Should Tamil authors be proficient in English?

An aspiring writer wishing to write short stories in Tamil wrote to contemporary Tamil author Jeyamohan asking if he can write good Tamil literature without ever reading anything in English. The aspirant confesses that he had studied in Tamil medium and lacks any level of proficiency in English and is completely unable to read anything in English. (This is exactly why I am not a big votary of Tamil medium education. Those students, unless they make great effort by themselves, remain frogs in a well). Jeyamohan consoles the youngster that he need not worry and that he can write good stories by studying just works published in Tamil and reading Tamil translations of English books. The aspirant had noted that some of the wonderful books that Jeyamohan cites are not available in translated form. Jeyamohan's advice is wrong. To create good literature in output in Tamil one needs very good proficiency in English and here's why.

Short story, the novel, essay, are all literary forms alien to Tamil and they arrived on the Tamil literary scene solely from western literature through English. Even modern poetry is not exempt of outside influences. One cannot appreciate Bharathi fully without reading Shelley. After all Bharathi once called himself 'Shelley Dasan" (slave of Shelley). I've a collection of Bharathi poems the blurb on the back flap says 'Bharathi is situated between Walt Whitman and the author of Gita'. Bharathi's 'Poem of me' is an echo of Walt Whitman. How can somebody understand the nuances of Bharathi without even browsing through Walt Whitman's 'Leave of Grass'. Bharathi created a genre called 'prose poems' (vasana kavithai) which he owed entirely to Whitman. Vairamuthu acknowledges that he borrows freely from Pablo Neruda. No Tamil author has been free of being influenced by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. How can one do justice to the short story without knowing O'Henry or Tolstoy or Maupassant or Balzac? How can one do justice to writing a novel without reading Naipaul and the numerous geniuses of the novel form?

English is a 'tool' to give anyone a window, an access, to the best that is in the world. English brings me Plato, Voltaire, Strindberg, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass and any one who may not actually be writing in English. This is not about speaking English in lilting British cadences or whatever status symbol it can be.

What is wrong with reading a translation? USSR and their 'New Century Book House' used to publish decent translations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev etc. But, that's it. Most good books are not available in Tamil. There is no market for them. The lack of market means lack of profits which, in turn, means only sub standard translators come to do the work. A notable Tamil writer , an English literature graduate too, published a Hans Christian Andersen story in Tamil on his web site. Since the story was nice I googled to read it in English. I got the English version but the story diverged after mid section. I was stunned to see such a huge discrepancy and since I knew the writer was an English literature graduate I wrote to him asking how this happened. He replied that he was using an old Tamil translation. He later repeated the wrong version of the story at his book release function and another writer ripped him for it. Benjamin Jowett's translation of Plato is considered the best and it is possible only because of a different environment in the English publishing industry. Homer has been translated hundreds of time yet when Princeton professor Robert Fagles published a new translation it was hailed as path breaking. This is not possible with Tamil translations.

Is there anything more to English proficiency than just being able to read all those literary classics? I was lucky to hear Nanjil Nadan speak about the literary richness of Kamba Ramayanam. The only disappointment was he could only speak very narrowly about the Tamil literary value. My English professor K.G.Seshadri would have taken it to a different level by drawing in references from Aeneid, Lear etc. Imagine a literary discourse on Kamba Ramayanam with many perspectives drawn from analyzing 'Free will', 'concept of duty', 'destiny', etc from across the world of philosophy and literature. How thrilling would it be to hear a chat on the idea of 'temptation' in Ramayana and cite Milton's 'Paradise Lost'. Reading Nietzsche brings an enriching of a creators ideas that is irreplaceable. Jeyamohan made an attempt to write science fiction? How can one do that without reading Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan? How can one do that without some idea of modern physics or science in general at a level higher than what we learn at school?

It is due to these shortfalls that, as I blogged last, no writer of note in Tamil has been produced from students of Tamil literature courses in colleges. Most Tamil authors of note have more than average proficiency in English and read widely. This counsel by Jeyamohan is wrong, misleading and a sheer disservice to the aspirant.

Macaulay: Misrepresented and unappreciated genius.

Thomas Babbington Macaulay is the most reviled name in Indian history and ironically the most enduring name too. 165 years after his famous (or notorious depending your politics) 'minute on Indian education' his legacy still lives. There are portions of Indian Penal Code that still retain the laws laid down my Macaulay. Recently I happen to chance upon a collection of his writings and read in full his 'minute on Indian education ' and his 'address on India'. In this blog I shall focus only on his educational legacy. Macaulay has been blamed for the Indian student's lack of appreciation for India's rich cultural heritage and instead for being supposedly 'indoctrinated' in the western civilization. Before I plunge headlong I'll cite a conversation I had with my cousin recently. My cousin and several friends of his, staunch DK/DMK activists, support Tamil as medium of instruction. They fund schools that are Tamil medium. I told him that very soon they will be knocking the doors of the government for some quota for these students. Presto, Karunanidhi did just that recently.

A very important note is that India, when Macaulay wrote his minute in 1835, was still administered by the "East India Company" and 22 years before the "Sepoy Mutiny" (or, as Indians love to call it, 'First War of Independence').

At Macaulay's disposal are funds to educate Indians. The dilemma before him is to choose the medium of instruction. His choices are a)English or b)Arabic or Sanskrit (depending on the religion of the pupil). Macaulay wades into the literary merits of each medium and very tellingly into what would be "good" for pupils.

It is his arguments on the literary merits, or lack there of, of Sanskrit and Arabic that stirred quite the hornets nest and. "A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia". Without exaggerating I can affirm that those words continue to irritate Indians to this day. Indians, reflexively, ask "what does Macaulay know of Indian literature. Macaulay answers "I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. .....when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same."

Even conceding the claim of Indians on 'literary value' of their epics Macaulay clearly rips into pride by showing that there is nothing more worthy in Indian literature when it comes to the sciences. This is only a blog and I cannot digress into every claim and counterclaim of Indians. I know the usual arguments that would be trotted out, Arthasastra, Bhaskara, Aryabhatta, Susruta etc but in 1835 India was an intellectually arid country. By then England had seen Shakespeare, Oxford, Cambridge, Shelley, Byron, Milton, Newton, Bacon, John Stuart Mill, Voltaire, Royal Society etc.

Macaulay is introspective too, "Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction has hitherto noted, had they neglected the language of Thucydides and Plato, and the language of Cicero and Tacitus, had they confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island, had they printed nothing and taught nothing at the universities but chronicles in Anglo-Saxon and romances in Norman French, --would England ever have been what she now is? What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. "

. In 1990 when I did my +2 at a Government aided private school (Up to 10th I was at Don Bosco) the school, under government rules, would charge English medium students Rs20 per month while the Tamil medium students studied free. The schools, under regulations, could have only one English medium section but as many Tamil medium sections as desired. Thus the government "created" a scarcity and made access to English medium sections difficult for the common man under the pretext of protecting Tamil (while M.K.Stalin studied in MCC, Kanimozhi in Church Park, Maran brother in Don Bosco etc etc etc).

Macaulay is at his best when he lays bare the ground realities and the hypocrisies. Even in his day students studying in Sanskrit and Arabic had to be paid the government whereas a pupil in English medium classes paid the government, "we are forced to pay our Arabic and Sanscrit students while those who learn English are willing to pay us. All the declamations in the world about the love and reverence of the natives for their sacred dialects will never, in the mind of any impartial person, outweigh this undisputed fact, that we cannot find in all our vast empire a single student who will let us teach him those dialects, unless we will pay him." 165 years ago the average parent rejected his children being taught in Sanskrit or Arabic and CHOSE TO PAY FOR ENGLISH MEDIUM.

"Why then is it necessary to pay people to learn Sanscrit and Arabic? Evidently because it is universally felt that the Sanscrit and Arabic are languages the knowledge of which does not compensate for the trouble of acquiring them. On all such subjects the state of the market is the detective test." Macaulay sounds very much like a right wing conservative of modern day America talking about the 'market as the detective test'.

Even today Tamil Nadu government acquires so called scholarly works of Tamil scholars and stuffs libraries with them irrespective of literary merit. Here is Macaulay in 1865 lamenting, "The committee have thought fit to lay out above a lakh of rupees in printing Arabic and Sanscrit books. Those books find no purchasers. It is very rarely that a single copy is disposed of. Twenty-three thousand volumes, most of them folios and quartos, fill the libraries or rather the lumber-rooms of this body." WHEREAS "the School Book Society is selling seven or eight thousand English volumes every year, and not only pays the expenses of printing but realizes a profit of twenty per cent. on its outlay."

To the oft repeated canard of Indians never being able to master English as a Englishman could Macaulay speaks warmly of the educated Indian, "It is taken for granted by the advocates of oriental learning that no native of this country can possibly attain more than a mere smattering of English. They do not attempt to prove this. But they perpetually insinuate it. They designate the education which their opponents recommend as a mere spelling-book education...Less than half the time which enables an English youth to read Herodotus and Sophocles ought to enable a Hindoo to read Hume and Milton."

Coming to the vulgar claim of quotas for Tamil medium graduates. Here is Macaulay 165 years ago and this passage needs to be quoted in full for the brilliance and clairvoyance. Here he talks about how students educated in Arabic and Sanskrit, at Government expense, come pleading to the same government for jobs. " These are surely the first petitioners who ever demanded compensation for having been educated gratis, for having been supported by the public during twelve years, and then sent forth into the world well furnished with literature and science. They represent their education as an injury which gives them a claim on the Government for redress, as an injury for which the stipends paid to them during the infliction were a very inadequate compensation. And I doubt not that they are in the right. They have wasted the best years of life in learning what procures for them neither bread nor respect."

Tamil chauvinists (masquerading as enthusiasts) clamor for being educated (that too educated free mostly) in Tamil and then present the same education as if it was an injury to claim compensation (jobs) from the government. I always hated this premise but until I read Macaulay I was not able to frame it clearly.

Deciding upon whether to further spend public money on supposed encouragement of Sanskrit and Arabic Macaulay is categorical "I would at once stop the printing of Arabic and Sanscrit books."

To mollify Indians he nevertheless agrees to allowing a college each to teach students in Sanskrit and Arabic BUT the conservative republican in Macaulay refuses to subsidise any such education, in shining prose he declares, "I would at least recommend that no stipends shall be given to any students who may hereafter repair thither, but that the people shall be left to make their own choice between the rival systems of education without being bribed by us to learn what they have no desire to know.

What did Macaulay hope to achieve by his educational policy, "We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern,  --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population."

So why did Macaulay want to educate the Indians at all? Indians have been fed a staple diet of looking at East India Company as mere 'conquerors' and people like Macaulay as 'unapologetic imperialists' suffering from the proverbial 'white man's burden'. I shall answer these in my next blog in detail.

165 years and each word rings true till today and what is sad they have GAINED much more relevance today. Macaulay's policy of taking education out of the hands of priestly classes which clamored for Sanskrit and Arabic shook the foundations of 1000 year caste heirarchy and laid  the foundations on which a century later India would raise its English speaking citizenry. A citizenry that is fueling India's economic surge. But for that accident of history India would not be where it is today.

I'd suggest erecting a statue for Macaulay in every town and hamlet.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html)

Learning in Mother Tongue -- Baloney !!!

Everytime the Tamil enthusiasts strut forward with theories on the hoary culture, the antiquity, the richness etc they are often faced with a glum sceptic public who just say "good, so what, lets talk about the present". Then we are forced to listen to hypothesis on how learning in mother-tongue accelerates learning, gives better understanding and finally makes a student a better student than learning in an alien tongue. Its time to question the premise and the hypothesis that flows out.

The first premise is that when children learn in the same language that is spoken at home they can understand what is taught very readily thus grasping it effectively. What is reality? Tamil has an unfortunate dichotomy between the colloqial version (spoken at home) versus not just literary Tamil but even what is used in plain textbooks. I still remember my first Biology class at Don Bosco very vividly. Brother Deva who taught it began by saying "bios means life and logos is 'study' therefore biology is study of life". Now think of a Tamil class. Yes the Tamil word "uyiriyal" (actually that is only an equivalent of zoology) is good, consider 'thavara iyal' (Botany). I can bet my farm that no home, irrespective of how well educated, uses the word "thavaram" to denote plants, colloqially we call it "chedi". This is just one instance.

My wife studied in Tamil medium completely. Out of the blue I asked her what did she study as Tamil equivalent of "matrix" (in math). She had to think hard and fish out the word "ani". Not a great equivalent. The point is learning in mother tongue did not make it easy to grasp the word because the word used is not what is in daily use. Matrix, on the other hand is used daily. Also if one were to see other usages like "matrix reasoning" we find that Tamil falters. Many mathematical terms are like that, the Tamil words are so far removed from daily use words that they might as well be in Greek or Latin. "mee peru vaguthi" -- Greatest common divisor. "mee chiru perukki" -- Least Common multiple. Now consider a common slum boy or girl, their Tamil is totally different from all these terms.

Remember children enter classes at 3-4 years of age, a very malleable mind, they spend most of their waking, conscious hours at school, if these are capitalized on then they can learn in any language, even Swahili as for that matter.

Take the case of tri-lingual houses. Let's say a Telugu family. I used to have a Telugu friend, she would be talking to me in English+Tamil but would switch to Telugu seamlessly when talking to her sister who passes by. Take the case of Afro-Americans, Hispanics etc in America they all talk different languages at home and send their children to English speaking schools.

Often times the other excuse is our schools in TN are ill equipped to teach in English. Our schools are simply ill equipped to teach anything in any language. Our teachers are the most ill equipped. Its not that teachers in US are of higher IQ or more dedicated, they are just better equipped. I once worked for McGraw Hill and was amazed to see the support material McGraw provides for teachers to teach using their textbooks.

We also lack hard empirical data or statistics of learning delays in bilingual children (Erika Hoff : Learning Development). There is no comprehensive multi-year study.

If we accept this argument of teaching in the same language that is spoken at home / neighborhood it is not a far leap to then say we can only teach to students whose parents are educated in turn. Yes, its a great advantage if parents are educated but the excellence of an educational system is measured by how well it caters to an under privileged student. Language is just a medium of instruction. A student from a slum, unfortunately, encounters a whole new world at school, the ideas in each subject are alien, the culture would be alien, the demands are alien. The language factor is more a truism than a true cause.

A crucial factor that we need to remember is that understanding of how language are learnt is itself a veritable battlefield. A joke in anthropology states, "no tribe has been discovered without language". This is true of the most secluded pristine tribes in Amazon jungles. Starting with CHomsky's theory of "universal grammar" to Steven Pinker's "language instinct" many theories abound, but all conceded that children are the fastest to learn languages and can handle as many as they are exposed to .

Many classmates in my class came from very normal backgrounds, literate but very literary families. Nobody suffered from language delays as a result of studying in English. Yes, some stumbled but the advantage of our learning-by-rote system is finally they just had to memorize. This lacuna is equally true for Tamil medium. In my home and my neighborhood nobody used English. Even at school we freely used Tamil.

My wife has done extremely well in her career and now speaks pretty good English. Many Indians in USA do well with a moderate fluency in English. However anybody who did not study in English in shool had a difficult transition period in college, actually the learning delay due to THAT is more evident. Many Indians reach mid level position based on technical expertise but fail to go higher primarily due to lack of ability to articulate higher reasoning in English. The lack of fluency is worsened by the almost total lack of extra-curricular reading in English by Indians.

That we live in a world dominated by English is no secret there is no let up on that. Stop with stupid questions like in english there is only "uncle" to denote "chithappa, periappa, mama etc". Tamil will do a double take before it can label the ever exponentially expanding sub-atomic particle zoo. So let's close down the Tamil Medium schools. Conserve resources, redirect efforts to rearing a English speaking population.