India's Indipendence Day

Today is India's "Indipendence Day", when the end of british colonial rule is celebrated.

This year it comes briefly after Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. The prime minister said during his speech that British colonial rule left lots of positive legacies in India, and this obviously caused quite a fuss back in his country. What's amazing though is that in Indian newspapers quite a few of the intelectuals who were asked to express their own view also said that the British Raj was basically a good thing for India. What's more it's clear from my own experience that quite a few ordinary Indians see it the same way.

I don't know what's worse: to hear colonizers presenting their own rule as a positive thing, or to hear the colonized agreeing.

The British remained in India for 200 years. They didn't conquer India out of compassion but out of their own interests. They may have built some basic infrastructure in India and banned some particularly ghastly Indian practices such as Sati (the widow voluntarily commiting suicide after her husband's death), but who can tell what might have happened to India if the British had never arrived? Perhaps India might have had it's own industrial revolution instead of contributing to Britain's. Perhaps it would have evolved in it's own way, a way more fitting to it's needs.

And yet in India, unlike in othe post-colonial countries, the memory of colonialism often inspires awe more then anger.

In his speech Manmohan among other things praised the english language as one of Britain's greatest gifts to India. This view is also common in India.

English, in reality, has divided the Indian elite from it's fellow countrymen, and linked it's imagination to the western world. Only about 10 per cent of Indians really know english (although foreigners first arriving in India often have the feeling that everyone does), and only 3 or 4 per cent could really seriously read book in english. And yet, a big part of India's intelectual life takes place in english. Important foreign books are only rarely translated into Indian languages, meaning that few people can actually read them. Even Indian literature is sometimes directly in english. English has delayed the emergence of a national language, with Hindi not being known in the southern parts of India. A tiny percentage of Indians even speak english at home regularly, and feel more comfortable in it then they do in the local language. Educated Indians often use english in their daily interactions with each other, and the private schools to which they all send their children are english-medium schools. Meanwhile the uneducated are increasingly cut off. This state of affairs has impoverished Indian languages no end. While the French say, or the Russians, take great pride in their languages, the Indians definitely don't.

And those who say that the prevalence of english in Indian life has helped India become a "world player" will soon be learning Chinese in any case.

Gabriele Corsetti