Dalits are building a temple in honour of a language they believe can liberate them from the oppressions of the caste system

When India's prime minister Manmohan Singh recalled, during a lecture at Oxford University in 2005, the legacies that his country had inherited from British rule, he placed the English language and the education system above all others.

This was a direct challenge to a century of nationalist rhetoric that had characterised the language of the British Raj as an "enslaving tool" imposed by colonisers.

Six years on, pro-English campaigners from the 200-million-strong Dalit community, the oppressed "outcasts" of traditional Hinduism, have gone a step further and are erecting a black granite temple dedicated to the Goddess English, hailing her as a deity of liberation from poverty, ignorance and oppression.

"She's modelled on the Statue of Liberty, holds aloft a pen and India's constitution, and her pedestal isn't the usual lotus but a computer monitor," said English teacher Amarchand Jauhar, supervising the temple's construction in Banka village in northern Uttar Pradesh. "Without English, nothing is possible for us Dalits."

The idea isn't new. It was propagated first by Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a giant of India's early 20th-century freedom movement and chief architect of its constitution, who was himself an "untouchable".

"Ambedkar compared English to the milk of the lioness, and said those who drink it become stronger," said Chandra Bhan Prasad, Dalit columnist, researcher and chief promoter of the pro-English campaign. "If your child learns English it's as if he or she has inherited 100 acres of land."

D Shyam Babu, a Dalit scholar, agrees: "English is no longer just a language – it's a skill. Without it you remain an unskilled labourer."

This idea resonates today especially due to the association of English with India's technology boom, which is responsible for creating a new middle-class of software programmers.

But it's as tough now for a poor Dalit to learn English, or to get educated in any language, as it was for Ambedkar a century ago. The British had introduced a state-run, egalitarian system of elementary education, with the regional language as the medium of instruction and English as a subject from the sixth standard onward. But the system came to be monopolised by the upper castes. It was only thanks to the English-medium schools run by Christian missionaries and the British Army that "outcasts" such as Ambedkar could get a proper education.

Even today mission schools play an important role in the spread of English. Raj Kumar was born to illiterate Dalits in a backward village in Orissa. Kumar is now a professor of English at Delhi University, and believes his amazing journey was possible because the standard of English is better in his home state than in some others due to the huge number of mission schools.

English as an instrument of social emancipation had been recognised by reformers even before Ambedkar. In a poem entitled Mother English, the legendary 19th-century educationist Savitri Phule wrote: "In such a dismal time of ours / Come Mother English, this is your hour. / Throw off the yoke of redundant belief / Break open the door, walk out in relief."

Yet six decades after independence, the door remains shut in many parts of India. At 54.7%, the literacy rate (although an unreliable index of educational ability) for Dalits is a full 10 points below the already low national average. Only forest-dwelling tribal groups fare worse.

"The Indian state has perpetuated the colonial policy of not providing proper education to the lower strata," said sociologist Vivek Kumar of Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Rajendra Mamgain, director of the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, adds: "The entire educational process is exclusionary."

Teachers are largely upper-caste, and mistreat Dalits. So do other students. In rural schools, Dalits often have to sit separately, eat separately, play separately and even drink water separately.

"They cannot identify with the curriculum either, so many drop out," said Kumar.

But caste bias is only one issue. Many teachers in the free state-run primary school system are poorly trained, and are often absent. As a result, a section of the urban poor make huge sacrifices to send children to fee-charging, English-teaching private schools. But even this option is missing in villages.

No wonder only a tiny proportion of youth make it to universities, where instruction is in English. India's GER (Gross Enrolment Ratio) in higher education is just 12.4%, roughly half the world average. But the GER for rural Dalits is an abysmal 6%; for rural Dalit girls it is less than 2%.

The government has finally woken up to the fact that the current 9% GDP growth cannot be sustained without radically overhauling the education system. Businesses complain that many college graduates are unemployable. However, the nationalist bias against English is on the wane, and the language is now taught in state schools from the age of six.

"Amongst our priorities is a massive teacher training programme," says Narendra Jadhav of India's planning commission.

Jadhav himself is a shining example of the transformative nature of education. Born to illiterate Dalit parents, he is an accomplished author, economist and educationist. "It's a self-evident truth that Dalits should learn English wherever they can," he says.

Not all Dalit intellectuals agree. "My own estimate is that 20 to 30 million Dalits know English," says Kumar. "Yet English hasn't helped liberate them. It's far-fetched to assume that English would absolve Dalits of their stigmatised identity."

Nevertheless, Rashmi Sadana, who is researching the politics of language, feels that "Prasad's headline-grabbing campaign draws attention to India's great divide – English and non-English – which is linked to issues of caste, class and gender. It's all to the good."

As Dalits flock to pay tribute to Goddess English in Banka, Prasad can only hope that Phule's poem will reverberate across the land: "Learn to read and write, Oh my dear one / Opportune times! Mother English has come."