Today's aspirational
Indians want their children to go to a school where lessons are taught
in English. But often the pupils leave speaking a language that would
not be recognised in London or New York. Could this Hinglish be the
language of India's future?
Why, half a century after Indian independence, does English
remain the language of higher education, national media, the upper
judiciary and bureaucracy and corporate business?
The answer is that India, unlike its rival Asian giant China,
has no truly national language of its own. Hindi, the official language
of central government, is an artificial and largely unspoken 20th
Century construct.
Even the colloquial Hindustani of Bollywood films is spoken
by only 40% of the population, concentrated in the "cow belt" of
northern India.
The rest of the subcontinent speaks hundreds of regional vernaculars.
Amid this Babel, English remains the country's only lingua franca.
