Hindi Medium, the latest Irrfan Khan-starrer that released yesterday, hits a collective nerve when the film’s hapless hero declares, “I’m Hindi, but my wife is English”, in a hilarious trailer that shows the reel couple trying all manner of tricks to get their child admitted to an English-medium school. Khan is desi, his wife, in his own words, is ‘hi-fi’, and they believe that an English-medium school alone can secure their daughter’s well-being. “Sarkaari school me jaayegi, toh iski ruh kaanp jaayegi. Fit nahi ho paayegi society mein, lonely aur depressed ho jaayegi... Iss desh me angrezi zabaan nahi hai, class hai (If she studies in a government school, it will freeze her soul. She cannot fit into society, and will turn lonely and depressed. In this country, English is not just a language, it is a class symbol),” the mother channels her anxiety onto her oblivious child in one scene.
India’s preoccupation with its former coloniser’s language has been conflicted historically. English is too deeply embedded in the nation’s DNA to be thrown out in favour of a homegrown language. It is one of the official languages along with Hindi. In fact, India is the second largest English-speaking country, although it ranks poorly in terms of proficiency. And as the language opens doors at the highest levels, English speakers are often looked at with suspicion, jealousy and even hatred by the rest.
In Vishal Bharadwaj’s Omkara, based on Othello, the Shakespearean tragedy underpinned by class differences seems equally tailor-made for an Indian landscape. Othello’s insecurities as an outstanding commander who belongs to the socially disadvantaged community of Moors, mirrors those of Omi Shukla as the newly-wed bahubali, a gang leader working for a local politician in the Hindi-speaking heartland of Uttar Pradesh. At the beginning of Othello, Desdemona elopes from her father’s house, as does Dolly Mishra, Omkara’s love, who runs away from a forced wedding. This is where the similarity ends.
Desdemona is a high-standing Venetian while Othello is on the fringes, a mere Moor. Omkara is a half-caste and Dolly, on the other hand, is upper-caste. There are no racial differences cleaving them apart, and yet, Omkara feels he isn’t handsome, educated or good enough for Dolly, and that she must be mad to want to marry him. He is jealous of Kesu, his subordinate and a former classmate of Dolly. He resents the fact that Kesu is Dolly’s ally in his house, and that he somehow understands her world better than he himself could ever hope to. Kesu is, after all, better-looking and flaunts an English education. Omkara’s jealousy is further stoked when Kesu teaches Dolly a love song in English, much like Iago in Othello teaches Desdemona the Willow Song. When Dolly sings for Omkara, he indulges her with a smile, but burns up inside. Dolly, blind to the privilege her education has afforded her, is only innocently seeking to please.
Every language opens up a new world, and Omkara sees Dolly and Kesu’s knowledge of English as an entry to a world of privilege, something that the less-fortunate, such as him, could never be a part of. Language ultimately drives them apart.
Anglophile as laughing stock
In recent times, the writer-politician Shashi Tharoor has unwittingly proved to be the nation’s Desdemona. Reacting to a Republic TV report that hinted at his complicity in the murder of his wife Sunanda Pushkar, Tharoor tweeted: “Exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies being broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist”. Social media erupted in mirth at Tharoor’s choice of highfalutin language. Farrago became a viral search term, even as the nation laughed off its limited vocabulary and took digs at the politician. “Flowery language” (referring to the needless use of multi-syllable words) is a curiously Indian problem, beginning in schools, which are divided on where they stand as far as its use is concerned.
Spoken widely across the world, the English language nevertheless hasn’t managed to disassociate itself from the country of its origin, and to profess a love for this language is to profess to be an Anglophile, a crime in the eyes of a nationalist. Speaking and writing in English can be seen as bowing to cultural imperialism, a continued servitude to the Empire.
However, it isn’t just moral indignation that drives comments such as “Angrez chale gaye, inhe chhod gaye” (The British have left, but they’ve left you in their stead) in a reference to those who are seen as harbouring a colonial hangover. It’s a joke, but it’s also a grand accusation. We’re all Omi Shuklas, incapable of looking beyond colour, race and class as identity markers, smarting with a collective hatred about our own perceived deficiencies, looking for signs in our fellow citizens that make them out to be less than patriotic, with a preference for White sovereignty and the Western non-Oriental world by association.
Language can be a mobiliser, but a language barrier in the case of English is also a marker of class differences, the line between the privileged and the marginalised, whether individuals or entire communities.
Discrimination on the basis of language predates the arrival of the British in India. Sanskrit was the tool of oppression in several States, a brahminical code not taught to the masses. Ambedkar had to study the language far away in Germany, for no Sanskrit teacher would teach him in Maharashtra. When English-medium schools were established, the bahujan (dalits) were kept away from these educational institutions meant for upper-class elites. Only 17 per cent of the population studies in English-medium schools, according to a Human Resource Development Ministry reply in 2016. Interestingly, the northeastern States and Jammu and Kashmir have the highest number of English-medium schools, a policy decision that is left to the State government.
Come home to Hindi
Any conflict is great material for a story. Our films have naturally obsessed about this language divide, the class barrier that crops up inside the home, when the personal becomes political. Chetan Bhagat’s hugely popular novel Half Girlfriend is yet another tragic story about a rich brat from Bihar who manages to get into the elite St Stephen’s college in Delhi through a sports quota. His poor English is offset by his excellent basketball skills. He finds a city girl he loves at first sight, but cannot get her to agree to be anything more than his ‘half-girlfriend’, or acknowledge their relationship in public, because she is ashamed of his lack of proficiency in English. (Spoiler alert) The hero exacts his revenge against his seemingly duplicitous girlfriend, yet pines for her till he gets her back years later, and doesn’t settle till they come back to his roots in rural Bihar, to run a local school.
The trope of the arrogant Indian-born English ‘memsahib’, and her subsequent ‘taming’ is very common to regional films. Even Karan Johar’s NRI audience demands that Poo acquiesce and accept that she’s “Hindi” too like the larger family in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. In Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Rani Mukerji’s US-born character has to sing Om Jai Jagadish Hare to avoid being bullied in an Indian college.
Typically, the Indian heroine who has squeezed her way to liberation by adopting the West’s ideals and language is eventually ‘put in her place’, but there are also films that have turned this cinematic conflict on its head. In Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Devdas, or Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire (The Home and the World), or Devi, adapted as cinema by Satyajit Ray, the women are often ‘educated’ by their knowledgeable husbands in worldly affairs, politics and sociology, but also English.
At that point of time, an English education was radical, and you had to be careful, or society could blame a dead husband on it. Binodini, the feisty heroine of Chokher Bali is a clear example of the power society vests in an English education, and how such an education can prove to be a double-edged sword for women. It is hinted at several points in the movie, by the women around her, that Binodini’s licentious ways were a result of her foreign education, and misfortune had befallen her because of it.
Perhaps English Vinglish, a film by Gauri Shinde that has Sridevi playing housewife Shashi, has the best portrayal of the power a language can wield. An English lesson in an idyllic US classroom, transforms Shashi, who then finds the confidence to stand up to the constant bullying by her husband and children, who find her homeliness ‘not good enough’. Even in this, it is language that is the true saviour.