The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual

PERSPECTIVE and Kannada and Hindi passably. He also The Rise and Fall of the has a reading knowledge of French and German. On the other hand, Mukul Kesa- Bilingual Intellectual van and I are essentially comfortable in English alone. We can speak Hindi conver- sationally, and use documents written in Ramachandra Guha Hindi for research purposes. But we can- not write scholarly books or essays in Hin- This essay interprets the rise and 1 di. And neither of us can pretend to a third fall of the bilingual intellectual in his essay is inspired by an argu- language at all. modern India. Making a ment between the scholar-librarian TB S Kesavan and his son Mukul that 2 distinction between functional I was once privy to. I forget what they were Let me move now from the personal to the and emotional bilingualism, it fighting about. But I recall that the father, historical, to an argument on the question argues that Indian thinkers, then past 90 years of age, was giving as of language between two great modern writers and activists of earlier good as he got. At periodic intervals he Indians. In the month of April 1921, would turn to me, otherwise a silent spec- M ahatma Gandhi launched a broadside generations were often tator, and pointing to his son, say: against English education. First, in a intellectually active in more than “makku!”, “paithyam”! Those were words speech in Orissa, he described it as an one language. Now, however, that Mukul, born in Delhi of a Hindi- “unmitigated evil”. Bal Gangadhar Tilak there is an increasing separation speaking mother, did not himself under- and Rammohan Roy would, said Gandhi, stand. But I did. They meant, roughly and have “been far greater men had they not of discourses – between those respectively, “imbecile” and “lunatic”. the contagion of English learning”. In who operate exclusively in B S Kesavan knew that I lived in Banga- G andhi’s opinion, these two influential English and those who operate in lore, that both my parents were Tamil, and and admired Indians “were so many pig- the language of the state alone. that one of my great-uncles had been a mies who had no hold upon the people Tamil scholar. Thus, when his son’s stupi- compared with Chaitanya, Sankar, Kabir, The decline of the bilingual dity (real or alleged) could not be ade- and Nanak”. Warming to the theme, intellectual is a product of many quately conveyed in their shared lan- G andhi insisted that factors, among them public policy, guage, namely, English, he took recourse what Sankar alone was able to do, the whole army of English-knowing men can’t do. I can elite preference, new patterns of to his mother tongue, which was also theo retically mine. The emphasis must be multiply instances? Was Guru Govind a product of English education? Is there a sin- marriage, and economic change. on “ theoretically”. My great-uncle the gle English-knowing Indian who is a match Tamil scholar used to write postcards ask- for Nanak, the founder of a sect second to ing me to “learn Tamil and lead a simple none in point of valour and sacrifice?... If the life”. I failed him wholly in the second re- race has even to be revived it is to be revived 1 spect, but have down the years managed not by English education. to pick up a few dozen words of Tamil, A friend, reading the press reports of among them makku and paithyam. this talk in Orissa, asked Gandhi to ex- B S Kesavan was formidably multi- plain his views further. Writing in his own lingual. He was fluent in Tamil, Kannada, newspaper, the Mahatma clarified that and English, spoke Bengali adequately it is my considered opinion that English edu- and Hindi passably, and had a good grasp cation in the manner it has been given has of Sanskrit. No doubt his multilingualism emasculated the English-educated Indian, it has put a severe strain on the Indian stu- came in handy in his work as the first dents’ nervous energy, and has made of us I ndian director of the National Library, his imitators. The process of displacing the ver- nurturing of a national information sys- naculars has been one of the saddest chap- This essay is based on a lecture delivered at the ters in the British connection. India International Centre, New Delhi, on tem, and his pioneering histories of pub- 15 May 2009, to mark the birth centenary of lishing and printing. However, his taste “Rammohan Roy would have been a B S Kesavan. I am grateful to Rukun Advani, for languages was shared by many other greater reformer”, claimed the Mahatma, André Béteille, Alok Rai, Geetanjali Shree and Indians of his generation who did not “and Lokmanya Tilak would have been a Rupert Snell for their advice and help. The neces sarily require those skills in their greater scholar, if they had not to start usual disclaimers apply. jobs or careers. My own father, for in- with the handicap of having to think in Ramachandra Guha ([email protected]) is stance, who was a paper technologist by English and transmit their thoughts chiefly a historian and writer based in Bangalore. profession, speaks English and Tamil well, in English”. Gandhi argued that “of all the 36 august 15, 2009 vol xliv no 33 EPW Economic & Political Weekly PERSPECTIVE superstitions that affect India, none is so to English learning as such”, but merely to east and west were either written in Eng- great as that a knowledge of the English its being made a fetish, and to its being lish or translated by a colleague under his language is necessary for imbibing ideas preferred as a medium of education to the supervision. Tagore understood that while of liberty, and developing accuracy of mother tongue. “Mine is not a religion of love and humiliation at the personal or thought”. As a result of the system of edu- the prison-house”, he insisted: “it has room f amilial level were best expressed in the cation introduced by the English, “the even for the least among God’s creation.” mother tongue, impersonal questions of t endency has been to dwarf the Indian Refuting the charge that he or his non-co- reason and justice had to be communi- body, mind and soul”.2 operation movement were a manifestation cated in a language read by more people One does not know whether the Mahat- of xenophobia, he said: and over a greater geographical space ma’s anonymous friend was content with I hope I am as great a believer in free air as than Bengali. this clarification. But someone who was the great Poet. I do not want my house to be By writing in English as well as their less than satisfied with Gandhi’s views walled in on all sides and my windows to be mother tongue, Gandhi and Tagore were was the poet Rabindranath Tagore. He stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to serving society as well as themselves. was then travelling in Europe, where he be blown about my house as freely as possi- They reached out to varied audiences – ble. But I refuse to be blown off by any.4 received, by post, copies of Gandhi’s arti- and, by listening to their views, broadened cles. Tagore was dismayed by their general These words are emblazoned in halls the bases of their own thought. This open- tenor, and by the chastisement of Ram- and auditoria across India, but always minded-ness was also reflected in their mohan Roy in particular. On the 10 of May without the crucial first line: “I hope I am reading. Thus Gandhi read (and was influ- 1921, he wrote to their common friend as great a believer in free air as the great enced by) thinkers who were not neces- C F Andrews saying “I strongly protest Poet”. In truth, despite this argument in sarily Gujarati. The debt he owed to against Mahatma Gandhi’s depreciation of theory, in practice Gandhi and Tagore Ruskin and Tolstoy was scarcely less than such great personalities of Modern India were more-or-less on the same side. that owed to Raychandbhai or Narsi as Rammohan Roy in his zeal for declaim- G andhi wrote his books in Gujarati, but M ehta. Gandhi was also enriched by the ing against our modern education”. made certain that they were translated time he spent outside Gujarat – the several G andhi had celebrated the example of into English so as to reach a wider audi- years in England, the several decades in Nanak and Kabir, but, as Tagore sug- ence. And when required he could use the South Africa, the millions of miles travel- gested, those saints “were great because conqueror’s language rather well himself. ling through the Indian countryside. in their life and teaching they made orga- His first published articles, that appeared On his part, Tagore was widely read in nic union of the Hindu and Muhammadan in the journal of the Vegetarian Society of European literature. When he visited Ger- cultures – and such realisation of the spir- London in 1891, were written in the direct many in the 1920s at the invitation of his itual unity through all differences of and unadorned prose that was the hall- publisher, Kurt Wolff, his host remem- a ppearance is truly Indian”. mark of all his work in English, whether bered the “universal breadth of Tagore’s In learning and appreciating English, petitions to the colonial government, learning”, their conversations revealing argued Tagore, Rammohan Roy had e ditorials in his journals Indian Opinion, “without doubt that he knew far more of merely carried on the good work of Nanak Young India, and Harijan, or numerous the West than most of the Europeans he and Kabir.

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