ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the cultural milieu in nineteenth-century Bengal when some upper-caste Bengali valorized Western education for intellectual benefits in the form of knowledge of modern science and emancipation from superstition and ignorance. The chapter further compares the introduction of English in India to the history of the English education in West and East Africa, Singapore, and Papua New Guinea to show that the sociocultural milieu in India was conducive to the emergence of an indigenized variant in the English language rather than a pidgin or a creole; The chapter then analyzes the phenomenon of ‘Indianization’ of the English language in selected writings of Rammohan Roy, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Keshub Chunder Sen in the form of loanwords, lexis-bound translations, and a shift of cultural traditions, such as the ‘purvapaksha’ style of argument.
