From: Veeramany.Sthanumurthy@lambada.oit.unc.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Our language education
Date: 31 Jul 1992 14:40:14 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

 Our language education
 
 As Ajay Divakaran observed in his essay "My English education" 
 linguistic differences generate (and sure enough still do) 
 some of the most acrimonious debates in India (SCI.) First 
 there was the case of the poor fellow suffering tonsorial 
 punishment for exhibiting total lack of decorum in using 
 MalayaaLam in a convent school (?) in Trivandrum. This led to 
 various fuddy-duddies defending/decrying the (nonexistent/double) 
 standards behind the intentions of moneyed mommy-daddies 
 from the land of milk and honey. Even Chandrasekharan's attempts 
 at (re)focusing the issues, ie., acceptability of immersion 
 learning/suitability of croporal punishments/ parental determination 
 of language preferences were not immune from Bengali barbs
 while missing out the (small?) side-issue of the implicit
 insult intended for the bald among us. 
 
 In the interest of equity in net-time, when I inquired a Bengali 
 if they have a V (as in Ravindranath) albeit with a smirk, I was 
 politely informed that they certainly do (in addition to the 
 omnipresent B) but they just don't discriminate vocally. He even 
 drew the letter in the air possibly (like some people who stand 
 up when talking to their boss over the phone - quite an honorary 
 gesture) but since we were communicating over a simple audio-telephone 
 he in all his AT&Tness couldn't reach out and enlighten me. His
 acute awareness of my smirk in spite of all the technological hurdles
 could not have helped. I am hoping some enlightened Bengali like 
 say Arindam will shed some light on this matter.
 
 Growing up in Bombay (more ammunition for the Raman Raghavs, but 
 what the heck - in Mulund - since it got mentioned recently in
 the context of a Maharajapuram Santhanam concert, I thought I might
 as well do my own bit - anybody from Vani Vidyalaya which started
 out in an asbestos shed I am told, in the mid-sixties? - that doesn't
 quite read right ..) I remember some discussions (!) at home about 
 sending the youngest in our household to a convent school which had
 sprouted up in the neighbourhood within earshot of our cooperative(!)
 housing society. My wife informs me that they had similar arguments
 which were settled by their practical mother, who in spite of her
 lack of proficiency in English insisted that her daughters not be
 denied of their share of  the educational pie and off they went 
 without any 'pottu's (bindi) on their foreheads to the convent school
 a mile away.  In my own family however, the bindi ban clinched the 
 issue - no convent school for my sister. Hmm..... Anyway, the 
 compromise was to send her to the English medium from KG onwards,
 as opposed to the fate of my brother and I, who had to deal with the
 crown jewel in all its glory only from the fifth standard.
 
 I don't claim to be immune from all the condescension expressed toward
 the poor Marathi medium types right next door to our school. The fact
 is, the one blind spot (in my memory of the area) is this school, as
 I realized when I was talking to my sister-in-law who drew my attention
 to the jhopad-pattis (slums) around it and the continuing use of the
 lane leading to the two schools as public toilet. To make matters 
 worse, I don't even remember the name of this school (anybody from
 there?) since we just called it the Marathi school! Of course, I
 don't claim to speak for everybody else from the school.
 
 My point is that there has always (as far as I remember) been this 
 tendency to belittle the lack of proficiency in English. Whether it is
 due to the Universal appeal of English - we saw all those Japanese
 appropriations of English (to add one more: my_car pronounced mica?) -
 or due to its widespread acceptance (are these the same things?) or 
 due to the cultural elite and the power structure is not very clear
 to me. Probably a complex mixture of these and other forces. In attempting
 to simplify the problem we are all inclined to look at the aspect
 of the problem immediately apparent to us and characterizing it as
 such. For example, there was a discussion (or a soliloquy if you will)
 on SCT about the need for education in regional languages. Some reference
 to a politician was immediately followed by the rejoinder: His kids are
 going to <insert-a-public/private-school> and he is talking about 
 regional language education for the masses. The engine promptly stalls.
 The situation is quite reminiscent of who should bell the cat. Where is
 the enlightened one putting all the eggs in one language to come from?
 
 To those of us in the US, it may be apparent that our language 
 education leaves the only-English language proficient among us
 in an unenviable position: being praised for our excellence (a
 rather generous choice of words sometimes) in English which is
 probably the only language we can best communicate in. And then
 there is the issue of accents - which I will avoid altogether.
 It seems to me therefore, that the issue of language is not 
 limited to a means of communication but also a perception of
 what kind of livelihood it is going to fetch you in the distant
 future. 
 
 Whether this was the reason why the few fellow Tamil students in 
 my (Tamil) class in high school pretty much ignored the lessons - 
 all attempts of the pool Tamil teacher attired properly in his 
 'veshti' to teach the swans to separate the milk from the water(?), 
 wish 'kaalai vanakkam aiyyaa' instead of the usual 'Good morning 
 sir' notwithstanding - except from the perspective of the exams. 
 I still remember the anguish writ large on his face at the very 
 eager questions from students barely heard from during the earlier 
 lessons regarding the possibility of questions from some of the 
 later lessons. I felt sorry for him, in spite of the notorious 
 (certainly not apocryphal) case of the Tamil student drawing the 
 picture of an elephant on being asked to 'yAnaiaip paRRi oru katturai 
 varaiga' write an essay (word-picture) about the elephant. Such is
 (was?) the state of language education I was exposed to.
 
 Perhaps, it is this tendency that finds expression in the type of
 articles we find lamenting the use of pompous/whatever words in
 the net, the tendency to make no effort to try and understand the
 other person in spite of the proliferation of technological devices
 to ease the burden of carrying dictionaries. And, as somebody else
 pointed out, the use of dictionaries is quite rare in the regional
 languages (maybe that too general) whereas every stupid-American(tm) 
 I have seen here has in addition to the mandatory photographic 
 representation of sexual preferences in the workplace, a handy 
 meaningful book.  There is a real communicator for you.

 Sthan.