British legacy alive and kicking in India

By Y.P. Rajesh

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - In a nondescript corner of Delhi, white marble statues and busts of British royalty and viceroys, including King George V, languish in a park filled with filth, feces and wild undergrowth.

In the next month or two, 13 cities and towns in southern India, including the IT hub of Bangalore, will give up their anglicized names and revert to their vernacular versions -- the latest in a list of places burying their colonial nomenclature.

Dumping symbols of two centuries of British rule remains a popular, if sometimes jingoistic, policy in India even 60 years after it became independent.

But it has not been as easy for the country to chart a completely independent new path, as some of the more enduring legacies of the Raj have become a big part of its identity and symbolize much of what is right with it, as well as what is not.

The English language clearly tops the list, with India home to between 300 and 400 million English speakers, thought to be the largest in the world.

"It used to be said that the sun never sets on the British Empire," Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a speech at his alma mater, Oxford University, after he was awarded a honorary doctorate in 2005.

"I am afraid we were partly responsible for sending that adage out of fashion," he said.

"But if there is one phenomenon on which the sun cannot set, it is the world of English-speaking people, in which the people of Indian origin are the single largest component."

Inheritance of the language -- as well as an accompanying university system -- has helped India produce millions of English-speaking engineers and back-office workers, pushing the country's IT industry to the global centre-stage and earning billions of dollars for the economy.

NEW WORLD COOLIES?

Today, children in cities and towns are taught English alphabets -- "A, B, C, D" as they call it -- at nurseries even before they are three years old, much before they learn to read or write their own native tongues.

Earlier this month, a Bangalore-based firm announced it would teach English to South Koreans through the Internet, saying Asians would benefit from learning it from non-native speakers.

Acquiring English has raised the prosperity levels of middle-class Indians, just as it brought a sense of equality under British rule by undermining the hierarchy of caste-ridden society, says renowned author and teacher U.R. Ananthamurthy.

But today, with market forces dominating and offering lucrative jobs to young men and women who can "speak English with the right accent", India's rich heritage of regional languages was being undermined, he said.

"We are not an economic force, we are a workforce of the world," Ananthamurthy said. "It is some kind of modern coolie work. This is a very illusory kind of development."