Being Indian in English: In India, English is not just a language, it is a caste.

“Do you speak Indian with your children at home?” It’s a question I’ve encountered with
rhythmic predictability in my decades living abroad. There was a time when the “Indian”
part of the query occupied my response: there is no such language… Hindi, Tamil,
English is an Indian language too… yaddy yada.

But increasingly, it’s not the ignorance of my interlocutor in assuming ‘Indian’ to be a

language that bothers me, as much as the fact that I speak English with my children,
grew up speaking English with my parents, speak English to my cats, and dream in
English. This was something that seemed quite unremarkable growing up, but
increasingly it feels, if not ‘wrong,’ at least something that deserves interrogation.

Given the deep bonds between language and identity, what does it mean for an Indian
who has lost her “native” languages (in my case, Hindi on the maternal side and Tamil
on the paternal)? Put another way, is it possible to be authentically Indian in English?

I went to an “English medium” school in Delhi where everything, except Hindi, was
taught in English. I understand Hindi well enough, although it is an oral, rather than
literary language for me. I can read in Hindi, but only haltingly, at primary school level. I
suppose that’s because I don’t read in Hindi. Period.

And while I spoke Hindi daily while growing up, it was exclusively to the “servants” or
other non-English speaking Indians: shopkeepers, autorickshaw drivers, the security
guards at the school gates, random people on the street I might need to ask for
directions. The non-English speaking Indian – an overwhelming majority in the country -
was but a cast of supporting characters in my life.

India with its polyphonic linguistic make-up allowed for this state-of-affairs. We have 22
official languages and almost as many mother tongues as we do Gods. According to the
2011 census there are 19,500 distinct mother tongues spoken in the country.1

But although all languages, or at least the 22 major ones, are equal, some are patently
more equal than others. I’d go as far as saying that there is only one linguistic fault line
that really matters. That between English and non-English, rivalled only by the division
between speakers of English as a first language and the rest.

1
(https://indianexpress.com/article/india/more-than-19500-mother-tongues-spoken-in-india-
census-5241056/).
Only 0.02 percent of Indians speak English as their first language according to the 2011
census, although 6.8 percent say it is their second. Forty-three other languages are
spoken more commonly as first languages than English, in Indian homes. Just about 10
percent of Indians can speak some English, including those who speak it as a second or
third language.

In contrast, Hindi is spoken by 528 million people, or almost 44 percent of all Indians, as
a first language.

And yet English is the language of the supreme court, of much of government and the
media at the national levels, of elite business, and of success.

Indians have many ways to divide themselves- by religion, by diet, by skin colour, by
gender. But the English – non-English divide arguably creates the most rarefied
distinction of all.

In India, English is not just a language, it is a caste.

**********

I didn’t grow up feeling alienated from, or alien in, India. My roots ran deep. I was proud
of my country, its diverse cultural heritage, foods, polyphony. I had no doubts about my
authenticity as an Indian, because I believed the wonderful thing about my country was
its resistance to the policing of its definition. There was no authority that could decide
who was truly Indian or not. My idea of India was as valid as yours.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, had famously described India (in superb
English) as an “ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had
been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had
been written previously.”

I was ergo, one type of Indian, as valid in my Indian-ness as any other type.

Moreover, although I was an English-speaking Indian, my generation had decolonized

the language, domesticated it. I inhabited Englishness with less bathos and pathos than
the generation who’d actually been taught at school by Englishmen. My accent was free
of stuffiness, my consonants unapologetically Indian-hard, and my vowels free of
striving for some sliced-cucumber-sandwich ideal. My English was unselfconsciously
peppered with “acchas” and “chalos” and “yaars.” It was breathable and loose like a
saree, not buttoned up in a suit and tie.

And furthermore, English was India’s lingua franca. It allowed for Hindi-influenced
northerners and the Dravidian language speakers of the south to be compatriots who
could communicate. It was the linguistic bridge upon which the country relied for internal
connection.
Yet. The older I get and the more time I spend abroad, the less convincing some of
these arguments sound. It is true that India is a palimpsest and has absorbed cultural
influences from elsewhere to make them her own. But unlike the Mughals and their
descendants who stayed and became Indian, so that Urdu – Persian and Arabic infused
Hindi – is as “authentically” Indian as turmeric, the British (and their language) were
always a race apart, who when the time came, left almost overnight.

Of India’s population of 1.3 billion people, only between 125,000-150,000 are Anglo-
Indian or Indians with some English ancestry. In contrast, there are over 200 million
Indian Muslims.

And while English-Indians like those in the milieu I had grown up in, had certainly made
the language their own, their playful bending of the idiom popularized in literary works
by international stars like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy was of a very different
order to the Indian-English of the English-aspiring, the vast majority of India’s so-called
English speakers.

Most Indians didn’t joyfully play with the language as much as desperately try, and
usually fail, to gain a modicum of fluency in it. The language they learned was
syntactically wrong, badly pronounced and had the air of desperation about it. It was the
ticket to a better life, but one that usually remained out of reach no matter the effort.

So that while it is true that as a lingua-franca English connects India, it also disconnects
it. The English-Indian caste is implicated in a system of inequality that is corrupting of
the country’s constitutional ideals of democracy, justice, liberty, equality, fraternity,
human dignity and the unity of the Nation.

******
Given language’s impact on the way in which we understand the world, the fact that
mine, English, is inescapably mediated through the colonial gaze, is an uncomfortable
one that I am trying to work through. It’s not as straightforward as claiming, like I used
to, that English is an Indian language and my Indianess is as valid, as authentic, as
anyone else’s. The role of English in perpetuating a system of oppression and racism is
an uncomfortable reality.

In India, I don’t just speak in English – I am of the English caste. It’s taken the constant
querying about language from foreigners to make me confront how I might come across
to the non-English speaking Indian as “other,” colonial in privilege, deracinated. There is
a derogatory Hindi phrase that goes: Angrez chale gaye, par apni aulad chhod gaye
(the English may have gone, but they’ve left their offspring behind). Am I the offspring?

********
Over the last couple of decades, a shift in Indian’s linguistic hierarchy has been
underway. The importance of an English-Indian like me is on the wane politically, while
Hindi-based mass culture as encapsulated in music and movies is indisputably
dominant.

For India, this feels like a positive development. For me, it’s an existential one. If English
becomes less important in India- what of me? In what ways does the development
diminish my claim over my country?