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

You will smile when I mention, that when I resolved to make this effort, I formally applied to Government for permission to let in day-light on the Natives of this country. But I mention it, to observe & testify with gratitude, that in all my applications public and private to Government and respectable Individuals, I met with decided encouragement & approbation.

It is but too true that these efforts have not as yet produced any visible effect; altho I can produce instances of Individual natives who have acquired a competent knowlege of the English language by the help of my Grammar… [696]

As the actions of the East India Company were more and more subjected to scrutiny and control in London, these attitudes—often shared by such influential reformers as Charles Grant, William Wilberforce and James Mill—were becoming the motive force of policy. In 1813 the House of Commons resolved that ‘it is the duty of this Country to promote the interests and happiness of the native inhabitants of the British dominions in India, and that measures ought to be introduced as may tend to the introduction among them of useful knowledge, and of religious and moral improvement’. [697]

In the nineteenth century, as British political control expanded and hardened in India, the old laissez-faire business ethic in dealing with the natives, which had entailed a robust mutual respect, was increasingly replaced by an unashamed belief in European superiority, coupled with a duteous endeavour to bring up ‘the dark race’ to the moral and intellectual level of the Godfearing Briton.

The company’s Charter Act of 1813 included the provision that ‘a sum of not less than a lac [100,000] of rupees in each year shall be set apart and applied to the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India…’ But at this stage the company’s traditional distrust of missionary priorities was still effective: the funding was explicitly aimed at ‘fostering both Oriental and Occidental science… a reliable counterpoise, a protecting backwater against the threatened deluge of missionary enterprises’. [698]The decision on how this small sum was to be applied turned out to be crucial for the language history of the subcontinent.

The missionaries’ wish to give priority to the English language was all the time gathering support from the home government, and at last from the Indians themselves. In the late eighteenth century the company, following popular urging, had founded a number of prestige colleges for the acquisition of Indian learning: for Muslims the Calcutta Madrassa in 1781, for Hindus the Benares Sanskrit College in 1791, and for incoming civil administrators from Britain the Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800. All of these had some classes conducted in English; and Fort William had little else. In the early nineteenth century spontaneous foundations were also made by eminent citizens, notably in 1817 the Hindu College of Calcutta, for ‘the cultivation of the Bengalee and English languages in particular; next, the Hindustanee tongue…; and then the Persian, if desired, as ornamental general duty to God’. [699]Ram Mohan Roy, who is considered its presiding genius, was a scholar of Sanskrit and Arabic, but vociferous in his appeals for greater access to English.

… we understand that the Government in England had ordered a considerable sum of money to be annually devoted to the instruction of its Indian subjects. We were filled with sanguine hopes that this sum would be laid out in employing European gentlemen of talents and education to instruct the natives of India in mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, and other useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world … We now find that the Government are establishing a Sanskrit school under Hindoo pundits to impart such knowledge as is clearly current in India … [700]

Several new government colleges were also founded, often in oriental disciplines, but under pressure from London the oriental ones were offered various inducements to improve their English-language instruction. Then in the early 1830s came catastrophic falls in the enrolments for all non-English subjects, and corresponding surges for English. A public meeting in 1834 protested against patronage of the classical languages, and in favour of English and the vernaculars. [701]

In this context, the General Committee of Public Instruction made its long-delayed decision on how to spend the company’s annual lakh of rupees to promote literature and knowledge. Reversing their previous preference, which had followed the hints in the charter, for native learning (and the translation of European scientific texts into Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian), they decided on 7 March 1835 that ‘the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India; and that all the funds appropriated for the purposes of education, would be best employed on English education alone’. [702]

This decision, although still controversial at the time, proved fateful. [208]The number of the government’s English-language schools more than doubled within three years of the English Education Act. [703]This was just the beginning. When in 1857 universities were founded in the classic three British cities, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, English would be their language of instruction. And this educational preference was simultaneously reinforced in 1835 by a regulation that English was to replace Persian as the official state language and the medium of the higher courts of law, with lower courts using the local vernacular. [704]Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian had hitherto kept a half-practical value, comparable to the survival of Latin into early modern Europe: henceforth, like Latin after the Enlightenment, they would be consigned to purely classic status, symbols of heritage rather than vehicles of learning and research. And English, which had been little more than the mark of a foreign ruling caste, was now going to serve as the means for opening the whole subcontinent to foreign traditions of culture.

The basic language balance had been struck, and it persisted in India through to independence in 1947. And in practice, although English is now classed as an Associate Official language of India, theoretically inferior to the eighteen official vernaculars, it has persisted right up to the present day. English is universal in South Asia as the lingua franca of the educated: how many actually know it is harder to say, with estimates over the past twenty years rising from 3 per cent to 30 per cent of Indians, but fewer in the other states of the region. [705]

Another long-term influence that favoured English, especially in the south, was the absence of any other useful lingua franca: Britain’s domain had always included the south of the country, and went on to encompass the whole subcontinent; but Persian or Hindi-Urdu were never acceptable south of the old Mughal boundary. If India, especially a democratic India, is to stay united, it needs a common language that seems neutral, or at least equally oppressive to all.

Although Britain had certainly not conquered South Asia in Seeley’s ‘fit of absence of mind’, the spread of Britain’s language which followed on from the conquest was almost fortuitous.

The success of English here came about by processes totally different from those that worked themselves out in North America; and these processes were different even from those that had put Britons and Indians in contact in the first place. In North America, English spread while remaining quite detached from local populations, simply displacing them over time by overcrowding numbers and overwhelming settlements. In South Asia, English spread by recruiting the local elites. Despite the company’s early fears, English-language immigrants never became very numerous, never stayed for long, and by and large have all now left.