Xenophobia in British India: A Linguistic Perspective
Dr. Sarmistha Roy
Guest Faculty, Dept. of English, BBM College
Agartala, West Tripura
India
Abstract
Some of the most persistent aspects of colonization involved not just military and
political domination and economic exploitation but also the systematic assault on different
cultural aspects like languages and ethnic identities. Colonization not only colonized a place
or its people, it also tried to control people’s thoughts and impose the superiority of the
colonizers. Of course, the political and economic exploitation of colonialism had drastic
effects on colonized people; colonialism also had palpable cultural effects.
Xenophobia is a term that is used to describe the dislike of outsiders (usually
foreigners) and the fear of accepting these individuals within one’s own group. The liberal
discourse of the civilizing mission and the various Orientalist positions, including a belief
that vernacular languages were the most efficient way to spread European knowledge in
India and the Anglicist insistence that English should be the language of education― both of
these discourses had cultural effects during the Colonial period. Xenophobia is found both in
societies hosting new migrant groups, and in the expanding societies. In the context of
colonization, xenophobia is also apparent in the nativist reactions that some countries have
experienced in relation to their former colonizing nations. For example, the term pisachabhasha (meaning goblin language) has been applied to English by the Indians as initially
they considered it total gibberish.
However, towards the end of the twentieth century the global spread of English has
remained not so much part of colonial control but rather part of neocolonial exploitation.
This paper aims to investigate various aspects of the linguistic situation in Colonial India
from the perspective of xenophobia.
Keywords: Language, Colonialism, Xenophobia, Colonial India, Language Policy.
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Some of the most persistent aspects of colonization involved not just military and
political domination and economic exploitation but also the systematic assault on different
cultural aspects like languages and ethnic identities. Colonization not only colonized a place
or its people, it also tried to control people’s thoughts and impose the superiority of the
colonizers. Since the early modern period the language of colonization has enabled European
travelers/writers to represent the newly “discovered” lands as an empty space on which they
could superpose their linguistic, cultural, and territorial claims by civilizing, rescuing, and
idealizing or demonizing their Indian subjects as “others.”
Colonizers attempted to consolidate their control (and claim moral legitimacy) by
training the racialized "primitive" through the ideological apparatus of both liberal and
religious civilizing missions. The "white man's burden" was the onus of enlightening the
ungrateful savage, the heathens. Hence, some of the most pernicious and persistent aspects of
colonization involved not just military occupation, political domination, and economic superexploitation but also the systematic assault on cultural integrity, languages, lifeways, and
ethnic identities. (Ramnath 18)
Of course, the political and economic exploitation of colonialism had drastic effects
on colonized people; colonialism also had palpable cultural effects. Colonialism is not only
some meticulous linear history of the material aspects of exploitation but also the cultural
constructs that were produced by this exploitation. Although the political and economic
exploitation of colonialism had drastic effects on colonized people, colonialism also had
unignorable cultural effects. As Thomas (1994) puts it:
Colonialism is not best understood primarily as a political or economic
relationship that is legitimized or justified through ideologies of racism or
progress. Rather, colonialism has always, equally importantly and deeply,
been a cultural process; its discoveries and trespasses are imagined and
energized through signs, metaphors and narratives; even what would seem its
purest moments of profit and violence have been mediated and enframed by
structures of meaning. Colonial cultures are not simply ideologies that mask,
mystify or rationalize forms of oppression that are external to them; they are
also expressive and constitutive of colonial relationships in themselves. (2)
Language is undoubtedly a critical arena for the operation of colonial power. C. A.
Bayly has argued further that language is central to establishing colonial power. In his
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Empire and Information, a study of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India, Bayly
argues that the colonial state’s ability to access indigenous networks of information and adapt
them to its own ends was critical to its success. This access rested on colonial officials’
linguistic abilities in the local languages. Company officials took pains to learn, codify, and
ultimately teach Indian classical and vernacular languages in colonial institutions, in both
England and India.1 Bernard Cohn has persuasively argued that such institutions helped
officials gain the “command of language” that was crucial to the consolidation of colonial
power in India.4 The non-egalitarian English language policy instituted byThomas Babington
Macaulay in 1835 was a way to use English language policy to exploit colonial India where
English was supplied to only the elite to hegemonize them. Through English medium
education in India he wanted to create a workforce of petty official jobs. English language
education policy in India, thus, was a top-down language policy.
Colonial language policy in India was a complex site of cultural construction. Fanon’s
well-known remark: “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the
morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the
weight of a civilization” (17–18). The liberal discourse of the civilizing mission and the
moral obligation to bring enlightenment to backward peoples; the need to provide a
productive and docile workforce who would also become consumers within colonial
capitalism; the various Orientalist positions, including an eroticization and glorification of a
distant Indian past and a belief that vernacular languages were the most efficient way to
spread European knowledge in India; and the Anglicist insistence that English should be the
language of education― both these discourses had cultural effects during the Colonial period.
Chris Searle comments on English in the world:
Let us be clear that the English language has been a monumental force and
institution of oppression and rabid exploitation throughout 400 years of
imperialist history. It attacked the black person with its racist images and
imperialist message; it battered the worker who toiled as its words expressed
the parameters of his misery and the subjection of entire peoples in all the
continents of the world. It was made to scorn the languages it sought to
replace, and told the colonised peoples that mimicry of its primacy among
languages was a necessary badge of their social mobility as well as their
continued humiliation and subjection. Thus, when we talk of ‘mastery’ of the
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Standard language, we must be conscious of the terrible irony of the word, that
the English language itself was the language of the master, the carrier of his
arrogance and brutality. (68)
We can view the context through the two main strands of post-colonial criticism – the
binarism of Said which observes Western texts discerning the Orient as racial other, and the
more complex Bhabba notion of the ‘hybrid’, in which the narrative work of the Third World
culture adopts the language of the aggressor in order to articulate its local content.3 This could
be articulated through the Marxist framework. As Marx points out,
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class
which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling
intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its
disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so
that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of
mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the
ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material
relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one
class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. (“The German
Ideology”)
The spread of English in the world has not gone without criticisms that have regarded the
language as a clear expression of political, cultural, and economic imperialism. “While
English-only rhetoric is often cloaked in the rationality of language unification, it has
frequently been associated either with crackpot linguistic schemes or xenophobia, or
sometimes both” (Dennis 40). According to Pennycook there is nothing “neutral” about
English use in Hong Kong: “this image of English use as an open and borrowing language,
reflecting an open and borrowing people, is a cultural construct of colonialism that is in direct
conflict with the colonial evidence” (143). Mühlhäusler regards languages like English,
Bahasa Indonesia and Mandarin Chinese as “killer languages” because as national languages
of modernization, education, and development they stifle and eventually kill local languages.
Dorian states the case unequivocally: “Europeans who come from polities with a history of
standardizing and promoting just one high-prestige form carried their “ideology of contempt”
for subordinate languages with them when they conquered far-flung territories to the serious
detriment of indigenous languages” (9). Language does not serve just as a shield, but it is also
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a mask for racial, economic, and political hostility toward users of other tongues; thus an
offensive weapon against hidden, nonlinguistic targets. However, the idea that English is a
killer language that endangers local languages and cultures is a kind of postcolonial
Orientalism not applicable to India (Vaish, 2005). The habitus of multilingual India always
had internal forces of resistance that never actually allowed English to kill the indigenous
languages.
Xenophobia is a term that is used to describe the dislike of outsiders (usually
foreigners) and the fear of accepting these individuals within one’s own group. Xenophobia is
defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as ‘fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of
anything that is strange or foreign’. The liberal discourse of the civilizing mission and the
various Orientalist positions, including a belief that vernacular languages were the most
efficient way to spread European knowledge in India and the Anglicist insistence that English
should be the language of education― both of these discourses had cultural effects during the
Colonial period. Xenophobia is found both in societies hosting new migrant groups, and in
the expanding societies. In the context of colonization, xenophobia is also apparent in the
nativist reactions that some countries have experienced in relation to their former colonizing
nations. For example, the term pisacha-bhasha (meaning goblin language) has been applied
to English by the Indians as initially they considered it total gibberish (Bunson 200).
However, towards the end of the twentieth century the global spread of English has
remained not so much part of colonial control but rather part of neocolonial exploitation.4 In
the recent world, Globalization and nationalism are not mutually exclusive. Therefore a plain
dichotomization is theoretically misleading and covers up a deep-rooted mentality of
xenophobia. English and Anglicism have re-emerged in a new light transcending and
undermining the Us versus Them framework upon which xenophobia depends. The
discourses of Anglicism still adhere to English, but now to a new English, a global English,
and an English in popular demand. And, while the Empire formed an important discursive
web for the spread of cultural constructions of colonialism, the new global empire in English
forms an even more significant means for their promulgation. Xenophobic discourses about
linguistic and cultural diversity express themselves differently in different social contexts.
Language is an empowering pragmatic instrument as well as a symbolic identity marker and
has always played an important role in shedding new light on the concept of coexistence and
pluralism in Indian society. However, it is undeniable that xenophobia as a sensitive
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sociolinguistic marker of issues of power and solidarity, hierarchy, intimacy, and even
political orientation has played an important role in the linguistic scenario of colonial India.
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Notes:
1. The first such institution was the College of Fort William in Calcutta, founded in 1800. In
1806, the Company established a college at Haileybury, England, for the purpose of
educating recruits before they arrived in India. In 1812, a second institution was
founded in India: the College of Fort St. George in Madras.
2. Bernard Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” in
Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1996),
16–56.
3. See Moore-Gilbert 129–30.
4. See Phillipson.
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