The raging debate over elitism associated with the English language is an issue too obvious for national media to be discussing. It is a phenomenon experienced across the country, at least in India where English spitting species are actually looked at with awe and reverence.
I studied in a convent school for 12 years, thanks to which I do not have to struggle with a language which ironically rules the roost despite it being an alien tongue for most who inhabit the land. For most years of my growing up and learning in the school, English was taught with a single-minded discipline that would probably surprise even the native English speakers.
There was a sense of calculated objective as Anglo-Indian teachers differentiated the pronunciation between necessary and necessity, adolescence and adolescent and aboard and abroad. I have some pretty strong memories of my primary school and I do not remember ever having spoken to a teacher in Hindi except for the one who taught us Hindi. The teachers put the prepositions in place during the course of our speech, put words into our mouth where we got stuck and though at home we spoke nothing but Hindi, I finally managed to become good at speaking and writing the language.
There was a flip side to this development though. There were schools and there were schools. There were the ISC board and the CBSE board. There were Government schools and there were kendriya vidyalays. So over a period of time those who spoke better English began to sneer (even if not openly) at those who made errors while speaking. The ones who spoke better hobnobbed together. This was within the school on an individual level. On a collective level, our school had better English speakers than the others, so the school as a collective became a higher entity than the one where English was not taught with as much a puritan zeal as it was taught in ours.
Later on in life as well, the friendships that one forged were more on the basis of English speaking abilities of people. But was it primarily on account of the snob value associated with the language of our erstwhile rulers or simply on account of having familiarity with the same literature in English, is not for me to say. At Delhi, people from other colleges would get surprised if we managed to mouth English the Queen’s way or the King’s way, whichever it be, because they could not expect it of someone who came from a ‘behenji’ college; behenji implying salwaar kammez wearing rustic wannabes who couldn’t emit English in a way considered correct and upmarket.
I had the opportunity to live in a non-English speaking country for four months. We lived in Montpellier, a city in southern France where not a soul spoke English. I had done a basic course in French at Alliance Francaise before we moved to Montpellier, and as I struggled with comprehending the accent of the native French and gesticulated wildly, embellishing each syllable of mine to establish some understanding in the mind of the hearer, a larger truth dawned on me. I was not worried about the tense or preposition or figure of speech, or any smart idiomatic expression; I just wanted to convey what I wanted in the simplest possible way. And so it must be for people who haven’t had exposure to the English language in our country. And I had no business to judge them.
Presently I am at the helm in a school where most children come from the rural background, whose parents have moved out of villages for their jobs. Some of these children can not even speak Hindi. But we are a school which shouts ‘English medium’ on the board. When I joined the school more than a year and a half ago, I had a half-baked notion that if we continually speak to the kids in English, they would ultimately understand the language and then manage to speak it as well. As I was to learn later, we could only insert a few English equivalents of the objects and actions of their daily lives, into their vocabulary; we couldn’t really get them moving with instructions that were solely in English.
Even during the interviews, as we sat to assess the aspirants who would teach these kids aged between three and five, the interviewees who could speak English were automatically considered superior than those who couldn’t; and those who could speak it with a convent-educated accent were again considered better than those who spoke with an accent that smacked of the local dialect.
For my own children who shall be frogmarched from one small town to another on account of their dad’s job, and will clearly not have the advantage of the likes of a school that I went to, I am worried if they will learn to speak and write English the correct way. I am constantly attempting to make them speak English but to no avail. They enjoy their comfort zone in Hindi in their lives and also on television. Sometimes, I change the Hindi speaking Japanese cartoon to start speaking English. There is instant rebellion. I think it is just as difficult for them to watch the programme in English as it would be for me to watch a French film. And if entertainment comes at the cost of such consternation of having to figure out what each word means, then it’s punishment. So I relent, and the Korean Pokemon and the Japanese Doremon and the English Noddy and American Power Rangers begin to mouth Hindi the Mumbai style and Gujarati style, putting a smile back on my kids’ faces.
So as superciliousness of knowing English becomes a point of debate only because a minister (who’s studied at St Stephen’s) has expressed it overtly for another minister (who’s done his college at Hansraj), it only seems that the media is discussing the great class divide, which everyone experiences but is not big enough for discussion because it happens to the commoners. Javed Akhtar calls Hindi our roots and English the branches for us to reach out to the world. But the point remains that the have’s and the have not’s in terms of the English language will continue to have this racial divide between them, at least in India, until each individual gets the opportunity to learn the English language in a manner that doesn’t make him/her felt left out in the race of language aspiration.
