Nowadays it’s not the East India Company that has a monopoly over India, but the use of the English language that determines the success of an Indian who wants to get ahead in the world.
According to a census taken eight years ago (it takes time to monitor one billion people) more than 10% of the Indian population speaks English although this official figure is widely considered a gross underestimate.
Indian parents look across to China, which has a new policy that makes English compulsory in primary schools and is consequently adding 20 million (!) new English speakers each year, and are booking their children into English meduim schools to learn the language.
Such schools cost a great deal of money compared to Hindi medium government schools where education is free but English is not mandatory. Hindi is spoken by 41% of India’s population and there are many sectors of Indian politics that would like this figure to be much higher.
But a case in the early 1990s underscores the problems that Hindi has compared to the creeping ubiquity of English. The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Mulayam Singh Yadev wrote a letter to his counterpart in the state of Kerala in Hindi who made his stance clear by replying in his native language of Malayalam, not Hindi.
And therein lies the significant rub. India has an array of local languages as long as Ganesh’s trunk and people prefer to speak their own language, not Hindi. More tellingly, they seem to prefer English as a second language.
In the state of Maharashtra that includes the city of Mumbai it is a matter of state pride to speak Marathi. Extremist politicians are also hijacking this language issue to set their own agendas although nobody is complaining about the use of English.
All of which bodes well for anybody setting up an English language school in India. More than 60 years after India gained its independence from the British, perhaps that little imperialist devil is having the last word… in English that is.
Monty Munford has more than 15 years' experience in mobile, digital media, web and journalism. He is the founder of Mob76, a company that helps tech companies raise money and exit. He speaks regularly at global media events with a focus on Africa, writes a weekly column for The Telegraph, is a regular contributor to The Economist, Wired, Mashable and speaks regularly on the BBC World Service.
