Revert to English as she is spoke

The Vice Chancellor of Mumbai University has misspelled ‘hawker’ in a letter to a politician. It’s big news in Mumbai and so it should be.

It indicates that the sections of society entrusted with the administration of education are not necessarily those who are most conversant with English. One has to grant that the Vice Chancellor’s first language is not English and he has been recruited from a class of worthies to whom proficiency in English is not a criterion of good governance.

Since Thomas Macaulay’s famous intervention in 1828 in the education of Indians, virtually advocating the creation of a babu class, English has become the administrative language of much of India. As Babur said, a language, like a woman, has many uses. (He didn’t actually say it, but it’s the kind of thing he would have said). He could have been thinking of all its functions — from carrying water from the river to child bearing, among a near infinite possibility of moods, modes and functions. 

My own opinion is that English limped along in India as a functional language till a few people like Gandhi and Nehru, educated in England and infected with the bug of being idiomatically and grammatically correct, began to use it for their pamphleteering and delving into memories and making impressive nationalistic constructs.

The stuff that passed for poetry then, including the Nobel winning efforts of Rabindranath and the rather poorer efforts of Ms Naidu, were hopelessly out of touch with the possibilities of English poesy in the 20th century. Again, let me resort to a more familiar example: My great-grandfather Jamshedji Saklatvala, a scholar and a gentleman, indulged his vast knowledge of Persian by translating the Rubaiyee of Omar Khayyam. (Rubaiyat is the collective).

He claimed that his Rubaiyat was a more accurate translation of what the Sufi astronomer of the 12th century intended. Far be it for me to cast doubt on the accuracy of Jamshedji’s contention and achievement. But one can say, as Yevgeny Yevtushenko did (now this he really did), that translation is like a woman: if she is faithful she’s not beautiful, if she is beautiful she’s not faithful.

And on present performance, its poetic potential won’t last forever. Sure, it’s the language in which IT and the world’s business are conducted and we can expect centuries of the proliferation of meaningless or dense jargon.

There is today in India a not very strange ‘bifurcation’(horrible word!) in the use of English. On the one hand we have the new western-educated elite who read and write books and start magazines like Time, Newsweek and Vogue.

They and their editorial staff are appreciative of English from Rugby, Cambridge and translated South American literature.

These people have a sophisticated grasp of developing English as she is wrote and spoke in the US and UK. So also the children of the western elite who watch American programmes, travel to New York and Disneyland and get degrees from American universities.

In contrast, the new operatives of IT and call centre jobs speak a new and ugly English. In an office in Mumbai this week a young man told me the story of a film he has written. In five minutes he used the word ‘basically’ 43 times.

He punctuated sentences with it to gain time to formulate what he was saying. It was basically otiose. He needn’t have said it. I am aware that my 13 year old daughter in England and her friends punctuate their speech with ‘like’ — and that hurts too.

The best people add ‘itself’ to sentences for no reason, and curiosity or incredulity are often expressed in the question ‘Is it?’, to which I reply ‘It is!’. I feel like a pronouncing Pharaoh.

I would abolish all these if I was really a Pharaoh, and I would add to the list the word ‘revert’. I can tolerate the Indian invention ‘pre-pone’ — it has a certain ring of authenticity and has no economic equivalent in spoken English, but ‘revert’ in e-mails, letters and phone-calls is the devil’s work and should go to hell.

The writer is a scriptwriter based in London