Pax Indica

India at this juncture of its history is one of the most interesting nations in the world. A flawed though functioning cacaphony with its people unshakled after years of successive foreign domination followed by the license raj of a socialist government, it finds itself at a point from where it can finally make a tryst with destiny or could plunge yet again into another chasm of stagnation and apathy from which it could take years to recover. This is the first entry in the blog in which I'll write articles which try to make sense of the phantasmagoria around us.

In the late 19th and the early parts of the 20th century the educated class of Britain spoke with an accent that was known as Received Pronunciation or the Oxbridge accent. People from the middle and the upper classes picked up this accent at the public schools and the universities since it did not belong to any particular region of Britain. As very few attended these institutions considerable prestige was bestowed upon anyone sporting this accent.

However since the 2nd World War successive Labour governments and their Socialist policies have dealt a death blow to the cult of Oxbridge accent. Even in the BBC, that bastion of the Received Pronunciation, regional accents prevail.

I take this example to elucidate the point that History has a remarkable tendency to complete a cycle of transition, returning to the point of origin. In India of today a pan-Indian accent seems to have found acceptance among the educated elite throughout the land. Regional variations and Indianisms e.g. placing an only or a but as an intesifier, are frowned upon. Would History take a similar course in India as in England where fusion tendencies have dissipated and regional variations aren't equated with a lack of learning? Or, given the more inclusiveness of this accent and the indespensability of English as the Lingua Franca of India, is this accent and Indian English on the way to become demographically the most spoken? I myself am inclined towards the latter viewpoint due to the aformentioned reasons for its wide acceptability. But who knows. history may have a few tricks up its sleeve.