Author: Madhu Purnima Kishwar
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: September 15, 2006
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/12663.html
Suggestions, both private and official, have inundated the Moily Oversight Committee on OBC reservations 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 English-based 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 family owns, if there is no good English-medium 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
