Sure, it could have been election-time rhetoric, but Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s grievances against the use of the English language and English-medium education—both real and imagined—touch a chord. Last week, Yadav said that if his party won, it would abolish ‘expensive education in English’. He is against ‘the compulsory use of English language in education, administration and the judiciary’. Does learning and working in English mean we neglect regional languages and literature? It’s an old debate—do we make a ‘foreign’ language, alien to most Indians, our nation’s lingua franca? We asked the experts. Edited excerpts:
Mahesh Elkunchwar
Marathi playwright, Nagpur
By excluding English, we would be shutting the doors on vast resources of language, literature and knowledge. And, like it or not, it has become India’s link language.
Illustration by Jayachandran / Mint
I have taught English in college for 35 years and the problem is that our system of education is bad and we don’t have good teachers. I came from a small village to Nagpur as an 18-year-old and used to pronounce “chaos” as “chay-os” because that is how my teacher pronounced it.
It was around 1845 that Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar, the first great essayist in Marathi, called English vaghiniche doodh or the tigress’ milk. It is only after we drank it that we realized we had to be independent. Chiplunkar, incidentally, insisted that he would write only in Marathi, but also said that we should learn English to acquire knowledge.
I know people and families in Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur where both English and Marathi is spoken with great ease—not a word of Marathi is used when they speak English and vice-versa. This attitude—don’t learn English— will only foster laziness; at this rate they’ll say you don’t have to know Marathi or Hindi to join the public services.
Sunil Gangopadhyay
Author, Kolkata
We can’t do without English because it is a global language that liberates us from the confines of regionalism. As a writer who has never thought of writing in any language other than Bengali, knowing English has enriched my work. I think in Bengali and express myself best in the language, but my fiction is better because of my exposure to English literature. And without English I would only be read in Bengal.
Yadav's statement rings hollow because he is talking about a ban that has already failed. In 1981, the Communist government in West Bengal (under Jyoti Basu) banned English in all government-run schools. Millions of Bengalis, who lacked the means to improve their plight anyway lost job opportunities to the middle-class youngsters who went to private schools and learnt English.
Raghu Dixit
Lead singer, The Raghu Dixit Project, Bangalore