The English mania

THE TAMIL Nadu Government, in a belated but laudable move, has put forward a small step in the right direction by passing an executive order that will make Tamil/mother tongue the medium of instruction from class I to V from the next academic year. Hopefully, the State Government will move further in the same path and extend this pedogogical arrangement to higher education also.

Contrary to the accusation of its detractors this G.O. is by no means a bolt from the blue. This has been the consistent and long-standing demand of organic intellectuals in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere for well over half a century now - a legacy not only of the Dravidian movement but also of the Indian nationalist movement. No less a person than the Mahatma wanted to enforce the mother tongue as the medium of instruction.

Anguished by the mushrooming growth of inefficient but pompous `English medium' schools which has had a deleterious effect on generations of young persons now, socially conscious intellectuals have campaigned for state intervention. Their movement culminated in the fast-unto-death agitation of a hundred scholars last year. Under such popular pressure the Tamil Nadu Government was forced to appoint a high level committee under Justice S. Mohan which included balanced and experienced educationists such as V. C. Kulandaiswamy. The constitutional validity of the considered recommendations of this committee has also been upheld by the courts. But then the Anglophiles who wax eloquent in the leader-page articles of English dailies wound not know this: divorced from the Tamil public sphere, they have no clue to what is happening in Tamil society at large.

The shrill noises and the recourse to the streets by the private English medium schools is quite understandable. The G.O. of the Tamil Nadu Government hits them where it hurts most. It strikes at the very root of what educationist Krishna Kumar called `the source of inequality in our society (which) operates in a subtle and intractable manner' in and through language. In the past few decades, the middle class in Tamil Nadu has assiduously patronised and built a system of education that is grossly discriminative in terms of both class and caste. Its primary tool has been the medium of instruction. By no means an innocent language of pedagogy, English is a social marker, the password for entry into the higher echelons of social and cultural power - a power that operates not only in the State but also nationally and globally. And of course this password has to be pronounced in the right accent and with the appropriate body language.

The middle class and its articulate advocates respond with a feigned naivete when confronted with the discriminatory structures that language builds: English is open to anybody who cares to study it. But is it? The language of knowledge- acquisition is closely tied to social milieu and family environment. A vast majority of our population can never dream of competing in the unlevel playing field of English medium. This situation extracts, a la Frantz Fanon, its price from the privileged middle class children also. Unfortunately, not only curricular activities but also co- and extra-curricular activities which should inspire the creative skills of the children and socialise them are also conducted in English. Steeped in Enid Blytons and, now, Harry Potters, MTV and V channels English medium schools produce rootless wonders. Isolated from the wider language environment, they are alienated from the society at large. The dangers of such a disjuncture are already manifest.

Capitalising on the delusive fascination for English of anxious middle-class parents private schools consciously cultivate such a system. Children are fined for every Tamil word they speak. The self-appointed defenders of fundamental rights who claim parental prerogative of choosing the language of instruction have not uttered so much as a murmur against such fascist procedures. The mother tongue and the organic culture that goes with it is inferiorised. At best it is relegated to a kitchen language, a language employed to address maid-servants, watchmen and other social `inferiors'.

Given the social power that this class enjoys, this inferiorisation is internalised by the children, and their parents, who go to State-run and aided Tamil medium schools. In a desperate bid to emulate the privileged urban class of the English-educated, they patronise a host of upstart English schools. Promoted by fly-by-night operators such schools are accountable to nobody. Untrained teachers are hired at miserable salaries and made to work for unreasonably long hours. The fundamental right of association is denied and the voice of dissent is silenced. The high tuition fee structures are the staple of jokes in the popular Tamil press. Parents and teachers do not realise that this is a race that cannot be won. English can only be the language of a small fraction.

If there is the Chomskian thesis that the human brain has innate linguistic structures elementary social science tells us that pedagogy cannot be delinked from the local language environment without running the risk of social and cultural neurosis. Groomed in the tradition of Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed the social reactionary use to which Chomsky's views are being put may not be approved by Chomsky himself! Invoking the minority-rights argument is indeed mischievous. Apart from the fact that what little legitimacy the Hindutva movement and its political manifestations have gained has been through the machinations of the English-educated middle class, no minority, other than the Anglo- Indian, can claim a right to study in English. In fact The Tamil Nadu government's G.O. talks only about mother tongue and not Tamil.

The study of English qua English is by no means prohibited. English will continue to be taught as a language of communication. In all probability, without the burden of having English as the medium of instruction, proficiency in the language will improve.

The right of the vast millions of people to study in their mother tongue cannot be sacrificed at the selfish altar of those who want to seek not only their livelihood but their very living abroad. The primary concern of a state is to provide a system of education that functions through the language of the people. The use of the mother tongue - Tamil in our case - will democratise not only education but also society at large. Little children will not be reduced to reciting nursery rhymes that have no bearing to the social world they live in. The absurdity of singing `Rain, Rain go away, Come again another day' in a water- starved, monsoon-dependent country will cease. Gone will be the self-consciousness of an inferiority that comes with the inability to employ an alien language in its `acceptable register'. Our children would have a mind that is unbridled and without fear. Then they will learn English as a language, on their own terms, and put it to functional use. And then, not only will Pudumaippithan and Jayakanthan be best-sellers in Tamil Nadu, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Kafka will be read in Tamil.

A. R. VENKATACHALAPATHY

Lecturer, Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli.

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