500+ words Essay on Place of English in India Today
The place of English in India today is a matter of importance, though there are some controversies. Of course, India is now a free country with its distinct culture and different regional languages. Yet it is a bare fact that India was under British rule for nearly two hundred years. Therefore, there is a sentiment against English as a legacy of colonial hangover.
In the pre-independence days, educated Indians learned English so well that they sometimes made the British dumbfounded. The great leaders of the liberation movement, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Aurobindo Ghosh, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Subhash Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and Chittaranjan Das, expressed their demand for freedom in the language of the British rulers. Through English education, educated people from all the provinces of India became nationally aware and won freedom at last. However, more than sixty years have passed since independence, and most official work in India is still carried out in English. Cases in the Supreme Court and the High Courts are still debated in English.
Of course, Hindi has been recognized as the national language. However, attempts to enforce Hindi have not been very successful in West Bengal, Odisha, and Assam, while the whole of South India has totally rejected it. So, for the sake of national unity, English should be continued as an already-established lingua franca. The use of English will act as a unifying force in a multilingual country like India.
Moreover, English provides easy access to the domains of modern science, medicine, technology, computing, and more. Not only that, English is India’s only window to Europe and the outer world. We must admit that most of the regional languages in India have been enriched immensely by coming into contact with English. Yet no Indian language is currently capable of expressing all technical concepts. Thus, although it is beneficial to learn essential subjects in one’s mother tongue, we cannot neglect learning English as an international language for trade, commerce, and industry as well.
List of 500+ Essay Writing Topics and Ideas
Love for one’s own country or language need not create unnecessary hatred for English.
The total abolition of English in primary education for about three decades in West Bengal resulted in extremely poor performance by students from the state. As a result, they are not performing well in higher education and competitive examinations at the all-India level. Ignorance or negligence of English will lead to isolation from the outer world and hinder our development.
With the increase in the number of English medium schools, one can sense the public’s desire to have their children acquainted with English at a very early stage. However, we must be cautious of the mushrooming of low-standard institutions that might lower rather than upgrade the standard of English at the school stage. A well-thought-out and well-balanced policy for teaching English at the school and college levels is the need of the hour, especially in the age of globalization.