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South Asians have taken their place in the world of native English speakers. A small but telling symptom can be seen in the name of my holiday destination last December, according to the airlines that got me there. Calcutta, India, is now officially known as Kolkata--which is how the people who live there have always pronounced its name. Calcutta--a Britishized spelling, but still not too far off--has gone the way of Bombay (now Mumbai) and Madras (now, or rather now reverted to, Chennai). That is, the not-quite-right Western versions of the names of these cities (of several million people each) can in fact still be found everywhere, on maps, in books and on the lips of ordinary speakers of all language stripes. But now so can the older (for Westerners, seemingly "newer") versions. In a multilingual, multiethnic nation that encompasses far more linguistic, religious and cultural diversity than Western Europe does, the mere proliferation of alternative names for things, or people, or cities, doesn't faze anybody. Reality is complex and many-sided; the names in use to describe reality reflect that complexity. South Asian English is similarly many-sided--and has now reached far beyond the borders of South Asia. You have only to open a book with Mistry on its spine, or Rushdie, Vassanji, or Rao.
Kolkata is the capital of the overwhelming experience. There's too much of everything--traffic, pollution, people. It is my birthplace (not my hometown--that honour belongs to Toronto, where I lived from the age of two to twenty). It is a place of pilgrimage remembered from childhood, and the destination abroad I most dream of visiting, especially in the depths of the Montreal winter. But I find it nearly impossible to say anything about India without feeling the need to hide my expressive inadequacy behind a screen of what almost feels like hyperbole (it isn't). For example:
India produces enough native speakers of English every year to populate a fair-sized city. Native speakers. Of course the proportion of the billion-plus population of India who acquire English in childhood as a first language is tiny, set against that staggering and incomprehensible figure of more than a billion. In 1997 it was estimated at only 5% (Gupta, 2001). But that still comes to over...