This paper seeks to answer some of the charges often leveled against English in India. It endeavors to give the English teachers some well-reasoned arguments to counter the attacks from the detractors of English. This kind of defense is perhaps necessary in the context of globalization and the role English is poised to play in India's economic and social life, and the persistence of old prejudices against it. It is time for the Indians to take a pragmatic view and accept English as indispensable for progress.

We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.

This was supposedly an `unholy' intention with which T B Macaulay recommended the introduction of English in India in his capacity as the President of the Committee of Public Instruction. Piqued by his imperialistic rhetoric, Indians have traditionally misjudged Macaulay, and readily attributed every undesirable development on the educational front to him. Macaulay's language was certainly objectionable but his intentions were not demoniac, as they were made out to be. The context in which he wrote these words was the availability of a fund for the intellectual improvement of the people of India and a heated debate between the Orientalists such as Warren Hastings and the Anglicists like Macaulay himself over the question of a lingua franca for India. Hastings preferred a classical Oriental language to be the lingua franca and the medium of educational instruction in India and went on to establish a college of Arabic and Persian studies in Calcutta. Macaulay wanted it to be English, not so much with the cultural denigration of India in mind but because of his conviction that it was a modern and more practical alternative to the classical trio—Persian-Arabic-Sanskrit—since it promised to bring the Western science and technology to India and had the potential to strengthen and modernize Indian vernaculars by means of a healthy contact. Chandrabhan Prasad, the well-known commentator on Dalit issues, recently vindicated Macaulay by emphasizing that "the full text of Macaulay's Minute shows him passionately arguing for modern scientific education for native Indians."

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