Keywords

1 Introduction

It is a well-known fact that, starting from the late sixteenth century, English spread well beyond the British Isles, and timelines of this process are widely available, e.g. in Fennell (2001). The English (and later the British) more or less simultaneously extended their sphere of interest to West Africa, the Caribbean, North America and to India. In West Africa, this involved the establishment of slave trade ports and forts along the West African coast, starting as early as the 1550s (The National Archives n.d.). In the Caribbean, Barbados was the first territory to be occupied in 1605, Jamestown the first permanent establishment in Northern America in 1607. Whilst areas on the African continent were only formally colonised from the late eighteenth century onwards, the English language had also been used sporadically along the West African coast when the slave trade brought European languages to the area from as early as the end of the fifteenth century.

Activities in India commenced when, at the end of the sixteenth century, the United Netherlands as well as England aimed at entering the lucrative spice trade with Asia and to break the Portuguese monopoly in the area. In 1600, the British Crown granted a royal charter to the British East India Company, and trading posts were soon established in Madras, Calcutta and Bombay (now Mumbai). Missionaries soon followed traders, especially after 1659. More extensive contact with English commenced, however, only after the famous Macaulay Minute of 1835, which “was written to advise the government of the best language and education policy for the region, with the express aim of creating an English-based subculture in the subcontinent.” (Fennell 2001, p. 249). Following the Indian Mutiny in 1858, the British Crown officially took control of the colony and abolished the British East India Company. From then on, an elite of the Indian population was educated and trained in English: universities were founded in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras in 1857, with English as their medium of instruction, and English got established firmly as the language of (higher) education and administration.

The early spread of English to the Indian subcontinent has resulted in a strong presence of the language in what today is India as well as in the neighbouring countries, albeit to a lower extent. As Gargesh points out, attitudes to English are generally positive, and English “is a symbol of the rising aspirations of its [India’s, cm] people for quality education and upward social mobility. It is no longer viewed as a colonial relic but rather a necessity as it is directly related to the present demand in both international and globalized local job markets.” (Gargesh 2015, p. 103). This attitude is not without problems, as Gargesh and Neira Dev (2017, p. 46) explain, since “most segments of the population of India do not receive the same kind of input or exposure to the English language in early school education, thereby creating difficulties for their admission into the hallowed portals of higher education in India, or at times even the completion of their higher education.” In the 2001 census, only 1% of the population stated English as their second language and only 226,449 gave it as their first language (Gargesh and Neira Dev 2017). The latest census to include a language question, Census 2011, reports on 259,678 persons who gave English as their mother tongue (Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs n.d.-a). However, the number of people who stated English as their first subsidiary, i.e. second, or as their second subsidiary, i.e. third language, increased drastically. A total of 82,717,239 reported English as their second language and 45,562,173 as their third language, which amounts to 10.6% of the 1210 million population in 2011 (Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs n.d.-b).

As Gargesh (2009) and Gargesh and Neira Dev (2017) explain, English performs various functions for those who report using it. Whilst it has a “complementary” or “equative” function for those bilinguals who use it in the same domains as their first language, it performs an “auxiliary” or “complementary” function for those who use it for restricted needs only, e.g. to acquire information, to study a particular subject, or when travelling abroad. For yet others, it complements their first language and serves as a lingua franca or as a medium of instruction. Not infrequently, Indians have taken their variety of English, and potentially its functions, into new territories.

2 Migration of Indians and the Spread of Indian English

People from the Indian subcontinent have been migrating for centuries. Indian merchants had been present on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, as well as along the East African coast, when Vasco da Gama explored the region in 1497 (Gregory 1993, p. 10). In fact, they may have been in the area from as soon as the first millennium BC (Gregory 1993, p. 950; Twaddle 1990, p. 152).

Migrations of people from the Indian subcontinent, i.e. from what today are Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka (Kachru 1994, p. 497), constitutes one of the largest movements in modern times. In 2014, more than 20 million people who have their roots in the Indian subcontinentFootnote 1 lived in other parts of the word, including Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, North America (Hundt and Sharma 2014, p. 1). Particularly large communities are found in Trinidad (appr. 40% of the population according to Rathore-Nigsch 2015) and in Fiji, where they make up the majority of the population.

Indians migrated for different reasons. During the British colonial period, large numbers were taken to Burma, Fiji (from 1879 to 1916, involving 61,000 people during the next 30 years; Lal 2006: p. 46.), Malaya, Mauritius (from 1834), Singapore (120 arrived with Stamford Raffles and by 1911 the Indian population had reached 28,454, Leimgruber and Sankaran 2014, p. 109), South Africa (approximately 150,000 between 1860 and 1911; Mesthrie and Chevalier 2014, p. 89) and Trinidad (144,000 between 1834 and 1838; Harakshingh 2006, p. 280) to work on the British plantations, either as indentured workers or on similar contracts. In the early stages of colonial rule in East Africa, approximately 32,000 indentured workers were brought to the area, mainly to work on the Uganda Railway (Gregory 1993, pp. 160–162). Also, Indian security personnel and soldiers were brought to several of Britain’s younger colonies. At the same time, individuals moved to work for the British in their Empire as traders, artisans or clerks, and many set up their own businesses. After the colonial period, there were migrations, largely of semi-skilled and unskilled workers, to Britain after WWII and to the Middle East in the 1970s. More recently, highly skilled individuals have been moving particularly to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US.

A number of papers (e.g. Mesthrie and West 1995) have investigated how British and American English was spread around the world by missionaries, slave traders, military personnel etc. Similar to these two varieties, Indian English has, over the centuries, been dispersed, together with its speakers, who have been migrating more or less voluntarily. As Mesthrie (2008) describes, this happened in three different phases and also yielded three different types of diaspora. Of interest to this paper is what he calls the second diaspora, which “mainly covers the forced migration of slaves and indentured workers from India during the period of European (mainly British) Imperialism” (2014, p. 173). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian slaves were taken to Kabul in Afghanistan (see below), Cape Town in South Africa and to Port Louis on Mauritius. After the abolition of slavery, the British contracted Indians on indentureship contracts, i.e. contracts extending over a fixed period of time, which took Indians to Fiji, Guyana, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, Suriname, and Trinidad. As a result, around 3.5 million Indians were transported to these parts of the world to provide cheap labour between 1833 and the 1920s.

The next section discusses three countries which have not typically been associated with the Indian Diaspora.

2.1 Indians and Their English(es) in Afghanistan, Maldives and Uganda – Three Brief Histories

Neither Afghanistan, nor Maldives or Uganda feature prominently in discussions of the Indian diaspora. This may be due to the fact that neither of them was a British colony and thus had no significant British settler population. Afghanistan was a British protectorate from 1881 till 1919, Maldives from 1796 to 1965, and Uganda from 1900Footnote 2 to 1962. None of the three countries witnessed large-scale immigrations of Indians as contracted workers. Nevertheless, Indian English has contributed to the linguistic ecologies of all three countries, albeit to varying degrees. The sections below provide concise summaries of the historical developments that led to the presence of Indian English there.

2.1.1 English and Indian English in Afghanistan (History)

British involvement in Afghanistan started in the eighteenth century, when the British aimed to extend their opium production from India into the country and, also to counter the Russian advances, “to create a large defensive buffer between its Indian holding and the expanding power or Russia” (Barfield 2010, p. 114). In 1838, the British signed the Simla Manifesto, which allowed them to station troops in Kabul, and in the following year, the British Indian ArmyFootnote 3 entered Afghanistan, thus introducing Indian speakers of English to the country. Following the immediate surrender of the emir Dost Muhammad Khan, large numbers of military personnel were deployed to Kabul (20,000), Qandahar (15,000) and other cities (15,000). However, this lasted until 1842 only, when following dissatisfaction with British control and, finally, a revolt against the British almost all died during massacres or when fleeing though the mountain passes.

Three and a half decades later, Russian intentions to advance into Afghanistan caused the then emir, Amir Shir Ali, to approach the British for military help. However, the British policy to “move forward to Afghan territory, gain control and create a buffer state to protect India” (Nawid 1997, p. 589) was met with sharp resistance, leading to the British declaring war and resulting in a second period of military intervention between 1878 and 1881. In 1881, an agreement was reached that made Afghanistan a British protectorate, giving Britain control of the country’s foreign affairs in return for their recognition of Abdur Rahman as the Afghanistan ruler. When his son, Amir Amanullah, aimed to gain complete independence and attacked the British Indian Army’s territory in the Khyber Pass area in spring 1919, a short one-month war ensued, after which the British withdrew from Afghanistan, and Afghanistan gained full independence in the same year.

Given the largely hostile relationship between the two countries, the presence of the English language seems to have been through military personnel, who were of Indian background, hence speaking Indian English. There are no accounts of settlers or Indians aside of the military in Afghanistan. The amount of contact between the Indian military and the Afghan population is unclear but was, most likely, very restricted and probably hardly involved regular intimate interaction.

2.1.2 English and Indian English in Maldives (History)

First contact with the British commenced in 1796, when the Maldives became a British protected area, leading to a formal protectorate in 1887. However, this did not involve any British personnel on the islands, as the British did not involve themselves in the internal matters of the country, apart from officially consenting to matters of succession to the throne of the sultan.

Speakers of English were only brought to Maldives, when the British built a military base in the South of the nation, on Gan Island in Addo Atoll, in 1941. This base initially served the Royal Navy and later the Royal Air Force (Meierkord 2018). Until 1976, permanently stationed British personnel of around 600, rising up to 3,000 during peak activity times, were stationed on Gan. Gan’s original inhabitants were moved to the nearby islands after the completion of the base. About 900 Maldivians and 100 Pakistani, commuted from there to support the British staff on Gan.

At this time, the English presence in Maldives did not involve Indian English, but Pakistani English. However, teachers of English from various parts of the Indian subcontinent immigrated to Maldives after English was introduced as a medium of instruction in 1961, and when tourism had been introduced to the country in 1972, there was a need to not only invite teachers but also other expatriate workers. In particular, the government’s decision on a national curriculum in 1984 and to use English as the sole medium of instruction, effective in all schools throughout the nation by the end of the 1990s, initially resulted in a huge influx of teaching personnel (see below).

2.1.3 English and Indian English in Uganda (History)

Indians came to what today is Uganda when the British were constructing a railway to link Mombasa on the East African coast to Lake Victoria. The project started in 1895 and lasted until 1903. As in other parts of their Empire, the British employed Asians on indentured contracts, resulting in some 13,000 Indian coolies working on the construction of the line in 1898 (Lugard 1901, p. 149). After its completion, Asians were recruited to maintain the railway, resulting in a total of 39,771 staying in East Africa in 1922. Predominantly, however, Indians came voluntarily, from 1896 onwards, to open their own small corner shops, to work as skilled artisans, or to act as middle-men and traders in the cash crop trade. Thus, East Africa differs greatly from Mauritius, Guiana, Trinidad, Natal and Fiji, where the vast majority of Indians arrived as indentured workers.

Whilst their number was only around 500 in 1903, Asians amounted to 13,026 in 1931 and the community increased to 82,100 until 1963. Many of them became English-speaking, and the community had its own schools, where teaching staff was entirely Asiatic and had received their teacher training outside of East Africa (Meierkord 2016, p. 64). Particularly those who served in secondary schools had typically taken their education and qualifications in India or Britain. Whilst before independence English was widespread in the Indian community and encouraged as a medium of instruction by the Aga Khan, it was typically not used for interaction with the local African population. Asians largely resorted to Kiswahili to interact with their domestic workers, customers and traders, because these lacked knowledge in/of English (Rathore-Nigsch 2015, p. 63). Later, however, towards independence, “Indian teachers were increasingly employed in African schools” (ibid, p. 55).

After independence, following a policy that aimed to Africanise the economy, a series of nationalist decisions, such as immigration and trading restrictions imposed on the Indians, culminated in Idi Amin’s decree in August 1972 that all Asians were to leave Uganda within 90 days, resulting in the emigration of the entire community.

3 Present Day Uses of Indian English in Afghanistan, Maldives and Uganda

3.1 Indian English in Afghanistan Today

Whilst English does not enjoy any official status in Afghanistan, where this function is performed by Dari and Pashto, English has been taught for several decades. In the 1960s, “[i]n the seventh through the eleventh grades English is studied for six periods of about fifty minutes a week, except in a few vocational schools where English is the principal medium of instruction and where the requirement may be as high as eighteen periods.” (Cannon 1963, p. 316). Teachers at the time were Afghans. Today, English is taught from the fourth grade onwards (Azami 2009), but many teachers seem to lack the competence and skills to teach English effectively. As English is valued as a tool for success in professional life, private language schools and foreign organizations such as the British Council, which has been active in the country since 1964, as well as the American Embassy, offer training courses. Probably due to this, a large number of English teachers currently come from India or have received training in India, using Indian English in the process.

Whilst Indian English is, thus, directly or indirectly spread through the education system, contact with the variety is also through interactions with Indians: India’s Ministry for External Affairs (MEA 2017, p. 4) reports that 2,500 Indians are estimated to live in Afghanistan, where they “are engaged as professionals in Banks, IT firms, Construction companies, Hospitals, NGOs, Telecom companies, Security companies, Universities, Govt. of India sponsored projects, Govt. of Afghanistan and UN Missions.” The Government of India is regularly involved in development partnerships and has recently announced that on-going projects in the education sector, capacity building and human resource development are to continue until 2022. Besides such political, government-level activities, “Indian films, songs and TV serials are popular with the masses” (MEA 2017, p. 4), contributing to the familiarisation of Afghanistan’s population with both Hindi and Indian English. In fact, the Asia Foundation (2006, p. 76) found that, in 2006, 4% of the Afghan population reported that their first choice of broadcast station was for a Pakistani or Indian one.

3.2 Indian English in Maldives Today

Maldives may be the country which, over the last two decades, has witnessed the most rapid increase in English speakers. A number of factors have contributed to this development, which took place after the island state had been fairly isolated and unnoticed until it was discovered as an ideal tourism destination in 1972.

As has been mentioned above, Maldives introduced a national curriculum in 1984 and made English the sole medium of instruction in the 1990s. Currently, English is introduced as early as pre-primary, at the age of three. As a result, the younger population is highly fluent in English.

The national curriculum also paved the way for tertiary education, which, however, until the early 2000s (when the Maldives College of Higher Education started to offer courses after it was opened in 1998)Footnote 4 involved moving abroad, as colleges and universities were not yet in existence in Maldives. Tertiary education is also only available in the capital island, Malé. As such, it is affordable only to those who can send their offspring to live in the capital. Similarly, upper secondary education is concentrated in Malé, although there are upper secondary schools in a few other islands too. Again, this means that upper secondary education is not easily available to those living on remote islands of the country. India is “a preferred destination for Maldivian for education” (MEA 2016, p. 3).

During the last decades, before the government of Maldives decided in 2016 to replace the expatriate teachers with local, Maldivian, teachers, students must have been frequently exposed to Indian English. One teacher recruitment site explains that “[m]any teachers in the Maldives are from India and Sri Lanka, and despite following a British curriculum of Cambridge ‘O’ levels and ‘A’ levels, the children are not used to British accents.” (Hampson 2015).

Another factor that has contributed to the regular use of English as a second language in Maldives is the large amount of expatriate workers. Due to the limited labour force available in the country itself, Maldives has seen a gradual increase of migrant workers (De Mel & Jayaratne 2011, p. 210). At the time of the most recent census, in 2014, 15.83% of the resident population were foreigners (National Bureau of Statistics 2015, p. 13), who work in the construction sector, in tourism, finance, insurance, real estate, and in education. Most of them live on the resort islands, i.e. those islands which were previously uninhabited and which the government has set aside for development in tourism (De Mel and Jayaratne 2011, pp. 212–3). On these islands, staff tends to be highly multilingual, using English as a lingua franca. Staff members on the resort island of Milaidho, for example, are from 18 nations, including Maldives, Philippines, Kenya, Namibia and India (Luig-Runge 2017). Communication in English as a lingua franca on these islands involves the use of second language varieties and foreign language varieties of English, including Indian English.

During the last decades, the initial shortage of trained Maldivian teachers resulted in a large expatriate workforce in the education sector. India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA 2016, p. 4) states that

Indians are the second largest expatriate community in the Maldives with approximate strength of around 22,000. Indian expatriate community consists of workers as well as professionals like doctors, teachers, accountants, managers, engineers, nurses and technicians etc. spread over several islands. Of the country’s approximately 400 doctors, over 125 are Indians. Similarly, around 25% of teachers in Maldives are Indians, mostly at middle and senior levels.

Besides education, the ties with India, who was the first country to recognise and establish official relations with Maldives after its independence in 1965, are also visible through the high popularity of Indian films, TV serials and music. In addition, the courses offered at the India Cultural Center in Male in yoga, classical music and dance “have become immensely popular among Maldivians of all ages.” (MEA 2016, p. 4).

3.3 Indian English in Uganda Today

After the political unrest that characterised much of the 1970s and 1980s in Uganda, many Indians returned to what had been their’s or their parents’ home country. In 2003, the Indian (and Pakistani) community constituted an estimated 15,000 people. Recently, this figure seems to have increased considerably. India’s Ministry of External Affairs, MEA (2015), reports an estimated 27,000 Indians and Persons of Indian Origin to be residing in Uganda. Indian companies are successfully conducting business and offering employment in manufacturing, trade, agro-processing, education, banking and financial services, automobiles, real estate, hospitality & tourism and in the IT sector. (MEA 2015). Although they only make up less than 1% of Uganda’s population, estimates hold that they contribute 65% of the tax revenues and dominate Uganda’s economy again.

Given the troubled past, attitudes in the local black population towards Indians are often negative. However, findings from a current research project conducted at Ruhr-University of Bochum, in collaboration with Gulu University, indicates at least some passive contact with the Indian variety of English. When interviewed for the purpose of recording spoken Ugandan English and asked about their leisure time activities, many of our informants in Gulu, Kampala and Mbarara reported watching Indian Bollywood films and soapies on a regular basis. Furthermore, when we asked informants to express their attitudes to a variety of English accents, most of them found it easy to identify the Indian speaker amongst the voices they were listening to.

Contact with Indian English also exists through interaction with Ugandan Asian or Indian colleagues, superiors and employers. Furthermore, there are universities such as Isbat University or Aga Khan University in Kampala and schools such as the Aga Khan High School or Delhi Public School International in Kampala where a large number of staff members have an Asian background or are Indian expatriates. Also, collaborations with Indian universities, such as the one between Makerere University and Amity University Uttar Pradesh, introduce Indian lecturers to Uganda.

Sections 8.2 and 8.3 have indicated that Indian English has contributed to the linguistic ecology of Afghanistan, Maldives and Uganda alike (as a foreign, second or even first language). Both sections have furthermore revealed that contact was historically more intense in the case of Afghanistan and Uganda, but that it has recently been stronger in Maldives. These observations leave us with the question of to what extent Indian English has also made an impact on the Englishes spoken in the three countries. The next section explores this for the level of the lexicon.

4 The Spread of Indian English – Evidence from the Lexicon

The lexicon of varieties of English is an area that makes influence from one language or variety on another most clearly visible. There is clear evidence of the fact that dialectal vocabulary from regions in the British Isles was carried to the settlement colonies of North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Also, lexical items borrowed into postcolonial varieties, such as bungalow or coolie from Indian English or ubuntu from South African English, have made their way into what is frequently referred to as ‘global’ or ‘international’ English.

Whilst in the latter case, these items are likely to be used around the world, and hence constitute what one may call “second hand” spread of Indian English via global English, other terms are more clearly related to the migrations of speakers of Indian English. As Mesthrie (2014) explains, vocabulary studies are important “in matters of culture and identity” (2014, p. 172), and the Indian diaspora has contributed to “new cultural formations and cultural enrichment of territories” with particular influence in the areas of cuisine, dress, entertainment, literature and even politics. He further holds that there exists what he calls ‘diaspora lexis’, “words and concepts emanating from the home country that have survived, perhaps with adaptation, in new terrains” (2014, p. 174). This mainly involves terms related to the experience of indentureship: girmit, girmitya/girmitiya, madrasi/madraji/mandraji; Calcuttia/Kalkathia, and Lathas.

Besides these, he identifies the following items in the above-mentioned fields:

  • cuisine: dhal ‘split lentil soup’, bhat ‘rice’, shak ‘vegetables’, roti ‘unleavened bread’, chapatti, bhaji and dhalpuri,

  • kinship terms such as bhai ‘brother’ and ben ‘sister’,

  • dress: salwar ‘loose cotton trousers’, kamiz/kameez ‘long shirt typically with slits on either side’,

  • music: bhangra.

The above-mentioned terms were investigated through simple google searches for the individual items on Afghanistan, Maldivian and Ugandan websites, identified via the countries’ country code top-level domains .af, .mv and .ug. The returned hits were scrutinised for mirror sites of international companies, and these were subsequently excluded from the analyses, as were hits where the item did not have the meaning mentioned above. The results of this search are summarised in Table 8.1.

Table 8.1 Spread of selected Indian English lexical itemsa
Full size table

Not surprisingly, those items which Mesthrie (2014) found to reflect indentureship or girmit did not feature on any of the sites, although they do in some of the descriptions of YouTube videos hosted in Uganda. As regards the further items, one clear finding is that all of them occur more frequently on Ugandan websites than on Afghanistan and Maldivian ones. However, this result needs to be interpreted with caution, as it may be a result of the different number of websites available from the three countries in general.

Nevertheless, the higher amount may also be caused by the fact that, different from Afghanistan and Maldives, Uganda had a comparatively sizeable Indian settler community in the late nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century.

Another interesting difference relates to the semantic fields to which the individual lexical items belong. Whilst Afghanistan has low numbers of hits for items in the food field, it has comparatively many when it comes to clothing. This may be due to the fact that roti and chapatti are not popular food items in Afghanistan. At the same time, the low amount of hits for kamiz/kameez and salwar in Maldives potentially stems from the fact that both are not common garments in the country. Interestingly Uganda has high hits for both, even though neither of the garments are worn by the local black population. Uganda also has very high hits for chapatti. In this case, the influence of the Indian food was high enough for it to remain a popular street food item until today, which has even developed into a novel item called Rolex, from rolled eggs, a rolled chapatti stuffed with scrambled eggs and, optional, onions and tomatoes.

5 Conclusions

In sum, Afghanistan, Maldives and Uganda tell three different stories of the spread of Indian English into new territories. Whilst Uganda is a classic example of the spread of this variety through the British Empire’s procedures of dispersing Indians to work on plantations or infrastructure projects such as the East Africa Railway, Afghanistan and Maldives have other stories to tell. Afghanistan has a history of comparatively hostile presences of the British Indian Army, and Maldives has, historically, only witnessed extremely limited exposure to speakers of Indian English. Today, all three countries are home to Indian communities, but with very different sizes. Whilst in Uganda, Indians make up less than 1% of the population, Indians account for 5% of Maldives but for less than 0.01% in Afghanistan.

Despite these differences, Indian English has left its mark in the Englishes spoken in all three countries. The ways in which their varying histories as well as their present-day situations seem to be reflected in the use of Indian English lexical items indicate that any linguistic impact of Indian English on other varieties is crucially linked to their social histories characterising language contact between them and Indian English speakers.