By some estimates, there are now more speakers of English in India than in Britain, perhaps seventy million, and their sounds range from the most pukka 'Oxbridge' enunciations to the obscure pidgins of the street. A country with many languages has remade English with many voices. Part of the fascination of English in India to the standard English-speaking visitor is the richness and completeness of its appropriation by the Indian people.
A few facts: English is the de facto language of official life in virtually every sphere. Most reliable estimates give about twenty five million regular users of English. The speakers of English - overwhelmingly from the educated, ruling élites - number more than the speaker, of some 'official' languages, like Assamese or Punjabi. The continuing power and influence of the language are remarkabale. It is the state language of two states - Meghalaya and Nagaland - and it is taught as a second language at every stage of education in all the states of the country. Many of the national daily papers are in English (Times of India, Bombay; the Pioneer, Lucknow; the Mail, Madras; the Telegraph, Calcutta). Out of nearly 16,ooo newspapers registered in India in 1978, about 1,000 were in English, a figure surpassed only by Hindi newspapers. More important is the fact that English newspapers are published in virtually every state, more than Hindi-Urdu and more than Bengali. All-India Radio is a world leader in the use of English, broadcasting throughout the subcontinent. The marriage of English and the languages of India has made what Anthony Burgess has called a 'whole language, complete with the colloquialisms of Calcutta and London, Shakespearian archaisms, bazaar whinings, references to the Hindu pantheon, the jargon of Indian litigation, and shrill Babu, irritability all together. It's not pure English, but it's like the English of Shakespeare, Joyce and Kipling - gloriously impure.'
In 1986, Soutik Biswas was a reporter on the Telegraph, Calcutta’s English-language newspaper. He was taught British English but he has adopted something of an American style: he refers to rupees as 'bucks', reads Mad magazine, and listens to jazz. On every assignment he will use an extraordinary variety of English (mixed in with two or three Indian languages) and his work, at both the spoken and written levels, typifies the situation of English in India today. If we follow him on one particular story, we find that the international qwire service in the Telegraph office operates in Standard English, while the editors briefing - about outbreaks of violence on some neighbouring fish-farms, or bheris - is naturally in English with an Indian accent. On the way to the assignment, Mr Biswas collects one of the Telegraph's photographers, Dilip Banerjee. Their conversation is in a mixture of English and Bengali. When they arrive at the fish-farm Mr Biswas discovers that the story is quite a serious one. Bandits - dacoits as they are called - have murdered two of the manager's men and are terrorizing the property. It is time to talk to the manager. His command of English is extremely limited. The conversation, in Indian English, goes something like this:
BISWAS: So what exactly are the problems you are facing now?
MANAGER The exactly problem of the fishing ... and dacoit robbery …
BISWAS: (Writing in his notebook) Hooligans problems.
MANAGER: On twentyninth June. About nine p.m. We take dinner at the time. They attacked in his hut. They come and they attacked and they fired and they murdered my uncle.
BISWAS: (Asking about a second attack) And the second time ...
MANAGER: Broad daylight. Three p.m. They attacked and murdered - open daylight - my second manager.
All this is repeated in an unmistakable Indian mode, with much nodding of the head, prompting, repetition, and suggestion. Sometimes, Biswas will conduct interviews in Bengali or Hindi. But he always takes notes in English: working for an English‑language newspaper it is the only sure way of getting accurate quotes.
When Soutik Biswas finally reports this story in the Telegraph, he writes in Standard English, with occasional Indianisms, under the headline FISHERY OWNERS FEEL INSECURE.
Frequent dacoities and looting of fish from bheris in the Sonarpur area has created a serious law and order problem. Tension prevails in the entire area which has 60 bheris. Dacoits armed with pipe guns, swords and sticks strike before the villagers can retaliate. They surround the bheris and loot the fish. For the villagers, the attacks are 'straight out of Hindi movies’.
This fragment of Indian journalism is an unspectacular but typical example of the everyday uses of English in a society that is continuously indigenizing a foreign language. It is the reinterpretation of the English language by the Indian people - a process echoed in Ireland - that has fascinated visitors from the very beginnings of the British involvement in India.
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
The English have had a toehold on the Indian subcontinent since the early 1600s, when the newly formed East India Company established settlements in Madras, Calcutta, and later Bombay. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Company controlled many aspects of Indian administration, reinforced, culturally, by the work of English missionaries. In 1813, the East India Company was dissolved and India became the keystone of an English‑speaking empire stretching throughout South‑East Asia. A flood of English‑speaking administrators, army officers, educators, and missionaries scattered English throughout the subcontinent, and the English of the subject Indians ('Babu' or 'Cheechee' English) became a widespread means of communication between master and servant. Almost from the first many prominent Indian leaders began to pester the East India Company with requests that its officials give instruction in English (not Sanskrit or Arabic) so that young Indians could have access to the science and technology of the West.
The real beginnings of bilingualism in India occurred in 1835, when the historian Thomas Macaulay, as president of the Indian Committee of Public instruction, proposed the creation of 'a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern - a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect'. Macaulay, whose History of England had achieved a spectacular popularity, was an out-and-out champion of the superiority of European culture (evaluating the rival claims of Arabic and Sanskrit, he once remarked that 'a single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'). Macaulay's plan was adopted. At a stroke, English became the language of government, education, and advancement, at once a symbol of imperial rule and of self-improvement.
The results of this policy were dramatic. English-speaking universities were set up in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras in 1857, the year of the Mutiny. By the end of the century, with many more colleges and universities established, English had become the prestige language of India, completely supplanting Persian and Indian rivals. When the nationalist movement began to gather momentum during and after the First World War, the medium of nationalist opposition was not Hindi, or one of the many other Indian languages, but English.
The imperialists' fascination with India - its people, its culture, and its landscape - was expressed in a substantial adoption of Indian words and phrases. Words of Indian origin have insinuated themselves into English since the days of Elizabeth I, words like brahmin, calico, curry, and rajah. By the end of the seventeenth century, they bad been joined by coolie, juggernaut, bungalow, cheroot, pundit, and chintz; and at the end of the eighteenth century, by bandana, jungle, jute, toddy, and veranda. As early as 1614, a letter written by two English traders already shows the local language creeping into their style:
Their last was of the 15th present, with a copy of the king's 'furmand' [furman: command]. Since then they have procured the dispatch of two haddies [ahadi: a royal messenger], who are ordered to carry to them the royal farman, in command of John Willoughby, 'Cojah [Kwaja Abul Hasan] havinge given them his parwanna [parwana: a written order] to see all things restoored unto you and re-established againe in youre formar trad and priviolidges. The messengers should therefore be acquainted with all moneys unjustly take from them, either by Safi Khan, 'Chukedares' [chaukidar: here, a custorn-guard] or 'radarries' [rahdar: a road-guard].
Throughout the nineteenth century, the English administrators added more and more local words to their basic vocabularies, words like chutney, guru, cummerbund, and purdah. A flourishing genre of handbooks for the English visitor to India sprang up, with titles like The Oriental Interpreter:
The new arrival in India, ignorant of the language of the country, is puzzled for some time, to comprehend his countrymen, whose conversation 'wears strange suits', and even he, who has been for years a sojourner in India is, to the last, unacquainted with the meaning of numerous words, which occur in his daily newspaper, the Courts of Law, and the communications of his Mofussil or upcountry correspondents.
The scale of English borrowing from Indian speech has had various estimates. The Oxford Dictionary lists about 900 words; a mid-nineteenth-century glossary runs to 26,000. One volume above all, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Words, compiled and published in 1886 by Colonel Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, is the classic summary of the mingling of the two cultures before the age of independence, at once stylish and informative. The glossary, whose title showed its authors' understanding of the relationship between English and the languages of India, was published two years after the first fascicle of the OED. It was an ambitious volume and, in the words of Yule and Burnell, 'was intended to deal with all that class of words which ... recur constantly in the daily intercourse of the English in India, either as expressing ideas really not provided for by our mother tongue, or supposed by the speakers (often quite erroneously) to express something not capable of just denotation by any English term.' Hobson-Jobson records thousands of such usages: amah/ayah (nurse), burra-beebee (lady of high rank), chota-hazry (light breakfast), and so on. As we shall see, the inventions of Indian English have been sustained to this day, and many regret the absence of a new dictionary of contemporary Indian English.
For a completely unforced, unselfconscious portrait of the state of English in India at the turn of the century, there are the delightful Letters From India by Anne Campbell Macleod, who married Sir James Wilson in 1888, and then went to India for a stay of twenty years. Lady Wilson described the experience in a series of letters to her family in England. She writes about the life of Anglo-lndia with obvious enjoyment, describing her travels to Simia, the Khyber Pass, and Benares with infectious enthusiasm. At the centre of official life, she witnessed the 1903 Durbar, criticized the early independence movement and mourned the passing of Queen Victoria, noting that 'She was worshipped by Her people in India, who identified Her with their gods, and to whom She was an incarnation of Motherhood.'
But she was not blindly imperialist. She took a keen interest in Indian culture, art, and music. From the beginning her comments on the language of the Raj are highly illuminating. Immediately after her arrival in India she started to learn Hindi; without a basic grasp of the local language she would be unable to communicate with her servants.
Thanks to my Hindustani grammar, I can make myself understood now by the cook and bearer. I take Akbar's accounts about twice a week, for he keeps the purse and is majordomo, local caterer, middleman between us and the villagers. The rest of our shopping has to be done by correspondence, and is associated in my mind with interminable receipts, which have to be signed by the sender and receiver, as well as by railway and post-office clerks.
She was self-aware enough to contrast her own inadequate struggles with the native language with the achievements of the educated Indians she met in her capacity as Sir James Wilson's wife.
From all this you may gather that I don't find Hindustani by any means easy. But when one remembers how marvellously educated Indians have mastered our complicated language, with its arbitrary differences in the pronunciation of words spelt in the same way, and its many idioms, so entirely unlike their own, one is ashamed of one's own stupidity, and renews the attempt to learn their language for the pleasure of being able to talk to them in their own tongue.
Quite quickly, Anne Wilson got to know all the local people, and her command of the superior language meant that leading Indian fathers tried out their children's education on the English memsahib. 'They bring their boys to read English to me, or show me their little English essays.' She made a note of the Indian English she encountered:
I am advancing at least in one branch of my new education, as I am learning by rapid strides the full inner meaning of 'chits' - these being scraps of paper with messages from neighbours, to which you are expected to add your answers at once.
Observing the highest echelons of Indian society, she notes the way in which some Indians become completely - almost absurdly - anglicized or deracinated.
K.S.'s father was cupbearer to Maharajah Duleep Singh's mother, and he was taken by the Maharajah as a boy to England to be educated, with some vague idea of his representing his interests in Parliament. That idea was given up, and K. S. returned to India highly educated and quite denationalized, not even knowing a word of Hindustanti.
In 1901, by now thoroughly at home with the Anglo-lndian way of life, her wide-eyed comments about local customs and languages are fewer. It is clear from her letters that in some circles, English was used even by the servants: 'Our first essay to enter alien ground (a conversation with an Indian civil servant) was not wholly a success, partly perhaps because of the presence of attendants who understood English, which destroyed some of the intimacy of a three-handed talk.'
Three years later, in 1904, Lady Wilson recorded a conversation in Calcutta with 'a Bengali writer of plays' that opens a window on to a political landscape with implications she (with her generation) probably could not grasp.
'We are a conquered race,' said the playwright, speaking very intensely. 'Sometimes I like to write a satire.' He threw back his head and his eyes blazed. 'I like to show up those creatures of my race, who go to England and forget their own traditions, and come back dressed like foreigners, monkeys, beef-eating rascals. I like to hold them up to ridicule, their clothes, their habits, and all their tomfoolery.'
THE INDIANIZATION OF ENGLISH
The Raj created an essentially bilingual society, Indian English and one (or more) native languages. There were infinite gradations of Indian English, ranging from the less-educated varieties (variously referred to by Hobson-Jobson as Babu English, Butler English, Bearer English, and Kitchen English), to educated or standard Indian English, often very scholarly and bookish. Yule and Burnell, identifying speech patterns we have already noticed in Chapter 6, described the most pidginized Indian English as follows:
The broken English spoken by native servants in the Madras Presidency; which is not very much better than the Pidgeon-English [sic] of China. It is a singular dialect ... thus I telling 'I will tell'; I done tell = 'I have told'; done come = 'actually arrived' . . . The oddest characteristic about this jargon is (or was) that masters used it in speaking to their servants as well as servants to their masters.
At the other end of the scale, college graduates might occasionally embellish the language of the Raj with an exotic flourish. The author of Onoocool Chunder Mookerjee, a memoir published in i873, writes that, 'The house became a second Babel, or a pretty kettle of fish. His elevation created a catholic ravishment throughout the domain under the benign and fostering sceptre of great Albion.' As in the English of some Irish writers, one can almost hear the writer translating into English from his mother tongue. (Even now, Indians who recognize several varieties of Indian English can often identify from which mother tongue English is being translated.) Much more common was the bureaucratic use of Indian English. Below the level of the most highly educated, whose English was invariably modelled on old-fashioned teaching, were the English-using clerks of the Imperial administration. These tended to introduce some characteristic Indian uses into their speech. They would say I am doing instead of 'I (constantly) do'; I am doing it for 'I have been doing it'; when I will come for'when I come'. A question like 'Will you please do this?' in Indian English becomes You will do this? A scribe in a letter will often give 'sympathetic consideration'.
In India today, Dr M. P. Jain, of the Indian Institute of Technology, is studying, with the aid of a computer, the unique character of Indian English. He is concerned about the Indianization of English, whose contemporary developments he is charting by storing millions of words in a database. A great collector of 'mistakes', Dr Jain distinguishes four important characteristics of Indian English. First, 'There is one type of flavour that comes from archaic words.' He quotes a sentence like, 'What's the time by your time-piece?' or 'You must have been out of station [away].' Second, there is the special flavour gained from words that have been borrowed from Indian languages. We have already seen Soutik Biswas use words like bheri and dacoit. An Indian might say, 'He went to the temple to have a darshan of the deity.' The word darshan means 'to offer worship'. An Indian might not even say 'temple' but use the Indian gurdwara instead. Words like lakhs ('a sum of money'), crores ('tens of millions'), goondas ('hooligans'), jhuggies ('shacks'), and hartal ('work-stoppage') are all part of the contemporary vocabulary of Indian English. Third, another quality of Indian English comes from ’a curious combination of two words in English doing a new kind of function'. For example, mixy-grinder, which is Indian English for a food blender. An Eve-teaser is someone who harasses women; a gunnybag is a sack; a lathicharge is a police baton charge; a stepney is a spare tyre. In the same category, we find, anti-people is 'not in the interests of the people'. An ace-defector is 'a past master at defecting'. In Indian films, a playback singer is 'a singer who provides the voice for an actor who is mouthing the words not singing'. Finally, there are the famous Indian English hybrids, godown space for 'warehouse', newspaper wallah (a man who sells newspapers), and box-wallah (a businessman).
Another characteristic of Indian English is the literal translation of idiom, echoing the earlier medieval tradition of translation from French into English of phrases like 'a marriage of convenience' and 'it goes without saying'. Today there are several such Indian English translations that may become part of a shared vocabulary: may the fire ovens consume you, a crocodile in a loin-cloth, and comparisons like as good as kitchen ashes, as helpless as a calf, and as lean as an areca-nut tree. Abuse in Indian English is a particularly rich source of idiomatic translation. From masters to servants: you donkey's husband. From parents to children: why did I rear a serpent with the milk of my breast? To women only: go and lie with a licking male dog. To oneself: I am a leper if there is a lie in anything I say.
In addition to these kinds of translations, Indian English possesses a number of distinctive stylistic features, some of which are inspired by local languages and some by the influence of English educational traditions. For example, there is a drift away from Anglo-Saxon words towards a Latinized vocabulary. An Indian speaker would prefer to say demise than death. There is a great range of polite forms in Indian English: I bow at his feet, long live the gods, God is merciful, and we only pray for your kindness. Speakers of Indian English, influenced by their own languages, like to create phrases like nation building, change of heart, and dumb millions. They also abbreviate and rearrange English phrases. 'An address of welcome' can become a welcome address, and 'a bunch of keys' will be a key bunch. Some commentators on Indian English have noticed an excessive use of cliché: better imagined than described, do the needful, each and every, and leave severely alone. Perhaps most difficult of all to convey is the way in which Indian speakers will switch backwards and forwards between their mother tongue and Indian English, in the course of conversation, often in the course of a sentence. Typically, for the visitor, a burst of incomprehensible Bengali or Hindi will be punctuated with words like 'unprecedentedly', or 'opening batsman', or 'Times Literary Supplement', or 'wishful thinking'.
Dr Jain accepts that Indian English must have an 'Indian' colouring: 'If we are using English in Indian, we have to integrate it with our social system. It must reflect our social reality. Now to that extent words like bheri and darshan are appropriate.' But he is at odds with those who believe that Indian English should take pride in and develop its native idiosyncrasies. Dr Jain expresses his worries for the future:
But there is another aspect where we are using English as a window on the world of knowledge. Then it has to be in line with Standard English. Now it is that aspect which is a bit disturbing. There are occasions when Indians are not understood. This is what Mrs Gandhi complained about when she was unable to understand the contribution of an Indian delegate to an international meeting - and the delegates spoke in English.
To emphasize his concerns, Dr Jain cites the example of Indian students, in the social sciences especially, who can no longer understand the Standard English of their textbooks:
We now have a very interesting industry in India where standard books written by American or British authors are rehashed into a kind of Indian English. A famous textbook by an American economist, Microeconomic Theory: A Mathematical Approach, becomes A Theory of Firm: Economic and Managerial Aspects.
A sign of 'deterioration' for Dr Jain, this for some is the logical and necessary fulfilment of a process that stretches back into the days of the Raj. As in the Caribbean, as in West Africa, the search for an authentically Indian voice in an alien language involves the remaking of the language in a local context.
BY INDIANS FOR INDIANS
Bookish or idiomatic, the making of Indian English was a marriage between the sympathetic elements of English society, typified by writers like Rudyard Kipling (who described Indian English as 'a clipped, uncertain sing-song') and E. M. Forster, and the innovative, responsive elements of Indian culture. Nearly half a century ago, before the great watershed of independence in 1947, the Indian writer Raja Rao made a famous summary of the problems of a bilingual community:
The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own. One has to convey various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word 'alien', yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up - like Sanskrit or Persian was before - but not of our emotional make-up. We are instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.
Raja Rao also addressed the question of style in Indian English. He wrote: 'The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move we move quickly. There must be something in the Sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on.'
After independence, the question of language and style became crucial. The Constitution of 1950 recognized fourteen Indian languages, of which Hindi was to be the first national language. Prime Minister Nehru declared that it was government policy to shake India free of English 'within a generation'. English was to be a transitional language until 1965. In reality, it is still the language that examines students in the universities, conducts foreign affairs and opens the way to a business career. In the words of one scientist, 'English is of course not necessary for learning science, but science is an international activity and it's convenient to have a link language which is understood by most people ... If you meet an active, working scientist abroad, then more often than not you can get by speaking English with him.’
Indian English has begun, also, to develop its own literary credibility. Before independence, there were English writers, like E. M. Forster, who wrote about India as outsiders; and there were Indian imitators. These were despised by their colleagues who, remembering Yeats's warning in 1937 that 'no man can think or write with music and vigour except in his mother tongue', rejected the 'alien' language as a literary form. After independence, this view continued to find vigorous expression. It was said that Indians who wrote in English 'do not have a real public in India, where literature is defined in terms of the different native languages, and their claim can be justified only by appreciation in England or the United States'. In spite of the controversy, Indian English writing - fiction, poetry, essays, and journalism - has gained such a flourishing international reputation as Indian writing that is now being recognized as one of the Indian literatures; not as 'a blind alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere', but as 'one of the voices in which India speaks. It is a new voice no doubt, but it is as much Indian as others.'
Professor P. Lal, who likes to quote such comments, runs a writers' workshop designed to promote the writing of Indian English. His circle has included the novelist Anita Desai. It is a sign of the times that his efforts on behalf of Indian English, considered laughable in the 1960s, are now widely respected. When his present group gathers to read its work to him, he listens, and reads out a poem — to make a point.
Why not let the English language to relax,
And have a truly tropical weekend?
After a course of the choicest Indian rudery,
English may return, chastened, to its prudery.
No? You won't agree?
Forgive me, you look sickened.
In Shakespeare's day,
English was such a dandy ...
As well as holding seminars for writers who are exploring with him the byways of Indian English ('the Indian languages love elaboration'), Professor Lal publishes for India. He has about six hundred books in Indian English on his list, and he makes this prediction:
You'll always have Indians who speak very good and correct English. But in fifteen or twenty years we might have evolved a language which is so truly and richly and uniquely and indigenously our own that you will have to carry a tourist guide, with footnotes, as to what these words mean. This will be a language written for Indians by Indians. And with no other outside audience in mind ... We will create another indigenous language, like Urdu, like Sanskrit and Hindi ... English is not my mother's tongue, but it is my mother tongue. And that's the way it is with many lnd ians - we have no choice of it.
Indian recognition of the bilingual traditions and distinctiveness of its culture is being backed up in academic circles by a sharper interest in a serious Indian English dictionary. In 1976 the Little Oxford Dictionary included a thirty-two page 'Supplement of Indian Words', drawing on Hobson-Jobson and some others. But these, the lexicographer pointed out, 'appeared nearly a century ago, before the time of satyagraphis, razakars, naxalites, gheraos, dosas, idlis, bosons, and jhuggies.' Not only are there many new developments in Indian English that need to be recorded, some of the definitions in, say, Hobson-Jobson, are ludicrously out of date:
Butler. In the Madras and Bombay Presidencies that is the title usually applied to the head-servant of any English or quasi-English household. He generally makes the daily market, has charge of domestic stores, and superintends the table. As his profession is one which affords a large scope for feathering a nest at the expense of a foreign master, it is often followed at Madras by men of comparatively good caste.
We have already seen the emergence of dictionaries of Australian English, Canadian English, Jamaican English, and South African English. Indian English has now been sufficiently recognized - internally and externally - as institutionalized on its own terms; and a dictionary of Indian English is under discussion at the offices of the Oxford University Press in Delhi.
The traditions of English, as we have seen, are peculiarly deep-rooted in India. Since 1947, there have been three schools of thought about the role of English in an independent India, and they provide a pattern for the likely future debate about English in the Third World generally. A small minority looked for ever-closer ties between 'International English and Indian English. Then there were those - mainly Hindi - who worked towards the day in 1965 when Hindi would become the official language. In fact, as 1965 came closer, the hostility of the South to the Hindi supremacy in the North proved decisive in favour of English. In May 1963 there were language riots in Tamil Nadu. The Indian Parliament capitulated. English could ‘continue to be used, in addition to Hindi, for all the official purposes of the Union ... and for the transaction of business in Parliament'. The third prevailing school argued for the status quo. In due course, this position has become stabilized as the so-called Three Language Formula: English, Hindi, and one other Indian language.
As the century draws to a close, the language debate is focused on questions such as the place of English in education, the proper roles for the three languages, and the model of English to be offered to Indian learners of English. The answers to these questions will be partly shaped by government policy, partly by pressure groups within India (pro and anti-English), but overwhelmingly by the reality of the society and the culture, the total permeation of Indian life by Indian English, a constant reinterpretation of English in new and changing Indian situations. It is a living language in a living environment, and the result is a new language, yet another of the many new Englishes emerging round the world.
The unique place of Indian English in the spectrum of English today makes it an attractive alternative to many Third World students for whom training in Britain or the United States is either too expensive or politically unacceptable. H. C. Narang, of the Centre for Linguistics and English at Nehru University, New Delhi, has taught students from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Laos, Kampuchea, and Vietnam and believes that 'some of these countries feel culturally closer to us, and politically closer, too'. There is also the feeling that ‘at the academic level, there will not be much harm if they come and learn their English in India ... English has been with us for almost two hundred years'. The English taught in this school is not the more idiosyncratic Indian English we have seen in this chapter. Teachers make a point of 'exposing our students to the native pronunciation of British English, through the BBC tapes and some of the BBC films'. In this school, the teachers believe that they have developed what they like to call 'a non-aligned variety of English'. For Dr Narang, the learning of English now transcends national boundaries:
Those countries which have strong groundings in English - like India, or Pakistan, or Bangladesh, or the countries in East Africa and West Africa - share in the task of teaching English to other countries who do not have any English but who do need English. In that sense we are helping the cause of English in a big way. This is no more the cause of England or America, it's the cause of the world.
The immediate and possible future power of Indian English can be seen in the sphere of Indian influence, that is to say, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and, further afield, the English-speaking parts of South-East Asia, notably Singapore.
From: The Story of English (Robert McCrum et al, 1986/1992)