My youngest brother, Adi, was yet again on his way to a corner store to buy some daily supplies for our home. Casually strolling down the street, a carry bag in his hands and his headphones plugged in, completely tuning out the world, he was stopped by a group of four kids. They were from a private coaching institute nearby and was hoping to take his interview. These students were given an assignment to ask a couple of basic questions to as many people as possible to brush up their English. What was he studying? What was the name of his college? Where did he live? A sympathetic Adi impressed by their humility took off his headphones to answer their questions properly. After a brief conversation, they thanked him and moved onto to another person.
They were studying in a “lifestyle” school, more precisely a coaching center that teaches English. The students, as per the site, enroll to master the English Language. But it is not the language that they are becoming proficient in, it is in fact an image that they are mastering. Like fair skin, Indians, especially North Indians obsess over the English language. English coaching is as common and affordable as the Glow and Lovely “brightening creams” available in every corner store.
I often feel I might be placed relatively low in the hierarchical state of society, but I cannot ignore the fact that I had the privilege of attending a private English medium school. Since I was four I was taught to speak in a certain way. I knew the difference between “can I come in?” and “may I come in?”. I knew how to roll my r’s or pronounce aitch and not ech. This invisible privilege plays a part in my presentation of self. Over the years, constantly conversing in English has given me a certain level of confidence. I know when to pause, I know how to behave and I know how to be polite. I was taught the invisible rules of this society – the same rules that might be taught in a lifestyle school.
This superiority of English is injected into us from the day we are born. As we start to learn to talk, parents bring home the graphic books decorated with colorful pictures of a bright red apple to learn our A’s, a speckled yellow banana to learn the alphabet B, a curly tailed and fat bellied cat to learn the letter C and so on. But who would want their kids to fall behind? This is the lingua franca, the “window to the world”.
English is used for official purposes such as legislation, judiciary, and communications between the Central Government and the State Government in India and within corporations. Thus the official atmosphere in meetings in corporations and sometimes otherwise is filled with English. Proficiency in English continues to be the sine qua non to better employment in big business firms and even government concerns. Language mediates who gets to speak and where, and who is listened to. Many universities worldwide increasingly favored English in teaching and research, creating a severe disadvantage to non-native speakers.
As soon as I entered 11th grade, like many Indian children, I was on the path of becoming an Engineer. I was enrolled in a high-end coaching center which fed lakhs of students the dream of cracking JEE exams (a competitive entrance exam held for Indian Institute of Technology ). I had just lost my father and as a consequence, my family was suffering through a serious financial crisis. My mother, seeing it as my only chance to crack this exam, borrowed fifty thousand rupees to pay for the coaching fees.
These classes took place in a room as big as an auditorium. It was filled with hundreds of kids my age and older. The voices of teens talking to each other echoed inside the building. A petite girl shifted to make space for me as I took a seat beside her. Two tattered notebooks laid in front of her, notes written in both of them. One was an English notebook with some words with incorrect spellings and another was a notebook filled with paragraphs written in Hindi. I asked her why the two notebooks.
She replied, “I went to a Hindi Medium school so it gets difficult for me to catch up. I need two notebooks: one in which I write what I understand and another in which I write the words I don’t understand. This way, I know which words to study better.” Looking over her face, I realized that I was never going to be as serious as her and lost motivation — she was ready to work twice as hard as me.
English entered our lands for all the wrong reasons. It was forced upon us. Outsiders tricked us and many of us still bear that oppression that was seeded by the Britishers. In India, British policy entailed a willingness to create a class that mirrored the colonizers’ frame of mind. This involved the opening of schools and universities based on British models, which embraced the hegemony of British language and culture. As Indians, the middle-class especially, started to realize that learning English would help them acquire a government job and make their future secure, gradually more people demanded to be educated in English. This resulted in the increase of private secondary schools to cater to these uprising demands in learning English and over time English became the symbol of elitism.
During a documentary shoot I was involved in, our crew had reached a remote village in Uttar Pradesh. While the camera team was setting the frame, a couple of the crew members were chatting up on the sidelines. A scrawny tall man hovered around the camera crew examining the equipment. He was the brother of the person we were about to interview. After surveying, he walked over to us and said, “The camera is quite impressive.” A couple of us looked surprised. One of my crew members carried the conversation while I moved on. At lunch break, the team member said, “That guy speaks amazing English. I did not expect him to speak so fluently.” In truth, we all weren’t expecting that a person belonging to a rural area would speak English so fluently. Our prejudiced mind was surprised.
This perception of elitism played a role in schools as well, creating a lot of shame and anxiety over non-academic matters. Although our crisp white uniforms brought forth a sense of equality between the students, possessions like bags, watches, tiffins, packed meals, and shoes revealed the drastic class differences between us all. The only non-material thing that separated us was language, and that was difficult not to notice. During our English classes we were asked to read the passages from our literature books, teachers selecting children at random or move in rows. Students would prepare beforehand, calculating which paragraph they would end up having to read. Accents and dialects helped us to judge who was part of the elite. If someone mispronounced something, they would not only be embarrassed but also demeaned. Children didn’t do it on purpose, but this inherent need to distinguish “the other” was definitely projected (the teachers attitude never helped either).
As I was growing up it became clear to me that the parents of others that were more educated than my parents spoke better English. By no means were my parents less intelligent, but not being able to speak in fluent English made me uncomfortable and ashamed (a short-coming on my end). I even started to distance myself from “Bhojpuri” the language that my father conversed in with his peers and even in the house. Whenever he used to open up the Mahua channel, where shows of Bhojpuri origin played, I would invariably shudder. It took years to unlearn, and get rid of the shame that I once carried. The shame did not originate from their inability to speak English rather it rooted from the image I constructed of my family.
I once fell upon a huge pile of Bhojpuri books covered with a sheet of dust in an ill kept state. The spines were tattered and the pages were yellow and torn, but I found myself opening up the first book of the pile and turning to a random page. The words felt familiar – I could read them but could not fully grasp the meaning. I photographed the prose to send to my mother, who had grown out of speaking Bhojpuri. During our phone call in the evening I asked her to read some lines from the Bhojpuri book. I heard a familiar tone that I hadn’t heard for the last thirteen years.
Bhojpuri over the years had grown to have attached a rather different image from its origin. Popular songs that generally objectify women or propose endless double meaning statements gradually decreased the gravitas of the language. A language which is older than Hindi. Its folk songs hold the tradition of northern India. This bastardisation of the language made me distance myself from it. I was affected too much by its image. But images change.
Those songs have become a melody that reminds me of a time that was filled with innocence and sometimes cluelessness. A time when I could sit next to my father and watch shows that I never fully comprehended. I remember my father’s voiceless laugh with his big belly bouncing up and down. Sometimes I think the reason why I gradually forgot his voice – because I never really spoke his language.
