HOW ENGLISH ERASED ITS ROOTS TO BECOME THE GLOBAL TONGUE OF THE 21ST CENTURY

From The Guardian:

The India of Hobson-Jobson has also found a new global audience. A film such as Mira Nair'sMonsoon Wedding is typical of the world's new English culture. The Indian bridegroom has a job in Houston. The wedding guests jet in from Melbourne and Dubai and speak in a mishmash of English and Hindi. Writing in the Sunday Times, Dominic Rushe noted that Bollywood English is "hard to reproduce in print, but feels something like this: "Yudhamanyus ca vikranta uttanaujas ca viryanavan: he lives life in the fast lane." Every English-speaking visitor to India watches with fascination the facility with which contemporary Indians switch from Hindi or Gujarati into English, and then back into a mother tongue. In 2009, the film Slumdog Millionairetook this a stage further. Simon Beaufoy's script, a potpourri of languages, adapted from an Indian novel, was shot in Mumbai, with a British and Indian cast, by Scottish director Danny Boyle, but launched worldwide with an eye on Hollywood's Oscars, where it eventually cleaned up.

India illustrates the interplay of British colonialism and a booming multinational economy. Take, for instance, the 2006 Man Booker prize. First, the result was broadcast on the BBC World Service from Delhi to Vancouver. The winner was The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, an Indian-born writer who had attended writing classes in New York. So far removed from any English experience, though steeped in its literary tradition, was The Inheritance of Loss that, finally, the British critic John Sutherland was moved to describe Desai's work as "a globalised novel for a globalised world". The writer herself is emblematic of the world's new culture: educated in Britain and America, she wrote her novel in her mother Anita Desai's house in the foothills of the Himalayas, and boasts on her website of feeling "no alienation or dislocation" in her transmigration between three continents.

More here.