Why does English outpace vernacular languages?

Karthik Venkatesh

A few years ago, the fabled entrepreneur and the founder of that middle-class dream and place of aspiration, Infosys, the redoubtable NR Narayana Murthy spoke about how English offered a competitive advantage that his own native language, Kannada did not offer. He was quite content to do away with vernacular-medium education in preference to English medium education, he said. This raised the hackles of many scholars who stated their obvious discomfort with such a position and were appalled that such a public figure as Narayana Murthy had gone public with such a statement. 

Today, things have come to a dangerous tipping point. English has completely invaded our lives and sensibilities. Regular pleas for the resurrection of Indian languages abound. Decidedly, English has become a marker of socio-economic privilege and in that sense, it is more than a language in today's India. It is a symbol of aspiration and of having “arrived”. And in a manner of speaking, it is the wrong kind of symbol. Indian languages have become identified with backwardness and English with modernity. It's a significant loss. It would not bode well for our society to lose these languages, which is the way we seem to be headed.  Also, given that English was implicit in the imperial project makes it even more problematic that it should occupy such a pride of place in a post-colonial society. Yet, it would be wise to unpack what lurks beneath an otherwise benign-sounding term “vernacular”.  In doing so, it might become clearer why it would be a half-truth to view English as something of a boa constrictor that is consuming the Indian vernaculars. While many nativists might want to imagine otherwise, the way our regional and linguistic identities have been constructed is as problematic as the creeping influence of English on our lives. And often, this has resulted in a form of violence that is as serious as the violence that the pre-eminence of English is doing to Indian languages. 

The construction of “Hindi” is a case in point. Many would like to believe that Hindi is an ancient language. Yet, many scholars have opined that Hindi's so-called “ancient” splendour is a matter of opinion. It is only possible if languages allied to Hindi are included in its ambit. It's a fact that the languages that Hindi seeks to “own” — Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj and others — were historically separate languages. Their proud body of literature is now part of the Hindi canon. This has embellished Hindi's status as an ancient language and in pursuance of the nationalist discourse, a Hindi has been constructed that has reduced these proud tongues to the status of “dialects” of the Hindi 'standard' language. To construct an acceptable standard, these allied languages have been denied their very identity. 

The implications that this has for education are as serious as the effects that English-medium education has on Indian vernacular sensibilities. What happens when Bhojpuri is subsumed under the Hindi category of languages? The medium of education of the Bhojpuri speaker becomes Hindi. The textbooks she has access to are also in Hindi. But, the Hindi of the textbook is alien to her. Its grammar, its morphology, its sentence construction are all alien too. Yet on paper, she is being taught in her purported “mother tongue” and the state can crow about its untiring efforts to preserve the local language, culture and idiom.

Many other Indian languages have played a similar role in their regions. Related languages have been reduced to the status of “dialects”. In popular telling, dialects are inferior and local as opposed to the “standard” form of the language which automatically becomes the benchmark against which the many forms of the language are measured against. The mania for standardisation in the pursuit of a mythical “pure” form of the language has served the purpose of silencing a significant section of the people whose only crime is that their mother tongue is a non-standard version of the language. 

The notion of a standard language is also irrevocably tied in with casteist and communalist leanings as well. In many places, the Hindu high-caste version of the language is held up as the standard. Lower caste versions are termed impure and ill-suited to the creation of the standard version of the language. There is a hankering after introducing Sanskritic words and a resultant marginalisation of words from tribal languages. Non-Indian words from Persian and Arabic are anathema. 

Often, what passes for the standard is an artificial construction.  The Sanskritised Hindi that is the norm in government documents and other sarkari outpourings is a case in point. The Hindi of the streets is a rich language that is happy to draw from many sources. Sarkari Hindi is a creation of committees who meet in air-conditioned rooms and have nary a concern with the everyman on the street. Their objective is the relentless pursuit of a golden age that supposedly once existed. 

In such a context, is it surprising that many Dalit writers and academics hold up English as a language of liberation? When a Dalit's language is denied its place in the rarified environs of the Sahitya Akademi and other sarkari institutions that have been created to serve the vernaculars, why should it surprise anyone that the Dalit chooses English in preference to the standard form of his mother tongue? English guarantees upward mobility and a certain masking of one's origins. Even after learning the standard version of his mother tongue, the Dalit's caste identity is unlikely to be forgotten. By learning English, these reductionist identities can perhaps, be transcended. Equally, English enables the marginalised to compete in the market and enables attainment of personal liberation that knowledge of the vernacular, loaded as it is with very many prejudices, does not. 

It is all very well to beat our chests about the pitiable state of our mother tongues. But it is hypocrisy to merely term English as the villain of the piece and refuse to introspect on the tortured history of our own vernaculars. That English is overtaking Indian languages is undeniable. Equally true is the argument that the market has much to do with this. But, buried beneath this truth is an unequally undeniable truth. The custodians of our mother tongues have marginalised and alienated many people in the foolish pursuit of a standardised and pure language. We cannot hope to recover the pre-eminence of our mother tongues without the support of all sections of the people. That support will not be forthcoming in the current scenario.

Our vernaculars must now re-imagine themselves differently. They must be accepting, nay, celebrative of the language's many forms and learn to appreciate the beauty of these forms. This hankering for purity must be consigned to the rubbish heap. Else, they will perish and it will be nobody's fault but their own. 

The writer, a freelance writer, is an editor with a publishing firm.