English as India's Link Language

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India has no national language. The Constitution designates Hindi in the Devanagari script as the official language of the Union, lists twenty two languages in its Eighth Schedule for official recognition, and leaves each state free to adopt its own languages for its own administration. Into that arrangement English enters not as a national tongue but as a working one: the language of the Supreme Court and the High Courts, of much central legislation, of higher education in most technical and professional fields, of the corporate sector, and of communication between an official in Chennai and an official in Chandigarh who share no Indian language. Very few Indians speak it at home. The census records first language English speakers in the low hundreds of thousands out of well over a billion people, while the number claiming it as a second or third language runs into many tens of millions. English in India is almost entirely an acquired language, and that fact governs everything else about its position.

Its institutional foothold was established deliberately by the colonial state. In 1835 the Governor General, William Bentinck, resolved that government funds for education should support instruction in English, a decision argued for in a notorious minute by Thomas Babington Macaulay which dismissed the entire literary output of India and Arabia as worth less than a single shelf of a European library and proposed forming a class of interpreters between the rulers and the ruled, Indian in blood and colour but English in taste and intellect. Whatever else it was, this was effective administrative policy: it produced clerks, lawyers, teachers and journalists, and it created a pan Indian professional class educated in a common language. That class then used the language against its authors, since the Indian National Congress conducted much of its business in English, and a great deal of nationalist argument was written in it.

The fifteen year clock that never ran out

At independence the language question was the most divisive matter the Constituent Assembly faced, and the compromise it reached was explicitly temporary. Article 343 made Hindi the official language of the Union but provided that English would continue for official purposes for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution in January 1950, that is, until 1965, after which Parliament could legislate for its continued use. The intention of many northern members was that Hindi would displace English over that period. The intention was not shared in the south, where Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam are Dravidian languages with no relationship to Hindi and their own long literary traditions, and where the prospect of a Hindi speaking north monopolising the civil service was understood as a straightforward transfer of opportunity.

As the deadline approached the issue detonated. In January and February of 1965, Madras State saw sustained and violent agitation against the imposition of Hindi, with student led protests, police firing, deaths, and several self immolations. The central government retreated. The Official Languages Act of 1963 was amended in 1967 to guarantee that English would continue as an associate official language of the Union indefinitely, and that any change would require the consent of every state legislature that had not adopted Hindi, a condition designed never to be met. The parallel education policy, the three language formula adopted in 1968, asked schools to teach a regional language, Hindi and English, with Hindi speaking states expected to teach a southern language; in practice most northern states substituted Sanskrit, and Tamil Nadu rejected the formula outright and has taught Tamil and English only ever since. The result is that English survives in India in large part because it is nobody's mother tongue and therefore advantages nobody's region.

Ladder or gate?

The most consequential argument about English in India today is not constitutional but about class. On one reading, English is the mechanism by which advantage is transmitted: the good jobs require it, the elite schools teach it, and a child educated in a Bengali or Marathi medium government school who arrives at an English medium university is placed at a disadvantage that no amount of ability easily overcomes. On this account English is a gate, and the fluent English of the metropolitan middle class functions as a class marker at least as reliably as any older one. On the competing reading, English is the one prestigious resource in India not owned by a hereditary group. It carries no caste, and the argument, made forcefully by Dalit intellectuals including the writer Chandra Bhan Prasad, is that access to English offers a route out of inherited occupation and local hierarchy that access to Sanskrit or to a regional literary language never did. In 2010 a temple to English as a goddess was founded in a village in Uttar Pradesh to make exactly this point, a gesture that was half provocation and wholly serious.

Household behaviour has answered the question in its own way. Enrolment in English medium schooling has grown very fast, including in low fee private schools serving poor families, and the promise of English is central to their marketing whether or not the teaching delivers it. Governments have followed rather than led: several states have converted government schools to English medium instruction in the face of objections from language activists and educationists, who point out that children learn foundational concepts better in a language they already speak and that badly taught English medium instruction can leave a child fluent in neither language. That pedagogical concern is well evidenced and sits awkwardly against a parental demand that is overwhelming and unlikely to reverse.

Meanwhile the language itself has stopped being anyone's property. Indian English has its own standard usages, its own vocabulary and a large body of literature; it has also exported a long list of words into global English, among them bungalow, jungle, shampoo, veranda, pyjamas, loot and cot. Newspapers in English have national circulations, Indian novelists in English have won the major international prizes, and India's ability to supply services to the anglophone world, from software support to accountancy to medical transcription, rests on a workforce educated in the language. That commercial fact has quietly settled a debate that constitutional argument never could. The remaining friction is about who gets in: whether English is a public utility that the state should teach well to every child, or a private advantage that the market distributes to those who can pay for it. India has not decided, and its schools reflect the indecision.

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