94. LANGUAGE: CONFLICTS AND CONTROVERSIES

LITERATURE-LIGHT AND DELIGHT

94. LANGUAGE : CONFLICTS AND CONTROVERSIES

So, our native litterateurs are at it again: condemning English and pleading for the native tongues in education.

This time, Bhalchandra Nemade, the Marathi writer who won the 2014 Jnanpith Award said recently that English should be eliminated from our educational system. It is killing the other languages. 'What is so great about it?' he asked, and said 'it did not even have an epic'. He could have stopped there, but didn't: he went on to say that Mahabharata alone had ten epics in it. He could have stopped at least there, but didn't. He questioned the literary merits and style of Salman Rushdie and V.S.Naipaul, accusing them of pandering to the West.. And Rushdie gave him back.

The surprising thing is that Nemade has studied  and taught English and comparative language! In expressing such hatred for an international language, he is acting like a typical local politician, and not like a man of letters. 

Gandhiji started the trend of attacking  learning through English medium, and excessive time spent on learning it and its literature for which he had no use; but he did not belittle the language.He referred to his own experience and said that "English medium created an impassable barrier " between him and members of his family who did not know English. He said in the 'Harijan' on 9 July 1938:

We had to learn several books of English prose and English poetry. No doubt all this was nice....I am unable to say that if I had not learnt  what I did of English prose and poetry, I should have missed a rare treasure. If I had, instead, passed those precious seven years in mastering Gujarati and had learnt Mathematics,Sciences, and Sanskrit and other subjects through Gujarati, I could so easily have shared the knowledge so gained with my neighbours.

I must not be understood to decry English or its noble literature.....But the nobility of its literature cannot avail the Indian nation any more than the temperate climate or scenery of England can avail her. ....Why need I learn English to get at the best of what Shakespeare and Milton thought and wrote?

Gandhiji said that Gujarati boys and girls could have learnt Tagore's "matchless productions" or the short stories of Tolstoy , without knowing  Bengali or Russian, through Gujarati translations! He said that higher education through the medium of a foreign language has "caused incalculable intellectual and moral injury to the nation."

There are some basic confusions here. The damage was caused not by the English medium as such but through what was taught through that medium. Macaulay's scheme eliminated Indian thought and and science, and allowed Indian literature to a limited extent . 


 Vivekananda, Tagore, Sri Aurobindo , Jagadish Chandra Bose,Ramanujam, Dr.Radhakrishnan, R.K. Narayan etc could make the world understand India and her greatness only through English! They mastered English to advance India and Indian subjects, and promote Indian interests. It is not the fault of the medium that we faltered; the fault is with us- our colonial status before Independece, and colonial mind-set since then.

Jagadish Chandra Bose Lecturing at the Sorbonne,Paris
1926, on the nervous system of plants.

Srinivasa Ramanujam

It is not easy to translate great literature even from one Indian language to another. And today, it is absolutely impossible to teach Mathematics, Sciences and other subjects through translations into Indian languages.

Gandhiji talked of our " false, de-Indianizing education". This has more to do with the content of that education, not the medium,necessarily. After all, has not the govt of "free" India continued with the same arrangements?

Disappearing languages- global trend.

Languages have been disappearing throughout history. Within each language group, many dialects have become extinct. The rise of imperialism and spread of colonialism led to the dominance of European languages. This was also the period of the rise of modern science. Economic strength and commercial interests were mainly responsible for the spread of English. Now it has become truly international. 

Dorothy Pentreath, last native speaker of the Cornish language.
1781 engraving.

Last three speakers of Magati Ke, one of the six dialects of an aboriginal language in Australia, whose total population was 100 in 2001.

It is estimated that there are between 6000 to 7000 languages in the world. Experts consider that 50 to 90% of these languages will disappear by 2050.

The problem faced by local or regional languages vis a vis English has to be understood in the right historical context. With the rise of globalisation a new type of  international commercial colonialism is ruling the world. The UN, World Bank, IMF and WTO are its executive arms and agents. No country is really or totally independent today, even in internal matters. Economy of no country can function alone. Even the seeds used by farmers are genetically modified, controlled and purveyed by multinational giants, thus restricting their natural variety and proliferation, against which govts are powerless. 

The world is losing bio-diversity; animal and plant species are disappearing. Local communities are losing their autonomy and identity. Smaller cultures with different styles of life are vanishing. With large scale migration to the cities and towns, countryside is getting deserted. Problems faced by languages are to be seen in this context. It is another form of monoculture.

With such migration comes the loss of not just economic independence, but  loss of  cultural independence too,and the gradual loss of dialects and variations; the richness of languages is arrested by the standardisation of language use under state-sponsored education.

Colonialism spread the European world view and the European ideas  and approach to everything. People were taught and indirectly forced to look at themselves and their systems through European eyes. Today, the world economic order is accomplishing this silently, but with greater force.

 In his 1909 book "Hind Swaraj"Mahatma Gandhi identified the problem as the rise of "modern civilisation" and not just "western" civilisation. He thus correctly understood the core issue- it was a 'clash of civilisations', in the words of a modern scholar- Samuel Huntington.Gandhiji said his Swaraj was  "to keep in tact the genius of our civilization". But later on, he took on too many issues and lost focus.

If we take all factors together dispassionately, we will understand we are up against "COSMIC" forces, and the dominance of English language is just a symptom.

All Indian languages, including Hindi, face the same problem: they may have rich literature, but they are just that: literary languages,in none of which any modern subject can be taught- not only the hard sciences, even the humanities and every variety of technical subjects. In the last thousand years, our languages have not grown at all, to be able to handle modern developments in the sciences.. For two hundred years, our youngsters have been brought up without much touch with our own classic literature and its traditions. This trend was only reinforced under leftist and 'progressive' forces. We have followed every Western trend even in literature. Those who study through the medium of their mother tongue will be totally cut off from the world of advanced  thought, be intellectually stunted, and face a dead end. 

Add to this the tremendous strides made in the area of Information Technology for which none of the Indian languages is fit or adequate.

There is just no solution to this problem. Reality has to be faced.  The best we may hope to do is to use English to promote our interests, not  drop its use.. Mahatma Gandhi missed this simple truth. What can we expect from lesser mortals?

The footwear may be from Japan, the pant may be from England, our breakfast cereal may be from the US, but what prevents us from being Indian in heart and mind? It is the content of the education we have received . Blame the men who kept it so even after Independence, and not the medium of the language.

India is the second largest English-speaking country in the world. This position can surely be used for our advantage. Let Indians first learn to treat other Indian languages with respect, and not discriminate against linguistic minorities.




Note:
Some quick number-munching about Indian languages:

1.George Grierson, Irish linguist and Indian civil servant counted about 364 languages between 1894 and 1928.
2. Govt. has not conducted a comprehensive language survey.Its official estimate for the total number of languages was 1652 in the 1961 census but was mysteriously reduced to  182  in the 1971 census.. It does not count a language spoken by less than 10,000 people. Govt. of India is deliberately suppressing linguistic data, and arbitrarily reducing the number of languages. 
3.In its survey directed by Ganesh Devy, the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre (first report issued in 2013) found that:

• India had 780 languages
• Another 100 may be existing

4. About 220 languages have disappeared in the last 50 years; another 150 could vanish in the next 50 years.

6. Though we have linguistic states formed around one language, no less than 10 languages are spoken in each state. Over 200 languages are spoken in the Delhi region.

7. Many largely-spoken languages like Bhojpuri, Kutchi, Tulu, Konkani, Coorgi (Kodava) etc have no state of their own!

8. Hindi is growing fast, edging out other local languages. Awadhi, the language of Ram Charit Manas is spoken by 45 million people,across many states, but it is taken as part or dialect of Hindi, and it has no state of its own! ( There are more than 50 countries in the world with a population of 10 to 50 million!)