Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

It is also clear that until the nineteenth century higher-level dealings with Indian authorities, above all the Mughal government, were conducted in Persian. [205]Company agents could become fluent in it, although they retained the services of a munshi , [206]a combined interpreter, translator, secretary and language tutor. A paragon of such expertise was Antoine-Louis Henri Polier, a Frenchman in the English company’s service and a friend of Warren Hastings, who published his Persian correspondence in the late eighteenth century. This shows him highly accomplished, too, in the courtly style that went with the language. [689]

On this basis the real question is: how did English ever spread in India at all, beyond the transplanted society of the ‘writers’ (i.e. clerks) of the East India Company, and British regiments serving in the country? The situation, after all, was almost identical with that of the contemporary Dutch in the East Indies, with Persian cast in the role of Malay, Urdu as Javanese, and Portuguese as its very own self. And as we have seen, after a first half-hearted attempt to teach their own language, the Dutch had contented themselves with the linguistic status quo: Dutch never became the language of any but the colonial rulers in the Dutch East Indies (see Chapter 11, ‘Dutch interlopers’, p. 395). If this pattern had been followed, Persian would have remained the preferred common language of India to the present day.

And there was an extra motive in the back of British minds which drained any enthusiasm for wider use of their native language in India. As a member of the British Parliament put it in 1793: ‘We have lost our colonies in America by imparting our education there; we need not do so in India too.’ [690]This loss was very fresh in memories in the late eighteenth century: Lord Cornwallis, the very general who had delivered the British surrender to George Washington in 1781, went on to become governor-general of Bengal from 1786 to 1793. Settler communities of Europeans, if they became well established, might follow the American example, and look for independence on their own terms. On this reasoning, India must remain a foreign country, albeit one kept open reliably for British business; it should not be a new British home. Richard Wellesley, governor-general from 1797, wrote to the chairman of the Board of Control in 1799:

… with relation to powers of banishing Europeans from the British possessions in India … those powers appear to me still to be too limited.

The number of persons [not in the company’s service] resident in these provinces, as well as in all parts of the British empire in India, increases daily. Among these are to be found many characters, desperate from distress, or from the infamy of their conduct in Europe. Their occupations are principally… at Calcutta, the lowest branches of the law, the establishment of shops and taverns, or of the places of public entertainment, or the superintendence of newspapers… Amongst all these persons, but particularly the tribe of editors of newspapers, the strongest and boldest spirit of Jacobinism prevailed…

In Madras, the evil resulting from Europeans not in the Company’s service is still greater. The advisers of the nabob of the Carnatic, as well as the principal instruments of his opposition to the British government, and of his oppressions over his own subjects, are almost exclusively to be found among that class of Europeans. [691]

British settlement in India, then, apart from activities directly sponsored by the company, was not even seen as desirable by the British authorities. From 1757 to 1856, Kampanī Sahib , as it was known, proceeded to expand its financial, political and military control first across Bengal to Delhi, then across the Deccan, and finally to most of what is now India, Pakistan, Śri Lanka and Burma. The one thing the company hardly spread at all was a body of speakers of its own directors’ language.

In the end, the wider spread of English was begun not by the East India Company, but by British Protestant missionaries. [207]The company was in general suspicious of missionary involvement in its domains, on much the same grounds—and with better evidence—as those on which they shunned other Europeans. The bloody mutiny of their Indian troops in Vellore, near Madras, in 1806 was associated with rants by one Claudius Buchanan on Hindu indifference to Christianity, demanding ‘every means of coercing this contemptuous spirit of our native subjects’; in 1808 the company had speedily to suppress a tract put out by the Baptist Mission Press in Serampore (Śrirampur), near Calcutta, ‘Addressed to Hindus and Mahomedans’. [692]India has long been a dangerous place for pressing a religious point, and the company was sensitive to this hazard, which could be highly damaging to trade.

Nevertheless, there had been churchmen at the company’s settlements from the earliest days. Early on, they had had to work in Portuguese, like everyone else, a requirement made explicit in the company’s renewed charter of 1698. [693]But soon they began to found English-language schools, primarily for children—often orphans—of company employees and servants: at Madras in 1715, Bombay in 1719, and Calcutta in 1731. The schools grew in attendance, then multiplied, and became centres of access to English, with attached printing presses and libraries. It was clear to anyone that English influence and power were growing massively throughout the eighteenth century: not surprisingly, ambitious Indian parents increasingly tried to obtain for their children a knowledge of English, to share in this growth. Around 1780 the raja of Ramnad (Ramanathapuram) sent his own son to Schwartz’s missionary school at Tanjore (Thanjavur), south of Madras. Schwartz’s schools were being supported by all the main powers in the region: the English Company, the Muslim Haidar Ali and nawab of Arcot, and the Hindu raja of Tanjore. [694]

The market soon responded. By the turn of the century, ‘mushroom’ schools were growing up in all the centres of English power, but especially round Calcutta. The teachers, ‘the broken down soldier, the bankrupt merchant and the ruined spendthrift’, [695]were in it mostly for the money, but they included respectable British ladies, such as one Mrs Middleton of Dinapur, outside Patna, and even the celebrated Baptist missionary William Carey of Serampore. They were aimed at prosperous Indians, and the fees charged were high. Nevertheless, the attitudes of the teachers were increasingly patronising. Writing to a military officer on the first day of 1801, the Reverend D. MacKinnon revealed his motives:

… I could not discover one particle of classical taste, of the knowledge of mathematical truth, or of genuine moral or religious principle in any class nor in any individual of the human species born and educated in Hindostán or even in all Asia. The dark race appeared and do appear to me, buried in darkness, moving like mere mechanism and utterly void of those sentiments which dignify and ennoble our species and entitle us to claim kindred with the Gods.

All my speculations were at last reduced to two simple propositions.

\1. That the natives of India cannot be illuminated by their own languages, nor by the Books now existing in those languages.

\2. That therefore they must be enlightened by the acquisition of other languages & by reading Books capable of forming their taste & of teaching them useful & solid knowlege as well as genuine moral and religious principles.

So long ago as the year 1787 after preaching a Sermon on Christmas Day on the field of battle of Kudjuah … I seriously resolved to try the effect of my own feeble efforts. I compiled a Grammar of the English language of which the rules & instructions were written in the Persian language & character. This Book was published in 1791 at the expence and risk of the Proprietors of the Calcutta Gazette Messrs Harington & Morris. I also was at the trouble & expence of causing a Version of the Grammar to be made into the Bengal-language, but that version was not printed.