Thomas Babington Macaulay, just 34 when he arrived in India, threw himself immediately into a debate that was going on in the Governor General’s Committee of Public Instruction; five members ( the ‘Anglicists’) supported making English the language of higher education in India and another five ( the ‘Orientalists’) were for using Arabic and Sanskrit. Macaulay was the President of the committee and after a brief period studying the issue cast his tie-breaking vote for English.

The lengthy justification that he wrote, his “Minute”, included England’s own historical example:

“ …at the beginning of the sixteenth century… almost every thing that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction has hitherto acted; had they neglected the language of Cicero and Tacitus; had they confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island; had they printed nothing and taught nothing at the universities but Chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and Romances in Norman-French, would England have been what she now is? What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India.”

Lord Bentinck, the Governor General, accepted Macaulay’s Minute and thus, in 1835, English became the medium of instruction for higher education in India.

Universities were founded, civil servants were trained, the Empire waxed to its glory days and then waned; Indian nationalists secured independence, statues of Governors General and Viceroys were pulled down (much like Sadam’s recently in Iraq), streets that were once called Hornby Wellard now became Bhulabhai Desai Road, Victoria Terminus became Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus…

But English remains the medium of higher education in India and the High Courts and the Supreme Court conduct their proceedings in English.

Why then is so much Indian entertainment in the “vernacular”? Why do Hindi and Malayalam and English newspapers outsell English newspapers? Why do Hindi and Tamil and other Indian language news and entertainment television channels earn so much more revenue than English ones? Does this imply that English is still in a transient state and will one day disappear?

R.S. Gupta of the Jawaharlal Nehru University has an explanation for this paradox and he calls it ‘code mixing’.

When an Indian says “Judges kaa decision final hooga”, or ,“Fixed deposits me bahut high interest milta hai”, he is ‘code mixing’.
He says a whole new world of compound and conjunct verbs, nominal compounds and verbal phrases have sprung up in day to day usage:
The Hindi operator karna gets conjoined with English nouns, verbs and adjectives to create open-ended phrases: “improvement karna”, “slow karna”, “invite karna”.

Or nominal compounds: “Parliament bhavan”, “mahila block”, “kabaddi team”. Or when mixing is done to add tone and colour to speech:
“Vice Chancellor nee kahaa hai ‘the university is willing to pay its share.’

“This kind of mixing,” he says is not “the result of ignorance or imperfect learning as some language pedagogues …would have us believe. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the long contact between English and Indian languages…”

He says that Indians frequently use mixed code in peer group interactions, transactional situations like commerce , but only occasionally in mass media or family situations and very rarely in formal situations like literature or religion.

In dyadic pairs like friend-friend or brother-sister there is frequent use of mixed code, only occasionally in dyadic pairs like boss-subordinate, teacher-student, father-son and rarely in hawker-customer, grandparent-grandchild and master –domestic servant.

Why then does an Indian family today with any financial wherewithal sends its child to an English medium school while all those who cannot afford it have to make do with government-run free ‘vernacular’ medium schools?

Macaulay observed this phenomena 168 years ago in his Minute:

“…we are forced to pay our Arabic and Sanscrit students, while those who earn English are willing to pay us. All the declamations in the world about the love and reverence of the natives for their sacred dialects will never, in the mind of any impartial person, outweigh the undisputed fact, that we cannot find, in all our vast empire, a single student who will let us teach him those dialects unless we will pay him.”

“I have now before me,” wrote Macaulay, “the accounts of the Madrassa for one month, -- the month of December 1833. The Arabic students appear to have been seventy-seven in number. All receive stipends from the public. The whole amount paid to them is about 500 rupees a month. On the other side of the account stands the following item: Deduct amount realized from the out-students of English for the months of May, June and July last, 103 rupees…

“The people of India do not require to be paid for eating rice when they are hungry, or for wearing woolen cloth in the cold season…why then is it necessary to pay people to learn Sanscrit and Arabic? Evidently because it is universally felt that the Sanscrit and Arabic are languages, the knowledge of which does not compensate for the trouble of acquiring them. On all such subjects the state of the market is the decisive test.”

The IT export revolution, that great showpiece of Indian success is based at least as much on the English-speaking skills as it is on the computer science knowledge of Indian programmers. The relative ease with which graduates of India’s Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management have risen to the top levels of giant US corporations is based substantially on their ease with the English language. The much anticipated BPO revolution that is expected to create 20 million jobs by the year 2020 (nearly 80% of all new jobs expected to be created by then) is predicated on the English language skills of our graduates.

Macaulay’s Minute comes echoing down the 168 years since it was first written.
END