Date: 04 Aug 2000 20:21:57 EDT
Subject: Re: Indian vernacular writing anno 1997


Hi Radhika,

Of course you're right that there are many state-language-medium schools in India and that the people who come out of those schools are on the whole more literate in their mother tongues than those who attend English-medium schools. The trouble is with the whole thrust as students progress in school, so that even by high school, if they are going on for the very competitive higher education, the state language (and esp literature) is being devalued in favor of English or Hindi. Isn't there still a two-tier system, held over from the colonial period in some respects, in which the preponderance of higher education is conducted in English? Vidyut Bhagwat has written an interesting piece in Economic and Political Weekly in which she talks about having studied Marathi literature in college and how it was looked down upon. So as I said in my last post, being just about literate in a language is one thing, but being able to enjoy literature in it is another. For instance, Bengali was my third language in school, and so I can understand simple Bangla and read the script, but I couldn't sit down and enjoy a novel by Tagore in its Bengali original. Certainly there are supporters, readers, and practitioners of  literature and the arts in all the regional languages, but I was speaking of the  problem as a systemic one in which a lot of different forces are militating against literacy in the regional mother tongues. 

Re. my point about parents'  zealous drive to put children through lessons in the mother tongue, I was not talking about the Indian diaspora, but making an observation about contemporary Mumbai, in which I've seen middle-class people (NOT by any means members of the elite or the diaspora) who  have  strong xenophobic, indigenist Marathi-only feelings, combined with a pragmatic acceptance of the need for their children to study English in order to "get ahead." So they enrol their children in colonial-type English-medium schools where they recite English nursery rhymes from books which still have pictures of little blond children in them. Then, in after-school classes or at home, they try to compensate by teaching them to read and write Marathi. (I suspect that even they're fighting a losing battle.) If these people are alienated postcolonial intellectuals, then so are large numbers of the Indian urban middle classes. And let's face it, most rural Indians from small peasant or landless laborer classes don't get enough of an education to become very highly literate in any language, certainly not to the point where they're reading and writing literature in it. I would hazard a guess (and am quite prepared to be shot out ofthe water on this) that if you finish a high school education in India, whether in English or any Indian language, you qualify to call yourself middle class.

When we use the term "elite" , I think we use it too loosely. We also have to remember that in India the range of what is considered when we say "middle class" is very wide, from people who are just barely eking out a living living in a shanty town to people who are wealthy enough for the world to be their playground. This tiny latter group is the true elite, but the problem of the power differential between English and the Indian regional languages is a much larger problem that affects a wide range of Indians all over the country.  

Well, that got awfully convoluted. Don't know if it made any sense!

Josna

--- You wrote:
- as with Rushdie's works - isn't Arundhati Roy's observation a class-specific/elite, on an average more of an urban based observation? We still have "telugu medium" schools in Andhra, for example,  and lots of people who graduate from these are indeed very literate in "the vernacular" - this dates back to pre-"Hindu-nationalism" type fervor - even back to pre-nationalism gandhian times when the learning and teaching of Hindi became a nationalist move. Even several "English medium" schools still insist on literacy in various official "vernacular" languages...

the problem of "English" and "not knowing any language" i would say is a "postcolonial intellectual" and "diasporic" type dilemma. Which is why one of the "back to our roots" rhetoric of various nationalisms works sometimes with a zealous, nostalgic need to put (alien-ated) children through  multiple lessons in mother-tongues within diasporic communities.

just my two cents.

r

Josna Rege wrote:

> Hello Thomas,
>
> The original post had the source and year of the Prasannarajan piece at the end, although not the exact date:
>
> Copyright 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
>
> I left it out by mistake when I copied it onto my response.
> ----you wrote----------
> One of the most interesting observations Arundhati Roy
> made on her wonderful Charlie Rose appearance was that in India most people don't really know any language, although too many claim they know English and many other regional languages.
> ----------------------
> Yes. My sense is that there is a big difference between spoken knowledge of several Indian languages including English (very common) and true literacy in them, especially the degree of literacy required in order to read literature. Many of the younger generation being educated in English-medium schools no longer read in their own mother tongues, even if they do speak it at home. (Of course, where would they have the time, unless they took it as an exam subject? They are too busy cramming for exams, both in school and in after-school private tuition sessions.) To the extent that there is a resurgence, though, with parents signing their nursery-school children up for special after-school lessons in their mother tongue, I suspect it's part of a Hindu nationalist/regionalist thrust. Just a guess based on some limited observations, though.
>
> Josna
>
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