The Language That Came as a Ruler and Stayed as a Bridge
The Language That Came as a Ruler and Stayed as a Bridge
How English travelled from colonial power to Indian identity — and why a language belongs not only to its birthplace, but also to those who make it their own.
There is something extraordinary about human beings.
We are born without knowing a single word. Yet, within a few years, we learn to name the world around us. We give names to our mothers, our homes, the stars, the rain, and even the emotions we cannot see.
A child learns the word love long before understanding what love really means.
And perhaps spends an entire lifetime discovering its meaning.
Language is one of humanity's greatest inventions. Not because it allows us to speak, but because it allows one human mind to enter another.
A thought born in one person's brain can travel thousands of kilometres, cross centuries, survive the death of its creator, and awaken something in a person who has never met them.
Imagine Shakespeare sitting somewhere in England four centuries ago, writing:
“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”
A few words. A simple question.
Yet those words still speak to a young student in India, a philosopher in Germany, or a patient facing an uncertain future in a hospital.
Shakespeare is gone.
His words are alive.
That is the miracle of language.
And among the thousands of languages humanity has created, English has travelled a particularly remarkable journey.
It came to India with colonial power.
But it did not leave when the British departed.
Instead, something unexpected happened.
India made English its own.
A language does not belong to its conquerors forever
Recently, I read a thoughtful article by Dr. G. Raghurama Rao, former Professor and Head of Dermatology at Andhra Medical College, Visakhapatnam, titled The Indelible Journey of English India: From Colonial Legacy to Modern Integrated India.
He raises a fascinating question.
Why should English, which has been used in India for centuries, not be regarded as one of India's own languages?
His argument goes beyond linguistics. It concerns national identity, education, scientific progress, communication and India's extraordinary diversity.
It made me reflect on something deeper.
Who owns a language?
The people who first spoke it?
The country where it originated?
Or the generations of human beings who adopted it, transformed it, and used it to express their lives?
Consider Sanskrit.
Its history on the Indian subcontinent extends back more than three thousand years. Its relationship with other Indo-European languages reveals ancient linguistic connections across enormous geographical distances.
The precise history of Indo-Aryan migrations is a matter for archaeology, linguistics and genetics, but Sanskrit's place in Indian civilisation is beyond dispute.
Now consider English.
Its presence in India is much more recent, becoming institutionally powerful under British colonial rule. Yet Indians have used it for generations in literature, education, law, science and public life.
The histories are profoundly different. One cannot simply equate Sanskrit's ancient development in India with the colonial introduction of English.
But there is a question worth asking.
At what point does a language stop being foreign?
After a hundred years?
Five hundred?
A thousand?
Perhaps time alone cannot answer.
Perhaps a language begins to belong when people stop merely borrowing it and start thinking, dreaming, arguing and creating through it.
That is precisely what Indians have done with English.
Twenty-six letters, an almost infinite universe
One thing has always fascinated me about English.
It uses just 26 letters.
From these simple symbols, human beings have created an astonishing universe of expression.
Think about it.
The same alphabet can describe a mother's affection, Einstein's equations, a surgeon's observations, a poet's loneliness, or the constitutional rights of millions.
A few letters arranged differently can make us laugh, cry, question, rebel or fall in love.
Of course, every developed human language possesses immense expressive potential. English is not uniquely capable of expressing profound thoughts.
What makes English particularly interesting is the enormous body of knowledge, literature and international communication that has accumulated around it.
It has also been remarkably willing to borrow.
From Hindi and other Indian languages came words such as shampoo, jungle, bungalow, pyjamas and chutney.
From French came cuisine and ballet.
From Arabic came algebra.
From Sanskrit, through other linguistic routes, came words such as avatar.
English has borrowed so extensively that its vocabulary resembles a crowded international railway station.
People arrive from everywhere.
Some stay briefly.
Others settle permanently.
And eventually, nobody asks where they originally came from.
Perhaps societies could learn something from that.
The beauty of saying something profound with very little
I have always admired English for its capacity to express enormous ideas in remarkably simple sentences.
Take Robert Frost:
“And miles to go before I sleep.”
A traveller speaking about a journey.
Yet we immediately recognise something beyond the journey.
Our responsibilities. Our unfinished dreams. The promises we have made to ourselves and others.
Or consider Emily Dickinson:
“Hope is the thing with feathers.”
What a beautiful imagination!
Hope is invisible. We cannot weigh it, photograph it, or hold it in our hands.
Yet Dickinson gives it wings.
Suddenly, an abstract human emotion becomes something almost alive.
Or Wordsworth:
“My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.”
There is no complicated philosophy here.
Just a human being standing before nature, experiencing wonder.
And perhaps that is the greatest achievement of poetry.
It makes the ordinary extraordinary.
But beauty is not the exclusive property of English.
Telugu has Vemana, whose deceptively simple verses contain extraordinary wisdom.
Tamil has Thiruvalluvar.
Sanskrit has Kalidasa.
Urdu has Ghalib.
Every language has its own music, metaphors and emotional landscape.
Translation allows us to travel between them, although something of the original rhythm may occasionally be lost.
The wonderful thing about English is that it has become one of the great meeting places for these literary traditions.
A reader in Brazil can discover Tagore.
An Indian student can encounter Tolstoy.
A Japanese philosopher can communicate with an African historian.
Often, English becomes the bridge.
Not because it is superior to their mother tongues.
But because it is a language they happen to share.
The strange irony of India's freedom struggle
There is an irony in India's relationship with English.
The British established English education partly to serve the needs of colonial administration.
Yet the very language associated with imperial power became one of the instruments through which Indians challenged that power.
Dadabhai Naoroji used English to explain the economic exploitation of India.
Mahatma Gandhi used it to communicate Indian political and moral arguments to international audiences.
Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India, written in English, became one of the most influential reflections on Indian civilisation.
Subhas Chandra Bose used English as one of several languages through which he communicated his political vision.
And Swami Vivekananda, standing before an international audience in Chicago in 1893, introduced the philosophical richness of India through English.
Imagine the irony.
A language that arrived with imperial authority became a vehicle for demanding freedom from that authority.
But we should also remember that India's freedom struggle was sustained by newspapers, speeches, songs and movements in numerous Indian languages.
English connected important sections of the leadership and carried India's case internationally.
Indian languages carried the struggle into millions of homes.
Both mattered.
History is rarely a story of one language defeating another.
It is usually a story of human beings finding whatever means are available to express their aspirations.
India: a civilisation of many voices
Imagine a young doctor from Andhra Pradesh attending a scientific conference in Chennai.
The inaugural proceedings are conducted entirely in Tamil.
He understands little.
A few months later, he attends another conference in Uttar Pradesh.
This time the proceedings are in Hindi.
Again, he struggles.
The problem is not that Tamil or Hindi lacks beauty.
The problem is that communication requires a shared language.
Dr. Raghurama Rao describes experiences of this kind in his article.
They are familiar to many Indians who travel beyond their home states.
India has hundreds of languages and countless regional varieties.
This diversity is one of our greatest cultural treasures.
But diversity also creates a practical challenge.
How do people who speak different languages work together?
English has become one important answer.
Not the only answer.
Hindi and other Indian languages also serve as link languages in different regions and contexts.
And modern translation technology is beginning to offer additional possibilities.
Nevertheless, English has a distinctive advantage.
For many Indians, it is not the mother tongue of either person in a conversation.
A Telugu-speaking doctor and a Tamil-speaking engineer may both use English without either having to surrender their linguistic identity.
In that sense, English can provide a relatively neutral meeting ground.
Yet we must be careful.
English is not equally accessible to every Indian.
Fluency often reflects differences in schooling, income and opportunity.
A language that connects educated professionals can also exclude those who have never had the chance to learn it.
Therefore, celebrating English should never mean allowing it to become a barrier to dignity or opportunity.
The language of science — and the danger of confusing access with intelligence
As a doctor, I have experienced the extraordinary importance of English in scientific communication.
A researcher in Japan publishes a discovery.
A scientist in Germany questions its methodology.
A clinical trial in India tests its implications.
A medical team in Africa applies the findings.
Within months, knowledge may travel across continents.
Much of this exchange takes place in English.
Consider what happens during a medical emergency.
A critically ill newborn in a neonatal intensive care unit does not care which language the doctor speaks.
What matters is whether the doctor possesses the knowledge and skill to save that child's life.
If research published elsewhere in the world helps improve treatment, language has served its highest purpose.
It has helped knowledge become action.
But here is an important distinction.
English is not the source of scientific intelligence.
It is one of the principal channels through which scientific knowledge currently travels.
Great discoveries have emerged from people thinking in German, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit and countless other languages.
Nature does not speak English.
The laws of physics do not recognise national borders.
A bacterium does not change its behaviour because a researcher describes it in Telugu rather than English.
Science belongs to humanity.
English simply provides much of its present international vocabulary.
And that is an enormous practical advantage.
However, if a brilliant student from a rural Telugu-medium school struggles to explain a scientific concept in English, we should not confuse linguistic difficulty with intellectual inability.
The task of education is to develop intelligence and give it the means to communicate.
Not to mistake fluency for intelligence itself.
What English gave India — and what India gave English
There is another side to this story that deserves appreciation.
We often discuss what English has contributed to India.
But what has India contributed to English?
Quite a lot.
Indian English is no longer merely an imitation of British English.
It has developed its own rhythms, vocabulary, expressions and cultural associations.
Words such as prepone have become familiar in Indian workplaces.
Expressions such as do the needful survive in Indian official communication, even when they sound unusual elsewhere.
Our English carries traces of our history.
It reflects how Indians think, organise relationships and negotiate everyday life.
More importantly, Indian writers have transformed English literature itself.
R. K. Narayan brought the fictional town of Malgudi to readers across the world.
Mulk Raj Anand explored social injustice.
Salman Rushdie experimented with language and narrative.
Arundhati Roy gave English a distinctive Indian rhythm.
Amitav Ghosh used it to explore histories that cross oceans and civilisations.
These writers did not merely use English.
They changed what English could sound like.
They made it carry Indian memories, Indian landscapes, Indian humour and Indian pain.
This is how languages evolve.
Not by remaining pure.
But by remaining alive.
Can artificial intelligence change this relationship?
We are now entering another fascinating chapter in the history of language.
For centuries, knowing a widely shared language provided enormous advantages.
It opened libraries, universities, professional opportunities and international conversations.
But artificial intelligence is beginning to change the economics of communication.
Imagine a Telugu-speaking student asking a complicated question about quantum physics in Telugu.
An AI system consults scientific literature published in several languages and explains the concepts in accessible Telugu.
Or a doctor in rural Andhra Pradesh communicates with a specialist in Germany without either needing to speak the other's language.
Real-time translation is improving, although it still makes mistakes, particularly with cultural nuance and technical terminology.
The possibilities are extraordinary.
Does this mean English will become unnecessary?
Not necessarily.
A shared language does more than translate information.
It creates relationships.
It allows humour, spontaneous conversation, intellectual disagreement and cultural familiarity.
AI may reduce the practical disadvantage of not knowing English.
But it will not automatically replace the human experience of speaking directly to another person.
Perhaps the future will be more interesting than a world dominated by one language.
Perhaps we will finally be able to preserve our mother tongues while accessing the accumulated knowledge of the entire world.
A child may learn mathematics in Telugu, read poetry in Tamil, understand philosophy through Sanskrit translations, and participate in international research through English.
And AI may help connect all these experiences.
What a remarkable possibility!
The mother tongue gives us roots. Other languages give us wings.
There is a danger in every discussion about language.
We begin by celebrating one language and end by diminishing another.
English versus Hindi.
Hindi versus Tamil.
Sanskrit versus English.
Regional languages versus global languages.
But why must language become a battlefield?
A child does not love the father less because the child also loves the mother.
Affection is not necessarily a limited resource.
Neither is linguistic identity.
I can love Telugu for the way it carries the emotions of my childhood.
I can admire Sanskrit for its philosophical literature.
I can appreciate Tamil for its ancient literary traditions.
And I can celebrate English for the extraordinary intellectual universe it opens.
There is no contradiction.
Indeed, knowing more than one language may enrich the way we understand the world.
Different languages sometimes organise experience differently.
They preserve distinctive metaphors, cultural memories and ways of describing relationships.
Learning another language can therefore be more than acquiring new vocabulary.
It can be an invitation to look at familiar things through unfamiliar eyes.
And that is one of the foundations of intellectual freedom.
When does a language become our own?
Let us return to the question raised by Dr. Raghurama Rao.
Can English be considered an Indian language?
The answer depends on what we mean by Indian.
If we mean a language that originated geographically within the boundaries of modern India, English does not qualify.
If we mean a language that has been adopted, transformed and used by generations of Indians to express their intellectual, political and cultural lives, English certainly has a strong claim.
These are different definitions, and they need not be confused.
India's Constitution recognises a complex multilingual arrangement. English continues to play important roles in Union administration, legislation and higher judicial proceedings, alongside the country's other languages.
It is not included among the 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule.
But constitutional classification and cultural belonging are not identical questions.
A language may have a place in people's lives long before any official classification acknowledges that relationship.
And perhaps belonging itself is not always a matter of origin.
A river may begin in one region and nourish people hundreds of kilometres away.
A tree may arrive as a seed from another continent and provide shade to generations who never knew where it came from.
A language can follow a similar journey.
English came to India through a history that included domination and inequality.
We should never romanticise that history.
But Indians did something remarkable.
They took a language associated with colonial power and made it serve their own purposes.
They used it to demand independence.
To write a Constitution.
To build universities.
To conduct research.
To create literature.
To communicate with the world.
And increasingly, to tell stories that could only have been imagined in India.
The language changed India.
India changed the language.
The final thought
There is a beautiful paradox in human civilisation.
We are divided by geography, history, religion, customs and languages.
Yet we possess an extraordinary desire to understand one another.
We build bridges across rivers.
Roads across mountains.
Satellites across space.
And languages across minds.
English has become one of those bridges.
It is not a perfect bridge.
It carries the inequalities of history and the privileges of modern education.
But it has also carried ideas, discoveries, aspirations and friendships across boundaries that once seemed impossible to cross.
We should not worship it.
We should not reject it merely because of its origins.
We should use it wisely, make it accessible, and allow it to coexist with the languages that preserve our deepest cultural memories.
Because the purpose of language is not to establish the superiority of one people over another.
Its purpose is to make understanding possible.
Perhaps that is the real beauty of English in India.
It arrived as the language of a foreign power.
It survived as a language of opportunity.
And through generations of Indian thought, creativity and everyday life, it became something else.
A language through which Indians could speak not only to the world, but also to one another.
Not the only voice of India.
But unmistakably one of its voices.
And that, perhaps, is what it means for a language to belong.
Inspired by Dr. G. Raghurama Rao's thought-provoking article, “The Indelible Journey of English India: From Colonial Legacy to Modern Integrated India.” With appreciation for his contribution to an important conversation about language, identity and India's future.
Dr. B. S. Chakravarthy
Professor & Head, Department of Pediatrics
Andhra Medical College / King George Hospital
Visakhapatnam, India
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