One of the questions that should bother (It doesn’t. At least, not strongly enough.) those of us who speak English in India is: What to do about Indian English? Pretend that we don’t speak it? Banish it as non-standard English? Study it the way one would a specimen in a zoology lab, or as a curiosity, taking care to immunize one’s own speech and writing from it?
An American friend once observed that he was amazed at the range and variety of English he encounters in India. It’s as if every person speaks a different dialect. In fact, every state in India has its own variety of Indian English, which can be quite taxing for a foreigner! And the variation is not just in accent, but also in sentence structure, vocabulary, and idiom, the vernacular of each state forging its own distinctive flavour of Indian English.
In academia, Indian English is definitely non-standard; our entire English education is aimed at erasing it and inflicting “the standard” upon us. But what is this “standard”? More often than not it’s Standard British English as seen or heard in British Literature, the BBC or textbooks published by British-based publishing houses. In corporate India, of course, American English (as seen/heard in Hollywood and American media) rules.
But shouldn’t it trouble us – that the standard for our most important link language comes from abroad? Don’t we speak enough English to be able to devise our own standard? Isn’t it time we standardized Indian English, instead of forcing a foreign variety down our throats?
The lack of a homegrown standard is perhaps one major cause of the alarming levels of linguistic profiling (using speech characteristics, or dialect, to identify a speaker’s race, religion or social class; a term coined by John Baugh) – easily one of the biggest forms of discrimination in India.
Gross variation in English is a source of much mirth (as it is anywhere in the world of course) but the mirth is often derisive. Consider, for instance, the very Indian poems in Indian English by Nissim Ezekiel, one of the founding fathers of modern Indian poetry in English. Here’s the most well-known example:
Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.
Friends,
our dear sister
is departing for foreign
in two three days,
and
we are meeting today
to wish her bon voyage.You are all knowing, friends,
what sweetness is in Miss Pushpa.
I don’t mean only external sweetness
but internal sweetness.
Miss Pushpa is smiling and smiling
even for no reason
but simply because she is feeling.Miss Pushpa is coming
from very high family.
Her father was renowned advocate
in Bulsar or Surat,
I am not remembering now
which place.Surat? Ah, yes,
once only I stayed in Surat
with family members
of my uncle’s very old friend,
his wife was cooking nicely . . .
that was long time ago.
Coming back to Miss Pushpa
she is most popular lady
with men also and ladies also.Whenever I asked her to do anything,
she was saying, ‘Just now only
I will do it.’ That is showing
good spirit. I am always
appreciating the good spirit.
Pushpa Miss is never saying no.
Whatever I or anybody is asking
she is always saying yes,
and today she is going
to improve her prospect,
and we are wishing her bon voyage.Now I ask other speakers to speak,
and afterwards Miss Pushpa
will do summing up.
The use of Indian English here is deliberate, meant to evoke laughter and not to exploit any expressive possibilities that the variety might offer. Contrast this with what African and Caribbean poets have shown is possible with pidgins, creoles, patois, and dialects. Here’s an example – Kaumau Braithwaite’s 1967 chant about tourism, “Wings of a Dove”:
So beat dem drums
dem, spreaddem wings dem
watch dem flydem, soar dem
high dem…full o’ silk dem
full o’ food dem…full o’ flash dem
full o’ cash dem..So beat dem burn
dem, learndem that dem
got nothin’….
This piece is from Rotten English: A Literary Anthology, an anthology of two centuries of world literature, edited by Dohra Ahmad (professor of post-colonial literature at St. John’s University in New York). What makes this anthology special is that it consists entirely of vernacular, non-standard writing (fiction, poetry, essays) in English from around the world – Jamaican English, African-American, Dominican, Chicano-American and “Spanglish”, Irish, Scottish, Brooklyn English, Nigerian English and Pakistani-Londoner English. As one reviewer of the book puts it, when you finish, you feel like a world traveler.
Reading and understanding so many different varieties is not easy, and sometimes you’re all at sea. (Ahmad acknowledges this by providing a useful glossary. ) But the anthology helps break the hold that the notion of a standard has on literary language. For, clearly, the stilted, standard form simply cannot capture the cadences, flavours and rhythms of life that these “non-standard” varieties do.
Smoke Screen 