[lg policy] India: Bengali to English: The Left Front policy of banning English from primary school boomeranged to produce young Bengalis with little Bengali,

[Harold Schiffman]

Bengali to English: The Left Front policy of banning English from
primary school boomeranged to produce young Bengalis with little
Bengali, says Anasuya Basu

My daughter has read all of Maugham and Hardy already. She is an avid
reader of English literature and tops her class in the subject,”
boasts a mother of a 12-year-old. Then she adds with an indulgent
smile: “But I just can’t get her to read Bangla books.” The lady in
question was speaking recently, but middle class and upper middle
class Bengali mothers, and fathers, have been making this statement
for decades now. It increased in frequency after the Left Front
government banned English from junior school in 1982.

Bengali is steadily losing ground to English. A generation of Bengalis
from Calcutta, sent to English-medium schools following the government
decision, has grown up without much Bengali. Much less Bengali, at
least, than the English-medium educated Bengalis of previous
generations possessed. It is not uncommon for someone from this
generation to call a Kumartuli idol-maker “mritoshilpi” instead of
“mritshilpi”, though the former would mean a dead artiste and the
latter someone who makes clay idols.

Later generations are following suit. It will be interesting to survey
how many young Bengalis going to English-medium schools know the
Bengali alphabet well. How many English-speaking Bengalis today read
Bengali books? “I cannot read Bengali at the same speed I do English,”
says 27-year-old Kaberi Das, a content writer. She has studied in an
ICSE school. “If I had to read a Bengali novel I would read it in the
original but it would take a long time,” she confesses. She is used to
reading English newspapers and magazines and her Bengali “is just out
of practice”.

Many read Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series in English translation. The
vast repository of Bengali literature is out of bounds for many of
this generation. And sometimes, the entire Bengali family converts to
English. At a sabeki Durga puja this year in a north Calcutta
household, a sabeki lunch of khichudi, beguni, labda, luchi,
phoolkopir torkari and chatni was served by women from the family in
sabeki wear, but in English. “Can I serve you one more luchi? A little
more torkari?” a lady wearing a red-bordered taant the traditional way
kept entreating.

School shutdown

That Bengali will be replaced by English to some extent is expected.
“The Bengali language is being cornered by English,” agrees poet and
teacher Sankha Ghosh. This is somewhat inevitable in the age of
globalisation. Adds Ghosh: “The same trend can be observed in
Bangladesh, where Bengali is the official language.”  But for Bengal,
Ghosh also blames the policy of banning English from classes I-V for
the current predicament. At that time scholars like Nihar Ranjan Ray,
Sukumar Sen and Pramathanath Bishi had voiced their protest.

Soon Bengali-medium schools saw a dip in enrolment as there was a
scramble for English-medium schools because of the Left Front policy.
“Bengali-medium schools witnessed a 50 per cent dip in enrolment,
about 250 Bengali-medium schools shut down in Calcutta in a hurry.
Till date 2,500 Bengali-medium schools in the state have closed
because of low enrolment," says Kartik Saha of West Bengal Primary
Teachers’ Association, an SUCI-affiliated primary teachers’ body.

Consequently, the standard of teaching Bengali started to decline,
feels Ghosh. In the English-medium schools, where Bengali mostly
enjoyed second-language status, the importance of the vernacular
seemed to lessen as the stress on learning English became greater.
Parents wanted to keep up with the times and see that their children
had the advantage of English.

Teachers contradict this. Says Devi Kar of Modern High School: “We
have been under the West Bengal board till recently and Bengali has
always been taught with a lot of care here. Even after switching to
ICSE, we put a lot of stress on the vernacular languages and encourage
children to use them.” Attributing the declining standards to the
common perception that Bengali was a “useless language”, Ghosh says:
“Bengali was not a language that would come into much use. So what was
the point of teaching it well?”

Bengal was always in favour of learning English and following its
example. Writer Nirendranath Chakraborty points out how English had
started influencing written Bengali even before Independence. "Way
back in 1946, a Bengali newspaper wrote ‘Swadhinata ekhon koromordan
durotte’ . That is a poor Bengali transliteration of ‘Independence is
just a handshake away’. The correct expression should have been
‘swadhinata ekhon nagaler moddhe’.” Chakraborty speaks of another
Bengali report that used the word “kumirasru”, a literal translation
of “crocodile tears”. “The correct usage is ‘maya kanna’,” he adds.

But from the Eighties there was no stopping the takeover by English.
Ironically, erstwhile education minister Kanti Biswas points out that
the state government’s English ban, based on the recommendations of
the Himangshu Bimal Mazumdar committee constituted during the Congress
government in 1975, was “in the interest of the young minds for whom
the study of two languages simultaneously would be unscientific and
tortuous.” A number of committees had been formed since Independence
to formulate English language studies in the state. “Starting from the
Harendranath Choudhury commission in 1948 to the Ashok Mitra
commission in 1991, all had recommended that the study of English
should not start before Class VI. Even a Unesco report says the medium
of instruction for primary teaching should be the mother tongue,” says
Biswas.

The same Left Front government turned its own decision on its head in
1999 on the recommendation of the Pabitra Sarkar commission and
started teaching English from Class I. Today, the government has even
started opening English-medium primary schools of its own, says
Biswas. “It was for the sake of globalisation and the age of
computerisation so that our children could retain the competitive
edge,” he says.
In the intervening years, students got away without learning Bengali.
Since there is no enactment by the government making it compulsory to
study Bengali, students in ICSE and CBSE schools can choose not to
study Bengali at all.

Low on the ladder

Bengali was socially downgraded. A hierarchy of languages grew in the
state where English was established as the language of power and
Bengali, a “subaltern” language. The story is different in the
villages. Bengali still survives and survives well beyond the urban
precincts, in the mofussils and villages. Says Pabitra Sarkar, the
erstwhile vice-chancellor of Rabindra Bharati University: “The English
bias pertains to a very narrow segment of society, the upper middle
class, which can afford to go to English-medium schools. Only 15 per
cent of the schools in the state are English-medium,” he says.

The real story, Sarkar believes, lies with the vernacular media. “Look
how Bengali channels are proliferating, there are more of Bengali
newspapers. The channels are being viewed internationally.”  And the
NRIs are doing their bit to preserve the language. There are 13
Bengali magazines that are published from New York. Australia and
Toronto, too, have a fair share of Bengali papers. Ghosh feels this
was a result of identity crisis among the NRIs. “The Banga Sanskriti
Sammelan and such things are attempts to cling to their roots. They
are caught in a dilemma, not belonging there and also not belonging
here,” says Ghosh.

He concurs with Sarkar that Bengali is thriving outside the city. But
it goes on to justify his view of the urban-rural divide in the
language practice. He recalls an incident in the city that shows how
Bengali is viewed in the city. “I was at a bookshop in front of
Lighthouse. There were two youngsters browsing books. They conversed
in English between themselves but when they turned to the bookseller,
they switched to Bengali,” recalls Ghosh. It was another thing that
the bookseller was not a Bengali.

Even in social dos, Bengali and Bangaliana seem to lose out to
English. Wedding venues proclaiming the marriage of a Bengali groom
and bride are written in English rather than Bengali. So is born the
legend Chandrani weds Santanu. “Why can’t we have Laboni Akhil er biye
at least at a biye badi,” asks Ghosh. “Look at the road signs and
directions in the city. They are in English. The other day I found the
police hauling up two very poor citizens for not following the
directions in English,” he adds.

“There is no contradiction in learning both English and Bengali. Why
does one have to learn one language at the cost of the other?” asks
Nirendranath Chakraborty. Bengal is unlike places that grow on the
strength of their own language. Countries like Japan, China, France
and Germany have been able to progress without the help of English,
but it is the legacy of colonialism that has stood in the way of
Bengalis respecting themselves.

Bengal is unlike some other Indian states as well. In Tamil Nadu,
English and Tamil are both compulsory in schools. In Maharashtra all
schools must teach both Marathi and English. But Bengal does not have
a dual language policy. “When we asked the government to make it
mandatory to learn Bengali as second language in these schools, the
government couldn’t succeed in implementing it,” says Ghosh.

As Ghosh says in one his poems: “Banglae ek Kolkata achhe bote, she
Kolkatae Bangla kothao nei”. Roughly translated, it means there’s a
certain Calcutta in Bengal, but in that Calcutta there’s hardly any
Bengali (the language).



-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to
its members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner
or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents.
Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal,
and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message.
 A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well.  (H. Schiffman,
Moderator)

For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to
https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/
listinfo/lgpolicy-list
*******************************************

_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list