I've been curious lately about the sociolinguistics of situations where a small ruling class came in speaking a different language than the people they were ruling over, and how those situations played out-- the Norman Conquest, etc.
I have the general feeling that the British in India might have learned various languages of India to the extent that they needed to for business purposes, but they probably weren't, say, speaking Hindi or Tamil at home with their families. But I really don't know. Would someone who studies this time and place be able to weigh in?
Thanks!
Learning Indian languages was considered a necessity for officers of the East India Company, though there were naturally significant differences between officers as to how fluent they became. There were two basic methods. East India Company officers were supposed to arrive in the country with a working knowledge of the native languages, and from 1806 a training college was established at Haileybury in Hertfordshire at which young men intending to join an Indian service would get basic instruction in Persian and Hindustani while still of school age. Tuition in the same two languages was also a compulsory feature of the curriculum at Fort William College in Calcutta, where, from 1800, cadets received instruction before receiving their first posting. Many men arriving in India would also make private arrangements to work with a "moonshee" (munshi), a native language teacher, in their off-duty time; lucrative postings and promotion to higher ranks depended on passing language exams.
For most Britons arriving in India, the munshi was an unwelcome visitor whose services were necessary but seldom appreciated. Nevertheless, an increasing number of officers made the point of remaining virtually ignorant of the local tongues, even though very few of the men they were expected to command spoke any English at all. Albert Hervey, who arrived in India in 1833, and was one of the more conscientious cadets in the Madras army, wrote of his own experiences:
‘I fagged hard with the Moonshee, who used to come to me every day for four hours. I held conversations with my teacher in English; every sentence uttered was put down on paper in Hindustanee, and the next day what I had written down in Hindustanee, was brought to me fresh written by the Moonshee, and those sentences I re-translated into English, so that I not only gained a knowledge of the words, but was able to read the common writing, which was of the greatest assistance. I fagged thus hard for three months, working away without relaxation, except for meals.’
Lack of familiarity and fluency in native languages declined in the nineteenth century as the number of British in India increased. Fluency had been a necessity in the previous century, when most EIC officials were working alone or in pairs in distant stations surrounded by, and dependent on, Indians; it was less so after 1810 as more European women began to arrive in the subcontinent and family life in English-speaking cantonments became more possible, though at the very least some basic phrases were always needed to communicate with servants.
Mike Dash, Thug (2005)
Albert Hervey, A Soldier of the Company: the Life of an Indian Ensign, 1833-45 (1988)