As we celebrate another anniversary of our securing freedom from the English, the picketing and propaganda so effectively used by our freedom fighters is being remembered and reprised. No, not in the token acts on school campuses, but in our public spaces and mass media. Today's adversary is English.
Recently, purported civil service aspirants protested against the preliminary test that decides their eligibility. The Hindi hackles raised over the basic English familiarity desired of prospective civil servants, the Government of India excluded the English section of the test from being a factor in determining the merit of the examinees. The section comprised of eight or nine questions on English comprehension, testing language skills at the class 10 level. The protesters argued that it was a section biased against those who had not studied in English medium schools, even if they had sat through English classes and examinations.
Now, applicants for the civil service must have a graduate degree from a recognized university. Leaving aside graduates who have specialized in the languages, most Arts and Science graduates, you would think, would have predominantly sat through lectures, studied texts, given examinations, and authored dissertations and project reports in English. Knowledge may be language independent, but its expression and assimilation rely on the only means that minds have to exchange thoughts: words, written and spoken.
I concede that expressing yourself in English is a skill different from being able to make sense of patterns of words and what they convey as a whole. But the preliminary test was checking the comprehension of the aspirants, and it is difficult to imagine how anyone could have imbibed the ideas of higher education in an English vacuum. Most text books and teachers rely on metaphors to introduce complex concepts, metaphors that they overlay with details as they ease into the nuances. If you have an issue with understanding English, despite a college degree you earned by navigating through syllabi taught in English, your eligibility for the degree would be dubious, unless the examinations required you to merely reproduce consistently in your handwriting the memorized sequence of words in print.
Now, applicants for the civil service must have a graduate degree from a recognized university. Leaving aside graduates who have specialized in the languages, most Arts and Science graduates, you would think, would have predominantly sat through lectures, studied texts, given examinations, and authored dissertations and project reports in English. Knowledge may be language independent, but its expression and assimilation rely on the only means that minds have to exchange thoughts: words, written and spoken.
I concede that expressing yourself in English is a skill different from being able to make sense of patterns of words and what they convey as a whole. But the preliminary test was checking the comprehension of the aspirants, and it is difficult to imagine how anyone could have imbibed the ideas of higher education in an English vacuum. Most text books and teachers rely on metaphors to introduce complex concepts, metaphors that they overlay with details as they ease into the nuances. If you have an issue with understanding English, despite a college degree you earned by navigating through syllabi taught in English, your eligibility for the degree would be dubious, unless the examinations required you to merely reproduce consistently in your handwriting the memorized sequence of words in print.
This week, in a shrewd advertising campaign aimed at making the most of the patriotic capital that palpably pervades the public consciousness for a brief period around Independence Day, a mobile phone manufacturer has had musicians collaborate on the cover of a popular Bollywood song. The cover has lines from more than half a dozen Indian languages and the video depicts a letter from a vernacular alphabet supplanting an English character, suggesting freedom from English. To be sure, the manufacturer only wants to convey that their phones now have user interfaces in Indian languages. But as is the wont of advertisements to draw on dramatics, the message is articulated as an escape from the oppression of English - a language you are forced to learn much against your will.
A fundamental issue with pitting English against the Indian languages is that the former no longer remains an alien articulation aid. English has been adopted into the Indian fold, much like the many folks who chose to not flee India upon Partition and freedom from the colonizers. Consequently, English has soaked in the ways of the native, so much so that Indian English is a recognized variant of the language, like American and British English.
Also, for all the linguistic bravado, the rich trove of theories and ideas from around the world has hardly been translated into a regional language. The Russians, the French, the Germans, and the Chinese may not value English as much, but that is because they have access to the global knowledge base in their mother tongues. It would be an arduous and near impossible task to replicate this knowledge base in the many languages that thrive in India. Keeping an entire generation, at least, in the dark while this translation goes on would make the result of this war against English anything but a Pyrrhic victory.
Lastly, English has afforded Indians a freedom to relocate across the country without necessarily having to learn the local language. The software engineer who keeps switching jobs and, so, hopping from Thiruvananthapuram to Chennai to Bangalore to Hyderabad to Gurgaon can expend her energies on mastering the newest programming languages rather than picking up Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Hindi during her sojourns, because she can make do with English. Professionals from other fields, of course, have an even wider range of places to choose from!
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