JOIN USThe deplorable state of language study in India
Most English-medium students in India opt for a fancy third language like French or German. They clear the language papers, including Indian languages, with ‘flying colours’. But few continue with French, German or Sanskrit, and even they do so to merely use these languages as “scoring subjects” to increase their marks tally, not to pursue them as career options, let alone for the love of a language.
Even Hindi (the language of gentiles and heathens in anglicised India) is used as a ladder, not just in the non-Hindi speaking states but also in Delhi and Rajasthan, where the predominant daily language is Hindi. In the southern states, especially in Tamil Nadu, Hindi is resisted and resented. At India’s premier colleges, students opt for Hindi as a pastime, and to add to their overall marks, just like students opt for Sanskrit to get full marks without ever knowing anything of Panini’s Ashtadhyayi or Bhattoji Dikshita’s (a 17th-century Maharashtrian Sanskrit grammarian) Siddhanta-Kaumudi (literally, ‘Illumination of the Established Position’)!
Due to this lackadaisical attitude, Sanskrit’s functional and colloquial utility ended decades ago, though there are still scholars in India who know Sanskrit pretty well. Students with a condescending attitude toward languages, especially Indian languages, studying at top-notch colleges in India, skip Hindi classes as they find it infra dig. How many college-going youngsters in Bangalore or Bombay (sorry, no Bengaluru or Mumbai) can converse in correct Hindi, let alone chaste Hindi? In fact, Hindi is a perfunctory permanent fixture at many colleges across the country.
There’s hardly an Urdu department or Urdu subject offered by elite colleges. Even the lesser ones have done away with Urdu. Urdu is being derogatorily called a ‘reverse’ language as it’s written from right to left. In such dismal circumstances, the study of languages becomes irrelevant and anachronistic.
And what about Persian, which was a common language of the elites and aristocrats in India not so long ago? As a lover of languages, especially Central Asian languages and Semitic cultures, the fact that Persian has almost become a defunct language in India comes as a sad realisation for me. Now, it is quite difficult to believe that Persian was one of our languages and poets like Amir Khusro, who never visited to Iran, wrote in this language.
Persian is such a euphonic language that even if you don’t understand a smattering of it, the phonetic sound of the language can transport you to a different realm. I vividly remember when I heard it for the first time at the tender age of three. The language left me virtually intoxicated; thus began my lifelong romance with what I regard as the world’s most fascinating language. And what a pity! Such a breathtakingly beautiful language is almost unknown even to the learned in India.
Though there are still a few universities in India offering a Master’s in Persian, the standard leaves much to be desired. Indian students of Persian language and literature cannot write a full page in correct Persian, nor can they speak it with any degree of confidence. And there is probably not a single non-Muslim studying Persian at these universities. But then, can they write proper Urdu at least? In a country where Urdu is not promoted because it is erroneously thought of as belonging to a particular community, how can Persian be expected to figure in a polarised scenario?
Arabic has no takers in India other than Muslims. They too learn it only from the perspective of understanding Quranic verses. On the level of Arabic taught at Madrasas, the less said the better. Those students never learn Arabic because their maulvis have no feel for or understanding of the tongue.
Even the obdurately fixed syllabi of English, with the reverential emphasis on Shakespearean plays, hasn’t augmented the horizons of Indian students. How long can they continue to churn Shakespearean oeuvre? We seem to have a fetish for the Bard of Avon! Someone aptly wrote a few years ago, “Indian students and their ‘erudite’ professors of English literature must realise that English literature goes far beyond Shakespeare, just like Persian literature is not limited to Rumi and Firdausi, Italian is not confined to Dante Alighieri or Goethe is not the alpha and omega of German literature.”
For any right-thinking person or institution, therefore, it’s time to develop a holistic approach to teaching and studying languages in India at all levels. But, of course, who cares for language/s and literature in these philistine and fissiparous times when a mere piece of clothing or higher decibels of prayers are much more important issues to quarrel over, to attack the ‘other’, than learning and appreciating the aesthetics of languages and cultures?
(The writer is an advanced research scholar of Semitic languages, civilizations and cultures)