By Accident of History

These days, people are always asking me for my first impressions of India. Family, friends, former co-workers, schoolmates from India, even the locals of Kadod or the urbanites of Bombay—they all ask what it is like on the ground. These questions are not the open ended ‘what is it like?’ or ‘whom have you met?’ that I am teaching my students at the moment. They are the much simpler yes/no questions—’is it like a, b, and c?’ ‘Have you met x, y, and z?’ Because everyone has their expectations, their own vision mind you, of what India is like, and also what it should be like. It has been a little over one month since we stepped out of the air-conditioned airport into the hot heavy Bombay atmosphere, even if it was only to be whisked away by brother Vimal to the sugarcane fields of Kadod. But already it is enough time to shatter all those pesky expectations. Without ever having travelled to a country, one can only scrape together an image, albeit an incomplete one, from news reports, books, travelers, and immigrants. Until now, I had modeled my image of India on the Indian Americans and NRIs with whom I grew up or else went to school. They spoke impeccable English, very often with a British lilt, made frequent trips to London or New York, and were invariably involved in, or at least planned to be involved in, engineering, finance, or other professional pursuits. All this gave me the same impression I had garnered from Kipling as a child—that the independent India of today was the twenty-first century progression of the colonial India of two centuries ago. India here was a vague sort of Eastern edition of the British Isles, or a commonwealth country like Canada or Australia. Its citizen drank tea in the afternoon and watched cricket on the weekends. Of course, both these statements are true. India is the current World Cricket Cup champion. But Indian chai, while simply delicious (just ask Sindhu how many cups I drink every day), is not anything like English ‘brown tea.’ I knew a good deal about the colonial era from reading books and taking classes. I had read in the paper all the mutterings about the ‘Indian Tiger’ and the tempered-glass spires of Bangalore. Already, I was anticipating a sort of Indian chai, a fusion between East and West. But what surprised me was the extent to which India has so thoroughly thrown off the trappings of British culture. Because other than the cricket euphoria, everything about Kadod, Madhi, and Gujarat in general is distinctly and utterly un-Western in character. Of course, you are going to accuse me of naïveté. ‘India is in Asia’, you say. ‘Of course it is not Western. How could you even expect it to be?’ But keep in mind that the historian and travel writer William Dalrymple had similar thoughts, and in no less than a place as cosmopolitan as Delhi. In City of Djinns, he writes: ‘Such was the enthusiasm at home for things Imperial Indian that I had assumed that India would be similarly obsessed with things Imperial British. Nothing, of course, could have been further from the truth. Instead, visiting the subcontinent less than forty years after the last sahib set sail back to Britain, I was intrigued by the degree to which India had managed to shed its colonial baggage. True, people spoke English, played cricket and voted in Westminster-style elections. Nevertheless, far from encountering the familiar, I was astonished how little evidence remained of the two centuries of colonial rule. In the conversation of my Indian contemporaries, the British Empire was referred to in much the same way as I referred to the Roman Empire. For all the fond imaginings of the British, as far as the modern Delhi-wallah was concerned, the Empire was ancient history, an age impossibly remote from our own.’ Dalrymple goes on to visit Delhi’s expansive Coronation Park. The grounds are thrown into disuse. Improper drainage has produced a shallow swamp; camel-thorn invades the entire grounds; a colossal statue of George V looms over the ruins like a forgotten Ozymandias. I have not seen Coronation Park, but a few weekends ago I visited Gujarat’s closest thing. Finding the Old English Cemetery in nearby Surat was trouble enough. No one but those living in the immediate neighborhood seemed even to be aware of its existence. And like Coronation Park, Surat’s angrezi kabrastan had seen better days. Grass grew to knee-height. Bands of small boys ran from the Mughal-inspired mausoleum to Mughal-inspired mausoleum in games of hide-and-seek. The older ones smoked hashish out of sight of the betel-chewing guard. Bums had put up kip inside some of the more expansive tombs. The city had forgotten the cadre of British merchants who had lived and died there as much as three hundred years ago. After all, why should it even remember them? In spite of their architectural pretensions, these Britishers have so little to do with today’s Surat. Britishers are not Surtis, and Surtis, of course, are hardly British. And yet it is British English that I am to teach to my students. For a culture so eager to overcome its colonial past and forge a distinctly Indian culture, teaching English seems a backwards step indeed. But English is no doubt a student’s key to the outside global world. It is the language of the Internet and the IT sector. A brief glance at Wikipedia’s homepage shows that there are nearly four million English articles, while Hindi has only a meager ten thousand. Students all over the world attempt to learn English in order compete in the global marketplace. But India has taken an additional step. Its constitution is written in English, and English is its official language of governance. Sindhu made an important point in her last post. Many members of the middle and upper classes learn English as their first language and speak it at home. To speak English at home raises a child’s chance at success in an English medium school, and by extension, in government or abroad. But in the process, the child loses a native proficiency in their mother tongue. The local culture suffers at the expense of the global. But how else could India remain unified as a country without English? For all its attempts to leave the colonial past behind, many of the political boundaries of today’s India are British inventions. The Mughals never made it as far as Chennai or Cochin. The last time one ruler unified the whole of the subcontinent was during the reign of Ashoka and the Mauryans more than two millennia ago. Indians, especially South Indians, realize this too, but they are regardless committed to being part of the republic. The forward to my Gujarati textbook gives an interesting perspective. Its author, Ishwar Datt, writes: ‘In spite of this closeness with Hindi, we have chosen to teach Gujarati through the medium of a foreign language, English. The reason is that English, by accident of history, has acquired a place of a link language in India, howsoever we may continue to shut our eyes to this fact of life. The English language has made such a deep dent in our national life that it alone binds the urban North with the urban South for which this book is meant.’ The tensions between North and South, between Aryan and Dravidian, between Muslim and Hindu, are substantial. One has only to read the history behind Partition. The world’s largest democracy is a delicate mixture which threatens to explode in nationwide riots whenever one group rocks the boat. To raise a single native language to the level of national administration is to show favoritism. To revive an ancient one, such as Sanskrit, is to invite a new wave of religious infighting. Teaching English in India therefore not only gives students access to a world beyond their own country; it gives them access to their whole country. By teaching English here at Kadod we are potentially contributing, however minutely, to greater globalization and the demise of local vernaculars. But we are also potentially enabling Indians to communicate and collaborate with other Indians. I prefer to think that we are doing more of the latter, even if it is an ‘accident of history.’ And, of course, there are also pictures of the students.