A Lingua Franca With No Franks: English in India

A schoolboy in a small town in the mountainous state of Uttarakhand in northern India told me, when I was conducting field research on Indian education, that other students would declare themselves students of an English-language school, even though they were not attending one. They did this so they would look better in the eyes of their peers that really did study at English-language schools. The story made me sad: To have an Indian kid who shies away from admitting that he or she studies in an Indian-language school is a yet another reminder that we live in a wildly unequal world, where some feel pressed to hide a part a part of their identify; forced to feel ashamed of something they should be proud of.

There are only a handful of English speakers in India that identify themselves as native speakers, but all the same the language remains the lingua franca of the country’s elites. There are ongoing, and much bigger, debates surrounding the status of English in India. However, the imposition of any Indian language on those who speak another Indian language would make the situation far more unequal. The boy I had talked to belonged to a generally Hindi-speaking area. Had Hindi been imposed as the only official language of all India, this would provide undue preference to Hindi speakers, who would find it much easier to, for instance, to pass exams to get into the civil service. 

This is one of the reasons why groups like Tamil speakers stridently opposed Hindi’s imposition as the only official language back in 1950s and 1960s. Thus English remained a temporary subsidiary language: In practice, an official language equal to Hindi. English remains the “fair” choice – nearly everybody needs to learn it, except for the paltry 0.0002 percent of citizens that learn it as their first language (256,000 of the country’s 1.211 billion inhabitants identified themselves as native English speakers in the 2011 census). Seen that way, the official status of English in India is a compromise. It is a tough, uneasy compromise that reminds everybody of the colonial legacy, but a necessary compromise in a multilingual and multiethnic country.

But this issue has many other aspects, and it is worth noting that English is not only the official language of the country, but also the language of the higher social world. It is used everywhere, not only in courts, public offices, and legislative assemblies. The more posh an area gets, or the higher the rung of the social ladder one climbs to, the greater the chance of hearing or reading it.

Even outside India one can tune into an Indian TV channel for a simple test of the proliferation of English. Listen to some of the anchors working for the stations available in northern India and you will hear many of them transitioning between English and Hindi as easily as a driver shifts gears in a car. Such a journalist may speak one full sentence in Hindi and the next in English. This means, by default, that they believe that their audience – the middle class – will understand English as easily as Hindi.

But this is not the same for lower-class women and men, who may have easy access to a television but not to good English education and will often fail to understand the hybrid language of the show. A poor person may know a good number of English words but this does not amount to speaking (much less writing and reading) the language in a way that provides better job opportunities. English continues to be the language of India’s elites.

A recent study administered by the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) and conducted by the Lok Foundation and Oxford University has confirmed this. English may be “even” by virtue of not being anybody’s first language but mastery is not at all evenly spread. It is much more the language of the urban than the rural class; of a part of the high castes, but not the low ones; of the rich, not the poor; of the educated, not the uneducated. The survey found that only 3 percent of rural respondents claimed to know it, while 13 percent of inhabitants of the cities declared the same. Only 2 percent of the poor self-identified as knowing English, while 41 percent of the rich announced the same. These two numbers – 41 percent of rich versus the 2 percent of the poor – speak volumes about the status of English in Indian society. Apart from the clear social cleavage, one additional variable is religion: The knowledge of English was reportedly highest among Christians (15 percent), far higher than the rates for the two largest religious communities, Hindus (6 percent English speakers) and Muslims (4 percent).

English, in this way, is at the same a tool of inclusion and exclusion: It can include anybody because it is hardly anybody’s first language, but it also excludes a majority, because only the rich have the means to access its world. The practical standing of English, which is very much connected to money and power, has a social impact too. It leads to many believing that the label of anything “English” somehow brings one closer to that better social world. The boys mentioned at the beginning of this text did not really attend an English-language school (while middle-class children often do), and yet they wanted to declare that they did, as they believed that it would make some of their English-language school peers respect them more.