English Across South Asia TARIQ RAHMAN The British East India Company, founded in 1599, introduced English in India in the elitist domains of power—government, administration, judiciary, military, education, com- merce, and the media—between the 18th and the 19th centuries. British language policy, aimed at governing the empire (Cohn, 1985), passed from an Orientalist to an Anglicist phase following T. B. Macaulay’s famous “Minute” of 1835 when English came to be used for elitist and higher education. Thus English became part of “cultural politics” (Pennycook, 1994) and was taught through its classics, which created an idealistic and morally inspiring image of the British and gave moral justification to British rule in India (Viswanathan, 1989). By the time British rule came to ended in 1947 English was a coveted “linguistic capital” in Bourdieu’s (1991, p. 70) sense of the term. As such, it was an elite social class marker facilitating upward social mobility in urban, professional circles in South Asia. English continues to enjoy this dominant status in South Asia despite resistance to it in the precolonial India (Gandhi, 1942, p. 62, 1980, p. 46), postcolonial Pakistan (Abdullah, 1976), Sri Lanka (Raheem & Ratwatte, 2004, pp. 94–6), and Bangladesh (Hossain & Tollefson, 2007, p. 248). These resistance movements were counteracted by the expansion of English through improved means of communication, especially in the electronic media and cyberspace (Crystal, 2004, pp. 64–91), and the aspiration of the expanding middle class for upward mobility both nationally and internationally. The general pattern of the use of English throughout South Asia is that it remains the language of the elitist sectors of the state, the corporate sector, foreign-funded think tanks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), higher education, science and technology, and elitist educational institutions. Variations in the pattern are visible in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. In Sri Lanka, the use of English was reduced in the state sectors when Sinhala became the official language in 1956. However, this made the Tamils resent the domination of the Singhalese and created ethnic conflict which ended after much bloodshed in 2009 (Kandiah, 1984; De Silva, 1996). However, English survived among the Westernized elite and, since 1995 when it was recognized as a national language, it has emerged as a language of privileged employment (Raheem & Ratwatte, 2004, pp. 98 – 103). In Bangladesh, the state patronized Bengali after 1971 when the country got its freedom after a war with Pakistan. However, the forces of globalization and the interests of the Westernized elite gradually brought English back through private education and non-state employment (Hossain & Tollefson, 2007, pp. 253–6). In Nepal, as the country opened out to the forces of globaliza- tion, the role of English increased in society (Sonntag, 2007, pp. 212–13). In Bhutan and Maldives English is used in the schools and its presence increases with increasing tourism. In India and Pakistan English was never seriously questioned (Rahman, 1996, pp. 230–48; Agnihotri & Khanna, 1997, pp. 143–4) despite constitutional promises to remove it as an official language. In both countries it is seen as a vehicle of modernization and develop- ment and the language of cutting-edge research, the Internet, globalization, and international mobility, which is why there has never been an effort to remove it from the educational system though its supply is highly uneven and unjust. South Asian governments teach most children, when they do teach them at all, through the vernacular languages, while reserving English for the elite of power and wealth. The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Edited by Carol A. Chapelle. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0372