English and the Middle Class

The inequality among Indian languages is reflected on a larger scale in the relationship between English and Indian languages. The governmental efforts to promote Hindi as the official language are not supported by the realities of everyday life in India. English continues to be the language used in offices, courts of law, schools and colleges. English is needed to keep abreast of the latest developments in the fields of technology and science. Moreover, it is seen as a status symbol that is associated with a particular social class. Rita Kothari says: “By and large, both the elite and the middle class of India living in its metropolitan cities seem to emerge as the chief mainstay of the English language” (31). She argues that the middle class which is the chief patron of English in India has the power that goes into “shaping and moulding policies, markets and culture” (32). Consequently, the growth of the middle class is proportionate to the growth of English.

Another notable feature of this middle class is that it is metropolitan and very often displaced from its regional roots. This leads to the loss of its mother tongue. Kothari explains: “Children of linguistic communities settled in spots far from what used to be called ‘the native place' can usually speak their ‘mother tongue' but they seldom learn to read it. They acquire English, the ‘regional language', and in most states, Hindi as well…” (50). These are the people who claim to be more fluent in English than in any Indian language. A writer like Shashi Tharoor is illustrative of this. Born of a Malayali father and Bengali mother, Tharoor's childhood was spent in the cities of Kolkata and Mumbai. He knows a smattering of Malayalam and Bengali, is fluent to a certain extent in Hindi, but is best in English. His cultural repertoire has been fed by a few regional sources, but he has admitted that he grew up on English books and English literature. English thus becomes the most natural language for expressing the creative urge in him; English, in his hands and other writers like him, becomes an Indian language. If Indian writers in English used to be apologetic about the ‘foreign' language that they used, their modern counterparts are aggressively confident. Salman Rushdie notoriously claimed that Indian writing in English is the only literature that India produces, and that regional language literatures do not count at all.

English is also the language of aspiration, and is seen as an essential stepping stone to the upper ranges of society, as far as the upwardly mobile middle class is concerned. This has ensured the presence and dominance of English in Indian society at least for the present. English is seen as generating jobs even for the not-so well educated.