Rumela Saha
Research Scholar, Department of English, Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, West Bengal, India
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Abstract: This paper aims to map the rise of English language and literature in India. To map the historiography of the English language and literature in India the paper will vividly focus on the colonial agenda behind the implementation of English education. It will also focus on the several Education Acts that were implemented by the British government to control public education, for the fulfilment of its own political, economic, and administrative requirements in India. Then the paper will examine how the English language gradually became so nativized that it led to the emergence of a gigantic gamut of literature from India, referred to as the Indian English Literature.
Key Words: English language, English literature, English education, Indian English Literature, empire, colonial
The East India Company, whose original aim was primarily commerce and not conquest, by 1800 discovered that with the gradual disintegration of the Mughal Empire in India and the failure of other European powers – the Dutch, French, and Portuguese – to establish their dominance, there was no other obstacle left to the proliferation of British domination on India. So the country that precisely had come to do business, after their victorious win at the Battle of Plassey (1757), decided to conquer and rule India. Plassey effectively brought Bengal under Company rule, and following Mir Qasim’s defeat at the Battle of Buxar in October 1764, the contiguous territory of Avadh came under British Influence. The Battle of Buxar had been brought to an end by signing the Treaty of Allahabad in 1765, where the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II appointed the East India Company his diwan (or chief financial manager) of the provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, thereby enabling to collect revenue on his behalf. This Treaty of Allahabad marked the political and constitutional involvement and the inaugural moment of the British Raj in India. British domination eventually grasped all aspects of Indian life – political, economic, social, and cultural. The introduction of English education for Indians by the colonial masters proved the most enduring aspect of this domination, cementing the empire at a supranational level. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’ on 2nd February 1835, clearly puts forward the agenda behind the implementation of English education for Indians. Macaulay said that “we must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and, in intellect”. Thus, the dissemination of English education in India was primarily made by the British government for the fulfillment of its own political, economic, and administrative requirements.
Some liberal-minded Indians also advocated for the implementation of English education in India. Raja Rammohan Roy pioneered the demand for implementing English education in India because he believed that English education would help in inculcating scientific and democratic thinking in the minds of the Indian people. Rammohan Roy was against the indigenous system of education because he thought that ‘the Sanskrit system of education would be best calculated to keep this country in darkness’. It was the Charter Act of 1813, according to which, the East India Company took up the responsibility of education for the Indians. Raja Rammohan Roy supported this policy of modern education through the medium of the English language itself. English was, as a result, introduced in educational institutions, courts, and offices thus dislodging the traditional use of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit as a mode of communication and documentation. Lord William Bentinck announced in 1835 by passing the Indian Education Act that the government would “favour English Language alone” henceforth and would move towards “a knowledge of English literature and science through the medium of English language alone”. In 1854, with Wood’s Education Despatch, the modern education system had its formal beginning in India. Charles Wood’s Education Dispatch which is known as the ‘Magna-Carta’ of English Education in India proclaimed the establishment of the Universities at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta and thereafter made the English language accessible to the Indian masses, so that an English class can be prepared among the Indian people to be used as workforce in the company's administration. In 1904, the British government passed the Indian Universities Act paving the way for affiliation rules for the colleges. So in this manner, the British government intended to control public education so that it could strengthen its political authority in India.
It is important to emphasize that the early British Indian curriculum in English, though based on literary material, was primarily devoted to language studies. Horace Wilson criticized these prevailing pedagogical practices because he felt that “the mere language cannot work any material change”. He said that only when “we initiate them into our literature, particularly at an early age, and get them to adopt feelings and sentiments from our standard writers, [can] we make an impression upon them, and effect any considerable alteration in their feelings and notions”. Gradually the British colonial administrators discovered an ally in English literature to support them in maintaining control of the natives under the guise of a liberal education. Gauri Viswanathan begins her book The Mask of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989) with the remarkable statement that English Literature was an established part of the curriculum in British-sponsored educational programs in India by the 1820s –“long before it was institutionalized in the home country” (Viswanathan 3). India thus became a kind of testing ground for the launch of English literature in the classroom at a time when English Universities were still steeped in the Latin and Greek classics. The colonial administrators initiated several steps to incorporate selected English literary texts into the Indian curriculum on the claim that these works were supported in their morality by a body of evidence that also upheld the Christian faith. In their official capacity as members of the Council on Education, Macaulay, and his brother-in-law Charles Trevelyan were among those engaged in minute analysis of the English texts to prove the “diffusive benevolence of Christianity” (Viswanathan 85) in them. Gauri Viswanathan in “The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India” mentions that:
the process of curricular selection was marked by weighty pronouncements of the ‘sound Protestant Bible principles’ in Shakespeare, the ‘strain of serious piety’ in Addison's Spectator papers, the ‘scriptural morality’ of Bacon and Locke, the ‘devout sentiment’ of Abercrombie, the ‘noble Christian sentiments’ in Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments (hailed as the ‘best authority for the true science of morals which English literature could supply’) (Viswanathan 86).
So the purpose of implementing English education in India by the colonial masters no longer remains just a means of strengthening their political control but also a means of transmission and perpetuation of English culture among the native population. The agenda behind implementing English literary studies in the British-sponsored educational programs in India was to colonize the natives culturally through intellectual and moral persuasion. The act of implementing English education and literature in India by the colonial masters according to Gauri Viswanathan was a blueprint for exercising social and cultural control in the guise of the humanistic program of enlightenment. The introduction of the English language and English literary studies in India was like one of the masks of the white race to legitimize their act of conquest.
The agenda of the colonial masters behind imposing English language and English literature might be to colonize the native population socially and culturally but the Indians mastered the colonizer’s language so well that by the 1820s the Indian society began to adopt English as their chosen medium of expression. Many Indians and Anglo-Indians started writing poetry, prose, novels, and drama in English which was acknowledged as Indian English Literature. In colonial India, the English language played a very significant role in creating uniformity of viewpoint and interest in the minds of the educated Indians. It was largely because of modern English education that they could imbibe a democratic, rational, secular, and nationalistic outlook. Contemporary European movements also created political awareness in their minds. Western political thinkers like Thomas Paine, Rousseau, James Mill, etc. became known to natives through this English education, which, in the long run, enhanced their understanding of the political situation of India. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar referred to the English language as the Suez Canal, which established the intellectual contact between India and England. Indian writers like Rammohan Roy, Ranade, Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjee, Bepin Pal, Sankaran Nair, S. Srinivasa Iyengar, Tilak, Gokhale, Malaviya, Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das, Aurobindo Ghosh, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, M.K. Gandhi, and many other who effectively used the English language for the benefit of the nation. During the colonial rule in India, we can trace the emergence of many prominent Indian authors who shaped the birth and growth of Indian English Literature like Henry Vivian Derozio, Toru Dutt, Tagore, Aurobindo Ghosh, Sarojini Naidu –in the field of poetry; Bamkim Chandra Chattopadhyay, K.K.Sinha, Lal Behari Dey, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, Ahmed Ali, K. A. Abbas and, Bhabani Bhattacharya as novelists and Krishna Mohan Banerjee, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, A.S. Panchapakesa, Tagore, Thyagaraja Paramsiva Kailasam and, Bharati Sarabhai as Indian English dramatist.
So, we understand that the English language and literary studies were introduced into the Indian education system by the colonial masters to create a bunch of educated Indians- Indian in colour and blood but European in intellect- who would help them in ruling this country effectively. But the Indians adopted, learned, and mastered the English language so well that they chose to express their opinions in the language learned from the Empire. Thus, the Indian literary scene saw the emergence of poetry, prose, novel, and drama written in English. There are many appellations given to this body of literature—Indo-Anglican literature, Indo-English literature, Indian writing in English, and Indian English literature. Indo-Anglican and Indo-English—both terms were considered inadequate over time. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar title’s his book Indian Writing in English and this was also used by M. K. Naik in his edited book. However, this name has a sense of circumlocution in it. ‘Indian English Literature’ is the most suitable term to define this body of literature. This appellation bears the sense that it is one of the languages in India, which is capable of expressing Indian sensibilities and ethos like the other Indian languages. The Sahitya Akademi has also accepted ‘Indian English Literature’ as the most suitable appellation for this body of writing. Today in the closing years of this century, the practitioners, and readers of the Indian English Literature (IEL) have grown steadily. The steady growth of Indian English Literature is enabling this literary phenomenon to make its mark in the international English marketplace. Authors like V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Virkam Seth are no less than celebrities. The supporters and practitioners of Indian English Literature seem to now successfully silence their detractors when debatable questions like ‘Can Indians write in English’ raised by C. D. Narasimhaiah in 1969 or ‘Is there an Indian way of thinking’ raised by A. K. Ramanujan in 1989 are often put forward by the critics and adversaries of Indian English Literature. Thus, the English language which was primarily used as a tool to colonize the natives culturally through intellectual and moral persuasion, later on, gets so nativized that it led to the emergence of a “literary phenomenon worthy of serious scrutiny” says M. K. Naik in the A History of Indian English Literature (1982), and which is referred to as the Indian English Literature.
References:
Iyengar, Srinivasa K. R. Indian Writing in English. Asia Publishing House, 1962.
Krishnaswamy N and Lalitha Krishnaswamy. The Story of English in India. Foundation Books, 2006.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington and G. M Young. Speeches by Lord Macaulay with His Minute on Indian Education. Oxford University Press, 1935.
Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. A Concise History of Indian Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan London, 2009.
Naik, M. K. A history of Indian English literature .Sahitya Akademi, 1982.
Ramanujan, A.K. “Is there an Indian way of thinking: An informal essay”. 1989.
Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Columbia University Press, 2015.
