Author: Madhu Purnima Kishwar
Publication: Manushi
Date: May-June 2006
Introduction: English Education Defines the
New Brahmins and the New Dalits of India
The current simplistic debate over reservations
as a key remedy for inequality, injustice and backwardness has been reduced
to a single point - should educational reservations be caste-based or include
economic criteria as well? The underlying mistaken assumption behind both
these alternatives is 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 the process we are ignoring a vital aspect
of deprivation and denial of opportunity that has come to acquire crucial
significance in modem India. Today, in our society, the single most influential
factor that determines access to elite educational institutions, and hence
to important avenues of economic and social advancement, is the ability to
use the English language with ease and facility. This is the magic wand that
opens many doors that can lead to inclusion in the social and economic elite.
By operating the modern economy in India only
through the English language, the ruling elites that emerged during the British
rule have ensured their own perpetuation and continuing dominance over the
rest of society. They have also ensured that most Indians are unable to attain
a high level of proficiency in English, as a result of which people fluent
in the language are in perpetual short supply. A person who has acquired even
reasonable proficiency in English will enjoy a major advantage while competing
for jobs while those few who have a good command over the English language
behave and get treated like an imperial race. They have any number of highly
paid jobs both in the public and private sectors to pick and choose from,
no matter what their other abilities, class or caste background. The rest,
who lack this skill, are made to feel worthless and therefore lose self-confidence.
However, someone who has failed to acquire
this magical skill can qualify neither for entrance to any institution for
higher learning nor for any decent white-collar job. He or she may be a first-rate
scholar in Marathi, Hindi or Assamese but that will not make the person eligible
for anything more than a peons' job even within the linguistic boundaries
of Maharashtra, UP or Assam - states in which these languages are spoken by
millions of people.
He/she may have great expertise in botany,
the since of healing Indian architecture or astronomy. But that will not qualify
her/him to any of the institutions of higher learning for these subjects.
A Passport to Privilege
Why is it that this routine and pervasive aspect of discrimination and elitism
has ceased to bother us, while caste and class have long dominated the discourse
of those who claim to oppose sources of privilege? Despite the widespread
prevalence of caste-based deprivation, it is easy to cite any number of examples
of persons from SC, ST and OBC backgrounds who have come to acquire high status
jobs in both the government as well as the private sector. But it would be
impossible for any of us to name people who have succeeded in getting admission
into an IIT or any other elite medical, engineering or management institute,
or cite instances of someone securing a high status job in the modern sector
of our economy - public or private - without having acquired a certain level
of competence in English.
If you want to qualify for medical school,
you have to know English even if you want to practice in rural or small town
India, where very few of your patients are likely to speak in English. If
you want to train to be an architect in India you have to know English, even
to apply to a school of architecture' People who do not know English are treated
as a lower species, unfit for any place in a modem society or economy.
A Vicious Divide
The English-speaking pan-Indian elite is entrenched in the higher echelons
of bureaucracy, politics, the armed forces, corporate business and diverse
professions -medicine, engineering, architecture, law and so on. Consequently,
this tiny elite dominates the terms of intellectual discourse on most issues,
be it social legislation, defence policy, farm policy, educational, legal
or electoral reforms. They act as though that they alone have a national perspective
on vital issues of national importance and the regional language elites represent
narrow sectarian and divisive tendencies. They present English as the language
of modernity and those rooted in indigenous languages are projected as being
leftovers of a pre-modern, traditionalist, anti-progress, even obscurantist
worldview. For all their nationalist pretensions, they insist on using a colonial
language for their project of modernising India and project themselves as
saviours of national unity and national culture as well as repositories of
intellectual merit and progress. The only role they assign to the masses is
to uncritically accept their version of progress and modernisation, which
includes a good deal of denigration of their own cultural heritage.
Since the domination of the English-educated
elite depends on preserving a centralised state structure, movements for political
decentralisation have often been presented as threats to national unity. However,
since this elite lacks social and cultural roots in Indian society, and their
lifestyle and aspirations are all directed towards the Western world, they
lack the vision and the competence to govern a society as diverse and complex
as ours. That is why the laws they enact, including those for the ostensible
benefit of the people, are observed only in their violation; the system of
governance they preside over is marked by corruption, incompetence and tyranny;
the law and order machinery they preside over has become increasingly lawless.
Because their social reform discourse is couched in an alien language and
uses an alien framework, the social reform measures they propose usually create
a backlash or at best remain on paper.
The New Brahmins
By retaining English as the medium of elite education, as a requirement in
the professions and in government offices, even after India was formally freed
from colonial rule, we have ensured that the schism that was deliberately
created by our colonial rulers between the English-educated elite and the
rest of the society has grown even further and acquired deadly dimensions
that are destroying the minds, souls and self-respect of the majority of our
people. The edge that English-based education provides often trumps the traditional
divides of caste and class.
Traditional Brahmins used Sanskrit mainly
as a language of higher intellectual pursuits, for chanting mantras to gods
and goddesses and performing certain types of religious rituals. The new Brahmins
speak in English even when talking to their dogs or their little infants.
They insist that their children learn their nursery rhymes in English. They
use local languages only when ordering menials who service their needs. The
power of the old Brahaminical elite was effectively challenged by various
- Bhakti movements with women and people from castes supposedly lower down
the hierarchy defying the dominance of the Sanskritised elite by asserting
their right to talk to their chosen gods in the mother tongue. Today the descendants
of those very castes are in such awe of the English language that they too
have leamt to prostrate before its soul-destroying hegemony.
They do so because they see that you gain
instant entry into the charmed circle of the social and cultural elite if
you can speak English in a manner and accent deemed appropriate within the
national elite, even if you do not come from the high castes, while the doors
are as good as shut for those who can't, even if they were born into the highest
among twice born castes. They are assumed to be from a lower species.
People rarely ask me what caste I belong to.
They simply assume I am from one of the twice born castes because I speak
English with a noticeable public school accent. It is ironical that in order
to draw attention to the damage being done by the unhealthy dominance of English,
I have to write in English. If I wrote the same thing in a regional language
and did not have a certain level of competence in English, my critique would
be dismissed as an expression of envy of the incompetent.
No matter how high your caste, no matter how
much land your family owns, if there is no good English-medium school within
easy reach of your village, your children will end up at the bottom end of
the job market. That is how the sons of Jats of Haryana, Punjab and UP, who
constitute the landowning and political elites in these two states, end up
as bus conductors and drivers if their families reside in villages that do
not have good English-medium schools close at hand. That is how so many Brahmins
end up as street vendors, selling paan bidi, vegetables or other tidbits when
they migrate from poverty-ridden villages, which do not have reasonable quality
English-medium schools within easy reach.
Conversely, Christian boys or girls living
in certain districts such as Ranchi, where missionaries run far better schools
than those run by the government in villages and towns of India, stand a far
better chance of getting good education and good jobs than upper caste young
men and women from backward villages without such schools. A person who has
studied in Modern School or St Stephen's College, no matter what his caste
by birth, is easily accepted as a member of an all India Super Caste and thereby
has far more opportunities than anyone can get by relying on his or her caste
by birth as his main qualification.
Most educated people have come to consider
this state of affairs as so 'normal' that this is not even seen as a matter
of note, concern or alarm. However, the absurdity and injustice of this situation
becomes obvious if we look around and observe the fact that there are not
many other countries in the world where people suffer such severe deprivation
and disability within their own motherland for having failed to acquire education
in a foreign language.
Demands of Globalisation
It is true that, in a fast globalising economy, English language skills are
somewhat at a premium in every country. However, in most of these countries,
English is used for communicating with the outside world, for international
transactions or exchanges. It is extremely rare for a country to adopt English
as the language of internal governance, education (including technical education)
or internal business dealings. A person in China, Korea, Thailand, Japan,
France, Turkey, Iran, Chile or Germany can become a lawyer, doctor, architect
or engineer without knowing any or much English. In India such a person will
not be able to get anything above a menial, blue-collar job. A person who
does not know the local language would not even be considered for any worthwhile
job in most countries of the world and would be considered a weird aberration.
India is perhaps the only country in the world where highly educated people
who have been raised and educated within their country consider it a mark
of status to declare that they are illiterate in their mother tongue and cannot
speak ten sentences in either their mother tongue or in Hindi, which is officially
the national language of India, without mixing in a good number of words and
phrases in English.
Many will counter this by saying:
1) It is not English language skills that are the key to success, but rather
that the English-speaking elite just happens to be overwhelmingly from the
upper castes. Their real dominance comes from their caste and class position.
2) English language skills can be picked up easily since there is no caste
bar to learning them.
This is as naive as saying that anyone can
qualify for an IIT-type entrance exam merely because the test is open to all
those who qualify on merit irrespective of caste or class background.
Despite the dominance of English in our education
system for over a century, only a minuscule minority, even among the educated
upper caste sections of our society, is able to use the language with any
clarity and effectiveness. Most of our MAs and PhDs cannot write three correct
sentences in English even though all their exams were given in English.
However, they get away with it because even
the pretense of knowing English, no matter how poor the person's actual language
skills and knowledge, works better than being genuinely proficient in any
of the Indian languages, if you are not simultaneously competent in English.
That is why upwardly mobile segments of the middle and even lower middle classes
are ready to sacrifice an incredible proportion of their social and financial
resources in bribes and other forms of influence in order to get their children
admitted to a school or college that provides quality English-based education,
beginning with the crucial admission into one of the highly regarded Englishmedium
nursery schools.
Denied Access to Knowledge
The growing preference for English-medium schools is primarily due to the
poor quality of education imparted in non-English-medium schools and the low
status value ascribed to learning in regional languages. If you are going
to be treated as an illiterate for not being fluent in English, you have no
choice but to prioritise learning it, even at the cost of other necessary
skills. Given the lower standards that prevail in non-English-medium schools,
it is assumed that those who have studied in English are better educated and
hence make better teachers. This despite the fact that teaching quality is
so poor in most of our Englishmedium schools, barring a few exceptional institutions,
that most of our students are ill-equipped to make sense of even newspaper
reports, leave alone read serious books in English. Yet, they spend just about
all their energy trying to grapple with English and willfully neglect learning
their mother tongue, Hindi or any of the Indian languages, which they could
master with great ease.
In the process, they end up with nothing more
than a pidgin language - a confused mixture of poor English and their mother
tongue - that damages their over-all linguistic abilities for life. This also
seriously impairs their thinking capacities because language is the primary
tool for understanding the world, for grasping ideas and using concepts for
effective communication. A person's thinking is seriously impaired if they
are not well rooted in at least one language. Linguistic cripples grow up
to be intellectual cripples.
This is also one of the major reasons why
there is huge deficit of good school and college teachers in India. Those
who know good English ordinarily move on to higher status and better paying
jobs. The few who choose teaching gravitate towards elite schools and universities,
while those who have studied in Hindi-medium schools, or in schools using
any of the regional languages, by and large end up being intellectually stunted
because they have far less access to sources of knowledge and learning without
good knowledge of English.
The dominance of English has consequences
far beyond what most of us dare acknowledge. Those who study in various regional
Indian languages, and know only a smattering of English, do not have access
to all the knowledge and information being produced in various disciplines,
including the politics, history, geography and sociology of India. Consider
the absurdity and injustice evidenced in the following examples of the arrogance
and callousness of our English-educated elite:
* There are no medical or science, technology
or social science journals in any of the Indian languages, including those
that are spoken by millions. All scientists publish their findings in English.
All technology institutions teach in English as if English is the natural
language of science and technology. This is not the case in Thailand, Korea,
China and Japan, not to speak of Germany or France.
* 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.
* It would be difficult, if not impossible,
to find training manuals for plumbers, electricians or masons in Hindi, Marathi
or Tamil. As a result, people who take to these occupations end up acquiring
half-baked knowledge as apprentices on the job by observing the work of others,
or by word of mouth. The children of our impoverished farmers and artisans
learn what they can by simply following traditional ways or picking up new
skills by observing others. There is hardly any educational material available
to them in their own languages for upgrading their skills.
* 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 local language. Almost all the allopathic medicines
produced in India are labelled in English; the accompanying literature about
directions for use, side-effects and precautions are provided only in English.
Today, even the fashionable among Ayurvedic companies label their medicines
in English. Most doctors, including those who work in government offices and
service low-income groups, write their prescriptions in English. Given that
only a tiny percent among the educated sections can make sense of things written
in English, imagine what it means for those who are barely literate to decipher
their prescriptions and understand the nature of treatment and medication
prescribed to them.
* 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, legal judgments
are delivered in English, the laws and precedents on which those judgments
are based are leftovers of British law and are written in English. Thus most
people who approach the courts for justice cannot comprehend a word of what
their lawyers write or say on their behalf, or make sense of the verdicts
passed in their favour or against them, except through the agency of their
lawyers. The sense of helplessness and crippling dependence this creates is
a major reason for corruption and unaccountability, and for the exploitation
of the poor by our legal system.
* 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. There are no serious books or journals available
to them in the subjects they study or teach. A large proportion of them have
never read anything other than cheap student guidebooks, many of which are
in rum written by poorly educated people. Consequently, most of our MAs and
PhDs, especially those from small town universities, are so poorly educated
that they cannot write five correct sentences in the language in which they
have to submit their thesis. 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 where few even among the
senior faculty are likely to be fluent in English.
One of the reasons why Indians have so deeply
internalised the disdainful view of their colonial masters about indigenous
Indian society is that very few among the educated elite are able to read
or make sense of Indian language sources of Indian history and society. Consequently,
we depend on the accounts written by colonial administrators, foreign missionaries
and sundry foreign travellers to get a sense of our past. 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, our problems
and delineate even our aspirations through the eyes of outsiders.
We celebrate those who are celebrated by the
West. We ignore those who are disapproved of or looked down upon the West.
Today, if you ask anyone among the English-educated elite to name three good
current Indian literary authors, they are likely to name the likes of Vikram
Seth, Shashi Tharoor or Amitav Ghosh. Very few will name OV Vijayan, who is
one of the best writers in Malayalam, or Vtjay Tendulkar, who wrote some of
the finest plays in Marathi. Why? Because these writers wrote for fellow Indians
in Indian languages and won Indian literary awards, not a British or American
award. They have given us profound new insights into our society and made
significant literary innovations both in form and content. But we do not consider
these authors as important as authors who have won a Booker Prize. Can we
think of an important Chinese, Japanese, German or French writer who has never
written in the language of his/her own people? Writers elsewhere get international
recognition after they have been read and admired at home. In India, we are
intellectually browbeaten into admiring those who are smart enough to achieve
recognition in the West.
Those who think English is the language of
opportunity would do well to remember that while it opens doors for a select
few and provides them the wherewithal to be internationally competitive, it
shuts all doors on those who are denied the opportunity to get a good education
in English. We are so obsessed with and enamoured by our ability to be able
to communicate and work with people in New York, London, Toronto, Sydney that
we don't seem bothered by the fact that English acts as a barrier in communicating
with hundreds of millions of people living in our own country and is making
them feel like third class citizens.
English can never serve as a vehicle for mass
education in India. 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 one percent of our people use it as
a first or second language. For the majority, even of educated Indians, English
remains at best a third language. Nearly 45 percent people live in states
where Hindi is the official language while a significant percentage of people
even in states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Kashmir, Assam, Punjab, Bengal,
Andhra, Orissa have a working knowledge of Hindi. And yet, the English-educated
elite gets outraged at the idea of Hindustani replacing English as a link
language.
The Politics of Language
Regional languages have become the vehicle of mass literacy as well as a medium
for the assertion of new regional cultures emerging through the process of
subsuming many of the folk languages and dialects and nonofficial languages
in various states. For example, Hindi as the official language of UP has marginalised
Bhojpuri, Awadhi and the many other dialects of Uttar Pradesh and in the process
homogenised the culture of the state, though at the cost of the latter. However,
it is impossible for non-official languages to gain respectability if the
official regional languages get treated with disdain.
Though these languages are downgraded socially
and economically, they are the vehicles of political discourse in states.
It is no coincidence that today, there is only one Chief Minister of a state
in all of India - namely Navin Pattnaik of Orissa - who is not comfortable
in speaking in the language of his State. He too could not have won an election
but for the tremendous goodwill built by his father Biju Pattnaik, who was
well rooted in Oriyan culture. Sonia and Rahul Gandhi have both had to learn
Hindi with sustained effort, after they developed political aspirations, whereas
for the first 30 years of her life in India, Sonia Gandhi did not bother to
learn Hindi nor taught her children to learn it seriously.
The political power of regional languages
and regional elite is evident from the fact that a person who is not deeply
entrenched in the language and culture of his/her constituency is not likely
to win an election, no matter how high his/her other qualifications. This
is an indirect indication of the language policy that people actually endorse
when they have the power through their votes. However, the judiciary, bureaucracy
and elite professions are dominated by people who cannot write five sentences
in the regional language, all because people have no power to influence the
language preference of the elite in those areas, as they do in politics through
their votes.
However, this has also meant that our politics has come to be dominated by
people who have failed to acquire good quality education. Consequently, most
of our elected representatives are ill equipped to handle the job they are
meant for, namely, legislation. Therefore, bureaucrats and hired legal professionals
end up conceptualising and drafting most of our laws, rather than people who
get elected to legislatures. Thus the decline in the performance and standards
of our political institutions is a direct consequence of the dual language
policy we have adopted, which leads to poor quality education for the general
mass of people in India.
To be continued.