I love how Indians write English

[xela]

I came across this while Googling for info pertaining to the post I'll be making in a few minutes. It didn't really fit there, not even in a footnote, but I wanted to share it.

Banning of books was unknown in India before the Britishers imported the concept to serve and protect their imperial hegemony. Even though mostly Christians by faith, they signally failed to learn from the life of Jesus Christ that crucifixion of the Messenger could not annihilate the message but made it more efficaciously vibrant and effulgently operative. You can kill the thinker, burn his writings, but not his thought or expressions.  —A.M. Bhattacharjee, in The Hindu.

...crucifixion of the Messenger could not annihilate the message but made it more efficaciously vibrant and effulgently operative. What American or Briton since the nineteenth century would have the balls to write that sentence? For a newspaper column? And expect the editor to let it pass? And be right?

I love clean, simple prose. But in my fairly random (though admittedly limited) encounters with English prose written by Indians, they demonstrate a relish for the entire range of the English vocabulary that I find wonderfully invigorating — in rather the same way a nice curry would be after a week or two of sandwiches.

Comments

[bluedaisy.livejournal.com]

Wow. The only other people I know who speak with such relish for vocabulary are geeks. I wonder what causes this differentiation.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I started this reply a week ago and lost track of it....

I'm going to assume from the fact that you're commenting on LJ that you're back from your honeymoon. I hope it all went by in a dreamy daze.

I don't know why Indian English speakers seem to take such delight in the language. I get the sense that comparatively few Indians speak English as a native tongue, but it is very popular as a second language, with instruction starting very young, among the educated classes. So to some extent it may be an artifact of the majority of Indian English speakers belonging, by definition, to the smart kids' club. The Wikipedia article on Indian English includes this paragraph, which suggests that a rather more Age of Empire English is popular in India:

Following the departure of the British from India in 1947, Indian English took on a divergent evolution and many phrases that the British may consider antiquated are still popular in India. Official letters continue to include phrases like "please do the needful" and "you will be intimated shortly".... Older British writers who made creative (and comical) use of now obsolete forms of colloquial English, like P.G. Wodehouse, and others who were en vogue fifty years ago, like Thomas Hardy, are still popular in India. It is ironic that although British writers Enid Blyton, P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie are now considered to have held racist views in their time, their books remain immensely popular in India. British writer, journalist and wit Malcolm Muggeridge once joked that the last Englishman would be an Indian.