Deprivation’s real language
Good jobs are shut to those with poor English. Reservation policy doesn’t
recognise that India is one of the very few places in the world where
pharmaceutical companies do not bother to write the names of the medicines
they produce in any Indian language. Imagine what it means for those who are
barely literate.
MADHU PURNIMA KISHWAR
S UGGESTIONS, both private and official, have inundated the Moily Oversight
Committee on OBC reser vations in institutions of higher education. The
commerce ministry’s call for a liberal education order is the latest in a
long line of varied advice. But all the suggestions have one thing in common
and they share this with the reservation policy itself: the flawed
assumption that deprivation has only two facets in India – being born in a
caste or tribe listed in government records as backward or depressed, and/or
being born in a poor family.
In reality, the single most influential factor that determines access to
elite educational institutions, and hence to important avenues of economic
and social advancement, is command over the English language. The advantage
that Englishbased education provides often trumps the traditional divides of
caste and class.
However, despite the dominance of English in our education system for over a
century, proficiency in English is unattainable for most and creates
conditions of unequal competition for the vast majority. More than a century
and a half after English came to be imposed as a language of governance and
for the elite professions, no more than 1 per cent of our people use it as a
first or second language. The rest find all avenues of advancement firmly
shut before them. A person who has failed to acquire this magical skill may
be a first-rate scholar in Marathi, Hindi or Assamese but that will not make
that person eligible for anything more than a peon’s job even within the
linguistic boundaries of Maharashtra, UP or Assam – states in which these
languages are spoken by millions of people.
No matter how high your caste, no matter how much land your fam ily owns, if
there is no good Englishmedium school within easy reach of your village,
your children will end up at the bottom end of the job market. That is how
the sons of the Jats of Haryana, Punjab and UP, who constitute the
landowning and political elites in these two states, end up as bus
conductors and drivers if their families reside in villages that do not have
good English-medium schools close at hand. That is how so many Brahmins end
up as street vendors when they migrate from poverty-ridden villages that do
not have reasonable quality English medium schools within easy reach.
Consider this: there are no medical or science and technology journals in
any of the Indian languages, including those that are spoken by millions.
India is the only country where no social science journal is published in
any of the Indian languages. All “eminent” historians write their histories
of India in English. All “eminent” sociologists publish their micro and
macro level studies of Indian society in English. For those who are not well
trained in handling the English language, all the new knowledge being
generated about the past and present of Indian society is inaccessible.
There are no serious books or journals available to them in the subjects
they study or teach. A large proportion of them have never read anything
other than cheap student guidebooks, many of which are in turn written by
poorly educated people. Consequently, most of those who have MAs and PhDs to
their names, especially those from small town universities, are so poorly
educated that they cannot write five correct sentences in the language in
which they have to submit their thesis. Not surprisingly, high status
scholarly conferences on Indian history, politics, sociology and even Indian
religions are mostly held in American, British, even Australian and German
universities, rather than in Kurukshetra, Patna or Meerut universities.
Scholarly studies and translations of Indian epics and dharmic texts are
also mostly done by Western scholars. As a result, their biases, their
interpretations, their critiques become ours. We begin to view our
successes, our failures, and our problems and delineate even our aspirations
through the eyes of outsiders.
No medical school conducts courses in any of the Indian languages even
though India has one of the oldest and most sophisticated traditions of
medical knowledge and expertise. The medium of instruction and examination
in all our schools of architecture as well as the course content is in
English, even though India has an exceptionally well-developed and distinct
architectural tradition of its own. No business management school would
condescend to teach in any Indian language even though the entrepreneurial
genius of our traditional business communities is legendary. It would be
difficult, if not impossible, to find training manuals for plumbers,
electricians or masons in Hindi, Marathi or Tamil. As a result, people who
take to these occupations end up acquiring half-baked knowledge as
apprentices on the job by observing the work of others, or by word of mouth.
India is one of the very few places in the world where pharmaceutical
companies do not bother to write the names of the medicines they produce in
any Indian language. Imagine what it means for those who are barely literate
to decipher their prescriptions and understand the nature of treatment and
medication prescribed to them. Our lawyers draft petitions in English on
behalf of even those clients who do not know a word of English. Court
proceedings, especially at the higher levels, are all carried out in
English.
Unfortunately our political leaders do not consider this new source of
inequality and disempowerment worth any attention because attacking this
source of deprivation would require serious thought and effort There are no
quickfixes here.
The writer is a senior fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,
Delhi madhupurnima@gmail.com