Is British English better than Indian English? The sensible and conventional answer these days is; ?What do you mean ?better?? They?re two branches of one language, each valid in its place.?

I came to that conclusion 45 years ago when, thanks to Dom Moraes, an Oxford friend, I joined the Indian Express, edited by his father, in the then Bombay. I arrived pretty wet behind the ears ? indeed dripping, as to all things Indian ? but at least, I thought, I knew the English language. But did I? One of my early tasks was to edit a piece by a senior Indian colleague that spoke of ?culturable land?. ?Cultivable,? I said firmly; ?There?s no such word.? As indeed in Britain there isn?t. ?It?s the one we use here,? said my colleague, and we agreed that an Indian paper, being written for Indians, should use the Indian form.

That was a trivial example of what Britons know and accept unquestioningly in American English. They say suspenders and gotten, we say braces and got. They use the subjunctive ? He urged that the speech be heard in silence ? which Britons, alas, have almost abandoned. And so on. No one has doubted since the 19th century that their usage is as good as ours.

Yet turn to India in, say 1900, and the answer was very different ? from both sides of the fence. The British saw their tongue, like their empire and their queen, as a gift from god for the enlightenment of lesser breeds. A gift, in reality, from Greeks and Romans ? and hence from ancient India, though few Britons knew that ? from Celts, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans and many more. But so be it: the language was theirs and they knew it best, period.

They had in fact adopted (adapted, rather) a few Indian words even in Britain: nabob (nawab) was one of the first, followed by words like bungalow and kedgeree. In India they readily used Indian words, even ones easily translatable into English: syce or mali, for example. But basically English, to them, was indeed theirs alone. They found the Bengali babu, as they called him, and his fractured use of English equally absurd.

Subtract the derision, and many English-speaking Indians of the time agreed, albeit for different reasons. They might well reckon they could run India better than Britons could, but they were after all newcomers to an alien tongue, with centuries of use and literature in its homeland behind it. It was perhaps Tagore who first proved to both races that Indians could use English as well as anyone. I used to have my father?s copy of Gitanjali, published in 1912, I think, until a Mumbai cockroach ate its binding. But Tagore was a rare case (and for all Tagore?s fame and 1913 Nobel prize, my father a fairly rare buyer).

Things, of course, are very different now. By the Thirties it was plain that Indians could use English, in political or historical works, for instance, as well as any Englishman. Works of imagination soon followed, with novelists like R.K. Narayan. Dom Moraes, not yet 20, was already a brilliant poet ? and winner of the 1958 Hawthornden prize ? when I knew him in the late Fifties. With a horde of Indian novelists today beating down the doors of British and American publishers, no one in those countries today can doubt that Indian writing and usage are as valid as theirs.

Yet questions remain, ones that arise indeed for several other languages. How far is there an Indian English at all? Should that perhaps read Indian Englishes? And is there no limit to the judgment that if enough people use a language and do so well, it is meaningless to see their usage as better or worse than that of any other group of users? The pidgin of the South Pacific is indeed valid there. But is it really as good as that of Canterbury or (let me spell it thus in this context) Calcutta or Kerala?

I shall return to these questions in a fortnight?s time. If readers care to email me comments, corrections, condemnation or queries, they?ll be gladly received by thewordcage@yahoo.co.uk.