On Friday 13 Jul 2012 10:39:05 pm Biju Chacko wrote: > Why are our usages any more incorrect than any other regionalisms? Is > it because our faces are browner?
Biju you have touched a nerve that would cause the intense anger of cognitive dissonance and denial to come pouring out of various places and people. Here is exactly what Macaulay said in 1835 http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html > it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the > body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may > be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, --a class of > persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in > morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the > vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of > science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by > degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the > population. The system achieved exactly that in creating "a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect" If you look at "English tastes. morals and opinions" from 1800 to well beyond 1900, colour racism was the norm. So Indians who became good "brown sahibs" were actively contemptupous of the "native" Indian. When this brown sahib himself faces crolor or language based discrimination, he gets all apologetic and defensive. And then we have a new class of Indians who are ashamed of their own backround and will argue with great erudition about why his compatriots are inferior compared to himself. a person who has "made it" among the white peoples of the west. shiv
