This refers to Kanika Datta’s interview with author Zareer Masani “Macaulay’s ‘child’” (Dinner with BS, January 1). The article covers some interesting issues. Masani’s observation that “English teaching is terrible” in India is right. The progress of a language in a foreign country depends on the pedagogy used in teaching, public usage, clarity-richness of the language in nuancing subtle differences in meaning with precision and its capacity for inventing new words to meet contemporary needs. While Wren’s grammar is still being taught in schools as also when I went school in the forties, emphasis has shifted from rigidity to convenience of usage. Earlier, the rule required use of apostrophe to show the possessive case of an animate noun only; so to call “Tom’s shirt” was correct but “shirt’s colour” was not. Not nowadays. Earlier, if you used “one” as a subject in a sentence, it was to be followed by its forms throughout.
As regards clarity and precision, English is one of the most powerful languages. We know that the thesaurus may give several words to mean “beautiful”; but they are distinctively different in meaning. As another example, if the Lt Governor of New Delhi were to be confronted by some women who go to his chamber, take out their bangles, put them on his table and walk out quietly, he should not charge them with “vulgar” misconduct. “Indecent” would be appropriate. One can savour the beauty of English not only in its literature but also in the drafting of laws during British period, with Indian Penal Code (which Macaulay help draft) as a model. Compare it with the Indian Technology Act, and recall Section 66A.
Business English is the best proof of inventive characteristic of English. We had “hotpant accounting” to serve the purpose in the seventies. Now we have “fiscal cliff’.
We must thank Macaulay for introducing English language to us. It may have helped the cause of the imperial reign but without it, we would have been lost in our fraternal fight to identify our national lingua franca. Let us hope it will survive “spelling and grammar checks” of Microsoft word too.
Y G Chouksey, Pune
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