The English edge

Where Money Talks

Bengal's schools shouldn't deny children the benefits of learning English

West Bengal's school education minister, Kanti Biswas, should look for an economic and not demographic or chauvinistic reason for the declining popularity of Bengali-medium schools.

It might be different if young Bengalis aspired to be poets and politicians like Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, the chief minister. Since all they want is a decent standard of living, they have little use for institutions that turn out unemployable people. Such schools will become even more unpopular if the government accepts a committee's recommendation not to teach English till class V.

John Stuart Mill argued during the 19th century debate on India's medium of instruction that English was the "passport to public employment". H H Wilson, the Sanskritist, deplored that Indians wanted no more English than would "enable them to earn a subsistence".

Some Muslim citizens complained that the new policy would encourage individuals "of the very lowest description whose only object is to learn sufficient for the transaction of a little English business". That's life. Education is a meal ticket for most people, and not just in India.

English is India's lingua franca, the equivalent of the polyglot jumble understood by Christians and Saracens along the Mediterranean, and cannot aspire to higher elegance.

Schools that deny boys and girls the lingua franca also deprive them of the chance of benefiting from the revolution in science and technology, competing in all-India examinations and enjoying the fruits of global commerce.

Moreover, the quality of instruction is appalling in state-funded Bengali-medium schools. Some buildings are open to sun and rain, some are without desks or benches. Many lack basic teaching facilities. Poorly qualified party cadres pass off as teachers.

Paradoxically, the Left Front government, which has been in power for 27 years, should take pride in the fact that these schools would have been shunned even if Bengalis had not constituted, as Biswas points out, only 37 per cent of Calcutta's population. Rural prosperity has whetted social ambition and facilitated upward mobility.

The first Indian members of the Indian Civil Service, four Bengalis out of five entrants, may have been products of Bengali-medium schools but they were exceptional men and there was no alternative then.

Any driver can now afford English-medium schooling for his son. He is not deterred by the hypocritical nationalism of pedants in dhotis who hoist the standard of a barren terminological revolution with frivolous gimmicks like changing Calcutta to Kolkata while selling decision-making authority to outsiders who fund the party.

West Bengal's changing identity and power structure should concern the Left Front. Undivided Bengal's chief minister, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, warned in 1947 that a "tussle (would) rage round Calcutta and its environments built up largely by the resources of foreigners, inhabited largely by people from other provinces who have no roots in the soil and who have come here to earn their livelihood, designated in another context as exploitation".

Imperial commerce created Calcutta. Workers from Bihar, UP and Orissa sustained British business. When the British left, Marwaris alone had the capital, acumen and energy to take over their assets and slip into their shoes.

Bengalis comprise the middle and lower middle classes "" professionals, clerks, petty tradesmen and, of course, poets and politicians. They are numerous enough but without economic clout. They do not account for Calcutta's astonishingly high retail sales. But even they know that Bengali schools are only for those who cannot afford better.

Instruction in English was once restricted to Anglo-Indian or missionary schools like La Martiniere, St Xaviers, St James, St Thomas or Calcutta Boys. Now, South Point, claiming the world's highest enrolment, teaches in English.

Many other such schools that are entirely Bengali except for the language of instruction demonstrate that Bengalis have left their rulers far behind in grasping market imperatives.

Many of the most vociferous champions of Bengali culture send their own offspring to English-medium schools. I don't blame them. But they should not deny the same privilege to others.

In the midst of the debate in Singapore between formal English and the local dialect called Singlish (of which the government disapproves), an ethnic Indian minister pointed out that those who argue that Singlish expresses the Singaporean's multicultural personality themselves speak perfect Queen's English. So do their progeny.

Therefore, their demand that hoi polloi should speak only Singlish is worse than condescending. It is calculated to institutionalise social division so that there are always two cultures. Those who master English will control the levers of political and economic power, while those who know only Singlish will remain the underdog.

The debate took place against the background of Singapore's earlier social, economic and political division between the English-educated and Chinese-educated.

Returning to India after 12 months, I notice that the comperes of popular chat shows and request programmes from All India Radio's Calcutta station slip from Bengali into English and vice versa. Clearly, hidebound Bengali purity does not pay.

It is fashionable for nationalists to blame Macaulay for this dilution of native culture. Macaulay only articulated what others had already advocated. The clinching factor was the Indian elite's strong plea for English.

Highly successful Bengali doctors, academics and computer engineers in Britain and America testify to barren prospects in West Bengal. Those who can escape do so. Only those whose schooling blocks opportunity remain.

If the Left Front persists with the delusion that an exclusively Bengali education is patriotic, the state will become even more the refuge of failure.