of the lesser known schools, you are wasting your money”, my nephew told me. It is costing him thousands of rupees a month to give his daughter the right pronunciation and right social connections through her school!
Let me also say that these English-medium schools are mushrooming everywhere in the country and their operators are making huge amounts of money by forcing parents to give donations in addition to tuition fees. Of all the millions who attend these institutions, only a small number succeeds in getting a good education and suitable arranged marriages.
Since 1947, when the British colonial administration granted independence to India , something unexpected has happened. By using English as their language of instruction in schools, people have eliminated a vast majority from the marketplace. Out of a population of almost a billion, not more than three or four per cent can read, write and speak English fluently; they are the ones who run everything in the country.
They get selected to civil and administrative services and the Army. They appear in High Courts and the Supreme Court of India. They work for daily and weekly papers. They secure high positions in industry and business. They run the computer industry in Bangalore and elsewhere. They get degrees in engineering and in medicine. They constantly preach the dogma that India cannot survive without them.
When I started my education in early 1940s, I went to the boys' school in my village. We studied Urdu in elementary school. In fifth grade, we took up English; in seventh grade, we added Hindi to our courses. One language we never touched was Punjabi, our mothertongue. Some educators used to argue that you do not have to place Punjabi in the curriculum because everybody knows his mothertongue, you go to school to learn something you do not know.
Just imagine the implications of this for the USA . You would go to school only to learn German or French or Italian or Arabic or Swahili, but not English.
In India — do not extend their patriotism to include the promotion and development of their mothertongue. Indians do not want to lower their social standing by learning their own tongue.
A prominent poet and historian and a pal of mine, is translating Shakespeare into Punjabi propels for the first time. Instead of requesting schools and colleges to adopt it as a text for students, some Indian academics say smugly: “You are downgrading Shakespeare by rendering his work in your native language.” It never occurs to them that when they read Dante or Tolstoy in English, they are looking at a translation.
I went on to Punjab University College , Hoshiarpur, for graduate studies in English. Luckily for us, the university had lost its centre when Lahore became part of Pakistan after partition in 1947. Even luckier, the new University College was only 14 miles from my village.
All our college and university instruction was in English. Our lecturers typically came to class with a set of notes which had turned yellow with age and which they read out in class. For Shakespearean tragedy, the great authority was A.C. Bradley. Our instructors summarized Bradley's analysis of Hamlet and Macbeth for us and expected us to memorise everything. All ideas came from English writers and critics. We were not supposed to deviate from them or corrupt them with our own responses in the context of our lives.
The edited version of a paper presented at English Speaking Union, Cincinnati , Ohio , on April 15, 2003. The writer teaches comparative literature in Cincinnati University . He is a distinguished scholar of Shakespearean texts.