Inglish as She’s Spoke

Two reports appeared recently in my newspaper that left me bewildered. The first said the Karnataka government still hasn't decided to rescind its ban on English in primary schools despite huge popular pressure. The second – a Karnataka minister, after a busy visit to China, announced that "members of the standing committee of the Jiangsu Provincial People's Congress wanted the help of the Karnataka government in teaching English in its primary schools." This was in pursuit of its objective to make every Chinese literate in English by the 2008 Olympics. The contrast between India's ambivalence and China's certainty is always instructive.

It does seem bizarre that a state whose capital is Bangalore – the symbol of India's success in the global economy – and which derives its competitive advantage from its mastery of the English language, should remain hostage to the insecurities of vernacular chauvinists. This, after more than 15 years when it first banned English from primary schools in the late '80s. Meanwhile, Bengal and Gujarat, realising their mistake, have gone back to teaching English after discovering they had created an unemployable generation.

I thought this debate was over, and English had won. But it seems many states, including Kerala and Karnataka, are still in a state of paralytic inaction, interminably discussing the language of school instruction. In a world where a quarter of the people already know the world language and where experts predict another half will be English literate within a generation, it's painful to see Indians – the envy of many countries for their English skills – being stopped in their tracks by vernacular Stalinists and their bogus arguments, telling parents, "You don't know what's good for your children. We do."

As for the Chinese, I try not to feel envious or fearful. While I am confident they'll win many medals at the next Olympics, I don't think learning English will be as easy. While I can't help but admire their ambition, I console myself with the thought that India has been spared their earlier ones at social engineering, the most prominent being the Cultural Revolution. A Chinese engineer, in India to improve his software and English skills, coincidentally told me that China's ambitions with regard to English are not only connected with their superpower ambitions but are also driven by envy over India's facility with the same.

I sometimes wonder what language Indians will be speaking 50 years on. Looking beyond the horizon of current events, two trends look likely to dominate our linguistic future. One, a rapid spread of English across India, including the aspiring lower middle-classes; the second – the unprecedented popularity of Hindi, even in the South, thanks to blockbuster Hindi movies and the universal appeal of Hindi TV programmes like Indian Idol and Kaun Banega Crorepati.

At the intersection of these two trends is the fashionable collision of two languages. It's called Hinglish, but should in fact be called Inglish because it is increasingly pan-India's street language. Mixing English with our mother tongues has been going on for generations, but what is different this time around is that Inglish has become both the aspirational language of the lower and middle middle-classes and the fashionable language of drawing rooms of the upper and upper middle-classes. Similar attempts in the past were considered downmarket, contemptuously put down by snob brown sahibs. This time, Inglish is the stylish language of Bollywood, of FM radio and of national advertising. Advertisers, in particular, have been surprised by the terrific resonance of slogans such as, 'Life ho to aise', 'Josh machine', and 'Dil mange more'. Radio Mirchi has found the same adoring response to: 'Ladki ko mari line, girlfriend boli, I'm fine!'

Unlike my generation, today's young are more relaxed about English and think it a skill, like learning Windows. No longer does it fly the British or US flags, except in the insecure minds of the Left or the RSS. Bollywood, TV, advertising, cricket – indeed, all our mass culture is conspiring to take English to the bazaar. Gone too is the ranting against English by swadeshi intellectuals. Every Indian mother knows that English is the passport to her child's future – to a job, to entry into the middle class – and this is why English medium schools are mushrooming in city slums and villages alike. English has quietly become an Indian language 50 years after the British left our shores. David Dalby, who measures these things in Linguasphere, predicts that by 2010 India will have the largest number of English speakers in the world. Thus, one of the cheerful things happening in India is the quiet democratising of English.

In Inglish, perhaps for the first time in our history, we may have found a language common to the masses and classes, acceptable to the South and North. We are used to thinking of India in dualisms – upper vs lower caste, urban vs rural, India vs Bharat – but the saddest divide, I always thought, is between those who know English and those "who are shut out" (the phrase of a deaf friend, Ursula Mistry, in Mumbai, who deeply feels the tragedy of those who can't participate). The exciting thing about Inglish is it may even unite Indians in the same way as cricket. We may thus be at a historic moment. One day, I expect, we will also find Inglish's Mark Twain, the writer who liberated Americans to write as they thought. Salman Rushdie gave Indians permission to write in English, but Midnight's Children is not written in Inglish, alas! And this is not surprising for the young Indian mind was not decolonised until the reforms of the 1990s.

What exactly is Inglish is not easy to define, and needs empirical research. Is its base English or our vernacular bhashas? If it's the latter, then it is similar to Franglais, the fashionable concoction of mostly French with English words thrown in that drives purists mad. Or is its support English, with an overlay of bhasha? I think it is both. For the upwardly mobile lower middle class, it is bhasha mixed with some English words, such as what my newsboy speaks: "Mein aaj busy hoon, kal bill doonga definitely." Or my bania's helper: "Voh mujhe avoid karti hai!" For the classes, on the other hand, the base is definitely English, as in: 'Hungry, kya?' or 'Careful yaar, voh dangerous hai!' The middle middle class seems to employ an equal combination, as in Zee News' evening bulletin, "Aaj Middle East mein peace ho gayi!" Three Hindi words and three of English.

In contrast to this vibrant new language, the old 'Indian English' of our headlines is an anachronism: 'Sleuth nabs man', 'Miscreants abscond', and 'Eve-teasers get away'. In the ultimate put-down, Professor Harish Trivedi of Delhi University contemptuously says, "Indian English? It's merely incorrect English." Inglish has parallels with Urdu, which became a naturalised subcontinental language and flourished mainly after the decline of Muslim rule. Originally, the camp argot of the country's Muslim conquerors, Urdu was forged from a combination of the conqueror's imported Farsi and local bhashas. As Urdu was transported to the Deccan, so is Inglish riding on the coat-tails of Bollywood across India.

So, is Inglish our "conquest of English" to use Rushdie's famous words? Or is it our journey to "conquer the world" as professor David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, puts it. He predicts that Indian English will become the most widely spoken variant based on India's likely economic success in the 21st century and the sheer population size."If 100 million Indians pronounce an English word in a certain way," he says, "this is more than Britain's population – so, it's the only way to pronounce it." If British English was the world language at the end of the 19th century after a century of imperialism, and American English is the world language today after the American 20th century, then the language of the 21st century might well be Inglish or at least an English heavily influenced by India (and China, to a lesser extent).

So what will happen to our mother tongues? This is the insecurity behind the ancient, paralysing debate over teaching English in primary schools. The vernacular chauvinists believe our languages and cultures will die under the mesmerising dominance of the 'power language'. They point to Gaelic and Welsh, which were eradicated by English. Vernacularists think we have made a pact with the devil – fluency in English gives us a competitive advantage, losing our mother tongue impoverishes our personality.

"Can English satisfy the imaginative hunger of the masses?" asks Kannada writer U.R. Ananthamurthy.

"Give me a break," retorts the poet Arvind Mehrotra. "The masses don't have imaginative hungers, and who is satisfying them anyway?"

Ananthamurthy proposed to the Kerala government that 'kacca' or spoken English be taught from the 1st standard, with the medium of instruction being Malayalam. I don't agree. Unless you acquire the nuances of English before 10, you are disadvantaged. But I have confidence in our culture. When Indians embrace English in order to win in the global market place, they don't turn their back on their mother tongue. While English empowers us, our mother tongue continues to give us identity. I agree with Ananthamurthy that in our big cities, we retain our 'home tongues', while using a 'street tongue' and working in the 'power tongue'.

In a wonderful essay, Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History, Sheldon Pollock, a Sanskrit professor at the University of Chicago, says our vernaculars were also 'created' and are not primordial, as vernacular nationalists would like to believe. The vernacularisation of Sanskrit began in the 9th century as Kannada and Telugu became the languages of literary and political expression in the courts of the Rashtrakutas and Chalukyas. Hindi was fashioned by Sufi poets in principalities like Orcha and Gwalior in the 15th century. Bearers of these languages were the elite and not the people, as Gramsci and Bakhtin made us believe. Our consciousness of a 'mother tongue' didn't even appear until the Europeans arrived. Languages are evolving things, we ought not to do too much social engineering. Vernacular nationalism is bad because it goes against the people's wishes. Instead of encouraging them by creating more English teachers, nationalists thwart their democratic aspirations. Why not celebrate potential gains, instead of worrying about phantom losses. Why not celebrate cool Inglish!