English in India
Language, Culture and The Colonial Mind
Dr. Jaspal Singh

IN the first half of the last century two American anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf gave the idea of oneness of language and culture. The peculiar world-view of a cultural entity according to them is reflected through its language and its language gives organization to the cultural categories. In other words, linguistics items dialectically correspond to cultural items and reflect people’s attitude towards things and phenomena around them. On the basis of our study of nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. we can understand the main tendencies, needs and urges of the cultural community. This hypothesis in its mild form is considered scientific among the linguists even today.

Colonization of the world in 16th and 17th centuries was not only a gigantic economic and political invasion but also a great lingo-cultural offensive. The natives in many colonized countries of the world were made to suffer an inferiority complex regarding their language and culture by the colonial masters. Franz Fanon believes that they were elevated above their barbarian status in direct proportion to their adoption of the language and culture of the mother country. After the rolling back of the colonial empires, the peoples of these countries are facing a peculiar linguistic situation. Teaching and learning the language of the former masters as (English in the case of Indians) which is one of their “own” languages, has become more problematic. On the one hand these people have lost the direct touch with the native speakers who culturally use the language, on the other many localisms have cropped up, that both universalize and deuniversalize the language, depriving it of its original cultural import.

Another problem is that of the dual use of language. One in the field of material culture that is in natural sciences, technology, trade and industry and the other in the field of semiotic culture that is in human sciences. The use of language in the former is referential having one to one correspondence of words, meanings and the empirical reality. This may be called the transparent mechanical use of language. But in the latter use of the language apart from being referential is metaphoric and symbolic with a powerful cultural mediation. The use of English in human sciences in India has given birth to the process of Indianisation of English on a gigantic scale thus slightly damaging the universal character of the language. Wherever effort was made to retain and perpetuate the Anglo-Saxon character of the language, it generated a comprador culture, totally cut off from the Indian reality. Linguists the worlds over are unanimous in their opinion that language and culture are inseparable. Indian teacher and learner of English face a dilemma. How to teach a foreign language without any cultural animation? How to keep the linguistically generated comprador culture at bay if the Anglo-Saxon character of the language is adopted. How to save the sciences from dehumanization spawned by an alien language? How to depoliticise and debureaucratize the English language so that it is not used as an instrument of hegemonic dominance? How to develop a curriculum of English keeping in view the imperative needs of native culture semantics and folkloric structures? These are some of the paramount questions crying for dispassionate answers. But the governments in various states of India are not following any scientific approach in respect of the English language. They seem to be more guided by their whims and caprices than by any principle of language acquisition and learning. The natural consequence of such a policy is universal linguistic chaos.

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