executive, who noted that non-native English speakers were able to communicate with a minimal, “utilitarian” vocabulary of English words. The term was coined by Jean-Paul Nerrière, a French former I.B.M. ![]() “Globish” is not quite the same as global English. “Is this revolution a creature of globalization,” he asks, “or does global capitalism owe some of its energy and resilience to global English in all its manifestations, cultural as well as linguistic?” English has also become, as Robert McCrum asserts in “Globish” (Norton $26.95), the “world’s language,” and it is a merit of his book that he is alert to the many dichotomies of English’s rise. It has often been shaped by populations upon whom it was imposed a large number of common English words (“jungle,” “nirvana,” “bungalow”) were, for instance, taken from Indian languages. English has been a language of occupiers and imperialists, but also one of insurgents and democrats. The story of English in India epitomizes its strange history. In 1950, the Indian constitution was ratified it was written in English. What’s more, the generations of independence leaders who emerged in the wake of the rebellion tended to be educated English speakers-from precisely the “class” that Macaulay had sought to create. The rebellion is now regarded by many Indians as the first war of independence. The uprising was ruthlessly put down, but the shock it provoked in London brought about the dissolution of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj. Macaulay’s vision of an independent class of Anglophone Indians was being realized.īut this development was not without irony: 1857 was also the year that Indian soldiers rebelled against the East India Company’s century-long rule. Sullivan, “English was the dominant language in Calcutta.” In 1857, English-speaking universities opened in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. With Macaulay’s backing, schools instructed Indian students in English, a language that offered “ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations,” whereas Sanskrit and Arabic offered only “false taste and false philosophy.” By 1840, according to Macaulay’s biographer Robert E. ![]() We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” The implication was obvious: Indians must learn the language of their occupiers. “But she can have the next best thing: a firm and impartial despotism.” A few months later, Macaulay wrote a memo on Indian education, which stated, “It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. “We know that India cannot have a free Government,” Macaulay had written to the Scottish philosopher James Mill the year before. He travelled north to Calcutta, then India’s capital, to assume the role of Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council. In 1834, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British historian and statesman, arrived in Madras. Robert McCrum Illustration by Paul Hamlyn
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