Why Indian English Isn’t Broken, It’s Running on a Different Backend

Woman and Clock, Louise Bourgeois (fair use)

Salman Rushdie once observed that no people whose word for ‘yesterday’ is the same as their word for ‘tomorrow’ can be said to have a firm grip on time (Midnight’s Children). He was talking about the Hindi word kal, and he meant it as gentle mockery. But Rushdie, I think, had it exactly backwards.

In the Western imagination, time is an arrow. You spend it, save it, waste it. Deadlines are cliff edges. Calendars are moral documents.

In the Indian imagination, time is a soup. Kal anchors us to the present, aaj, by making everything else equidistant. Yesterday and tomorrow are both simply ‘not today,’ sitting at the same space in our mental geography, just in different directions. This isn’t confusion, just a different map.

And Indian English is the language that map produces.

The Continuous Tense as Emotional Infrastructure

In Standard English, knowledge is binary. You either know or you don’t.

In Indian English, we prefer: ‘I am knowing.’

To Western ears, this sounds like a grammatical error. But listen closer. ‘I know’ is abrupt, a door closing. ‘I am knowing’ is a door held open. It signals that the speaker is still in the process, still available, still relationally present. In a culture where conversations are relationships and relationships are ongoing, nothing should ever sound fully complete.

The same logic extends across our syntax. ‘I am wanting,’ ‘I am understanding,’ ‘I am having a doubt’, these aren’t errors, they are more like linguistic shock absorbers. A polite head wobble translated into grammar. 

The Universal -ing Protocol

I had a friend-manager who was completely convinced that she spoke to her driver in what she believed was Tamil. ‘Car bring-ing.’ ‘You go-ing.’ ‘Wait-ing here.’ The driver understood her perfectly. The household ran smoothly for years.

She wasn’t speaking Tamil. She was speaking the purest form of Indian English, a protocol where any verb can be domesticated by adding -ing. The suffix softens commands into suggestions, converts instructions into requests, and renders English parseable to ears tuned to entirely different grammatical frequencies.

It is, in effect, a linguistic API that works across 22 scheduled languages and 28 states. So nope, not a bug, think of it as an engineering triumph!

The Cognitive Labour of Translation

Here’s what outsiders don’t see: for many of us, every English sentence is a translation.

I think in a mother tongue that grammaticalizes deference and hierarchy. I type in a language optimized for people who find directness efficient rather than rude. When I write to an American colleague, let’s call him Steve, I am not merely drafting an email. I am performing real-time cultural interpretation.

Steve wants ‘No.’

My brain wants to wrap that syllable in an apology, a justification, and an earnest promise to ‘try my level best.’

There is a specific exhaustion that comes from deleting ‘Hope this email finds you well’ and replacing it with the bare, uncarpeted ‘Here is the report.’ It feels like walking into someone’s home with your shoes on. Efficient, yes. But the body knows it’s wrong.

The Genius of ‘Doing the Needful’

Which brings us to the phrase language purists love to mock: ‘Please do the needful.’

To Western ears, it sounds archaic, but consider what it actually accomplishes.

‘Send the file by 5 PM’ places the burden of specificity on the speaker/writer. I must name the action, set the deadline, anticipate every variable.

‘Do the needful’ assumes shared context. It says: You already know what needs to be done. I trust you to proceed. It leverages a cultural database where context is communal property.

Few phrases embody high-context communication more elegantly.

The Great Flattening

Is anything even an argument now if you don’t bring in AI, the proverbial elephant in every room we enter?

I recently ran an email through an AI writing assistant. It was one of my usual ones: a scathing message to an Insta-store that had let me down. Again. I wanted to channel my best disappointed Indian parent energy.

My input: ‘I am very, very disappointed with my experience, especially since I have personally been buying from you guys since 2018 and in fact, am always recommending you guys to everyone.’

The output: ‘I am disappointed with my recent experience. I have been a loyal customer since 2018 and frequently recommend your store.’

Technically correct. Emotionally lobotomized. A shade I can only describe as Consultant Beige.

Gone: the doubled very, very (because repetition is “redundant”). Gone: personally (because who else would be buying, my ghost?). Gone: you guys twice (too casual). Gone: always and everyone (too hyperbolic). What remains is the skeleton of a complaint, stripped of the guilt-inducing, relationship-invoking, how-could-you-do-this-to-me weight that makes Indian disappointment a moral event.

The AI doesn’t know that, “In fact I am always recommending you.” isn’t about frequency, it’s about betrayal. I vouched for you. To everyone. And it was a ‘fact’. And now look.

This is the new frontier: AI models trained on Western linguistic norms, deployed globally, quietly ‘correcting’ the textures out of a billion people’s English. Our reverts, our doubts, our continuous tenses, flagged as errors. Debugged. Smoothed into the same flat syntax that emails from San Francisco to Sydney to Sao Paulo now share.

We are trading the chaotic warmth of kal for the sterile efficiency of optimization.

Coda

So the next time someone tells you Indian English is ‘wrong’, that we ‘return back’ redundantly, that our ‘doubts’ should be ‘questions,’ that our continuous tenses are grammatically suspect, remember the kal paradox.

Time to let go of the notion that we are somehow speaking a corrupted version of the Queen’s English. When in fact, we are speaking a dialect engineered for a civilization where time bends, context sings, and language, like everything else, refuses to sit still.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to intimate Steve about the same.

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