Dear Sir Macaulay’s aim was to form a class of English speaking Indians who would play the role of interpreters between the British government and the native speaking Indians. His aim was to make Indians look down upon their distinctive heritage and look highly upon the European culture. But little did he know that creativity runs in our veins, no matter the situation, we turn the table around each time.
With the demise of the imperial rule in India and burgeoning of the Indian way of life, Macaulay’s English (British English) was transformed into what today is known as the Indian English or Hinglish. Only in India, you will see the use of “only” as an emphasis at the end of a sentence. Indians will never change only and Indian English is a tongue which the rest of the world will never understand only. Macaulay wanted English to be extensively used in the Indian higher education system but did he have any clue about how the education system in India works? Here, we don’t take a test, we give a test and in geometry when we need to draw a circle, we use a rounder instead of a compass and if by chance it doesn’t turn out well enough, we rub it with a rubber because eraser is so not Indian. And if the overly enthu students have a lot to write, they readily ask for a supplee! Short, simple and cute, just the way we like it.
The British wanted us to follow them, but we are born inventors. We invented “Zero”, the Decimal System and the mathematical postfix notation “Za” (it is actually two ones are two, two twos are four, but it has no rhythm and we just cannot compromise on rhythm, right?). Don’t know about dress sense but Indians sure do have an exquisite dressing sense and we absolutely love spicy food and spiced up news, so much so that we added spice to a game’s name. Ice-Spice? Ring any bells? (The game is actually called I Spy).
Actually, we believe in updating our vocabulary constantly to meet the current requirements. Our country is so populated so saying that I moved from one place to another, obviously doesn’t sound right, so instead we say I shifted. We don’t go out of town for a vacation (that’s so common), we go out of station and when the front desk executive of the hotel asks us our goodname; we give a big ear to ear smile. In India, time pass is an activity, adjective, verb and what not. “What did you do on the weekend?” “Just time pass.” “How was the movie?” “You know, just time pass.”
Most of us use the word prepone, but did you know that the word prepone didn’t exist in the Oxford Dictionary before 2010? It has been given by Indians just like the other 2% of the 2 billion English words that form the Oxford English Corpus. In fact, India has more people who speak or understand English than United Kingdom, Australia, United States, New Zealand and South Africa combined!
Even the staunchest Grammar Nazis in India use the above terms surreptitiously. Most of us are aware of it but we don’t mind, after all, everyone has a guilty pleasure – for us, it is saying “What to do? We are like this only!” to people who like to mock us.
