‘Indians losing cultural identity because of Americanisation’

Karachi
Indians are fast losing their cultural identity because of mass Americanization being brought about in the most subtle of manner by American lobbies, both in India and the US.
This was the lament of Kavery Nambisan, a surgeon and a novelist from India who is in town for the Karachi Literature Festival (KLF).
She said that there were programmes introducing mass Americanisation, teaching and encouraging Indians to switch over to American English and grooming them in American customs and mannerisms. This, she said, was attracting lots of young people who seemed to be fascinated with it.
“Americanization has destroyed the majority community, the majority culture. There’s a regular programme in this regard that an American organization is conducting in collaboration with an Indian university.
“This is sad”, she said, adding that if the Americans can have their own brand of English, why can’t we Indians? English now is a global language and every group has a right to have its own brand of the language. There’s simply no need to speak like an American.”
As for the corporate face that the media were assuming today, she said, “I am worried about the media in India. My husband is a journalist and I know how things have changed. Rupert Murdoch’s trend in journalism is, willy nilly, being replicated in India”.
The media, she said, were pandering to corporate whims. However, she said, there were a whole lot of bloggers who came up with the truth but sometimes bloggers got into complications. It all started with the advent of the Narasimha Rao era, she said, when he jettisoned all the ideals of socialism and took on the market economy with all its disadvantages.
“The corporate entities dominate the media in such a subtle way that the latter are not even conscious of the fact that they have been bought,” she says.
Her compatriot, Sridala Swamy, a poetess from Hyderabad, Deccan, who also is town for the KLF, while less critical of the Americans, agrees all the same that American English is fast making an appearance in India which she attributes to the frequency of travel between India and the US. “With people pouring in between both countries, such a thing is sure to happen”, she says.
She also attributes this to the latest Bollywood trends. She also credited Bollywood with bringing in another genre of the language which could be dubbed India English.
Swamy is a freelance writer and contributes a column titled, “Sideways door”. The column is all about poetry. She did agree that there were variations going on in the media but was of the view that the old values could still be retained. She said that Indian Press was really free but there had been stray cases of suppression.