By Dennis Baron
Global English may be about to go celestial. A political activist in India wants the country’s poorest caste to improve its status by worshipping the English language, and to start off he’s building a temple to Goddess English in the obscure village of Bankagaon, near Lakhimpur Khiri in Uttar Pradesh.
English started on the long path to deification back in the colonial age, and in many former British colonies English has become both an indispensable tool for survival in the modern world and a bitter reminder of the Raj. In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay recommended to fellow members of the India Council that the British create a system of English-language schools in the colony to train an elite class of civil servants, “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” who would help the British rule the subcontinent.
The philologist William Jones, who visited India almost 50 years before Macaulay, had a much more positive view of Indian language and culture. “Oriental” Jones, as he was sometimes called, praised Sanskrit as “more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either,” and he demonstrated that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek all shared a common Indo-European ancestor. But Macaulay didn’t think much of India’s ancient linguistic heritage, and he told the Council, “A single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Macaulay argued that British support for India’s traditional Arabic and Sanskrit schools gave “artificial encouragement to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology.” In their place he recommended English-language schools that would civilize India, as European languages had already civilized Russia: “I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.”
Today Indian nationalists shun Macaulay for his condescending, Eurocentric view of language and culture, but the Dalit activist Chandra Bhan Prasad wants millions of India’s Dalits (the former untouchable caste, before caste discrimination was outlawed), to learn English and let their local languages “wither away.”
Prasad celebrates Macaulay’s birthday, Oct. 25, as “English Day.” But to make English more attractive to ordinary Dalits, he’s created Goddess English, whose image is modeled on the Statue of Liberty, though the goddess wears a floppy hat instead of a crown, carries a copy of the Indian Constitution (the days of the Raj being long gone), and holds aloft a fountain pen. Prasad argues that “Universalism [is] central to the soul of Goddess English,” while India’s indigenous languages are both divisive and discriminatory. For him, speaking English is the way for Dalits to exchange their hereditary poverty for high-status jobs in science and IT, which is why his statue of Goddess English stands on a personal computer.
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