Outside the English Medium School

Let’s just say I went into Gujarat with mixed feelings surrounding English education. I’d heard all the rhetoric. I even wrote a post about it last August. English language skills are a gateway to better opportunities—not only internationally, of course, but also nationally within India. They are a prerequisite to any post-graduate education, where English is more often than not the language of instruction. For lawyers, doctors, and engineers in India, English is the language of the trade, of trade journals, and of international conferences. It is also what ties the Dravidian south to the Indo-Aryan north. English is the language of the Rajya Sabha, the Indian constitution, and the central government.

But there is also an opposite rhetoric. What happens when English threatens to erode the local language? Lamenting the demise of vernacular literature is something of a popular pastime these days. With the death of a language supposedly a whole genre of cultural expression dies alongside it. We lose the ability of Inuits to differentiate among nine different kinds of snow, and so on.   Honestly though, I’m a tad skeptical about all these funeral dirges for dead and dying tongues. Simply put, it’s the nature of any beast to die at the end of its life. People come and go. Languages do too. We mourn them, true, but let’s not fall into melodramatics. Languages are practical animals. Those parts of the language which can express things only unique to the culture (those nine different sorts of snow for instance) live on within the usurping language. When faced with a dead animal, the vultures eat its tongue too.   So, the demise of a language does not equate to the demise of a culture. At least I don’t think it does. And I can think of no finer example than Indian English. Wikipedia has an extensive list of Hindi words currently incorporated into English, primarily Indian English. Whether it’s the way Desi speakers of English use retroflex consonants in place of dental ones (not ‘t’ or ‘d’, but ‘ṭ’ or ‘ḍ’), or their free use of Desi idioms and slang, Indian English is a dialect of its own, like British English, American English, or Australian English. In spite of all their regional slang, these three countries have little trouble communicating with one another. And why can’t Indian English maintain its own flavor without sacrificing communicability? It’s one of my pet peeves that every time a Gujarati teacher introduces me to a new class, he chides them to “listen carefully” to my pronunciation. As if this were the most important aspect of my Spoken English classes. We’re not here to homogenize the world. We’re here to help people communicate with it. Right, yaar?

English has hardly become death, destroyer of cultures. On the contrary, it has become a virtual lingua franca the world over. This was never made clearer to me than while travelling in Nepal during the recent Diwali vacation. Trekkers from the United Kingdom, United States, or Australia are a minority in the heights around Everest. But sit down a Frenchman, a German, and a Nepalese around the same wood fire stove, and inevitably the conversation will be in English. The barriers of worldwide cooperation are lower than ever before. It seems we have finally overcome the curse of Babel. The human race can once again try its hand at building towers that soar into the heavens.   There is still a problem though, a kink in the system. Quality English education is not available to all. A great deal of the rural population of developing countries will be unable to engage with the emerging global community. English is not only a practical skill set. It is also the medium of the government examinations for the most prestigious and lucrative posts. What we have today is a system in which access to these high-sector jobs is almost completely monopolized by those who grow up at an early age speaking, reading, and writing English in elite English medium schools. Wealthier parents, especially those living in major urban centers such as Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, or Chennai, have greater access to these schools for their children. What more, these families often speak English at home. Students in rural areas simply don’t stand a chance on these exams until they too have access to quality English medium education.

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