Sarah Kher-Bek
“Indian by blood and colour, but English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect.” Words from the infamous Macauly Minute of 1853. This relentless colonial hangover just – wont – fucking – quit. It lingers in the way we speak, the way we move, the way we navigate a world that still demands we mould ourselves to fit its language. Some performances entertain, some educate, but Why English? – Layers beneath the Language! does something far more urgent: it unearths and excavates, digging into the wounds of colonialism, pulling out the grief we have reluctantly learned to live with. A wound so deeply embedded in many of us that we’ve mistaken them for our own flesh, mistaken this ache for ours.
Vibhinna Ramdev stands before us not just as a performer, but as a vessel of generational memory, reminding us that the colonial hangover is not over – and our way out is through, and through looks like unlearning, and taking the journey back to your roots. The universal pull, begging us to be proud of where we came from, and understand, especially for those of us in the West, there is room to have balance.
Ramdev moves like memory—fluid and sharp, unraveling and reweaving the threads of language, belonging, and loss. We meet her in Bengaluru, India – her hometown. As she pauses from the task at hand of folding her life into a suitcase, hoping to make the journey over to the West. Turning on the her ring light to record an audition tape, the glow frames her as she speaks, marking a moment in time—both in the show and in her life.
Carrying six languages on her tongue — Including, Kannada, her mother tongue and English, the world’s demand. The focal stars, pulling her between past and possibility. The audition tape, first fixed in time, begins to shift throughout the show —words bending, accents hardening, fluency unraveling and reforming. Language is not just spoken here; it is lived, lost, and found again.
We plunge into the depths of Ramdev’s subconscious—a world shaped by a missionary school education, the privileges of an upper-class childhood, and a dream to be a performer. Born and raised in India, yet taught, implicitly and explicitly, that West is best. Like her mother, Ramdev is one of Macaulay’s children, generations moulded by colonial ideology, where English is not just a language but a measure of worth.
Ramdev’s connection with her audience is unparalleled—intimate, unfiltered, as if we were simply sitting with a friend, watching her pack a suitcase, losing herself in stories that spill out between folded clothes. Her vulnerability knows no bounds, each revelation pulling us deeper into her world.
The lights shift as her memories unfold, illuminating the quiet calculations she makes in every interaction—socially profiling, instinctively selecting the right language, to belong, to be understood. Then, the air thickens. Performing a raw, visceral dance between sheer curtains, her movements scored by an intense, haunting soundscape. We are drawn into the shame that grips her mind when she falters in her mother tongue while speaking to a taxi driver. “Ma’am, I am educated, you can speak to me in English.”
A single sentence, yet it holds centuries of weight—offending her, yes, but more than that, reinforcing the insidious lie that English is not just a language, but a mark of superiority. English spoken is English known. And English known—a King makes.
In India, the colonial hangover is not a relic; it is a ghost that lingers. It is a gatekeeper, deciding who moves forward and who stays behind, who is worthy of opportunity and who must fight to be heard. A hierarchy, a tool grasped by the grip of death to not get left behind.
We follow Ramdev to her audition. In English, she is fluent, effortless. But when asked to speak in the dialects of her own homeland, she stumbles. Moving between them, she can only read from a script—hesitant, mispronouncing words that should feel familiar but now feel foreign. This is the paradox of Macaulay’s children: raised to present themselves in a way the West will accept, yet unmoored in the reality of their own country, where only 12% speak English. Socially displaced in their own home.
Unravelling the way English has been both a weapon and a refuge—a tongue forced upon us, yet one we now find ourselves clinging to for survival. Why English? does not merely explore language; it mourns and resists the way it has pulled us from our roots. Every step, every shift in tone, every unraveling of fabric feels like an invocation of the past, a plea for something lost, a challenge to the audience: What have you given up to be understood?
As a Diaspora in the West, I can attest to the ways in which we bend ourselves into palatable shapes, make our accents softer, let our tongues forget the sounds they once knew. Yet no matter how well we speak the language, the West still reminds us—we are not from here. We are foreign in both places, suspended between worlds, belonging to neither. Ramdev captures this displacement with a rawness that stings. Experiencing this displacement in her homeland, adhering to the false superiority of the colony in a nation that only few can afford to. Every flicker of expression holds a question: At what cost does belonging come? And who decides the terms?
But what happens when we leave? When we take this fractured identity to the West, where whiteness remains the silent standard? Ramdev does not just speak to those in India, but to the diaspora that carry this weight across oceans. We come to foreign lands hoping for belonging, only to find ourselves trapped in a cruel paradox: too foreign for the West, too Western for home. We code-switch, we soften our mother tongues, we laugh off the mispronunciations of our names, all in an exhausting attempt to assimilate. And still, we remain othered.
This performance is not just a show—it is a reckoning. It is a cry against the erasure of identity, a call to remember, to reclaim, to grieve. It is a reminder that language is not just words—it is history, it is power, it is home. Why English? does not ask for easy answers. Instead, it leaves you with the weight of its truth, sitting heavy in your chest long after the final bow.
This performance exposes the quiet suffering of families who push their own histories aside so their children can have a better shot at “success.” This is art that breathes, that aches, that demands to be felt. An unmissable masterpiece. Five stars are not enough. Not in this lifetime or the next.
Recommended drink: Rum Masala Chai—a homegrown richness, brewed by those who know erasure too well. Spiked with rum, because whether you relate or are about to be confronted, you’ll need something to take the edge off.
Madeleine Martin
Kat Burton
Jake Mace
