Its a different feeling to be able to use English only as a tool and nothing more than that. This has been my experience since I came to Italy. Here English is just a tool for communication. Nobody is considered, unlike in India, super intelligent just because they speak English well or nobody is considered an idiot just because they don't speak English well. I am not against the language but I feel its wonderful to learn English just as we learn French or German and use it when necessary, rather than feeling that "English flows through every cell of my body". I have seen many students of India being "branded" as incapable, just because they cant speak English. What I noticed here in Italy is that people speak English confidently with mistakes. They are comfortable as long as you are able to understand what they are trying to say. It may not be true everywhere in Europe, but back home, we turn bright intelligent students into shy, not-so-confident, stage-fearing students by emphasising that they cant speak English well. Hours and hours of training go into learning the mere grammatical constructs of the language which has led to the degradation of many Indian languages. I was not fortunate to learn Tamil because I stayed mostly outside Tamilnadu but somehow everywhere I had the opportunity to learn an Indian language. The extent to which one can express one's feelings in an Indian language is unparalleled. Again, nothing against learning English, but its a tool not my life breath.
I read in the book "The Beautiful Tree" that almost everyone in India was literate and knew some form of reading and writing before the advent of the British style of education(close to 1800). The book beautifully presents statistics of the number of students enrolled and the list of prescribed books pre-English-education. One statistical report prepared by a Britisher mentions the existence of 1 Lakh schools in the Bengal region alone in 1820s. Sadly now we are talking of illiteracy!! It pains to see how rapidly the traditional knowledge died in a matter of 100 years and right now we call our own students and people "idiots" using a foreign metric.
Learn the language, learn it to perfection but develop an appreciation for Indian Languages. You will come to understand how powerful and intuitive they are. The very way they were imparted was so effective that it was almost impossible to commit a grammatical error.
http://www.samanvaya.com/dharampal/
ReplyDeleteThere is another way of looking at such self awareness, that of Mahatma Gandhi which perhaps represented the dharana (view) of most Indians. In 1909 he had said in Hind Swaraj:
“Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves.
“If this definition be correct, then India, as so many writers have shown, has nothing to learn from anybody else, and this is as it should be. We notice that the mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge our passions the more unbridled they become. Our ancestors, therefore, set a limit to our indulgences. They saw that happiness was largely a mental condition. A man is not necessarily happy because he is rich, or unhappy because he is poor. The rich are often seen to be unhappy, the poor to be happy. Observing all this, our ancestors dissuaded us from luxuries and pleasures. We have managed with the same kind of plough as existed thousands of years ago. We have retained the same kind of cottages that we had in former times and our indigenous education remains the same as before. We have had no system of life-corroding competition. Each followed his own occupation or trade and charged a regulation wage. It was not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our forefathers knew that, if we set our hearts after such things, we would become slaves and lose our moral fibre. They therefore, after due deliberation decided that we should only do what we could with our hands and feet. They saw that our real happiness and health consisted in a proper use of our hands and feet. They further reasoned that large cities were a snare and a useless encumbrance and that people would not be happy in them. They enjoyed true Home Rule”.
Again, around 1911 he wrote to his eldest son, Harilal Gandhi on fagun sud 5 (March 5, 1911) that it was because of the punya accumulated by our immediate ancestors that we are functioning today. He added, “the practical knowledge boys in India possess is not due to the education they receive in schools, but is due to the unique Indian way of life. It is due to the meritorious deeds of our ancestors that we find healthy standards of behaviour, thrift, etc., around us. ”
Well said. Even getting a job depends on this language!
ReplyDeleteSir definitely a thought provoking one.I once had a dream of conversing in Sanskrit! in the Pre- English advent do you know if it was Sanskrit which was spoken by many people? What happened to all that? Just curious because one of my Korean professors here asked me about how the buddhism split from hinduism, for which in was not sure so I said may be they spoke different languages like sanskrit and pali. Was I correct? Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI really wonder why people find it so difficult to understand that language is just for communicating with our similar kind!!!
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