Language myths

IN India, nearly everyone you meet has an opinion about language, particularly the form in which it is used by the media. And perhaps in no other field are unscientific and illogical folk beliefs so firmly entrenched, that even the most reasonable policy makers are seduced into believing and supporting them. This is particularly visible vis-a-vis the use of English and Hindi. With English, the attitudes address themselves mostly to the accent and the usage of Indian slang, the operative question being why can't we have a "purer" English? With Hindi it is the opposite. Why can't a simplified, less pure version be used?

People would not pontificate and make unreasonable demands such as these, if the field in question were physics or medicine, because they would acknowledge that there, before debating purity and populism, you need to consult an expert. But the same people see nothing foolish about sitting in judgment over the language used on television or in radio news bulletins, while confessing, simultaneously that they do not know much Hindi and hardly hear/watch the bulletins in question.

Interestingly, such attitudes are not limited to India alone. A number of scholars have studied such grassroots opinions in the United States. Their studies reveal that stigmatisation or glorification of certain languages used by various ethnic, racial and caste groups, and the attitudes they create in culturally diverse societies, actually mirror deep impulses and atavistic fears. A shrill insistence by a group of people for preserving the purity of a certain language may thus have little to do with a love for the language and lots with a fear of other, unfamiliar languages influencing and changing its known form. Similarly, an insistence on standardisation may be rooted in a desire for preserving the status quo in society. Linguistic prejudices are thus very often a coded expression of prejudice against a certain disliked or feared group.

Judged against purely linguistic standards, all languages have equal merit. They are all products of human cognitive abilities, are expressive and have logical systems of their own. How is it then that certain languages or the colloquial forms of Queen's English in India, are considered substandard?

The answer is not hard to seek. In an ex-colonial semi-feudal, caste ridden society such as ours, judgments about relative worth- (that Prannoy Roy or P. Chidambaram, for example, speak better English than say Mamta Banerji or Venkaiah Naidu) are often socially determined. Leaders such as Laloo Prasad Yadav or Mayawati are also seldom seen to have a high-prestige linguistic ability, no matter what their popular base or their winnability in the general elections.

Many educated Indian believe that there exists a single standard English - the one that our top broadcasters and editors of English language dailies use. And that variety of English must be kept free of all regional and vernacular encroachments. But if you said to one of these people, here is a room full of some of our best scholars, communicators and public leaders. Who do you think speaks the best English? You may well get people who speak different kinds of English. You would, for example get R. K. Narayan and you would get Jyoti Basu and you would get Mrinal Sen. They may not use the stigmatised local colloguiums much in their English, but they would not be using the same variety of English either.

If we allow these diverse Englishes into the pantheon, (notwithstanding the fact that English, as a language, does not have Indian origins or semantic roots), how can we keep out the ones that discomfort us with "their" English: the Laloo Yadavs, the Chandrababu Naidus, the Giridhar Gomangs? That is where we begin to understand what language myths are all about. In her book English With An Accent (Routledge 1997), Lippi-Green points out that one function of language myths is to provide a rationale for existing social orders. The myths of standard and substandard English do just that. In India, we can add to them the myths of dysfunctional or inadequate vernaculars that the British built up and that the likes of Salman Rushdie and Khushwant Singh have been painstakingly endorsing since.

Such myths permit those in power to label others, as inferior on the basis of their "broken" or colloquialised English or the basic inadequacy of the vernaculars that they and their readers/electorates communicate in. Fact is, nobody can be said to be speaking substandard English or a substandard Indian language, unless you regard them as nonstandard or substandard human beings in the first place.

Interestingly, in matters of language, the myth of good versus bad is so deeply entrenched that it has seduced even die-hard followers of Ram Manohar Lohia who repeatedly underscored the fallacy of considering English a substitute for our vernaculers. Leaders such as Laloo Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav, who would instantly condemn casteism in any other guise, were also eventually seduced by the "English is superior to Indian languages" myth and sent their own sons to English medium public schools even as they waxed eloquent about the need for more "Charvaaha - Schools' and Hindi-medium government schools. Similarly, many of our leaders in the Bharatiya Janata Party, with their unshakable Hindutva theories that glorify Sanskrit and Hindi, take good care to see that their own proficiency in the right type of English is established among the intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals alike.

Why do language myths endure? According to Lippi-Green, they have a disturbing utility. They can be used to stigmatise and ostracise a group, or groups of people, you do not actually like on grounds of their caste, colour or gender, but are afraid to say so for fear of being politically incorrect. So instead of saying I do not like people from the Hindi belt or down the Vindhyas or across border, you say that person does not speak English to my satisfaction; or he/she uses a language that says nothing to me.

Many years ago, this columnist was struggling to teach English to students in an apex institute of technology in Hindi-speaking Madhya Pradesh. It was then that she discovered that the educational consequences of providing vernacular based education to a majority of our students, for broadly political reasons, while retaining the notion of the same vernaculars being inadequate for teaching higher courses in technology or medicine or law, have been considerable.

To remove children whom we have put through 12 years of schooling in the local vernacular, and place them in institutes of advanced learning where their vernaculars are stigmatised as being inadequate and primitive, is racist. And the failure to take into account vernaculars within the educational process is to make that process itself hugely biased in favour of the upper classes. Rather than being a social "leveller", the Indian higher education system remains a powerful, and even respectable, bastion of colonialism and casteism. And most of our law makers, educators and media practitioners who have passed through this system, later go on to inform public policy and discourse with the myths they have picked up therein. Will someone kindly look into it before underscoring the need to singing religious hymns lauding the goddess of learning?

The author writes in Hindi and English and is a freelance journalist.

MRINAL PANDE

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