Much has been made of the handful of Indian writers who have mastered the language to the satisfaction of their former colonial masters. But their few, extravagantly ballyhooed novels cannot compensate for the grievous social and psychological damage caused by the hegemony of a language few people in India know, or have the means of knowing well. The English language survives in its oppressive, debased form, but the people who brought it are, after just 50 years, sliding out of middle-class consciousness in India. The bald, cruel villain with the funny Hindi accent in Bombay films represents the average British person to millions of Indians. The Anglicised classes, standard bearers of petit bourgeois British culture in India, have been supplanted by people more in tune with a globally diffused American culture.
Anniversaries are never a good time for calculating the costs and benefits of any relationship.
But, as celebrated in Britain, the 50th anniversary of Indian independence provided remarkably little occasion for sober introspection. Very often it seemed as if not India but the British achievement in India was being celebrated. To a visitor from the subcontinent, much of the British television and newspaper chatter on India was bewildering. It also revealed astonishing ignorance. This absence of understanding at the most important levels was witnessed again two decades ago, when Michael Foot chose to support Indira Gandhi's imposition of dictatorial rule.