When I was 12, one
day, my class-teacher announced that anybody who spoke in Malayalam would be
fined 50 paise. Excited by the challenge, we secretly passed notes in Malayalam
or during recess and lunch hour, sat in silence or mumbled a few words to each
other in English, not knowing which of us the teacher had appointed as the
“spy” to note down the names of those who talked in our mother tongue, so that
the next day she could call them out in class. This policy would help us
improve our “spoken English”, she had announced. We did not care back then.
Almost a decade later,
as I read the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind: The
Politics of Language in African Literature, I was shocked to learn that 60
years into freedom, a public school in Independent India was following almost
the same policy that British imperialists had followed in colonial Kenya. As a
child, Ngugi writes, the cost of speaking in his mother tongue Gikuyu was
corporal punishment, or wearing plates around the neck with slogans such as “I
AM STUPID”, giving birth to a culture of humiliation similar to what I had
experienced, in less severe yet no less serious forms. While one can claim that
the goals of the two policy-makers were different, one aiming to colonise the
minds of its subjects and the other attempting to (apparently) provide a tool
for economic mobility, the psychological and sociological effects of these
policies are the same: a sort of linguistic violence that leads to social
marginalisation.
Emerging from my own
humiliating experiences as a child growing up, it is by no means a limited
phenomenon. I realised that tens of thousands of school-going children,
especially from minority communities, knowingly or unknowingly undergo this
experience. The situation in the
classrooms in the country, partially derived from the unequal colonial
treatment of languages, in general is complex: 1,652 mother tongues have been
identified by the 2001 Census, and 234 of these mother tongues have more than
10,000 speakers. These mother tongues have been grouped into 122 languages of
which 57 have more than 1 million speakers. Of the 122 languages, only 26 are
used as mediums of instructions in primary education.
Less than one per cent
of tribal children have the opportunity of learning in their own languages.
Most schools in towns and cities use English as the medium of instruction from
first grade itself.
Less than one per cent of tribal children have the opportunity of learning in their own languages. Most schools in towns and cities use English as the medium of instruction from first grade itself. Thus, substantial populations of children who join schools encounter an unfamiliar language, and statistics show that 25 per cent of them face issues in the early stages of schooling due to this.
Further, while my own
experience with linguistic colonialism was related to English, perhaps an
equally, if not more, dangerous threat looms in the form of Hindi imperialism.
In India, Hindi has taken on a role akin to Swahili in Ngũgĩ’s Kenya, which was
standardised and popularised by the colonisers at the risk of obliterating
other regional languages. Therefore, the fight for preserving our mother
tongues is a dual fight against both a Hindi imperialism as well the social
marginalisation rising from the emphasis on English.
***
In his book Ngũgĩ puts
forward compelling answers to the questions of language, colonialism and
neo-colonialism. “The choice of language and the use to which language is put
is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural
and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe”, he writes
in the context of a decolonised Kenya still haunted by the continuing forces of
imperialism or neo-colonialism.
He was deeply
influenced by the Afro-Caribbean philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon who
himself was concerned with issues of decolonising the mind and language, and
the psychological effects of colonialism which results in the self-division of
a person into two: black and white identities. As he writes on the example of
Antilles, the mastery of French and the adoption of French culture give a
person power and a sense of being a “real human being”, in other words, white.
Language, which was a
crucial vehicle of power, was disseminated through schools to spiritually
subjugate the colonised. Ngũgĩ writes: “Berlin of 1884 was effected through the
sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by
the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the
battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom.”
After the declaration
of a state of emergency in 1952, as the nationalists’ schools were taken over
by the British, English became “the language” in Kenya. At school, speaking
local languages brought about humiliation and punishment. Using English was, in
contrast, rewarded.
Formal education was
limited in scope, primarily focusing on English and Swahili, the latter taught
until the fifth grade before switching to English, to the detriment of the
pupil. The national exams in the eighth grade required proficiency in English
and so did secondary school entrances, severely hampering educational
opportunities for the natives. Inadequate skills in English led at best to
low-paying jobs and inter-ethnic communication was rendered ineffective, as
English was “the official vehicle and the magic formula to colonial elitedom”.
To Ngũgĩ, language is
both a means of communication and a carrier of culture. For communication,
there exists the language of real life (“relations people enter into in the
labour process”), speech that emulates this life aiding communication between
relations and, finally, the written word, which symbolises the spoken, being a
much later historical development than the other two. In a society where the
written and spoken languages are the same, Ngũgĩ argues, there is harmony
between the three elements. In other words, the child’s experience of life and
his or her language is closely linked.
The second
characteristic of language as a carrier of culture emerges from the need to
transfer from one generation to another the values and experiences accumulated
over time. These values and experiences form people’s identities, since as
Fanon said, “[t]o speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to
grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume
a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.”
A community or a person’s
sense of self is derived from its language to a great extent. Language
functions in any culture as an “image forming agent in the child’s mind”,
giving her visions of her own society’s history. (Thiong’o, 1987). In fact, a
group’s culture and language become almost indistinguishable from each other.
Transmitting these images through the spoken or written word language equips a
person to creatively confront the reality of the world she lives in. To sum up in Ngũgĩ’s own words, “[w]ritten
literature and orature are the main means by which a particular language
transmits the images of the world contained in the culture it carries.”
Having explained the
centrality of language (one’s own language) to a society, Ngũgĩ’s continues to
depict how colonialism transforms this “harmony” into “disharmony”. At the
basic level, the colonial goal was to control the “language of real life” for
its own material gains. The colonialists aimed to achieve this by controlling
the psychological universe of the colonised, by deciding how people perceived
their place in the world (a function that language performs); in other words,
to gain economic control through cultural control. On the one hand the
colonised culture was undermined and on the other, by dominating the local languages,
colonial language and culture was elevated. To the African child in Kenya,
English was a foreign “language of real life” and learning it resulted in
alienation from the immediate environment and the spoken language at home.
Ngũgĩ terms this phenomenon colonial alienation. At school, the teaching of
purely British geography, history, music and so on deepened this dissociation.
Ngũgĩ had grown up
speaking Gikuyu (or Kikuyu) at home, adept in the language’s nuances, magic,
music, stories and values, but had to abandon it for English at the secondary
level. Consequently, there was a split between the language of his education
and the language of his culture. Therefore, writing in Gikuyu was an important
part of his personal anti-imperialist struggle in Kenya. He wanted to transcend
the colonial alienation and use the undervalued African languages to create
links between African literature and the struggles in the real lives of
peasants, linking the two distinct linguistic spheres in his person.
Decolonizing the
Mind was his farewell to
writing in English. His later play Ngaahika Ndeenda (“I will marry when
I want”), an innovative form of theatre where audience participation and
improvisation blurred the barriers of traditional theatre, was written in
Gikuyu and was produced with the villagers and the Kamiriithu Community
Education and Culture Centre of Kamiriithu, who had kept their mother tongue
alive in speech and orature even as the government suppressed its written
expression in schools.
In the play, the
peasants and workers, in their own language, portrayed a history that was their
own to claim—a history of revolt, drawing heavily upon the Mau Mau rebellion,
the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army and especially the events during the Emergency
in 1952. They were given a voice; their minds were being decolonised, asked to
move out of the colonial discourse. They questioned the contemporary realities
of Kenyan society sharply. When the play was staged for the first time in 1977,
however, despite huge popular success, it was banned by the government, and
Ngũgĩ was arrested and spent a year in jail. As he writes: “A writer who tries
to communicate the message of revolutionary unity and hope in the languages of
the people becomes a subversive character. It is then that writing in African
languages becomes a subversive or treasonable offence with such a writer facing
possibilities of prison, exile or-even death.”
He was released as an
Amnesty International prisoner of conscience and currently lives in the US. His
exile is testimony to the importance of language and its decolonisation to a
society.
According to Louis-Jean
Calvet, the French linguist, there are two steps involved in linguistic
colonisation: the “vertical step” of socially spreading the language, first
among the upper classes and then among the lower, and the “horizontal step”
where the colonial language spreads geographically, from the capital to the
villages. It is my belief that in the process of spreading the English language
in India, the post-independence Indian government has played the most crucial
role in the “horizontal step” and even in later stages of the “vertical step”.
The attempt of the
British to create a small English educated Indian administrative class required
them to limit access to this education while the Indian government, from the
very beginning, hailed this language as a “gift”, a “window to the world”, a
practical tool beneficial to all Indians. With this idea in mind the
government’s stance regarding the spread of English education has been more
utilitarian than the utilitarian imperialists. English education, in the newly
independent country, further, would help the state to create disciplined
citizens under its nationalist ideology and the method for achieving this
socially exclusive space includes, at the higher levels, various tests such as
the NET (National Eligibility Test), the civil service examinations, the
conventional university curriculum and so on.
The privilege given to
the language in schools and universities, by parents and by teachers, by
entrance examinations and job interviews, makes it inherently exclusive. Just
as in Ngũgĩ ’s colonial Kenya, English in India today is considered the magical
tool that can empower you, which is why “spoken English” classes and guides to
learn English are thriving industries separate from the educational arena. An
interesting example to note is that of Kerala, where the government’s attempts
to reinforce mother-tongue education in government schools was criticised by
the Marxists as a bourgeois attempt to keep the poor from gaining the material
benefits of English education. The two images shown below are daily sights in
newspapers and billboards and demonstrate the nature of the public demand for
English education.
Knowledge of English
gets you jobs, it gets you respect in public; it even saves you from
humiliation. When I joined school, after a few weeks, my class teacher of first
grade contacted my mother, surprised that I didn’t know English alphabets (she
did not care than I could read, write and speak in Malayalam very well). The
fact that a six-year-old freshly joining school is supposed to have attended
pre-school and learnt enough English was not apparent to my parents and they
were taken aback. Later on, I remember, as a 17 year old, joining a new school
and being made fun for my many mispronunciations and accented English. I
remember how this made me reserved, how I avoided all instances of speaking in
class and how I generally came to be termed as “quiet” and “shy” by my
classmates.
I learnt of
Wordsworth, of Shakespeare, I read To Kill a Mockingbird, my mind
wandered around the moors of Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, I recited Auden
many times and finally wrote my higher secondary examination not knowing a
thing about Indian authors, either in English or in my mother tongue. Looking
back, I can see that I was lured by the worlds that English offered me. I
sought them, just as the colonised Indian intelligentsia sought English-medium
schools and English literature curriculum from the British. And I know what it
has cost me: alienation (which I am not sure is reversible) from my culture,
from my home and its people, its literary traditions.
This is one level of
concretely cultural, social and economic marginalisation by portraying and
emphasising English as the key to economic success. Another kind of linguistic
imperialism has prevailed in India as well. Though after the 1965 anti-Hindi
agitation in Tamil Nadu against rendering Hindi as an official language there
was constitutional resolution to the issue, the language’s hegemony has
continued to spread through cultural platforms. The political milieu that has
emerged in the last few years provides fertile soil for making Hindi hegemony
official. The mother tongues of the country are at peril from the dual
onslaught of English and Hindi. How can we fight this?
***
An innovative and
inspiring example of a system attempting to change the concerns mentioned so
far is that of the Multilingual Education Programme in Odisha and Andhra
Pradesh in tribal contexts. Multilingual Education, with its use of two or more
languages as mediums of instruction in subjects other than the languages themselves
in order to cultivate multiliteracy amongst the students, was implemented here.
Usually the cycle of
language disadvantage slowly deepens the cleavage between indigenous community
knowledge and textbook content, ceating a content barrier children on top of
the language barrier, leading to their socio-economic deprivation.
Usually the cycle of language disadvantage slowly deepens the cleavage between indigenous community knowledge and textbook content, ceating a content barrier children on top of the language barrier, leading to their socio-economic deprivation.
At its core, the MLE
project aims to bridge this gap between the knowledge that the mother-tongue
speaking children carry and the official curriculum, creating an effective
learning space where fair opportunity is given to children of all linguistic
backgrounds to excel.
As Fanon said, the use
of a language entails the supporting of “the weight of a civilization”, and the
marginalisation of a language is nothing but the marginalisation of a
civilisation and the true inclusion of all civilisations, all communities by
making education multilingual sets the ground for a truly multicultural
education system.
MLE is a tool for
social justice and providing equal opportunity to children by ensuring
children’s Linguistic Human Rights besides providing a psychologically sound
early education. It helps children escape the vicious cycle described above
where the status of your language in popular perception as the colonialists and
nationalists have created it (some languages like Hindi are encouraged more and
receive more support in terms of institutionalisation) determines your
socio-economic future.
It gives a place to
the child’s community a place in the world by validating its indigenous
knowledge and practices, by not hindering his or her identity formation at an
early age and by not interfering through a foreign language. In MLE, the first
language (L1) is taught at the primary level before transitioning into the
second and third languages (L1, L2) at later stages. Studies have proven how
children who have a strong education in their mother tongue and later
transition to L2 do better in terms of academics. Since the human brain
develops its fundamental cognitive skills at a younger age, the MLE programme
focuses on children between grades 1 and 5.
Most of the time the reason for the bad performance of children in their
L2 and L3 is early exit from the mother tongue system. Therefore, an effective
MLE programme would use such activities at a later stage while focusing on
strengthening their base in the mother tongue at earlier stages.
How can an educator
deal with multilingualism in a society where the practicality that English
provides in terms of material upliftment governs the minds of millions of its
youngsters? How can the need for
multilingual literacy and society’s demand for English education be balanced in
the classroom? MLE programmes in India have failed primarily because of the lack
of teacher-training. How can a teacher, then, deal with the issue of
multilingualism in the classroom? After all, there is only so much change that
top-down policies can achieve.
As mentioned earlier,
one of the most important components of multilingual, multicultural education
is linking the culture and community of the student to the classroom
curriculum. This can be done through projects, archiving and other methods of
recording, exploring and bringing into the classroom the folk-tales, rhymes,
stories, measurement systems, and so on, of the communities in their own
language and basing other subjects such as mathematics on it. This slow
movement into English scientific education from local traditions does not
alienate the student from his or her real life immediately but transitions
experience into knowledge. For example, “mathematising” folk games, using local
price systems to learn equivalence and barter systems, and so on, have proven
to be effective. This makes the transition from home-life to the classroom
easier for the child since he or she comes to school with a plethora of prior
knowledge and language from past experience.
The MLE system has a
“Read Together” programme that further transcribes this knowledge and makes it
an accessible data source to students, teachers and community members cementing
the gap between oral and written traditions, between the classroom and the
community, between the official curriculum and indigenous knowledge. The
article titled “The Selection of Culturally Compatible Classroom Practices” by
Cathie Jordan talks about similar practices in Hawaiian classrooms in terms of
making teaching methods being more in tune with the cultural practices of the
society concerned.
As far as textbooks
are concerned, there has been a drive to create resource materials such as
glossaries, dictionaries, bilingual textbooks or books in the mother tongue.
However, these have not added successfully to the classroom atmosphere because
of the way in which these are taught: rather than an interactive setting, the
system falls into a rut of the teacher dictating lines and students repeating
after him or her. Communicative, oral, interactive linguistic practices in the
classroom would be more effective than textbook-teaching.
An interesting idea is
that of the “language-hour” where every day, children speak freely in their
mother tongues with their peers without the emphasis on understanding for an
hour. This can be a fun activity if planned properly.
An interesting idea is that of the “language-hour” where every day, children speak freely in their mother tongues with their peers without the emphasis on understanding for an hour. This can be a fun activity if planned properly.
However, given the
current situation in India, rather than promoting mother tongues, the first
step should be towards the prevention of the subtraction from mother-tongue
learning. Before we can celebrate multilingualism, monolingual practices must
be stopped. Therefore, at this point, stress should be laid more on teaching
English in a manner that does not negate the culture, language or intellect of
the child rather than teaching mother-tongues more effectively. Further, there
should be a balance between English learning and mother-tongue education as
well. In this context, the suggestions made by Lisa Delpit in the book “Other
People’s Children :Cultural Conflict in the Classroom” regarding language
diversity in classrooms become relevant. The teacher’s aim in teaching language
and teaching in a language should be to encourage the student’s holistic
language development rather than merely writing ‘answers’ to the questions
posed. General discussions about how different communities and cultural groups
speak in a TV show or a movie can be an effective starting point to discuss
such issues in the classroom.
The most interesting
example given in this book is of the use of theatre for effective learning.
Drama and theatre become a platform where the student or the child can put
aside her real personality and assume another. Therefore, this is a space most
conducive to teaching the English language in the most non-interfering way. The
memorising and playing of a character who speaks English gives the child skills
in English-speaking and thinking, all the while being a “character”. The child
attempts to and can be encouraged to speak as the character would have, in
Standard English, and does not feel threatened by the teacher’s corrective
methods. The instructors can further choose bi or tri-lingual plays in the
later stages to make the transitions between languages easier for the child. A
child who has learnt to speak the language through theatre is thus both
economically mobile as the society wants and is not alienated from his or her
mother tongue.
Besides the cultural
importance of mother tongue education, many studies have pointed to its
concrete impact on students’ educational dispositions. That children learn
better in their mother tongue has been established by many studies, especially
those conducted by UNESCO. Further, Save the Children published a report
authored by Helen Pinnock, where it points out that mother tongue-based
multilingual education is fundamental to the development of learning skills in
general, which in turn results in student success at school and lower dropout
rates. A study conducted on primary school children in Cameroon named the Kom
Language Project found that the students taught in their mother tongue acquired
basic numeracy and literacy faster than their counterparts who were taught in
English. Interestingly, the former group was better at learning English as
well, for they had a basic foundation in their mother tongue.
As far as long term
economic benefits are concerned, a study conducted by Bethlehem A. Argaw in
Ethiopia (where Amharic was the dominant language of instruction) on the
effects of language of instruction on reading skills and early labour market
outcomes found that the reading skills of those who had access to mother
tongue-based primary education increased significantly and that this system
reduced the reading skills gap between Amharic and non-Amharic mother tongue
users in half. “The improved reading skills seem to translate into gains in the
labour market in terms of the skill contents of jobs held and the type of
payment individuals receive for their work”, writes Argaw.
In a world of rising
communal, linguistic, regional and other kinds of intolerance, especially in a
country like India, linguistic equality in classrooms and in society is an
extremely important element. Being accommodative of languages is being
accommodative of cultures. In India, as fascist, fundamentalist forces arise,
attempting to link the language to specific religions and impose their language
on the citizens in other parts of the country, systems like MLE are most
crucial to battle these hegemonic forces. As dialects and spoken languages are
endangered and are fast becoming extinct, a programme for multilingualism in
the classrooms can further preserve the linguistic, cultural and civilizational
diversity of the world, building a better, harmonious, sustainable future for
all its habitants, which must after all be the primary goal of all education
systems.
is a postgraduate scholar of Modern History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
