India's colonial legacy and linguistic diversity has given English language a prominent role in the country. This research, through a historical analysis, first understands the factors behind the persistent prevalence of the language in India. The reasons go beyond colonial legacy and globalisation, and enters the domain of economics. Particularly, India’s reliance on the service sector plays a role in accrediting the language with a superior status. Having entered the economic arena, the research, using India Human Development Survey Round 2, conceptualises and quantifies the impact of English language on economic indicators including wage rates and GDP. The results reflect a significantly positive relationship between the language and income. A fluent English speaker earns 34 percent more than a non-English speaker. Furthermore, the empirical results highlight that the response of growth to investment in a state is greater the higher the number of English speakers. The substantiation of the importance of language’s perpetuation from service-based growth is further embedded by the fact that there exists a positive and statistically significant relationship between the number of fluent English speakers in a state and the growth rate of the Gross State Domestic Product of services. The thesis further investigates the relationship between the language and the inclusivity of growth. The results highlight that the likelihood of fluent English speakers moving out of the ‘deprived’ income strata by earning INR 1.5 lakh or more annually is 33 percentage points higher than that of non-English speakers. The research thus, empirically proves that though English is helping economic growth, it is simultaneously hindering development in terms of inclusivity, hence paving way for a dichotomy that policy makers need to resolve. Finally, the research aims to suggest a solution to the dichotomy through an analysis of the education system in India. Particularly, using primary data collection in Delhi, Chandigarh and Shimla, the research evaluates the pedagogy of English Language, and its impact on the learning levels. It highlights that the pedagogy of the language within the CBSE framework requires editions to lead to an inclusive learning of the language.

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This pilot study addresses the distribution of nonstandard syntactic and lexical features in Indian English (IE) across a homogeneous group of highly educated IE speakers. It is found that nonstandard syntactic features of article use, number agreement and assignment of verb argument structure do not display uniform intragroup distribution. Instead, a relationship is found between nonstandard syntactic features and the sociolinguistic variables of lower levels of exposure to and use of English found within the group. While nonstandard syntactic features show unequal distribution, nonstandard lexical features of semantic reassignment, and mass nouns treated as count nouns display a more uniform intragroup distribution.

I investigate the spoken dialogue of four Indian novels in English: Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable (1935), Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956), Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan's The World of Nagaraj (1990), and Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters (2002). Roger Fowler has said that literature, as a form of discourse, articulates ideology; it is through linguistic criticism (combination of literary criticism and linguistic analyses) that the ideologies in a literary text are uncovered. Shobhana Chelliah in her study of Indian novels in English concludes that the authors use Indian English (IndE) as a device to characterize buffoons and villains. Drawing upon Fowler's and Chelliah's framework, my investigation employs linguistic criticism of the four novels to expose the ideologies reflected in the use of fictionalized English in the Indian context. A quantitative inquiry based on thirty-five IndE features reveals that the authors appropriate these features, either to a greater or lesser degree, to almost all their characters, suggesting that IndE functions as the mainstream variety in these novels and creating an illusion that the authors are merely representing the characters' unique Indian worldviews. But within this dialect range, the appropriation of higher percentages of IndE features to specific characters or groups of characters reveal the authors' manipulation of IndE as a counter-realist and ideological device to portray deviant and defective characters. This subordinating of IndE as a substandard variety of English functions as the dominant ideology in my investigation of the four novels. Nevertheless, I also uncover the appropriation of a higher percentage of IndE features to foreground the masculinity of specific characters and to heighten the quintessentially traditional values of the older Brahmin generation, which justifies a contesting ideology about IndE that elevates it as the prestigious variety, not an aberration. Using an approach which combines literary criticism with linguistic analysis, I map and recommend a multidisciplinary methodology, which allows for a reevaluation of fictionalized IndE speech that goes beyond impressionistic analyses.