English medium in primary schools would be introduced from the next academic year by the Telangana government taking cue from the neighbouring Andhra. Language in post-independent India took a peculiar form under a dominant Marxist-Communist ideology permeating our academic and political worlds. In a linear view of history, Indian past became ‘primitive’ and its future goal became the ‘golden’ West. Sanskrit and the local languages became redundant and the state policies went for an exclusive English based education, especially in institutes of higher learning whether law, medicine, engineering, humanities, social sciences, or management. It also became a requirement for Civil services. Over seven decades, an exclusive reliance on English- a deliberate state policy, has created a clear-cut social hierarchy placing a select few knowing English fluently above those who are not comfortable with English as a mode of expression. This unique policy has excluded a vast majority of the country from the talent pool to make useful contributions to the country.
This ‘colonial consciousness’ believes English as naturally superior to any vernacular language for higher education and economic prosperity too. Arguing for a vernacular language would be either regressiveness or a false sense of ‘nationalism’. Sankrant Sanu (The English Medium Myth) argues that an English language-based class separation hurts the people by privileging a foreign culture over the native culture; by disconnecting the general population from the intellectual and policy discourses where the thinking is in vernacular language but the expression has to be in the colonial language using a colonial worldview; and by creating a ceiling for progress in academia for those educated in the native languages. This becomes a severe axis of discrimination, says Sankrant.
The examples of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, France, Russia, Germany, and Israel using exclusively their own languages are enough to blow the myth of a connection between English medium and economic prosperity. The top 20 richest countries in the world do not use a language for higher education and official business different from the native language of the general population. Again, only 4 of the top 20 richest countries have an English-based system. On the other hand, Sankrant Sanu points out that 19 out of the 20 poorest countries were colonies of exploitation by European powers and today, more than half of these countries do not even recognize the common spoken language as an official language; the latter being generally a colonial language. Even the so-called English advantage to India’s software industry became questionable when Israel’s software exports, with a population less than Delhi, stood at 2.5 billion dollars as against total India’s exports of 6.5 billion dollars in 2001.
Language is important for communication and as a carrier of culture. About its role in facilitating communication, there is no problem. One can learn as many languages as possible. However, by making English compulsory in schools and colleges as a medium of instruction, there is a destruction of culture and a deracination of its citizens. This is all painfully evident in India which started, in fact, with the colonials. We cannot blame the colonials now. The colonials, by introducing English forcefully, created an elite having a distorted view of the Indian past; not only that, they destroyed a thriving indigenous Indian education system. Thiong’o, a Kenyan writer, calls English a “culture bomb” for other cultures which annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities, and ultimately in themselves. He can as well be speaking for India. Cultural denigration and destruction manifests itself clearly in the attitudes of our intellectual elites, bureaucracy, academics, journalists, and authors writing in English.
In a crucial Parliament debate, Sanskrit lost to English as a medium of instruction by only one deciding vote. A near perfect language carrying all our intellectual, academic, cultural and artistic heritage receded into the background; with newer Indological narratives, Sanskrit has even become ‘exploitative’, ‘patriarchal’, and ‘oppressive’. English learning became premium. The colonial violence simply continued, but in a different time-frame, by altering our intellectual frameworks. The maximum impact of this has been in the social sciences which simply rehashed old colonial theories without providing a better understanding of India causing immense damage to our social fabric. Also, the last political theory which came in India was Kautilya’s Arthashastra as we continue looking at the ill-fitting western ‘Parliamentary liberal democracy’ as the ideal solution for us. By trying to make English medium compulsory at primary level instead of allowing an Indian to reach the highest levels of arts and sciences in any vernacular language of comfort, our state policies are only hastening the demise of the great Indian culture, something which even our colonials could not do.
RANDOM MUSINGS 