The Language Policy In British India And The Construction Of Cultural Imperialism

“The sun never sets on the British Empire” is a very well-known phrasecommenting on the illustrious history of Great Britain as a colonizer of many parts ofthis world. Colonialism is a crucial site of cultural production, and many of thecultural constructs that still operate in the contemporary world are products ofcolonial contexts.Based on Said’s post-colonial theory, this thesis purports to argue that the BritishIndia employed its language policy on education as an approach to realize its culturalhegemony in the19thcentury.Firstly, this paper explores the history of the formation of language policy in thenineteenth century through analyzing the controversy between the orientalists andanglicists, indicating that both the Orientalism and Anglicism were complicit withthe project of cultural imperialism of the Britain for those two sides claimed thesuperiority of the west. And then this paper goes on to examine the role of languagein culture and the close relation between language teaching and colonialism,highlighting the colonial way of establishing English medium schools which wereimportant sites of cultural imperialism to impose their values and ways of life on thecolonized through using their English literature as the main textbook. Finally thispaper reaches a conclusion that with their language as the weapon, the Britishcolonizer constructed the oriental other boosting the superiority of their self andskillfully imposed their English education system on the Indian people, creating classof people who were Indian in blood but English in taste and making the colonizedbecome the hybrid of two different and lost their identity.Since English was interwoven with British colonialism in the colonial history, theexploration into it would be fruitful if we seek the connection between the languagepolicy and the construction of cultural imperialism. There are many studies oncultural imperialism but hardly any research has been done on the language policies on education in nineteenth-century India. Therefore, this study is significant incontributing to the literature on cultural imperialism, particularly in the languagepolicy in the colonial context.