ਪਰਦੇਸੀ ਢੋਲਾ
Inhabiting two planets
The history of the unequal relationship between English and Punjabi goes back to the early 19th century, when William Carey, a shoe-maker turned Baptist, published a 99-page A Grammar of Punjabi Language in 1812 in Calcutta, then the capital of British India. In 1849 the East India Company's army occupied the sovereign state of the Punjab, the land of my ancestors. The Punjab came under the control of the British Crown government in 1858. Seven years earlier John Newton of the Ludhiana Christian Mission in eastern Punjab had published the first-ever Punjabi translation of the New Testament titled Anjeel [after French - Evengile] along with a new Grammar of the Punjabi Language. The three-pronged process of politics, religion and linguistics was in full swing, though the African formula of the Bible and the Land had not been charted exactly in India. The religious conversion was negligible and the linguistic one was enormous. The British left India in 1947 dismembering the Punjab, but English still rules there; so much so that the Punjabi syntax, now mirroring the English sentence structure, is changed forever.
With the steam rail engine came the drivers of the colonial locomotive full with a new class of western-oriented Indian gentlemen, better known as baboos. Careerists- the offspring of Lord Macaulay's agenda of educating Indians to craft a nation of petty clerks- soon learnt to take pride in attaining glibness in English. [Lord Macaulay had put on record his deliberate opinion that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India." The Essays of Lord Macaulay, William Heinemann, 1908.] All school children of future generations were made
[76]
