September 4, 2012Commentary Featured Longform

Standing Upon the Ruins of the Macaulite Project: India, The English Language and the Need for a Native Idiom of Intellectual Discourse

India has yet to develop a native and sustainable language of modern intellectual discourse. However, a new native language that would replace English as the pre-eminent mode of intellectual expression in India is nowhere on the horizon. At the same time English is declining. Thus we are left in a linguistic-intellectual no man’s land where we can neither speak English properly nor can we have a decent intellectual discussion in our own languages.