Language of upward mobility

Here we go again. language chauvinists in Goa have launched disruptive protests against the state government’s proposal to allow primary and secondary schools to offer English as the optional medium of instruction in addition to Marathi and Konkani.

A bunch of rabble, associated with Hindutva forces, stopped traffic in Panjim recently and threatened to hold the state hostage to their misbegotten worldview. It’s not just about Goa, it’s all over India. They are the same people who protested the screening of Slumdog Millionaire; the same people who assaulted women emerging from a bar in Mangalore; the same who renamed the airport and the railway terminus in Bombay, and who rechristened Bombay, Madras and Calcutta.

English, both as a language and our cultural heritage, is a convenient horse to flog. Increasingly though, the burgeoning middle class is embracing it as the key to success in a modernising country. Thus, while politicians go on renaming sprees, ‘Indianising’ names of city streets and entire cities, real estate developers across the country sell their projects with Western-sounding names such as ‘Provence’, ‘Belvedere’ and what not.

Coming back to Goa’s language disturbances, even the usually rational Mano-har Parrikar, opposition leader and erstwhile chief minister, backed the obscurantists’ protests. He said if children are educated in English, they will look down on their parents who don’t speak the language. He is right.

The problem with the English language is that it is subversive. To accept it is to accept the cultural and philosophical worldview of the Enlightenment. It requires acceptance of the rules of courtesy, egalitarianism and right of dissent. In the Hindutva worldview, these values don’t count for much. Instead the focus is on superstition, indulgence, exclusivity and conformism. Children schooled in English won’t easily buy into backwardness.

If you look around today, journeyman classes that offer students English language proficiency are mushrooming everywhere. Parents and children know that to make their way in the world, English is essential. They have no time for chauvinist arguments against the language. Parents just want their children to get ahead and like all middle class Indians, place their faith in education.

It’s high time obscurantists who oppose English learning became aware that English has always been an Indian language, and that in recent years the number of people who use English as the lingua franca has increased exponentially. A new form of Indian English has taken shape which incorporates Indian idioms. Today globally, literary salons celebrate Indian writers in English for introducing Indian cultural flavours to the world. I can name at least a dozen and their number is probably in the hundreds. Therefore it’s madness for people in India to dismiss English as a foreign language. The Supreme Court’s judgements are in English as is government legislation. They may be translated into various languages but the first draft is written in English.

Vernacular chauvinists, who disparage the use of English in India, are products of a feudal mindset that still regards India as a long-suffering victim of colonial oppression. They draw inspiration from the jingoist rantings of M.S. Golwalkar in his aptly titled book Bunch of Thoughts, and surprisingly also from the Luddite fulminations of Gandhiji’s Hind Swaraj. Their India is a closed and diffident victim of unchaste foreigners. In the 21st century, such mindsets are ridiculous and out of touch with the new, resurgent India.

Protests like the one in goa flare up now and again, led by fringe groups which are communal and chauvinist. But they fly in the face of what citizens want. The protestors assume the vast majority of the Indian population has no use for English. They are right; only a small section use English in their daily lives. However, English is the language of aspirations. Even a semi-literate family in rural India is aware that for their children to get out of the poverty rut, the passport is English language proficiency.

Unlike yesteryear, when the language of Milton and Shakespeare was a mark of elite status, in the new India, English is the language of upward mobility. As such, it has captured the imagination of the new dynamic young gener-ation that values merit and effort as determinants of success. Its importance is gauged not from numbers but from its grip on the imagination of the country’s rising middle class.

As India enters a new development phase, going from a uniquely-won independence to global recognition, English is the agent of aspiration and change. And it gives me pause to think about just how prescient Thomas Babington Macaulay was when he said in his famous Minute on Education: “Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects.”

Curiously, today’s chauvinists who protest the use of English reserve their worst for those who celebrate it as a dynamic Indian language. They call us the children of Macaulay; one of several ‘M’s’ they hate including Marx, Modernity and Muslims.

(Rajiv Desai is president of Comma Consulting and a well-known Delhi-based columnist)