Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, France, Russia, Germany, and Israel using exclusively their own languages blow the myth of a connection between English medium and economic prosperity. Apart from only 4 (who use English), 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. Regarding language for a medium of instruction, our successive governments at all levels since independence have shown a remarkable lack of clarity and vision adding only to a cultural destruction of the land.
Today, on the one hand, we have state governments trying to make English medium compulsory right from primary school; and on the other, we have now central governments trying to make Hindi as a medium of instruction in institutes of higher learning. It is sad that seventy-five years after independence were not enough to apply a good language policy in our diverse country. The ideal would have been to make Sanskrit at the time of independence as a national language. We lost that opportunity and today India stays greatly damaged due to the colonial mindset deeply permeating our intellectuals thanks to the English language.
A far thinking policy would be such that it allows any citizen of India to reach the highest levels of education (technical and non-technical) in the vernacular of choice. An entire system has to be in place which addresses the many issues of translations right from the earliest stage of education especially in the technical subjects. Without such systems in place, making Hindi (or any other language) as a language in higher institutes with urgent translation of the graduate level books is clearly a short-sighted policy and is bound to backfire. Addressing Hindi first is also hegemonic and is a gross injustice to the other equally important languages of the country.
Professor Bhikhu Parekh, in a thoughtful essay (The Poverty of Indian Political Theory) says that surprisingly, post-independent India failed to define traditional ideas on subjects like social justice, the specificity of the Indian state, secularism, legitimacy, political obligation, citizenship in a multi-cultural state, the nature of the law, the ideal polity, and the best way to theorize the Indian political reality. Communist Party theoreticians never offered an original interpretation of Marx in the light of Indian history and experiences.
Barring continuing work on Kautilya’s Arthashastra, there are no major reconstructions of ancient or medieval Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist texts on politics and discuss how Indian thought differs. Most Indian political theorists broadly engage in two categories: the bulk repetitive work on the structure of nationalist thought; and derivative work on contemporary Western writers or movements (positivism, behaviourism, and so on). Contemporary political theorists have taken little interest to produce creative theories for many reasons.
The most important is the way Indian universities teach political theory. Apart from the fact that the best students stay away from social sciences, a poor English command makes creative thinking in a non-vernacular language difficult. The best thoughts in a vernacular when attempted to be expressed in a non-vernacular can lead to stifling of many thoughts as might have surely happened in India. Colonial rupture in Indian thought; the cognitive alienation of intellectuals from their society; the difficulty of theorizing in English a reality constituted in vernaculars; and practically oriented Indian traditions have been other factors have been responsible for poor political theorizing too. Thus, extreme importance to English in humanities too has been disadvantageous to indigenous understanding of India. Every aspect of socio-cultural- politico-legal life in India stays distorted in its understandings due to the superimpositions of western ideas and this mainly because of a liberal acceptance of English language.
RANDOM MUSINGS 