English's place in history is not black and white

In 1784, two white men joined forces to establish an English school in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu.

- Manu S. Pillai

John Sullivan was British representative at the court of the local rajah, while C.F. Schwartz was a missionary who had long worked in India.In promoting English education, they had, of course, specific goals. Sullivan lamented how British officials depended on “self-seeking dubashes” (interpreters) for business. If the “principal natives” took to English, however, these pesky middlemen could be eliminated. What attracted Schwartz, meanwhile, was that Western education offered to break the “obstinate attachment” Indians had to their religion, helping the “diffusion of Christianity”. Higher-ups in London agreed. For them, English instruction promised one more advantage: the infusing of “native minds” with “respect for the British nation”. On the face of it, this was a perfect “win-win”. Except that these figures didn’t factor in a key element: the motivations of Indians themselves.

India’s engagement with English has been much in the news lately. This follows a recent speech by the Prime Minister, in which he cited the infamous Lord Macaulay and his colonial-era effort to evidently “uproot Bharat from its own foundation” by creating a class of Indians brown in colour but white in spirit. The result, the Prime Minister added, was a “sense of inferiority” about all things Indian, with a mindless aping of the West, and a devaluing of local languages. To a serious extent this is true, in that English and what it represents did acquire—and still holds—tremendous power in our country. There remain, for example, patrician clubs where the dress code frowns on kurta-pyjamas and admits brogues but not Kolhapuri slippers. Fifty years after independence, similarly, Salman Rushdie could claim that “Indian writers working in English” were producing “more important” work than those writing in our bhashas—a comment that has definitely not aged well.