Abstract
This chapter examines the English language in India as an object of democratic promise shaped by the bilingual English—Hindi Indian Constitution and as part of the bureaucratic scriptural economy. With its opening proclamation of “We, the people of India,” the Constitution offers an exemplary case of a people speaking English. Of all the ironies that characterize postcolonial India, perhaps the biggest irony is that the language of the erstwhile colonizer came to be indispensably tied to postcolonial assertion. The Constitution carries a voice that belongs both to the sovereign people and the colonial and postcolonial state. The relation of English with Hindi and other Indian languages is a key way in which these competing voices are maintained. The chapter examines the life of English as just such a democratic object through India Demands English Language (1960), a little-known collection of pro-English essays by influential Indian political leaders, and contrasts the statist vision of English found there with the bureaucratic technics on the ground in Srilal Sukla's satirical Hindi novel Raag Darbari (1968) and Upamanyu Chatterjee's English novels, English, August (1988) and Mammaries of the Welfare State (2004).
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