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| Saturday, 20 November 2004 |
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The social revolution through English: will it succeed or flounder? by S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole Chairman, Standing Committee on the Teaching of English, University Grants Commission At the seminar on New Directions in English Teaching in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the UGC, 9 November.
A massive social revolution was brought about by modern education in the English medium. This revolution failed with the mother-tongue policies of the 1950s. Today, again, English medium education is on the table. I would like to use this opportunity today to explore a question. The question is whether the new revolution will flounder like before, or succeed; whether proficiency in the English language will divide us or empower us. Since taking on the chair of the Standing Committee on the Teaching of English, I have strongly experienced the power of English in demarcating those proficient in it into a high, upper class and at the same time its role as a tool that empowers the so-called lower classes or the hoi polloi; that is those whose mother-tongue is not English. And I am being deliberately provocative. To answer the question, let me go back a little in history. Even some 300 years after free education of sorts was introduced by the Portuguese, the British Missionary Meggs in a survey of the North in 1815 found that literacy was confined to high caste men. These numbering some 30%, actual literacy must have been well below that. As for women, there were only 2 women in the entirety of the peninsula who could read or write. Both of them were prostitutes who had been tutored so that they could transcribe temple music even as they served the men who came to the temple. Educating the public Around them began the truly great enterprise of educating the public, whatever faults we may identify with the system that was introduced and whatever motives we may attribute to those who introduced that system. The first Boarding School in Asia for girls was established in 1826 in Uduvil. The first truly collegiate university level institution in Asia, Batticotta Seminary, was founded in 1821, an institution whose contribution we today are reluctant to acknowledge for very pedestrian, perhaps even dishonest, reasons. Powerful social forces were let loose by education in general and English education in particular. Suddenly the untouchable could sit on the same seat as the high caste at school and in the bus. Government being neutral, those who saw themselves as high caste - please excuse the phrase - could go to hell if they objected. Those whom we adulate today as national heroes and in whose memory we print postage stamps, argued forcefully in the legislature against commensality and equal seating in schools and for asking the low caste to sit on the ground outside the classroom. But the new social forces backed by the colonial regime were too strong to resist or reverse. Nonetheless, the fact that we adulate those who spoke up against these changes as our great heroes, tells us where we stand as a society. The real objection of these new leaders of the emerging independent society - that is our real objection - was that the English language and the wider educational opportunities and reading material available through that langauge were upsetting the social order. Those whom we lorded it over, were now suddenly our class-mates and co-workers. Our children who by mere fact of going to St. Thomas' or Royal had almost automatic admission to degree programs could no longer count on it. This revolution was arrested suddenly by compulsory education in the mother-tongue. Those from privileged families had nothing to lose - they could learn the English language from the home, their elite schools and perhaps the Church too. The revolution that was over-turning hierarchies was successfully aborted. The problem But those who engineered this counter-revolution had a problem. They derived their status from their English fluency. So they asserted it locally. And yet in dealing with Europeans, principally the British, they necessarily had to be second since the culture that gave them privileged status was British. So enter the Westernised Oriental Gentlemen or WOGS in short. To deal with the Europeans they had to be Oriental. So we had the national dress reasserted. But then a new problem - the Oriental culture would make them feel small among the locals since their status among locals came from their English culture and English langauge. To overcome this problem therefore, the oriental attire had some distinguishing marks introduced to ensure that although they dressed local they really were seen obviously to be not local. With the national dress the moustache went out and in came the closed sandals, or the walking sticks or pipes. It was as if to say, "Hey, you saronged fellow! I might look like you, but don't you dare believe it." A characteristic of this emerging class was that through the promotion of local culture to tell its European competitors that it too had its own culture, it promoted a culture of a sort, the majoritarian sort. Like their Fabian masters in Oxford, Cambridge and London, they too publicly espoused socialism. The same way the European upper classes go to the cinema, the theatre and the orchestra, they promoted themselves as the great connoisseurs of local art, with devastating effect on minorities. They really were nationalists and xenophobes mobilizing the underprivileged and exploiting the attractions of socialism in the cause of nationalism.. Naturally they earned the epithet "champagne socialists". Promising revolution A promising revolution that democratized opportunities had been aborted. It had run aground on a warped nationalism that failed to build a Sri Lankan identity. It expected everyone to accept the identity that the mixed up ruling class defined as Sri Lankan. A classic example is the cockerel, the symbol of the little god Muruha of Kataragama, that is foisted on us as a national symbol. When they say so, we must accept. So overpowering is this social oppression that even His Grace, the Archbishop, conforms and lights lamps to Muruha at University of Colombo now. In this new Sri Lanka, those from the leading families learnt their English. The others had the opportunity to learn it withdrawn. Colombo children had a stranglehold on opportunity - through their parents, through being surrounded by many who spoke English, etc. In the rural setting, those who knew English gravitated to Colombo. As the older teachers who had been schooled in English retired or migrated to Colombo if not to the West where they felt the most at home, the chasm widened. Standards not sustained But in Colombo too standards could not be sustained without the experience of writing and expressing oneself in English seriously as one would in class. A new effete class emerged that spoke stunted English but was confident that it was the last word in class. Grammar soon became secondary to fluency. Fluency alone now was the characteristic of good Sri Lankan English. If anything a bugger here and bloody there made it even haute culture as I soon realized when a Thomian introduced his father thus: "Machang, have you met Pater bugger?" And the father seemed oblivious to the devious sexual practices being ascribed to him. It was while Colombo revelled in this milieu of asserting its self-perceived haute culture and basked in its self-proclaimed glory that I grew up in Jaffna. Forced to study in Tamil, my English was weaker than it ought to have been. When I came to Colombo in 1970 to study in Moratuwa, for the first time I was exposed to a class that was so absolutely sure of its privileges and high status through English. I would be trapped into saying I was from St. John's "Colij" as we say it in Jaffna, "No it is 'collage'" came the retort amidst sniggers although dictionaries supported only "collij". Soon being immersed in this vast sea of pidgin that was rooted in the English army sergeant's vocabulary and phraseology, I avoided saying 'captin' as in Jaffna since the effete culture in power held that 'captan' was the correct rendering. Though a Tamil brought up on the regular Tamil fare of "puttu", "thosai" and "paruppu" these had to be rendered as "pittu", "dhosa" and parippu" under threat of being labelled a Philistine if I did not conform. Even the Tamil word Machchan was suppressed since Machang was now the right thing. This effete class whose power rested solely on its attribute of emulating the British army sergeant's speech coloured with a few pidgin words, held complete sway over our lives - to the great detriment of us and the nation because of its majoritarian inclinations. Ultimate vulgarity To my mind, the ultimate vulgarity of this neo-colonialism within a Third World state was when Colombo-returned old-boys danced at the big matches in Jaffna singing about the other being a parippu school-not quite knowing what a parippu school is - and importing that most abhorrent of all Colombo phrases, "Yes, no?" which is then soon copied by Jaffan boys overawed by the imagined sophistication of their Colombo cousins visiting them. This reminds me of my late mother's assertion that Jaffna English was very good until the Second World War when Colombo was evacuated in anticipation of a Japanese invasion. Ladies College girls temporarily in CMS Chundikuli Girls' College, according to her, brought in the "Yes, no?" English to Jaffna. Today, there is fresh opportunity. Even though the old revolution of empowerment and social upheaval through the English language was aborted through the counter-revolution imposing one mother-tongue to the exclusion of the other and English and eduction in English, the massive failures of this counter-revolution are very visible. The economy runs aground with very few of us able to function competently in English to fill the needs of modern science and meet the demands of dynamic commerce. Sri Lankan scholarship has ground to a halt because there aren't enough people to study the wider works of others in English and make improvements or other contributions. For example a look at the book shelves of the School of Oriental and African Studies of University of London will show Sri Lankan journals, thus proving that our scholarship was valued abroad. But then these collections suddenly stop from the 1970s or so because our scholarship too had stopped. Our best minds in the physical sciences go into engineering. But hardly a paper or two is published in serious journals by our three engineering faculties together in a year. The world of commerce cannot find people to negotiate with foreign principals and sign water-tight contracts. Our courts at the highest levels see an aging legal profession because the younger lawyers cannot write a proper brief and are confined to filing papers and photo-copying for their much older seniors. The social upheaval brought about by the promising enterprise of modern education is just not there, whilst other countries draw far ahead of us. (To be continued) |
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