[Lgpolicy-list] [lg policy] India: Beyond the language tussle

Sat Dec 6 14:03:50 UTC 2014

Beyond the language tussle  ·
      inShare2
  <http://www.thehindu.com/tag/arts-culture-and-entertainment/428/>
 <http://www.thehindu.com/tag/higher-education/951/>
  <http://www.thehindu.com/tag/language/546/>
<http://www.thehindu.com/tag/sanskrit/557/>
 It might be more productive to see the ongoing Sanskrit versus German
controversy as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent
problems of our education system, not all of which have to do with which
languages children get to learn

The ongoing Sanskrit vs. German controversy
<http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/german-taken-off-third-language-slot/article6600359.ece?ref=relatedNews>
is being seen by some as the sign of a sinister conspiracy to change
educational options, and by others as a much-needed corrective to bring
back “Indian culture” into the schools. It might be more productive to see
it instead as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent
problems of our education system, not all of which have to do with which
languages children get to learn. The attempt to implement the teaching of
Sanskrit in schools seems to be supported by a remarkably uninformed view
about what sort of language policy we require today. And this is not to say
that previous governments had any greater insight into how to handle either
the medium of instruction problem or the issue of how many languages to
teach and at what level.

*Education budget cut*

Far more disturbing than the Sanskrit-German debate was the news last week
that the new Central government has decided to cut Rs.11,000 crore from the
Education budget (*The Hindu*, “Social sector funds slashed
<http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/social-sector-funds-slashed/article6637180.ece>,”
Nov. 27). The favouring of physical infrastructure over “the social sector”
(health, education, social security, nutrition, etc.) disregards the
intangible factors that go into strengthening knowledge bases and the
setting up of infrastructure in the first place. One of the implicit
casualties of the massive cut in the Education budget is a proposed 12th
Plan programme to revitalise Indian language resources in higher education.
The rationale for this programme was that generation of knowledge in Indian
languages would not only create new intellectual resources but transform
the teaching-learning process in positive ways. The access-equity-quality
triangle emphasised by policymakers could effectively be strengthened
through a focus on Indian languages. Since the default medium of
instruction at the tertiary level was actually a local language rather than
the “mandatory” English, the deliberate blindness of successive governments
to this fact was depriving students across disciplines of good quality
resources. This linguistic divide affects the majority of tertiary students
in the country. Thus, investing in Indian language materials at the basic
and advanced levels is a sustainable (not to mention cost-effective) way by
which Indian higher education could be strengthened.

  “The long-term objective should be to make the student bilingually
proficient, so that he is able to bridge effectively the conceptual worlds
of the local and the global.”

We should note here that the emphasis is not on how many languages the
student learns but on whether s/he is developing cognitive capabilities.
This too has been a serious blind spot in modern Indian education over the
decades, right up to the recent May 2014 Supreme Court judgment on the
non-enforceability of mother-tongue instruction. The Court invoked the
right to freedom of speech and expression in this instance to say that
children and parents could choose the language in which the child wanted to
be educated. With all respect to the learned judges, one wonders if they
sought expert opinion in the matter or merely relied on their common sense.
If they had done the former, they might have found out that worldwide
research has proved that the most effective teaching and learning happens
through the use of the mother tongue. If exposing a child to English at a
very young age is dictated by opportunism and a skewed sense of what makes
social mobility possible, this choice flies in the face of language and
education research as well as the most enlightened pedagogic practices
available. If mother tongue or Indian language education is not practical
today, it’s because of the enormous lack of good educational resources in
those languages, another need that state initiatives have failed to address
adequately.

*Parallel with China*

Since, these days, China is the favourite country of comparison for us, we
should pay attention to the fact that students in China start learning
English in the fourth standard and for the most part study all their
subjects in Mandarin. In my experience, the English fluency of the average
Chinese undergraduate ranges from functional knowledge of English to
complete proficiency, with an emphasis on reading and writing rather than
speaking. Even those with functional knowledge are far more capable of
dealing with the world of higher education today than most students I
encounter in India. The single most important variable here would have to
be that of mother tongue instruction combined with later exposure to a
language that gives students access to resources not so readily available
in Chinese. It’s a different matter that Internet use is so heavily policed
in China. However, every person I know inside and outside the university
has figured out how exactly to access the resources they want, which is
much more than can be said of Indian students who don’t experience
government-imposed firewalls. So, again, is the ability to navigate the
digital domain related to language skills or critical skills?

*Lack of clarity*

The inability to create a systematic curricular exposure to language and
critical skills is perhaps what prompts periodic outbursts like the Central
Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) directive to replace German in Kendriya
Vidyalaya schools with Sanskrit. Combined with this lack of application is
what can only be seen as the extraordinarily resilient prejudices about
what constitutes “Indian culture.” We routinely tend to forget that this is
a modern concept, mobilised by colonialist as well as nationalist
perspectives on our society. Lack of clarity about what education is for
leads to muddled thinking about what should be done in the space of
education. We should not confusedly believe that the primary task of
education is to pass on ways of living — we do that in almost every domain
of social engagement. The task of education is to foster and strengthen
cognitive capacities that can equip students to produce original knowledge
on their own terms, for which we are likely to need bilingual and
trilingual education. Debating whether we should learn Sanskrit instead of
German is a distraction from the real tasks that lie ahead. We need to
reorient the language debate to focus not on learning the language (any
language) but learning how to think.

*Language use analysis*

The CBSE circular of June 30, 2014, instructing its affiliated schools to
observe ‘Sanskrit Week’, introduced the topic by stating that “Sanskrit and
Indian culture are intertwined as most of the indigenous knowledge is
available in this language.” It’s shocking to see that people in the
business of education are unaware about the fundamental histories of
language use in our country, and that mere assertion can pass for accurate
information. Apart from the facile collapsing of “culture” onto
“knowledge,” the circular’s statement about Sanskrit as the language of
indigenous knowledge appears as a sweeping generalisation when you look at
it from the point of view of medical, artisanal or performing arts
knowledge forms. Even if we stay with just one example, that of indigenous
medicine, and even if we stay with the venerable Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR) and its Traditional Knowledge Digital Library
(TKDL), a quick overview of the books listed would show that the languages
of indigenous knowledge include Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Tamil in addition
to Sanskrit. The library currently lists 137 Tamil books on Siddha, for
example, with 157 Sanskrit books on Ayurveda. Some of this knowledge is
also available in Malayalam, like the important works on *vishavaidyam*.

Coming to contemporary language use in India, it would be important to note
that just as modern Kannada, Marathi or Telugu for example have drawn on
Sanskrit to build their vocabulary, they have equally strongly drawn on
other languages. Here are some sample Kannada words that reveal the
original language coiled inside the present day usage: *adalat*, *vakila*,
*javabu*, *ambari*, *gulabi*, *sipayi*, *taakathhu*, *firyadu*,
*bunadi*, *najooku
*(Persian/Urdu). This kind of sampling could be replicated for any
contemporary Indian language, and an exhaustive mapping exercise might
reveal fascinating borrowings and transformations that gesture well beyond
language use.

Most of our languages cannot sustain teaching and research in the context
of the modern university and its disciplines. We need to create critical
vocabularies across several conceptual domains. Students need to learn the
ability to distinguish between levels of meaning, to
contextualise/translate, and to create new concepts that capture the life
of our societies and our institutions. And in doing this, they have to
learn to draw on multiple linguistic resources.

Ensuring the entry of Indian language resources into the mainstream of our
higher education system is a long-delayed project. By bringing these
resources into a national educational structure, we will be (a) expanding
the analytical abilities of these languages, and (b) making the curriculum
more relevant to the society we live in. The long-term objective should be
to make the student bilingually proficient, so that he is able to bridge
effectively the conceptual worlds of the local and the global.

*(Tejaswini Niranjana is with the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher
Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.) *

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/beyond-the-language-tussle/article6665681.ece

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