Unwarranted linguistic revivalism

India’s largest opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seems uncertain about whether it wants to take the nation forward to a progressive future or backwards into the feudal past which it views as a golden age. Within the BJP itself, on the one hand, there is Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat and recently appointed the party’s national campaign manager for the 2014 general election, who stresses good governance and end to corruption, appealing to urban youth. On the other hand, there is Amit Shah who has raised the divisive, age-old issue of building a Ram temple on the site of the demolished Babri mosque at Ayodhya, and BJP president Rajnath Singh, who has suddenly discovered the English language as the mother of all evils, which is destroying Indian culture and development.

In the late 1950s, after completing school, my father, a committed Anglophile, decided that I should try for admission into Oxford or Cambridge, which he regarded as the best universities of the world. To qualify for admission, I was required to write an entrance examination in one of three classical languages (this requirement has since been abolished) — Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit. Therefore I engaged a Sanskrit tutor and spent about two hours every day for three months preparing for the test. The discipline req-uired learning by rote. Those who chose Latin or Greek did the same. However, once the exam requirement was fulfilled, the language was quickly forgotten.

When I was admitted into Cambridge, I learned that students who had passed the Latin or Greek exams forgot what they had learned very quickly. That’s because when one learns something by rote, it passes out of the mind unless you can keep practicing what you learnt. In other words, just like Greek and Latin learning Sanskrit had been a complete waste of time as all three are dead languages, spoken by very few people in the world (classical Greek is very different from colloquial Greek). Another reason why Sanskrit died out was because only the higher castes were allowed to learn it and it became a victim of the pernicious caste system. Therefore it’s amazing that the BJP president is championing learning of Sanskrit in this day and age.

The BJP chief would do well to recall the anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu in the 1950s, when Hindi zealots who had evolved a purist Sanskritised Hindi, tried to ram it down the throats of non-Hindi speaking people in peninsular India. This policy almost led to Tamil Nadu seceding from India. Much before that, while acknow-ledging the importance of a link language for the country, Subhash Chandra Bose, in many ways a far-sighted leader, had suggested that Hindi in the Roman script be adopted as it may be more acceptable to the south. But this suggestion was shot down by Hindi chauvinists and purists. A foolish and unworkable ‘three-language formula’ was enunciated and soon abandoned.

Anyway, since then a colloquial Hindus-tani — a mix of Hindi, Urdu and also English — has emerged, popularised to a great extent by Bolly-wood. It is currently being used in television news channels, spoken all over the north, and has become the link language of different communities, especially in urban areas, even down south. I see this as a welcome unifying development, though I am sure Rajnath Singh doesn’t. He is happier listening to the pure Sanskritised Hindi of Doordarshan and All India Radio which few Indians understand.

Let’s now examine Rajnath Singh’s proposition that English has destroyed Indian culture, if not the country. I would like to pose a question to him. What type of schools and colleges have his BJP colleagues enrolled their children in? I’m not sure about Rajnath Singh himself, but a national daily conducted a survey on this very subject and discovered that virtually the entire top leadership of the BJP has sent their offspring to English-medium schools and colleges, some even to the US and UK. Today the reality is that even poor and lower middle class households which can barely afford to, prefer to send their children to such schools, rather than free government schools where the medium of instruction is the local language.

The main cause of the mad annual scramble for admission into English-medium schools can be summed up in one word: jobs. Knowledge of English guarantees a better chance in the jobs market, especially in the service industry, the fastest growing sector of the Indian economy. India would not be a force to reckon within the information technology (IT) or ITES (information technology enabled services) industries providing skilled services to multinational companies, but for the country’s large pool of English literate youth.

Currently there are many Indians who are bilingual, equally at ease in their mother tongues, as in English. They can converse, read and write in two languages. I regret I’m not one of them. I believe the majority of educated people worldwide use one language predominantly for reading, writing and thinking though they may speak more than one.

In my own case, and equally in the case of millions of other Indians, that language is English. I am not embarrassed by this and I don’t think it has “harmed” me or my understanding of my country’s culture in any way.

(Rahul Singh is the former editor of Reader’s Digest, Indian Express and Khaleej Times)