Let a hundred languages bloom

The story goes that a linguist once visited Akbar’s court and challenged the emperor to guess his native tongue. As usual, the Jahanpanah turned to Birbal for help. Give the man a thrashing, the minister instructed. As action was suited to word, profanities flew freely from the visitor’s mouth. In his native tongue.

Curses come spontaneously in your own language, Birbal explained. And endearments.

Then there’s Babasaheb Ambedkar. This eminent jurist, Constitution-writer and Dalit leader exhorted his adherents to learn English which he compared to the milk of a lioness.

Those who drank it became stronger, he said, and exhorted Dalits to learn English in order to be released from social and economic bondage.

The story of languages in India rips and roars between these two points of view.

The impact of English on the political, social and economic life of India has long been debated — recently in these columns as well. But things have changed, the balance has shifted.

English is no longer a foreign language; it has emerged as another Indian language, apart from becoming, for all practical purposes, a secondary official language. It has its place in the Constitution too, although intended for a short, settling down period.

There is no dispute that the first language is the best language for learning and living. In pluralistic India, that could be anything: mother tongue, father tongue, dominant language of the region, language of familiarity, language of instruction, official language...

In government schools across the country, the medium of instruction is the local language; the fact that the quality of that instruction requires overhauling is another matter. It is a matter that needs urgent and serious attention.

But over the last 10-15 years, something’s been happening: government agencies and NGOs have been taking books to children in schools all across the country, literally lakhs and lakhs of books. Many of the books are being created with care for content and form, in several Indian languages, including English.

The narrative is appealing, not moralising, drawing the children into the many worlds the books unravel. The books look good, they make the young readers feel good holding them, reading them, sharing them.

Children are also learning to see languages in relation to each other — as rivers flowing into one sea.

From being stuck with just textbooks for years and years — if those were available — this is a huge step forward.

Just like our numbers and our diversity, our many languages must be counted among India’s biggest plus points.

For one, Indians have a natural facility with languages. Go to any tourist spot, Mamallapuram, for instance, and see how boys from the locality approach tourists with hellos and can we help yous in French, German, Italian, Russian… Who taught them? Nobody. They simply listened and learned.

For another, every language comes intangibly packed with its own unique cultural and historical consciousness, which expand the mind of the user and can, therefore, expand the user’s worldview.

Most Indians are automatically bilingual, many are multilingual.

Even if most Indians can’t read or write, they can speak, they can comprehend. We mistakenly equate knowing a language with knowing its literature.

Language is the vehicle of communication. Some do it in code, some do it in prose, and some in poetry. But all adapt. That’s what language is: creative adaptation for communication.

Village school libraries are also slowly being stocked with bilingual books: that is, picture books that come with the narrative printed in two languages, English and the local language.

After some initial resistance from institutions, the value of approaching an unfamiliar language through a familiar one is slowly being understood, so that now some institutions are seeing the sense of learning local languages through English.

And in some other institutions, children are reading their first languages through English.

The facility with languages is fertile ground for the acquisition and exchange of knowledge and ideas.

In this context, then, it seems silly to carry on about how English kills “our” languages.

As U.R. Ananthamurthy, the brilliant Kannada writer best known for his novel, Samskara , who was, for many years a professor of English, once said: English is the language of power, make it your own.

That’s where we are now: in a position to use a colonial hangover to hoist our own freedom flags without losing ourselves in the process.

To make this happen, though, we will have to rehaul the education system, read in more languages, write creatively, discuss and debate, and, most important of all, learn to listen.

In some countries that decided they didn’t want to live in a cocoon, children learn English as a second language in school. Proficiency comes with practice, but the medium of instruction is the first language.

There are schools in India where the medium of instruction up to about Class 5 is Hindi/Tamil, after which it is English.

Most students are equally comfortable in both languages. Some states have a three-language formula in schools — in the long run, it’s useful.

So there’s no doubt that in order to facilitate efficient and effective communication in a multilingual society, the teaching and learning of languages has to be given primacy. And if English serves a useful purpose in this project, we should deal that card.

Instead of blaming the English language for the ills in the education system, let’s look at how we are mismanaging the teaching/learning of languages, let’s look at reading and listening, let’s look at our natural abilities and the desire to communicate.

Languages are the most important ‘subject’ and the best materials must be used to engage with them — in this case, challenging content packaged well.

If we are not willing to spend on nourishing the mind, of what use is the body?

We must also be practical. Is it really workable to run Parliament or any other forum on simultaneous translations? Two or even three might work, but more than that?

So it makes sense to use English if you don’t know Hindi. It doesn’t mean you love Tamil or Dogri less.

There is one other thing. When the French speak English in incomprehensible accents, we intellectuals find it charming, but we turn up our noses at Bihari or Bengali or Telugu inflections.

The snobbery is misplaced, not the aspirations.