Recently, the British broadsheet The Spectator carried an article written by a retired professor of English, who taught at Cambridge University till the mid-1970s. The purist professor wrote rather caustically that English was bastardised (yes, he used this word but with an apology) by Indians. The oversensitive Indians might take umbrage at the professor’s ruthless condemnation of Indian English, but the fact is that many of us indeed have mongrelised English in usual discourse. It has become so awful — except in isolated cases — that those who really know the language are appalled at its degeneration into a patois. To use an Indianism again, we’ve chutnified English. The Internet has further worsened and expedited the decline.
But before that, it’s imperative to assess and analyse whether Indians really killed the essence and spirit of English. The answer will be in affirmative. Though the Brits ruled India for nearly two hundred years and the educated Indians learnt the language of their white masters, they could never internalise English into their linguistic consciousness and ‘dialectical psyche’, to quote the British linguist Sir David Crystal.
This is similar to the fate of Persian on the subcontinent (never ‘in’ the sub-continent: this corruption would show the influence of vernaculars on English). From 1526 to 1857, Mughals were the undisputed rulers of the sub-continent and their mother tongue was Persian (though Zahiruddin Babar didn’t know Persian and he spoke Uzbeki and had a smattering of Turkish). Many educated Indians of that era learnt Persian in order to get lucrative jobs in Mughal court. But who speaks Persian in India any longer? Even the Indian ‘scholars’ of Persian speak it with so many blatant errors that a native speaker of Persian like yours truly gets the shock of his life every time he gets to hear an Indian professor converse in convoluted Persian.
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This was explained by the Indian professor, poet, translator and linguist A.K. Ramanujan. He wrote: “No Indian ever learnt English because of his/her genuine interest in the language. We picked up Persian and English with a view to getting government jobs. Fascination for English and Persian was absent and is still absent despite Indians speaking and writing English for a long time.” So very true.
We could never develop a sense of belonging or natural attachment to English because somewhere it’s in every Indian’s psyche that it was the language that our insensitive white masters spoke. We, therefore, could never exactly relate to English the way a native speaker could. At the same time, there’s a streak of subconscious ire and helplessness (to quote Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats when they separately went through Tagore’s stale English in the manuscript of Gitanjali ) that this language of English could never be mastered by an Indian. One more reason why we speak and write atrocious English is that we want to create an independent linguistic identity of ours and establish our brand of English on a par (never ‘at par’ or ‘on par’) with the English-English or Queen’s English, so to say.
That's why we ‘revert’ to emails instead of replying to them, and ‘prepone’ rather than ‘advance’. We’re ‘grateful’ to human beings instead of being 'thankful’. It’s worthwhile to state that in good English, we’re 'thankful to humans' and ‘grateful’ only to god! It’s like ‘
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We often seem to have absolutely no idea that in the case of 83 words and phrases in English, the gerund (- ing ) is used rather than an infinitive (verb) after ‘to’. For example, it’s always: With a view to getting (never, ‘get’) an idea', ‘It’s essential to wearing a cap’ (yes, this is the right syntax) and ‘necessary to wear a cap’! ‘It’s always committed to serving the nation and never ‘serve’. The same rule is applicable after ‘contribution’ and ‘addiction’: ‘He contributed to enriching (never ‘enrich’) the language’ and ‘he’s addicted to smoking ten cigarettes a day.’
We always ‘fill up’ the form and never ‘fill in’ or ‘fill out’. We ‘discuss about’ things, whereas ‘discuss’ as a verb doesn’t accept a preposition such as ‘about’. Most Indians have never been able to use the word ‘since’ properly. They’ll invariably say or write, ‘I’ve been doing this since years/ages’. They’ll hardly say or write ‘for years/ages’. ‘Since’ as an exception is used only in a phrase such as, ‘since time immemorial’. In all other cases and contexts, ‘since’ is used before a definite period: ‘He’s been with me since 1972.’
Such execrable errors have wormed into our linguistic consciousness so deeply that we’ve no knowledge, sense or idea that what we speak or write is often outright ridiculous. But who cares, because no one knows really good and grammatically sound English. We’re perhaps the most casual people with a blase attitude towards not only a language, but all that’s an epicurean’s delight and a connoisseur’s dream.
To quote British Poet-Laureate Sir Stephen Spender, ‘the very structure of Indian English is ramshackle.’ This he stated in a letter to his friend Khushwant Singh, who carried the letter mutatis mutandis in the now-defunct The Illustrated Weekly in March 1970.
sumitmaclean@hotmail.com