Page 307 - Culture Technology Communication

290 Kenneth Keniston

If Macauley’s policy succeeded linguistically at least with Indian
elites, it failed dramatically in other ways. As the independence
movement of India and other former British colonies showed, that
policy failed to imbue in the population of South Asia, and even in
English-speaking elites, an undying love for British rule and Em-
pire. Politically, Macauley’s policy was a complete failure, even if cul-
turally it was partially successful. Men like Gandhi and Nehru in
India, or Jinnah in Pakistan, attacked the British raj in exquisite
English, which they had often learned in English public schools and
universities. Indeed, some have even claimed that “Anglo-Saxon”
values of fair play, equality, the rule of law, and the dignity of all
human beings paradoxically helped inspire the movements of inde-
pendence of the former British colonies.
Studies of the elites of South Asia are rare and incomplete.
Clearly, these elites differ from nation to nation, from region to re-
gion, from city to city. The Urdu-speaking elite in Pakistan that re-
sulted from Partition differs in important respects from the business
elite of Bombay or the political elites of Delhi. Moreover, with dra-
matic changes underway in the subcontinent, generalizations valid
a decade ago may be invalid today. Witness, for example, the rise of
a new younger generation of entrepreneurs in India, fueled by the
progressive “liberalization” of the economy. Witness, too, the emer-
gence of an elite group of the “captains of the software industry,”
today India’s largest source of export earnings.
But whatever the characteristics of elites in South Asian cities
and nations, they tend to have one common characteristic. For
membership in South Asian elites, English is not only useful, but it
is virtually the only privileged route to power, the only reliable key
to any reasonable hope of wealth, preferment and influence. In
South Asia, as in few other regions of the world, language and power
are fused. To be sure, English plays a similar role in the distribution
of wealth, power and influence in other former British colonies in
Africa and Southeast Asia. Moreover, throughout the world, English
is today the preferred language of commerce and science, a fact al-
most as true in North Europe as it is in South Asia. In South Asia,
however, the fusion of language and power is almost total.
What makes this relevant for computation and the impact of the
Information Age in South Asia, and what differentiates South Asia
from many other parts of the world, is the nearly complete absence
of localized software in any of the traditional languages of this vast
and populous region. Efforts have been made to change this situa-
tion; many schemes for localizing programs, operating systems, and
applications to vernacular languages exist; many creative people are