The gardeners on campus, mostly from the neighbouring villages supplementing their farm income, graciously greet me with a ‘ Gudu maarning, saar ’ as I walk by. I don’t believe their English language skills go far beyond their greeting, so it won’t be a common language of communication for us.

So I suspect their use of English is their perception of a cultural etiquette; they see me as belonging to a class (Educated? Professional? In authority?) that requires to be addressed in English.

That is unfortunate. We are near Jagdishpur village in Sonepat, Haryana. I reflected on this as I read in the newspapers the spat that arose after a couple of leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Messrs Rajnath Singh and Mohan Bhagwat, made remarks about the use of English in our society.

The response in the English press was swift and vicious, opinion mixed with reporting. The nameless correspondent who filed the report in one paper titled it as ‘Rajnath Eng-bashing’. One letter to the editor referred to Singh’s “diatribe against English”.

A columnist referred to his ‘‘railing against the language;’’ a cartoon strip referred to Singh having ‘lampooned’ English.

Problem is complex

I took a second look at the original statements being torn apart. Singh was quoted as saying that knowledge acquired out of English was not harmful, but the Anglicisation that penetrated into the youth was dangerous.

Bhagwat felt that the spread of English had hurt Indian culture and it was an illusion that English was the only means for progress. It seemed to me more like they had the situation I described with the gardeners in mind, rather than ‘bashing,’ or ‘diatribe’ and so on.

Many oped pieces followed ploughing new tracks. There were the usual arguments, a la Macaulay, that English was needed to get jobs. One report interviewed migrants from villages into Mumbai taking English classes, so they could get high paying jobs as drivers for company executives. And there were the expected ones about how knowing English was the reason that Indians got those call centre jobs (clearly the most significant event in our recent development history).

This debate on the role of English in India arises on a regular basis but dies quickly since it does not seem to have staying power. The problem is too complex for sound bytes. It has too many dimensions. One is the question of culture that the politicians raised. Culture is not just skin deep and so seeing the youth in tight jeans and t-shirt does not mean we have lost our culture.

But does hearing almost half the dialogue in any Hindi film today being conducted in English mean a loss of culture, because we are conveying the impression that speaking in English is ‘cool’ and everybody should do it?

It is not a question of English or being doomed to despair, as the press reports make it out to be. It needs to be English in addition to everything else. In today’s globalised world, the more languages you know, the better. Leading business schools, such as INSEAD, are requiring proficiency in at least two foreign languages to improve the effectiveness of their students.

Knowledge creation

The more serious issue that is not being spoken about is that of knowledge creation. You need a language in which to do that and to communicate the knowledge being created.

With such a minority in the country being comfortable with English, and the elite insisting that should be the language of the courts and higher education exclusively, we end up relying on the knowledge created in the English speaking world, most of which is outside India.

With higher education on other languages stunted, it is an enormous waste of a nation’s assets, the brain power of the people, who are more comfortable in languages other than English. Bi-lingual higher education will solve that.

When the general ethos is very heavily oriented towards only one language (English), it inhibits creative activity in other languages.

I see it in the classrooms where students who have studied English as a second language feel overwhelmed by those who grew up speaking English because of an urban anglicised upbringing, and end up remaining quiet and do not speak up in class discussions. I have seen it when a student in the middle of a presentation in English spontaneously breaks into his/her native language to express a point that couldn’t be done in English.

When all these other languages they resort to are their native tongues, there is a resentment that builds up and a feeling of inadequacy that affects self-esteem, apart from being reflected in poorer career opportunities. In a polyglot country like India, knowledge creation has to be multilingual; the situation of the elite speaking in English and the hoi polloi trying it unsuccessfully is not tenable.

Building regional ties

To deviate slightly, I know of no state in India that actively encourages the language of its neighbours to be taught in its schools, which can certainly help their mobility when it comes to jobs, apart from encouraging better neighbourly relations. That is where we should begin — teach our children to be fluent in at least two regional languages apart from English.

At the next step, our educational institutions should gradually move from being only English medium to being bilingual; even if study materials are in English, instruction should be in the local language and in English.

The level of comfort and confidence that will arise in our population when they see that they can speak their native language and be respected for it will be as significant as the various rights to food, education, information, and so on, that is being churned out from Delhi. We need a ‘right to be understood’.

(The author is a professor and dean of the Jindal Global Business School.)

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