We Killed our Mother Tongue

I was groping for a lullaby to put my nephew's son to sleep.  From the recesses of my mind a lullaby that my grandfather used to sing to me in Hindi, my mother tongue, when I was a baby came to my lips. With that lullaby came many memories of my grandfather, father, uncles and aunts who used to tell me stories and parables that I am sure they have must have heard from their parents and grandparents. Those parables and stories became part of my fabric, my being. My father, a teacher of Hindi and Sanskrit, often quoted a Sanskrit verse to make a point and my mother often quoted from Ramayana. They read Hindi newspapers, weeklies and novels. They gave us Hindi novels and magazines to read and discussed the characters and their foibles with us. They were primary and secondary schoolteachers satisfied with their lower middle income, their small house, and their bicycles and with their children's accomplishments. While others around them moved into bigger houses, bigger vehicles and better neighborhoods, they stayed where they were.  My parents knew only Hindi but the others knew English.  The others were babus, clerks, who did not read novels or scriptures but could read and fill forms in English.

In free India, the Hindi speakers, scholars, teachers and preachers, the foot soldiers of Gandhi, were left behind and relegated to a secondary status. Those who thought, talked and wrote in Hindi were marginalized. They became archaic, old types and out of touch. English became the engine of progress in India and the bureaucrats who were the sepoys of British colonialism became modern and were elevated. Hindi education was eliminated for the technology and medicine bound children after the eighth grade setting the stage for the biggest educational divide and hence economic divide in India between native language speakers and English speakers.  My Auntie's, uncles who were wise, literate in Hindi became illiterate and so did a vast multitude of people who lived in the country side. Hindi poetry, prose, ballads and epics, were shelved as dead archives, or trashed, only to be recited ritually at religious rites without any understanding or discourse.  Hindi newspapers became smaller, their language became less literary and slowly they became unworthy of Hindi literati, and being a Hindi speaker became unworthy for literati. Today, most think tanks, most policy wonks in India think and write in English drawing upon sources from the west and using western paradigms. Hindi was trivialized, bastardized and vulgarized in which one talked to the rikshawallah, or sprinkled with a few words of ill pronounced English for ribaldry, light talk or a wise crack. All serious business in English only!

English speakers became the elites creating the biggest cultural and economic inequality in India. The Hindi speaking laborer would now remain a laborer; a (chotu) domestic servant will remain a chotu because they cannot access education in English. The plight of Government schools where I received bilingual education from well read and devoted Hindi speaking teachers, in today's India, symbolizes this divide – the government schools now prepare the servant class for servitude with little possibility of vertical movement while the English medium public schools teach the children of nouveau riche who on the wings of broken English become even richer. The wise priests, the wandering monks, well read in Vedas, the Upanishads and epics, who could give intelligent and articulate talks in Hindi with annotated and supported arguments, were eliminated as a source of education for the masses who cannot access schools in the vast rural and slum landscapes of India.

In a rush to overproduce mediocre work force we overlooked the possibility of bilingual education where the language of lore and culture could have prevailed and thrived with the language of universalism and economic prosperity. The children would have understood the symbolic nature of language and in learning and comparing the two would have learned the beatitudes of both.  The vast multitude of native language speaking population whom we marginalized would have been included in new prosperity. Students would have benefitted from the wisdom and erudition of people like my folks who were the keepers of our culture and would give Indian solutions to Indian problems. Today Indians look to the west for the solution of their problems, they draw our inspirations from western paradigms, history and literature when we could draw upon from own literature that we trashed. Whatever Indianness we show and the culture that we profess is broken bits and pieces that we construct from Bollywood, from TV soap operas or from literature about India written in English by Indians who study in the halls of Columbia University or live in the neighborhoods of London or New York – culture that we could have gotten wholesomely from our own sources had we nurtured our native languages along with English. Children can learn two languages and are better for it as many scientific studies have shown. They would write original expositions based upon what they hear from real people on the street, from their parents and grandparents rather that borrowing hackneyed phrases and pieces from Google or Facebook or create some phantasmagorical lore like Rushdie did in Midnight’s Children. They could articulate what their parents talked, they would have chosen correct words in either language where they now contend with Hinglish or some patois brand of language. They would not have to buy CDs of English lullabies that sing the glory of the plague of England or some baba black sheep from Scotland which few have seen but would sing to Chanda mama whom every child can see anywhere, or to wind, nanhi pari sone chali hava dhire aana, that every child feels when we cradle her, thus becoming the bearers of centuries old tradition and which they could proudly tell their children, my grandmother sang that for me and like Kunta Kinte could even trace their ancestry based upon these lullabies.  

Yes, I am lamenting the death of my mother tongue, my history and my culture, because in today’s Delhi, my father, a teacher of Hindi and Sanskrit, would be lost in a mall where all signs and are in English and my grandfather who was well versed and educated in Urdu and Farsi would have to request an almost uneducated clerk in the corridors of Delhi High Court to fill a form. No, I am not lamenting the ascendance of English for both could have thrived had we not trivialized and trashed Hindi and other native languages but treated all with egalitarianism and respect.