Channeling Ngugi wa Thiongo, Samanth Subramanian writes on the impact Modi's victory is having on India's sense of language:
More here“The aspirational aspect of English is still there in India, in that people still think that if you know English, your life is set,” said P.N. Vasanti, the director of the Centre for Media Studies in New Delhi. “But I think the myth has been broken that only English, and English alone, can earn you an assured future.” As Modi’s rise makes clear, this shift has left a deep imprint upon India’s political class. Beginning in the 1990s, prime ministers from outside the Congress briefly came to power, and they spoke better Hindi or Kannada than English. “There were local leaders, state chief ministers like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Laloo Prasad Yadav, who won elections by speaking the only language they knew: Hindi,” said Mrinal Pande, once the editor of the Hindi daily Hindustan. She was surprised that others were surprised by this turn of events. “Anybody could see that these guys—Mulayam, Laloo—were the leaders of the future. It showed how we had gotten our own democracy so twisted around.”
Piyal Adhikary/epa/Corbis
