The Unedited Version
The ill-thought out introduction of English medium in primary schools would be a great blow to the already tottering Telugu language and culture sadly. A ‘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 ‘regressive’ 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. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, France, Russia, Germany, and Israel using exclusively their own languages strongly disprove a connection between English medium and economic prosperity.
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 manifest itself clearly in the attitudes of our intellectual elites, bureaucracy, academics, journalists, and authors writing in English. 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 and becomes a continuing colonial project.
Letter dated 5th August 2022
RANDOM MUSINGS 