AMONG the many blatant injustices perpetrated on its own people by the Indian state, the disenfranchisement of Indian languages in education is undoubtedly among the most destructive. Discussion of this question in the public realm at present has become so entangled in the neo-liberal discourse of aspiration, that the origin of the problem in the colonial character of the Indian state has been obscured. Despite the growing evidence of long-term destruction of human potential, even those who perceive the problem clearly seem to have resigned themselves to the seeming irreversibility of six decades of damage.

What gives us hope for a serious and consequential renewal of the debate on this question, however, is the fact that the question is not specific to the field of education but is a larger political one. What we observe in the educational field is merely a symptom of what is in effect a feature of the political structure.

An awareness of the anti-federal, hence anti-democratic and colonial character of Indian state design is to my mind the essential prerequisite for any effort at changing the educational system for the better. We should also keep in mind that the shock effects of precipitate capitalist development and globalization, together with the ever wider circulation of democratic discourse, have led to new experiences and altered subjectivities with the potential for challenging established common sense. Our task as educators is to develop the critical tools necessary for such a task.

As I have said in a piece published in an earlier issue of Seminar on higher education,¹ the problems plaguing education in India, and especially those related to the question of the language of education, have been extensively studied and there exists a broad consensus among educationists and other experts in the field about everything that is wrong and about what would be the right way to go about things. The paradox is that expert consensus has had little impact on the way the education system is run and the choices made by governments in the states and at the Centre.

It is not that the views of such experts are not taken into consideration at all in the framing of policy. When it comes to the language question however, there is silence regarding expert opinion. It has come to be assumed that the current situation is the result of a failure to implement policy and as the Republic ages, the possibility of a renewal of policy seems more and more remote. On the ground, for teachers at all levels, the experience of teaching is demoralizing as reports about the quality of graduates produced and the worthlessness of degrees awarded continue to multiply.

 

The reasons cited for say the mother tongue or the language of the region as primary language of education make eminent practical sense, as they usually have to do with what enables effective learning. Here expert opinion is nearly unanimous that especially early education should be in the home language or the language of the region where the child resides. The disastrous consequences for the majority of jettisoning the home language and functioning with ‘English medium’ are copiously documented. Even the British Council, which is in the business of teaching English to the world, does not disagree with this basic principle: ‘English-medium by itself brings no special magic – there is no point in teaching through English if the teachers and children are not up to it. The result is a child who has neither English nor much education and the social divide is increased.’² To repeat, everybody knows, or ought to know, that the current situation is nothing short of a wilful destruction of entire generations of children. And yet nobody in power seems to care.

 

The contrast with other countries too is striking: Graddol gives the example of Malaysia, like India a former British colony. Having replaced English with Bahasa Malaysia as the medium of instruction after independence, in 2003 the Malaysian government decided to revert to the teaching of science and mathematics through English in an effort to shore up the country’s ‘international competitiveness’. Six years later, the policy was reversed because of a perception ‘that children’s learning had suffered.’³ The contrast cannot be starker: one country keeps changing and recalibrating policy, at all times keeping in view the interest of its citizens. The other ignores all expert opinion and recommendations and allows extortion rackets to operate as educational institutions.

In dealing with this matter we are not concerned with the abstract question whether or not English is an alien language. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that English is neither alien nor indigenous, or both alien and indigenous, depending upon how we approach the question of who we are as a modern nation state, i.e. if we attend to the ontology of India. According to a normative idea of actually existing cultures as organisms with an internal consistency and an altogether organic relationship of parts to whole that cannot be violated without destroying the entire organism, English would be alien to India.

But if we attend to the political question of India as a nation state forged in the throes of anti-colonial struggle, we see immediately that this entity, India, is neither a single cultural organism nor a cluster of such organisms, but an entity of an altogether different order, one that is not coextensive with anything that existed prior to its coming into being. This entity has proven itself incapable of operating without the supplementary presence of English, a presence which, in terms of the reigning logic of global governance, is not unlike the presence of UN peacekeeping forces in less fortunate ex-colonies.

 

More recently, this historical contingency has begun to be seen as the magic wand with which an economic miracle was about to be staged. All this may well mean that English is totally indigenous to that enclosure which is India, and which is not merely the sum of its organic parts. Here the subject-object duality appears in a new guise: the subject of India is not any one of the (cultural) subjects to be found within its territories, but one that is altogether extrinsic to them, which takes these internal cultural subjects as its object. It is a set of which it cannot itself ever be an element.

But among the elements of the set are not only the cultural subjects, but also another set of such subjects – let us call it Bharat as it is often referred to – which proves unable to be the set that India is, in spite of being composed of the same elements. By one definition, Bharat is just an indigenous name for India, but the other definition, which will not be easily wished away, posits Bharat as the material substance and India as the gaze that authorizes and sustains its integrity. Between Bharat and India, there is an invisible extra element that renders the latter more inclusive than the former because it also includes Bharat in addition to the elements of Bharat.

In a variation on the patriarchal gendered gaze, Bharat is the object of the Indian gaze that does not, cannot, return the gaze. We must also note that this Bharat is itself not a real set but a phantom that is proposed by the ‘set’ India in order to register the distance between itself and its organic elements. ‘India’ will not, cannot relate directly to these organic elements, it can only do so through the mediation of its own other, Bharat. It seeks to be the virtual double of Bharat rather than a direct unmediated set of organic elements. In this way it keeps in place the illusion of a prior unity of which it is the supplemental representation.

This is also the reason for insisting on having, additionally, an Indian language as official or national language, a decision that, having served ‘India’ well in the past, is now hastening the consolidation of a Hindu Bharat. In the absence of Bharat, India would immediately betray its empty character, the fact that it is an enclosure, a camp rather than a community, a fact that is now being exploited by the politics of Hindutva. Thus India also shows awareness of its own inorganicity, its ideality. It is this gap between the legal-political entity and its cultural double that pertains to the question of language that we want to investigate.

 

The prevailing conditions decree that all societies teach their children English in addition to whatever language they function with in everyday life, in order to ensure that their citizens are not left behind in a world which is increasingly marked by global interdependency. The standard model for this is that within a nation state, there would be the national medium of instruction plus English which would be introduced at different stages during the period of primary education. This makes young people competitive on the global employment market, promotes mobility and ease of communication beyond national borders and, above all, enables access to a whole world of knowledge for which English has become, for the moment in any case, the language of record.

 

So simple a model, however, has proven nearly impossible to achieve for India, in spite of the much trumpeted fact of ‘historical luck’ which is supposed to give us an advantage over others (like China) who are trying to teach their children English. ‘In the last ten years, many countries have made large investments in English teaching. It can no longer be safely assumed that India has more English speakers than China, for example.’⁴ Why is this so? A tautological answer is often given: if we haven’t achieved this or that goal of democratic existence, it is because of our failure to do so! But what is (self)-indulgently described as failure by the governing class may not appear as such to everybody.

As the late K. Balagopal said, ‘No ruling class ever builds the nation except as a (not incidental but essential) by-product of the process of enriching itself.’⁵ Thus if a class or the state that it dominates fails to do something, this can only be because such a failure was beneficial to itself. Its own success is predicated on the failure of the projects of the revolution assigned to its executive powers. If the Indian left’s ‘understanding of Indian reality … has been seriously burdened by an ideological albatross, which is the notion that the Indian ruling class is morally required to build the nation’,⁶ it is because of the image of the bureaucracy as militants of the Indian revolution fostered by the governments of the time. But behind this façade the governing class actively ignored the primary education agenda, knowing fully well that its own privileges, earned from the colonial power and capable of substantial expansion, could not be maintained if educational opportunities were universalized.

 

In practical terms, as we observe everywhere today, the elements of the simple model outlined above are all actively present but in place of the model of which they are the elements, there is a multi-tiered system of privilege which is kept in place by an aspirational ideology. Instead of English being a supplementary resource available to all, it has become a rare and indispensable commodity to be acquired in the market at one’s own expense. Rare, because it costs money, more money than the vast majority can afford to pay, to acquire it. Rare also because although countless number of privately run ‘English-medium’ schools seem to be offering it to all, the quality of this good is rarely such as to make a difference to the capabilities of the student. (‘India does not have sufficient English-proficient teachers to deliver the programmes now being embarked on. This is a familiar challenge faced by most countries in the world which aspire to provide English to all their children, but in India the scale of the problem is greater.’)⁷

The unemployability of Indian engineers, management graduates and so on which is frequently asserted by surveys and studies is primarily due to the fact that these young people have technical skills which they can repeat as they have learnt them but not the linguistic ability with which to use them in practical situations. Indispensable, on the other hand, because without it a person’s worth is near zero, in economic but also in social terms, or at any rate universally perceived as such. For this reason, parents deprive themselves of even basic necessities to be able to pay for English medium education. Thus they effectively pay an aspiration tax with no guarantee of fulfilled aspirations, which with the state’s connivance, goes directly into the pockets of education entrepreneurs. Increasingly, in higher education, students arrive with inadequate knowledge of English and (more distressingly) of even their own home languages, which they have neglected as worthless in the quest for an elusive English proficiency and all that it promises.

I have seen university students failing to complete their programmes not because they lack intelligence or knowledge or dedication but simply because they were unable to write up their research in global-standard English. How did such a situation come to be?

 

English was mobilized to serve the class interests initially of the Anglo-phone colonial bourgeoisie of which the civil servants of the colonial regime constituted the core. Once the essential elements of the rule of colonial difference were perpetuated by this and other means, this class has continued to expand and although it still remains a fairly small minority of the population, its ability to manoeuvre the policy apparatus to serve its own ends has considerably expanded.

With the advent of the Republic, the rule of colonial difference was to end. With it would end the rule of the collectors/district magistrates, the ICS as a whole, and other sections of the colonial elite. In the years prior to independence, Jawaharlal Nehru had said as much, in no uncertain terms:

‘Whenever India becomes free, and in a position to build her new life as she wants to, she will necessarily require the best of her sons and daughters for this purpose. Good human material is always rare, and in India it is rarer still because of our lack of opportunities under British rule… Among those who have served in the ICS or other imperial services there will be many, Indians or foreigners, who will be necessary and welcome to the new order. But of one thing I am quite sure that no new order can be built in India so long as the spirit of the Indian Civil Service pervades our administration and our public services. That spirit of authoritarianism is the ally of imperialism, and it cannot coexist with freedom. It will either succeed in crushing freedom or will be swept away itself… Therefore it seems to me quite essential that the ICS and similar services must disappear completely, as such, before we can start real work on a new order.⁸

 

Nevertheless, when the time came, class interests prevailed over the revolutionary spirit evoked earlier: ‘When political power came to be definitely transferred it was expected that the politicians now in power, who had always denounced corruption under the British, would immediately take stringent measures, as in every revolution, to suppress this evil. It was also known that some of the leaders, especially Prime Minister Nehru, would give short shrift to all corrupt officials. Unfortunately, nothing was attempted. Even the services of officers who had indulged in sadistic acts of cruelty against the nationalists, beyond the ample provision of the repressive laws of the foreign government, were retained. Occasionally, such officers were even promoted.

‘No revolutionary party coming to power has ever done this. One wonders what was behind all this compromise! Was it that the Congress government, harassed by the many difficult problems arising out of the transfer of power and the Partition, did not relish the idea of adding yet another problem by increasing discontent in the services? Was it that the politicians and the members of the services often came from the same strata of society, from the same caste and families? Was it that members of the services had powerful connections among the new holders of power?’⁹

 

In the decade following the proclamation of the republic, many Congress members, among them the Gandhian educationist M.P. Desai, who took an active part in the struggle against continuation of colonial rule by other means, roundly condemned the attitude of the colonial class in using its institutional power to restrict the freedom that had been won:

‘Queerly enough the spokesmen of these pockets at present are crying out against the natural need of readjusting the place of English in our national life and education, in the name of nationalism and India’s unity through English. They forget that English India was only a microscopic minority in the great ocean of India’s illiterate crores. However, they harp on these old slogans, forgetting that the so-called unity though English was like the Brahmanical unity of a superior caste born through Sanskrit, only of English educated aristocracy lording over the millions of Indians in collusion with the order established by their English overlords. What good came to us through English was in spite of them and only as its by-product.’¹⁰

Dismantling the civil service would have been a hard blow for the colonial Anglophone elite. One can get an idea of the magnitude of this restructuring from the case of the Hyderabad state where with the annexation, the entire bureaucracy, which functioned in Persian/Urdu, was disbanded and many thousands of the bureaucratic elite lost their jobs. Language was the undoing of the Nizam’s bureaucracy. Language, on the other hand, was going to be the trump card of the colonial Indian bureaucracy.

 

Many in those early days, when substantial freedom was still a possibility, clearly perceived that the colonial class was a counter-revolutionary force acting to preserve its own position at the top. But only some, like M.P. Desai and Ram Manohar Lohia, understood that the English language was the Trojan horse in its strategy of subversion. We are not accustomed to think of something like language as a possible site of class conflict. This is a privilege we normally accord to the economic domain. But political thought has more recently begun to perceive that there are no privileged sites for waging and winning or losing the class struggle.¹¹ In the transition from a colonial to a modern republican form of government, especially in a polity consisting of a multitude of nationalities, it becomes all the easier to sustain the structural bilingualism characteristic of empire as political form. By contriving to institute this variation of paduka rule at a time when the vast majority of the constituents were illiterate and in no position to raise questions, the colonial bourgeoisie effectively rigged the ostensibly democratic state form in its own favour for the foreseeable future. It was the scarcity value of English that enabled it to perform this function, as Desai notes when he compares it to Sanskrit. As such there was no question of English being introduced as a universal second language in a manner that would contribute to the levelling of (educational) opportunities and quality.

 

A legal scholar who has examined ‘the puzzle of ICS continuity’¹² explains it by reference to a perception that the civil servants were neutral experts with no political affiliations. Burra’s solution to the puzzle is that in the civil servants’ own perception, they were merely loyal servants of the state, a view shared by the leaders of the national movement. While yesterday they served the British masters loyally, today they were ready to switch loyalties and serve the national government with equal loyalty.

While these perceptions may well have figured in the justifications offered, Burra does not seem to notice the irony here. The bureaucracy offers its services in a strictly mercenary capacity, thus admitting its dissociation from the republican ideals of the nationalist leadership. And the latter was evidently satisfied with this! For the traditional mandarin (or mantri) communities of India, such neutrality was of course a necessary survival strategy given the instability of monarchic power. By basing the explanation on this, the bureaucrats and the nationalist leaders were effectively denying the new Republic any kind of formal break with the monarchic and imperial forms of rule. That in doing so they spoke the truth about the nature of the new Indian state is another matter.

 

But the retention of the Anglophone state apparatus did not in itself guarantee a decisive victory in the struggle. Further consolidation had to be secured and once again an instrument employed by the British to secure their own administrative pre-eminence proved useful. This was the ‘concurrent list’. By shifting education to the concurrent list, the Centre was able to organize for itself (i.e., the Central class) an educational sector insulated from the democratic process. This ensured the continued image of English as the ultimate means of social mobility within the borders of the new Republic. The colonial aspirational pyramid, which the Republic was meant to destroy, was restored.

Once this was accomplished, the attempts by the states to construct national polities within their own boundaries had to reckon with the lure of the centralized IAS and other English-enabled routes to prosperity. While some states succeeded in building their own language cultures, others found themselves unable to withstand the challenge. In due course, languages came to be reduced to endangered cultural property to be protected by state initiatives, sometimes leading to absurd situations such as languages claiming classical status which had to be bestowed by the Centre.

The advent of television and new media has to a great extent revitalized the national languages but this has so far had little impact on the pyramid. Changes wrought by economic developments have not found reflection as yet in the political order, but one can observe some restlessness in society as a new prosperous section experiences the colonial cultural order as an obstacle to its social ambitions. Armed with purchasing power but deprived of English, this class nevertheless lacks the means to convert its daily frustrations into political awareness. The shift from English as social privilege to English as part of a thoroughly reconstituted educational programme, however, is predicated on some such awakening, and the ability of state level political groups to read and respond to the stirrings.

Social inequality has been a common feature of all political structures that the world has seen till today. However, the Republic was supposed to have introduced a difference. While pre-Republican polities were inequality structures through and through, the Republic, though still characterized by inequality, was supposed to be founded on a symbolic or political equality. The fact that every person’s vote counts for one and no more regardless of economic or social status, is a mark of that foundational equality but not the basis. Language is the more secure, real medium of symbolic equality and no nation state has so far managed to invalidate this. By dispensing with this most fundamental of requirements, and yet persisting in characterizing India as a nation, the central apparatus has merely misused its proficiency in English to dupe the Indian public, primed by colonialism to be in awe of privilege.

The recent success of Hindutva has once again brought the question of India’s federal character to the foreground. It is to be seen whether the debate this time around can get beyond the issue of material resources and administrative powers to those immaterial (or ‘intensive’¹³) design features which alone can ensure democracy.

 

Footnotes:

1. ‘Democratizing Knowledge: A Symposium on Reforming Higher Education in India’, Seminar 624, August 2011.

2. David Graddol, English Next India: The Future of English in India. British Council, 2010, p. 92.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., p. 91.

5. K. Balagopal, Ear to the Ground: Selected Essays on Class and Caste. Navayana, Delhi, 2011, p. 49.

6. Ibid., p. 48.

7. Graddol, op. cit., p. 94.

8. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography. Penguin Books, 2004, pp. 462-63.

9. J.B. Kripalani, ‘Deep Roots’, Seminar 8, April 1960, pp. 24-26.

10. M.P. Desai, Language Study in Indian Education. Navajeevan, Ahmedabad, 1957, p. 10.

11. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Verso, London, 1991.

12. ‘The extent of constitutional safeguards for civil servants indicates not only the profound suspicion with which the British establishment viewed the prospect of ceding some degree of control to Indian legislatures; but also the fears of the ICS at the prospect of working under Indian political control – a fear which perhaps reflects their own perception of their role in the suppression of the nationalist movement.’ Arudra Burra, ‘The Indian Civil Service and the Nationalist Movement: Neutrality, Politics and Continuity’, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 48(4), November 2010, pp. 404-432.

13. Scott Lash, Intensive Culture. Sage, London, 2010.