the lAnguAge of mAstery 81never emerge as India’s national language nor should it become, as Thomas
Babington Macaulay advocated, the language of Indian education.^6 Ma-
caulay’s call to enforce English- language education in the colony aimed
famously to produce hybrid subjects—Indian in appearance but English
in every other way—whose familiarity with English language and culture
would enable them in turn to “enrich” vernacular dialects with Western
thought. This new class of Indian subjects would infuse local dialects with
Western ideology, rendering them “by degrees fit vehicles for conveying
knowledge to the great mass of the population” (1835, 8). For the native,
learning English was the best way toward civilization: “Whoever knows
that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all
the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of
ninety generations” (3).
Gandhi explicitly refuted Macaulay’s claims about English and argued
that Indians had enabled the impoverishment of their own languages and
in so doing enslaved themselves (1997, 103). While he agreed with Macau-
lay’s insistence on the central importance of bolstering India with “modern”
knowledge, he understood that Macaulay’s vision would confirm the subju-
gation of Indians well beyond the achievement of national independence.
Instead, Gandhi advanced and worked toward the idea of an India that em-
ployed the new Hindustani to serve intra- Indian political exchange while
bolstering native dialects with the language of modernity. Both Hindustani
and the native dialects would then shift and advance through proper use
and increasing education.
Gandhi became the leader of the Hindustani Prachar Sabha, an organi-
zation aimed at mobilizing and spreading Hindustani across the country.
In order to accomplish this task, he set out to create a fleet of rashtrabha-
sha workers across the nation whose advanced language training would
then enable them to educate the masses in Hindustani. These rashtrabhasha
workers, Gandhi insisted, should have “perfect mastery over both Hindi
and Urdu.” Only once they had mastered these two languages could they
hope to be “true Rashtrabhasha workers” (1997, 55). Yet for those students
who would be taught Hindustani, mastery was not the aim. They simply
needed an “All- India heart” or an “All- India will” and Hindustani would
come to them, not as a language that they would aim to hold dominion
over but as a language that would unite them with others through a mutual
and noncoercive devotion to the nation. The teachers of Hindustani would