"I have become
a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home
nowhere." Jawaharlal Nehru
It’s an old horse, mostly flogged by politicians to win
votes or voters’ brownie points. The debate about English versus Indian
languages as the medium of instruction in our schools. And I write today
conscious about the fact that “convent-educated” continues to be one of the
most the coveted attributes of a prospective bride, next only to “fair”. That
the “right” English accent can still open many doors that no “desi” accent can
including getting you that fancy-salary paying call center job. That without
the knowledge of English, higher education as it exists today will be
impossible. That I myself am a product of such an education; reading, writing
and doing all of my conscious thought in English. I also write wondering why
this debate should exist at all. Because, for one, isn’t it obvious that
children should be taught to use their minds and their hearts in their own
mother tongue? Secondly, in a country where even the “anghuta-chaap” can
fluently speak at least 2 languages, why should it not possible to have multi
lingual education? And in case it isn’t obvious, too many research studies
conducted over the years clearly show that bilingual children perform better in
school when the school effectively teaches the mother tongue.
But since the debate exists, let’s get that out of the way
first. As you must have guessed by now, I’m throwing in my lot with the Indian
languages. So, am I saying that the medium of instruction in our schools should
be in an Indian language? Ultimately and primarily – yes. And before everyone
gasps in disgusted astonishment, it won’t do harm to just look around at all
the world around us. Every single “developed” economy – and let’s not go too
far away and stick to the Asian tigers – speaks, reads and writes in its own
native tongue. And for the ones muttering about how difficult it is to undo
centuries of British colonization that branded the English language as the
superior-sahib’s language into the psyche of the nation, and how it’s virtually
impossible to have one official language in a country which speaks 14 languages
and over 3000 dialects, let me remind them that Singapore, Malaysia and Hong
Kong were once British colonies. And Singapore has not 1 but 4 official
languages of which one is Tamil. Iincidentally, the name Singapore was derived
from the Sanskrit simha (lion) and pura (city).
Besides, some of the greatest Indian minds that shaped not
only modern India but also the world were people who had their primary
education in their mother tongue and later went on to become proficient in
English. I could reel off a long and impressive list but perhaps just one name
will do the trick. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
“Up to the
age of 12 all the knowledge I gained was through Gujarati, my mother tongue.
Then I entered a high school…. Everything had to be learnt through English. The
tyranny of English was so great that even Sanskrit or Persian had to be learnt
through English, not through the mother tongue. And let me confess to the
reader that in spite of all my love for the mother tongue, I do not to this day
know the Gujarati equivalents of the technical terms of Geometry, Algebra and
the like. I know now that what I took four years to learn of Arithmetic,
Algebra, Chemistry and Astronomy, I should have learnt easily in one year, if I
had not to learn them through English but Gujarati.… I must not be understood
to decry English or its noble literature. The columns of HARIJAN are sufficient
evidence of my love of English. But….India has to flourish in her own climate,
and scenery, and her own literature. We and our children must build on our own
heritage. If we borrow another, we impoverish our own. We can never grow on
foreign victuals. I find daily proof of the increasing and continuing wrong
being done to the millions by
our false de-indianizing education……” Gandhi writing in HARIJAN, July 1938
Now let me
get to the points that I really want to make.
First, that irrespective of what is the “medium” of
instruction in school (and we can’t change the system overnight), the
responsibility of teaching our children our mother tongue rests first with us
parents. And I don’t mean teaching them to just be able to read and write it.
We mistake language to be just an alphabet, a script, a conglomeration of words
that is a conduit for communication and information. When in fact, it is so
much, much more beyond that. It is literature and music and theatre. It is our
great epics and folklore. Listen to a tale from the Panchatantra in an Indian
language and then listen to it in English. It is like eating a dosa or a
chapatti with a knife and fork. It is
with what we feel the summer heat sear our skin, smell the rain’s first kiss on
the earth, taste a mango, hear Krishna’s flute, see the colour of his beautiful
skin reflected in the night sky. It is our mother’s voice softly crooning us to
sleep. It carries in it the fragrance of this land. It is the mirror in which
we see and recognize who we are, defined not just by this lifetime but the
thousands of lifetimes of our ancestors.
It is as much who we are as is the colour of eyes that we inherited from
a grandmother or the walk that we inherited an uncle. So how can we leave the
responsibility of introducing our children to themselves to someone else?
Second, I plead the case for our mother tongues for one
other very important reason. Because they are some of the most musical, most
beautiful, most evocative, richest languages in the world, not to mention the
most ancient. How can we not give this precious gift to our children? I wish I
could spout passages of prose or poetry to make my point, but I am barely
literate, only being able to speak but not read or write my mother tongue and
my Hindi comes largely from Hindi films and Hindi film songs. (Which isn’t all
that bad because fortunately they come from writers like Gulzar, Kaifi Azmi,
Sahir Ludhinavi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Rajinder Kishan.) And dim though it is, even by that flickering
flame, what I see is spectacular, breathtaking, enthralling. Languages vast and
generous like the river Ganges in where there are a hundred choices to describe
one thing, each word meaning the same yet not the same. Aakash, aasman, amber,
gagan, digh is all “sky”, yet each have a different shade of meaning. Shyam is evening but also Krishna
and his beautiful colour. “Piya ” and “saajan” is lover, but the
great bhakti poets of our land – Meerabai, Kabir and Surdas – also used it to
mean God. Words so concentrated and packed with meaning and expression that in
just one word, you can tell a life story, describe the universe. Perhaps that
is why on the one hand, we have sahasranamas for every god and on the other
just…..“Om”. And perhaps that is why the Sanskrit lexicon is is called Amar
Kosh – eternal treasury.
Can you think of a
more beautiful way of saying “mother” than “janani”? And can you find an
equivalent word in English that is an adequate translation? For that matter,
can you translate “Man tadapata hari darshan ko aaj”? Have you ever
wondered why English subtitles in Indian films are so ridiculous? How, for
example do you translate “jeevan se bhari teri aanken majboor karain jeene
ke liye”? Or “chaudavin ka chand ho ya aftab ho”? How would you explain “sringaar rasa”
to somebody who knows only English? Or what Tulsi Das meant when he said, “Tumaka
chalat Ramachandra, baaje paijaniya”? Or Meera Bai when she pleaded
“Hari tum haro jan ke peed…”? Or
Purandaradasa when he begged, “Karuniso ranga karuniso, Krishna
karuniso….”?
Many, many years ago, in my penultimate year in school, a
wondrous thing happened to me. Her name was Sister David and she was my English
Literature teacher. I still remember the class and the poets – Robert Frost and
T S Eliot and William Blake – and the poems.
“Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it is likely to go better….”
And I still have that poetry book. Because that day I fell
in madly, deeply and irrevocably in love with the English language, a love has
not faded to this day. And all that preeti, pyaar, prem, lagan, mohabbat for
English – even though today I write against it – started from the wonderful
introduction that I had to its great literature and poetry. It led me to its
songs and cinema and theatre. I wish I had met such a teacher of Kannada or
Hindi Literature. I wish that there could be such a teacher of Indian language
in every school.
Perhaps a vain hope because thousands of “English-medium”
institutions are sprouting up all over the country even as we speak. Sadly,
given the quality of the English taught in a majority of them, most of these
children will be both inarticulate and for all purposes illiterate in both
languages. Look at the average advertising slogan and you will see how
dangerously close we are to that.
“Their
vocabulary in the mother tongue is so limited that they cannot always finish
their speech without having recourse to English words and even sentences.” Gandhiji wrote this almost 70
years ago but it applies to most of the current generation of Hindi film stars.
And many VJ’s and TV show hostesses speak Hindi with an accent that the even
the average Angrez baddie in a Hindi film would be ashamed to speak in.
Yet, a century ago, there were Indians with a different
vision of things. Tagore founded Shantiniketan, Rukmini Arundale Kalakshetra
and it is said that the great physicist,
S. N. Bose fought for the introduction of Bengali as the medium of instruction
and as Professor in Calcutta University in 1945, taught physics to the
postgraduate students in Bengali.
You see, it’s really
very simple. How can we have self-respect when we don’t know who we are?
How can we raise generations of proud, confident Indians if they don’t know who
they are, who cannot don’t read their own poetry and song, who haven’t been
touched by the magic of their mother’s tongue? Who know their Mahabharata and
Ramayana through assembly line serialization on television and English
translations, who never fallen in love
with Jayadeva’s Geet Govindam or Bhartrihari’s fabulous love poetry? Who have
never seen a Yakshagana performance? It is not enough to declare Tamil and
Kannada and Sanskrit as “classical” languages. They must roll off our tongues
as easily as our mother’s name. In other words, they must truly become our
mother tongues.
I end on a light-hearted note, but one that illustrates the
exquisite subtlety of our languages. One of my mother’s closest friends was a
Punjabi lady who was eager to make a good impression on her Kannadiga boss. So,
after much tutoring from my mother, she went off to work one morning armed with
a complete, freshly polished Kannada sentence. When her boss came in, she went
up to him and proudly declared, “Neenu beku.” Translation : I want you. All that the poor lady wanted to
ask for was water or ‘neeru” which slipped just by one syllable and became
“neenu” - you. My mother says that it took the boss a long while to recover….
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