Post-colonial elitism.

A RECENT video that went viral on social media of two owners of a restaurant in Islamabad has drawn a lot of ire, with calls for boycotting the restaurant ranking at the top of trends in Pakistan for more than a day.

The video shows the restaurant owners interviewing their manager of nine years about the English language courses they sent him to attend, and then ask him to speak to them in English while pointing the camera towards him, saying they are doing this because they are bored. He responds in English well enough to be understood but in an accent less affected, and they laugh saying this is the result after his language courses, with them having paid him a high salary.

The video and the reaction raise several questions related to post-colonial elitism, the relationship between class and language, and the short-lived nature of outrage.

The owners quizzing their manager about his English-language skills after saying they are bored rightly enraged a lot of Pakistanis. It signifies the bored capitalist elite exploiting their power as employers to entertain themselves by humiliating their dependent employee for not being good enough at English - the language the elite is fluent in - after they have paid for his training in it.

The language of the colonisers is seen as a marker of success.

The supposed clarification from the owners afterwards made matters worse: calling it friendly banter is a weak cover-up; the video showed a clear instance of bullying where the manager got no chance to respond but only nervously do as the employers asked him to after putting him on the spot, on camera.

This episode also highlighted the relationship between class and language. English, the language of the colonisers that we adopted, is seen as a marker of success and prestige. Though it is a significant skill to have in the global arena, it is also often a prerequisite for class mobility and a marker of gatekeeping in elite circles, even for those with wealth. This South Asian phenomenon was wonderfully captured in the Irrfan Khan and Saba Qamar starrer movie Hindi Medium.

The notion of English being superior is reinforced through private elite education in Pakistan. Schools mandate students to speak in no language other than English, and my nephew tells me his private school imposed a fine every time a student spoke in a language other than English up until the fifth grade. It is such trauma, reinforced through a financial penalty, for speaking one's own...