The place of English
M.S. NAGARAJAN
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Reception of English in India from the colonial to the modern period
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THIS GIFT OF ENGLISH — English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India: Alok K. Mukherjee; Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd., 3-6-752, Himayatnagar, Hyderabad-500029.
The language that the Englishman brought along with him stays with us long after he left us for good. There are widely differing views as to how this has come about. There are those who believe that it was a colonial imposition thrust upon an unwilling people that needs to be resisted. And there are those who maintain that this language was the most potent weapon, a mask, a disguised tool of conquest to subdue the subcontinent. Still others hold the view that we welcomed the language with open arms and encouraged its adoption for our use. Alok Mukherjee problematises the dialectic of English reception in India—whether it was imposed or sought—employing the frameworks of the Italian intellectual Gramsci and the French sociologist Bourdieu, and concludes that the continued presence of English after Independence unveils the hegemonic agendas of the reigning British and the privileged Indians.
Hegemonic agenda
Alok Mukherjee’s This Gift of English traces the place of English in India’s colonial history. The colonial rulers and their fellow-citizens such as administrators, educators and missionaries were motivated by the aim of creating an English-educated bureaucracy that would serve them satisfactorily. In this hegemonic endeavour, they were the “organic individuals’ in the Gramscian sense. With this end in view, they valorised and legitimised English education as a project that had lasting benefit for Indians. Such a project was stirred by their sheer self-interest in the economic exploitation of India. While this resulted in the Indians’ acceptance of the superiority of European knowledge and culture over their own, it helped them, incidentally, to acquire and cultivate an English sensibility in nurturing what Mukherjee calls an “alternative hegemony.” This acquisition of knowledge of English duplicates itself as a tool—a “cultural capital”—in seeking wealth, position, prominence and, of course, power. Appetite grows by what it feeds on. Desire for gaining more and more knowledge of English, the gateway as it were to dominance, perpetuates itself.
Historical backdrop
Mukherjee devotes two chapters for providing a historical backdrop against which English teaching took place in India. Chapter four deals with developing an undergraduate English curriculum. “The obvious and explicit Anglocentric slant of the curricula would be conducive to create out of them that class of Indians that Macaulay had described in his Minute as ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.”
The next chapter is fully devoted to a close study of the syllabi of different institutions: texts, authors, literary histories, manuals of grammar and rhetoric, besides the terminal examination, evaluation systems. Chapter six illustrates how certain cognitive structures get internalised and how cultural hegemony is achieved: the diary of Amar Singh, an aristocrat and officer in the British army, and the autobiography of C.D. Narasimhaiah are chosen as examples. The overt purpose is “to demonstrate some of the ways in which English education influenced the sensibility of Indians, and thereby, to suggest that an understanding of this sensibility is necessary as a key to the continuing hold of English literary and language education in India.” It also reviews some significant critiques of the theoretical and pedagogical issues related to English in India. It is a depressing reflection on our system that the Anglo-Saxon curriculum and an “interpretive approach that treats texts as artefacts rather than material products of particular social, cultural, political and economic realities” get perpetuated in most places, barring a few metropolitan institutions. English thus being accepted as the major site of contestation, the “window on the world” or the gateway to western knowledge, Mukherjee pleads for a sound English education for the Dalits in India which alone can empower and emancipate the historically disenfranchised Dalits, leading to social mobility.
The debate on the place of English in India is never-ending. His view, supported by evidence, is that English got deeply and unshakably entrenched in the Indian soil on account of a wilful collusion and mutual consent between the dominant British and dominated Indians. Written in an accessible and informed style, this book is one of the most comprehensive and probing accounts of the issues involved in the discussion relating to English and India.
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