English was confined to elite higher education while vernacular schooling served the masses
Evidence
English became the language of higher education, especially at university level; while normal schooling was carried out everywhere in what was taken to be – and was therefore greatly standardized as – the local vernacular. Only in the handful of highly exclusive public schools was English taught in an exclusive way. There, a key sector of the dominant intelligentsia evolved which was actually removed from any productive relation with any other of the Indian languages. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 517
Related
- English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.82)
- English in India is simultaneously knowledge production, global connection, and class division (similarity 0.81)
- English in India is stratified as a class boundary, not a neutral world vehicle (similarity 0.81)
- Even elite Indian colleges produced distinctly bilingual intelligentsias (similarity 0.81)
- India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages (similarity 0.80)