Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity Read online

  When nations do not accord their own languages the respect that is their due, they are guilty also of destroying a literary heritage developed over millennia. Sheldon Pollock, who is the Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University in New York, and has also edited the Clay Sanskrit Library, wrote recently that ‘the house of Indian classical language study is not only burning, it lies almost in ashes’.12 Pollock makes the point that until 1947 and for centuries before that, India had scholars in philology who compared with the best in the world. These scholars produced pioneering works in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Bangla, Brajbhasha, Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya, Persian, Prakrit, Sanskrit and Urdu that were invaluable reference works and constituted a window to the roots of our culture. Unfortunately, the last few decades have seen almost no work on this literary treasure, so much so that foreign universities—and Pollock cites the case of an important one in the US which failed to get a trained professor in Telugu who had a command over the entire classical Telugu tradition—are being forced to close down their specialities in our languages. ‘Today, in neither of the two great universities in the capital city of India,’ laments Pollock, ‘is anyone conducting research on classical Hindi literature, the great works of Keshavdas and his successors. Imagine—and this is an exact parallel—if there was no one in Paris in 2008 producing scholarship on the works of Cornielle, Racine and Moliere. Not coincidentally, a vast number of Brajbhasha texts lie mouldering in archives, unedited to this day. This is even truer of Indo-Persian literature. Large quantities of manuscripts, including divans of some of the great court poets of Mughal India, remain unpublished and unread.’13

  All Indians need to seriously introspect: where are we in relation to our own languages? We need to do this in our own interest, because citizens of a great nation cannot afford to appear like linguistic photocopies or caricatures. Photocopies are a convenience for the benefit of others. To win respect we need to be rooted in our own cultural milieu, and language is an indispensable element in this effort. At present we are fast becoming a nation of linguistic half-castes, who can never speak English as their first language, but who are adrift from their mother tongue and unsure in the official language. To remedy the situation we need a radically new approach to the teaching of languages. It is essential that children are taught only in their mother tongue and simultaneously learn Hindi up to grade six. This will give them the necessary grounding in their own milieu, their own folklore, mythology and literature, and help them develop a love and respect for their own immensely rich linguistic heritage. It will also ensure that instead of memorizing and learning by rote—as inevitably happens when students are instructed in a language that doesn’t come naturally to them—our students will learn to think and debate. Those students for whom Hindi is the mother tongue should learn at least one more Indian language. Today, for instance, we have a situation where many of the educated have never read Kalidasa or Thiruvallur but are familiar with Shakespeare. Shakespeare is undoubtedly a great writer, but think of a situation in Britain where Englishmen take pride in knowing Kalidasa but have never read Shakespeare! The analogy appears to be farcical, until we pause for a moment and realize that this indeed is the situation, in great measure, in our country.

  English must be taught, but it must be introduced after the sixth grade, by when children have become fluent in their own languages. The elite Sardar Patel Vidyalaya in New Delhi follows this pattern very successfully, so it is possible. Such a linguistic curriculum will still allow Indians to be competitive in the IT markets, and equip them to interface with a globalizing world. In fact, there is a theory that those who are fluent first in their own language pick up a foreign one faster. There is no inherent contradiction between being rooted in one’s own linguistic heritage and also knowing enough English to cope with international transactions. Knowledge of English is a utility; it is an asset in a competitive job market, and opens up new avenues of employment. When Chandrabhan Prasad, the ebullient Dalit thinker, emphasizes that English is a tool of empowerment he is not entirely wrong. The argument here, however, is not against the teaching of English, but in favour of striking the right balance between acquiring a working proficiency in the foreign language and according respect, acceptability and pride of place to one’s own languages.

  The brilliant Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, who begins his book Decolonizing the Mind with the statement that this will be his last book in English, and henceforth he will write only in Giyuku and Kishwahili, makes the basic point that every language ‘has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture. Take English. It is spoken in Britain and in Sweden and in Denmark. But for Swedish and Danish people English is only a means of communication with non-Scandinavians. It is not a carrier of their culture. For the British … it is additionally, and inseparably from its use as a tool of communication, a carrier of their culture and history.’14 We urgently need to understand this difference, the difference between a language of communication and a language which is the carrier of culture, and to realize further that the language of communication cannot develop at the cost of the carrier of our culture.

  It is demeaning to advance the logic that the thousands of young Indians staying awake all night mimicking American and British accents in call centres across the country can do their job well only if they make a mockery of their linguistic inheritance. Call centres provide much-needed jobs, but their existence is less a proof of the revolution in IT that India is capable of and more an indication of the fact that a large number of our educated youth are branded as ‘IT coolies’. One of the first things that recruits to call centres learn is how to remove the MTI (Mother Tongue Interference) and RI (Regional Interference) in their speech. They spend weeks at ‘training’ centres acquiring a Yankee twang or picking up British slang, learning to say ‘Good moarning’ to American customers and ‘Hai Maite’ to Australian ones. The ‘training’ includes a deliberate programme of deculturalization: someone called Sumati is encouraged to become Suzanne and create an American family history which makes her a resident of Columbia, Maryland, with a twenty-two-year-old younger sister called Becky.15 This conscious dislocation is considered a good way to destroy or dilute the pernicious hold of mother tongues. But ‘a mother tongue is not just a verbal pile. It is a psychology, an environment, a source of cultural and cognitive sustenance, an emotion, a bond, and many collateral things. To attempt to guard against its “interference” is an act of violence with a potential to damage some vital nerves of the emotional–cultural–artistic continuum of a learner’s personality.’16 The economic incentive to impose English was used by the British in the nineteenth century: those who knew English had a better chance of becoming clerks in the colonial bureaucracy. It is astonishing that it is being purveyed again to suit the so-called compulsions of a globalizing world—despite the fact that this time round we have a choice.

  The challenge before all Indians is this: either we re-appropriate our linguistic cultural space, or continue to be linguistic caricatures. We do not realize the extent to which we have indeed become the latter, unless we begin to grasp how foreigners see us. I can never forget what a Russian woman, who had enjoyed reading my book on the Indian middle class, said to me: ‘Mr Varma, I greatly enjoyed reading your book. Do you also write in English?’ Her assumption—and a very valid one—was that coming from a country with over twenty languages that go back thousands of years, I must have written in my own language, and that what she had read was an English translation. On 10 May 2007, in the august Central Hall of Parliament, a commemoration event was held to mark the 150th anniversary of the first uprising against the British. The speaker of the Lok Sabha spoke in English; the then vice president of India—whose Hindi is excellent—spoke in English; the prime minister spoke in English; only the President of India at the time, whose mother tongue is Tamil, began his speech in Hindi to spontaneous applause. Later he too switched to English.
Macaulay must have congratulated himself in his grave, hearing free India’s highest dignitaries speak of our first war of independence in the imperialist’s language, a language few of them had mastered but which they would still privilege over their own, though they would probably use the latter with far greater confidence and proficiency. Pamela Philipose, one of the country’s most talented columnists, wrote a wonderfully sarcastic piece in the Indian Express (30 May 2007):

  Lads and Ladis, let us be celebrating our first war of independence by hailing with our hankies our heroes and hero-ranis … Arrey bhai, the battle is carrying on even as I am speaking, be marking my words. Each bandha in our Bharat Mata is, aise waise, fighting the English pepuls by doing to death their national language … Arrey, if you are coming to be thinking about it, we are all Mangal Pandeys, hitting hardly on the darwaza of the maharani’s bhasha every-shevery day of our living lives, every-shevery time we are saying or writing even one word only, we are fighting the angrez. You are not understanding, no? Kindly be taking a seat while I am explaining this for your better sense … We are independent minded and are speaking English like we are speaking Hindi-Vindi, Tamil-Shamil, and all. Let me be putting it nicely in a poetical way, we are moulding angrezi and scolding it, we are mangling it and strangling it, undermining it and over-mining it.

  Language is a symbol of a people’s identity. It is the most vital part of their culture. A people must be proud of their language, and not speak it by default or with diffidence. This is the hallmark of nations who can earn the respect of others. The French, the Germans, the Spanish, the Russians, the Chinese and the Japanese are doing quite well economically without needing to sacrifice or neglect or belittle their own languages in preference to English. The Italian town of San Remo is literally a few minutes away from Menton, the last French town on the Riviera. But the moment you cross the border into Italy, the language changes. People prefer to speak only in Italian; the signage is only in Italian; there is a perceptible difference in culture and lifestyle too. This is evident also on the other side of the south of France when you cross into Spain. Nobody seems to speak French the moment you cross the barrier high up in the Pyrenees. The language changes ubiquitously to Spanish.

  Boyd Tonkin, the erudite books editor of the Independent, met me in Delhi some years ago. He had come to attend the Indo-UK Kitab Festival, where largely Indians writing in English had congregated. He agreed with me that the neglect of Indian languages is obvious. The question is, what can be done. There are very few good translators from the original into English, and even when they are found, there are few publishers willing to publish the translation. The result is that good writers in the Indian languages languish, and bad writers in English proliferate. For every one Vikram Seth there are thousands who aspire to become authors in English, and actually believe that the rubbish they churn out entitles them to claim English as their first language. Boyd mentioned that at the time of the Roman Empire, Latin had become a kind of lingua franca for a huge area stretching from Britain to Egypt. But nations in Europe, he added, are extremely attached to their languages. They associate their language with their culture, and look upon it as their calling card, a mark of their unique identity. English is understood and spoken by an increasing number of Europeans, but the gain for English is not at the cost of the primary language. It is an additional resource, a convenience, a means to facilitate international communication. If countries that are seeking to demolish barriers between them through the common membership of the EU can still retain and nurture their languages with both passion and pride, why are we so willing to relinquish our own and adopt another?

  Examples of the invidious manner in which knowledge of English has become a tool for social exclusion proliferate in our daily lives. I will quote but one recent example. Sunil Kumar, a young student at the London School of Economics, came to see me. His family comes from Bihar, but he has been educated in England, and his parents now live in California. Sunil likes to dress in an Indian way, especially in London, where his favourite outfit is a kurta over his jeans, combining both what he has borrowed and what is his own. For someone who has stayed outside for so long, he also speaks surprisingly good Hindi. He narrated what happened to him on a recent visit to Delhi: ‘I had gone to a bookshop, and then thought I’d have a coffee at Barista, the trendy coffee-shop chain, next door. I was wearing a kurta over my jeans, and the hostess at the door spoke to me in Hindi: “Kahan ja rahe ho? Idhar coffee bohat mehngi hai.” (Where do you think you’re going? The coffee is very expensive here.) I asked her, in Hindi, how expensive it was. She said: “Baavan rupees ka ek cup.” (Fifty-two rupees a cup.) I then asked her in English: “How much is baavan?” She paused, and noticing the way I spoke English, and noticing too that I was anglicized enough not even to know the Hindi numerical, her whole demeanour changed. Replacing her dour expression with a smile, she welcomed me in.’ Sunil managed to gain entry to the Barista (where, incidentally, as in every such outlet across India, the shop sign, the menu and the notice outside the toilets are all in English). But I wonder what humiliation a similarly dressed man might have been subjected to if he hadn’t the right English with which to humble and shame the lady guarding the entrance.

  The resolve to give our own languages the respect that is their due is part of the unfinished agenda of Independence. This revival must take place volitionally, at the level of mass realization, with the government making the requisite policy changes. Once we understand that language is an inextricable part of nationhood, and that nations that do not understand this are devaluing their sovereignty, the rest will fall into place. The issue then will not be about the imposition of Hindi or the rejection of English. It will be about the use of English as an international language but not at the cost of the development and primacy of our own languages. The late Nirmal Verma rightly made the point that a beginning must be made in the proceedings of Parliament, the most visible and the highest forum of our democratic polity and nationhood. There is no reason, he argued, why our MPs cannot speak in any of the recognized Indian languages of the Constitution, with translations into Hindi, which is the official language of the Union and was envisaged by our founders as the national language. If it is argued that not everybody knows Hindi, it could as well be argued, he said, that not everyone knows English.17

  Once changes of this nature begin to take place, there will be no place for the linguistic chauvinisms of the past. The British projected India as a place of linguistic chaos, a Tower of Babel to beat all such towers. The argument that English must replace the Indian languages was theirs, not ours. As one of them put it, ‘The Indian mind had walled itself up inside such a prison that only a new language could give it a ladder of escape.’18 They missed, deliberately, the fundamental point that almost all the Indian languages have an underlying unity because they are based on Sanskrit and that the decision to impose English was a colonial project devised by Macaulay and the Anglicists in opposition to the Orientalists who were an influential group among the rulers themselves. Moreover, in the last few decades the acceptance of Hindi has made incremental progress across the country, and thanks to the popularity of Hindi films and national television, it is now spoken and understood by over forty per cent of Indians. Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, a state which was the most vociferous in its protest against Hindi fifty years ago, has today the country’s largest number of private schools teaching Hindi.

  The key imperative is that along with Hindi all the other Indian languages must also come out of the shadow of English. Changes in the school curriculum need to be accompanied by the systematic creation of a pool of competent translators, so that Indians can read the best in all the languages of the country. If this is achieved, it would be enough of a revolution, for once a people develop a love and respect for what is their own, the rest—including the project of a national language—will follow. Professor Namwar Singh makes the crucial point that no language can be substituted by another. Like mot
her’s milk, our mother tongue is something we acquire in our childhood; a foreign language can be an additional acquisition but never an alternative to it.19 The respected Kannada author U.R. Ananthamurthy echoes the same thought: ‘We are going to lose our memory. We need English, but not of the “call-centre” sort. It is not a gateway to knowledge. We need to create in our own language. The English elite in India are not as cultured as the masses. English must be taught but children in schools need to create in their own languages, because we don’t think in English. It is a received language.’20 The awareness must dawn on us that there is no great nation without its own language of which its people are proud. And a people who continue to regard another’s language as their own ultimately become caricatures, for themselves and for others.

  Some years ago, when the world was already in the new millennium, I accompanied Gaj Singh, the affable erstwhile Maharaja of Jodhpur, to the small hamlet of Ossian in Rajasthan, some sixty kilometres from Jodhpur, in the middle of the desert, where a luxury tented resort is run by a plucky entrepreneur. Since the route is off the main highway, the road was rutted and uneven, and the countryside mostly deserted, except for the occasional village, lit up in the engulfing Indian dusk by a few naked bulbs outlining the familiar clutch of people around the chai shop. Suddenly, in the near wilderness, I saw a huge hoarding: LORD WILLIAM BENTINCK HIGH SCHOOL—DAY AND RESIDENTIAL.