English - Language Bridge or Language Divide?
The question that has been troubling Indian intelligentsia for quite some while.
Why couldn't we have a national language like China which has even more people and a greater area?
Why is English, or the popular modified local version Indish, the language to communicate across the various Indian states?
Why couldn't we use some indigenous language like Hindi or Sanskrit if we wanted a common language?
Padam Shree Javed Akhtar was answering these questions in a public gathering at IIT Madras in January 2003. He said - "In this dynamic world where knowledge and science is the primary form of wealth, a language has to be flexible and dynamic to be able to survive. A language has to keep adding new words to describe the new inventions, discoveries and ideas. It should be expanding so as to be capable of describing ongoing research. Hindi or other Indian languages are not doing that. Thus, English has become our language of academic discourse. Young Indians will find English more suited for their future lives as it will help them to describe their times. Hindi will not have enough expression to match the things of future."
It is not that Indians and Chinese have to learn English to be able to communicate with the west. If India and China decide to force the world to start using their language, they might be able to do so after some time, by virtue of sheer force of their numbers and growing stature. But their languages are slow evolving and they depend on English a lot of times to move forward in describing new ideas. Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and a lot of other languages are far ahead of Hindi in this regard, but still there is a long way to catch up with English.
In the few days that I have been in UK, I have often come across the compliment that you learn languages pretty fast from people of various nationalities. I thought may be it comes naturally to us Indians. Most of us are at least bilinguals.
Yesterday, I was talking to this British friend of mine, Ball Williams (Will). He was curious that "why was English (Indish) the common language in India?". My answer was in taking a parallel to the European situation. Most Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu, Marathi are spoken by a population spread over an area bigger than most European nations and spoken by more people than most European languages. Read this to know better. The common language across Europe is English and so is it in India. Quite naturally so. The first time when a diverse Indian plethora was united in a formation that resembles the current concept of Indian nation, it was due to the Imperial forces (Raj). It was the first time that people from all over the India felt the need to learn a common langauge to communicate with a central government. Raj gave us our "first common language" and hence, Indish is our common language. It will be quite futile to expect Hindi to do the same job. If we wanted that, the Hindi Rulers should have done what the Raj did before them, they should have united the country. Language evolves by ease of use, not by an measure of patriotic and cultural coolness. Will was quite impressed by the statistics that we ourselves ignore so very often. I never thought about these statistics until he asked me this obvious question. It is very easy for North Indians to feel frustrated when they can't use their Hindi to communicate in south. The same north Indian wouldn't feel the frustration while talking to a Spanish guy with a broken English. The frustration that we so often find justified and take for granted, is letting a regional indignation creep into our otherwise unprejudiced and secular minds. Its feet stands on a soil of blatant ignorance of largely telling statistics staring into our face.
Okay, lets say English is not that bad. After all Urdu also came from the influence of Invaders and we have accepted it so warmly. Why not make India a one language nation and kill the regional divide? "Why not do it like China?"- as the popular Indian herd mentallity statement goes these days. In China, when Mao Tse-tung rose to power, he brought about the Cultural Revolution. He made Mandarin (Chinese) the compulsory common language. So he killed two birds with one stone - regional divide and regional diversity. With democracy, at least our regional diversity has survived. That is something that we are very proud of. IITs get a very diverse population with no special effort. Even the much revered IVY schools like Harvard and Columbia make an conscious effort to get diversity, even at the cost of merit at times. Respect for diversity is a tradition in India. This is the most important tradition that we have to preserve, more than the arranged marriages and saarees.
Thus, we should let the masses to choose their language and wait until a common language evolves with growing education and literacy. We still have a good reason to preserve Hindi and other regional languages. Our regional languages are much more qualified to describe our lives, the Kachoris, the dosas, the ishq, the mohabbat, the sati, the harijans, the kudiyan..... List is long. They are much more apt when describing the Indian emotions. So, the hindi fundamentalist who are advocating abolishing English from our education have a more costructive job left to them than obstructing scientific education. They have to fight hard to spread the beauty of Hindi Literature. I am sad that most of my Indian batchmates can't read Hindi books. Lets preserve our languages. Let us youth work for preservation when we become fathers and mothers. The opportunity is in our hands - Carpe diem.
Jai Hind.
The question that has been troubling Indian intelligentsia for quite some while.
Why couldn't we have a national language like China which has even more people and a greater area?
Why is English, or the popular modified local version Indish, the language to communicate across the various Indian states?
Why couldn't we use some indigenous language like Hindi or Sanskrit if we wanted a common language?
Padam Shree Javed Akhtar was answering these questions in a public gathering at IIT Madras in January 2003. He said - "In this dynamic world where knowledge and science is the primary form of wealth, a language has to be flexible and dynamic to be able to survive. A language has to keep adding new words to describe the new inventions, discoveries and ideas. It should be expanding so as to be capable of describing ongoing research. Hindi or other Indian languages are not doing that. Thus, English has become our language of academic discourse. Young Indians will find English more suited for their future lives as it will help them to describe their times. Hindi will not have enough expression to match the things of future."
It is not that Indians and Chinese have to learn English to be able to communicate with the west. If India and China decide to force the world to start using their language, they might be able to do so after some time, by virtue of sheer force of their numbers and growing stature. But their languages are slow evolving and they depend on English a lot of times to move forward in describing new ideas. Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and a lot of other languages are far ahead of Hindi in this regard, but still there is a long way to catch up with English.
In the few days that I have been in UK, I have often come across the compliment that you learn languages pretty fast from people of various nationalities. I thought may be it comes naturally to us Indians. Most of us are at least bilinguals.
Yesterday, I was talking to this British friend of mine, Ball Williams (Will). He was curious that "why was English (Indish) the common language in India?". My answer was in taking a parallel to the European situation. Most Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu, Marathi are spoken by a population spread over an area bigger than most European nations and spoken by more people than most European languages. Read this to know better. The common language across Europe is English and so is it in India. Quite naturally so. The first time when a diverse Indian plethora was united in a formation that resembles the current concept of Indian nation, it was due to the Imperial forces (Raj). It was the first time that people from all over the India felt the need to learn a common langauge to communicate with a central government. Raj gave us our "first common language" and hence, Indish is our common language. It will be quite futile to expect Hindi to do the same job. If we wanted that, the Hindi Rulers should have done what the Raj did before them, they should have united the country. Language evolves by ease of use, not by an measure of patriotic and cultural coolness. Will was quite impressed by the statistics that we ourselves ignore so very often. I never thought about these statistics until he asked me this obvious question. It is very easy for North Indians to feel frustrated when they can't use their Hindi to communicate in south. The same north Indian wouldn't feel the frustration while talking to a Spanish guy with a broken English. The frustration that we so often find justified and take for granted, is letting a regional indignation creep into our otherwise unprejudiced and secular minds. Its feet stands on a soil of blatant ignorance of largely telling statistics staring into our face.
Okay, lets say English is not that bad. After all Urdu also came from the influence of Invaders and we have accepted it so warmly. Why not make India a one language nation and kill the regional divide? "Why not do it like China?"- as the popular Indian herd mentallity statement goes these days. In China, when Mao Tse-tung rose to power, he brought about the Cultural Revolution. He made Mandarin (Chinese) the compulsory common language. So he killed two birds with one stone - regional divide and regional diversity. With democracy, at least our regional diversity has survived. That is something that we are very proud of. IITs get a very diverse population with no special effort. Even the much revered IVY schools like Harvard and Columbia make an conscious effort to get diversity, even at the cost of merit at times. Respect for diversity is a tradition in India. This is the most important tradition that we have to preserve, more than the arranged marriages and saarees.
Thus, we should let the masses to choose their language and wait until a common language evolves with growing education and literacy. We still have a good reason to preserve Hindi and other regional languages. Our regional languages are much more qualified to describe our lives, the Kachoris, the dosas, the ishq, the mohabbat, the sati, the harijans, the kudiyan..... List is long. They are much more apt when describing the Indian emotions. So, the hindi fundamentalist who are advocating abolishing English from our education have a more costructive job left to them than obstructing scientific education. They have to fight hard to spread the beauty of Hindi Literature. I am sad that most of my Indian batchmates can't read Hindi books. Lets preserve our languages. Let us youth work for preservation when we become fathers and mothers. The opportunity is in our hands - Carpe diem.
Jai Hind.
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