The Little Republic of Good English

There are Indian households in which the country enters as a disturbance. It comes sweating up the staircase in the vegetable seller’s call, accumulates in the impatient consonants of the taxi driver, appears at weddings in a blaze of brass and marigold, and waits, most embarrassingly, in the mouth of the servant, the watchman, the mechanic, the cousin from a town no one has had the decency to visit. Within the drawing room, however, another climate prevails: the sacred red lamp before the image of the Heart, the rosary clicking in the elderly fingers, the shivering glass of gin after six, the faintly defeated English spoken with the confidence of inherited property. Here, good breeding is not a matter of goodness. It is a system of ventilation. It keeps out heat, smell, noise, obligation—India itself, in its more intimate forms.

One must be careful, at once, with the broad, ugly diagnosis. There is no single “Catholic Indian middle class,” any more than there is one India or one Christianity. There are Goan Catholics, Mangalorean Catholics, East Indians, Tamil Catholics, Malayali Syrian Christians, Anglo-Indians, Dalit Christians, urban parishes and coastal villages, families for whom English is native air and families for whom it is a bureaucratic weather forecast received from above. Caste has not been dissolved by the baptismal font; social hierarchy, endogamy, inherited status, and the old distinctions between “forward” and Dalit Christian communities persist in many settings despite a formally egalitarian theology. The portrait here concerns a narrower creature: the upwardly mobile, English-dominant, institutionally mannered Catholic enclave—the small republic of school ties, parish committees, office promotions, foreign visas, and careful domestic contempt.

Its members are not necessarily cruel. That would be too simple, and simplicity is usually the first luxury of those who have never had to survive a contradiction. They are often generous in the old, enclosure-bound way: magnificent at funerals, solicitous toward the sick, alert to the private catastrophe of an aunt’s surgery, capable of producing, from a kitchen with two functioning burners, enough food to sustain a minor military campaign. But generosity is not the same as openness. A community may love fiercely within its walls and still regard the world beyond those walls with the mild horror reserved for an uninvited cousin in a stained shirt.

The central misunderstanding is to call this emotional poverty. It is more accurately an economy of feeling. The enclave has learned what may be felt, where it may be felt, and before whom. Grief is permissible when it wears black and arrives on schedule. Sentiment is permitted when accompanied by a hymn. Affection may flow toward family, school, parish, club, old classmates, and the beautifully catalogued dead; but the bewildering plurality outside—the Hindu neighbor, the Hindi speaker, the teeming civic world, the vulgar miracle of a country not organized around one’s own manners—must often be held at a conversational distance. The heart is not absent. It has simply been taught to carry a passport.

English is the passport’s most precious stamp. Missionary and elite educational institutions were central to the spread of English education in colonial India, and English gained continent-wide authority through the ambitions of Indian elites as well as the work of missionaries and elite colleges. This history should not be reduced to a crude morality play in which English is villain and vernacular innocence its victim. English gave many Indian families access to education, professions, legal literacy, mobility, and a vocabulary with which to argue against old tyrannies. But every ladder has its underside. Once English became the ladder, it also became the measure of altitude. The child who spoke it fluently seemed brighter, cleaner, more employable, more “international.” The child who did not became, in a thousand almost invisible gestures, local.

Local: that terrible word. It means native only after native has been made to sound like a stain.

Thus the linguistic tragedy is rarely staged as a tragedy. No one announces, at breakfast, that the child shall be divorced from the country’s larger verbal inheritance. No villain twirls his mustache over the Hindi textbook. Rather, the estrangement arrives in pleasantries. A parent laughs at an accent. An uncle praises a nephew for sounding “foreign.” A school prizes polished English but treats the national language as an examination inconvenience. A Hindi-speaking crowd becomes “too much.” Hindu ritual becomes a field trip for other people, picturesque when viewed through tinted glass and vaguely improper when it asks for participation. By adulthood, one can inhabit India with the poise of a well-dressed tourist, fluent in prices, airports, contracts, menus, and private complaint, yet unable to enter the ordinary emotional architecture of the place.

This is how a person may grow up in India and feel, before the word has even formed, that India is somewhere else.

The gymkhana, in this regard, is not merely a club. It is a tiny theatre of empire after the empire has departed, a space where membership becomes a substitute for metaphysics. The gymkhana tradition grew through colonial public life: sporting clubs and social clubs spread across the subcontinent, carrying British forms of association, exclusion, and prestige into urban India. In their mature, postcolonial forms, such places became more complicated than simple European relics; Indian members entered, reshaped, administered, and inherited them. Yet their architecture still retains a lesson. Here is the lawn, here is the bar, here are the old names, the committees, the slowly browning photographs of men who appear to have spent their entire adult lives waiting for a drink to arrive.

A club can be a refuge. It can also be an aquarium. The same people circulate in its water: the airline administrator, the bank manager, the aunt whose daughter is studying in Melbourne, the uncle who knows a colonel, the retired gentleman who has seen the world only from the air-conditioned side of the departure gate. They are worldly because they long for elsewhere. They have an intimate knowledge of Heathrow, Toronto, Dubai, Sydney—places imagined less as actual cities than as celestial upgrades, sanctuaries in which the old embarrassment of being Indian might be redeemed by a better address. The foreign country is not desired for itself. It is desired as an absolution.

And so the social soul becomes oddly adolescent: obedient, competitive, mutually watchful, nervously status-conscious, very concerned with what “people will say,” yet poorly trained in the more adult arts of boundary, disagreement, curiosity, and encounter. The community can be sophisticated in consumption and innocent in life. It may know which wine is acceptable, which school is still respectable, which cousin has fallen, which family has “made it,” while remaining spectacularly unequipped for the impolite reality that other people possess worlds as coherent as its own. Such innocence is not charming. It is expensive. It produces adults who mistake insulation for refinement and loyalty for moral intelligence.

The insult, then, should be withdrawn and retained at once. Withdrawn because people are not defective for having inherited fear, hierarchy, and a historically manufactured longing for social safety. Retained because inherited fear is no less damaging for being inherited. A parent may give a child a rosary, an English education, a spotless shirt, a fear of public disorder, a suspicion of the vernacular, and an ambition for departure—all in the name of love. The child receives, along with these gifts, a map whose blank spaces are enormous. He may not know the songs of the country. He may not know its festivals except as spectacle. He may hear Hindi not as one of the great muscular instruments of human feeling, but as a language from which the household has tactfully recoiled.

Yet the recoil is not destiny.

There comes a point at which the child, now grown, must understand that contempt is often a frightened form of dependence. The enclave despises the wider country partly because it cannot bear to need it. Its language, labor, markets, servants, voters, streets, rituals, and inexhaustible disorder sustain the very class that sighs theatrically at their existence. The mature task is not to perform a theatrical return to authenticity, to drape oneself in borrowed tradition like a guilty costume. It is subtler and harder: to learn, belatedly, how to be implicated. To hear a language without judging its speaker’s social altitude. To enter a temple, a festival, a bazaar, or a conversation not as anthropologist, savior, or embarrassed exile, but as someone whose inheritance was made incomplete and who has chosen, without melodrama, to complete it.

The rosary may remain. The good English may remain. Even the gin, after six, may remain. But the glass wall must not.