SINCE Johnson mused recently on English in Singapore, I was looking forward to "India Faces a Linguistic Truth: English Spoken Here", a "Letter from India" by Manu Joseph in the New York Times. Unfortunately, it has some nice detail, but is unusually one-sided for the normally cautious newspaper. Yes, English is everywhere in India, near-universal in the upper classes and crucial to getting the best jobs there, after getting higher education in it. So why don't they just be done with it and adopt English as the national language, asks Mr Joseph? He doesn't seem to have been able to find someone who could give a basic answer to that question. The only quoted proponent of non-English is Raj Thackeray, a Mumbai politician "enraged" by the encroachment of English on Marathi in his city (though he sends his son to an English-language school).

Since it goes unanswered in the article, I'll give that question a stab myself, while confessing my utter lack of qualification as an American working on a British newspaper who doesn't speak an Indian language. Indians don't adopt English as a national language, I imagine, because it's not their national language: it's an extraordinarily useful auxiliary language, but it was imported from halfway around the world via centuries of colonialism that are not a beloved memory in India. Because India has many large and proud language communities, and many more small ones that face extinction. Or, put more briefly, because language choice isn't sheer pragmatism. We should abhor language "rage" like that of Mr Thackeray (especially when it comes to beatings; good grief). But the answer to that cannot simply be "oh, get over yourselves and your silly little languages"—especially when those languages are in fact rather large. Marathi has about as many native speakers as German does.

India, fortunately, is more enlightened than most countries. In its idealised form, it has a three-language policy: students learn their regional or state language, Hindi and English over the course of their educations. In practice, though, there are many holes. Hindi-speaking natives are supposed to take another Indian language, but some study Sanskrit, a classical language, to the annoyance of speakers of India's many living languages. And even a three-language policy will leave many languages threatened in hugely multilingual India; K. David Harrison claims discovery of a language unknown to outsiders until just last year. But at least India is trying to take advantage of English while preserving some diversity; the trickiness of that balancing act would have made a better story than condescension to Marathi and the rest.

(Via Reihan Salam.)