Two faces of English

That English is a unifying and divisive factor is something we have all recognised. The nature of the accent sets you apart in terms of your ethnicity, race and nationality, and the prose style can locate you within a distinguished tradition. Alok Mukherjee’s book This Gift Of English is an ambitious attempt to map the shifting politics of using the English language in India.

Mukherjee opens with his personal story: of how he came ‘into’ English, his studies, and research, all the while arguing that his is a symptomatic case. He presents, via his own experiences, the dissemination of English literary studies in 1960s and 1970s India — the period of the great ‘modernisation’ of the country. He then outlines his theoretical framework, adapted from the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdeiu and the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.

In order to map the early moments of English education in India, Mukherjee does a time-shift into the 19th century. He examines the Anglicist and the Orientalist debates: whether English alone is necessary — as the Anglicists believed — or should the vernaculars also be encouraged, as the Orientalists argued. Mukherjee proposes that English language arrived in India as a means to create Babus for the empire.

It was to aid in the training of Indians to think and administer like the British, and thus extend their hegemony over the subcontinent. Interestingly, the Englishmen were supported in this project by select sections — mainly Brahmins and upper classes — of Indians exemplified by people like Raja Rammohan Roy. Mukherjee suggests that these sections of Indians saw in English a chance to enforce their own dominance over their fellow countrymen.

That is, English was seen as an instrument of social power and dominance by both the British and the native elites. The enforcement of English values was to be achieved through a study of English literary texts. These were read through the aesthetic and critical prisms developed by Europeans, where both the frameworks and the texts were distant from the students’ daily lives and cultures.

Turning to post-Independence India, Mukherjee argues that the stranglehold of the elites over social and cultural realms was facilitated by the use of English. Reading the autobiography of CD Narasimhaiah, the doyen of English studies in India, Mukherjee argues that this generation of English teachers was attempting a Sanskritisation and Hindu-nationalist appropriation of English. He also notes that this begins to change in the 1990s when affirmative action enables Dalits to enter the university and acquire English.

This brings Mukherjee to his key argument. In the post-Independence era, English is the language of emancipation and hope for the Dalits who, for a long time, have been denied access to any instrument of power. Using the works of Dr Ambedkar, Kancha Ilaiah, Sharan Kumar Limbale and other Dalit writer-activists as examples, Mukherjee argues that the Brahmanical dominance that was achieved through English is beginning to erode.

However, Mukherjee is also quick to add that the adoption of English cannot be a mindless acceptance of the ‘West’, as he sees some Dalits like Chandra Bhan Prasad doing. As Mukherjee puts it, such a glorification of the West in Prasad puts him “in the company of the early high caste Hindu proponents of English education.”

Mukherjee’s is a useful historical account of the way English has arrived and spread in
India. He is right to point to English as the language of emancipation and empowerment for Dalits.

Those who moan the disconnect between their ‘local’ cultures and languages when Dalits take to English — a common feature of social commentary today — are in fact proposing a ghettoisation: that upper castes will keep English and the Dalits will keep their local languages. This hierarchy has to be broken and, as Mukherjee shows, English is a means to achieve this dismantling.

Mukherjee is also critical of the use of English in the present context which “produces an army of workers for the multinational corporations, such as call centre operators, computer program writers, journalists and middle managers.”

This, he claims, is reminiscent of the early stages of English education in India where colonial and indigenous elites used it to reinforce their hegemonies. This is a harsh indictment of youth and workers who need English to survive in contexts not of their choice or making.

If I might intrude a personal note, I have heard Professors of English make disparaging remarks about ‘accent training’ for call center workers, all the while ignoring the fact that these critics have made their fortunes teaching certain accents and writing textbooks on ‘English language teaching’, but would hypocritically deny this act born of economic necessity to the new generation.

This Gift Of English demonstrates how English becomes a double-edged sword, for dominance and emancipation, for the hierarchic organisation of society, and for dismantling hierarchies. Anybody interested in the history of the language, or its literature in India and the cultural politics of education will find Mukherjee’s book a useable starting point.