Mohan-ji recently forwarded me this excellent article by Madhu Kishwar* titled, “Deprivations real language” .

Madhu-ji writes how amidst the furore over reservations and quotas, people are forgetting the fundamental issue regarding English – specifically English as a critical factor in professional and career advancement in the India of today.

I have experienced this first-hand and have strong views on this matter. In fact, one of the “dreams” I have is to have a piece of software that could translate this blog in Hindi and Indian regional languages so that more people can access it and read it. I could of course choose to blog in Hindi but there are numerous practical difficulties (keyboard layout/ my Hindi typing speed etc); a podcast may be a viable idea – but I have not tried it yet. Anyways, here are a few excerpts from the article (emphasis mine):

all the suggestions have one thing in common and they share this with the reservation policy itself: the flawed assumption that deprivation has only two facets in India – being born in a caste or tribe listed in government records as backward or depressed, and/or being born in a poor family. In reality, the single most influential factor that determines access to elite educational institutions, and hence to important avenues of economic and social advancement, is command over the English language. The advantage that English-based education provides often trumps the traditional divides of caste and class. However, despite the dominance of English in our education system for over a century, 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 1 per cent of our people use it as a first or second language.

The rest find all avenues of advancement firmly shut before them. A person who has failed to acquire this magical skill may be a first-rate scholar in Marathi, Hindi or Assamese but that will not make that person eligible for anything more than a peon’s job even within the linguistic boundaries of Maharashtra, UP or Assam states in which these languages are spoken by millions of people.

This is sad but appallingly true. As Madhu-ji points out:

Consider this: there are no medical or science and technology journals in any of the Indian languages, including those that are spoken by millions.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.

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. 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, and our problems and delineate even our aspirations through the eyes of outsiders.

No medical school conducts courses in any of the Indian languages even though India has one of the oldest and most sophisticated traditions of medical knowledge and expertise. 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. No business management school would condescend to teach in any Indian language even though the entrepreneurial genius of our traditional business communities is legendary. 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 Indian language. 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. Unfortunately our political leaders do not consider this new source of inequality and disempowerment worth any attention because attacking this source of deprivation would require serious thought and effort. There are no quick fixes here.”

This is beyond being merely tragic. For unconsciously, we are creating an underclass whose only handicap is that they have (or had) no access to English. It is a pity and a shame because millions of bright children and youth are being kept out of the workforce simply because they are unable to confidently or fluently converse in English or are unable to read an write beyond the most basic sentences.

What can be done? I think the solution needs to be attacked from two directions: one, make English teaching more affordable, more accessible and more widespread. Two, consciously create a sense of pride in our own languages, promote their literature, encourage translation of scientific and socio-economic research, academic journals, produce textbooks in these languages. This is not impossible.
Japan, with a language system that does not even have a phonetic base, has managed to do it and almost all European countries have an extensive amount of scientific, technical, literary and commercial body of work in their own languages. With political will, it can be done. The problem is, as Madhu-ji rightly says, “this would require serious thought and effort – and on that count alone, it is safe to assume that politicians would never attempt it.”

Harsh, but sadly, the truth.

Image courtesy: Madhu Kishwar’s Blog