Book Overview

1.1 English teaching in India Down the ages, India had been subject to invasion of the foreign rulers. Shak, Hun, Mughal, Pathan and many other tribes came in India and extended their empire. The British was the last one in this line. The great cultural heritage of India borrowed extensively from their way of life and assimilated with itself whatever it deemed good for the land. The linguistic history of India under foreign rule shows that Persian was the official language of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor States from the beginning of the thirteenth century till the first half of the nineteenth century. It ceased to be so in 1839 by the British. The British first arrived in India in the beginning of the seventeenth century and established trading posts in a number of cities under control of The East India Company. They introduced English in India with an aim to serving its own administrative purpose. Initially English was taught only to the local population by Christian missionaries. There was no official attempt to force the language on the Indian masses. By the 1700s, English had firmly established itself as the language of the British administration and many educated Indians like Rammohan Roy, were demanding instruction in English as a means of social advancement in India. It was Lord Macaulay who first stressed on teaching English language in India in his famous “Minute of Education” in 1835. According to the ′Minute′, there was need to form “a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect” (Bailey, 1991: p. 138). Lord Bentinck, the then Governor–General, expressed his full support for the ′Minute′, declÃ¥ that the funds “administered on Public Instruction should be henceforth employed in imparting to the native population a knowledge of English literature and science through the medium of the English language” (ibid). In 1854, Sir Charles Wood in his famous ′Despatch′ stated that English could be a suitable medium of higher education in India.