Modernisation And Westernisation

In assessing the role of English in national life there are three important points to be made. First, as is apparent from the surge in learning English as the second language of choice worldwide from culturally nationalist France to China -- it is now the world lingua franca in large part as it has become the international language of science and commerce. These are the instruments of the modernity on which future prosperity is increasingly seen to depend in a globalised economy. India has a headstart in this respect given its colonial educational heritage. It would be senseless to give this up.

 

Second, as the experience of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as well as the continuing resistance of many non-Hindi speaking states in India attests, in multilingual states, if the language of any group is adopted as the official that immediately puts its speakers at an advantage, and will be fiercely resisted by other groups. To allay these discords, like the Austro-Hungarians many colonial nationalists have kept the old imperial lingua franca as the official language. The same pragmatic consideration continues to apply to India, and seeking to eliminate the colonial lingua franca is likely as in Austro-Hungary to lead to the vernacular nationalism which will destroy the Union.

The third point is more complex. It concerns Macaulay's children (see my last column published on September 17). In a recently completed book on culture and development (Unintended Consequences, MIT, (in press) I have found it useful to distinguish between the material and cosmological beliefs of a particular culture. The former relates to ways of making a living and concerns beliefs about the material world, in particular about the economy. The latter are related to understanding the world around us and mankind's place in it which determine how people view their lives -- its purpose, meaning and relationship to others. There is considerable cross-cultural evidence that material beliefs are more malleable than cosmological ones. Material beliefs can alter rapidly with changes in the material environment -- peasants can be converted into industrial workers and managers within a generation.

There is greater hysteresis in cosmological beliefs, on how, in Plato's words, one should live. Moreover, the cross-cultural evidence shows that rather than the environment it is the language group which determines these world-views. Therein lies the rub for Macaulays children. For the full-fledged members of this caste for whom English has become their first language their cosmological beliefs are likely to conform more closely to those of their linguistic cousins in the west than their vernacular countrymen. They are westernised in a way that for those whom English is a second or third language are not.

But if modernisation requires a knowledge of English for instrumental reasons, does that mean that westernisation will follow willy nilly? There has been an influential body of thought in development studies which has claimed this necessary connection, and as I shall be arguing in a subsequent column this is also the current basis of the belief in the west that with the success of the market its own values will also be adopted worldwide. But this is to assume that material beliefs determine cosmological beliefs. Even though in the rise of the west the two were conjoined, there is little reason to believe this is the case as the important case of a modernised but non-westernised Japan has shown.

Unfortunately in India there continues to be great confusion amongst the intelligentsia on this point which is reflected in the two diametrically opposed penanceas that its Macaulays children have prescribed for its ills. The roots of this confusion go back to the early days of the nationalist struggle. All the early leaders of the movement were Macaulay's children, and their nationalism echoed the creole nationalism that overthrew colonial rule in the Americas both in the North and the South. The major complaint of the creoles against the peninsulares was that even though in every respect language, descent, customs, manners and even religion -- they were indistinguishable, they had an inferior status because of the accident of their birth.

In India, Macaulay's children too had an inferior status, despite being English in every respect except in blood and colour. Like the American creole elites they first sought to remove these restrictions on their advancement, eg by agitating for the ICS exams to be held in India, and when these fell on deaf years, they sought to exclude their penisulares from their colony with the cry of full independence. There was however for a time a division as noted in my last column between the modernising and traditionalist elements in this English speaking caste. Both groups implicitly believed that modernisation and westernisation were linked. But whereas the Nehruvians -- who despite lip service to marrying Indian with western culture -- accepted the implication and sought to implement a particular secular western set of cosmological beliefs, the Gandhians (whose cultural successors include the various Hindu nationalist groups) have sought to resist modernisation for fear it would lead to westernisation.

But there was another choice which was to modernise without westernising -- a process in which the role of English would be instrumental. For the myriad district and lower level service functionaries whose first language remained their vernacular, the English they spoke as a second or third language already fulfilled this role. They were not infected by western cosmologies like the English speaking caste. Even though not westernised they could have been modernisers. It was fateful that, during the nationalist movement, it was Gandhi -- that other Macaulay's child -- who mobilised them politically. For unlike the modernisers, Gandhi was above all concerned with maintaining a refurbished Hindu equilibrium. But by equating modernistaion with westernisation he created a backlash not only against the cosmological views of the west but also its material beliefs. Many of the views of both the Hindu nationalists and many in the Janata Dal also reflect this confusion.

The field was then left clear for the modernisers cum westernisers, symbolised most powerfully in the iconic figure of Jawaharlal Nehru. It is instructive to see why it is the western cosmology they imbibed which has had such inimical effects on the material prospects of Indians -- a subject I will take up in my next column.

(The author is James S Coleman Professor of International Development Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles)