Nisha Susan: Read the signs, make policy that includes people
In a misguided quest for ‘global job potential’, a new petition to make American Sign Language mandatory in India is a battle for the linguistic dignity of the deaf community.
When my friend was in school in Delhi, his family put him in Russian class rather than Hindi because they thought that it would give him an advantage in a world where the erstwhile USSR was a superpower. He was happy to not do Hindi but sad that he was not in French where the cool kids were. When he was 14, he took the family car for a secret joyride and in a moment of bravado, gave a drunk, middle-aged Russian man a lift. He successfully figured which hotel to pour the man out at—the only time the Russian ever came handy.
Around the same time, I was a high school student in Oman and my classmate was taking private Arabic lessons because her family, which had come up the hard way at home in Assam, thought their impressive daughter had a future in the UN. Back in the 18th century, a nine-year-old Raja Ram Mohan Roy too was sent from Bengal to Patna to study Arabic and Persian. In more recent times, there has been plenty of overlap in the populations of people being urged to spurn all Chinese products as well as the people taking Mandarin tuitions. Not surprising since China looms large and neon.
Up north in Canada, folks joke that when you quietly put your five-year-old in French immersion school, it is because you want to give her everything she needs to become prime minister someday. The particular game of teen patti that parents play with global realpolitik is… global. And just about as reliable. Which brings us to the question of a strange public interest litigation (PIL) filed recently in the Supreme Court by a Mumbai-based activist asking to make American Sign Language (ASL) compulsory in education for the deaf in India
In late August, the Free Press Journal reported that several associations representing the deaf and hard of hearing have raised alarm bells because the PIL was bizarrely asking for compulsory ASL at a time when Indian Sign Language (ISL) is well-established and meaningful for the Indian deaf community. The associations wrote to the Chief Justice of India pointing out that around the world, different nations have their own culturally rooted sign languages.
I have long been fascinated by the varieties of deaf cultures around the world but fascinated is not the same as educated. For instance, I didn’t know a superb detail that the National Association for the Deaf (NAD) pointed out. The Indian Sign Language uses two hands unlike ASL, which uses one hand. This perfectly illustrates the statement from the All India Federation of the Deaf that “just as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and other spoken Indian languages represent cultural pride, ISL represents the linguistic dignity of deaf Indians. Allowing ASL to operate alongside ISL poses a dual threat as it risks colonising minds and potentially leads to cultural erasure."
The NAD estimates that India has as many as 18 million deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The gap in census data leaves us at a bit of a loss but again the estimates from 2014 was that one out of five deaf children in India was out of school. Making ISL more popular is a solution promoted by all kinds of activists and policy nerds. Abhimanyu Sharma, a language scholar, pointed out a while ago that the stigma around sign language and the preference of “oralism" in mainstream schools is harmful for deaf students. Poet Abhishek Anicca, for instance, always has a sign language interpreter present at his live performances and book launches.
During the covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, researchers noted the piercing tragedy that some deaf adults newly stuck in the family home were lonely because their family members had not learnt sign language. Which points to the idea that more folks across the board (hearing and deaf) should learn ISL rather than throw the dice and pray for an America lottery—an America which, I have to point out, is busily connecting paracetamol with autism.
Disabilities studies scholar Shilpaa Anand once wrote, “That merit is not accessible to persons with disabilities is not merely the point; what is under-examined is how merit is made up of ableist structures." In their polite interventions, the Indian deaf associations made allowance for possible good intentions in the alarmingly ignorant PIL which aims to “unlock global job potential." Just weeks later, they could have pointed out the problem with this manner of teen patti—no one is really prepared for the moment when a generation of Indians trained from age 12 to make it in California have to suddenly consider H-1B earthquakes.
Meanwhile, if one wants to look at what happens when you thoughtlessly implement policies without including the communities affected, one has to merely look at China which is keen to give its deaf populations better access to information. In 2022, Chinese television began providing sign language translation through digital avatars during live broadcasts. According to Zheng Xuan, a Chinese academic, the country has over 20 million deaf people and sign language is widely used but not widely taught. Sign language reflects spoken and written Chinese differently. As is expected in a large country like China, there are plenty of regional variations too, none of which is reflected in AI-generated translations. The AI sign language avatars were doing the equivalent of your NRI cousin trying to speak Malayalam—causing hilarity and confusion. A perfect moment, as Xuan says, to repeat that classic slogan of the disability rights movement—“nothing about us without us".
Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot To Invent Facebook And Other Stories. She posts @chasingiamb
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