Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (99 page)

The missionaries’ wish to give priority to the English language was all the time gathering support from the home government, and at last from the Indians themselves. In the late eighteenth century the company, following popular urging, had founded a number of prestige colleges for the acquisition of Indian learning: for Muslims the Calcutta Madrassa in 1781, for Hindus the Benares Sanskrit College in 1791, and for incoming civil administrators from Britain the Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800. All of these had some classes conducted in English; and Fort William had little else. In the early nineteenth century spontaneous foundations were also made by eminent citizens, notably in 1817 the Hindu College of Calcutta, for ‘the cultivation of the Bengalee and English languages in particular; next, the Hindustanee tongue…; and then the Persian, if desired, as ornamental general duty to God’.
⁵¹
Ram Mohan Roy, who is considered its presiding genius, was a scholar of Sanskrit and Arabic, but vociferous in his appeals for greater access to English.

Several new government colleges were also founded, often in oriental disciplines, but under pressure from London the oriental ones were offered various inducements to improve their English-language instruction. Then in the early 1830s came catastrophic falls in the enrolments for all non-English subjects, and corresponding surges for English. A public meeting in 1834 protested against patronage of the classical languages, and in favour of English and the vernaculars.
⁵³

In this context, the General Committee of Public Instruction made its long-delayed decision on how to spend the company’s annual lakh of rupees to promote literature and knowledge. Reversing their previous preference, which had followed the hints in the charter, for native learning (and the translation of European scientific texts into Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian), they decided on 7 March 1835 that ‘the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India; and that all the funds appropriated for the purposes of education, would be best employed on English education alone’.
⁵⁴

This decision, although still controversial at the time, proved fateful.
^*
The number of the government’s English-language schools more than doubled within three years of the English Education Act.
⁵⁵
This was just the beginning. When in 1857 universities were founded in the classic three British cities, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, English would be their language of instruction. And this educational preference was simultaneously reinforced in 1835 by a regulation that English was to replace Persian as the official state language and the medium of the higher courts of law, with lower courts using the local vernacular.
⁵⁶
Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian had hitherto kept a half-practical value, comparable to the survival of Latin into early modern Europe: henceforth, like Latin after the Enlightenment, they would be consigned to purely classic status, symbols of heritage rather than vehicles of learning and research. And English, which had been little more than the mark of a foreign ruling caste, was now going to serve as the means for opening the whole subcontinent to foreign traditions of culture.

The basic language balance had been struck, and it persisted in India through to independence in 1947. And in practice, although English is now classed as an Associate Official language of India, theoretically inferior to the eighteen official vernaculars, it has persisted right up to the present day. English is universal in South Asia as the lingua franca of the educated: how many actually know it is harder to say, with estimates over the past twenty years rising from 3 per cent to 30 per cent of Indians, but fewer in the other states of the region.
⁵⁷

Another long-term influence that favoured English, especially in the south, was the absence of any other useful lingua franca: Britain’s domain had always included the south of the country, and went on to encompass the whole subcontinent; but Persian or Hindi-Urdu were never acceptable south of the old Mughal boundary. If India, especially a democratic India, is to stay united, it needs a common language that seems neutral, or at least equally oppressive to all.

Although Britain had certainly not conquered South Asia in Seeley’s ‘fit of absence of mind’, the spread of Britain’s language which followed on from the conquest was almost fortuitous.

The success of English here came about by processes totally different from those that worked themselves out in North America; and these processes were different even from those that had put Britons and Indians in contact in the first place. In North America, English spread while remaining quite detached from local populations, simply displacing them over time by overcrowding numbers and overwhelming settlements. In South Asia, English spread by recruiting the local elites. Despite the company’s early fears, English-language immigrants never became very numerous, never stayed for long, and by and large have all now left.

One essential force driving the recruitment was cultural prestige, definitely a British characteristic by the nineteenth century; and the attractions of this prestige went beyond the early motives of gaining preferment in the government or business. Yet it was not cultural prestige which had made India British, but rather the animal spirits of the men in the East India Company. The one point at which these romantic chancers
^*
drew the line was any thought of meddling with local religions, or the roles of the languages that seemed so closely associated with them. Protestant missionaries, for all their many scruples, did not have this one, and it was precisely on this point that they gradually won the argument back in the home country. The company men at last were forced to take the risk of a prescriptive line on native education: imagine their surprise when it not only did not cause riots, but even proved popular with the (thinking) public. Indian scholars found that English did indeed give them access to a world of thought beyond Indian tradition, in law, physical and social sciences, politics, literature—even, here and there, religion.

In fact, the only disappointment was felt by the Protestant missionaries, who, having won the linguistic and cultural argument, and accepted the gratifying popularity of English-language education, still failed to find many converts among the new English speakers. By and large, the worldly content of modem European culture proved much more attractive to Indians under British rule than any new and readier access to Protestantism. In that sense, the missionaries, who had confidently predicted that ‘a thorough English education would be entirely subversive of Hinduism’,
⁵⁸
were deceived.

English has remained all over the region, long after the conquest that made its presence possible has been undone. English will probably continue to spread here, or rather to thicken, with the growth of higher education (and other cultural influences, as we shall see). For this reason, the growth of English in India and the rest of southern Asia provides a far better model for any likely future spread of the language than does the history of English in North America.

’North America speaks English.’

Answer attributed to German chancellor Bismarck, when asked by a journalist in 1898 to identify the defining event of his times

These two means to the spread of English—what we may call American sweep-aside and Indian re-education—were to be applied, one or the other, across the whole British empire as it expanded to cover a quarter of the earth. Revealingly, the choice was correlated as much with climate as population: the typical—and ultimately most influential—settler is a farmer, and European farmers only really know temperate-zone crops. In temperate colonies, above all Australia and New Zealand, British long-term settlers became a majority of the population, and so English became the principal language. But in the tropics, where British activities were restricted to government, trade and commercial exploitation, the spread of English was more superficial, affecting local elites, and those in contact with British power centres, through school education and gradual recruitment of the locals into British government and enterprise: this was the pattern in most of the Asian colonies—Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah.

In the sweep-aside countries,
^*
the action was concentrated in the nineteenth century. Australia is estimated to have accommodated 300,000 people (speaking two hundred languages) when the British began arriving in the 1790s; by 1890 they were down to 50,000 (with 150 languages left). Their population had always been concentrated in the south-east, just as the English speakers are today: that is where there is water. In the same period, English speakers went from nil to 400,000 by 1850, and nearly 4 million by 1900.
⁵⁹
As in the Americas, after the first few years no serious effort was made to accommodate the Aboriginals, let alone learn any of their languages; even the missionaries were rather unsuccessful in making non-destructive contact.

In New Zealand, although the British found it in 1770 held by a single people speaking a single language, Maori, a similar story ultimately played out. After the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was struck between the Maori and Britain, British immigration took off, growing twelvefold in the following decade, from 2000 to 25,000 by 1850. In the next half-century, their population grew thirtyfold again, now boosted by big families, as well as an unceasing flood of hopeful new settlers: by 1900 it had reached 750,000. In the same nineteenth century, Maori numbers sank from well over 100,000 to 42,000. They may have had the advantage of knowing the country for a millennium before the British arrived; but they could not contend with European diseases, and above all the productivity of European farm animals, cattle and sheep, evolved to thrive on temperate grasslands. They put up a bitter fight, but like the Australian Aboriginals, they were swept aside.
⁶⁰

Both Australian Aboriginal and Maori populations have rebounded in the late twentieth century, but their proportions in their own countries remain tiny: 170,000—a little less than 1 per cent—Australians are now reckoned to be of Aboriginal descent (47,000—0.03 per cent—with some knowledge of an Aboriginal language), and there are now over 310,000 Maori—8 per cent of New Zealanders—of whom some 70,000 speak the language, 1.8 per cent. They are simply engulfed by the modern English-speaking nations of Australia (18.5 million) and New Zealand (3.8 million) in which they still struggle to survive.
⁶¹

Farther north, English speakers came in earnest to South-East Asia only in 1786, when the English East India Company acquired Penang, a small island just off Kedah, largely as a base for naval refitting.
^*
Lord Cornwallis was still governor-general at the time, as keen as ever to avoid settlement, and above all any political involvement. But one thing led to another; the British kindly stewarded the Dutch empire from 1795 to 1814, while its metropolis was occupied by the French, and in the meantime Penang gained a mercantile life of its own, eclipsing the ancient entrepôt of Malacca. The British lieutenant-governor, Sir Stamford Raffles, who had opposed return of the Dutch colonies, felt that Penang, lying outside the Straits, was not quite right to protect the burgeoning trade (largely in opium) between India and China. Through an act of diplomatic legerdemain, installing there a Malay sultan who had been slighted by the Dutch, he was able to acquire Singapore for Britain in 1819. It was then a fairly small settlement, but the population instantly went up to five thousand, and began to develop as the new major entrepôt.

Subsequent intrigues and wars, always undertaken by the British with an eye to the commercial main chance, resulted in British political control being extended to the whole of Burma (1853-86), Malaya (1883-95) and the northern region of Borneo (1888). As icing on the cake, Britain also acquired its own base in China, Hong Kong (1848, enlarged in 1860 and 1898). The linguistic effect was extension of English for law and administration, all over these parts of South-East and East Asia. Others soon saw which way the language wind was blowing: the
Straits Times
of Singapore began publication in 1845 (current circulation 386,000, for a national population of 3 million), and the
South China Morning Post
of Hong Kong in 1903 (circulation 200,000, for a population of 6 million).

Nowadays, knowledge of English is still a mark of the elite in all the successor states of the British colonies. It is often difficult to know what proportion of the people speak it. Its status has become politically controversial in Malaysia since independence in 1957; there is an active policy to ‘standardise’ on Malay in education, but as in India, English is popular with the large minorities, here Chinese- and Tamil-speaking, who feel threatened by this. In Burma (or, to use its more ancient name, Myanmar) use of English is nowadays not readily admitted by government sources. Its future in Hong Kong, since 1997 returned to mainland China, is obscure, but a survey in 1992 suggested that over 25 per cent had some competence in it. In Singapore, a 1975 survey put competence among the over-forties at 27 per cent, but among fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds at over 87 per cent.
⁶²