a mARTIAN dIARY

As a product of the Indian KV schooling system, some of my earliest memories date back to my English classes where spelling tests used to be the stuff my nightmares were made of. Having been constantly fed on 2nd hand DC comics that my father used to get me, “Color” is one of the first words that helped me realize that all English is not “good” English. I still remember the red marks (although I have to confess that a recent viewing of Tare Zameen Par refreshed those memories) in my English notebook with ‘color’ being one of the words prominently getting colored.

It’s been over 60 years since the Union Jack was taken off and replaced by our Tricolour at Red Fort. But even with a history spanning more than thousands of years, the 200 odd years that the British ruled us left a huge impact on us, nothing more profound than the popularization of (British) English as a means of communication. 60 years is of course too close to call, but at the dawn of the information age, the English legacy can be said to have had a positive impact on our economy. The availability of so many employable English-speaking youth is the single most important factor that has helped us emerge from our slumber in this age where English is the sickle which is helping us reap as the knowledge industry sun shines brightly

But gone are the colonial days when the sun never set in the British Empire and now the US of A has taken over as the dominant economy of the world and with the end of the cold war, its position as the first among equals has only gotten more and more concrete. The fact that most countries hold their foreign reserves in American dollars is perhaps the best testament to the fact that they drive the world economy.

Now in this uni-polar world it’s only natural that a doubt arises in our mind as to whether we should tow the line of our former masters or cede our “English freedom” to the Americans. This is more relevant for us as we are a rapidly growing “developing economy” with services exports as one of the major propellants of our growth. America is an important market for the skills of millions of Indians and if you go by the cliché “any money is good money” it won’t be hard to predict how the winner of the British vs. American English tussle is. Not only is a large chunk of our exports going to the America, of that a good chunk of the business goes into transcription and voice/text based support where the subtle differences in the different avatars of English will stand out.

But in a recent study in India, for the book English in India: Loyalty and Attitudes by Hohenthal, Annika., we were still able to see the ghosts of our colonial past. In the study the majority of the respondents (70%) felt that RP (Received Pronunciation: BBC English; Standard English in Britain) would serve as the best model for Indian English, 10% thought General American English would be better, and 17% preferred the Indian variety of English. This is of course due to some important fallacies in our earlier analysis, the most important being the question of teaching resources. For a country that has a history of teaching a different flavor of English , which is now entranced in all its English teaching resources, both human and material, it can be a humongous task to chance and there is no switch button solution to move to American English and the as simple business rules go, the cost must be justified by the advantage.

Also its is not just a matter of teaching resources but also some of the words are so ingrained into our culture that a change would require a change in our social mindset. Think of confused driver having to put “gas” into their cars instead of petrol or of the devout vegetarian wife going aghast at the prospect of having to put ‘egg’plant ( brinjal) into the “otherwise” fully vegetarian dish or The disgust of the Indian who is happy when he can pay bills with bills, only to later find out the truth. And in a different view, this can be seen as an open invasion of our culture which we ourselves are promoting
Another important factor that must be given its due is the origin of the so called Indian English which comprises several dialects or varieties of English spoken primarily in India, and by first-generation members of the Indian Diaspora. This dialect evolved during and after the British colonial rule of India for nearly two hundred years. English is the co-official language of India, with about 100 million speakers. And looking at the activity in the Indian English Literature arena, which is only rising year by year, we can see that we taking our rightful place in the history of evolution of English by contributing to it, as much as, if not more than what we take from it.

At the end of the day if we are to move to American English , which, as we saw, warrants a lot of social and financial costs, it has to be justified by the advantages gained Also we must be convinced that such a path is the only path for us. But this is not the case as the success story of the our services industry in itself points to the fact that the differences between the various dialects of English are not very high and that they can be compensated by an intelligent mind or in the worst case scenario by a job specific “finishing” training.

To conclude I feel that for us to move to American would not only be a step backwards in social terms but also it would be a great insult to the English language itself, as we would be discounting its resilience and universality which made it popular in the first place. And as for the huge influence that British English already enjoys in our English, only time can tell whether this impact is good or bad. As Angus Wilson once said, contemporaries are too close to the event to be good judges. And contributing and developing our own Indian English would be the best step forward.