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What language should children be taught in?
Aakar Patel
Most middle-class urban homes in India are likely to have grandparents who cannot speak English, parents who speak it reasonably and a young generation for whom it is their primary language. This transition, in one or two generations, out of their mother tongue and into English is unaccompanied by a proper education. This means the young cannot speak English correctly and few can write it without error or without recourse to stock phrases and cliche. English education also means that young Indians are removed from tradition, because tradition does not translate well. Their culture tugs at them strongly however, and so they revert to Hindi for entertainment through Bollywood.
Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915 with strong views on this subject. At a reception in Karachi in March 1916, he said of those educated in English that “there is no continuity between school and home in India.”
In June that year Gandhi wrote, in a letter to a correspondent, details of how to reintroduce modern education in Indian languages: “Arithmetic will certainly include oral sums and Indian accountancy.” He was 46 then and on most matters his ideas were fully formed. He was clear that education in India should be in the mother tongue.
Concluding a speech in English at Benaras Hindu University in February 1916, he said if he had to examine those whom he had just lectured, most would fail. “And why? Because they have not been touched.” To be touched, to truly understand, he believed, we need to be communicated to in our own language. There was also the problem of efficiency: “We never master the English language; with some exceptions it has not been possible for us to do so; we can never express ourselves as clearly as we can in our own mother tongue.”
Gandhi had no problem with English also being taught at school; but not as the medium for schooling: “We do want the English language, but we do not want to destroy our own language.”
India’s greatest literary figure was the Nobel Prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore, and his views were similar to Gandhi’s. Tagore felt that the setting up of English-language institutions in India was confused with making and staffing buildings. In February 1919, he said at a lecture: “The mischief is that as soon as the idea of a university enters our mind, the idea of a Cambridge University or Oxford University... rushes in at the same time and fills the whole space. We forget that the European universities are living organic parts of the life of Europe, where each found its natural birth.” This organic growth of centuries could not be reproduced by raising buildings.
Tagore wrote each culture had something unique to contribute to the world, and that India would contribute nothing if it educated its young in English, because what that language held within was European. In 1921 Tagore set up Viswa Bharati University at Santi Niketan (Abode of Peace) “to approach the west from the standpoint of such a unity of the life and thought of Asia.”
His university aims to be a “centre of culture where research into and study of the religion, literature, history, science and art of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Islamic, Sikh, Christian and other civilisations may be pursued along with the culture of the west, with that simplicity in externals which is necessary for true spiritual realisation, in amity, good fellowship and co-operation between the thinkers and scholars of both eastern and western countries.” The Nobel Prize-winning economist and former Master of Trinity College, Amartya Sen, who was named by Tagore, attended Viswa Bharati University.
C Rajagopalachari, who took over as governor-general from Mountbatten, was an intellectual of the highest calibre. He thought English caused damage at school: “The language becomes almost the main aim of all effort and the instruction in science and other subjects will suffer in efficiency.” His solution for keeping up with science was that its terminology could remain in European languages, without translating the terms.
M S Golwalkar, the second leader of the RSS and its most influential ideologue, said English should be sacrificed in schools and three languages ought to be taught: mother tongue, Hindi and Sanskrit. He acknowledged, however, that Sanskrit had died in India for a reason: that it was too complex to be a mass language. Asked if English wasn’t the language of international commerce and diplomacy, he said: “Not quite. English is the predominant language of only one power bloc. Why should every schoolboy — who will have nothing to do either with high finance or high diplomacy — learn it?”
In February 1964, he pointed out in an interview that English was the medium in all universities, but standards were yet poor. This remains true in 2009.
If there was this consensus against English, how was it able to prevail in India? Because of Nehru, who led the country for 17 years after independence. All the higher education institutions he built, and he has no peer in developing nations in this regard and few in Europe, assumed students who were grounded in English: the institutes of management, of technology, and of design. Having attended Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, Nehru benefited from a classical European education. His best biographer, Walter Crocker, wrote that he was fluent in Hindustani, of course, but if he had a third language, it was French.
All three of Nehru’s books, Autobiography, Glimpses of World History and Discovery of India, were written in English. Nehru told a meeting of the Sanskrit Commission in 1957: “If the medium of instruction was Sanskrit, or even if it was any other Indian language, nobody could make any progress in the technological and scientific field without having a good knowledge of some of the foreign languages.”
But he puzzled over the fact that his countrymen received an English education in India’s towns and cities but were not quite modern in their outlook.
He said at All India Radio’s literary forum the same year that despite India’s progress in science “strangely enough, the thinking of the people lags behind.” Science “has not changed the thinking of the common man. So there is a danger that while we grasp the ideas of modernity superficially, we do not imbibe them fully and we will fall between two stools.”
Nehru had support from Gujarati’s biggest literary figure, the Congressman and lawyer K M Munshi. As the English-or-Hindi controversy started after independence, Munshi said that English should be used for official and educational purposes till Hindi was “voluntarily accepted” by parents. Speaking in February 1953, he said English was “a world language with a width and range of comprehension which no Indian language has. So it is important for English to be taught to students at all levels.” In September 1967, he wrote about this again, in a Gujarati letter to his students, and pointed to the Nizam of Hyderabad’s “30-year failed attempt to impose Urdu on Osmania University.”
Strangely, among India’s better-off states, Munshi’s Gujarat lags in English though it has deep connections with America, Africa and Europe. This is because its centuries-old mercantile culture is mature and does not need English to express itself.
In urban India, the matter has been settled by economics and there is no longer debate over this. Urdu medium schools in Bombay are shutting down every month because there are no students, and the same holds for Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati schools in the city.
This is producing more people equipped to work in offices, but it will result in an intellectual and cultural desert. Indians who come out of English schools have poor understanding of their culture, and retain no touch with it save for rituals. Their understanding of Europe and its culture is close to zero because they have no knowledge of or contact with its classical roots.
However, they are still better off than the students who have been taught in their mother tongue. Those students are neither equipped to work in the modern office, nor have they special hold over culture. This is because the quality of education in regional languages is even worse than it is in English.
So the fears of both sides have come true. The debate was over the medium but ought to have been over quality. However it cannot be denied that it would have been easier, cheaper and better for India to produce quality education in its own languages than in English.
The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar@ hillroadmedia.com
The News: Sunday, July 12, 2009 |
