Lord Macaulay, in his infamous minute on Indian education (2nd February, 1835), said to the British parliament that:
“We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”
Granted that, as he says, the ‘vernacular’ languages are not fit for science and technology; granted that English is superior; but why should the people be converted to English tastes, opinions, morals, and intellect? Or even and ‘foreign’ religion? It is not known. Isn’t it enough that people learn the trade in English and maintain their own culture? To pursue a degree in the U.S.A., as many Indians aspire to these days (in fact, for the past several decades), is it necessary to rock to the tunes of pop and all that jazz? Frankly, I don’t think it is necessary. We don’t have to westernize ourselves to be up-to-date with the developments of science and technology. Is it necessary to wear minis and midis, and tank tops to do scientific research or software development? It beats me...
That the young generation rocks and rolls to the tunes of Michael Jackson, who was passé a decade ago seems strange to me. But that is what one of my students said: guys, Michael Jackson is God. And we rock. Some such thing. The seeds of this are sown again by Lord Macaulay:
“Learning English is closely associated with the study of English literary pieces in the Indian subcontinent. Even as many adult students in short term English courses may not care for the literary benefits of learning English, many more do not feel satisfied with just learning the language and using it only for practical ends. They do, indeed, seek to understand, enjoy and appreciate what English literature offers them. School curriculum always blends learning English language with learning and enjoying English (and American) literature.”
Luckily, there aren’t a huge number of these Macaulay’s orphans in our midst.
However, English has been taken up for instrumental (practical – utilitarian) purposes by millions of Indians and that helped us to stand beside the most advanced nations in the world today. Nattarin, an ethnic Chinese girl from Thailand, whom I met in Singapore circa 2000 said once, with a wistful air: “you guys are so lucky, to be colonized by the British; (Alas,) we have never been colonized and my English is so bad.
The Singapore Story
Singapore is a small island state, of about 265 square miles (at when the waters recede, as Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew put it humorously in The Singapore Story), is one the most westernized of the Asian countries. Japan is probably more westernized of all; China too is pretty much westernized. All the schools and colleges in Singapore teach in English medium; but the people have a heavy accent. Even someone who graduates from a good college in India, after schooling in the mother tongue medium (for instance, yours truly), speaks better English than the average Singaporean who goes through 15 years of English medium instruction.
Figure that out yourself.
Finnish Pride…
The Finnish people are supposed to be very individualistic. When it comes to family bonds, they care less for their kin than the Americans. They take great pride in their language and their celebrated poets. There are statues of poets at every intersection: when I asked why they have so many poets’ statues, they said it is because they have nothing else to celebrate but their poets and their language.
And their commitment to Finnish gets in the way of their learning English; for them English is just another language (and it is vastly different from their own). They tend to pick up Swedish, because there is a sizeable Swedish population.
Interestingly, the Swedish speak better English because of similarity with English. The Finns have a bilingual dictionary on every computer and write with the help of the translations they obtain from the dictionary. Sometimes, even their spoken language is influenced by their translational-ese: like one guy was telling me that he was wasted the previous night. After looking it up in the dictionary, I realized that being wasted means being drunk.
The bottomline: I learnt a new word!
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