In the process we are
ignoring a vital aspect of deprivation and denial of opportunity that has come
to acquire crucial significance in modern India. Today, in our society, the
single most influential factor that determines access to elite educational
institutions, and hence to important avenues of economic and social
advancement, is the ability to use the English language with ease and facility.
This is the magic wand that opens many doors that can lead to inclusion in the
social and economic elite.
By operating the modern
economy in India only through the English language, the ruling elites that
emerged during the British rule have ensured their own perpetuation and
continuing dominance over the rest of society. They have also ensured that most
Indians are unable to attain a high level of proficiency in English, as a
result of which people fluent in the language are in perpetual short supply. A
person who has acquired even reasonable proficiency in English will enjoy a
major advantage while competing for jobs while those few who have a good
command over the English language behave and get treated like an imperial race.
They have any number of highly paid jobs both in the public and private sectors
to pick and choose from, no matter what their other abilities, class or caste
background. The rest, who lack this skill, are made to feel worthless and
therefore lose self-confidence.
However, someone who has
failed to acquire this magical skill can qualify neither for entrance to any
institution for higher learning nor for any decent white-collar job. He or she
may be a first-rate scholar in Marathi, Hindi or Assamese but that will not
make the person eligible for anything more than a peons’ job even within the
linguistic boundaries of Maharashtra, UP or Assam — states in which these
languages are spoken by millions of people. He/she may have great expertise in
botany, the since of healing Indian architecture or astronomy. But that will
not qualify her/him to any of the institutions of higher learning for these
subjects.
A Passport to Privilege
Why is it that this
routine and pervasive aspect of discrimination and elitism has ceased to bother
us, while caste and class have long dominated the discourse of those who claim
to oppose sources of privilege? Despite the widespread prevalence of
caste-based deprivation, it is easy to cite any number of examples of persons
from SC, ST and OBC backgrounds who have come to acquire high status jobs in
both the government as well as the private sector. But it would be impossible
for any of us to name people who have succeeded in getting admission into an
IIT or any other elite medical, engineering or management institute, or cite
instances of someone securing a high status job in the modern sector of our
economy — public or private — without having acquired a certain level of
competence in English.
If you want to qualify
for medical school, you have to know English — even if you want to practise in
rural or small town India, where very few of your patients are likely to speak
in English. If you want to train to be an architect in India you have to know
English, even to apply to a school of architecture. People who do not know
English are treated as a lower species, unfit for any place in a modern society
or economy.
A Vicious Divide
The English-speaking
pan-Indian elite is entrenched in the higher echelons of bureaucracy, politics,
the armed forces, corporate business and diverse professions —medicine,
engineering, architecture, law and so on. Consequently, this tiny elite
dominates the terms of intellectual discourse on most issues, be it social
legislation, defence policy, farm policy, educational, legal or electoral
reforms. They act as though that they alone have a national perspective on
vital issues of national importance and the regional language elites represent
narrow sectarian and divisive tendencies. They present English as the language
of modernity and those rooted in indigenous languages are projected as being
leftovers of a pre-modern, traditionalist, anti-progress, even obscurantist
worldview. For all their nationalist pretensions, they insist on using a
colonial language for their project of modernising India and project themselves
as saviours of national unity and national culture as well as repositories of
intellectual merit and progress. The only role they assign to the masses is to
uncritically accept their version of progress and modernisation, which includes
a good deal of denigration of their own cultural heritage.
Since the domination of
the English-educated elite depends on preserving a centralised state structure,
movements for political decentralisation have often been presented as threats
to national unity. However, since this elite lacks social and cultural roots in
Indian society, and their lifestyle and aspirations are all directed towards
the Western world, they lack the vision and the competence to govern a society
as diverse and complex as ours. That is why the laws they enact, including
those for the ostensible benefit of the people, are observed only in their
violation; the system of governance they preside over is marked by corruption,
incompetence and tyranny; the law and order machinery they preside over has
become increasingly lawless. Because their social reform discourse is couched
in an alien language and uses an alien framework, the social reform measures
they propose usually create a backlash or at best remain on paper.
The New Brahmins
By retaining English as
the medium of elite education, as a requirement in the professions and in
government offices, even after India was formally freed from colonial rule, we
have ensured that the schism that was deliberately created by our colonial
rulers between the English-educated elite and the rest of the society has grown
even further and acquired deadly dimensions that are destroying the minds,
souls and self-respect of the majority of our people. The edge that
English-based education provides often trumps the traditional divides of caste
and class.
Traditional Brahmins
used Sanskrit mainly as a language of higher intellectual pursuits, for
chanting mantras to gods and goddesses and performing certain types of
religious rituals. The new Brahmins speak in English even when talking to their
dogs or their little infants. They insist that their children learn their
nursery rhymes in English. They use local languages only when ordering menials
who service their needs. The power of the old Brahaminical elite was
effectively challenged by various Bhakti movements with women and people from
castes supposedly lower down the hierarchy defying the dominance of the
Sanskritised elite by asserting their right to talk to their chosen gods in the
mother tongue. Today the descendants of those very castes are in such awe of
the English language that they too have learnt to prostrate before its
soul-destroying hegemony.
They do so because they
see that you gain instant entry into the charmed circle of the social and
cultural elite if you can speak English in a manner and accent deemed
appropriate within the national elite, even if you do not come from the high
castes, while the doors are as good as shut for those who can’t, even if they
were born into the highest among twice born castes. They are assumed to be from
a lower species.
People rarely ask me
what caste I belong to. They simply assume I am from one of the twice born
castes because I speak English with a noticeable public school accent. It is
ironical that in order to draw attention to the damage being done by the unhealthy
dominance of English, I have to write in English. If I wrote the same thing in
a regional language and did not have a certain level of competence in English,
my critique would be dismissed as an expression of envy of the incompetent.
No matter how high your
caste, no matter how much land your family owns, if there is no good
English-medium school within easy reach of your village, your children will end
up at the bottom end of the job market. That is how the sons of Jats of
Haryana, Punjab and UP, who constitute the landowning and political elites in
these two states, end up as bus conductors and drivers if their families reside
in villages that do not have good English-medium schools close at hand. That is
how so many Brahmins end up as street vendors, selling paan bidi,
vegetables or other tidbits when they migrate from poverty-ridden villages,
which do not have reasonable quality English-medium schools within easy reach.
Conversely, Christian
boys or girls living in certain districts such as Ranchi, where missionaries
run far better schools than those run by the government in villages and towns
of India, stand a far better chance of getting good education and good jobs
than upper caste young men and women from backward villages without such schools.
A person who has studied in Modern School or St Stephen’s College, no matter
what his caste by birth, is easily accepted as a member of an all India
Super Caste and thereby has far more opportunities than anyone can get
by relying on his or her caste by birth as his main qualification.
Most educated people
have come to consider this state of affairs as so ‘normal’ that this is not
even seen as a matter of note, concern or alarm. However, the absurdity and
injustice of this situation becomes obvious if we look around and observe the
fact that there are not many other countries in the world where people suffer
such severe deprivation and disability within their own motherland for having
failed to acquire education in a foreign language.
Demands of Globalisation
It is true that, in a
fast globalising economy, English language skills are somewhat at a premium in
every country. However, in most of these countries, English is used for
communicating with the outside world, for international transactions or
exchanges. It is extremely rare for a country to adopt English as the language
of internal governance, education (including technical education) or internal
business dealings. A person in China, Korea, Thailand, Japan, France, Turkey,
Iran, Chile or Germany can become a lawyer, doctor, architect or engineer
without knowing any or much English. In India such a person will not be able to
get anything above a menial, blue-collar job. A person who does not know the
local language would not even be considered for any worthwhile job in most
countries of the world and would be considered a weird aberration. India is
perhaps the only country in the world where highly educated people who have
been raised and educated within their country consider it a mark of status to
declare that they are illiterate in their mother tongue and cannot speak ten
sentences in either their mother tongue or in Hindi, which is officially the
national language of India, without mixing in a good number of words and
phrases in English.
Many will counter this
by saying:
- It is not English language skills that are the key to success, but rather that the English speaking elite just happens to be overwhelmingly from the upper castes. Their real dominance comes from their caste and class position.
- English language skills can be picked up easily since there is no caste bar to learning them.
This is as naïve as
saying that anyone can qualify for an IIT-type entrance exam merely because the
test is open to all those who qualify on merit irrespective of caste or class
background.
Despite the dominance of
English in our education system for over a century, only a minuscule minority,
even among the educated upper caste sections of our society, is able to use the
language with any clarity and effectiveness. Most of our MAs and PhDs cannot
write three correct sentences in English even though all their exams were given
in English.
However, they get away
with it because even the pretense of knowing English, no matter how poor the
person’s actual language skills and knowledge, works better than being
genuinely proficient in any of the Indian languages, if you are not
simultaneously competent in English. That is why upwardly mobile segments of
the middle and even lower middle classes are ready to sacrifice an incredible
proportion of their social and financial resources in bribes and other forms of
influence in order to get their children admitted to a school or college that
provides quality English-based education, beginning with the crucial admission
into one of the highly regarded English-medium nursery schools.
Denied Access to
Knowledge
The growing preference
for English-medium schools is primarily due to the poor quality of education
imparted in non-English-medium schools and the low status value ascribed to
learning in regional languages. If you are going to be treated as an illiterate
for not being fluent in English, you have no choice but to prioritise learning
it, even at the cost of other necessary skills. Given the lower standards that
prevail in non-English-medium schools, it is assumed that those who have
studied in English are better educated and hence make better teachers. This
despite the fact that teaching quality is so poor in most of our English-medium
schools, barring a few exceptional institutions, that most of our students are
ill-equipped to make sense of even newspaper reports, leave alone read serious
books in English. Yet, they spend just about all their energy trying to grapple
with English and willfully neglect learning their mother tongue, Hindi or any
of the Indian languages, which they could master with great ease.
In the process, they end
up with nothing more than a pidgin language — a confused mixture of poor
English and their mother tongue — that damages their over-all linguistic
abilities for life. This also seriously impairs their thinking capacities
because language is the primary tool for understanding the world, for grasping
ideas and using concepts for effective communication. A person’s thinking is
seriously impaired if they are not well rooted in at least one language.
Linguistic cripples grow up to be intellectual cripples.
This is also one of the
major reasons why there is huge deficit of good school and college teachers in
India. Those who know good English ordinarily move on to higher status and
better paying jobs. The few who choose teaching gravitate towards elite schools
and universities, while those who have studied in Hindi-medium schools, or in
schools using any of the regional languages, by and large end up being
intellectually stunted because they have far less access to sources of knowledge
and learning without good knowledge of English.
The dominance of English
has consequences far beyond what most of us dare acknowledge. Those who study
in various regional Indian languages, and know only a smattering of English, do
not have access to all the knowledge and information being produced in various
disciplines, including the politics, history, geography and sociology of India.
Consider the absurdity and injustice evidenced in the following examples of the
arrogance and callousness of our English-educated elite:
- There are no medical or science, technology or social science journals in any of the Indian languages, including those that are spoken by millions. All scientists publish their findings in English. All technology institutions teach in English as if English is the natural language of science and technology. This is not the case in Thailand, Korea, China and Japan, not to speak of Germany or France.
- The medium of instruction and
examination in all our schools of architecture as well as the course
content is in English, even though India has an exceptionally
well-developed and distinct architectural tradition of its own.
- It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find training manuals for plumbers, electricians or masons in Hindi, Marathi or Tamil. As a result, people who take to these occupations end up acquiring half-baked knowledge as apprentices on the job by observing the work of others, or by word of mouth. The children of our impoverished farmers and artisans learn what they can by simply following traditional ways or picking up new skills by observing others. There is hardly any educational material available to them in their own languages for upgrading their skills.
- India is one of the very few places in the world where pharmaceutical companies do not bother to write the names of the medicines they produce in any local language. Almost all the allopathic medicines produced in India are labelled in English; the accompanying literature about directions for use, side-effects and precautions are provided only in English. Today, even the fashionable among Ayurvedic companies label their medicines in English. Most doctors, including those who work in government offices and service low-income groups, write their prescriptions in English. Given that only a tiny percent among the educated sections can make sense of things written in English, imagine what it means for those who are barely literate to decipher their prescriptions and understand the nature of treatment and medication prescribed to them.
- Our lawyers draft petitions in
English on behalf of even those clients who do not know a word of English;
court proceedings, especially at the higher levels, are all carried out in
English, legal judgments are delivered in English, the laws
and precedents on which those judgments are based are leftovers of British
law and are written in English. Thus most people who approach the courts
for justice cannot comprehend a word of what their lawyers write or say on
their behalf, or make sense of the verdicts passed in their favour or
against them, except through the agency of their lawyers. The sense of
helplessness and crippling dependence this creates is a major reason for
corruption and unaccountability, and for the exploitation of the poor by
our legal system.
- India is the only country
where no social science journal is published in any of the Indian
languages. All “eminent” historians write their histories of India in
English. All “eminent” sociologists publish their micro and macro level
studies of Indian society in English. For those who are not well-trained
in handling the English language, all the new knowledge being generated
about the past and present of Indian society is inaccessible. There
are no serious books or journals available to them in the subjects they
study or teach. A large proportion of them have never read anything other
than cheap student guidebooks, many of which are in turn written by poorly
educated people. Consequently, most of our MAs and PhDs, especially those
from small town universities, are so poorly educated that they cannot
write five correct sentences in the language in which they have to submit
their thesis. Not surprisingly, high status scholarly conferences on
Indian history, politics, sociology and even Indian religions are mostly
held in American, British, even Australian and
German universities rather than in Kurukshetra, Patna or Meerut
universities where few even among the senior faculty are likely to be
fluent in English.
One of the reasons why
Indians have so deeply internalised the disdainful view of their colonial
masters about indigenous Indian society is that very few among the educated
elite are able to read or make sense of Indian language sources of Indian
history and society. Consequently, we depend on the accounts written by
colonial administrators, foreign missionaries and sundry foreign travellers to
get a sense of our past. Scholarly studies and translations of Indian epics
and dharmic texts are also mostly done by Western scholars. As
a result, their biases, their interpretations, their critiques become ours. We
begin to view our successes, our failures, our problems and delineate even our
aspirations through the eyes of outsiders.
We celebrate those who
are celebrated by the West. We ignore those who are disapproved of or looked
down upon the West. Today, if you ask anyone among the English-educated elite
to name three good current Indian literary authors, they are likely to name the
likes of Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor or Amitav Ghosh. Very few will name OV
Vijayan, who is one of the best writers in Malayalam, or Vijay Tendulkar, who
wrote some of the finest plays in Marathi. Why? Because these writers wrote for
fellow Indians in Indian languages and won Indian literary awards, not a
British or American award. They have given us profound new insights into our
society and made significant literary innovations both in form and content. But
we do not consider these authors as important as authors who have won a Booker
Prize. Can we think of an important Chinese, Japanese, German or French writer
who has never written in the language of his/her own people? Writers elsewhere
get international recognition after they have been read and admired at home. In
India, we are intellectually browbeaten into admiring those who are smart
enough to achieve recognition in the West.
Those who think English
is the language of opportunity would do well to remember that while it opens
doors for a select few and provides them the wherewithal to be internationally
competitive, it shuts all doors on those who are denied the opportunity to get
a good education in English. We are so obsessed with and enamoured by our
ability to be able to communicate and work with people in New York, London,
Toronto, Sydney that we don’t seem bothered by the fact that English acts as a
barrier in communicating with hundreds of millions of people living in our own
country and is making them feel like third class citizens.
English can never serve
as a vehicle for mass education in India. Proficiency in English is
unattainable for most and creates conditions of unequal competition for the
vast majority. More than a century and a half after English came to
be imposed as a language of governance and for the elite professions, no more
than one percent of our people use it as a first or second language. For the
majority, even of educated Indians, English remains at best a third language.
Nearly 45 percent people live in states where Hindi is the official language
while a significant percentage of people even in states like Maharashtra,
Gujarat, Kashmir, Assam, Punjab, Bengal, Andhra, Orissa have a working
knowledge of Hindi. And yet, the English-educated elite gets outraged at the
idea of Hindustani replacing English as a link language.
The Politics of Language
Regional languages have
become the vehicle of mass literacy as well as a medium for the assertion of
new regional cultures emerging through the process of subsuming many of the
folk languages and dialects and non-official languages in various states. For
example, Hindi as the official language of UP has marginalised Bhojpuri, Awadhi
and the many other dialects of Uttar Pradesh and in the process homogenised the
culture of the state, though at the cost of the latter. However, it is
impossible for non-official languages to gain respectability if the official
regional languages get treated with disdain. Though these languages are
downgraded socially and economically, they are the vehicles of political
discourse in states. It is no coincidence that today, there is only one Chief
Minister of a state in all of India — namely Navin Pattnaik of Orissa — who is
not comfortable in speaking in the language of his State. He too could not have
won an election but for the tremendous goodwill built by his father Biju
Pattnaik, who was well rooted in Oriyan culture. Sonia and Rahul Gandhi have
both had to learn Hindi with sustained effort, after they developed political
aspirations, whereas for the first 30 years of her life in India, Sonia Gandhi
did not bother to learn Hindi nor taught her children to learn it
seriously.
The political power of
regional languages and regional elite is evident from the fact that a person
who is not deeply entrenched in the language and culture of his/her
constituency is not likely to win an election, no matter how high his/her other
qualifications. This is an indirect indication of the language policy that
people actually endorse when they have the power through their votes. However,
the judiciary, bureaucracy and elite professions are dominated by people who
cannot write five sentences in the regional language, all because people have
no power to influence the language preference of the elite in those areas, as
they do in politics through their votes.
However, this has also
meant that our politics has come to be dominated by people who have failed to
acquire good quality education. Consequently, most of our elected
representatives are ill equipped to handle the job they are meant for, namely,
legislation. Therefore, bureaucrats and hired legal professionals end up
conceptualising and drafting most of our laws, rather than people who get
elected to legislatures. Thus the decline in the performance and standards of
our political institutions is a direct consequence of the dual language policy
we have adopted, which leads to poor quality education for the general mass of
people in India.
First Published in Manushi Journal (Issue No. 154) :
http://www.manushi-india.org/pdfs_issues/PDF%20Files%20154/MK%204-10.pdf
