English is the language of social mobility in India and its rise has been good for the country, keeping regional parochialism at bay and possibly containing separatism. But Government and society must ensure that its popularity does not come at the cost of Indic languages
There was a huge furore recently when, in what appears to be a classic case of misunderstanding, the new Government’s decision to promote Hindi on social media was seen by some language revolutionaries as an attempt to foster Hindi across the country. Immediately, assorted BJP-bashers crawled out of the woodwork attacking the Government, and the latter’s response was ham-handed to say the least. Until our instant gratification electronic media moved on to their next ‘controversy’, this was the topic of the day.
However, during the controversy several points were lost beneath the high decibel screaming and shouting. First, there has to be no doubt that English has, for all intents and purposes, become the leading social and transactional language in India. This is not the case of a century-and-a-half old English newspaper trying to promote the language; it is a fact in this heterogeneous country.
Hindi is not the mother-tongue of a majority of Indians. Your columnist’s mother-tongue is Bengali, the second-largest spoken-tongue in the Indian subcontinent. The BJP itself should realise this, after crucial breakthroughs in Assam and Karnataka. Strangely enough, Hindi’s promotion is seen as quasi-imperialist in certain parts of the south, not least by rabble-rousing politicians.
India has seen a dramatic increase in the number of English speakers, evident in the success of Indian authors writing in English such as Chetan Bhagat. While there is no conclusive empirical data to back up this statement, there is little doubt that English is the fastest-growing language in India. It is almost certain that Hindi-chauvinist politicians in north India have invariably sent their children to schools that use English as the language of tuition. But there is a class gap as well. English content dominates the Internet, whereas, regional languages dominate television.
A lot of this is stating the bleeding obvious. However, it is crucially important that the Union Government promotes Indic languages — and not just Hindi but much, much more. This is not arguing that English is a bad influence. India is not a small country like Israel that it can stipulate and revive the use of a language, as the Jewish nation has done in the case of Hebrew. However, there is a huge risk that a generation of Indians can, and will, grow up with a poor understanding and comprehension of their own languages whether it is Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati etc. We risk losing the ability to be bi-lingual at the very least; it is not surprising to find people today who can easily speak multiple Indian languages.
An English education has never been more seducing. English is seen as the language of upward social mobility in India. However, while the rise of English is a good thing — it has kept regional parochialism at bay and possibly contained separatism — it should not be at the cost of Indian languages.
While Union and State Governments have set up commissions for the promotion of Indian languages and in some cases even taken the dubious decision of teaching only on the local language at Government schools, they have failed on certain counts. Take computerisation, for instance. India is one of the sole large countries in the world where regional language keyboards and fonts are not shipped out as standard. Some of the blame goes back over two decades when the Government of the day failed to make Indian language fonts part of the global Unicode standard. In fact, regional language fonts were seen as a money spinner for the Government.
In contrast, the Government of Bangladesh mandated keyboards and software with Bengali support, which is why there is so much Bengali-language content on the Internet. It is true that as Internet access goes deeper there has been a rise in the availability of regional language content; however, unsurprisingly this has been more due to private media than the Government.
Even more surprisingly, American technological giants like Apple and Google have played a key role here. The Apple iPhone can, at the switch of a button on its keyboard, change from the latin script keyboard to one in Devnagari. Google has a service called Transliteration which allows users to type on a latin keyboard and get the output in an Indic script. That said, Google does not natively offer Indic scripts on its Android devices, although some manufacturers are adding that as an extra feature. Users can also download Indic language support.
Yet, if one were to judge from the millions of jokes that do the rounds over text messages, and increasingly on messaging applications such as WhatsApp, even the bawdy jokes in Hindi, Punjabi or other Indian languages are written in the latin script. Heck, Hindi movie posters usually have the title written in the latin script, Bollywood movie acronyms are also latinised — ‘DDlJ’, ‘HAHK’ and so on and so forth.
There is a huge risk over here which has not been elucidated strongly enough. Nations, not very far from ours, while retaining their language, have lost their scripts — Bahasa in Indonesia, Malay in Malaysia and Tagalog in the Philippines are good examples. Reading Hindi, written in the latin script, is not uncommon for certain politicians. India remains exposed to the risk of losing its scripts — maybe not in the next five or 10 years, but perhaps over the next 20 years.
There are multiple ways to redress this right now, and none of them involving taking down of English. Increased language tuition in schools make students more proficient in reading and writing in their mother-tongues and possibly a second Indian language. The Hindi (or language) exam at the board-level or even the one given by Delhi University (and others) should not be one that students should just aim to pass. Bi-lingualism and tri-lingualism has to be encouraged, if for no other purpose than the basic fact that people who speak multiple languages have been proven to be smarter in tests. Speaking many languages should be seen as something ‘cool’ for kids, and parents should also realise that.
The second part is to market regional languages. It is unfortunate that they are seen as ‘uncool’; they should not be. Bureaucratic mandates imposing languages are self-defeating because they invariably attack English. English is an Indian language for all intents and purposes. India has a deep and immense cultural heritage of languages, one that is unparalleled in the world. It is something to be immensely proud of. Yes, a non-native language, so to speak, has become the de facto language of India, but we should not forget our own tongues.