The English language has stood India in good stead before and after the success of the independence movement. Mahatma Gandhi wrote “My Experiments with Truth”, which remains a classic. And India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, created a worldwide awareness of the country’s struggle for independence through a series of books, including his landmark autobiography, and in his interactions with world leaders.
After India became free, the country was punching much above its weight, thanks partly to the eloquence of Indian leaders in English in articulating their own and other developing countries’ urges for independence, development and dignity, the last in particular in apartheid South Africa.
More recently, the boom in India’s information technology is at least partly due to Indians’ fluency in English, in addition to their mathematically attuned mind. Yet the mushrooming of English language news television channels broadcasting 24 hours a day foreshadows the bleak prospect of India losing the language advantage within a generation.
The truth is that the young are more inclined to learn from television than the print medium, and the distortions and plain bad English that is the norm of major English-language channels today mean that the language they are learning and how it is pronounced and accented will render communication with the rest of the English-speaking world more and more difficult.
No one expects anchors and reporters of Indian news channels to speak in Oxbridge accents. What one has the right to expect in broadcast journalism is legibility, the ability to pronounce words intelligibly and correctly and to follow the basic rules of English grammar. And one does expect anchors to take some trouble to pronounce non-English words accurately.
Let me take some examples of India’s major English-language television channels. Take grammar first. How often is the basic rule of “accused of” and “charged with” abused and reversed? And patients are hardly ever admitted “to” hospital, as they should be, instead of “at”. Times without number running streamers at the bottom of the television screen spell “defence” and “licence” as “defense” and “license” in their American avatar, as is “practise” spelled with two “cs” as a verb. And our anchors delight in using split infinitives.
Hearing some of the anchors and reporters on English-language channels is often a revelation. One would expect of the major channels, particularly those with a prosperity bulge, to run in-house training courses to put their staff through the paces. Is it too much to expect of our broadcasters to pronounce and articulate words correctly? Must “development” be invariably mispronounced or “industry” and “interesting” wrongly accented? One had not imagined that “mechanism” would be so difficult to pronounce correctly.
Little attempt is made to discover how foreign names are pronounced, that the former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun who recently committed suicide, for instance, is pronounced Noh. The piece de resistance was a news anchor’s conversion of the legendary French artist Gauguin into our very own Gagan! He must be turning in his grave. And no one has apparently informed our TV channels that the surname in Chinese names, unless anglicised, is the first word. The veteran Singapore politician is Mr Lee, not Mr Kuan-yew.
Sometimes, it is difficult to discover the criteria for selecting anchors and reporters. Voice, presentation and ability to communicate are essential ingredients in broadcast journalism. Yet some reporters are barely intelligible and some anchors have such a strong Hindi diction that it is difficult to find out if they are talking in Hindi or English. Here I am writing about English-language commercial television channels because Doordarshan often has other compulsions in appointing staff.
Indeed, the conclusion is inescapable that sloppiness is the rule, rather than the exception. There is no inclination to focus on quality and accuracy in running television channels. It is sloppiness, not “Indian English”, that is responsible for the basic rules of grammar not being followed . Indianisms have a contribution to make in enriching the language of Shakespeare, but there can be no excuse for speaking bad English and shelter behind the slogan of “Indian English”.
There are, of course, honourable exceptions as anchors who speak impeccable English and know the virtues of voice inflection, rather than relying on belligerence, in seeking information from those they interview. Yet these anchors, even those who have managerial and decision-making functions, treat the distortion and abuse of English with placidity. Our major English-language television channels do not seem to be starved of money. Either they do not bother about enforcing quality or they do not wish to devote resources to running classes for staff to train them in speaking English correctly.
Are we then, a generation hence, destined to see our language advantage frittered away in bad, unintelligible English? Will the breed of Indian writers in English — God bless them — remain the only Indians reminding us of a time when Indians spoke English well and fluently and were listened to around the world with admiration?