Both the Inglish-Hinglish (as Lalu Prasad might say) aspect of Gordon Brown’s trip and his wife’s sartorial fantasies attracted public attention. But while Sarah Brown’s dressing served British interests, her husband’s offer of linguistic training could further the Indian revolution by narrowing the widening gulf between those who speak English and those who don’t.

It does intrigue me though why in China Mrs Brown spurned the elegant cheongsam with sexy slits up both thighs. If her advisers thought Qing dynasty apparel would be politically incorrect, they don’t know that Mao suits were banished in 1987, when Zhao Ziyang pirouetted in double-breasted pinstripe in front of Western reporters, declaring, “I hope you will send out a dispatch saying all my suits are made in China and look very smart, so that we can promote the export of Chinese garments.’’ Socialism with Chinese characteristics had arrived on the sartorial stage. The cut of a politician’s coat proclaimed his ideology.

Mrs Brown’s Jaeger and Marks and Sparks outfits testified to her “Buy British” campaign. True, the St Michael label is prized more abroad than at home (where mass produced goods still raise eyebrows), but abroad is where the money is. It will be one in the eye for the “cousins” to whom Brown’s predecessor grovelled if China can be persuaded to buy British with some of the $237,477.5 million the Americans owe it from last year’s trade.

That wasn’t the only link. Cherie Blair was known to wrap a sari round herself for the benefit of ethnic voters who didn’t care that she wore it as clumsily as Mrs Chester Bowles in Fifties New Delhi. Number 10’s new chatelaine cut a more exotic figure in bejewelled salwar-kameez-dupatta, though if the purpose was to advertise British, she could just as well have worn a couple of Liberty scarves, as Mrs Jinnah did to the disgust of Lady Willingdon, who ordered a wrap ostensibly to protect her guest from the cold. Perhaps it was cleverer to patronize British-Indian merchandise. If she was a walking ad in China, she was a mobile catalogue in India, the names of her couturiers and jewellers, and even the cost of each item in her ensemble, announced in advance. Borrowed finery needn’t be sniffed at either. She (or the British taxpayer) was spared the expense of purchase and the world tipped off about smart alternatives to Moss Bros. Instead of Queen Elizabeth-slept-here, shopkeepers and socialites can now gush, “This pashmina draped Sarah Brown’s left shoulder!” Or “These jades dangled from her ears!” She’s entitled to a fee.

That’s the future. The notable aspect of the Inglish-Hinglish business is that it’s already here. Some reports quoted Brown as saying that his £825 million loan would suffice to start “three lakh schools (and) help train three lakh teachers.” Of course, “lakh” long ago crept out of Hobson-Jobson and into the Oxford dictionary. But if Brown was rightly quoted — and it wasn’t just a reporter translating his words into Hinglish — then lakh has now crept into prime ministerial usage. Or was Brown also making a grand gesture like his wife’s attire?

At first sight, his “new gift to the world” places us in a quandary. Calcutta is where a veteran owner-editor famously defended his newspaper’s appalling English with the boast that unable to fight the British Raj in any other way, he was doing his best to destroy the imperial language. Do we want to stop tilting at that favourite windmill? Calcutta is where Macaulay threatened to create a genre “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Geoffrey (not Jeffrey) Archer addicts may recall Sam in the thriller, The Burma Legacy, saying “a voice that was both plummy and oriental” prompted thoughts of Calcutta. Plummy Calcutta might disdain Brown’s gift as patronizing. Rajah Pyari Mohan Mookarjee would have been utterly bewildered by it, seeing no linguistic eccentricity in his plea “that the sudden aggravation of the pain in his legs caused by the proximity of the full moon prevents his attending his (the viceroy’s) Levee.” But this “oriental gem” amused Lord Hardinge so much that he forwarded it to George V.

Burdened with this historic legacy, do we need what Brown calls “our language” but which belongs as much to us as it does to Hollywood and calypso writers? But, then, he wasn’t really being so presumptuous as to offer a language — his, ours or theirs. What he promised were the tools to learn or teach it, and that deserves unqualified welcome, especially if it means English will be taught scientifically as a foreign language. A British Council website, providing access to new materials and resources, including the possibility of one-to-one tuition and a programme to recruit “master trainers” to train 750,000 English language teachers over five years, would certainly “move things forward immediately”. Apart from demonstrating that the British Council is not just Britain’s equivalent of John Le Carré’s Moscow Centre, it might bring all of India within the ambit of globalization.

English being the language of India’s elite, our professionals have little problem making connections abroad. But that only compounds an inequality that confines the benefits of globalization to the urban few and enables states that promote the language to march ahead of those that don’t. Anyone who has used Indian Business Process Outsourcing services from abroad knows how painful it can be, and can understand why many BPOs are sub-contracting to the Philippines, where they are more fluent in English. George Orwell’s comment that a completely illiterate Indian picks up English far faster than a British soldier picks up Hindustani suggests an instinctive advantage that ought to be developed. Picking up and learning are different things, and unless English instruction is far more widespread and effective, India will lag behind in the global race.

What is especially important as experience, and even memory, of British rule recedes is the need for serious broad-based programmes to teach English as a foreign language in schools throughout the districts. That specialized skill has always been grossly neglected. My generation was taught, as in any school in England, the structures of instruction and framework of reference taking a great deal for granted. The ambience of English-speaking homes and cultural links with England filled in the gaps. But, today, an institution like South Point promises fluency in English without the elaborate trappings of older Anglo-Indian/English-medium schools, thereby democratizing the language and aiding social mobility. Much more needs to be done in those directions, which is where British Council expertise can help.

Thanks to enlightened methods and modern materials, Chinese students learn to read, write and speak English much faster and better than comparable young Indians. New versions of the Linguaphone process enable them even to get their diction right. That is because English is not a status symbol in China as it is in India. It is a practical tool, “the world’s language: the language of the internet, of business, of international flight — the pathway of global communication,” to repeat Brown. That’s how it should be in India, too, and can if properly taught as a foreign language. Only if mastery of English is not identified with Macaulay’s Children will Indians be able to disprove Brown’s prediction that by 2025 there will be more English speakers in China than people who speak English as a first language in the entire world.

A critical mass of Indians with a sound command of English is far more relevant to economic growth than the $1-billion Nalanda project for a fancy global university and Asian heritage centre. If the latter is like Sarah Brown’s sartorial extravaganza in India, the former bears comparison with her pointed salesmanship in China.