If English has been a key tool of ideological subjugation and social oppression in colonial times, creating as it did Westernized colonial subjects whose tastes and sensibilities betrayed their indigenous make-up, in today’s era of global-ization its potential for domination is almost limitless. Globalglobal-ization has made the borders of the nation state more porous and reinstated the importance of the English language for all communities, through multinationals, market forces, pop culture, cyber space and digital technology. Riding on the wave of
globalization and the forces of global capital, and abetted by resources of the media, the internet and satellite communication, the ‘soft power’ of English neocolonialism is positioned to control minds even more completely, as Annamalai notes, ‘not by coercion but by seduction’ (2005: 33). The cultural violence that the pursuit of imperialistic and capitalist goals can wreak has been attested by scholars such as Giddens (1991), Phillipson (1992), Penny-cook (1994), Fairclough (1999) and Canagarajah (1999).
In India’s case though, the fear of cultural homogenization is perhaps of less immediate concern, given India’s cultural vibrancy and its capacity to accommodate creatively to non-indigenous influences without losing its own identity and distinctiveness. Indians are not easily persuaded to give up their cultural roots even after migrating to powerful, developed countries of the West, but tend to foster indigenous linguistic and cultural mores and take much pride in passing them on to their offspring. The additive nature of English-bilingualism in India is a case in point, wherein Indians have appro-priated the English language and made it one of their own, nativizing and hybridizing it in inventive ways in a seamless blending that Bruthiaux (Chapter 1 this volume) refers to as a potential benefit to be welcomed, pro-vided of course that cultural continuity is safeguarded. As Annamalai observes, the attitudinal integration with English culture associated with English lan-guage-in-education during the colonial period is therefore politically irrele-vant to postcolonial India. Nor has the motivation for learning English been purely, or mainly, economic, as in the case of Singapore, for instance (Wee, Chapter 2 this volume). A combination of various forces – economic, political, intellectual and social – has propelled the craze for English, successfully mar-keted as the language of development, modernity, and scientific and techno-logical advancement.
For most Indians the primary motivation for learning English has been instrumental rather than an integrative one (Gardner and Lambert 1972;
Agnihotri and Khanna 1997). English has long held sway as a ‘library lan-guage’, or the language of knowledge acquisition (Tickoo 1996). Consequently, English is the language in which most of the academic material is published and the number of Indian publishing firms makes the country one of the leading publishers of English language books in the world. Indeed, as Kurzon comments ‘[T]o be educated tends to be synonymous with the ability to speak fluent English. Any chance meeting with an academically educated Indian will naturally be conducted in English. Internal migration among different states of the Union further strengthens the status of English not only as a library
language or a link language, but as an all-Indian language, more so than any other language spoken in India apart from Hindi’ (Kurzon 2004: 18–19).
There is, however, as Annamalai notes, a new kind of cultural integration in which English plays a pivotal role, that of class culture, with its distinctive group behaviour, ideas about life and view of the world, and it is disseminated to the members of the class by English. ‘English is the cross-linguistic symbol of the identity and solidarity of this class, which is economically the middle and upper class of the country’ (Annamalai 2005: 32). He goes on to state:
English has also assumed a role in another kind of cultural integration, which puts a premium on what is called global culture, but which is heavily drawn from Western cultural values . . . . English is the key to this overpowering culture that offers material rewards to its adherents. This cultural role of English marks down the value of nation-building, in the cultural sphere through identification with Indian languages. The ideological and behavioural integration with Europe planned through the language in education policy in the colonial period re-enters in the guise of global integration,
with English playing the same instrumental role (Annamalai 2005: 32).
This inter-connectedness of English with a global culture that supersedes the national and ethnic cultures, not only works to heighten its seductive power. With all the social selection mechanisms unchanged which use the mastery of English as the chief screening and gatekeeping measure for access to higher education and the recruitment of professionals in job settings, it ensures that the parents,’ students’, teachers’ and principals’ as also the employ-ers’ and the company executive’s choices are necessarily constrained under the hegemonic effect of the dominance of English in a way that the mechanisms of social mobility are newly re-legitimized in the postcolonial era by the dis-courses of globalization.
Such trends justify the view held by critical theorists that ‘[G]lobalization has given more opportunities for the extremely wealthy to make money more quickly . . . In fact, globalization is a paradox: while it is very beneficial to a few, it leaves out or marginalizes two-thirds of the world’s population’ (Kavanagh, cited in Lin and Martin 2005: 7). And that it is elusive to the most disadvan-taged members of a society because they are positioned to reap the least bene-fits from it:
While the cosmopolitan multilingual elite well-versed in global English and new knowledge technologies (often mediated through global English) can find jobs anywhere across the globe (i.e. gaining transnational mobility), those monolingual
locals who never catch on to the new skills and new languages (often due to lack of class-based capital and habitus) are ever more locked up in non-mobility both geographically and socioeconomically. (Lin and Martin 2005: 8)
From this perspective, it seems clear that like the discourse of opportunity, a discourse of equality is being used to justify English as a soft option and the emergence of a new middle class.
Not everyone shares this perception of globalization or of the hegemonial potential of English in perpetuating it, however, and I return here to Gurcharan Das’s prediction, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, namely, that India’s prosperity will increase in proportion to the extent of increase of its middle class. Dismissing the gloom-and-doom vision of globalization as a spectre that university-based post-modernist thinkers in particular like to raise, Das’s primary concern is with the economic potential of globalization for India’s development agenda, perceiving its function as a lever to revitalize the economy and generate tangible social change by effecting a break from past inefficiencies and incapacities that stifled and suppressed the nation’s eco-nomic growth.
Thus, analysing the situation from an economist’ point of view, Das sees globalization as a fresh new opportunity that can work to India’s advantage precisely on account of the number of people available in India today who are English-speaking bilinguals. Das rues the fact that in the post-independence era of development and re-structuring, India was miserably left behind by the East Asian ‘tiger economies’ when it skipped the industrial revolution, owing partly to stubbornly persisting with an inward-looking socialist model of development, which protected local industries and the slow-paced implemen-tation of its reforms. Noting the curious historical inversion wherein unlike many democratic countries in the West, India embraced democracy first and capitalism much later, he observes that the making of money was never a priority for Indians. But there are reasons to rejoice – one of them being what he terms ‘the commercialization of Indian society’. This time round it is the educated young in India’s largest cities who are leading the change. And this commercial spirit, in his view, is not just limited to the cities; the smallest vil-lage has found it. He visualizes a ‘trickle down effect’, particularly when, given that the discourse of knowledge can only be effective to the extent that it is congruent with the discourse of power, these developments are accompanied by decentralization, with the local self-government (panchayat raj) emanci-pating the Indian village politically. The lively informal economic activity gathering force in these villages marks a healthy proactive spirit that is capable
of leading the people from endemic poverty to empowerment and better living conditions. As the rewards of economic growth penetrate downward he is optimistic that more people will share in the prosperity.
In Das’s view, the present change from an industrial to a global information economy speaks to India’s advantage. For one thing, the new economy is largely a service economy and creates more jobs, unlike the cost-cutting, downsizing and mechanizing economy of the past. Besides, because in today’s global econ-omy a country’s status is determined by the share of brains that it uses, he contends that India with its vast intellectual capital is in an excellent position to provide knowledge workers to the global economy and benefit from the knowledge revolution. The communications revolution is creating masses of job opportunities in India. For instance, helped by cheap telecommunication networks and English language-speaking skills, the call centre industry, which employs about half a million people between 20 and 26 years, is already girded to sell itself as the face of globalized India. India’s advantage over other coun-tries is that English is pervasive and call centre operators have found that it takes only 6 weeks to get Indians talking with an American accent. Increasingly, powered by the knowledge sectors of economy, India’s emerging success in information technology is yet further evidence of its competitive edge. India’s software companies have the best computer engineers in the world and Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are at the heart of the internet revolution. The internet has levelled the playing field, promising to make up for past inefficien-cies (Friedman 2006). Aggressive recruiting by global companies have pushed the programming wages in the homegrown software industry in India and the fact that the number of workers for these companies have doubled in the course of 12 months (March 2004–2005) with a 7 per cent increase in average revenue productivity makes for impressive statistics, reflecting a whole new reality. The software and outsourcing boom has also resulted in an environment that has drawn to India research centres from across the world. Das therefore argues that the spread of information technology is an opportunity to overcome historical disabilities and compress the time needed to reach important devel-opmental goals. And what makes all this possible is India’s universities, which produce 2.5 million fresh graduates every year who have varying levels of pro-ficiency in English, while India’s business schools provide around 89,000 MBAs per year. With India’s competitive advantage in the new knowledge economy, it may in the end have been all right to skip the industrial revolution.
Similar views have been put forward by Thomas Friedman (2006), author of the international bestseller, The World is Flat, who argues that globalization
has gone to a whole new level in the 21st century. Dividing the era of globaliza-tion roughly into three broad periods, he identifies brawn as the key driving force in Globalization 1.0 (from 1492, when Columbus set sail, opening trade between the Old World and the New World – until 1800) – that is, ‘how much muscle, how much horsepower, wind power or, later, steam power your coun-try had and how creatively you could deploy it’. In the second era (roughly from 1800 to 2000), Globalization 2.0, the dynamic force driving global inte-gration was multinational companies spearheaded by the Industrial Revolution and breakthroughs in hardware – that is, from steamships and railways in the beginning to telephones and mainframe computers towards the end.
But, he argues, while in Globalization 1.0 it was countries globalizing and in Globalization 2.0 it was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Global-ization 3.0 that gives it its unique character is the newfound power for indi-viduals to collaborate and compete globally. And the phenomenon that is enabling, empowering, and enjoining individuals and small groups to com-pete in this way is what he calls the flat-world platform, because of its powerful potential to level the playing field. What is more, Globalization 3.0 differs from the previous eras not only in how it is shrinking and flattening the world and how it is empowering individuals. But, he maintains, while in the previous eras
‘it was Western countries, companies and explorers who were doing most of the globalizing and shaping of the system, . . . Globalization 3.0 is going to be driven not only by individuals but also by a much more diverse – non-Western, non-white – group of individuals . . . and you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part’ (Friedman 2006: 9–11).
Friedman’s predictions find empirical endorsement in Nayar’s (2006) recent monograph India’s Globalization: Evaluating the Economic Impact, excerpted by Yale Global Online (1 February 2007). Compared to the derisively termed
‘Hindu’ rate of growth of 3.4 per cent over the period 1956 to 1975, in the dozen years from 1995 to 2007 the growth rate has been over 6.5 per cent;
and during the last four years, an unprecedented average growth rate of over 8 per cent. Nayar concludes: ‘[C]ontrary to the position of the critics, global-ization has served as the agent of deliverance for India from economic stagna-tion and perpetual economic crises even as it has reduced poverty. However, India continues to be dogged by deep-seated societal problems that persisted throughout the autarkic period. But it is precisely the accelerated growth gen-erated by globalization that has provided the additional resources to alleviate, if not yet to remove, them.’
This analysis seems to run counter to the approach I have adopted so far which associates the politics of English language education in India with socially and culturally undesirable consequences as viewed within the com-modification of language framework. Yet the perspective put forward by econ-omists such as Das is worthy of serious consideration not just because it is extremely interesting and persuasive but in that it presents an alternative con-ception. Das’s analysis of current developments in the Indian economy, and the high regard with which he views English’s role in them, provides a good example, noted by Bruthiaux (2002), of the disparity between the views held by mainstream economists and many critical theorists and applied linguists.
Commenting on the tendency of these two parties to operate independently of each other, Bruthiaux points out that while many applied linguists see the phe-nomenon of globalization as nothing but having negative linguistic conse-quences, they show a general reluctance to engage more deeply with the views held by mainstream economists, or to examine the factual basis of the debate.
He argues for the need to adopt a greater plurality of positions and suggests that if we take a more nuanced view of the spread of English and its effect on local cultures and languages, it is possible to see globalization as a process of social and cultural transformation, liberation even. Listening to what main-stream economists are saying will also help invigorate the debate.
Das, for instance argues that, rather than condemn developments such as the global information revolution and economic liberalization as the
‘pathology of modernization’, one might be persuaded to accept that modern-ization offers the only opportunity for the majority of Indian people to raise themselves to a decent standard of living: ‘To eschew modernization is to condemn the masses to degrading poverty and the injustices of caste in our traditional society’. Hence, paradoxical though it may seem to critical theorists and applied linguists, the conclusion he comes to is that the only way for India to prevent economic stagnation and achieve prosperity is by increasing its middle class:
When half the population in society is middle class, its politics will change, its world view will be different, its poor will be fewer, and society will have greater means to look after them. Thus, to focus on the middle class is to focus on prosperity, unlike in the past, when our focus has been on redistributing poverty.
This does not mean that one is callous. On the contrary, the whole purpose of the enterprise is to lift the poor – and lift them into the middle class.
(Das 2002: 252)
Understandably, many are sceptical about India’s ability to succeed in the knowledge economy or its ability to spread the rewards of its success to the masses. There are contending views about India’s entry into global compe-tition and trade even among Indian thinkers. The critical questions being asked are: ‘Is international trade a public good for all participants? Or is it more accurately seen as a zero-sum game, where certain nations and groups prosper at the expense of others?’ (Khilani 1998: 206). Even if one discounts the fact that Indian software programmers are earning one-fifth the wages paid in the West, and that the youngsters employed at the call centres risk losing their cul-tural moorings while being urged to learn more about Western lifestyles and imitate Western accents in order to gain the approval of their clients, how will a few thousand ‘knowledge workers’ transform the destinies of a billion people, particularly when 40 per cent are illiterate and the infrastructure crying out to be overhauled? For a majority of working-class Indians, English remains some-thing beyond their reach. Unlike their middle-class counterparts, they typically live in a lifeworld where few will, or can, use English for any authentic commu-nicative or sociocultural purposes. Besides, as Bruthiaux rightly asserts, for a large majority of the poor L1 literacy is the essential factor because they need the basic skills to participate in their local economies, not the English that is needed for participating in the global economy (Bruthiaux 2002).
To be fair, Das is throughout passionate in his zeal for alleviating India’s poverty. He is of the firm view that if indeed there is one thing that could secure India’s future, it is the vigorous attention to building human capabili-ties – and that the most effective means of doing this is to unleash the power of human capital through education (Das 2005: 226). He contends that attain-ing success in the knowledge economy will necessitate both the expansion of primary education and improving the quality of higher education – whereas the Indian state’s failure in these areas has been glaring. In the post-indepen-dence years, led by the notion that modernization meant greater attention to advanced research and development, the country’s scarce educational resources were devoted entirely to furthering tertiary education while the more urgent needs of primary education, particularly for women, were put on hold. Despite
To be fair, Das is throughout passionate in his zeal for alleviating India’s poverty. He is of the firm view that if indeed there is one thing that could secure India’s future, it is the vigorous attention to building human capabili-ties – and that the most effective means of doing this is to unleash the power of human capital through education (Das 2005: 226). He contends that attain-ing success in the knowledge economy will necessitate both the expansion of primary education and improving the quality of higher education – whereas the Indian state’s failure in these areas has been glaring. In the post-indepen-dence years, led by the notion that modernization meant greater attention to advanced research and development, the country’s scarce educational resources were devoted entirely to furthering tertiary education while the more urgent needs of primary education, particularly for women, were put on hold. Despite