ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that diachronic studies on the emergence of Indian English as a dialect have not been done enough. Particularly, the contribution of the writers of the colonial era towards the emergence of Indian English has not been sufficiently explored; instead, critics and linguists highlighted the existence of babu English, a mesolectal variety of the English language which emerged in the nineteenth century. The chapter introduces the argument that the acrolectal variety has a rich corpus of fictional and non-fictional prose in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries and this rich body of literature, which absorbed elements of Indian culture and languages, scripted a nationalist discourse and simultaneously paved the path for the emergence of Indian English as a distinct dialect in the English language. It is also argued that this body of literature is evident of the fact that language is politically and ideologically neutral as eminent Indian writers and speakers of the English language in the colonial era were not confined by colonial discourses or even by the peripheries of Standard British English.
