Dr Dastoor said something about this teaching of English being above the dust and turmoil of politics. Well, that is exactly what it is not in this country, but should be so. The English language should not have anything to do with politics a such, but, unfortunately, the whole language question has got itself entangled in political issues. If you analyse it, going a little deeper into this controversy, those who object to English are those who have reacted strongly to the domination of the English people on India for the last many generations. The fact is that with many of those who learnt English it became a kind of fixation that the English language was a symbol of status. A man who knew very indifferent English somehow thought himself a better scholar than one who had studied our own languages. That fixation was obviously most improper and most objectionable. It has to be got rid of. I am not quite sure if you have still got rid of this feeling. This has nothing to do with our liking for English, considering that it is a very desirable language to learn.

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If we consider the English language like any other language, on its merits, then our attitude to it will become objective and our reactions to it will not be coloured by resentment. If people say, as some do, that English should remain dominant instead of our regional languages or mother tongue being dominant, it will have an irritating effect and as a result English itself would suffer more than any other language. In the older days when we had a fixation about English we produced a relatively small class of English-knowing people who formed a kind of English-knowing caste in India. In this land of castes, everything tends to turn into castes. The persons who learnt English, even though they might not have learnt it very well, considered themselves superior to those who did not. That kind of attitude continues, to some extent, even now. It is clear that just as we are trying to do away with the caste system in India, we have to do away with this ‘English-speaking caste’ idea, too. However widely English might spread, it is hardly conceivable that it will spread to the vast masses, to hundreds of millions of our people. We do not want English to become a barrier, separating millions of our people from those who have learnt this language. We have to acknowledge that any kind of real progress, specially to begin with, can be made only through the mother-tongue, that is, in the regional languages of India. To these languages we add English, just as we do Hindi, for various reasons. Essentially, the question is of the medium of instruction being in the regional language.

I am not an educator as such. If I try to educate people at all, I do so in vast public meetings, not classes. To some extent even in public meetings I do try deliberately to talk to them as perhaps an indifferently trained teacher might talk. Teaching, specially in the school stages, has to be in the regional tongue. Thereby you may perhaps lose some advantage which you might have at the higher stages of education; but you gain the enormous advantage of finding the children’s mind opened through their mother tongue. They will not have the tremendous handicap of having to learn another tongue in order to learn something else. Such a thing is not desirable at all. If you have the medium of instruction as the regional language, the first question that would arise is how can we extend it to the later stages of education also—the higher stages. I have no doubt that we can do this even though there might be some difficulty at the present moment in finding scientific and technical terms. I would prefer to leave this problem to get solved gradually by experience and not force a solution down. The idea is that the medium of education has to be one’s mother tongue, but aided and helped by other languages, such as English, for instance. To begin with, we may retain English for the study of specialised subjects in higher studies, but eventually this would have to give place to the mother tongue. I do not see any great difficulty in solving this problem provided one decides on not too theoretical or passionate an approach.

English is a very widespread language, a very important language. Other foreign languages too, like French or German or Italian or Spanish or Russian, are very important, although probably English is the most widespread. There is a good deal that other foreign languages have to teach us which no language can teach. If science and technology are important, practically no high class student of technical subjects can get on without learning at least two or thee languages. German is very important for them. Russian is becoming even more important now. The amount of literature that comes out in Russian on science and technology is increasing rapidly and the least that any student of science or technology does is to either learn several language or obtain translations of all that appears in the other languages. This is a complicated business. Without going into the merits of various foreign languages, English is obviously more convenient for us than French, German, Russian, or Spanish. We want, as a matter of act, to encourage the teaching and the learning of French in Pondicherry. We have a base for the French language in Pondicherry which has been existing for a long time. We want to take advantage of that and to keep Pondicherry as a window to French culture. Just as Pondicherry has been associated with French, the greater part of India has been associated with English and it is obviously desirable for to take advantage of this. Apart from the obvious reason that English has a historical background in India, it deserves to be nourished.

Why do we want a foreign language in India? There are many reasons, more especially so for a country like India. India in the past had many virtues; it had risen to great heights in many ways. But it had a tendency to get itself cut off from the rest of the world, although it did not happen always. We have lived for long in a shell of our own. It is true that the shell was very big, but it was a shell all the same, and we were cut off from what was happening in the rest of the world. Many things helped to bring this about. The growth and intensification of the caste system, for instance, has been, I think, a total abomination. I do not know what it was like when it originated but all the castes created smaller shells and the larger shell was India itself. So we lost touch with the changes taking place in the rest of the world at a time when vast changes did take place in science, technology, etc., the industrial revolution, and all kinds of other things. We came to be left behind, steeped as we were in our own self-developed culture which was, of course, very good in so far as it went. But we were hopelessly left behind. But it is of the utmost importance today that we should have these avenues open to us. The windows of our mind should be open to them and the best windows are those of language. Most of us who know English can easily read English literature, English or American journals, reviews, magazines, etc. This language link is a greater link between us and the English-speaking people than any political or Commonwealth or any other link. It is so because we can read their thoughts, and see how they are functioning. So I attach the greatest importance to keeping the windows of our minds open to what is happening in foreign countries. Naturally, that can be done best by knowing their languages. We can translate them, and we should translate them. We have a very efficient service for translating foreign books. But it is really quite impossible to keep pace with the flow of new books.

Another development is taking place in languages which is likely to have a fairly far-reaching effect. With developments in science and technology and the like, and with the increasingly important part that mathematics plays, language is becoming progressively a language of symbols. Of course, symbols are always to be found in languages, but you see many of them in scientific treatises, sometimes frighteningly large. Every child knows some simple symbols like plus and minus or, going a little further, such Greek words as theta, pai, etc. But now every language is increasingly becoming a language of symbols, a kin of universal language. How this will develop further, I do not know. But I suppose we shall also have to adopt that symbolic language in dealing with science, technology, and similar subjects. Therefore, the arguments that we use for or against this or that language will probably fade out as we grow more and more scientific minded and begin to adopt a symbolic language with a few words to connect the various symbols. I think it is a good and important decision which our Government took that in regard to scientific and technical words, we should try to retain them as such. This will keep us in touch with international practises and will also introduce a common factor in all the Indian languages. The number of words is increasing with amazing rapidity and I believe every year hundreds of new words are being added on to the English language. While we should direct the growth of our languages in the right direction, we should make no attempt at forcing new words on them. If that is done, much of the fury of political conflict in regard to the language question would lessen and may even disappear. ...

If we have to retain English, we have also to try to keep up certain standards in its usage. People tell me, and it is a fact, that the standard of English has gone down considerably in India. It is bound to go down as it ceases to be the medium of instruction. But it is desirable and important to keep up high standards and the effort made in this Institute to keep them up and train the teachers of English language is very valuable. I hope your Institute will succeed in bringing about better standards in the usage of English in India.

Excerpted with permission of Oxford University Press from The Oxford India Nehru edited by Uma Iyengar; Rs 795