The fractured and stately English spoken by top Indians: “Welcome to the wonderful world of Hinglish, a Hindu-inspired dialect that pulsates with energy, invention and humour.” The Spectator/UK

I have a different take on ‘Hinglish’. As an extensive traveller on the Indian subcontinent in years past, I consider it to be a tortured tongue, painful not so much to listen to — it is indeed elegantly and whimsically spoken — but (since I believe that our language shapes, constrains and facilitates what we can think, or at least think easily) because I have found the circumlocutions of Hinglish to be indicative of a cultural thought disorder, a cultural schizophrenia, the keenest manifestation of the torment of an entire civilization from having English colonial morés grafted over them. I cannot help wondering why it is not as embarrassing and painful to contemporary Indians as as Stepin Fetchit is to modern African American sensibilities. And whether The Spectator finding it so endearing is not a residue of the cultural-imperialist attitude.