In a modest classroom in Sirsa, Haryana, Abhay Singh Monga practices vowel sounds. He is about to begin his law degree at Panjab University, but before that, he has enrolled in a spoken English course at a private coaching institute. For Abhay, English is more than a language. It is a class marker. “Without English, people think you are from the backward classes,” he says. “It is an indication of your standard in life.”
His classmate, Pankaj Bansal, a young advocate, echoes the sentiment. “In court, everything — from paperwork to argumentation — is in English. If you are not confident in the language, you fall behind, no matter how smart you are.”
Their teacher, Aanchal Arora, who runs the institute, has seen this pattern often. “Most of our students come when they hit a ceiling,” she says. “They are smart, capable, but they feel stuck. They know their career will not move forward without English.”
In Delhi, Shivani Chandel, a government school teacher, shares a similar view. “For many of the middle school students I teach, especially those from lower middle-class backgrounds, learning English is nothing short of a dream,” she says. “From jobs to entertainment, English is the key to participation in modern life.”
But how did this happen? How did the language of the coloniser become the language of ambition, governance, and even resistance? What does it mean for a country to simultaneously resent and revere the same language? This journey begins with the arrival of the East India Company and their bureaucratic need for order.
Contrary to popular belief, English did not enter India purely as the language of the Empire; it first arrived in the early 17th century as the language of trade. The East India Company, focused on commerce, needed a practical linguistic bridge. The Company’s earliest recruits in India were not scholars or administrators but petty traders and dockside workers, who relied on pidgin forms of English to conduct business in the bazaars.
British Orientalist William Jones’ 1786 speech comparing Sanskrit with European languages provided a linguistic rationale, but it was utilitarian politics that sealed English’s fate. From 1818 to 1835, British Parliament engaged in intense debates over how to govern and educate Indians. Orientalists valued indigenous languages, partly to maintain continuity with traditional elites. Evangelicals, by contrast, saw English as a vessel for moral reform and Christian conversion. But utilitarians like Thomas Babington Macaulay reframed the debate entirely. Language, for them, was neither sacred nor civilising — it was a managerial tool. Macaulay saw English as a means to shape a class of Indians who would be “interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern” — a buffer class that was intellectually and morally British, but ethnically Indian.
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Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’, presented in 1835, cemented English’s primacy. (Wikimedia Commons)
Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’, presented in 1835, cemented English’s primacy. He famously claimed that a single shelf of English literature outweighed all the books ever written in Sanskrit or Arabic. His goal was the production of an elite class — “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” The debates ultimately led to the implementation of the English Education Act 1835.
But as linguist Rukmini Bhaya Nair notes in her 2012 paper, Bringing English into the 21st Century: A View from India, this also enshrined an ideology: that English was synonymous with reason, clarity, and modernity, while Indian languages were branded as “harsh,” chaotic, or outdated.
The story of English in India is more layered than policy or perception alone. As Krishnan Unni P, Professor of English at Deshbandhu College, Delhi University, points out, the roots of English education run deeper than Macaulay’s Minute. “Much before Macaulay,” he says, “the missionaries were already circulating English through schools, conversions, and other means.”
The language’s spread, he argues, was closely tied to caste and class hierarchies. “It started with simple needs,” he says, “first with commerce, then conversions, and then came Macaulay.”
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Resistance and reclamation
This ideological shift, however, did not go unchallenged. By the mid-19th century, Indian reformers and early nationalists grew uneasy. English offered mobility, but also alienation. Social reformers such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy initially embraced English, but others began to question whether its cost — cultural dislocation — was too high. Still, English had taken root in law courts, universities, and commerce.
Among the earliest voices of dissent were those of Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, who, though profoundly different in temperament, shared a common concern: that English was unmooring Indians from their linguistic and cultural soil.
Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj critiqued English for alienating Indians from their roots: “To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them. The foundation that Macaulay laid of education has enslaved us. I do not suggest that he had any such intention, but that has been the result.”
Tagore, in a 1915 essay, Shikshar Bahan, worried: “When I intently ponder over the spread of education, the main obstacle seems to be the fact that its carrier is English.”
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Yet, English endured. Jawaharlal Nehru delivered key speeches in English; the Indian Constitution was drafted in it. Even Gandhi’s writings eventually made their largest impact in English translation.
Could India have realistically de-anglicised? Perhaps. But the choice was never purely linguistic; it was economic, cultural, and political.
After Independence: English, Hindi, and the State
After 1947, India faced the formidable challenge of choosing a national language, one that could unite a linguistically diverse population without privileging a particular region or caste. While Hindi was promoted as the natural choice, its Sanskritised register raised concerns in the South. The strongest backlash came from Tamil Nadu, where anti-Hindi agitations erupted as early as the 1930s, and then again with far greater intensity in the 1960s.
The language debate continued to evolve. In 2004, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee acknowledged its psychological dimension: “The real fight is not between Hindi and the regional languages… but between the Indian and English mentality.” A year later, his successor, Manmohan Singh, offered a more inclusive perspective while receiving a degree at Oxford: “Of all the legacies of the Raj, none is more important than the English language… We have made the language our own… English has been enriched by Indian creativity.”
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Yet this bilingual compromise remains uneasy. Former Delhi University professor Sumanyu Satpathy remarks that while English was never formally chosen, its persistence reflects practical consensus: “Nobody imposed English. But Hindi? That was forced, and South India revolted.”
A language reimagined
The slow embedding of English into the Indian psyche is not merely pedagogical. It is historical, sociological, and deeply political. English in India is a paradox: the language of the coloniser that now signals empowerment, aspiration, and even resistance.
British-Indian author Salman Rushdie famously reframed English not as a colonial relic but as a contemporary Indian language. In his 1983 essay, Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist, Rushdie wrote: “The children of independent India seem not to think of English as being irredeemably tainted by its colonial provenance… English is an essential language in India… simply to permit two Indians to talk together in a tongue which neither party hates.”
Satpathy agrees. “Even the Sahitya Akademi always considered English an Indian language. Even the Jnanpith Award, which traditionally honoured Indian-language writers, recently went to Amitav Ghosh, which is a major shift.”
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According to Satpathy, English has been “remade” in India, stripped of colonial superiority and redeployed as a tool of local expression.
In his introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: 1947-1997, Rushdie reaffirmed this: “English has become an Indian language. Its colonial origins mean that, like Urdu and unlike all other Indian languages, it has no regional base.”
Class, caste, gender, and the English divide
In contemporary India, English remains one of the most powerful gatekeepers of privilege and opportunity. Fluency in the language often draws the line between mobility and marginalisation, between inclusion in the knowledge economy and exclusion from it.
“Where language is concerned, it is the language user who calls the shots,” says Professor Deepti Gupta, former chairperson Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University. “Initially, when most Indians did not use or understand English, it did become a hegemonic baton wielded by the colonial masters. But India, in its own style and at its own pace, first adopted English, then adapted to it, in order to become adept at it. Today, the imperial power is missing, but very clearly, in certain professions and situations, fluency in English is required for success.”
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Yet this advantage is not evenly distributed. Nair, in her paper, notes, “Thirty percent of the Indian population is still illiterate in any language.” The promise of English remains unequally realised, skewed in favour of the urban and upper-caste elite. In metropolitan centres, English-medium education is often a default; in rural areas, it remains a distant dream. The divide is as much about class as it is about geography.
The pressure to acquire English fluency is especially acute for women in newly affluent families. Nivedita Gupta, Assistant Professor at Amity University, Noida, recalls her years teaching in Punjab, where many young women enrolled in English programmes not for academic fulfillment but as preparation for the marriage market. “They were under immense pressure to become symbols of refinement and upward mobility,” she says. “I saw many of them break down, traumatised by the expectation that English fluency would define their worth in the eyes of prospective in-laws.”
In 2010, Dalits in Uttar Pradesh’s Banka village built a temple to worship ‘Angrezi Devi’ or the ‘Goddess of English’. (Source: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
And yet, for many, English is not an emblem of elitism, it is the ticket to emancipation. In 2010, Dalits in Uttar Pradesh’s Banka village built a temple to worship ‘Angrezi Devi’ or the ‘Goddess of English’. As Satpathy explains, “They felt that the classical languages of India had kept them oppressed. One way to bypass this long-standing linguistic hegemony was to ‘worship’ English.” For these communities, English offers an escape from the caste-bound hierarchies.
This was also the vision of BR Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution and one of India’s most influential Dalit thinkers. For Ambedkar, English represented a rare neutral ground, a language unfamiliar to all castes, and thus free of the embedded privilege and ritual authority of Sanskritised Hindi. It was, in his view, the only linguistic medium capable of ensuring real equality.
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“Major Dalit leaders worship Macaulay. There’s even a temple for him,” Satpathy adds. “They know English empowers them. If they shun English, they’ll be left nowhere.”
The colonial-era caricature of ‘Babu English’, mocked for its awkward syntax and mimicry, has lost its sting in today’s India. “The whole term… has to be discarded,” Satpathy argues, pointing to the evolution of English into a dynamic, Indianised form. Deepti, who specialises in applied linguistics, agrees: “Today, the importance of paralinguistic features stands diluted. This may be due to the tremendous spread of English and the countless variety of Indians using it.”
‘Chutnified’ English: Irreverent, hybrid, and Indian
Indian English has evolved into something unmistakably its own and is no longer tethered to colonial correctness. Nair describes this transformation as an act of “semantic subversion.” From sutta to bindaas, young Indians inject regional idioms, slang, and grammar into English, reshaping it into a language of expression rather than imitation.
Such hybridity is not a flaw but a sign of vitality. “Hybrid forms are always good for the growth and development of a language,” says Professor Deepti Gupta. “More varieties mean that the language is not at risk of language death and is evolving.” In a multilingual society like India, she adds, this interplay between languages is “dynamic” and, if encouraged, can enrich both education and expression. However, she also offers a caveat: users must develop “language intelligence” — the ability to switch registers and choose the appropriate variety for each context. “For instance, in an interview for a position in a multinational organisation, a candidate cannot use the hybrid form. This is not masked cultural dominance, this is language intelligence.”
Cinema, too, reflects this linguistic reorientation. Nivedita observes that “while Indian cinema historically used refined Hindi and Urdu to evoke sublimity and emotional catharsis, today’s films cater to urban, English-speaking elites.”
English remains aspirational, but not just for the urban elite. Its reach now cuts across class lines. “English is a passport to the world of jobs,” says Satpathy. “Domestic workers send their children to English-medium schools because they see a reward in learning English.” For many, it is a question of survival, access, and the hope of social mobility.
English in India today is no longer foreign. It is code-switched, re-invented, accented, and recontextualised, shaped by those who use it, on their terms.
