GORAS who ruled over India for over two centuries had a very poor opinion of us Indians. Hardly any of them cared to make friends with the natives; their contacts were limited to offices, parade grounds, battlefields, and occasional visits to brothels. They insulated themselves in their well-appointed bungalows, "Whites only" clubs, where they issued staccato orders to their khansamas, masalchis, aabdars and chaprasis. Hardly any of them bothered to learn Indian languages and they had very limited vocabularies to issue orders. Most of them never bothered themselves with Indian classics; those who did, found them incomprehensible. There were undoubtedly a few who did and translated them into English and earned the gratitude of natives who had never read them in their original forms.

By World War II the white-brown relationship had changed beyond recognition. The two races were mixing more freely. "Whites only" citadels were crumbling. The younger generation of Brits far from being proud of their Imperial heritage were apologetic about it. In return many Indians conceded that the British rule had not been as black a period of Indian history as had been painted by their ultra-patriotic political leaders. Following the more relaxed Indo-British social relationship, Indians were able to read what British jingoists had written about their forefathers and their country. Top amongst them was Rudyard Kipling who they had dismissed as a bigot trumpeter of the Raj and an anti-Indian racist. They realised there was more to him than jingoism. He was also a good storyteller and a poet. Though he loathed Indians, most of all Bengali babus and nationalists, he loved India for its beautiful countryside and was nostalgic about the smell of spices and even the stench of sewers of Lahore, Allahabad and Calcutta. He had two sides to him: one extolled the white man’s burden bringing law, order and justice to "lesser breeds without the law", the other imbibed of India what he considered worth imbibing. In both cases, he put them in words that have the majestic ring of scriptural writing. The best example of his pride in his imperial legacy is The Recessional, specially composed for felicitating Queen Victoria in 1897. I quote a verse from it:

Most Kipling scholars are of the opinion that Kipling’s most famous poem If was inspired by an Englishman he admired. I am equally convinced that his inspiration was the Bhagavadgita. He dismissed the Ramayana as an "infinity of trivialities" and the Mahabharata as "a monstrous midden, ... a lump of hopeless, aimless and diffuse dried tempered with puerile obscenity." He did not realise that the Bhagavadgita was a part of the second epic. I think most readers will agree with me that his poem carries the essence of our sacred classic.

My friend P.R. Krishna Narayanan of Cochin sent me a photostat copy of an article by Nirad C. Chaudhuri entitled From Babu English to Indian English, published in The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1958. Nirad Babu clearly believed that the future of English writing in India was very bleak. He wrote: "The argument that English will be needed for maintaining India’s contacts with the outside world, political as well as commercial, has no force at all as a justification of Indian English. What will be needed for maintaining India’s contacts with the outside world will be good, current, idiomatic English and not a local Indian version of the language which will be unintelligible to the outside world."

How wrong could this great scholar be? He continued in the same vein:

"The fate of Indian English is already sealed. Every Indian writer of English knows that he is faced with a situation in which the choice before him is to write much better English than he has done so far, or go to the wall. If he is to survive, he will have to graft himself on the intellectual and literary life of the English-speaking world, and there will be no place for him in his own country. This will have, as its corollary, the disappearance not only of the writers of Indian English in the narrow sense of the term, but also of those Indians who write the usual current Indian English, undistinguished and pedestrian, grammatically correct, though interspersed with Indianisms, which till now has been the average educated Indian's English."

However, in the same article Nirad Babu cited a memorable example of two Indians who continued to think in their regional languages even when speaking or writing English. This was from an address presented to Pandit Nehru by the citizens of Avantika. The florid verbiage was obviously inspired by Sanskrit: "Most revered soul, most adorable politician, the father of the people, the creator of the age, exponent of universal peace, the eternal fountain of the world politics, and the enlightened veteran of the millions and millions of souls of India — universally adored Jawaharlalji, Jai Hind: The holy Ganges of the heart of the singer is the time of those sweet moments, at every throb of which there is rhythm, in every concord there is a bliss, and in every tune there is a vibration of affection."

(Contributed by Rajeshwari Singh, Delhi)