English that is angrezi
by Shriniwas Joshi

EDEAR language of India, nglish, that is angrezi, is the official and very that is privilege of being Bharat. We, the file pushers, have the entertained by English which was to continue as official language till 1965 and thereafter with no time limit. Once a case of a working mistry two-page note in an (carpenter) in the PWD resulted in a office file on the mystery of working in the PWD.

I received a letter in 1983, from the Government of India emphasising the need to give a thrust to the ongoing Rural Development Programmes in order to improve the social and economic conditions in the rural areas. The letter was addressed to a freshly appointed babu upon whom Mother Nature had so generously bestowed the gift of passing the buck. As soon as the letter was put in a file it became PUC(paper under consideration) and the gifted babu with the command of language at his disposal, penned. "The difficulty on the face of villages is that the land is divided into pieces. The farmers dig land here and make water in it and then go there in a separate land owned by them but lying at far distance from the first carrying their oxen and ploughs to do the same what they did in the first land. This is time waste, money waste, energy waste and resource waste. The office feels that there can be no rural development, ipso facto, unless the lands are joined together and given to one farmer. The other joined-land be given to another farmer. This process needs ab-initio treatment so the PUC has nothing to do here and may be sent to the Land Consolidation Department for n.a. (necessary action)." When I asked the gifted one why he could not write the note in our beloved mother tongue, his reply was that angrezi was a forceful language and that there were no substitutes for ipso-facto and ab-initio in Hindi. I wanted to tell him that I could feel the jolt of the force emanating from the note written by him but kept quiet for I felt that the fellow might be another Moore in the making. Oscar Wilde had said, "George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar."

There is a display board put up by the Forest Department near the Chief Minister’s residence in Shimla. It says, "Site Development near C.M.’s residance." When I pointed out the spelling mistake to a senior officer of the department, he used his sense of humour to say, "This is because we dance to CM’s tunes here, so residance."

As a student of local Sanatan Dharam College I was accustomed to such gems from our teachers, "Both of you two get out," or "I am not empty at this time, meet me behind the period." But I was surprised when my nieces, who were studying in public and convent schools in Chandigarh and Delhi, told me that their teachers were not far away from English, that is angrezi. A few of their class-room utterances were tickling, "Why have you left the tubelights burning?", or "Open the windows and let the atmosphere come in", or "I have two daughters and both of them are girls", or "keep silent, the Principal is rotating round the school." The best remark, however, came from mathematics teacher who used geometrical English to reprimand the children, "All children who have not done their home-task will remain standing perpendicular to the ground and parallel to the walls during this period. No acute or obtuse angle formation."

George Bernard Shaw had said, "English is a language not accessible even to an Englishman." We are not bothered. Far away from that little isle and its people, playfulness with angrezi is our joie de vivre.