A lot has been said and written about India’s linguistic diversity and about our love for the English language. I have seen Indians being described as slaves of the British or slaves of the English language. I have heard them being accused of harbouring an absurd fascination (/fetish) for English. Not content with attacking Indians for their weird fascination for foreign imports, people then continue on to dissing English, calling it backward, stupid, regressive, and a dozen other adjectives that aren’t even defined over the domain of languages as far as linguistics is concerned.
For once, I agree that the problem exists, is real, and is serious enough, but it hasn’t got as much to do with English itself as it has with India’s double edged sword of linguistic plurality, which is proving itself to be more of a liability than an asset. As a linguiphile, it’s rather hard for me to say this, of course, but I see no way out of the mess that we are in.
It is true that imposition of a non-native language as the prestige language and the language of all commerce leads to a country’s own citizens without knowledge of that language to become marginalized, second-class citizens. It reduces their productivity in the society, leads to under-utilization of their capabilities, and leaves a vast pool of talented and intelligent citizenry unused and wasted. It also causes this stupid association of intelligence and capability with knowledge of English, as if it is not possible to be smart in any language but English.
But I see no easy solution. As long as knowledge of English is mandatory for access to higher education and well-paying jobs, English will continue to be a prestige language. And unless there is a common national language (it is clear that it would be unfair to declare Hindi or Tamil as the common language; but some language has to be the common language), some language will take over that role, and that language, for us, is English, equally foreign to all of us. A friend once suggested that instead of English, Sanskrit should be chosen as the common language. I don’t see how choosing one arbitrary foreign language (I use foreign to mean non-native here) as the common language instead of another arbitrary foreign language will solve any problems, except stoking nationalist egos. In fact, if I had to choose between the two, I would go with English purely for practical reasons.
You could treat each state like a mini-country, making the majority language of the state the official one. School education would have to be in that language, you will need to have top quality institutes of higher education in each state offering degree courses in that language. Likewise, you will need a talented pool of teachers and professors to run who have themselves been educated in the same language. But this is likely to cause problems when people would want to move from one state to another.
You could instead have a North-South divide, with North Indian states working with Hindi, which is still practical, but fixing a common language for South Indians states would still be a hassle.
One thing is clear. It makes little sense to make it a fight against English. It is possible that English got larger than its fair share of encouragement after India’s independence, but I am not sure if things would have unfolded significantly differently even if English didn’t have the head start it did.
I have heard quite a few radical ideas, but I am yet to see any practical, reasonable, non-crazy solution.
Any ideas?