Language Policy and Education in India: Documents, Contexts and Debates 9781138687059, 9781315542454

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LANGUAGE POLICY AND EDUCATION IN INDIA

This book presents a history of English and development of language education in modern India. It explores the role of language in colonial attempts to establish hegemony, the play of power and the anxieties in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century India. The chapters in the volume discuss language policy, debates and pedagogy as well as larger overarching questions such as identity, nationhood and sub-nationhood. The work also looks at the socio-cultural and economic factors that shaped the writing and publishing of textbooks and dictionaries and determined the direction of language teaching, specifically, of English language teaching. Drawing on a variety of archival sources – policy documents, books, periodicals – this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of linguistics, language teaching, cultural studies and modern Indian history. M. Sridhar is former Professor, Department of English at the University of Hyderabad, India, and is currently Secretary of the Alladi Memorial Trust that renders educational, medical and legal help to the underprivileged. With experience of teaching English at higher secondary and research levels for more than two decades, he is now engaged in teaching school children. He has keen interest in multilingualism and linguistic creativity and has published in the areas of language, English literature, comparative literature and literary theory. Sunita Mishra is Professor, Centre for English Language Studies at the University of Hyderabad, India. She has published on communication skills, discourse analysis, English in India and English language education. Presently, she is working on the history of English language education in India and critical pedagogy.

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LANGUAGE POLICY AND EDUCATION IN INDIA Documents, contexts and debates

Edited by M. Sridhar and Sunita Mishra

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, M. Sridhar and Sunita Mishra; individual chapters, the contributors The right of M. Sridhar and Sunita Mishra to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book. ISBN: 978-1-138-68705-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-54245-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

viii ix

Acknowledgements About the contributors Introduction

1

PART I

Language debates: the English encounter 1 Early English textbooks and language policies in India

7 9

AL O K M UK H E RJ E E

2 The emergence and growth of colonial language policy and its clash with the linguistic agenda of the national movement

26

VARO O N BAK S H I

3 The language policy of the East India Company and its impact on education during British India rule

41

RAJ N. BAK S H I

PART II

Language debates: the ‘vernaculars’ and English 4 Language, power and ideology: the changing contexts of bhasha in India E . V. RAM AK RIS H NAN

v

55

57

CONTENTS

5 Subject language: preliminary notes on education around late-nineteenth-century Hyderabad state

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AS M A RAS H E E D

6 Interminable anxieties: Odia language movement in colonial Odisha

79

S UB H E N D U M UND

7 Revisiting the ‘modern Telugu’ debate a century later: the pre- and post-history of Gurajada Appa Rao’s Minute of Dissent

90

N. V E N UGO PAL RAO

8 Modernisation of languages: the case of Premchand vis-à-vis Hindi

100

AN AN D P RAK AS H

9 Analysis and modernity: the language debate in the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad

112

P RO BAL DAS GUPTA

10 ‘English education’ in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Indian fiction

126

T. S RIRAM AN

PART III

Language debates: textbooks and teaching

145

11 First textbooks in English in India

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S H RE E S H CH AUDHARY

12 Anglicized–Sankritized–vernacularized: translational politics of primer writing in colonial Bengal N AN D IN I B H AT TACHARYA

vi

166

CONTENTS

13 ‘The poet’s pedagogy’: Rabindranath Tagore’s English primers

184

A M RIT S E N

14 Language and education in nineteenth-century Odisha: some issues and perspectives

198

R AM E S H C H AN D R A MAL I K AN D S UN I TA MI SHRA

15 The quest for Sahitya: rise of literature in colonial Orissa

211

SID D H ART H S AT PAT HY

16 Multilingual education in India and the English-only myth

236

A . GIRID H AR RAO

17 English studies in contemporary India: caste, class and power A RUN P. M UK H E R JEE

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246

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For this work to have come out, we would like to sincerely thank the following. The UGC DRS SAP programme of the English Department and the UPE programme of the Centre for English Language Studies, University of Hyderabad, India, which funded the two seminars where some of these papers were initially presented. Our students who helped us conduct the seminars and especially Paromita who, as the project fellow of the SAP, helped us put together a lot of details. The faculty and office staff of the two departments who helped us put the events together. The contributors who have willingly cooperated with us and waited for a very long time to see the light of this publication. Our families, especially Shivani, who put up with our preoccupation with the book. Alladi Uma for her support and suggestions throughout the making of this book. And the publishing team of Routledge who made it happen.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Raj N. Bakshi is Professor of Linguistics at Northern Border University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He was Professor and Director of the English and Foreign Languages University, Lucknow Campus, India, for more than seventeen years before his superannuation in 2014. His areas of interest are sociolinguistics, Indian English, second language acquisition and English grammar. Varoon Bakshi completed his Masters in English from the English and Foreign Languages University, Lucknow Campus, India, where he is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in English (Linguistics and Phonetics). His interests lie in the fields of language policy and planning, sociolinguistics and English grammar. Nandini Bhattacharya is Professor and Head, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Central University of Jammu (CUJ), India. She is presently Dean, School of Languages at CUJ. She has taught at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad, and acted as Professor and Head of the Department of English and Culture Studies, University of Burdwan, West Bengal, India. She specializes in 19th-century studies (Bengal–Britain engagement in particular); critical theory; genre studies, comparative literature, translation theory, Tagore and Gandhi studies, conflict and bioethical studies. Shreesh Chaudhary is Adjunct Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bhubaneswar and Distinguished Professor at GLA University, Mathura, India. He retired as Professor from IIT Madras in 2015. He has helped the British Council as an Examiner and team leader for IELTS. Most recently, he led a training programme in English for Civil Aviation for air traffic controllers. Video-recordings of his courses in spoken English and linguistics are available on YouTube. He has been

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CONTRIBUTORS

interested in history, structure and use of English in India. His book Foreigners and Foreign Languages in India: A Sociolinguistic History (2009) was received well. He studied at Mithila University, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), India and Lancaster University, UK. Probal Dasgupta is Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, since 2006. He has a Ph.D. in Linguistics (1980) from New York University and has taught in New York, San Francisco, Melbourne, Kolkata, Pune and Hyderabad. He has (co-)edited several linguistics journals and Beletra Almanako. He has been a member of Akademio de Esperanto since 1983, and its vice-president since 2001. He has been an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America since 2004. He is author/translator of over ten books and over four hundred articles in English, Bangla, Esperanto and French. He is best known for The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome (1993). Ramesh Chandra Malik is Post-Doctoral Fellow, University Grants Commission at the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies, University of Hyderabad, India. His areas of interest are translation studies, ethnography studies and literary criticism. He has a few research papers to his credit. Alok Mukherjee is Distinguished Visiting Professor, cross-appointed to the Department of Criminology and Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. He holds a Ph.D. from York University, M.A. from University of Waterloo, Canada, and from University of Saugar, India, and B.A. from Agra University, India. Mukherjee has taught at Ryerson and York. His research and writing express his concern with the dynamics of power in the institutional spaces of the hierarchical societies of Canada and India, with a view to developing strategies for transforming those spaces so that they are truly reflective of and accountable to the interests of all members of the communities they serve. Arun P. Mukherjee did her graduate work in English at the University of Saugar, India and came to Canada as a Commonwealth Scholar in 1971 to do a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her current interests are South Asian and minority Canadian literatures and human rights and justice. Her translation of the Dalit writer, Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography Joothan: A Dalit’s Life won the New India Foundation Prize for ‘the finest book published in India during 2002–2003’. x

CONTRIBUTORS

Subhendu Mund is a well-known Odia poet, lyricist, translator, lexicographer and an acclaimed critic in the area of Indian English literature and Odia studies. He has translated extensively from Odia to English, as well as from Hindi, English and Bangla to Odia. He has translated for Sahitya Akademi, Odisha Sahitya Akademi, National Book Trust, India, among other organizations. He is the Chief Editor of the Indian Journal of World Literature and Culture; and a former Member of Odisha Sahitya Akademi and the Odia Advisory Board of Sahitya Akademi. He has been Vice-President of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies since 2008. Anand Prakash has a Ph.D. and has taught English literature in Delhi University till his retirement in 2007. His publications include Marxist Literary Theory (1994) and Muktibodh in Our Time. His Hindi translation of Georg Lukacs’s The Theory of the Novel was published under the title Upanyas Ka Siddhant (1981). He currently edits the Journal of Literature Studies. E. V. Ramakrishnan, poet, critic and translator, is Professor Emeritus, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies at Central University of Gujarat, India. He writes in Malayalam, his first language, and English. He has three volumes of poetry in English, critical books in English in the areas of comparative literature, Indian literatures and modernism in Indian poetry. He has five books in Malayalam, including Aksharavum Aadhunikatayum (1994) for which he was awarded the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award. A. Giridhar Rao teaches at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India. His research interests include linguistic diversity, language policy, multilingual education and science fiction studies. He writes and blogs on these topics in English and Esperanto. His blog in English is at bolii. blogspot.com. N. Venugopal Rao is a poet, literary critic, translator, social scientist, journalist and public speaker. He has published twenty original books in Telugu and translated as many from English into Telugu. He is currently editor of Veekshanam, a Telugu Monthly Journal of Political Economy and Society, Hyderabad, India. Asma Rasheed teaches at the Department of English Language Teaching, the English and Foreign Languages University (EFL), Hyderabad, India. Her academic and research interests include critical pedagogy, education, gender studies, literature, contemporary inter-disciplinary xi

CONTRIBUTORS

studies and critical theory. She teaches courses and has published in the areas of education, literary representations and women’s studies. She examines the ways in which issues of language, culture, community, caste and so on complicate our understanding of questions about pedagogy. Siddharth Satpathy teaches in the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. He earned a joint Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, and South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, Illinois. He is presently working on a booklength study of narratives produced by the English General Baptist Mission to Orissa in the nineteenth century. His most recent publications include the chapter ‘Reading History in Colonial India: Three Nineteenth-Century Narratives and Their Teleologies’ in the book Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (edited by Henning Truper, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sanjay Subrahmanyam). Amrit Sen is presently Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India. Interested in eighteenth-century studies, travel writing, Tagore studies and the history of science, he won the Outstanding Research Award for his doctoral dissertation. His major publications include The Narcissistic Mode: Moll Flanders, Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy (2007); Gitanjali: The Centenary Edition (co-edited with Tapati Mukhopadhyay, 2012); Rathindranath Tagore: The Unsung Hero (co-edited with Tapati Mukhopadhyay, 2013) and Rabindranath Tagore and His Circle (2015). He is also joint editor of The Visva-Bharati Quarterly and is presently UGCUKIERI Fellow for the project on ‘The Scotland-India Continuum’. T. Sriraman retired in 2011 as Professor in the School of Distance Education, the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, and now lives in Chennai, India. He has translated a novel and two plays from Tamil to English and co-authored course books in English for undergraduates and a book on practical criticism. His other interests include Shakespeare studies, grammar and usage and stylistics.

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INTRODUCTION M. Sridhar and Sunita Mishra

English was not the first foreign language to have come to India. By the time English reached this land and started gaining dominion, there were already foreign and Indian languages like Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Sanskrit that had well-established and operative learning systems. Every time a foreign language came in and became influential, it impacted the existing system and entered into a ‘dialogic’ relationship with the other languages in various domains. The difference between the coming of English and the coming of other languages was that while most languages that came earlier remained confined to specific domains of use, English was dispersed through a centralized system of education and administration that made its impact overwhelming and immediate. Persian, of course, had a very vast spread as the language of court and administration in most parts of India. Even the employees of the East India Company had to learn Persian. And among the Indian population knowing Persian definitely had advantages in terms of reach and access. But even during the eighteenth century – the golden age of Persian in India – it did not take control over the living and thinking of Indians the way English could a century and half later. As Shreesh Chaudhary points out in his Foreigners and Foreign Languages in India, the introduction of English in India was slow and difficult but its spread was rapid – not only because of the administrative control but because of the economic opportunities it provided its users. By the nineteenth century the English language definitely had the advantage of impacting and controlling the teaching and thinking in most Indian languages. But in effect the situation was much more complex because the Indian languages also impacted one another and English teaching in complex ways that involved social, cultural and economic factors. The chapters in this book look at some of these processes. In many ways, they challenge and critique perceived assumptions about English and ‘vernacular’ education and the place of English vis-à-vis other Indian 1

M . S R I D H A R A N D S U N I TA M I S H R A

languages. Most of the chapters unpack the historiography of English and English education in India and look at how it was constituted differently in different regions and how it was shaped by and also in turn shaped vernacular education. This volume of chapters springs from an assumption that the history of the teaching of English across various provinces of India may not have followed the same trajectory throughout the country and that the early textbooks in the teaching of English may not have been the same across the country. The assumption springs from the fact that English was introduced in various parts of the country at different points of time and that the early textbooks, which included bilingual ones, drew on the local languages. These facts obviously complicate the writing of the history of English teaching in India. For instance, even when the same book such as A Help in Acquiring a Knowledge of the English Language; Designed for the Benefit of Those in This Country, Who Wish to Study English Language and Science was being printed in Mumbai and Bellary in the early part of the nineteenth century, the content varied slightly as it took into consideration the specific linguistic contexts of Marathi and Telugu, respectively, which it had sought to address. The bilingual nature of the textbook presents itself strikingly in the very title page where the Marathi/Telugu translation of the title is interspersed with the English component. The chapters in the present book take into consideration the fact that there has always been a hierarchy of different languages within India (as anywhere else in the world) and that some languages have always enjoyed the position of official, administrative importance at different points of time. Political factors active at various points of time too have contributed to the position of privilege some languages have enjoyed. When English was introduced in India in the mid-nineteenth century, it gave rise to Anglicist–Orientalist controversies. Simultaneously, the introduction of English provided impetus to the process of modernization and standardization of Indian languages. This sparked off a series of debates within Indian languages. Added to this is the relative patronage each of the Indian languages has received from the British. Such factors have given rise to a host of language debates across the length and breadth of the country. Some of the chapters in this volume attempt to address these debates; they present a nuanced history of English education that takes into consideration the multiple factors that contributed to the growth and sustenance of the language in the country. We hope that an understanding of the historiography of these debating positions such as they emerge from the chapters presented in this volume will go a long way in our understanding of the present position of significance of these languages. 2

I N T RO D U C T I O N

The chapters will also hopefully throw light on the historicity of the relative prominence some Indian languages enjoy over their counterparts. The chapters in the book have been divided into three parts. Part I titled ‘Language debates: the English encounter’ deals with the language debates that were negotiating the policies regarding English language education at the national level in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interestingly, the chapters reveal a complex power play where the colonial power and policies were formed and framed within a complex network of multiple voices and countervoices. Alok Mukherjee in his ‘Early English textbooks and language policies in India’ gives an account of the complex positionings in the context of textbooks and language policies. He argues that English in India cannot be seen as colonial imposition. It was, instead, the effort of individuals and institutions to establish their ‘cultural capital’. Varoon Bakshi in his chapter ‘The emergence and growth of colonial language policy and its clash with the linguistic agenda of the national movement’ shows that on various occasions it was the natives who demanded for more and better English education. But the faulty system of schooling, the inappropriate language policies and so on failed to give them the amount of English they needed. Raj N. Bakshi’s chapter ‘The language policy of the East India Company and its impact on education during British India rule’ is a more general discussion of the factors that propelled education in the English and vernacular medium. The chapters in Part II, ‘Language debates: the “vernaculars” and English’, throw light on the multipronged ‘war of positioning’ that one finds in the debates and policies around language questions in nineteenth-century India. The questions here are not only regarding English vis-à-vis the vernaculars but dialogue between Indian languages and at times varieties of the same language interlocked in a complex network of negotiation and competition. The debates here are primarily centred on questions of modernity, progress and access to opportunity. E. V. Ramakrishnan in his chapter ‘Language, power and ideology: the changing contexts of bhasha in India’ looks at the history of Malayalam in the nineteenth century in the background of the emerging print culture. The chapter also dwells on the larger questions of the emerging dominance of English and the attendant foregrounding of logic, rationalism and empiricism and traces the trajectories that the Bhasha tradition had to take as a consequence. Asma Rasheed’s chapter ‘Subject language: preliminary notes on education around late-nineteenth-century Hyderabad state’ similarly looks at the politics that governed the shift from Persian to Urdu as the medium of instruction in the Hyderabad state. The chapter also analyses the changes that followed with the arrival of English, with its print 3

M . S R I D H A R A N D S U N I TA M I S H R A

resource and the manner in which it eventually restructured meanings, practices and agendas. Subhendu Mund in his chapter ‘Interminable anxieties: Odia language movement in colonial Odisha’ explores the anxieties the Odia-speaking community had to undergo because of the domination of the Bengali intelligentsia and the British language policy. If these two chapters talk of the impact of the English language and the British language policies on the vernaculars, the chapter of N. Venugopal Rao ‘Revisiting the “modern Telugu” debate a century later: the pre- and posthistory of Gurajada Appa Rao’s Minute of Dissent’ and Anand Prakash’s ‘Modernisation of languages: the case of Premchand vis-à-vis Hindi’ look at the oppositional positions that varieties of the same language took up in the face of modernization. Venugopal revisits the very important debate between the advocates of classical and modern Telugu and the manner in which Gurajada Appa Rao intervened to impact the medium of instruction and language variety to be used in the examinations. And Anand Prakash looks at Premchand’s language as a conscious intervention to move away from the Persianized Urdu and make literature available to the common mass through the spoken idiom of Hindi. Similarly, Probal Dasgupta’s chapter ‘Analysis and modernity: the language debate in the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad’ discusses Hariprasad Sastri’s Baanggaalaa Byaakaran and looks at it as an initiative taken by the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad to move away from the archaic diction and modernize the linguistic and cultural setting of Bengal. And T. Sriraman’s chapter ‘ “English education” in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Indian fiction’ looks at seven Tamil novels that bring out the ambivalence towards English education. In his chapter, he focuses on the interesting way in which the question of English education interplays intricately with multifaceted identities of gender, caste and class. Part III of the book, ‘Language debates: textbooks and teaching’ contains chapters that explicitly focus on issues of curriculum determination, textbook preparation and pedagogy in the context of the hugely altered context in the nineteenth century, where a centralized system of education and evaluation was being experimented on for the first time in India’s long multilingual history. Like the other two parts, the chapters in this part also look at pedagogy and textbook preparation in the context of vernacular teaching, the introduction of English education and the impact this had on the vernacular teaching systems. Shreesh Chaudhary in the chapter ‘First textbooks in English in India’ discusses the first textbooks in both language and literature that became popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter also discusses the circumstances and the different contexts in which these texts were written and prescribed. 4

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If Chaudhary’s chapter focuses on the textbooks used for English education, Nandini Bhattacharya in her chapter ‘Anglicized-Sankritizedvernacularized: translational politics of primer writing in colonial Bengal’ discusses the dynamics of anglicization, Sanskritization and ‘vernacularization’ that shaped the vernacular primers in colonial Bengal. Talking of colonial Bengal again, Amrit Sen in his ‘ “The poet’s pedagogy”: Rabindranath Tagore’s English primers’ looks at the primers prepared by Tagore for vernacular education and focuses on the new kinds of identities these primers were forging. He discusses these identities in the context of the new system of education Tagore was experimenting within the sociopolitical context of the times he was writing in. Ramesh Chandra Malik and Sunita Mishra, and Siddharth Satpathy in their chapters talk of education in the context of Odisha. While Malik and Mishra in their chapter ‘Language and education in nineteenth-century Odisha: some issues and perspectives’ discuss the coming of English to Odisha and the impact it had on the highly contested territory of language education in the region, Satpathy in his chapter ‘The quest for Sahitya: rise of literature in colonial Orissa’ analyses the constructedness of literature as a discipline. He unravels the principles that guided the formation of this canon and the desires and anxieties that moulded the pedagogy of literature teaching. A. Giridhar Rao and Arun P. Mukherjee in their chapters comment on the contemporary situation of English education in India. Giridhar Rao in his chapter ‘Multilingual education in India and the English-only myth’ shows how the problems in the education system in India have been compounded by the ‘English-only’ myth. Arun P. Mukherjee’s chapter ‘English studies in contemporary india: caste, class, and power’ illustrates how caste and class intercept the teaching of English literature in India even today. As we see, the volume attempts to bring out the ‘polyphony’, the complex multiplicity of factors that define this period, without trying to sum up the trend of language debates and English teaching (language and literature) in India. Hopefully, this historiography will provide different/ alternative insights and help us understand the complex language situation we find in India today.

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Part I LANGUAGE DEBATES The English encounter

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1 EARLY ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS AND LANGUAGE POLICIES IN INDIA Alok Mukherjee

The topic of early English textbooks and language policies in India is a rich and complex one. Happily, however, there is no dearth of archival records to help us form conclusions based on evidence. What this evidence tells us is that the rise of English studies in India was very much the result of a convergence of the interests of the colonial rulers of Great Britain and the social and cultural leaders of India. That is to say, English did not appear in India only because the colonial rulers needed an army of inexpensive clerks or because Lord Macaulay penned his (in)famous ‘Minute’. The popular view that English was a colonial imposition, propagated, for example by Gauri Vishwanathan’s Masks of Conquest (1989) and resulting from the influence of the theories of nationalism, Orientalism and postcolonialism on the study and understanding of the colonial era, is one-dimensional. As an explanation, it is not sufficient or adequate, because the reality is more nuanced. Formal policies vis-à-vis English evolved over time, as did a defined field. However, English education, that is to say, teaching and learning of English and through English about subjects, ideas, manners, morals, practices and so on that were associated with the English, began to make its appearance in India in the eighteenth century. We find many examples of institutions and individuals, both British and Indian, preparing learning materials for their pupils that might be seen as the earliest examples of textbook writing for the purpose of teaching English in India. Alongside these curricular developments, there emerged a lively conversation on the need for an English education involving advocates and opponents from both sides, British and Indian. This conversation leads to the development of the first policies on the subject as well as the first formal syllabi and texts for the teaching of English. 9

ALOK MUKHERJEE

I will review, first, the debate related to policy and then discuss developments related to an English curriculum. I should say that my approach will be symptomatic rather than comprehensive. My effort will be to demonstrate that English education did not arise in India due to the interplay of certain abstract or impersonal forces; rather, it happened because of the engagement of individuals and institutions who, to draw on the theoretical concepts promulgated by Pierre Bourdieu, used their social and cultural capitals, their habitus (see, e.g. Bourdieu 1987, 1990), to pursue their respective interests. English was the ‘field’, to use another Bourdeauxian term (Bourdieu 1984), on which these combatants waged what Antonio Gramsci called a ‘war of position’ (Gramsci 1971: 108) to establish their ‘hegemony’. I use ‘hegemony’ in the Gramscian sense to mean the process by which the ruling group of a society obtains the consent of the ruled to the notion that its ideas are the ideas of the society (see, e.g. Gramsci 1988a, 1988b). It does so through the work its intellectuals – namely the civil servant, the teacher, the priest, the artist, the journalist – perform at the level of the superstructure. My proposition is that these ‘organic intellectuals’ (Gramsci 1988) of the British ruling group were faced with another force, comprising representatives of the civil society in India and Britain, and the English education that emerged in India was the product of a contest of alternative hegemonies between the two groups. One of the earliest entrants in this contest was Charles Grant who had spent over a decade in India between 1767 and 1790 as a soldier and a factor. Returning to England a very wealthy man, this soldier-turnedcapitalist entered the Parliament, became president of the East India Company’s Board of Control and was an active member of the evangelical party, the Clapham Sect, which included prominent Englishmen like Zachariah Macaulay and Wilberforce. In 1792, Grant started to write his Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals; and on the Means of Improving It. The target of Grant’s Observations was quite specifically ‘the Hindoos’ who, according to him, ‘err, because they are ignorant; and their errors have never fairly been laid before them’ (Grant 1999: 83). The work was, for him, a labour of love, motivated by ‘nothing except the Consciousness of meaning to do good’ (in Paranjpe 1938: ix). And that involved a detailed proposal for the introduction of English education and Western knowledge in India. This was, in effect, the first formal proposal for the introduction of English education in India. Grant claimed that his intent was to remove ‘darkness’ through ‘communication of our light and knowledge’ (1999: 83). And though he conceded that there were ‘two ways of making this 10

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communication’, namely through local languages or ‘the medium of our own’, that is English, and though he agreed that ‘either mode, lies open to us’ (84), he argued for a system of education that would progress from teaching English language to teaching other subjects through English. The objectives of a programme of modern education for India that Grant had in mind, one that would bring light and eradicate darkness, were the building of moral character, development of rational thinking and acquisition of the practical skills of the West. One discerns here the early outlines of what has become known as the trope of English language as ‘window’ to the knowledge of the world. As Grant put it, The first communication, and the instrument of introducing the rest, must be the English language; this is a key which will open to them a world of new ideas, and policy alone might have impelled us, long since, to put it into their hands. (83–85) Writing in the late eighteenth century, Grant envisaged a programme of education in which the student would progress from learning the English language to studying ‘our easy literary compositions’, to ‘various engaging works’ with Western neoclassical themes, to, eventually, learning other ‘useful’ fields including ‘the principles of mechanics, and their application to agriculture and the useful arts’ (84–87). He expected, in terms of outcomes, that this education would inculcate in students a capacity to reason, to make ethical distinctions, to apply a ‘system of principles and morals’ and to make use of modern inventions in the applied fields of science and technology. In pursuit of his goal, when the charter of East India Company came up for renewal, Grant, supported by Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, drafted a clause for inclusion in the company’s new charter, known as the ‘Pious Clause’. This was in 1793 and it was inserted in the proposed charter bill being considered by the Parliament. The clause directed East India Company to adopt ‘such measures . . . for the interests and happiness of the native inhabitants of the British dominions in India, as may gradually tend to their advancement in useful knowledge, and to their religious and moral improvement.’ To this end, the company’s Court of Directors were ‘empowered and required to send out, from time to time . . . fit and proper persons . . . as schoolmasters, missionaries or otherwise’ (in Laird 1972: 61). The language of the clause is noteworthy for its combination of evangelicalism and principles of utilitarianism. However, Grant was unsuccessful in his mission. Due to the strong criticism of the company’s Court of Proprietors, Henry Dundas, then 11

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president of its Board of Control, thought it advisable to withdraw the clause before it came up for third reading in the House of Commons. Grant and the evangelists and missionaries supporting him had to wait twenty years before an amended version of the Pious Clause was included in the East India Company’s charter in 1813. The clause made it ‘lawful’ for the Governor General in Council to set aside and apply ‘a sum of not less than one lack [sic] of rupees in each year’ out of the net profits of the company ‘to the revival and improvement of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India’ (East India Company 1999: 91). I have dwelt at some length on the efforts of Charles Grant for several reasons. The Pious Clause laid the groundwork for the introduction of state-funded English education in India. Lord Macaulay’s Minute, by providing the official legal interpretation of its words, completed the edifice. On one hand, the passage of the clause marked one phase in the direction of British policy regarding religious and educational work in India. On the other, it opened the door to the next phase of the debate. In a Gramscian sense, the inclusion of the clause in the company’s charter symbolized the success of those in Britain who favoured an interventionist approach characterized by support for English education, Western knowledge and Christian missionary work in a ‘war of position’ (Gramsci 1971: 108) over those who favoured a hands-off approach marked by education through local languages and religious neutrality. Until now, the latter group had held sway. Governor generals, such as Warren Hastings, had prohibited missionary work, and the company had not seen education as its responsibility. Indeed, the public policy had been based on the view that loyalty of the colonized subject was best won through a combination of neutrality in religious, social and cultural matters and encouragement in preservation of local systems of knowledge and education. Protagonists of the two views were drawn from Britain’s social, cultural, religious and political elite. Members of the two camps were connected to each other and to those in power by ties of family, school, economic interests, political affiliation and so on. And their efforts on behalf of their respective cause offer a textbook example of the Bourdeauxian forces at play, in particular, habitus. As a result, there was no quick action resulting from the passage of the Pious Clause. In the meantime, the battlefield for this Gramscian ‘war of position’ over policy extended to India also. The British combatants were joined by Indians who, too, were divided between those who wanted the public funds to be spent on supporting 12

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traditional education in Sanskrit and Arabic and those who argued for the funds to be expended on an English education, known as Orientalists and Anglicists, respectively. Their arguments continued for a quarter of a century before a resolution was reached in 1839 when the governor general, Lord Auckland, made the decision to essentially support the Anglicist position. A major intervenor on the Indian side in support of English education was Raja Rammohun Roy. A social reformer, one of the founders of the Brahmo Samaj and a successful merchant, Roy had made a name as a scholar of Sanskrit and Arabic as well as for his campaign to ban the practice of widow burning. With arguments that echo those of Charles Grant, Roy made a forceful case for state support of English education in his letter of 1823 addressed to the Governor General Lord Amherst. My book, This Gift of English, provides a detailed comparison of the arguments put forward by Grant and Roy (Mukherjee 2009: 123). Coming from a Sanskrit scholar with a deep knowledge of sanatan dharma and the Vedic texts, Roy’s plea constitutes a devastating case for the denial of any public support for traditional education through acts like the establishment of a Sanskrit college for which a campaign was being waged by Orientalists. Invoking Bacon and comparing the learning provided by Sanskrit pundits with that offered by the pre-Baconian schoolmen, Roy argued that a Sanskrit college can only be expected to load the minds of youth with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions of little or no practical use to the possessor or to society. The pupils will there acquire what was known two thousand years ago, with the addition of vain and empty subtleties since then produced by speculative men, such as is already commonly taught in all parts of India. (Roy 1906: 472) Roy ended his address with the following plea: If it had been intended to keep the British nation in ignorance of real knowledge, the Baconian philosophy would not have been allowed to replace the system of the schoolmen which was the best calculated to perpetuate ignorance. In the same manner the Sanskrit system of education would be the best calculated to keep this country in darkness, if such had been the policy of the British Legislature. But as the improvement of the native population is the object of Government, it will consequently promote a more 13

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liberal and enlightened system of instruction, embracing Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy, with other useful Sciences, which may be accomplished with the sum proposed by employing a few gentlemen of talent and learning educated in Europe and providing a College furnished with necessary books, instruments and other apparatus. (1906: 474) Roy advanced his case at a time when the Orientalists held sway among policymakers in India and England. He came under severe criticism on several grounds, including that he did not represent more than a handful of people and that he was distorting traditional Sanskrit education as well as Hindu religion. This second criticism was more than a little ironic because one of Roy’s motives behind his advocacy for English education was, in fact, reform of Hinduism and revival of sanatan dharma through acquisition of Western knowledge (Mukherjee 2009: 124–125). As Sumit Sarkar has pointed out, the later Roy was a conservative figure who believed in reforming Hinduism from within, compared to the earlier, rational Roy of the Arabic text, Tuhafut, who sought to ‘synthesize Hindu, Islamic and Christian cultural traditions’ (Sarkar 1985: 2). In any event, it was Roy’s belief that the rational thought and scientific knowledge of Europe acquired through an English education would assist in stripping away the layers of ritual and superstition that centuries of brahminical practice had imposed on religion and thus help revive sanatan dharma. But other motives also underlay Roy’s advocacy, and these were economic and political. As a merchant and an ardent free marketer, Roy saw in English education an opportunity to expand the economic interests of his class. It is clear from his writings and speeches that he foresaw – and suggested with great circumspection – a day when the British will no longer rule India. With the help of English education, he envisaged the possibility of Indians – or, more specifically, men of his class and social background – taking over the reins of economic and political power. His, then, was a strategic manoeuvre in the cause of an alternative hegemony. In English education, thus, there was a convergence of interests, although there was no identity of goals or objectives. For the British, these motives were maintenance of political power, creation of a loyal subject, spread of Christianity and dissemination of Western knowledge and culture. For Indians represented by people like Roy, these included religious revival, access to rational thought and scientific knowledge and positioning for gaining economic and political power. 14

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It can be argued that there was a similar convergence of hegemonic interests on the part of the Orientalists also. There were among them colonial administrators and scholars who had gained a profound knowledge of Sanskrit and Arabic, become experts in traditional literature and philosophical thought and made significant contribution to Eastern culture. They were in power at this time and did their best to resist the cause of English education. This changed when the balance of power changed. Macaulay’s Minute of 1835 marks this shift. The governor general of the day, Lord Bentinck, already supported the Anglicist cause, as did the government of the day in England. Macaulay was sent to India as the law member of the Governor General’s Council as reward for his work in the British Parliament in helping the government in 1833 steer successfully a bill moved by Charles Grant dealing with trade and governance issues involving India and creating the position of law member – the very position that was given to Macaulay a year later in 1834. Macaulay had several other connections with this group that were familial, political and ideological. When, therefore, faced with countless petitions from Orientalists, on one side, with whose cause he did not sympathize, and advice from Anglicists and evangelicals like Macaulay’s brother-in-law, Charles Trevelyan, on the other, with whom he did sympathize, Governor General Bentinck referred the matter to his law member, namely Macaulay, for a legal opinion; the decision was a foregone conclusion. Indeed, some scholars have even called it ‘a charade’ (Zastoupil and Moir 1999: 28). It is important to understand that Macaulay’s task was not to create a policy; rather, it was to provide a legal interpretation of the language of the Pious Clause approved by the British Parliament in 1813 but not yet enforced. It is important to keep this in mind in order to place Macaulay’s Minute in its true context. Failure to do so has resulted in a dehistoricization and decontextualization of this document and in according it a status that it scarcely deserves. Macaulay gives his legal interpretation in the first five paragraphs of the Minute. If the document has acquired a certain notoriety, it is because of what he goes on to say in the rest of the text where, in effect, he exceeds his brief and the language in which he does so. In reality, however, what he does in these parts of his Minute is to borrow from and synthesize what those preceding him, like Grant and Roy, had argued and those during his time, like his brother-in-law, Charles Trevelyan, a colonial administrator and evangelist, were saying. Macaulay uses his position as an organic intellectual of the empire and draws on his considerable political and scholarly capital to advance their cause. It is, of course, a cause with which he agreed, given his belief in the superiority of the English language and 15

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British culture, as well as his allegiance to Britain’s imperial interests. He had given a clue to his thinking when speaking on Grant’s bill in the Parliament in July 1833. As a historian familiar with the rise and fall of empires, Macaulay could anticipate the possible end of Britain’s political empire. His alternative was a grand design for an enduring cultural empire. He had said: The sceptre may pass away from us. Unforeseen accidents may derange our most profound schemes of policy. Victory may be inconsistent to our Arms. But there are triumphs which are followed by no reverse. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarianism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws. (Macaulay 1952: 155) The Minute of 1835 is, I would argue, but an elaboration of the thinking Macaulay articulated in this speech he made two years earlier. Bentinck gave his assent to Macaulay’s advice promptly. Yet the matter did not end there as strong opposition continued from British Orientalists, like H. T. Prinsep, who wielded considerable power as head of the General Committee for Public Instruction, and supporters of Sanskrit and Arabic education within Hindu and Muslim communities, respectively. Attention shifted to the company’s headquarters in London, and implementation of any scheme of mass English education was delayed by several years. A response to Macaulay’s strident proposal came from John Stuart Mill who, like his father James Mill, had taken employment with the company where he assisted the elder Mill with correspondence to and from India. J. S. Mill shared his father’s belief in utilitarianism, but the two diverged in their response to India and Indian culture as well as in their thinking about a public education system for India. As a historian, James Mill had been scathing in his assessment of India in his massive work History of India (see, e.g. J. Mill 1968 vol. 1: 312–313 and 324, vol. 2: 33–34 and 116). In a dispatch prepared in 1824, he had castigated with great sarcasm any effort to support traditional systems of Indian education. The only contribution ancient India had made, he felt, was in the realm of poetry, but he saw no ‘utility’ in funding colleges dedicated to the cultivation of poetry. In arguments very similar to those of Roy and, later, Macaulay, he had argued for the entire sum of one lakh rupees to be spent on a system of English education (Court of Directors 1999: 115–117). J. S. Mill, displaying a greater appreciation for and sensitivity towards India and Indian 16

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cultural traditions, parted company with his father. His counter-proposal of 1836 argued for continued support of education in local languages as well as introduction of English education (Mill 1999: 225–243). John Bearce describes J. S. Mill along with Edmund Burke and James Mill as one of the three British philosophers who ‘greatly influenced the course of British attitudes towards India’ (Bearce 1961: 277). He says: Burke had established the principles of Conservative philosophy as applied to India, and had shaped the contents of Conservative attitudes. . . . James Mill, drawing his ideas from Bentham, Ricardo and the youthful Liberal movement, had expounded and popularized, as an historian and essayist, the Liberal philosophy of transforming India into a Westernized nation. . . . John Stuart Mill synthesized the two traditions. He balanced the essentially Conservative traditions of his Company background and the radical temperament of his philosophical career. His ideas about India, in consequence, combined the best of the two traditions and emerged as the most important interpretation of India in the age of progress, moderate in tone, considerate of Indian society in the Conservative mood, and representative of the most advanced Liberal principles of government and society. (277–278) As far as an education policy for India was concerned, J. S. Mill, according to Bearce, wanted to encourage ‘education in India for the same reason that he wanted to extend education in Britain, that is, to encourage individual self-development, the highest utility, which would mean the progress and the development of man as a “progressive being” ’ (282). For Mill, ‘improvement’ through ‘a disinterested love of knowledge or intelligent wish for information’, rather than education for the narrow purpose of gaining social advantage or ‘as a passport to public employment’ should be the justification for choosing a system of education (Mill 1999: 232). From this perspective, while he believed that ‘improvement’ was best obtained through developing ‘a taste for our literature’, ‘participation in our sentiments’ and ‘impression of our principles’ (232), he was not prepared to summarily dismiss, like his father and Macaulay, the claim of Indian philosophy, literature and learning as deserving of study. There were two further reasons for his opposition to a complete shift in the system of education. First, as a matter of policy, he believed that any sudden change in the government’s direction ‘tends to destroy all confidence on the part of the people, in the wisdom of the rulers’ (Mill 1999: 229). His 17

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second reason was his belief that it was ‘altogether chimerical to expect that the main portion of the mental cultivation of a people can ever take place through the medium of a foreign language’ (233). Indeed, he admitted of the possibility that ‘English ideas’ could be inculcated through a language other than English (233). Thus, by way of a proposal, Mill advanced a twofold policy. The first part of his proposal was ‘to teach the teachers’, that is to raise up a class of persons who having derived from an intimate acquaintance with European literature the improved ideas and feelings which are derivable from that source, will make it their occupation to spread those ideas and feelings among their countrymen. (233) It is this small group that would receive an English education. This proposal was very much the one contained in Macaulay’s Minute, and Mill quoted Macaulay’s passage with complete approval. The second part of Mill’s proposal was the provision of education to the larger body through the ‘vernacular’ languages (233). And since he agreed with Macaulay that the local languages, or ‘vernaculars’, were ‘not fitted for any purposes but those of every-day life’, he recommended official support for those languages as well as for Sanskrit and Arabic as media and subjects of study (233). Mill’s was perhaps the most balanced and considered of all proposals on the best way to expend the sum of money to be allocated for education in India under Grant’s Pious Clause approved by the Parliament in London in 1813. However, it attracted strong opposition from the raj officials in India; as a result, J. S. Mill’s dispatch was not even sent. The debate finally ended in 1839 when the then governor general, Lord Auckland, implemented a somewhat watered-down version of the model approved by Bentinck based upon Macaulay’s recommendations. Auckland approved the funding of an English education as his ‘principal aim’, in order to ‘communicate through the means of the English language, a complete education in European literature, philosophy and science’ (Auckland 1999: 306). And at the same time, he declared that ‘whatever amount of reward and support for meritorious Students [sic] may be granted to those attached to our English, should be granted also in perfectly like proportion in our Oriental Institutions’ (320). With this culminated the first phase of the policy debate or contest. There were, of course, many participants in this debate. I have chosen to focus on Grant, Roy, Macaulay and Mill because I believe that they 18

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synthesized, articulated and gave leadership to the perspectives and interests that were at play in terms of establishing a policy about a publicly funded system of education in India. It is, I suggest, important and relevant to pay attention to this debate or contest of forces because it set the course for what has evolved by way of an English education for India. Of course, the debate was not taking place in a theoretical or political vacuum. At the same time when it was going on, there were developments, as well, with respect to curriculum. Beginning with the efforts of private individuals and missionaries, these early years witnessed the emergence of a more formal curriculum that continues to cast its shadow even today. In this sense, curriculum is an ideology, a reflection of hegemony as well as a tool of the hegemonic process. Textbooks, as a key ingredient of this process, are very much interpellated by ideology, as I propose to demonstrate now. Preparation and selection of textbooks – or more accurately, learning materials – as I have said earlier, predates the policy debates and continued apace. It gained momentum and became a more formal process once the policy question was settled, because this is when privately owned, small-sized institutions providing rudimentary education and missionary schools began to give way to institutions of higher education. And with that development, a more formalized or, rather, standardized curriculum of English education began to take shape and a consistent selection of learning materials began to emerge, with little difference between secular and Christian institutions. As I have argued in This Gift of English (162–171), what began to take shape was a programme of English education that performed the hegemonic interest of the groups that had prevailed in the education debate, both British and Indian. Within this overall context, three points bear mention. First, this development clearly mirrored the ones that were occurring in Scotland and England. In Scotland, which was the first place to adopt a programme of English education, the objective was to acquire knowledge of the language and culture of the imperial power and thereby to gain an advantage. The move was, in other words, prompted by a strategic calculation not dissimilar from that of the Indian proponents of English education. In England, on the other hand, education in the vernacular, that is English, was motivated by the anxiety felt by the ruling class vis-à-vis the lower classes. English was to be the medium through which these classes were to be introduced to culture as a barrier against anarchy – a truly hegemonic motive. As we have seen earlier, a similar motive existed with respect to the introduction of English education in India, except that race took the place of class. In both instances, what the 19

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ruling group sought was the willing participation of the ruled in its transactions through inculcation of a ‘false consciousness’ (Marx and Engels 1976: 42ff) of its reality as the reality. As a tool in this move, literature performed an ideological function. Indeed, to paraphrase Terry Eagleton’s observation, it was an ideology (Eagleton 1983: 22). The second point to be made is that in England as well as in India, evangelists and utilitarians were the main agents for the introduction of English education. But while they both supported English education, their goals were different. The former sought to breed Christian values through this system of education, while the latter wanted to equip students from the lower orders with practical skills. Their respective educational objectives may be classified broadly under ‘breeding’ and ‘useful knowledge’. English education, then, was required to meet a variety of educational objectives. And this, as we shall see, influenced the curricular decisions that were made, including the preparation, selection and use of learning materials. My third point is that in England, English was preferred as the medium of instructing the lower orders because it was the vernacular language. However, when it came to India, the local languages, or vernaculars, were not deemed fit alternatives to Sanskrit and Arabic, even though Grant, Macaulay and Mill had entertained that possibility. Mill, in particular, had gone so far as to concede that English, being a foreign language, may not be the best medium of instruction. Nevertheless, all three had rejected the choice of vernaculars on the ground that they were not yet at a point in their development where they could be put to use as vehicles for the transmission of Western learning. Macaulay and Mill expressed the hope that contact with English would, in fact, contribute to their development. Interestingly, and as a sign, as it were, of their elite location, Indian proponents like Roy did not even consider the idea of deploying the vernaculars to the project of providing a Western education. The curriculum of English education that emerged from these considerations, thus, involved, on one hand, teaching of the English language and, on the other hand, teaching of ‘breeding’ as well as ‘useful knowledge’ through English. With respect to the development of future language policies in India, these would be formative factors. John Clark Marshman’s ‘copy books’ are among the earliest examples of learning materials that were designed to serve these multiple pedagogical goals. Marshman was a missionary operating out of Serampore Missionary College at a time when missionary work and religious instruction were not permitted in the East India Company’s territories. The copy books were his way of bypassing the restriction. Students, appointed to 20

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serve as monitors, dictated sentences from the copy books, which pupils were required to write down, read aloud and learn by heart. According to Laird, these textbooks were designed to provide through a graduated course ‘an effective grounding in the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, together with an introduction to ethical values and modern knowledge, as related to the conditions of life and work in contemporary Bengal’ (Laird 1972: 78). Marshman’s copy books thus performed at an early stage of instruction almost all of the functions expected of English education. And they were prepared before the policy debate on Grant’s Pious Clause had settled. A noteworthy aspect of these copy books is that while they used ‘ethical values’ as a subterfuge for transmitting Christian knowledge, the ‘useful knowledge’ they provided concerned local realities and needs. This was not necessarily the case with learning materials that came later. Even manuals for language teaching were divorced from the local context. Indeed, they found ways to promote British nationalism and cultural imperialism while imparting a practical skill. For one thing, of course, these were not texts specifically prepared for a second language learner. The texts that were used for advanced teaching of English language were meant for the British student and were imported from England. Two such texts used widely in Indian educational institutions were Lindley Murray’s English Grammar (1795; rpt. 1968) and George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (1816). Both used a rules-driven, prescriptive approach to teach linguistic breeding, such as propriety, perspicuity and precision in the use of English. And at the same time, they used examples to illustrate their rules that were rooted in either Christianity or British nationalism. Another purpose that they shared was the establishment of a classical lineage for English, which was, in fact, a vernacular language. Besides these language manuals, there were three types of learning materials. These were histories of literature such as Frederick Schlegel’s Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern (1865) and Henry Hallam’s Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1882); readers of poetry and prose, such as Rev J. M. McCulloch’s A Course of Reading (1834); and, finally, works of single authors. An examination of each type of these materials shows us the ways in which it performed the multiple objectives of English education. The two histories, for example, take an encyclopaedic approach that, while proposing the possibility of a universal history, culminates in the determination that Western Europe’s – and specifically Britain’s – literary achievement signified the pinnacle of culture. Schlegel, in particular, traces a continuous process of cultural history in which the sun of high culture having set in 21

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India had now risen in Europe. He anticipates the Hindu revivalists’ claim that this cultural sunset over India was caused by the appearance of Islam in that land. These histories presented English literature as the most recent as well as the best expression of a universal culture. In so doing, and by their own practice, they also valorized a universalistic interpretive approach as legitimate, regardless of the origin of a text. Histories like these, along with single authors, were read by students at an advanced level. Readers of prose and poetry were used at the earlier levels. They were called readers because their primary purpose was to teach reading, and this included learning the elements of speech as well as textual interpretation. Readers like the one by Richardson were, for the most part, prepared for Indian learners. However, they rarely, if ever, included Indian materials. Others were anthologies produced in Britain. One such, used in the second class of the senior division of Calcutta’s Hindu College, was A Course of Reading by Rev. J. M. McCulloch, a Scottish minister and school headmaster from Edinburgh. McCulloch claims a twofold purpose for his collection: ‘to instruct . . . in the meaning of what is read, as well as in the art of reading’. He claims also that only those pieces had been included that ‘seemed likely to inform and entertain’ (McCulloch 1834: iii). A careful examination of his selections and of the editorial apparatus provided by him, however, brings to light two other dimensions of the reader’s textual politics: one, transmission of strong Christian religious and moral values, and two, glorification of all things British – its people, history, culture and even geography and natural environment. The final type of texts consisted of literary works by single authors. A comparison of the literature curricula for the higher classes in Calcutta’s Hindu College, Dacca College and Madras University – all secular institutions – as well as the Free Church Institution or FCI – a religious institution – during the 1830s to 1840s reveals a commonality of choices. This is a notable phenomenon in view of the fact that a commonly accepted ‘canon’ or ‘great tradition’ of English literature had not yet emerged. That did not happen until the late nineteenth century, though Chaucer had been called ‘the pure well head of Poesie’ by Spenser and the graveyard in the north transcript of Westminster Abbey had been designated ‘the Poetical Quarter’ by Addison in 1771. In this context, it is interesting to note that the same authors from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries were being taught in all institutions. These were Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Addison and Pope. In addition, other works by authors from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries appear in the literature curricula of individual institutions. FCI’s was the most extensive and included Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’, James Thomson’s ‘Seasons’ and ‘Castle 22

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of Indolence’, Mark Akenside’s ‘Pleasures of Imagination’, poems of William Cowper, John Foster’s Essays in a Series of Letters and Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’. Missing from the lists of all institutions were works of fiction, presumably due to the emphasis on the moral dimension of a literary education. Poetry had pride of place as the highest form of literary expression, and belles letters was the most useful genre for imparting language skills. Absent, along with fiction, were works by Dissenters and secular writers. Thus, the authors who found a place were those who shared, in one form or another, a set of religious, moral, cultural, philosophical, scientific, social and political ideas and values. They were all Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and exemplars of the glories of British culture. At the top of this list stood Bacon, whom Raja Rammohun Roy had cited with great approval. These, then, were the types of learning materials that were used for the teaching of English language and literature in this first phase of the emergence of English education in India. They were key components of a curriculum that was intended to serve an ideological purpose, indeed, that constituted an ideology in so far as its objectives were to inculcate ‘breeding’, that is the morals, manners and values of Britain’s ruling group, and to transmit useful knowledge, that is rational thinking, scientific temper and practical skill in a language that would provide access to the scientific knowledge of the West. This curriculum was, finally, the site where the hegemonic agendas of the two sides sought convergence. I have purposely dwelt upon and emphasized the political dimension of the policy debates and their educational consequences because I believe that the result has been a deeply conservative, aestheticist and elitist programme of English education with questionable liberatory potential. To the extent that it has continued to cast a shadow long into the future, there is a need to consider its implications for a democratic society. Since Roy, many in government and civil society have articulated a political agenda for English in India. In post-independence India, the two dominant tropes associated with English have been in terms of its role as a window on the world and as a link language within. In setting out government policy in 1967, in response to the recommendations of the Kothari Commission, the education minister of the day, Dr Triguna Sen, emphasized the role of English in enriching other Indian languages while rejecting vehemently its role in elite formation. More recently, a section of the Dalit community has made a strong case for access to English because of its perceived potential as an agent of empowerment and emancipation. In other words, there always has been, and continues 23

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to be, a political agenda associated with English. Based on the history of those originary moments that I have outlined, the question needs to be asked as to whether the English education that came out of those early efforts contained within it the capacity to perform the roles expected of it in later years or, conversely, whether it has remained, largely, a vehicle for Macaulay’s ‘imperishable empire of the mind’, no matter how porous, with a class of people playing the role of the interpreter envisaged by him and John Stuart Mill.

References Auckland, Lord 1999. Document twenty-nine: Minute about ‘Native Education recorded in the general department by the governor-general, Lord Auckland, 24 November 1839. In Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds. The Great Indian Education Debate. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. 225–243. Bearce, George D. 1961. British Attitudes towards India 1784–1885. London: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1987. ‘What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups’. Berkeley Journal of Sociology. 32: 1–17. ———. 1990. In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflective Sociology. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Campbell, George. 1816. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and John Fairbairn; London: T Cadell and W Davis. Court of Directors. 1999. Document nine: Court of Directors’ revenue department dispatch to the Governor-General in council of Fort William in Bengal, dated 18th February 1824, paragraphs 79 to 86. In Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds. The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. 115–117. Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. East India Company. 1999. Document four: East India Company charter act of 1813, section 43 (53 Geo. III, c. 155, s. 43). In Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds. The Great Indian Education Debate. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. 90–92. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Newell Smith. New York: International Publishers. ———. 1988a. An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935. Ed. David Forgacs. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1988b. Gramsci’s Prison Letters/Lettered al carcere. Sel. and trans. with introduction by Hamish Henderson. London: Zwan Publications in association with Edinburgh Review.

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Grant, Charles. 1999. Document three: Part of chapter IV of Charles Grant’s Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to morals: Written chiefly in 1792. In Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds. The Great Indian Education Debate. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. 81–89. Hallam, Henry. 1882. Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Ward, Lock & Co. Laird, M. A. 1972. Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793–1837. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1952. A speech delivered in the House of Commons on the 10th of July, 1833. In Speeches by Lord Macaulay with His Minute on Indian Education. Sel. with introduction and notes by G. M. Young. The world’s classics. London: Oxford University Press. 345–361 (orig. pub. 1935). Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1976. The German Ideology. 3rd revised edition. Moscow: Progress Publishers (orig. pub. 1968). McCulloch, Rev. J. M. 1834. A Course of Reading. London: Oliver & Boyd; Simpson, Marshall, & Co. Mill, James. 1968. The History of British India. Vols. 1 and 2. Notes by Horace Hayman Wilson. Intro. by John Kenneth Galbraith. New York: Chelsea House. Mill, John Stuart. 1999. Document twenty-one: First draft of a Court of Directors’ public department dispatch to India (previous communication 1828) prepared by John Stuart Mill, assistant to the examiner of Indian correspondence, with marginal comments by the president of the Board of Control, Sir John Cam Hobhouse, c. July–December 1836. In Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds. The Great Indian Education Debate. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. 225–243. Mukherjee, Alok. 2009. This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Murray, Lindley. 1968. English Grammar 1795: English Linguistics 1500–1800 (a collection of facsimile reprints), no. 106. Sel. and ed. by R. C. Alston. Menston, England: The Scolar Press. Paranjpe, M. R. 1938. Introduction. In A Source Book of Modern Indian Education 1797–1902. Comp. M. R. Paranjpe. London: Macmillan. v–xvii. Roy, Raja Rammohun. 1906. A letter on english education to his excellency the right honourable Lord Amherst, Governor-General in council. In Jogendra Chunder Ghose and Eshan Chunder Ghose, eds., The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy with an English Translation of ‘Tuhfatul Muwahhiddin’. Allahabad: The Panini Office. 471–474. Sarkar, Sumit. 1985. A Critique of Colonial India. Calcutta: Papyrus. Schlegel, Frederick. 1865. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern. London: Bell & Duldy. Vishwanathan, Gauri. 1989. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Zastoupil, Lynn, and Martin Moir. 1999. The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press.

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2 THE EMERGENCE AND GROWTH OF COLONIAL LANGUAGE POLICY AND ITS CLASH WITH THE LINGUISTIC AGENDA OF THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT Varoon Bakshi

English was initially spread in India by the Christian missionaries. However, officials of the East India Company feared that under the garb of spreading English, the missionaries wanted to convert Indians to Christianity. Attempts at proselytization did not go well with the East India Company. The reason was that the company had recently won the Battle of Plassey and had established a foothold in Bengal. Any unrest among the ‘natives’ due to the efforts of proselytization on the part of the missionaries would loosen the foothold of the company in Bengal. Therefore in 1807, the company decided to expel the missionaries from Kolkata. However, the intervention of Dutch prevented their expulsion. But the Court of Directors issued a dispatch, dated 7 September 1808, declaring strict religious neutrality and refusing to lend authority to any attempt to propagate the Christian religion. Thus, the effort of the missionaries to spread education through the medium of English was stymied due to the lack of support of the company. Perhaps English would have spread early in India if the company had formulated a policy to encourage the teaching of English by the missionaries. But the bulwark of religious neutrality thwarted any effort at spreading English in India. During the initial period of the company rule in Bengal, there was no formal education policy and language policy for educating Indians. However, individuals opened colleges to educate the native population. Thus, in 1781 Warren Hastings founded the Calcutta Madrassa, the main 26

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object of which was ‘to qualify the sons of Muhammadan gentlemen for responsible and lucrative offices in the State, even at that date largely monopolised by the Hindus’ (In Sharp 1920: 7). The cost of educating the people was initially borne by Hastings, but after two years he was reimbursed and the institution was handed over to the government. Similarly in 1792, Jonathan Duncan, a resident at Banaras, founded the Benares Sanskrit College, which was maintained by the government. The commissioner of the Deccan started a college for Hindu learning at Poona. In the Delhi district Mr Fraser founded schools for the instruction of ‘children of the zamindars or peasantry, in reading and writing the Persian language, at an expense to himself of about Rs. 200 per mensem’ (In Sharp 1920: 13). The company had not assumed any responsibility for the education of the people; however, its individual officers were doing their bit to educate the people. The aforementioned colleges offered instruction in the Indian languages and not in English. One of the main reasons for establishing these colleges was to train young men in native languages like Sanskrit and Persian. These men would then join the company’s administration at various positions. The reason that Indian administrators and officials were required by the company is explained in the following lines: First of all it is worth mentioning that all these colleges were mainly established after Warren Hastings’ appointment as Governor of Bengal. The reason was that during Hastings’ tenure, the Company’s Court of Directors ended the dual system of government and took charge of the revenue and law and order management of Bengal Bihar and Orissa. This essentially meant that the Company officials were directly in charge of the revenue and law and order of Bengal. However the Company officials who were British required Indian revenue collectors and law enforcement officials, who knew the language of the province, to help them with the administration of revenue and law and order. Warren Hastings reformed the judicial system along the lines of the Mughal judiciary. Under the reformed judicial system, the Diwani Adalat was established to deal with civil cases; Hindu law and Muslim law were applicable in the adalat. Similarly a criminal court, the Faujdari Adalat was established. It was headed by Indian officers of the Company who were in turn assisted by Qazis and Muftis. Muslim law was followed in the Faujdari Adalat. (Grover 2008: 71–72) 27

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Thus Indian judicial officials were required to work in the newly established courts. Thus it can be inferred that even though there was no official language policy during the early rule of the company, a few individuals and officials realized the need for establishing colleges to train Indians in their native languages. The Indian officials being well versed in the languages of the province was of utmost importance for many British officers. Thus perhaps an unofficial policy was followed to train Indians in their native tongues. The aforementioned inference is supported by evidence in the form of a letter, dated 25 September 1823, from T. F. Fraser to the chief secretary of Fort William. Fraser’s letter states the importance of Indian boys being able to understand something about the British judicial and revenue system (In Sharp 1920: 13). However, there were people in Britain who were opposed to the policy of imparting education in vernacular languages. One of such people was Charles Grant, a company official and later a Member of the Parliament. Grant regarded the people of India to be ignorant. Ignorance could be rid by education, and education would be imparted in English. While he admitted there are certain advantages in the use of the vernaculars like better employment prospects, he strongly declared his support of the English language as the vehicle for imparting Western ideas. Thus Grant anticipated Macaulay. But at the same time he went far beyond him in proposing the diffusion of English over the country, the apparent supersession of vernaculars by English and the imparting of the knowledge of Christianity and adopting English as the official language of the Company and the government in India. (In Sharp 1920: 81) He wanted a language policy to be implemented within the education system of India that would also help in the spread of Christianity among the Indians. Hence during the renewal of the company charter in 1792– 1793, Grant’s friend in the Parliament, Wilberforce (instigated by Grant), proposed to introduce a bill that encouraged sending missionaries and schoolmasters to India for teaching and imparting education in English. However, the Court of Directors was against such a system and it did not want education to be used to convert Indians. It stated, The Hindus had as good a system of faith and of morals as most people and that it would be madness to attempt their conversion

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or to give them any more learning or any other description of learning than what they already possessed. (In Sharp 1920: 4) Hastings followed a policy of patronizing ‘Oriental’ languages by supporting the establishment of colleges like the Calcutta Madarassa and the Sanskrit college at Banaras. His education and language policies were totally different from Grant’s pro-English policy. Hastings encouraged an Oriental system of education and language learning, whereas Grant and the missionaries were a part of the Anglicist group that wanted the spread of English and Western knowledge among the natives. However, the Anglicists were not the only people who were influencing British language policy; ordinary educated Indians along with certain British individuals also played a major role in influencing a change in the language policy of the British, a change which would signal a shift from vernacular to English education. Before going any further, it would be pertinent to take a brief look at the emergence of English education in India. There is a misconception till today that English education was originally introduced by the British. Government-funded and government-supported English language education could not be introduced in India until 1835. However, English education was introduced in India much before 1835. If we go back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, we will see an appreciation of the value of English as a medium of education, among the educated Bengalis. In 1817 we find an effort made to introduce English education in Bengal, especially in Kolkata. There are two important institutions that did this work, the Calcutta School Book Society and the Hindu College. The Calcutta School Book Society had the task of making available good textbooks in both English and Indian languages. The textbooks were meant for schools, and the society successfully printed and published several textbooks. However, the members of the society felt that there were no good schools for teaching English; therefore, for this purpose, a meeting was held in the town hall of Kolkata on 1 December 1818 and a new society called Calcutta School Society was formed with a mandate to establish English medium schools and improve the standard of English in the already-existing schools (Majumdar 1960: 32–33). The other important landmark was the establishment of the Hindu College. The Hindu College was established by Sir Hyde East at the behest of several Indian parents in Calcutta. Quite a few of these parents had perhaps been the products of the indigenous language education system established by Hastings and had been employed in the service of the

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company as pleaders and low-ranking civil servants. They realized that an education in English and Western subjects would enhance the prospects of their children, securing better jobs. The presence of children of professional classes in the newly opened schools is poignantly represented by Palit in his book New Viewpoints on Nineteenth Century Bengal. He states, ‘As early as 1830, sons of Diwans, brothers of clerks, nephews of accountants or grandons of Sarkars dealing with the auction and sales of goods joined the Hindu College in bulk to qualify as cadets for professions’ (Palit 1960: 61). Palit has also given a list of the occupations of the parents or guardians of the students studying at the Barisal Zillah School in 1870; 24.6 per cent of the parents were zamindars or talukdars, whereas 33.3 per cent of the parents were pleaders in the courts (Palit 1960: 61). The medium of instruction in these schools was to be Bengali and English. As Majumdar puts it, Raja Ram Mohan Roy suggested to Sir Hyde the concept of a school. ‘The establishment of the Hindu College was followed by that of a large number of institutions, both in and outside Kolkata, for teaching English and imparting a system of liberal education’ (Majumdar 1960: 28). Mr H. H. Wilson stated in 1836 that when he left Kolkata there were about 6,000 youths studying English (Majumdar 1960: 28). Many schools and educational institutions were established through private efforts of individuals, both British and Indian. The students of Hindu College in turn established several schools to impart education in English and Bengali. As stated before, the demand for English education came from the educated class of India. In a letter written by Raja Ram Mohan Roy to Governor General Lord Amherst, Roy stressed the importance of having a liberal education system that focused on Western subjects instead of native subjects like Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian. Similarly, an article in a Bengali journal named Sambad Sudhakar on 7 September 1833 states: The Government pays no heed to the newspaper articles on the spread of education. It no doubt spends a lakh of Rupees on education through Education Society, but we are at a loss to understand the benefits accruing from it. The amount spent on Sanskrit College or School is of no benefit to the people in general, for only Brahman students are admitted there. Besides, institutions for teaching Sanskrit were never wanting in this country, and Sanskrit education would not have suffered much even if Government had not extended its patronage to it. It is further to be remembered that Sanskrit learning only enables a man to prescribe Sastric rules, and serves no other useful purpose. Therefore the Government should sow the seeds, all over the country, of that type of learning 30

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which can remove the darkness of ignorance and makes a man fit for administration and other public activities. It is necessary to establish an English school for this purpose in every village. This would involve a huge cost and to meet thus we suggest that the Government orders each villager to pay a subscription according to his ability ranging from one to four annas. The balance may be met out of the funds placed at the disposal of the Education Society. (Majumdar 1960: 31) Thus it is clear that there was considerable dissatisfaction among the Indians regarding the British education and language policy. Indians who had established colleges for providing Western education to the youth were not happy with the patronage given by the company to vernacular medium colleges, established by the company officials. Thus the educated Indians were on the same side as the Anglicists. Apart from the demand of English education by the Indians, we should also take note of the success of English education among Indian students who were studying in the newly opened schools. The students mastered the language and studied advanced texts in English. The British had initially felt that the Indians would learn a smattering of English, which would be enough for them to work as clerks. However, it came as a surprise to the British that a large number of Indian students became fluent in English. A Bengali weekly in 1828 commented on this: Formerly the English believed that the Indians pick up a smattering of English just enough for serving as a clerk. But it now transpires that they are learning English like their own language. (in Majumdar 1960: 35) The same weekly also reported in March 1829 on the occasion of the Bhawanipur annual school examination: The efforts made during the last five or six years for spreading English language and learning in this country are really remarkable. Formerly we heard that Indians only learnt a little English for securing jobs as clerks. But we now find with surprise that Indian boys venture to study the most advanced texts and the most abstruse subjects in English and have mastered even the most difficult branches of English learning. The students of Hindu College and of the schools founded by Rammohan Roy and Jagamohan Basu have recently been examined by Englishmen 31

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in English language. If we repeat the praises we have heard from these examiners we may be accused of flattery. But we may say that the Englishmen have been very pleased with the results of these examinations and it is their desire that the English education may be further spread in this country. (in Majumdar 1960: 35) The aforementioned news items clearly show the popularity of the English language and English language education among the Indians in the early and mid-nineteenth century. However, this popularity and the Anglicist zeal did not have any effect on the company’s policies regarding the languages in general. On the contrary, the company followed a totally different policy of patronizing the colleges (mentioned before) established during Hastings’s period. The establishment of the General Committee of Public Instruction in 1823 furthered the government’s impetus to vernacular education. The committee continued with the old system of patronizing Indian languages. One lakh rupees were allotted to the committee, and it spent it on the promotion of Arabic, Sanskrit and so on. Even though Indian reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy pleaded for the introduction of company-backed English education, the committee went ahead with its Orientalist policy of funding vernacular education. However, the appointment of William Bentinck as the governor general changed everything. He was sympathetic towards the Indian demands. Finally, the educated Indians had succeeded in influencing British policymakers. With the appointment of Lord Macaulay as a member of the governor general’s Executive Council and president of the General Committee of Public Instruction, the Anglicist viewpoint was strengthened. Macaulay was a reliable advisor to Bentinck and had the ability to influence Bentinck’s views on language policy. Thus the time was ripe to bring some big changes in the linguistic scene of India. Moreover, ‘the policy of half measures was becoming increasingly difficult and impractical because of the demand for English and the opening up of employment opportunities in government services’ (Krishnaswamy 2006: 29). All the aforementioned causes led to the presentation of Macaulay’s famous Minute. Without going into the details of the Minute, which are known to everyone, it can be said that the Minute led to far-reaching changes in British language policy, especially those related to education. The government started establishing English and Anglo-vernacular schools, where English was taught. All available funds were diverted to English education. Bentinck was succeeded by Lord Auckland in 1836. Fortunately for Macaulay and his followers, both of Indian and British origins, Auckland was a great votary of English education, writing a minute on Macaulay’s Minute, 32

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supporting Macaulay’s viewpoints. Auckland famously said ‘the denial of English and English education meant a denial of education’ (in Krishnaswamy 2006: 44). Auckland was succeeded by Lord Hardinge who continued his predecessor’s policy. At the same time, there was popular support for the government policies from the educated Indian class. The formal policy on education from the British government and the company came in the form of the Woods Dispatch. The dispatch tried its best to tone down the ‘harsh imperial rhetoric of Macaulay’ (Krishnaswamy 2006: 48). It recommended that English language would be taught where there was a demand for it and it would also be taught along with vernacular languages. However, the dispatch did ponder upon the point of teaching the masses in vernacular languages because a large number of people in India were not acquainted with English. The outcome of the Woods Dispatch was that English became the language of the administration in India. Therefore it was all the more important to impart education in English in order to produce Englishspeaking graduates who would in turn join the Indian administration. To enable this, the Court of Directors envisaged the establishment of Anglovernacular and vernacular schools. Anglo-vernacular schools provided education in English and the vernacular language, whereas vernacular schools provided education only in the vernaculars. The Woods Dispatch had also recommended the establishment of universities. And in 1857, the year of the Mutiny, three universities were established in the presidencies of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Thus it would be pertinent to note that the effort of the educated Indians in influencing the language policy of the British East India Company succeeded finally. It did take some time, but due to the efforts of Indians at establishing a large number of schools and colleges imparting English education and the success of the Indians at not only learning but also mastering the English language, it did become possible. The appointment of Bentinck was a boon for the Indians, and it was during Bentinck’s period when English education emerged in India. Thus till the 1900s, the Indians were generally happy with the system of education established by the British. The views of the educated Indians on language policy converged with the views of the British government. However, with the appointment of Lord Curzon as the governor general, things changed. Lord Curzon appointed the Indian Universities Commission in 1902, and it gave its report in 1904. The report of the commission highlighted the problems faced by matriculated students in understanding English lectures at college. The report of the commission also stated that many students would complete their university education without acquiring any knowledge of English. Such students lacked the ability to read and 33

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write English correctly. The commission blamed the schools for the sorry state of affairs and regarded bad teaching and bad teachers as the primary reason for the lack of competence in English among the matriculates. The commission’s report recommended an exam that every boy matriculating from school would have to take. The boys would be admitted to the colleges subject to passing the matriculation exam. The recommendations of the commission led to the implementation of the Government Resolution on Educational Policy. This resolution brought in the rule of conducting high school exams in English and introducing English in schools only after the students had achieved a thorough grounding in their first language. Moreover, the resolution also suggested that English should not be introduced as the medium of instruction before the age of thirteen. The report of the Universities Commission clearly shows that all was not well with the English school education system. The educated Indians had supported the education system that began during Bentinck’s period. But now there was resistance among them. Somehow the support for the government’s language and education policy was eroding among the Indians. As early as the closing decade of the nineteenth century, the English system of education that was prevalent in India since the time of Lord William Bentinck (1835) came up for sharp criticism at the hands of many Indian leaders and intellectuals. Gooroo Dass Banerjee, the first Indian vice-chancellor, was one of the first who sought to draw public and governmental attention to the numerous deficiencies of the existing system of university education in course of his Convocation Addresses (1890–1892) and suggested the urgency of the introduction of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction (Mukherjee 1957: 5). Similarly Rabindra Nath Tagore in his paper titled ‘Shikshar Her-Fer’, published as early as 1893 in Sadhana, pointed out in a clear manner the inadequacy of the prevailing system of education under British rule and pleaded for the acceptance of Bengali as the medium of instruction (in Mukherjee 1957: 5). Another charge levelled against the English education system was that it was foreign in nature and ill-suited to Indian conditions. Valentine Chirol observed, The fundamental weakness of our Indian educational system is that the average Indian student cannot bring his education into any direct relation with the world in which, outside the class or lecture room, he continues to live. For that world is still the old Indian world of his forefathers, and it is as far removed as the poles asunder from the Western world which claims his education. (Chirol 1910: 2) 34

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Another problem with English education was that there was a lot of emphasis on learning language and literature, not technical and scientific training. Moreover, the training of English was faulty in that it tested the student’s knowledge of only the vocabulary and terminology. The British philosopher Herbert Spencer pointed out in The Dawn (June 1899): The amazing folly of an Examiner who proposes to test the fitness of youths for commencing their higher education, by seeing how much they know of the technical terms, cant phrases, slang, and even extinct slang, talked by the people of another nation. Instead of the unfitness of the boys, which is pointed out to us, we may see rather the unfitness of those concerned in educating them. (in Mukherjee 1957: 8) Moreover, the educated Indians were unhappy with less emphasis being given to Indian philosophy and religion and culture in the English education system. Satishchandra observed in August 1899: ‘The encouragement and promotion of oriental thought and learning have never been the object of the British Government. That object has been in the first place political; in the second, administrative’ (in Mukherjee 1957: 10). Satishchandra further goes on to say, ‘The cultivation of higher Eastern thought and learning was as much imperative in the interest of national advancement along evolutionary lines as a wider appreciation and assimilation of a higher culture from the West.’ He further added, ‘Government policy since the time of Lord William Bentinck, and indeed from even earlier, has subordinated this higher educational factor in the interests of mere administration and political purposes’ (in Mukherjee 1957: 11). In 1904, the new Universities Act brought certain draconian rules as far as English was concerned. The pass mark in English under the new act was raised from 33 to 37 per cent. The increase in the pass percentage in English was set to serve as a brake upon high percentage of passes and to control the expansion of higher education. Even when the pass percentage in English was 33 per cent, there was ‘a general massacre’ of 50 per cent of the candidates appearing in the entrance examination (in Mukherjee 1957: 16). Therefore, Indian leaders feared that an increase in the pass percentage from 33 to 37 per cent would surely lead to the failure of about 80 or 90 per cent of the candidates, and only 10 or 20 per cent would successfully pass through the ordeal. It was also feared that in the higher examinations – the F.A., the B.A. and M.A. – there would be correspondingly higher percentage of failures. 35

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Motilal Ghose observed that in the Entrance exam, students 80 or 90 per cent will fail when they appear at the examination. Thus, a large number of our lads will never again enter into the precincts of a college hall and know what higher education is. Every year their number will swell, and our country will be filled with tens of thousands of half-educated men belonging to respectable classes, who will either be useless or dangerous members of the society. (in Mukherjee 1957: 16–17) Finally, the Act of 1904 targeted private Indian colleges that would be shut down in the absence of a decent number of F.A.-passed candidates. This made the Indians suspicious of the Universities Act and Curzon’s intentions. ‘The least that Lord Curzon was charged with’, observed Valentine Chirol, ‘was a deliberate attempt to throttle higher education in India’ (in Mukherjee 1957: 17). Not only were Indians suspicious of British intentions for tweaking of the education and language policy under the Universities Act, but they were also angry. The partition of Bengal in 1905 acted as a catalyst in unleashing a parallel education movement. This education movement also propagated an alternate language policy. During the Swadeshi movement, a large number of young school- and college-going boys were mobilized by the nationalist forces. Universities were boycotted and an endeavour was made to establish a parallel education system with its own linguistic component. The wrong policies of the government, especially those related to the English language exams and so on, had angered the youth, which led to their involvement with the Swadeshi movement. The youthful votaries of the Swadeshi Movement, influenced by Satis Chandra Mukherjee, soon declared a boycott of the Government-controlled Calcutta University, beginning with the boycott of the impending P.R.S. and M.A. examinations to be held in November–December, 1905. Rabindra Narayari Ghose, the best M.A. candidate of that year, assumed leadership of the boycott. (in Mukherjee 1957: 23) The mobilization of students during the Swadeshi movement was huge. It was the first time in the history of British India that such a huge mobilization of students had taken place. In order to deal with the growing mobilization of young men, a circular had to be issued by the district 36

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magistrates to all heads of schools and colleges in the district. The contents of the circular have been quoted: 1

2

3

4

The use which has been recently made of schoolboys and students for political purposes is absolutely subversive of discipline and injurious to the interest of the boys themselves. It cannot be tolerated in connection with educational institutions assisted or countenanced by Government. I am therefore to state for your information and guidance that unless the school and college authorities and teachers prevent their pupils from taking public action in connection with political questions or in connection with boycotting, picketing, and other abuses associated with the so-called Swadeshi movement, the schools or colleges concerned will forfeit their grants-in-aid and the privilege of competing for scholarship holders, and the University will be asked to disaffiliate them. Where they loyally desire to prevent such conduct on the part of their pupils and are unable to do so, they must immediately submit a report to the District Magistrate, giving a list of boys who have disregarded their authority, stating the disciplinary action taken to punish them. I am also to point out that should there be any reasonable apprehension of disturbance on the part of schoolboys or students, it will be necessary to call on the teachers and managers of the institutions concerned for assistance in keeping the peace, by enrolling them as special constables. Their services as such will be specially valuable as the boys are bound to respect them and they will be able to identify those who may offend. The gentlemen to whom this circular letter is addressed are requested to explain the above to their subordinates. The District Superintendent of Police will please instruct his thana officers to report instances of misconduct on the part of boys of the nature indicated in the first paragraph above. (in Mukherjee 1957: 27–28)

This circular was called the Carlyle Circular, and in response to this circular, an Anti-Circular Society was established by the nationalists. In response to the British policies regarding education and language, the nationalists involved in the Swadeshi movement decided to take matters into their own hands and held an education conference in September 1906. A decision was taken in the conference to establish a National Council of 37

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Education (NCE) and to organize a system of education that would be scientific and technical in nature. A provisional committee was established to further the objectives of the council. According to the committee, education would be imparted through vernaculars whereas English would be a separate compulsory subject. Moreover, there would be special emphasis on imparting technical education. The NCE was established in 1906, and a Society for Promotion of Technical Education was also established in 1906, which, in turn, established the Bengal Technical Institute. At this institute, the medium of education was in the vernacular, and, furthermore, knowledge of a vernacular language was one of the criteria for admitting matriculated students. The curriculum of the NCE was broad and involved the study of various languages. Under the NCE,‘studies was to be imparted in three stages: Primary (including a three years’ course commencing from the 6th year of the student), Secondary (including a seven years’ course commencing from the 9th year) and Collegiate (including a four years’ course commencing from the 16th year)’ (Mukherjee 1957: 50). The primary stage of learning involved the teaching of vernacular language; English was not a compulsory subject. In the secondary stage, an English reader was introduced, but the contents of the reader mainly dealt with Indian thoughts and objects. At the collegiate stage, students could choose to study subjects from various areas like linguistics, science and maths. If a student chose the linguistics group, then he or she had to study English language and literature along with one Oriental language. The NCE, along with the Society for Promotion of Technical Education, endeavoured to provide education through the medium of vernaculars and English was the compulsory second language. This system was very different from the British system in which education was provided in English medium. Indians had faced the draconian rules of the University Act 1904 regarding the pass percentage of the English language exam. Moreover, a large number of students who after matriculation joined colleges and universities had difficulty in understanding and writing English. Thus, it could be easily inferred that English became a barrier for many Indian students who wanted to successfully complete their education. This was the reason that the Indians were unhappy with the language policy of the British under which the medium of instruction was English from the secondary level and the required percentage for clearing the English paper in the entrance or matriculation exam was high. Therefore, Indians decided to establish their own institutions and frame their own policies. One of the important decisions taken by the movement was to impart education through the vernacular medium. The teaching of English was not sacrificed, but English was made a compulsory second language subject. Suitable textbooks in vernacular had to be prepared for this teaching. 38

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The decisions made by the nationalist elements during the Swadeshi movement had far-reaching implications. The seeds sown during the Swadeshi movement germinated in future. It would also be important to state that there was hardly any change in the language policy of the British government in the later years. In 1915, in the Imperial Legislative Council, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya wanted a committee to be set up which would look into the question of introducing vernaculars as the medium of instruction at the level of secondary education in India. Unfortunately this proposal was shot down by other members of the Council. The Hartog Committee was set up in 1928–1929 by the Simon Commission to review various aspects of education. However, it did not make any recommendation regarding the language used as the medium of instruction. The Abbot Wood Committee appointed in 1936–1937 made the recommendation for using vernaculars till the high school stage along with English as a compulsory language, but not as the medium of instruction. However, these recommendations were never implemented by the British government. The Sarget Report submitted in 1944 made recommendations along the lines of those made by the Abbot Wood Committee, but the recommendations were again never implemented by the government. Thus the language policy of the British hardly changed even in the face of immense opposition from the Indians. The language policy of the Indian National Congress (INC) in the early twentieth century, however, was very different from that of the nineteenthcentury Congress. When the INC was formed and before, the leaders were in favour of English, not only as the official language but also as the medium of instruction in schools and colleges. However, with the emergence of the Swadeshi movement in 1905, the viewpoint of nationalist parties like Congress changed. They were vehemently in favour of vernacular languages. This viewpoint got strengthened with the emergence of new leaders in the Congress like Gandhi, Nehru and Rajagopalachari. This was primarily because at that point of time there was the need of a common language to reach out to the masses. Thus, Gandhi was in favour of having ‘Hindustani’ as the common language of India. Nehru too had stated that the common language of the country would be Hindustani, which would be used at the national level whereas provincial languages would be used at the local level. Nehru also felt that the education system should be based on provincial languages. He never discounted the importance of English but was of the view that English could not hold the status of being a common language of the country since it was of foreign origin. He also advocated the use of a simplified form of English called basic English. 39

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References Chirol, Valentine. 1910. Indian Unrest. London: Macmillan. Grover, B. L. 2008. A New Look at Modern Indian History from 1707 to the Modern Times. Delhi: S Chand. Krishnaswamy, N. 2006. The Story of English in India. Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Majumdar, R. C. 1960. Bengal in the Nineteenth Century. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay. Mukherjee, Haridas. 1957. The Origins of the National Education Movement 1905–1910. Jadavpur: Jadavpur University. Palit, Chittabrata. 1960. New Viewpoints on Nineteenth Century Bengal. Calcutta: Progressive Publishers. Sharp, H. 1920. Selections from Educational Records 1781–1839. Calcutta: Bureau of Education.

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3 THE LANGUAGE POLICY OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY AND ITS IMPACT ON EDUCATION DURING BRITISH INDIA RULE Raj N. Bakshi

According to Basu,‘When the East India Company attained political supremacy in India, they did not bestow any thought on education of the inhabitants of their dominions. Gold was their watchword’ (1867: 1). However, in the pre-British period in India, according to Basu, there were four methods of education. In some cases, the Brahmins gave instruction to their disciples. There were tols or schools for Sanskrit learning. There were also the mantabs or madrassas for Muslims, and there were some kinds of schools in every important village. Therefore, before the East India Company established the three presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay, there was some kind of ‘mass education’ in India though it must have been limited to the knowledge of three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic). In the beginning, the East India Company was fighting wars and consolidating its position by waging wars in India. However, Warren Hastings, as early as in 1781, established two colleges in India. He decreed, establishing the Calcutta Modrissa or Mohamedan College to get qualified officers for the courts. Similarly, the Banaras Hindu College was founded in 1791 in order to have qualified Hindu law officers. Therefore, Warren Hastings opened these colleges out of sheer administrative prudence as Persian was still the language of lower courts and there was no Indian Penal Code or Civil Law codified; hence, lower courts dispensed justice according to the personal laws of the Hindus and Muslims. When the charter of the company was renewed in 1813, section 43 was inserted to spare a sum of one lakh rupees every year for the ‘revival and improvement of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives 41

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of India, and for the introduction and promotion of knowledge of sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India’ (Basu 1867: 6). This charter made two major changes in Britain’s role with respect to its Indian subjects. There was a new responsibility of the company towards native education, and the other fact was a relaxation of controls over missionary works in India. As per the charter of 1813 and as per the demand of the British Parliament, it was guaranteed that large-scale proselytizing would not be carried out in India. Therefore, initially it was felt that Oriental learning should be encouraged in India. Vishwanathan mentions that British swiftly learned to their dismay; it was impossible to promote orientalism without exposing the Hindus and Muslims to the religious and moral tenets of their respective faiths – a situation that was clearly not tenable with the stated goal of ‘moral and intellectual improvement’. (Vishwanathan 1987: 377) As mentioned earlier, the charter mentioned the ‘revival and improvement of literature’. The charter was silent on whether it was Oriental or English literature. Therefore, the relationship between Orientalism and religious faith was negated through the introduction of English literature. Ghosh (2009: 25) explains that clause 43 of the Charter Act of 1813 resulted in the emergence of a middle class in the presidencies of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. English had already become the language of East India Company’s administration. The knowledge of written and spoken English helped Indians in many ways. There were several clerical posts available in British establishment. There was also a demand for Englisheducated Indians to work in expanding mercantile establishments. Thus, for an ordinary Indian, English education helped in getting a job either in the East India Company or in a mercantile establishment. In addition, there were some educated and liberal Indians like Ram Mohan Roy who wanted European education and English language for Indians. It is worthwhile to analyse the existence of colleges before Lord William Bentinck’s famous Act of 1835. According to Duff (1837), there were a few colleges existing in India that imparted Oriental education. They were as follows: 1

2

The Mohamedan College of Calcutta: ‘This college was founded by Warren Hastings, in 1781, to assist in preserving a knowledge of Persian and Arabic literature and of Mohammadan law’ (Duff 1837: 8). Sanskrit College of Calcutta. 42

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3

4 5

The Benares Sanskrit College: ‘This college was established by Mr. Duncan in 1792 to preserve a knowledge of Sanskrit literature and Hindu law amongst the Pandits’ (Duff 1837: 9). The Agra College. The Delhi College: This was established in 1824.

In addition to these native colleges, there were some other smaller institutions for the advancement of Orientalism. However, as mentioned earlier, there was a demand by Indians to get English education. In 1817, an institution for the dissemination of European knowledge through the medium of English was established by some individual English and Indian gentlemen. Later it became a government institution and was named the Hindu College. English literature and science were taught through the medium of English in this college. In a few years, the government committee introduced English classes in their principal Oriental colleges like the Mohamadan College of Calcutta, the Sanskrit College of Calcutta, the Benares College, the Agra College and the Delhi College. Macaulay evaluated the charter of 1813 and presented his interpretation of this charter and also wrote a long argument of his understanding of the use of English for Indian education. Macaulay wanted to change the Charter Act of 1813 and criticized the teaching of the sacred books of ‘Hindoos’. In paragraph 8 of his Minutes, Macaulay used the term ‘dialects’ for Indian languages and argued that they did not contain any literary or scientific information and were poor and rude. Higher education in India could be given only in another language, which could be English. Macaulay in paragraph 12 believed that English was a ‘pre-eminent’ language among the languages of the West. In paragraph 16, he gave the analogy of the writings of Greeks and Romans being taught in England in the fifteen and sixteenth centuries and compared English for India in the nineteenth century to what Greek and Latin were to English in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He was surprised that students educated in Arabic and Sanskrit were paid while those who learnt English had to pay for their education. Macaulay, further, gave examples of the petition of the students of the Sanskrit College who wanted government jobs even if the emoluments were low. He also criticized printing of Arabic and Sanskrit books as no one purchased those books. He felt that codification of law would make studying of the Hindu and Muslim laws meaningless. Therefore, in paragraph 34, Macaulay wrote his oft-quoted Minutes, We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a 43

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class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. (Sharp 1920: para. 34) Therefore, on 7 March 1835, Lord William Bentinck promulgated English education in India as follows: His Lordship in council is of opinion, that the great object of the British Government ought to be promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India and that all funds appropriated for the purpose of education, would be best employed on English education alone. (Duff 1837: 3) As a result of Macaulay’s Minutes and Bentinck’s policy, a large number of colleges were opened between 1835 and 1854. Basu (1944) presents a few examples of the enthusiasm shown by people to the opening of these colleges. Hooghly College was opened in 1836, and on the first three days 1,200 students were enrolled. Some of these colleges or institutions were founded by the government, and others were opened with funds collected from the public. Basu (1944) mentions, ‘When the Elphinstore College was founded in 1827 to commemorate the services of a noble officer of the Government whose wise educational policy received approval of the people, more than two lakhs of rupees were subscribed by the people of Bombay’ (Basu 1944: 16). Most of these colleges were arts colleges. In addition, a few professional colleges were opened during this period. In 1835, Calcutta Medical College was established, and, in 1854, Grant Medical College was opened in Mumbai. A few years earlier, a school of engineering had been started in Mumbai. It is interesting to note that there was an institution called ‘Madras University’, but in reality it was a high school. In 1852, it was upgraded to a college called Madras Presidency College. There were a number of colleges established by Christian missionaries in the presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay. This chapter will not be complete if we do not analyse Lord Auckland’s resolution of 24 August 1836 to encourage the education of natives. Auckland lists the names of twenty-seven institutions/colleges opened before 1835. He wanted to consolidate the education system in India. He wanted an elementary school to be opened in every village where teaching would be through the vernacular language and later a college for Western learning at the principal town of every commissionership. Lord Auckland wanted the first lectureship in a college to be established to 44

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teach ‘English composition and literature’. The second appointments in colleges would be to teach mathematics and natural philosophy. However, at this point of time, no concrete proposal was framed to establish universities in India. The first proposal to establish a university was made in 1845. The proposal has an interesting history. In order to strengthen the government policy of encouraging Western education, Lord Hardinge in 1844 ordered that in public employment preference would be given to those who had studied in an institution imparting English education. Further, the Council of Education started ‘public services examination’. The missionary institutions objected to this manner of selection. In order to avoid the criticism of the missionary institutions, the Council of Education proposed in 1845 the opening of a university in Kolkata. We now move to an important document called Wood’s Despatch of 1854 that led to the opening of three universities in India. In paragraph 7 of the dispatch, he clearly mentioned, ‘We must emphatically declare that the education that we desire to see extended in India is that which has for its objects the diffusion of the improved arts, science, philosophy and literature of Europe; in short of European knowledge’ (Richey 1922: para. 7). However, in paragraph 8, it is amply made clear that the knowledge and development of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian literature and language were important and valuable for historical reasons. In paragraph 11, it is mentioned that ‘a knowledge of English will always be essential to those natives of India who aspire to a high order of education’ (Richey 1922: para. 11). However, in paragraph 13, it is argued that the English education cannot be taught to the great mass of population and, therefore, the majority of the people would require the vernacular languages for education. In paragraph 17, it is suggested that an education department be established in each presidency in place of the existing board and councils of education. A large part of the dispatch is devoted to the administration of the education department. In paragraph 24, it is recommended that universities be established in India. In the dispatch, we have several paragraphs about the functionaries of the universities. It is recommended that universities in India be modelled after the London University. An entrance examination is recommended in place of the matriculation examination. There are detailed recommendations about the regulations of the degrees, affiliation of colleges and so on. It is recommended that apart from arts, law, civil engineering and Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian might be introduced in universities. The dispatch is equally concerned about school education and recommends the use of the vernaculars in majority of the schools. It recommends that in addition 45

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to the grants-in-aid from the government, wealthy and benevolent natives may contribute for the development of education. There are eleven paragraphs on the process of grants-in-aid to educational institutions. There is also a reference to the training schools for masters in each presidency. The dispatch also indicates its concern for the female education in India. Therefore, this dispatch was an important document in the development of education in India. It recommended establishing universities in the three presidencies where the medium of instruction was to be in English, but it also supported vernacular languages. It suggested establishing Indian universities after the London University model. It recommended affiliation of colleges to universities. It also discussed the administration of a university, and recommended that in addition arts, law and civil engineering as subjects were to be taught. It showed concern for school education and recommended vernacular as the medium of instruction for the masses. It recommended establishing a department of education and suggested grants-in-aid to educational institutions. This led to establishing three universities in India. Finally, after a lot of deliberations, Calcutta University was incorporated on 24 January 1857. The preamble to this Act of Incorporation stated: Whereas, for the better encouragement of Her Majesty’s subjects of all classes and denominations within the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal and other parts of India in the pursuit of regular and liberal course of education has been determined to establish an university at Calcutta for the purpose of ascertaining, by means of examination, the persons who have acquired proficiency in different branches of Literature, Science, and Art. (Act of Incorporation 1857: 17) The university was to comprise a chancellor, a vice-chancellor and ex-officio and other fellows. The governor general of India was to be the chancellor of the university. It is interesting to note the importance given to the nomination of the fellows of the university. Lieutenant governor of the northwestern provinces, lieutenant governor of Bengal, chief justice of Supreme Court judicature in Bengal, bishop of Calcutta, commander-inchief of forces in India and so on were the fellows of the university and thus members of the senate. The second part of this act comprises bye-laws. It is important to mention here that bye-laws are what ordinances of universities today have. The bye-laws refer to the faculties. In fact, the senate itself is divided into four faculties, namely arts, law, medicine and engineering. Another 46

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interesting development was that ‘every member of the Senate shall be a member of one faculty at least and any member of the Senate may be a member of more than one faculty’ (Act of Incorporation 1857: 30). The governing body of the university was called syndicate. Every university in India, even today, has a syndicate or an executive council. There is also a reference to the appointment of registrar under the bye-laws. We will, now, analyse the various courses prescribed by the university. Under the arts stream, the first examination was called entrance examination. The university had a vast jurisdiction. The ‘chief examination’ was to be held in Kolkata, but candidates could be examined at Berhampore, Kishanghur, Dacca, Chittagong, Cuttack, Ajmere, Lahore and any other places appointed by the syndicate. The candidates for the entrance examination were examined in the following subjects: 1

2 3

Two of the following languages of which English must be one. The other languages were Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Bengali, Oriya, Urdu and Burmese. History and geography Mathematics

A candidate could answer the papers on history and geography and mathematics in any living language in which the candidate was examined. The next degree was the degree of bachelor of arts. A student had to study for three years in any affiliated colleges of the university. The subjects for the B.A. examination were 1 2 3 4 5

English and any of the languages listed for the entrance examination History Mathematics and natural philosophy Physical sciences Mental and moral sciences

There was a detailed syllabus, and the books to be used or teaching were listed along with the syllabus. Any student getting first division could be examined for honours, where he had to take some extra subjects. Every candidate immediately after passing the B.A. honours examination would be entitled to the degree of M.A. There is a detailed course content for the degree of bachelor of law (B.L.), medicine, honours and doctor of medicine and finally master of civil engineering and honours in civil engineering. Section V of 47

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Regulations specifies the course content for each subject for a particular examination. The question papers of English of the B.A. (Pass) examination held in 1858 show that the students were tested for content knowledge rather than for the critical evaluation of different authors. The first two questions will give some idea of these questions: 1 2

Give a rapid sketch, with dates, of Shakespeare’s life. What are the probabilities as to the extent of his classical education? What was the immediate source from which Shakespeare took the plot of Macbeth? What play of a contemporary dramatist has been thought to have given him hints in certain portions of this tragedy?

There were some questions on paraphrasing of a given extract. In the early days the universities conducted only entrance examination later called matriculation and B.A. In 1860, another examination called F.A. (faculty of arts) was introduced. The F.A. examination was taken two years after the entrance examination, but in Mumbai it was taken after one year only. Basu (1944: 34) describes, ‘The F.A. course consisted of five or six subjects (the number differing in different Universities)’. English, of course, was a compulsory subject. The medium of instruction was changed to English in Calcutta University in 1862. English was the medium of instruction for the teaching of geography, history, arithmetic and science. Most of the high schools provided education through the medium of English though several primary schools still offered education through the vernacular medium. The reason for the importance of English was absorption in a government job depending on one’s qualifications. As the demand for more universities increased, Punjab University was established in 1882. According to Sharma and Sharma (2000), In comparison to other Universities in the country the University (Punjab) was nearer to the Indian needs. The mother tongue was the medium of instruction. It was more imbued with the Indian ideas and ideals. Indian classical languages were taught at this University. The Western literature and sciences were taught through the mother tongue. (114) Several colleges were opened in the country during this period. All these colleges were affiliated to one of the universities. There were no 48

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teaching departments in the universities. Thus universities framed only the course content and examined students at the end of a particular course. Hunter Commission was appointed in 1882 to review the progress of education in India. Briefly, the Hunter Commission’s recommendations are as follows: 1

2 3 4 5 6

Primary education to be imparted through vernacular languages. The responsibility of primary education was to be with the district and municipal boards. Universities should be autonomous of the government control, and they should have autonomy to have their own curriculum. Secondary education should lead either to university education or to vocational studies. There should be secular education at all levels. There should be libraries in schools. There should be support given to female education.

The result of the Hunter Commission was establishment of two universities, Punjab (1882) and Allahabad (1887). Both Western and Oriental studies were given equal importance. A university commission was set up in 1902 ‘to enquire into the conditions and prospects of the Universities established in British India’ (The Report of the University Education Commission 1962: 19). The main recommendations of the commission were as follows: 1 2 3

4 5

The universities should be teaching bodies, and the jurisdiction of each university should be defined. The senate, the syndicate and the faculties should be reorganized and made more representative than before. The rules for the affiliation of colleges to a university should be framed so that the affiliation was granted to academically sound colleges. Each college should have a properly framed governing body. An attempt should be made to have residence for students in university and colleges.

This led to the University Act of 1904. Teachers were given representation on the syndicate, and conditions for affiliation were clearly laid down and rigorously followed. University professors and lecturers were appointed for the promotion of study and research. 49

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In 1913, the government through its resolution decided to have universities that would be teaching and residential universities only. New universities were opened in Dacca, Aligarh, Banaras, Rangoon, Patna and Nagpur. In 1916, the Calcutta University wanted to start postgraduate departments. The government of India established a commission to study the problems of Calcutta University. This commission submitted its report in 1919. The main recommendations were as follows: 1 2 3

4

The intermediate classes were to be transferred to a board of secondary education and not to be under the university. The duration of the degree course should be three years after the intermediate. Vocational training and training of teachers, lawyers, medical men, engineers, architects and so on were to be seriously pursued at the university. The medium of instruction for most subjects up to high school stage was to be the ‘vernacular’ but for the later stages it was to be English.

A large number of universities were established after 1920s, but each university had its own independent character. In 1947, there were twenty-five universities in India. We may take two universities as the representative examples of the universities during British India. Banaras Hindu University was established by Act No. XVI of 1915, which was subsequently revised in 1922, 1930, 1951, 1958, 1966 and 1969. The act mentions that it is ‘An Act to Establish and Incorporate a Teaching and Residential Hindu University at Banaras’. The Hindu University Society was dissolved, and in its place BHU was established. Banaras Hindu University was to be technically opened after the governor general in council had notified the act in the gazette of India. The university was open to all races, creed, castes and classes. Dacca University, now in Bangladesh, was established in July 1921. In the beginning Dacca (now Dhaka) University was a non-affiliating, residential university. I would like to conclude my chapter with a brief summary of the language policy of independent India and its impact on several aspects of education. Triguna Sen, the then union education minister, in the Lok Sabha on 19 July 1967 debating the use of vernaculars or English in education, concluded, ‘The Government of India has accepted in principle that Indian languages should now be adopted as media of education in all stages and in all subjects, including agriculture, engineering, law, medicine and technology.’ 50

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We will first discuss Tarkunde (2007) refuting Triguna Sen. Tarkunde, in his foreword to The Great Debate: Language Contoversy and University Education, edited by A. B. Shah, appreciates that India was welded into a nation during British regime. Trakunde writes, ‘It is generally acknowledged that three factors aided this development – an integrated civil administration, a uniform judicial system and a common language of higher education’ (2007: 23). He further argues that the English language provided the necessary link between educated sections of the people from different parts of the country. He further elaborates that due to the association with English, the regional languages in India ‘began to grow in richness and maturity’. He feels that because of a narrow nationalist sentiment, several people looked at English as a foreign language. He further argues that with the introduction of regional languages at the secondary school and university levels the standards of education are of poor quality. He supports the recommendation of vice chancellor’s conference in 1967 that in big cities university education could be in English in addition to the regional language. He also appreciates that the education commission insisted for an adequate command over English to complete the first degree course. It may be worthwhile to quote Rajagopalachari on this. He says: On the English medium hangs the unity of the Universities and college in India . . . the replacement of English by the respective regional languages is a reckless adventure which will lead to the disintegration of the intellectual life of the country. It is a dangerous pitfall. (2007: 77) However, later in his article, Rajagopalachari holds that the mother tongue is the best medium for the early years of the student. But English, he feels, must be the language of the universities in India. M. C. Chagla, the then external affairs minister, resigned from the cabinet as a protest against Triguna Sen’s language policy. In his letter of resignation to Indira Gandhi, he wrote that he was in favour of the development of Indian languages but the changeover should be slow. He also refers to the education commission that had proposed ‘in major Universities it will be necessary as a rule to adopt English as the medium of education because their students and teachers will be drawn on an all-India basis’ (Chagla 2007: 141). I have given the examples of Sen, Tarkunde, Rajagopalachari and Chagla to present that the great debate about the use of the mother tongue or English continues even today. 51

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Let us go back to Macaulay’s time once again. After Lord William Bentick’s resolution, a new status was given to English. The new status of English led to English bilingualism in India. However, the use of English for communication was restricted to educated people and that too for specific occasion and purposes. During the nineteenth century, English was rarely used for interaction at home or with friends. English was reserved for ‘official, academic, and other relatively cosmopolitan behavior situations’ (Das Gupta 1970: 44). However, in the twentieth century, there was a constant shift between English and Indian languages and English had extended to many domains, though the degree of the use of English varied from domain to domain. Prasher’s (1980) study reveals that English and Indian first languages exist in a diglossic relationship, with certain domains like home being dominated by the mother tongue and the domains of education, government and employment dominated by English. Bakshi (1992) shows that there is relatively more use of English in the formal domains in Chandigarh. This proves that English is preferred in a formal context. Since we have been talking of domains, let us have a brief look at the concept of domains. Fishman (1972) proposes that there are certain institutional contexts, called domains, in which one language variety is more dominant or appropriate than another. Typical domains in a society can be family, friends, religion, education and so on, and these domains in society may be related to diglossia; that is some domains are more formal than others. Thus the variance in the use of language with change in domain can lead to a diglossic situation. Fishman (1967 and 1972) makes a distinction between diglossia and bilingualism. Whereas bilingualism refers to an individual’s ability to use more than one language, diglossia refers to the distribution of more than one language to perform different functions in society. Related to the question of language use is also the question of language attitudes. There is a greater need to carry out surveys on the use of English and mother tongue and the attitudes of people towards different languages on a pan-India basis. We need a survey at the national level to get a complete picture of the language choice and language attitudes of Indians in general. Ferguson (1975) mentions that accurate and reliable information on the language situation of a country can be used in making policy decisions and can be of tremendous value in planning and implementing the policies. Education in modern societies is the most important agent for social change. There is a great need to find out what linguistic factors make a person ‘educated’, what is the status of a language in society, which 52

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language is responsible for group solidarity and so on. The knowledge of these factors is important in a country like India, where there is no common language. The US bilingual educational programmes for which the awarding of funds was not based on the sociolinguistic situation could not succeed. Similarly, Ghana’s 1950 Accelerated Development Plan in Education failed because of the unrealistic nature of the proposals. Therefore, there is a need to assess the realistic nature of the educational programme with reference to the use of English or mother tongue as the medium of instruction at the primary/secondary school/tertiary level on the basis of a national- or state-level survey.

References Act of Incorporation: Act No. II of 1857 (An Act to Establish and Incorporate an University of Calcutta). http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/bitstream/10689/ 11254/2/Chapter%202-4_17-62p.pdf (last accessed on 06.05.2016). Bakshi, R. N. 1992. ‘The Effect of Domain on Language Used in a Multilingual Community’. Indian Linguistics. 53(1–4): 121–136. Basu, A. N. 1944. University Education in India: Past and Present. Calcutta: The Book Emporium Ltd. Basu, B. D. Major. 1867. History of Education in India. The Modern Review office. Universal Digital Library. https://archive.org/details/historyofeducati034991mbp (last accessed on 02.09.2013). Chagla, M. C. 2007. Mr. Chagla resigns: Mr. M.C. Chagla’s letter to Mrs. Indira Gandhi. In K. Bolton and Braj B. Kachru, eds. Asian English Debating English in India 1968–1976. Vol. IV. London: Routledge. 121–141. Das Gupta, J. 1970. Language Conflict and Language Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in India. Berkley: University of California Press. Duff, Rev. A. 1837. New era of the English language and English literature in India. In Kingsley Bolton and Braj B. Kachru, eds. (2007) Asian Englishes. Vol. I. London and New York: Routledge. 5–50. Ferguson, C. A. 1975. On sociolinguistic setting of language planning. In J. Rubin, B. H. Jerundd, J. Das Gupta, J. A. Fishman and C. A. Ferguson, eds. Language Planning Process. The Hague: Mouton. 9–29. Fishman, J. A. 1967. ‘Bilingualism with and without Diglossia and Diglossia with and without Bilingualism’. Journal of Social Science. 23(2): 29–38. ———. 1972. The relationship between micro and macro-sociolinguistics in the study of who speaks what language to whom and when. In J. A. Fishman, ed. Language in Sociocultural Change. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 244–267. Ghosh, Suresh C. 2009. The History of Education in Modern India 1757–2007. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Prasher, S. V. 1980. ‘Mother Tongue-English Diglossia: A Case Study of Educated Indian Bilinguals Language Use’. Anthropological Linguistics. 22(4): 151–162.

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Rajagopalachari, C. 2007. The pitfall of fourteen regional languages. In K. Bolton and Braj B. Kachru, eds. Asian English Debating English in India 1968–1976. Vol. IV. London: Routledge. 59–79 (originally in Swarjya. Madras. 2 September 1967). The Report of the University Education Commission (December 1948–August 1949) 1963. Government of India Press. http://www.academics-india.com/Radhakrishnan%20 Commission%20Report%20of%201948-49.pdf (last accessed on 06.05.2016). Richey, J. A. (ed.). 1922. Selections from Educational Records Part II (1840–1859). Bureau of Education. Delhi: National Archives of India. Reprint, 364–393. Sen, T. 2007. Education minister’s statement: Statement made by Dr. Triguna Sen, union education minister in the Lok Sabha on 19–7–1967. In K. Bolton and Braj B. Kachru, eds. Asian English Debating English in India 1968–1976. Vol. IV. London: Routledge. 21–23. Shah, A. B. (ed.). 1968. The great debate: Language controversy and university education. In K. Bolton and Braj B. Kachru, eds. Asian English Debating English in India 1968–1976. Vol. IV. London: Routledge. 1–230. Sharma, Ram N., and Rajendra K. Sharma. 2000. History of Education in India. New Delhi: Atlantic. Sharp, H. (ed.). 1920. Minute by Hon’ble T.B. Macaulay, Dated the 2nd February 1835: Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781–1839). Superintendent, Government Printing. Calcutta. Reprint. National Archives of India (1965), 107–117, http:/mssu.edu/ projectsouthasia/history/primarydocs/education/Maculay/001.htm (last accessed on 29.11.2015). Tarkunde, V. M. 2007. ‘Foreword’ to The great-debate language controversy and university education. In A. B. Shah, K. Bolton and Braj B. Kachru, eds. Asian English Debating English in India 1968–1976. Vol. IV. London: Routledge. 7–12. Vishwanathan, G. 1987. ‘The Beginning of English Literary Study in British India’. Oxford Literary Review. 9(1–2): 376–380.

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Part II LANGUAGE DEBATES The ‘vernaculars’ and English

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4 LANGUAGE, POWER AND IDEOLOGY The changing contexts of bhasha in India E.V. Ramakrishnan

Language is the site where, very often, social, cultural and political battles are fought in India. Alternatively, one may say that socio-political conflicts invariably acquire cultural and linguistic overtones, necessitating negotiations with and through languages. Some of these fault-lines that cause fissures and ruptures run deep and will have to be factored into the discussion of the shifts of our cultural terrains. In the present discussion I would like to map some of these fault-lines, keeping in mind their proclivity to erupt at unexpected times and places. We will briefly look at the history of Malayalam in the nineteenth century as print culture emerges into dominance. One of the major shifts that happened in India or throughout South Asia, as Sheldon Pollock argues, was the decline of Sanskrit and its replacement by regional languages as the medium of intellectual discourse and literary composition from roughly 900 CE. Sanskrit lost its monopolistic status as the pan-Indian language of high culture. This was accompanied by the assertion of regional forms of articulation both within and outside court. Pollock uses the term ‘vernacularization’ to describe this linguistic and cultural shift (Pollock 2011: 330–338). I would prefer to use the term ‘regionalization’. This shift towards bhasha ( by bhasha, I would mean both the language and its cultural habitat) took place in Kannada around the ninth century; Telugu around the tenth century; Marathi around the thirteenth century; Gujarati around the twelfth century; Malayalam around the fifteenth century and Assamese, Bangla and Oriya around the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries. In his discussion of the Kannada scene, Pollock identifies certain features of the process of ‘regionalization’, two of 57

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which may be relevant for our main subject. He finds a correlation between ‘vernacular innovation and a reconfiguration of the culture-power order’ (Pollock 2011: 336). As the new political discourse rooted in the region gained ascendancy and consolidated its position, Sanskrit yielded its place as a cosmopolitan language. The identification of the region and its people with its language marks a moment of transition when the regional language begins to function ‘as the primary code of political communication’ (Pollock 2011: 337). As Pollock puts it, this is the ‘moment when “aesthetics of vernacular power” began to produce “a new power of vernacular aesthetics”’ (Pollock 2011: 338). The central argument of Pollock regarding a transfer of power from Sanskrit to bhasha is debatable. In his eagerness to incorporate the cultural shifts in India into a universal model that is dictated by the paradigms of European Reformation, Pollock erases the differences between the regions within India with reference to their modes of adopting and shaping new literary cultures centred on regional languages. The plurality of the Indian situation is not reflected in his argument. The trajectories of Malayalam and Kannada are not the same as far as the response to Sanskrit cosmopolis is concerned. It has been argued that after the rise of regional languages into separate, independent languages, Sanskrit occupied a cultural space within many of these regional discourses, largely through its preeminence as the language of knowledge and its rich traditions of poetics. In her study of the evolution of Marathi language and culture titled Language, Politics and the Public Sphere, Veena Naregal cautions against the adoption of categories derived from the European Reformation and says: ‘The literarisation of the vernaculars here did not lead to a redefinition of aesthetic norms and ideas of cultivation or notions of collectivity, as happened through Renaissance’ (Naregal 2001: 41). She argues that the rise of ‘vernacular’ textuality was mediated through the ‘high’ textual traditions of Sanskrit. Her argument that the shift towards the regional bhasha traditions was not accompanied by a radical redefinition of norms of literary production, or adoption of criteria for literary evolution may not be tenable if we take into account the large number of prose-based literary forms that emerged in the nineteenth century. In the case of Malayalam, the emergence of ‘missionary Malayalam’ is a clear pointer to the fact that a popular domain of literary composition rooted in the experience of the community, ending the hegemonic hold of Sanskrit-centred kavya tradition, had begun happening in the eighteenth century itself. The gap between the ‘high’ culture of Sanskrit and the ‘common’ practices of the masses has always been apparent to the discerning scholars of regional languages. It is true that this gap has remained untheorized till modern print 58

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cultures altered the power relations between the traditional kavya-centred literary tradition and the modern print-centred prose tradition in the nineteenth century. The large number of prose-based literary forms such as the travelogue, the short story, biography, autobiography and the novel that emerged in the nineteenth century did not subscribe to paradigms of Sanskrit aesthetics. Bhakti poetry clearly shows a shift away from Sanskrit poetics as it used forms such as vachana and abhang for literary composition to address the elite as well as the masses. The defiance of hierarchy as institutionalized in the caste system and the assertion of collective aspirations of the people towards a shared experiential world characterize much of bhakti poetry in the regional languages. The rise of manipravalam in Malayalam points to the emergence of a participatory cultural space where the cosmopolitan and the local interpenetrate, enabling Sanskrit to retain its legitimacy within a regional cultural framework. Though manipravalam existed in varying degrees in all South Indian languages, only in Malayalam did it become the standard medium of composing poetry. This is because Malayalam, in its development towards an independent language, had to confront the hegemonic structures of both Tamil and Sanskrit: translation becomes the mode of negotiation in these confrontations of culture and power between opposing experiential locations. Manipravalam in Malayalam enables the native speech community to retain a regional cosmopolis without being subservient to the dominating power of Sanskrit or Tamil. The shift from Sanskrit to regional languages in North India happened at a time when Persian and Arabic emerged as languages of authority, with the consolidation of political power by Mughal Empire. The spheres of influence, Sanskrit, on the one hand, and Persian and Arabic, on the other, enjoyed, remained mutually exclusive as their power and authority were derived from different traditions and sources. The shift towards bhasha assumes visibility in the textual traditions of bhakti, and the enabling role of Persian and Arabic in this process needs to be noted. Sufi poetry and the Islamic world view have played a crucial role in shaping the poetic discourse of bhakti. Arabic and Persian were languages of intellectual discourse and not merely those of civic authority. By the thirteenth century, South Asia had been constituted as a cultural domain of great intellectual rigour through Persian and Arabic. In her introduction to Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti, Kavita Panjabi comments: The influence of Sufism permeated the whole of Islamic world from Persian right upto the borders in Bengal, combining Arabic and Persian influences with indigenous languages, literatures and 59

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folk cultures, and drawing the latter into the wide open PersioArabic network, even as it transformed Indian literatures and society in significant ways. (Panjabi 2011: 6) This evidently shows that the literary world of India during the period from thirteenth to eighteenth centuries was characterized by a deeply resonant multilingualism that writers like Sheldon Pollock refuse to acknowledge. A poet like Amir Khusru (d. 1325) wrote in Persian, Hindwai and Brajbhasha and was fluent in Turkish and Arabic. The deep-rooted and widespread multilingualism transcended the political boundaries and opened up social spaces. The lexical influence of Persian and Arabic can be seen even in the works of Eknath (roughly 1270–1350) who composed poetry in Marathi in the fourteenth century (Naregal 2001: 16/23n). One of the key reformers of the nineteenth century, Raja Ram Mohan Roy was well versed in Persian and Arabic, besides Sanskrit, showing that this multilingual tradition continued well into the nineteenth century. Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s first book was a treatise, Tuhfat-ul-Muwahiddin (‘A Gift from the Monotheists’), in Persian with an introduction in Arabic. In this book Ram Mohan Roy underlined the need for a ‘rational approach to religions and religious experience’ and drew the attention to the ‘achievement of monotheism throughout the world’ (Tagore 2009: 10–11). Obviously, rational approach could be derived from Persian and Arabic as well. This multilingualism also led to an intellectual ferment in mediaeval India, leading to dialogues between different ideologies and philosophies. Jonardon Ganeri, in the essay, ‘Intellectual India: Reason, Identify, Dissent’, comments: ‘India in the seventeenth century, the century after Akbar, was a place of great intellectual excitement. Muslim, Hindu and Jaina intellectuals produced works of tremendous interest, ideas circulated around India, through the Persianate and Arabic worlds, and also between India and Europe’ (Ganeri 2009: 258). In 1656, the year when Dara Shikoh’s grand project of translating fifty-two Upanishads from Sanskrit into Persian was achieved, the French physician and philosopher, Francois Bernier, was in India and he translated the works of Descartes and the empiricist Gassendi into Persian. Thus, much before the advent of colonial education, the ideas of the Enlightenment were available to Persian-knowing elites of India. It was through the translation of Bernier’s Travels in the Mughal Empire into English that Dryden got materials for his play Aurangzeb (1675). Ganeri asks: With Gassendi’s work translated into Persian even before it was available in French, and the monotheistic pantheism of the Upanishads 60

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and Dara Shukoh already in France and England years before Spinoza’s Ethics were published, what more dramatic evidence could there be of the rapid global circulation of ideas in the 1660s and 70s? (Ganeri 2009: 260) Arabic and Persian were not merely languages of the court and administration, but medium of intellectual discourses that impacted the world view of discerning Indians. Their liberating influences provided a powerful impetus for the bhashas to question and subvert the hegemony of the Sanskrit cosmopolis. This also means that before the arrival of English, India had already been in dialogue with the West and had contributed towards the rise of modernity in the West through its own dialogic traditions. This intellectual history was effectively erased from public memory with the forcible evacuation of Persian and its traditions from all over India. This also meant a shift from the multilingualism of the mediaeval India to the bilingualism of the nineteenth century where English became the language of the intellect and Indian languages their inferior other. In Kerala the rise of Malayalam as a literary language happened at a time of political turmoil in the hundred years between 1650 and 1750 when the Portuguese and the Dutch were engaged in war for supremacy in the western coast. The Portuguese had made their presence felt in Cochin (today’s ‘Kochi’), and the Arabs were entrenched in Calicut (today’s ‘Kozhikode’) under the patronage of King Zamorin. By the end of the seventeenth century (1660 to be precise), the Portuguese commercial empire in Indian waters gave way to the Dutch who were displaced by the British subsequently in another wave of attacks and counterattacks. The presence of Portuguese missionaries in Kerala contributed towards the development of prose through the translations of the Bible and publications of grammars and dictionary. Malayalam was deficient in prose though there was a certain tradition of writing in royal proclamations and courtly documentation. The new ‘missionary Malayalam’ obviously followed a trajectory that was different from the highly Sanskritized Malayalam or the earlier variety of Malayalam derived from Tamil. Many varieties of Malayalam such as Arabi Malayalam and Jewish Malayalam had evolved during the long periods of Kerala’s contacts with the various communities from other parts of the world. Malayalam contains a large number of words from Persian, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch and many other European languages. It was through this hybridization that Malayalam emerged into a ‘modern’ language, capable of dealing with the larger project of modernity. 61

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Languages such as Malayalam used translation as mode to negotiate the multiple life worlds they inhabited. It must be remembered that Sanskrit rarely translates other texts and its resources were not openly accessible to most of the people in India. One of the reasons that colonial administrators patronized Sanskrit was this ‘purity’ that made it the ideal medium to recover an Aryan antiquity. Max Muller says: ‘But what is far more important than its merely chronological antiquity is the antique state of preservation in which that Aryan language has been handed down to us’ (Max Muller 2000: xvii). Orientalists as well as Anglicists refuse to engage with the multilingual ethos of the regional languages and their cosmopolitan traditions. William Carey, one of the reputed Serampore missionaries, who translated the Ramayana in Bengali in 1802 (he was also a scholar of Marathi, Telugu and Hindustani), comments: If any language could be adopted as the universal medium of communication with all the different Indian nations it would be Sanskrita, which is indeed not only the key to all Indian literature, but also the parent of every language spoken throughout India. (Quoted from Ranganathan 2009: 73–74) While Orientalists translated the classical India into modern European languages to construct a grand narrative of its Aryan past, Anglicists harped on the lack of rational discourses and scientific temper in modern Indian languages. Charles Grant, who is one of the first Anglicists to spell out the white man’s burden, finds print as an effective vehicle for dominating the native consciousness. He writes: The art of printing would enable us to disseminate our writings in a way the Persians never could have done, though their compositions had been as numerous as ours. Hence the Hindoos would see the great use we make of reason on all subjects, and in all affairs, they also would learn to reason, they would become acquainted with their own species, the past and present state of the world; their affections would gradually become interested by varying engaging works, composed to recommend virtue, and to defer from vice; the general mass of their opinion would be rectified, and above all, they would use a better system of principals and morals. (emphasis added; Ranganathan 2009: 83) Reason becomes an organizing principle of recovering one’s past as well as knowing one’s place in the world. Indian languages are now required 62

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to conform to this paradigm, which is derived from the discourses of Enlightenment rationality. The ‘othering’ of Indian languages is achieved through the deployment of a moral economy where they are banished to the realm of the irrational. Indian languages are repeatedly referred to as dialects incapable of transmitting ‘modern’ knowledge. Macaulay’s infamous Minute states: All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are more over so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. (Ranganathan 2009: 85) The intense multilingualism and the shared metaphoric universe sustained by Indian languages were disputed by the hegemonic structures of colonial power. The fuzzy nature of pre-colonial society enabled communities to relate to the pan-Indian Sanskrit cosmopolis on their own terms, but the colonial authority had a hegemonic hold on all their faculties including imagination, necessitating a reworking of all their resources and discourses. The conceptual grid of colonialism had at its disposal the elaborate cognitive apparatus of rationality as an organizing principle. This is why the introduction of English, along with the advent of print, set in motion an unprecedented process standardization from which no Indian language could escape without risking extinction. English occupied the space marked by modernity, appropriating to itself the power of arbitration regarding the nature and content of modernity. Sanskrit fell from its pedestal to the status of an archaic language. The process of modernization that was now under way demanded that regional languages have to internalize the logic of rationality and empiricism that had already been initiated by print. The internal economy of bhasha becomes differentiated, acquiring an elitist high form that equipped it with features of English and Sanskrit. Many varieties of bhasha now came to be relegated to the level of dialects, while those closer to the elite variety gained greater currency and value. Modernity in the colonial context manifests itself in the political–cultural discourse of nation and nationalism. Orientalists and Anglicists, seemingly opponents in their authentication of Sanskrit and English, respectively, both pan-Indian languages, effectively meet in the narrative of the nation that has to reconcile the requirement of an uninterrupted history of unitary discourses with a present where a univocal rationality could 63

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be embodied in a homogenized contemporary idiom. Regional linguistic traditions become the other in this scheme of a past that is imagined as future. Instead of designating the nation as a work in progress, in all its imperfect visions and revisions and complex living heteroglossia, the nation was bestowed an imagined unity in its Sanskritic high tradition, and this constructed homogeneity was consecrated and canonized through a pact with discourses of universality and objectivity under the facade of a false modernity. In this enactment of culture–power conjunction, region becomes a fragment, a lack that is forever suspect and incomplete. The earlier confidence with which Indian languages had asserted against Sanskrit and developed their own independent literary styles could not be recovered in their encounter with English largely because of the political power of the hegemonic colonial apparatus. In the nineteenth century Persian was progressively replaced by English throughout India: in 1832 in the Bombay and Madras presidencies and in 1837 in Bengal presidency. This set in motion a process that gradually resulted in the Sanskritization of Indian languages under the patronage of the state. The fracturing of the shared composite culture of Hindi/Urdu is a case in point that reflects the disastrous consequences of the cleavage that developed in North India. The founding moment of the linguistic divide that finally deepened into the communal divide and the twonation theory is the order issued by Anthony Mac Donnell, lieutenant governor of NWP&O on 18 April 1900, allowing permissive use of Devanagari in the courts to the province (Rai 2000: 17). This subtle move, in effect, put the colonial stamp of approval on the legitimacy of Sanskritized Hindi as against Persianized Urdu, which was perceived as a threat by the Hindi elite. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Hindustani in the Persian script gave way to Hindi in the Nagari script. The pedants of Fort William College and the missionaries of Serampore contributed in their separate ways to the institutionalization of Sanskritized Hindi. This is also the time when print media had begun a crucial role in the shaping of the subjectivities of various communities. To quote Alok Rai: The rough beast of cultural differentiation – of amputation and self-mutilation leading eventually to civil war and partition – was formed in new parallel nurseries of which were the innocent and certainly unintended consequence of colonial education policy. (Rai 2000: 95) The subjectivities legitimated by a centralized nation-state demands allegiance to the langue of elite discourse and not the parole of the popular 64

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multilingual heteroglossia. Here then is the fault-line that animates the conflictual terrain of the regional Indian languages. The contestations that have accompanied the formation of the public sphere in regional speech communities have repeatedly problematized the elitist positions embodied in the nationalist narratives. I will conclude this discussion with a brief note on the role of missionary Malayalam in the shaping of modern Malaylam prose. As was pointed out earlier, the mainstream literary tradition of Malayalam till the eighteenth century was made up of poetry and had not developed a viable form of prose for articulating ideas, feelings and attitudes. With the coming of missionaries in the sixteenth century things began to change. Here we need to remember that the missionaries had an impact on Indian languages as a whole. In a lecture titled ‘Languages of India in Their Relation to Missionary Work’ delivered by Rev. Robert Caldwell on 28April 1875 on the occasion of the annual meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, he outlines the nature of the contributions being made by missionaries to even minor tribal languages, besides the major languages of India. He begins by outlining the complexity of the linguistic situation in India where a large number of languages are spoken: Not including English, the language of government and of the higher education – not including Sanskrit, the literary language of the Brahmans and other Indo-Aryans – not including Persian, the literary language of the Muhammadans – not including any of the languages spoken on the frontier side of Indian frontier, such as Beluchi, on the north-west, or the Burmese dialects spoken on the eastern side of the Bay of Bengal – reckoning only the languages spoken within the boundary line, but including the native states as well as the British provinces, and the aboriginal tribes of the hills and forests, as well as the more cultivated races – the number of languages spoken in India cannot fall short of a hundred. (Caldwell 2007: 577) Towards the end of the lecture he says: We have seen that Christianity is now being taught in about seven-and-twenty Indian languages, or including the literary languages – Sanskrit and Persian – in nine-and-twenty and that amongst twenty three of the peoples by whom these languages are spoken Christian truth has assumed visible shape, through the formation of amongst them of congregations of Christians. 65

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I trust therefore the time is coming – it will soon come – it will come perhaps almost before we are aware – when every language and dialect in India will be consecrated to Christ. (Caldwell 2007: 587) Missionaries did not turn to the traditional prose for their models of writing but to the ordinary speech of the common people, and this revolutionized the manner in which Malayalam prose was written. However, scholars of Malayalam have been reluctant to recognize the role of missionaries in the development of Malayalam prose. A veteran scholar of Malayalam S. Guptan Nair, in his introduction to the book on missionary Malayalam by P. J. Francis, harps on the proselytizing role of the missionaries, which, according to him, prompted them to opt for the common speech current in society (Francis 2006: 7). While this is true, the fact remains that they saw language from the outside and transformed it to suit the demands of writing discursive prose where ideas and feelings could be communicated. The first travelogue written in Malayalam in 1780, Varthamanapustakam by Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar, is remarkable for its detailed account of the social conditions of Kerala Christians in the eighteenth century, apart from the references to the problems faced by Christian sects in Kerala. P. K. Parameswaran Nair, the eminent literary historian, observes that ‘many qualities rare in Malayalam prose of those times such as the systematic presentation of ideas, division into paragraphs, rational ordering of sentences could be traced here’ (Parameswaran Nair Smaraka Trust 2001: 150). L. V. Ramaswami Iyer, a prominent linguist of the early twentieth century, has noted the Latinate syntax of early missionary writings. He writes: The journey man prose of these Missionaries, particularly of the more recent periods, is ‘coloured’ by what may be called the ‘Latinistic’ outlook. Ideas, comparisons and turns of expression are cast in the Latinistic mould; constructions of Malaylam are imitated or adapted from those of the Latin speeches; new compounds and phrases are coined on the analogy of those existing in the speeches of south of Europe; and sometimes even the words and forms of Malayalam are so chosen as to correspond to the South European outlook. (Parameswaran Nair Smaraka Trust 2001: 142) Historians of Malayalam prose like Prabhakara Varier tend to argue that, given the conditions of transformation in the eighteenth and nineteenth 66

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centuries, the Sanskritized prose of the seventeenth century would have developed into its modern form, even without the intervention of the missionaries. He says: ‘If we examine the development of prose from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, it can be seen that a new clear prose is gradually emerging. Missionary prose has not played any role in this process’ (Varier 2004: 104). But this contradicts the facts we are confronted with. The intervention of print, translations of the Bible, the publication of dictionaries and so on constitute an important stage of colonial modernity that redefined the direction of the language. Benjamin Bailey (1791–1871), a Protestant priest from Dewsbury, Yorkshire, in England, not only translated the Bible into Malayalam and produced a monumental Malayalam–English dictionary that took twenty-eight years of labour but also created the types for printing of Malayalam, creating a standard form of Malayalam alphabet, altering the manner in which we write Malayalam. As the first principal of the Kottayam College established by the Church Mission Society, he was the first to introduce English into the curriculum of college education in Kerala. The round and shapely Malayalam type he introduced in the place of the square-type Malayalam letters went on to become the standard type for writing and printing Malayalam, making him the first typographer of Malayalam. In translating the Bible into Malayalam (first published in 1829), he used an idiom that incorporated colloquial words and common idioms, thus moving away from the high Sanskritic style. The first Malayalam book to be printed in Kerala, Stories Translated from English for the Benefit of Small Children, was printed in the modern Malayalam type developed by him and published in 1824. What is central to the present argument is that the imprint of colonial modernity can be seen in all the projects initiated by Baily: the translation of the Bible, production of Malayalam types, introduction of English and the establishment of the Malayalam printing press. He effectively laid the foundation for a new Malayalam prose that led to the rejuvenation of literature in the modern phase. What displaces the Sanskrit-centred high tradition is the combination of the projects of modernity that brought about changes in the dissemination of literature, educational curriculum and modes of relating to the others in society. The new literary forms such as the novel, the short story and the autobiography did not develop from the earlier prose forms but under the impact of the new prose that had internalized the logic of the new print. However, it has to be noted that the new hierarchy with English occupying a superior status as both administrative and intellectual medium, also Malayalam being seen as a medium of the masses, has further created a schism in the world of culture that has deepened into a major fault-line of our socio-cultural domain. 67

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It is significant that at a crucial stage of its development of prose, Malayalam has come to internalize the syntactical features of South European languages. By the time Varthamanapustakam came to be written in 1785, the missionary Malayalam had developed a robust prose style capable of expressing a range of ideas about society, religion, art, architecture and moral values. Another book written during this period was Jnanamuthumala (a garland made of the pearls of wisdom), which appeared in 1784. C. L. Antony, an eminent linguist of the last century, in his analysis of this text demonstrates how it marks a significant advancement in the development of Malayalam prose by incorporating the colloquial language of central Kerala. The text carries the stamp of its times in several of its syntactical and grammatical features, but there is no denying the fact that modern Malayalam prose developed from this kind of missionary prose. According to Antony, the foundation of modern prose in Malayalam was laid in the works of missionary prose. The first Malayalam book to be published (in 1811) was the New Testament (with 504 pages) that was printed in the Courier Press of Bombay. Benjamin Bayley’s Malayalam–English dictionary appeared in 1846, which continues to be a standard lexicon. It was titled A Dictionary of High and Colloquial Malayalam and English and included a large number of words of everyday usage from all communities from the south of Kerala. The impetus for transformation of Malayalam into a modern language came not from Sanskrit but its encounter with European languages and its incorporation of the local and everyday speech of the living community. This is where it parted company with the Sanskritic tradition that had fossilized Malayalam into a language with very little expressive power. This process, strangely enough, secularized Malayalam, giving it the capacity to address the common people through various periodicals that began to appear from 1847 onwards. The translations of Shakespeare that became available in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early novels such as The Slayer Slain were all written in the language that developed from missionary Malayalam that leaned heavily on the spoken varieties of Malayalam in different parts of Kerala. In an editorial written in Malayala Manorama on 11 February 1893, the editor says that of the seventeen periodicals published in Kerala six were weeklies, one appeared thrice a month, four appeared twice a month and the remaining six were monthlies (Ramakrishnan 2011: 25). The shift from orality to print happened through the medium of the missionary Malayalam. The missionary prose, while being encapsulated within colonial modernity, was the product of a public sphere where ‘inherently unstable identities in a stratified society could be visualized from new perspectives’ (Ramakrishnan 2011: 161). The new public sphere was characterized by its resistance to elitist notions of culture and politics. 68

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In conclusion it may be stated, keeping the example of Malayalam in mind, that modern Indian languages used the emancipatory potential of colonial modernity as embodied in English to turn away from the hegemonic hold of Sanskrit during the period between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. In the process, the dynamics of the multilingual culture that informed their structure and ethos in earlier stages of their development lost its primacy. The presence of English has created a new hierarchy where modern Indian languages are required to approximate themselves to the epistemological models set by English with its professed rationality. The symbiotic relations between Indian languages have come to be viewed with suspicion and distrust, as they now feel increasingly insecure, in their state of contest and competition with English. Modern Indian languages have also distanced themselves from their oral resources that have been relegated to the irrational pre-modern domain. The ‘other’ of modern languages is now located within themselves, and this accounts for the embattled state of their present being.

References Caldwell, Dr. Robert. 2007. ‘The Languages of India in Their Relation to Missionary Work’. (Republication from the Archives) in TAPASAM. 2(3–4): 574–588. Francis, P. J. Advocate. 2006. Pathiri Malayalam: Oru Vichitanam. Kottayam: Current Books. Ganeri, Jonardon. 2009. ‘Intellectual India: Reason, Identity and Dissent’. New Literary History. 40(2) (Spring 2009): 247–263. Max Muller, Friedrich. 2000. India: What It Can Teach Us? Delhi: Penguin. Naregal, Veena. 2001. Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Panjabi, Kavita. 2011. Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia: Love, Loss and Liberation. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Parameswaran Nair Smaraka Trust. 2001. Malayala Sahitya Charitram 17um and 18 um Nootantukalil. Kottayam: Current Books. Pollock, Sheldon. 2011. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Rai, Alok. 2000. Hindi Nationalism. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Ramakrishnan, E. V. 2011. Locating Indian Literature: Texts, Traditions, Translations. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Ranganathan, Balaji. 2009. Orientalism and India. New Delhi: Creative Books. Tagore, Saumyendranath. 2009. Raja Rammohun Roy (Makers of Indian Literature). New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Varier, K. M. Prabhakara. 2004. Malayalam: Mattavum Valarchayum. Sukapuram: Vallathol Vidyapeetam; Trichur: Current Books.

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5 SUBJECT LANGUAGE Preliminary notes on education around late-nineteenth-century Hyderabad state Asma Rasheed

This chapter tracks the shifts in linguistic policies that operated simultaneously to the beginnings of teaching English in Hyderabad State during the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, to explore its links with the administrative, political and socio-cultural shifts that were pivotal to the shaping of the state. As is now well established, the idea of language – or different languages – as a medium (rather than as an abstract object of knowledge) has been tracked to the colonial times in the Indian subcontinent. Language, we know, may not be the only object of education. A systematic comprehension of a language – in terms of grammar and meaning – is a basis for further education, but it can also be a foundation for doing things with the language later on.1 The shift from ‘learning languages’ in use (as a by-product of formal learning through reading, writing, memorizing, writing accounts, etc.) to learning languages as discrete and separate objects is epitomized by the transition from pandits and maulvis as teachers to the printing and publishing of primers and textbooks. Lisa Mitchell, for instance, points out that this goal of language learning involves a shift within educational practices, in the attention to and intervention in language.2 This also meant that language provided a medium for the acquisition of ‘knowledge’ as well as a marker of cultural identification. In what follows, I explore the story of education in English in Hyderabad State through shifts in language, which also involved shifts in cultural identifications. According to standard history textbooks, the Asif Jahi Nizams ruled over a multi-religious, multilingual state with a tradition of using languages other than Persian in some public domains. The 1871 CE census report

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lists Persian as the official language of the government, though it is said to differ slightly from spoken Persian. The rulers themselves were mostly Urdu-speaking Muslims, but the majority of the common people spoke Mahratti (Marathi), Telugu, Canarese and other languages. The Andhra Pradesh State Archives had letters, treaties and other documents in Persian up to 1911 (until the death of the sixth Nizam, Maḥbub Ali Khan), when Urdu documents started taking their place. Archival evidence of documents with Mahratti and even Telugu translations from Persian exists, but none with Hindvy (or old Urdu) translations. It would appear, then, that the local languages, rather than some variety of Urdu–Hindi, were used at the lower levels of the administration. These local languages may have been referred to as ‘Hindvy’ or ‘Hindi’, that is the language of Hind, but, according to renowned linguist Mustafa Kamal,3 this does not necessarily mean that one of them was the ancestor of Urdu. Interestingly, Hyderabad city was predominantly, it has been argued, Deccani-speaking.4

The shift from Persian to Urdu Persian was an essential part of the identity of the cultural elites, the old nobility that followed a Mughal system of administration and was indeed a marker of their elite status and of political domination. Even as late as 1885, by which time Urdu had become more widespread, students at the Madrasa-i-Aliya were praised for improving their Persian. But by the end of the nineteenth century, as Urdu-medium schools came to be established for the children of the elite classes, they were taught Persian at home. It would be instructive to examine this shift from Persian to Urdu, at different levels.5 One of the important aspects of this shift involves the tensions between the local, Deccani-speaking Sunni inhabitants of Hyderabad, called the mulkis, skilled at the specialized Mughal language of administration, Persian, and the ‘modern’ Urdu-speaking, largely Shi’a Muslims of North India who were termed the ghair mulkis. The old Hyderabadi officials had an advantage as long as Persian remained the state’s official language; the shift to Urdu had implications for administrative recruitment. The new ghair mulki administrators, academics and high officials, on the other hand, had been schooled into Urdu since a few decades earlier and therefore had an investment in promoting Urdu for administrative purposes.6 The pro-Urdu campaign also worked to efface the use of local languages, including Deccani. Interestingly, a few days before his death, Prime Minister Salar Jung I allowed further consideration (though the orders for

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the courts were published after his death on 8 February 1883) to Urdu. His orders, according to Kamal, implied that if officials were granted the right to record decisions in Telugu and Mahratti, those whose mother tongue was Urdu should also be allowed to do so in Urdu. However, a formal shift in the language of the state was brought about only during the time of the next prime minister, Mir La’iq Ali Khan Salar Jung II (1884–1887). In 1884, the new prime minister, in an order dated 21 February, noted the linguistic confusion created by the use of Urdu as well as Persian and issued directions to end possible misunderstandings by using Urdu, which, according to him, was the most easily understood language. The order, as cited by Kamal, states: Thus Madaru’l-Maham is pleased to order that as soon as this order reaches the offices of the court, from that time all the work in those offices will be in Urdu. (in Kamal 1990: 117) The order also directs officials to use simple instead of a stylized, Persianized, Urdu. What is of significance here is that rural offices were allowed to continue to function in their local languages (Kamal 1990: 29–30). The landed gentry or talukdars were to use Urdu to address their higher authorities, and urban areas such as Hyderabad would also use only Urdu (131–132). By 1886, almost all government offices were working in Urdu: such a transformation has to be seen in the background of a series of government resolutions that redefined mulkis.7 The shift from Persian to Urdu also helped to consolidate political power in urban Hyderabad in the hands of the Urduspeaking and educated, Muslim as well as Hindu, urban ghair mulkis.

Medium of education Local languages were used as the medium of instruction in schools in Hyderabad State. By 1880–1881, for instance, there were 162 educational institutions out of which 105 were Persian, 35 Mahratti, 19 Telugu, though only 3 English-medium schools.8 Also, there were both Persian and Mahratti clerks in the districts of the state (Ali, II: 197). Moreover, different departments gave orders in Persian, and writers (muharrir) of the two languages were hired at a salary of twenty-five rupees per month.9 One such order states: Shahpur Ji raised the point that the rules for the toll taxes on the road, which are a copy of those already used for the road to 72

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Gulbarga, should, in addition to being added to the gazette, also be written in Persian and Mahratti and be pasted on every check post and every place for the information of everybody. ( Jarida 1885 III: 304) At another place, an order by the prime minister (Madaruil-Maham), Mir Turab Ali Khan Salar Jung I, who held office between 1853 and 1883, states: The questions will be in Urdu but those who answer them can translate them and write their answers in Talangi or Mahratti or English. However, anyone who answers them in any language except Urdu will have to appear for an examination in the Urdu language on the fifth day. ( Jarida 1885 IV: 308) Similarly, around 1886, when the idea of conducting district land surveys began, a school was established in order to teach the principles of surveying. The medium of education in the school was Mahratti, in addition to others.10 Indeed, the diary of Salar Jung I records that he told the students: From the Putwari’s office to that of the Talookdar, all official communications are made in that language. Not to learn Mahratti therefore is to place yourselves outside the pale of official employment. (Diary entry of 8 January 1880, in Ali, III: 195) After his talk with assistant settlement officers, both Muslims and Hindus, the prime minister recorded in his diary: I desired them to hold a conversation in Maratti [sic], in order that I might judge of their attainments in that language. I found that they spoke it fluently. I was astonished to find them so proficient both as regards speaking and writing. (quoted in Ali, III: 200) Thus, overall, the population at large, particularly the middle classes, was shifting to learning Urdu to get jobs. Several institutions as well as people were involved in developing this, and prominent among them was Maulvi Abdul Ḥaq (1890–1961), later called Baba-e-Urdu (father of Urdu) and one of the pioneering figures in setting up the Osmania University.11 73

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This shift into education in Urdu was accompanied by significant shifts in terms of administrative and political formations, and I will return to this later in the chapter.12

The arrival of English The scene for English language education is slightly different. Protestant missionaries had founded the St. Georges Grammar School in the new city area around the British Residency in 1845, and Dr Aghornath Chattopadhyaya had founded the Hindu Anglo-vernacular School (also called the Chaderghat School or Gloria High School) by 1877. These two schools offered English education and were the only two schools that prepared students for higher education in English; hence, there was eager competition for admission into vacancies among the non-Christian boys. Two private schools offering English instruction were begun by the Malwala Kayasth family and the Khatri community each: these functioned in the old city by the 1880s, served predominantly their own community and received government aid after 1883. Each had enrolled about 100 pupils by the mid-1890s and was backed by high-ranking nobility; by the end of the century, a girls’ school was also added. The demographics for the schools were overwhelmingly composed of Hindu and Christian boys and the sons of Muslim ghair mulkis. Increasingly, their education placed them in a shared cultural orientation that also drew them apart from the traditional Deccani-centred and Persian-educated Hyderabadi society and towards British society. Statistical reports of the time also show that attendance was sparse in the schools for the nobility, particularly by their children, and highest by the children of government officials, who would be the ‘modern’, urban ghair mulkis (Leonard 1978). Western education, with English as a medium of instruction in schools, among the old Hyderabadis, came up only by the 1880s. Aristocratic families educated their children in Urdu and deemed some Western education also desirable. For instance, the young seventh Nizam, Maḥbub Ali Khan, was taught Urdu and Persian as well as English. Sarvar Jung notes that by 1879, the prince’s report card showed a progress in geography, arithmetic and Urdu.13 The then prime minister, Salar Jung I, set up the English school, City College, around 1870 as a branch of an Oriental school, the Darul Ulum College (established in 1856, affiliated to Punjab University).14 English education was included in the curriculum of the Madrasa-i-Aliya, which began in Salar Jung I’s own palace around 1873 to offer English education for his own sons and the sons of the nobility and later moved 74

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to be near the new city around the Residency in 1877. Englishmen were the headmasters at the Madrasa-i-Aliya in those days. The students were also taught Persian, along with Arabic, Hindustani and other languages. The Civil Engineering College in the new city of Chaderghat had an English middle school attached to it around 1870; by about 1880, it was approved by the Madras University as the Hyderabad College. By 1886, the Madrasa-i-Aliya and the Hyderabad College were merged into the Nizam College, affiliated to the Madras University. Around the turn of the century, this English-medium college had about forty Eurasian and ghair mulki Hindu and Muslim students. With this, as the number of English-educated and Urdu-speaking applicants from the next generation of ghair mulkis grew, it also meant that they were in a better position to get jobs. The installation of Salar Jung II as prime minister under the seventh Nizam signified just such a takeover. An English-oriented new culture, with the promise of an open and integrative society on the horizon, however, evaporated under new administrative policies. The weakening of traditional power groups and their shrinking political clout was directly linked due to their slowness in adapting to and acquiring Western education.

Conclusion While the previous discussion may be a narrative open to contestation from various quarters on different grounds, this brief overview does indicate the shifts in the uses of a language and the notions of literacy. Language was no longer seen in terms of tasks – for instance composing or copying an official letter or document in Persian, performing religious duties or rituals in Arabic or Sanskrit, recording a local transaction in Marathi or sending a personal note or dealing with a local vendor/ businessman in Telugu/Tamil/Kannada – as Mitchell puts it. Rather, with the collocation of textbooks and primers, language acquisition was about linguistic skills – to acquire a general, basic skill in English, or Urdu, or Kannada and so on. This, in turn, meant a shift towards learning the grammar of the language as a prerequisite for doing other things with the language, whereas earlier grammatical texts were taken up for advanced study by established scholars. These shifts in terms of language and educational policies in the particular context of Hyderabad State, when English increasingly takes over from Persian via Urdu as a medium of instruction, as ‘knowledge’, have been linked to the political failure of Hyderabad State to capitalize on a strong, mulki, cultural nationalism as well as to its political decimation. 75

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What this shift also entailed was the shift in the perception of languages – earlier, to be skilled in different languages was a complementary, rather than a parallel, skill. It demonstrated the value on an ability to control multiple linguistic domains, scripts and functions in the contexts and spaces of their uses. In times of decentralized political formations, it was a skill that allowed a mobility and control over areas and resources. However, the shift in language learning – with the use of printed resources – restructured the meanings, practices, participants, goals and agendas related to the process of being educated. It allowed languages to be used, experienced, as equally acceptable media, parallel to each other. Anything that was said or done in one language could be done equally felicitously in any other language, in a framework of universal translatability.15 But given that the command over or use of a language was inextricably linked to various other concerns, the introduction of English cannot be discussed merely in terms of the contents of textbooks – the nature and orientation of the ‘lessons’ – or methods of teaching. It also requires attention to wider political, socio-economic and cultural resonances of the time that, in the case of the erstwhile Hyderabad State, would be irrevocably linked to changes of the time, on the political and socio-cultural terrain, as well.

Notes 1 Among many such arguments, for example K. Ilaiah makes a compelling case for English language education. See, for more, http://kafila.org/2014/09/01/a-civilwar-is-on-the-doorstep-of-india-interview-with-kancha-ilaiah-by-mahmoodkooria/#more-23519. Accessed on 1 September 2014. 2 See Mitchell (2009). 3 See Kamal (1990). 4 See Rahman (2008). 5 The erosion of Persian as a language of administration, however, was not without resistance. The tutor of the sixth Nizam, Mir Mahbub Ali Khan (1866–1911), Sarvar Jung is reported to have spoken favourably about Urdu in the presence of the then prime minister, Salar Jung I, who reacted by bolting upright from a reclining position to exclaim ‘God forbid!’ Jung writes that He prolonged the ‘a’ of Khuda so much that I was very disturbed and understood that I had made a mistake. Later he said that you Hindustanis are not competent in Persian writing and speech. Persian is the symbol of Muslim victories and we are from the victorious nation and have conquered this country by force of arms. In your own country [North India] you have done away with this symbol and now you want to do the same here also. As long as I am alive, Persian too will remain alive. For more on this, see Jang (1933), p. 244. 6 The tensions between the two groups were at such a level that the Nizam was forced to call for a report on employment statistics. The report by his prime

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7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14

minister showed that the ghair mulkis drew a higher aggregate salary, since they were more ‘qualified’. In fact, the Executive Council that carried out the administration had twelve ghair mulki members at one time (Ali 1883–86, Vol. VIII: 68) and newspapers complained against Prime Minister Salar Jung I, who was accused of taking the bread out of the mouth of locals and putting it in the mouth of strangers. Iftikhar Alam Bilgrami, in his Ḥayatuin-Nazir (The Life of Nazir) (1912), notes that the most prominent of the ghair mulkis were Imad-ul-Mulk, who came to Hyderabad in 1773; Mahda Ali Khan (1874); Vaqar-ul-Mulk (1875); Chiragh Ali Yar Jang (1877) and Deputy Nazir Aḥmed (1877). Bilgrami also quotes from a letter of Nazir Ahmed, a significant figure in the rise of the Urdu novel, where Nazir Ahmed talks of his difficulty in working in Persian since he was not used to it (79–80). Maulvi Abdul Ḥaq, in his Chand Ham Aṣr (2000; 1959), points out that Saiyad Ḥusain Bilgrami (Nawab Imad-ul-Mulk) who was the Indian tutor to Usman Ali Khan and the chief executive of education for thirty-two years (391) was a great supporter of Urdu as a medium of instruction (409). As adviser to Prime Minister Nawab Mir Yusuf Ali Khan Salar Jang III (1888–1949), he issued a notice that English words should not be used in Urdu documents (415). Similarly, V. K. Bawa, in his biography titled The Last Nizam (1992), mentions some other important literary figures of Urdu who came from North India and whose stay in Hyderabad, brief or lengthy, had effects on the salience of Urdu in the state (56–58). For more on this, see, for instance, Sajanlal (1974) and Leonard (1978). The resolutions, passed from about 1884 to 1886, redefined a mulki: a mulki now came to be defined as a person who had permanently resided in Hyderabad State for fifteen years or who had continuously served under the government for at least twelve years; he and his lineal male descendants to two generations were legally mulkis. For more on this, see, Leonard (1978, 65–106). See Ali (1883–1886, 128). See Jarida-e ‘Ilmiyya-e Sarkar-e Nizam (1294 Fasli, No. 14; Andhra Pradesh State Archives, 1885) Volume III: 304. See Chiragh Ali (1885–1886, Volume II, 197). Maulvi Abdul Ḥaq (1890–1961) also presided over the Darul Tarjuma (Bureau of Translation) at the Osmania University and invited eminent scholars and writers from North India: Zafar Ali Khan, Abdul Majid Daryabadi, Abdul Ḥalim Sharar, Vahid ud-din Salim, Saiyad Sulaiman Nadvi, Maulana Mirza Mehdi Khan, Ross Masud and others. For more on this, see, for instance, Muḥammad Imami,‘Mujahid-e Urdu’ (The Champion of Urdu) in Saiyad Mu’nu’r-Rahman, Baba-e Urdu: Aḥval-o-Afkar (1976). Maulavi Abdul Haq told one of his friends, also called Abdul-Haq, that he considered the latter a ‘true Muslim’ because one characteristic of a Muslim was Urdu ki muhabbat (the love of Urdu). Haq wrote two pamphlets on letter writing in Urdu in 1901, at the request of the Nizam’s tutor, Saiyad Ḥusain Bilgrami. The second pamphlet was a letter from a father to his son, urging the son to learn his mother tongue, Urdu. See Sarvari, ‘Untitled Opinion of Abdul Ḥaq’ in Saiyad Mu’nu’r-Rahman, Babae Urdu: Aḥval-o-Afkar (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 1976), p. 158. I am not, here, getting into the details of education for women – their class, curricula and so on. See, for more, Pernau (2002: 36–54). See ul Mulk (1932). One more such institution was the Madrasa-i-Aliya where Persian was taught along with various other languages.

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15 This is also, it has been argued, a reorganization of ideas or thoughts in terms of a ‘mother tongue’. Lisa Mitchell, for instance, lays this out in the context of Telugu around the turn of the twentieth century. She suggests that the shift from understanding language as a feature of a territory or region, possibly one of several, to viewing it as an ‘attribute’ attached to a particular people or community (particularly, through writing) is to be regarded as not just an assertion of a new cultural identity in opposition to a pre-existing elite identity but also as an extension of an already-powerful identity into a new linguistic identity. See, for more, her Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (2009).

Works cited Abdu’l-Ḥaq, Maulvi. 1959/2000. Chand Ham-‘Aṣr. Karachi: Urdu Academy. Ali, Chiragh, 1885-1886. Hyderabad (Deccan) Under Salar Jung, 4 volumes. Bombay: Education Society’s Press. Ali, Syed Mahdi (ed.). 1883− 1886. Hyderabad Affairs, 8 volumes. Bombay: Times of India Steam Press. Volume I: 128. Andhra Pradesh State Archives. 1885. Jarida-e ‘Ilmiyya-e Sarkar-e Nizam, 4 volumes. 1294 Fasli, No. 14. Volume III: 304. Bawa, V. K. 1992. The Last Nizam: The Life and Times of Mir Osman Ali Khan. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. Bilgrami, Iftikhar Alam. 112. Ḥayatuin-Nazir [The Life of Nazir]. New Delhi: Shamsi Press. Ilaiah, K. http://kafila.org/2014/09/01/a-civil-war-is-on-the-doorstep-of-indiainterview-with-kancha-ilaiah-by-mahmood-kooria/#more-23519 (last accessed on 01.09.2014). Jang, Mirza Beg Sarvar. 1993. Karnama-e Sarvai: Savaneh-e Khud-navisht [The Great Deed of Sarvar: Autobiography]. Aligarh: Aligarh University Press. Kamal, Saiyad Muṣtafa. 1990. Ḥaidarabad men Urdu ki Taraqqii: Taʿlimi aur Sarkari Zaban ki Ḥailiyat se [The Development of Urdu in Hyderabad as an Educational and Official Language]. Hyderabad: Shagufa Publications. Leonard, Karen. 1978. ‘The Mulki–Non-Mulki Conflict’. In Robin Jeffrey ed., People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 65–106. Mitchell, Lisa. 2009. Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mu’nu’r-Rahman, Saiyad. 1976. Baba-e Urdu: Aḥval-o-Afkar. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel. Pernau, Margrit. 20002. ‘Female Voices: Women Writers in Hyderabad at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’. Journal of Urdu Studies. 17: 36–54. Rahman, Tariq. 2008. ‘Urdu in Hyderabad State’. The Annual of Urdu Studies: 36–54, Volume 23. Sajanlal, K. 1974. ‘The Mulkis and Non-Mulkis Question under Salar Jang Regime – His Arzdashts and Ahkams of Asaf Jah VI’. Itihas: Journal of the Andhra Pradesh Archives. 2 (1): 129–145. ul Mulk, Server. 1932. My Life. London: Arthur Stockwell.

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6 INTERMINABLE ANXIETIES Odia1 language movement in colonial Odisha Subhendu Mund

On 12 February 2013, there was an article by Dr Debi Prasanna Pattnaik in the edit page of The Samaja. The title was Odia Kie? (Who’s an Odia?). The Samaja is not only the most widely read Odia newspaper; it is also the one founded by Utkalamani Pandit Gopabandhu Das (1877–1923), the greatest icon of the twentieth-century Odia social, cultural and political life. Around that time, there was a huge celebration on the ‘reprint’ of Barnabodha (1895), the Odia primer written by Bhaktakabi Madhusudan Rao (1853–1912), which has been read and adored by generations of Odias. There have been several versions, reprints and reissues of this illustrious book, including musical CDs, and most of the rhymes and couplets in the book have attained the status of adages. On 20 February 2014, Odia was accorded the status of a ‘classical’ language by virtue of a resolution by the Union Cabinet. Odisha has started observing 11 March as the Classical Odia Language Day. However, the growing strength of Odia language does not seem to assuage the anxieties Odias have about their language. Nearly every day one sees articles and news items being published in Odia newspapers and periodicals, and somehow the anxiety of an identity crisis in Odias linked to their language keeps coming up. It has been for more than 150 years that Odias seem to have been in the grip of interminable anxieties. Odia Bhasha Suraksha (Preservation of Odia Language) has been one obsession of the Odia people, stemming out of threats to their language, a project that began around the mid-nineteenth century – hence, in the popular psyche, the compulsive need for the protection and preservation of Odia language. Every culturally aware Odia likes to believe that Odia language is threatened and, sooner or later, it is sure to become extinct. The famous couplets of Swabhabakabi Gangadhar Meher (1862–1924), written during the historic 79

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Odia language movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Uchha heba lagi kara jebe asha/Uchcha kara age nija matrubhasha (If you wish to be great, first make your language great), and Matrubhumi matrubhashare mamata ja hrude janami nahin/Tanku jebe jnaniganare ganiba, ajnana rahibe kahin? (If you count those with no love in their hearts for their motherland and their mother tongue as erudite, where will the ignorant go?), are generously quoted by speakers and publicised in government advertisements. Be it the celebration of Utkal Divas (1 April) or the International Mother Tongue Day (21 February), all printed articles, websites and speeches and lectures seem to focus on this one subject alone. In this chapter I wish to explore the causes of the interminable anxieties of the Odias – their sense of insecurity as a community: the feeling of being in a perpetual vortex of multiple identities. Looking at the issue as merely a language question, or a sense of insecurity arising out of the culture of globalisation, would be superficial. The problem is much more deeply rooted and older than what people, even the scholars, now assume. The recent reports of the Government of India say that Odisha is second in the list of the poorest states in the country, and our lawmakers are worried why Odia boys and girls are not doing well in the all-India competitive examinations. I will try to show how these anxieties have their origin in the colonial policy during the nineteenth century. Recent theoretical and epistemological discourses on identity vis-à-vis history, language and nationalism/subnationalism have opened possibilities of fresh explorations into the emotional bonding of people living in a cartographical space, sharing a common history/culture and speaking a common tongue. Nation as a discourse came to influence us when coloniality had already started redefining our perception of some of the fundamental aspects in our societal and political life. Recent scholarship in postcolonial studies has contributed immensely to the perceptions of coloniality through literature, especially fiction, and has shifted the discourse to nation–narration paradigm, vis-à-vis the ambivalence of coloniser–colonised relationship, but scarcely there is any enquiry into the situations – as those of Odisha, Assam, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and the like – where the people experienced multiple ‘colonisations’. Subnationalism takes many forms, but at the most general level all forms of subnationalism can be seen as manifestations of a search for community or identity different from the community or identity offered by shared citizenship of an existing state. The rise of Odia subnationalism was, in fact, an expression of the quest of the Odia people for their identity. And a variety of issues related to language, culture, literature, religion as well as social reform, politics and economics were subsumed in this quest. 80

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The Odia Movement, which began as a Bhasha Andolan (language movement), was characterised by its efforts to culturally unite the Odias for the unification of the different Odia-speaking tracts into one province under one administration. This phenomenon is quite close to Michael Hechter’s definition of ‘unification nationalism’, which involves ‘the merger of a politically divided but culturally homogeneous territory into one state’ (Hechter 2000: 17). This category of nationalism manifests itself in ‘the effort to render cultural and governance boundaries congruent, requires the establishment of a new state encompassing the members of the nation. Whereas state-building nationalism tends to be culturally inclusive, unification nationalism is often culturally exclusive’ (Hechter 2000: 15–17). Benedict Anderson also acknowledges ‘the cultural roots of nationalism’ (Anderson 1983: 7). In fact, Odia Movement, at its very inception, derived strength from a book called A Practical Handbook of the Uriya or Odiya Language (1873), written by Thomas James Maltby – an Indian civil service officer posted at Madras (now Chennai) – which proposed that the 90 lakh Odias be united and kept under one administration. Odia intellectuals have always been chagrined about the unfortunate fact that Odias are a divided community even more than seventy-five years after Odisha attained ‘independent’ statehood on 1 April 1936. They lament the fact that even now, a good number of Odias live in Manjusha, Tikali, Bastar, Jagdalpur, Sarangad, Raigarh, Chainbasa, Singhbhum, Birbhum, Dhalbhoom, Medinipur and such other regions under different states. In fact, after the occupation of Odisha by non-Odias in the late sixteenth century, Odias have never lived together as one social or political community. Besides, even now Odisha suffers from regional imbalances – not only because of unequal economic development, but perhaps because of the seeds of political and cultural estrangement sowed about 150 years ago by the policies of colonial administrators. Besides, Odisha has speakers of many languages: Koshli/Sambalpuri, Bengali, Telugu, Hindi, Tibetan and, of course, those of the ethnic groups: Santhali, Gondi, Kui, Ho, Juang, Kharia, Khond, Kisan, Koya, Munda/Koi, Mundari, Kurukh/Oraon Saora and so on. Koshli/Sambalpuri, the first mentioned one, has of late been yet another anxiety – a threat to an imaginary entity of an integrated Odisha. Since the early 1990s, sections in the western Odisha have been demanding separate statehood for the speakers of Koshli, and what began as a language debate has already taken a political turn. A section of the speakers of Koshli now demands a separate state on the basis of language, though the issues of alleged regional imbalance, economic inequity and administrative neglect are readily tagged to it. The root of this discontent can be traced to the colonial period. Sambalpur, 81

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the nerve centre of western Odisha, which was being ruled by the rajas, came under the British Rule in 1849; in 1860 it came under the Bengal presidency, while the constituent parts of the erstwhile ‘kingdom’, such as Sarangad, Padampur, Phuljhar and Khariar, still remained under the Central Province. In 1862, Sambalpur was again returned to the Central Province, from where it again came out to become a part of Orissa in 1905, then shifted to Bihar Province in 1911 and finally became a part of the unified independent Orissa Province on 1 April 1936. Besides, several culturally linked parts of this region still lie scattered outside the political map of present-day Odisha. Many other Odia-speaking regions share a similar kind of history. Before British colonisation too many of these regions were under different rulers, but at least they could speak and read Odia and could share the same culture. In 1568 Sulaiman Karrani conquered Odisha by defeating Mukunda Dev, and this marked the end of the Odia rule in Odisha. In 1590, the Moguls started their Odisha aggression. Between 1611 and 1617, Raja Todar Mal, who did the first settlement of land, divided Orissa region into two categories: Mogulbandi and Gadjat,2 a system that the British also followed and perpetuated the chasm between the people of Odisha. In 1625, there was the first incursion of ‘foreign powers’: the Dutch founded their first settlement at Pipli of Balasore District, whereas the East India Company was granted free trade in Odisha in 1671, during the reign of Aurangzeb. The Maratha Rule began in Odisha in 1751. The East India Company occupied Ganjam in 1766. In 1803, Barabati Fort in Cuttack, the symbol of Odishan self-esteem, was wrested by the East India Company from Marathas. By the 1860s, the company had consolidated its power over a large part of Odisha and continued its administration through the Mogulbandi– Gadjat divide. While the Mogulbandi, practically the coastal Odisha, remained under the direct rule of the East India Company, the Gadjat areas – the hilly regions of the western and southern Odisha comprising thirty princely states – were under the rule of the ‘Rajas’. By 1804, only sixteen of these ‘kingdoms’ remained under the native princes who were supervised by political agents/representatives of the company. After taking administrative control of the Odia-speaking tracts, the East India Company government effected a bizarre reallocation of regions. While the coastal Orissa mostly remained under the direct British rule, Ganjam and its adjoining Odia-speaking regions south of the Chilika Lake were kept under the Madras presidency; Midnapore went to Bengal; Singhbhum, Saraikela and Kharsuan were placed under the Chotanagpur division and Sambalpur and the other feudatory states3 in the west were 82

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merged with Central Province. The colonisers kept shifting the administrative positions of different regions from time to time as per their sweet will and kept the people in a state of uncertainty and confusion. I have already showed how Sambalpur was placed under about seven different administrations in a span of sixty years. I may mention here that many other regions in the country might have undergone a similar experience during the colonial era, but what made the Odishan situation exceptional was the language issue. In addition to politically distancing the Odia-speaking people, the colonisers, from the very beginning of their rule, nurtured a policy of marginalising Odia language. It appears that they began with a mindset that Oriya/Odia is not a language at all, but only a dialect, and it should give way to Bengali/Bangla in Orissa. For instance, as early as 1854, Dr E. Roer, an Indologist of repute, who was appointed as the first inspector of schools for Orissa in 1857, reported: The Ooriah of this district, whether it may originally have been, is not but a dialect of Bengalee, from which it differs chiefly in pronunciations and in its written character. . . . I would submit as a measure of general policy, it is desirable that the Ooriah should cease to exist as a separate language within the British territories. (emphasis added; in Patra 1979: 101) Similarly, Sir William Wilson Hunter (1840–1900), British administrator– turned historian, wrote in 1872, Throughout the length and breadth of the province with its population of two and a half million of souls, all was darkness and superstition. Here and there a pundit taught a few lads Sanskrit in a corner of some rich landholders, mansions, and the larger villages had a sort of hedge-school, where half a dozen boys squatted with the master on the ground forming the alphabet in the dust and repeating the multiplication table in a parrot like sing song. Anyone who could write a sentence or two on a palm leaf passed as a man of letters. (The Annals of Rural Bengal, Vol. 1; later included in Orissa: The Vicissitudes of an Indian Province under Native and British Rule, 1872: 145) R. L. Martin’s General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency (1869–1870), which recommended only for a normal school4 at Cuttack for gurus and pandits and nothing more, argued that 83

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Oriya be used only in elementary education because there were adequate textbooks for lower levels of education (60–62). Similarly, William Stephen Atkinson (1820–1876), who became the director of public instruction of Bengal in 1860, was against the selection of Odia as a second language at the university entrance examination. He did not consider Odia a proper subject of study as a substitute of Bengali. In May 1863, he submitted a definite proposal to the lieutenant governor that every Odia aspirant for the Calcutta University entrance examination has to take up Bengali as his or her second language. I have cited these excerpts to demonstrate the mindset of the colonisers in respect of Odisha, Odia language and Odia people. Even a muchadmired colonial administrator–turned scholar John Beames, who is often eulogised by Odia scholars for playing the role of the saviour of Odia language, had, indirectly, inspired what crystalised in the shape of a monograph called Oriya Swatantra Bhasha Nahe (1870), written by Kantichandra Bhattacharya, a teacher in Balasore High School. Aggressive responses to Bhattacharya’s hypothetical findings were immediate. Gourishankar Ray wrote, He [Kantichandra] would not have been misled had pure Odia words entered his ears. We may say that he has misled his readers in this book; or he himself has been misled. Being ignorant of Odia, he poses to know everything. One can’t find worse impudence than this. We must recognise these two languages [Odia and Bengali] separate ones and they can’t be called one may Kantibabu write any number of books. (Utkal Dipika 28.9.1870) I agree with the argument of Pritipuspa Amarnath Mishra that ‘in some ways Bhattacharya’s arguments were based on Beames’ discussions about Indian vernaculars and the idea of dialects’ (70). It is quite logical to say that Bhattacharya and the other advocates of Odia being substituted by Bengali are likely to have been inspired by ‘the ongoing discussion among colonial philologists about the origins, classification and inter-relationships between various vernacular languages’ (Mishra 2008: 69). Right from the beginning of the philological research on Indian languages by William Carey of the Serampore mission, colonial philologists had been attempting ‘to map the diversity, development and identity of various north Indian languages’ (67). The fact that most of these languages came from the same root language (Sanskrit or its colloquial form, Prakrit) and often shared a significant number of words made the differentiation between languages 84

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a rather tricky problem for philologists. Therefore, not only Kantichandra Bhattacharya, but also a celebrated scholar and historian Rajendra Lala Mitra, was prompted to argue that the few recently published Oriya texts contained language that was very similar to their Bengali originals. Mitra, the author of a number of scholastic books, including Ántiquities of Orissa (1875), in his speech to the Cuttack Debating Society in 1868, argued that Oriya be substituted by Bengali in the schools of the Orissa division because the Oriya-speaking population was numerically too small to support the production of new Oriya school textbooks: Any well-wisher of Utkal will first introduce Bengali and replace Oriya. As per the Famine Commissioner the total population of Utkal is twenty lakhs now. If we discount the women and the children, it is possible that only ten to twelve lakh people know how to read and write. But can this small number of people maintain a language? Nobody can be successful in writing new books here. Bengal is a vast country and has progressed so much because its population is large. If Bengali is introduced in Utkal then Bengali books will be read here. And the Oriya people will get good books easily. (Mohanty 2002: 66–67) Uma Charan Haldar supported Mitra’s views in an article he published in the Cuttack Star, an English weekly. Dr Mitra reiterated his argument in a lecture he made at the Asiatic Society in Kolkata. Soon it became a very popular subject of intellectual exercise in Kolkata and some places of Odisha. While Bengalis were thus engaged in abolishing Odia language in education as well as administration, some domiciled Bengalis in Odisha sought to counter the anti-Odia mission of their brethren. Interestingly, the Odia language movement and the project of reconstructing the identity were spearheaded by a number of non-Odias of the time, the foremost being Gourishankar Ray (1838–1917), the founder editor of the most vibrant Odia weekly, Utkal Dipika, and the founder chairman of Utkal Sabha. Most of the pioneering writers and leaders of the movement were non-Odias by birth. While Gourishankar Ray, Ram Shankar Ray, Umesh Chandra Sarkar and Radhanath Ray were Bengalis, Madhusudan Rao was a Marathi. Raja Boikuntha Nath De, the leader of the movement in Balasore, was also of Bengali origin. Similarly, there were leaders of Telugudescent like Guneya Shastri (founder editor of Odia Hitabadini) and Utkal Sammilani activists in south Orissa, who led the movement for Odia to be adopted as the medium of instruction in place of Telugu. 85

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It is Gourishankar’s Utkal Dipika, which was launched on 4 August 1866 in the wake of the Na’anka Durbhiksha5 (the great famine of coastal Odisha) to provide a space for popular resistance, that eventually took over the language issue in full earnest. The first response came as a two-part article called Odia Bhasha Unnatin Prati Byaghat (Obstruction in the Development of Odia Language) published in Utkal Dipika on 10 March 1871. The anonymous writer argued that the greatest hindrance in the development of Odia language was the dispersed locations of Odia-speaking people, and that is why Odia was spoken by a minority in British provinces. He added that the number of Odias would be much more if the total population living in the dispersed areas was taken into account. The author concluded his article by calling upon the Odia people to fight for the amalgamation of the Odia-speaking tracts (in Patnaik 1971: 531). The Uktal Dipika published many more articles on the subject in 1870 and 1871. This was the beginning of the language movement in colonial Odisha. In course of time, similar debates came up in the Odia-speaking tracts in the Central Provinces and the Madras presidency. The people of the Sambalpur region apprehended that the government would introduce Hindi in place of Odia. On 22 August 1894, Nilamani Vidyaratna wrote in the editorial of Sambalpur Hiteisini: It seems that the authorities wish to introduce Hindi by abolishing our mother tongue in the Sambalpur region. By this, none else but the Odias will alone be the sufferers. It is not at all desirable to impose Hindi in Sambalpur. . . . If there is any problem of the government in having Odia here, let this district be separated from Madhya Pradesh and amalgamated in Odisha. (Vidyaratna 1894) On 19 January 1895, Sir John Woodburne, the chief commissioner of Central Provinces, passed an order that Hindi would replace Odia as the official language of courts and government offices in Sambalpur. Hindi was introduced in Sambalpur by abolishing Odia. This led to a public debate in both Orissa division and Sambalpur, and a group of intellectuals began a movement for the restoration of Odia in their region. In the aftermath of the Great Famine of 1866 and after the threat to Odia language, the Odias began to seek public platforms to organise the people for the development of Odisha. Incidentally, this endeavour boiled down as a language movement and ended up with the demand for declaring Odisha as a separate province with all its estranged parts together. Notable among these platforms were Utkal Bhasa Unnati Bidhayini Sabha 86

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(Baleswar, 1866), Utkal Bhasa Uddipani Sabha (Cuttack, July 1867), Utkal Ullasini Sabha (Cuttack, 1869), Cuttack Society (1867), Cuttack Debating Club (1869), Cuttack Young Men’s Association (1869), Ganjam Utkal Hitabadini Sabha (Berhampur,1872), Bhadrak Desh Hitabadini Sabha (1875), Utkal Sabha (1882), Odisha People’s Association (1882), Utkal Hitaishini Sabha (Parlakhemundi) and Utkal Sahitya Samaj (1903). All such organisations in different parts of the province were strengthened by the emergence of the Odia newspapers, which focused attention on the problems of local interests. In 1882, Gourishankar Ray, in the capacity of the secretary of Utkal Sabha, submitted a memorandum to the commissioner for the unification of the Oriya-speaking regions and the formation of a separate province of Orissa. Eventually, most of these organisations merged with the Utkal Union Conference, the brain child of Utkal Gourab Madhusudan Das, which had its first conference as Utkal Sammilani on 30–31 December 1903. Finally, on 1 April 1936, the state of Odisha was formed on linguistic basis, comprising six British-administered districts: Balasore, Cuttack, Puri, Sambalpur, Ganjam and Koraput. But a large part – the gadjatmahal or the princely Orissa – as well as many more tracts still remained outside the new state. Although the gadjatmahal joined the state of Odisha after the independence (the only exception being Mayurbhanj, which was annexed in 1948), Odias still lament over the tracts lying in different neighbouring states. In 1957, there was a Seema Andolan, but it could not succeed in its agenda of amalgamating these with Odisha. In conclusion, I wish to say that the language issue in Odisha, which has been the cause of an interminable anxiety for Odias for the last 150 years, owes its origin to the colonial policy of the British ruling classes – the colonial policy of disintegrating a cultural community and destroying its identity by depriving it of the basic right of using its mother tongue. In this context, the observation of Franz Fanon seems to be very appropriate: Colonisation is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it. (Fanon 1963: 170)

Notes 1 This is the now-acceptable spelling of ‘Odia’, in place of the commonly used Oriya, a derivation of the English phonetic imagination. It can be seen that the English

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2

3 4

5

have loosely, nay carelessly, used various spellings, namely Ooreaha, Ooriah, Uriya, Odiya and Oriya in their writings as well as official letters and documents. Similarly, in place of Orissa, ‘Odisha’ is now being used. The changes in the nomenclatures have recently been approved by the appropriate authorities. However, I have retained the old spelling in some places in accordance with the requirement of the chapter. During the colonial period, most parts of what was Odisha then were divided into Gadjats (also spelt as Garjat) and Mogulbandi. This system for land revenue administration was originally introduced by the Mughals (Moguls) in the late sixteenth century. It was followed by the Marathas and later the British. Those parts under the direct rule of the Moguls (and later the British) were called Mogulbandi. Gadjats, mostly hilly regions, remained under the kings (called raja/maharaja/ruling chief ) who accepted the suzerainty of the British and agreed to pay an annual revenue in either cash or kind. As per the Sanads signed by Lord Elgin, the then viceroy and governor general of India, the chiefs of the tributary mahals of Orissa were formally recognised as feudatory chiefs in 1894. There were at least twenty-six feudatory states like Bamra, Bonai, Dhenkanal, Kalahandi, Nilgiri, Patna (Balangir) and Talcher with Odia-speaking population. On the other hand, places like Balasore, Cuttack, Puri, Khurdha, Ganjam, Sambalpur and Koraput were under direct British administration. The regions under direct British administration were then called Mogulbandi or British Orissa. Feudatory states are small princely states or ‘kingdoms’ under the overlordship of a foreign power. A normal school is an institution for the training of teachers. Its purpose is to establish teaching standards or norms, hence its name. The British, encouraged by the success of the system in the United States, France and Germany, introduced this system in the nineteenth-century colonial India to have trained teachers for elementary schools. The Cuttack Normal School, which has now grown into Radhanath Institute of Advanced Studies in Education, was established in 1869 in accordance with the recommendations of Wood’s Dispatch of 1854 and Stanley’s Dispatch of 1859. It began with two departments: the Guru Training Department and the Pundit Training Department with separate staff for each. Na’anka Durbhiksha, also known as the Great Famine of Orissa (Odisha), broke out in 1866. This is called so because it occurred on the ninth regnal year of Divya Singha Deva, the Gajapati king of Orissa.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Fanon, Franz. 1963. On national culture. In The Wretched of the Earth. London and New York: Grove Press. 145–169. Hechter, Michael. 2000. Containing Nationalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Hunter, William Wilson. 1872. Orissa: Or The Vicissitudes of an Indian Province under Native and British Rule: The Annals of Rural Bengal. Vol. II. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Maltby, Thomas James. 1874. A Practical Handbook of the Uriya or Odiya Language. Wyman.

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Martin, R. L. 1871. General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency (1869–1870). Calcutta: Department of Public Instruction, Bengal. Mishra, Pritipuspa Amarnath. 2008. Divided Loyalties: Citizenship, Regional Identity and Nationalism in Eastern India (1866–1931). Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota. http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/99163/1/Mishra_umn_ 0130E_10150.pdf Mohanty, Panchanan. 2002. ‘British Language Policy in Nineteenth Century India and the Oriya Language Movement’. Language Policy. 1(1): 53–73. Patnaik, Sudhakar. 1971. Sambadapatraru Odisara Katha. Vol. 1 (1856–1881). Cuttack: Grantha Mandir. Patra, S. C. 1979. Formation of the Province of Orissa: The Success of the First Linguistic Movement in India. New Delhi: Punthi Pustak. Ray, Gourishankar. 1870. ‘Samalochana. “Odiya swatantra bhasa nahe”’. Utkal Dipika 26 February, 1870. In Sudhakar Pattnayak, eds., Sambadapatraru Odisara Katha. 1971. Cuttack: Granthamandir. Vidyaratna, Nilamani. 1894. ‘Editorial: An attempt to kill the Odiya Language’. Sambalpur Hiteisini. 6(12), 22 August 1894: 46.

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7 REVISITING THE ‘MODERN TELUGU’ DEBATE A CENTURY LATER The pre- and post-history of Gurajada Appa Rao’s Minute of Dissent N. Venugopal Rao

The Telugu-speaking parts of Madras presidency under the British rule witnessed a wide-ranging debate during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the propriety of using spoken language in writing examinations as well as literary texts. Even though parts of the arguments are dated and appear irrelevant today, they could be explored for historic as well instructive purposes. One could also draw several similarities between the past and present debates. The past debate witnessed the official victory of the traditionalist school, but in the popular literary world it could not be sustained. Beginning as a small issue on the choice of language to be used in writing an exam by a school final or inter student, the debate blew out of proportions and spread far and wide. It not only dragged teachers, scholars, writers and government’s education department but also landlords, British officials and the legislative council on to its arena. It would be quite interesting and rewarding to go into the details of the debate, but due to constraints of space, I would like to present a broad outline of the whole debate.

Status of Telugu language There was a clear-cut distinction between written Telugu and spoken Telugu throughout the history of written literature in Telugu, spanning from the eleventh century till the 1850s, decades after the entry of printing 90

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and sprouting of newspapers and early modern literature. Till the 1850s it was always a classical literature in traditional prosody, mostly translations and retellings of Sanskrit works, embellished in verbose Telugu, bordering on Sanskrit. Writing in inaccessible and difficult language and employing prosody used to be regarded as a measure of scholarship. Indulging in a lot of literary acrobatics – writing without using certain letters, writing using only certain letters, writing with double and multiple meanings, writing without using any local native words, coining and creating compound and difficult phrases and so on – was the order of the day. While all this pertained to form and style, there were also stringent rules on the choice of the content. The net effect of this trend that ruled the roost for about 800 years, with very few, generally ignored exceptions, was a clear division of people who wrote, read and appreciated these works on the one hand and a large mass of people who did not have any access to this literary tradition. Class and caste divisions synchronized with this division, while formal education was prohibited to all sudras and the ‘untouchables’. This division also translated into a division between the written language and the spoken language. There was a deliberate attempt to keep the written language away from the masses and relegate the spoken language to mundane affairs, of the upper castes also, but not allowing it to be used in the written texts. The spoken language was looked down upon as vulgar, slang, colloquial and so on. We do not know how the students of upper castes for hundreds of years felt about this palpable division between what they spoke and what they read and what they had to write. But when the education field was getting extended to larger segments of masses, this dichotomy started to appear in stark contrast. Again it is yet to be explored how the early teachers or students of the modern education system responded to this dichotomy. One of the earliest observers and critics of this dichotomy was Gurajada Appa Rao (1862–1915), who in the preface to the first edition of Kanyasulkam in 1897 wrote: The Telugu literary dialect contains many obsolete grammatical forms, an inconveniently large mass of obsolete words and arbitrary verbal contractions and expansions, necessitated by a system of versification based on alliteration and quantity. A licence, which, no doubt, has its own advantages, of introducing Sanskrit words to any extent has been but too eagerly availed of by poets who brought glossaries into requisition, revelled in fantastic compound-formation, and made the Telugu literary dialect doubly dead. This is not the place to dilate on the question of 91

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linguistic reform; but this much might be said – if it is intended to make the Telugu literary dialect a great civilizing medium, it must be divested of its superfluous, obsolete and Sanskrit elements, and brought closer to the spoken dialect from which it must be thoroughly replenished. (Rao 2012: 127–128) Twelve years later, again in the preface to the second edition of the same book, he said: [T]he Telugu intellect is also seriously handicapped by the tyranny of authority of a highly artificial literary dialect, a rigid system of alliterative versification, and literary types which have long played out . . . I view the Telugu literary dialect as a great disability imposed by tradition upon the Telugus. Let those who love fetters venerate it. My own vernacular for me, the Living Telugu, the Italian of the East, in which none of us is ashamed to express our joys and sorrows, but which some of us are ashamed to write well. Literature in the vernacular will knock at the door of the peasant and it will knock at the door of the Englishman in India. Its possibilities are immense. (Rao 2012: 214) In the subsequent years he wrote at least half a dozen essays in Telugu defending the use of modern Telugu and criticizing the views of the traditionalists. Finally, in 1913 two years before his death, he wrote a thorough exposition of his point of view with regard to the use of modern Telugu as against traditional Telugu, in the Minute of Dissent. The fewer-than 150-page document is a scholarly intervention in the debate, with several visionary pointers that appear relevant even after a century. The document, though rooted in its contemporary debates, looks far beyond and makes valuable suggestions on various issues like teaching, medium, difference between literary and pedagogic styles, classical poetry and popular poetry, prose writing styles, poetic and spoken dialects, standard spoken language, two dialects and two grammars, process of simplification and orderly development of languages. The author also added to the document eight appendices, including a list of spoken language forms used in inscriptions, quotations from different European authors on language reform, a list of improper use of words in the written texts and an essay on the Arabic language question in Egypt, published in 1912. 92

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It is interesting to note that this treatise advocating the use of spoken Telugu in textbooks and literature was written in English. In fact, several important documents in favor of spoken Telugu, including ‘A Memorandum on Modern Telugu’ by Gidugu Ramamurthy (1863–1940), were written in English. An important reason for this may be that these advocates had to appeal to the English rulers for bringing in necessary changes in administrative policies. Though translated into Telugu much later (first translation in 1968 and the second, annotated in 1987), ‘Minute of Dissent’, along with the views of the author as well as other champions like Gidugu Ramamurthy on the subject, inspired and rallied a number of poets, writers, scholars and academics to what is now called a movement for modern Telugu. Despite the failure to win over other members of the committee to his position and the predicament of submitting a dissenting note, Appa Rao ended up as a victor, and a century later his point of view has become the mainstream and the resolution of 1913 faded into oblivion within a couple of decades. The entire literary scene of the next century respected and followed modern Telugu for which he fought.

British intervention It appears that it was the British civil servants and officials who first recognized the dichotomy between written and spoken Telugu and began their efforts to resolve it. While Colonel Colin Mackenzie (1754–1821) was instrumental in procuring a lot of historical material and getting village chiefs write local histories in the spoken language, C. P. Brown (1798– 1884) collected and published, edited and annotated versions of classical literature as well as texts in the spoken language. Brown recorded an incident in his literary autobiography where he recognized the inaccessibility of the traditional language. During December 1850 he was Telugu translator and conducted an exam for forty-seven students of the Madras High School. In his report submitted to the government, he said that out of the forty-seven students, only nine passed. Even though all of them were fluent in English, only three of them could translate well from English into Telugu. He said they used a language that got praise from native scholars, but one that was useless, not spoken and bookish. Brown thought that the students were burdened by useless grammar rules though they appeared intelligent. He concluded that ‘all the textbooks being used now are useless and all of them should be abandoned’ (in Arudra 2005: 277). This status further deteriorated in the subsequent decades with more and more books written in the traditional difficult language getting prescribed 93

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as textbooks. The books written by scholars like Paravastu Chinnaya Suri, Bahujanapalli Seetaramacharyulu, Kokkonda Venkataratnam, Kandukuri Veeresalingam, Vavilikolanu Subbarao and Vedam Venkataraya Sastri made the already-artificial language further difficult. In fact, at least two writers among these had already recognized the use of the spoken language. Vedam Venkataraya Sastri took licence to use the spoken language to lower class/caste characters in his dramas in the name of language suited to the character. Veeresalingam used the spoken language in the dramas he wrote for social reform. However, these scholars thought children should be taught the traditional Telugu and should be asked to write their exams only in traditional Telugu. In 1906 J. A. Yates was appointed as the education officer for Ganjam, Vizagapatnam and Godavary districts. He wanted to learn Telugu and got a munshi to teach him Telugu. However, he became a laughing stock when he tried to speak the language he had learnt with the common man on the streets. He realized that he was taught the literary language that was far removed from the language on the streets. He wanted to find out what was the language taught in schools and visited a college in Vizagapatnam. In a Telugu class he found that the teacher had not yet finished teaching his first page of poems even though it was two months since the classes began. The teacher told him that each poem of four lines took at least three hours to explain whereas about forty lines of an English poem could be taught in the same duration. Yates was surprised to know that learning a foreign tongue was easier and learning the mother tongue was difficult. Yates began his attempts to reform the teaching and enlisted the support of Gurajada Appa Rao and Gidugu Ramamurthy who were already thinking on these lines. From 1907 onwards he began organizing two-day annual workshops for teachers and Ramamurthy gave a talk on ‘history of languages and history of Telugu language’. Ramamurthy’s thrust was on developing modern Telugu on the lines of modern English and other European languages. Slowly teachers started setting up small associations to discuss the new methods of teaching and using the spoken language in the written expression.

The traditionalists’ response While the attempts of Yates and his friends were going in the direction of popularizing the use of modern Telugu, the government announced new changes in education and examination system in 1909–1910. According to these changes, the students of school final and inter were allowed to write exams in whatever language they chose – whether classical bookish 94

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or modern spoken. The classical scholars rose in protest and ridiculed the decision terming the spoken as ‘vulgar’. Essays criticizing the decision began to appear in various newspapers like Andhra Patrika annual number, Shashilekha and Arya Maha Bodhini. Scholars like China Purushotham, Komarraju Lakshmana Rao, Rayaprolu Subba Rao, Balakavi Bhogaraju Narayana Murthy, Vavilikolanu Subba Rao and Kasibhatla Brahmaiah Sastri were in the forefront in condemning the decision and putting out arguments against the spoken language. Gurajada Appa Rao wrote a rejoinder to these attacks on the spoken language in November 1910. Vavilikolanu Subba Rao compared classical language to a truthful mother and the spoken language to an adulterous mother and exhorted children to adore the truthful mother. This comment came in for heavy criticism from Appa Rao. In another essay Appa Rao showed that there were at least eight types of language errors in the writings of highly erudite scholars and asked whether it was surprising to find mistakes in students’ compositions. Yates questioned why the textbooks should not be written in the spoken language instead of in the faulty, error-prone traditional and archaic language. P. T. Srinivasa Iyengar, another votary of modern language and principal of a college in Vizagapatnam, went a step ahead and got Greeku Puraana Kathalu (mythological stories) written in mixed language and prescribed it as a textbook. Though the book used a lot of the classical language, it earned the wrath of the traditional scholars because of the preface written by Iyengar and his characterization of archaic Telugu as dead language. The traditionalists thought it was high time to protest against the attempts of the modernists with the help of the government and stop their efforts in writing textbooks in the spoken language and getting them prescribed as textbooks. Jayanthi Ramaiah Pantulu, the would-be champion of the traditional/classical language movement, wrote an essay in Andhra Patrika, calling upon all the traditionalists to get organized as Andhra Bhasha Maha Sangham to pressurize government. He was working as presidency magistrate in Chennai at that time. The zamindars also supported this cause, and the traditional scholars rallied around this war cry. The first meeting of the traditionalists took place on 26 March 1911, and within two to three months Andhra Sahitya Parishat was formed with the zamindars and the traditional scholars as its patrons and members. At a meeting held in Chennai on 12 April 1912, the scholars resolved to request the government to prevent the attempts of the modernists in destroying classical language. They also requested the government to ban the textbooks written in the spoken language. The meeting and the resolutions were seen by the modernists as an attempt to take over the Telugu Board 95

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of Studies of the government’s education department. The English press also took note of these stirrings, and The Hindu published detailed reports of these developments. Again in May 1912 the traditionalist Andhra Sahitya Parishat held a meeting in Chennai and elected a delegation to meet the governor to explain a resolution to ban the spoken language from textbooks and examinations. The delegation met the governor on August 7 and apprised him of the greatness of classical language. They also told the governor that spoken language would prevent the development of language and hence it should be stopped. As a response, the education department issued an order in September that it is the responsibility of the school authorities to decide on the choice of the language to be used in exams for the school final. In October, this order was revised to say that all the students of a school should use a single style and that they will not be allowed to use whatever they feel like. In January 1913, the order was further revised and the choice was given to the students. While the school final examination was undergoing this back-andforth controversy, the policy for the examination of inter was yet to evolve. In 1911, when the controversy was beginning, the government appointed composition committees for different South Indian languages. The committee for Telugu, set up on 18 July 1911, consisted of six scholars, including a British official and a strong votary of modern Telugu, along with the traditionalists. The committee’s composition changed over time with new additions and deletions, and finally the committee had ten members by March 1913. In the changed committee, two staunch traditionalists Jayanthi Ramaiah Pantulu and Vedam Venkataraya Sastri as well as two leaders of the modernist movement, Gurajada Apparao and Gidugu Ramamurthy, found their place. In the first meeting of the new committee in March 1913 itself, there was a tussle on a resolution on the major function of the committee moved by Appa Rao. The traditionalists wanted amendments to the resolution, and in the voting the modernists won with a majority. The traditionalists felt concerned about the developments and approached the government with an apparently genuine complaint. They raised the question of the ceded districts (present Rayalaseema) going unrepresented in the committee, since all the members of the committee except the government nominee (an Englishman) hailed from the coastal Andhra. The government responded positively and included four members from the ceded districts, and with the new additions the traditionalist point of view gained majority in the committee. In the meanwhile the subcommittee appointed to classify and prepare a list of archaic and current (modern) forms of words continued its work. 96

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The subcommittee consisted of the traditionalists Vedam Venkataraya Sastri and Komarraju Lakshmana Rao, along with the modernist Gurajada Appa Rao. With a majority of two to one, the subcommittee submitted its report in favour of traditional composition and Appa Rao placed his Minute of Dissent on 13 December 1913. The dissent note was further extended to be published in book form in April 1914. The subcommittee’s report was discussed in the main committee, and there also it was ratified in January 1914 thanks to the addition of members from the ceded districts. However, Gidugu Ramamurthy, Burra Seshagiri Rao and P. T. Srinivasa Iyengar submitted their own dissent notes. While the composition committee was holding its deliberations between 7 October 1911 and 31 January 1914, the entire Telugu-speaking areas of the Madras presidency had seen a lot of activity on the part of the traditionalists in the form of pamphlets, essays and letters to the editor in newspapers, petitions and public meetings. A significant aspect of these protest meetings was a speech given by Vedam Venkataraya Sastri at a meeting in 1912 at Nidadavole. The speech ‘Graamyaadesha Nirasanamu’ (Protest against the Order for Native Language), published as a pamphlet subsequently, extended the argument beyond the language and bordered on whipping up communal and religious passions. He said, [S]everal people are under a wrong impression that it is an attack on the language alone. But it is not. It is an attack on the Hindu religion. This is an attempt to destroy and root out our religion by wiping out all native languages one after the other, just like pulling out brick after brick to demolish a house. (in Arudra 2005: 291) He said that criticizing the traditional and archaic language tantamounts to rejecting our glorious past, our ethical values, our divine histories of incarnations like Rama and Krishna and so on. The debate went on with dozens of arguments and counter-arguments published in almost all the major newspapers of that time. In the meanwhile, in his capacity as examiner and member of the textbook committee, Gurajada Appa Rao recommended five books, including Enugula Veeraswamy’s Kasiyatra Charitra. This recommendation came in for discussion in the legislative council on 13 November 1913. Bayya Narasimheswara Sarma moved a resolution that Kasiyatra Charitra was written in spoken Telugu, which is not the standard and uniform style, and that the style was being opposed by the Reddys of Nellore and all 97

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the Telugu zamindars, and hence the book, as well as the order allowing students to write their compositions in the spoken language, was to be withdrawn. Half a dozen members in the council supported and spoke in favor of the resolution. Finally the director of education assured the House that the order was only a temporary one and that a final decision would be taken only after the report of the composition committee. Criticizing the reply of the director in its editorial, The Hindu said, [T]he reply of the Director Education is hopeless . . . now the education department can take a proper position and ask the modern language advocates to settle their position, gain strength and then only seek recognition. Till now the colloquial has not gained such a status. (in Arudra 2005: 295) Even before the composition committee arrived at a conclusion, this legislative council’s debate and newspapers began tilting the scales in favor of the traditional language. The traditionalists also started building up public pressure by organizing meetings in small and big villages and towns. According to one source, there were twenty-four meetings in as many towns in less than two months, from 28 June to 23 August 1914, in support of the traditional language. In such a charged atmosphere, the government could not but repeal its earlier order of allowing students to use the spoken language in composition. Even though the earlier order’s allowance was only a partial recognition of the spoken language, the traditionalists did not want to concede even that and forced the government to change. Ultimately the university registrar in his order on 11 August 1914 said that the syndicate was not prepared to recognize the so-called modern Telugu in the interests of the university.

The modernists’ attempts But the same year witnessed the publication of Kamadhenuvu Katha written in the spoken language by Veturi Prabhakara Sastri. In the preface to the book, Rentala Venkatasubba Rao wrote, [A]mong the two crore Telugu-speaking people, not even one person speaks the bookish archaic language. How many of these two crore people use the language of Mahabharata in writing letters? To make our people and children understand new histories, 98

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sciences, stories, humour, songs and words, the texts should not be in the mixed and mutilated bookish language, but in the genuine, pure and beautiful spoken language. Write, print and publish universally useful books that provide knowledge and pleasure. (in Arudra 2005: 301) In 1914, both Gurajada Appa Rao and Gidugu Ramamurthy were not allowed to participate and speak at the fourth annual conference of Andhra Sahitya Parishat at Kakinada. Gurajada Appa Rao died the next year, and Ramamurthy continued his efforts to spread the modern language movement. He went on speaking, writing and propagating the need and benefits of using the spoken language. He was successful in winning over not only people at large but also scholars of repute and even the traditionalists, including Veeresalingam. By 1919 a new literary organization, Sahiti Samiti, was formed to spread the message of the spoken language and hundreds of poets and writers began using the spoken language as the only means of communication. If one scans the hundred years that passed after Minute of Dissent, Appa Rao’s concluding words reverberate: We stand at the parting of the ways and our decision will affect the future destinies of the Telugu people. It lies with us to chain and starve Telugu literature or to give it liberty and vitality and to make it a great civilizing force. Individual likes and dislikes should not be allowed to sway the decision of problems which affect a whole nation today and who knows, for all time to come. (Rao 2012: 1354) Of course, the Minute of Dissent and some of the arguments of the modernist school might be problematic in today’s context. Ideas of accessible medium of instruction, function of language as a civilizing mission and description of the language of Krishna and Godavari districts as standard Telugu might be challenged in the present context. These problems, notwithstanding the efforts of the pioneers of modern, spoken Telugu, are too precious to be ignored.

References Arudra. 2005. Samagra Andhra Sahityam. Vol. 4. Hyderabad: Telugu Akademi. ———. 2012. Gurujaadalu – Mahakavi Gurajada Appa Rao Samagra Rachanalu. Hyderabad: Manasu Foundation.

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8 MODERNISATION OF LANGUAGES The case of Premchand vis-à-vis Hindi Anand Prakash

In the nineteenth century, the British Empire planned to hegemonise the common masses in India through the use of the vernaculars at the primary and secondary levels of education. The plan occasioned opening of channels for nationalist forces to spread the message of freedom among the country’s vast population. Suddenly, language became a core issue for the contending centres of influence. Through internalisation of language debates of his time, Premchand evolved a medium of expression suitable for depicting the pains and sufferings of the masses as well as hidden potentialities in the country’s ethos. For him, the question of language was not of academic interest; the matter scarcely touched him as a subject of engagement in abstract terms. Instead, Premchand’s sole motive was to educate the audience through storytelling, fiction being his strategy to connect with the ordinary folk. The venture helped him to involve the reader in the broader thought processes of the day. The more equipped the language conceptually and intellectually, the better, he thought, it would serve the avowed purpose. We realise that his predicament vis-à-vis language was in fact the predicament of the phase of history he lived in. Later in the career, he elucidated his stand on the language issue as follows: To date, our conferences and associations have usually only discussed language and language propaganda. So much so that the first [modern] literature available in Hindi and Urdu was written not with the aim of moulding ideas and feelings but only in order to create the language. That, too, was an important task. Until it acquires a stable, fixed form, where will a language find the capacity to express thoughts and feelings? We would be ungrateful if we did not feel thankful towards those language ‘pioneers’ 100

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who cleared our path by creating the Hindustani language. They have done a great thing for our national community. (The Oxford India Premchand 2004: Appendix) Mark here that Premchand considers language to be a creation, a conscious social endeavour meant to be pursued systematically. Also, there is a condition attached to it: unless it ‘acquires a stable, fixed form’ it will not graduate to the level of literary expression and will, in fact, lack the ‘capacity to express thoughts and feelings’. As a consequence, we realise, indeed, that a kind of consensus is required to be built up with respect to usage. Still more pertinent in this statement is the background against which Premchand evolved as a writer with vision. We are made to think, too, of the constraints and pressures obtaining at the time. ‘Language propaganda’ is significant. Does the phrase signify a concerted effort by a group of people to popularise a particular language? If the answer is in the affirmative, the closing years of the nineteenth century come across as a challenge. The act of forging a language to approach people of different regions entailed that new ideas had to be constructed and a larger community of thinking readers had to be created. The viewpoint doing the rounds at the turn of the century related to inventing a new vocabulary suitable for meeting nationalist aspirations. One created a language for meeting larger requirements, and the requirements in turn solidified usage and strengthened the language – made it ‘stable’ and ‘fixed’. Premchand was a writer of the ‘movement’ literally – he believed in ever going forward, passing alertly through different phases and reaching the goal of freedom from the imperialist yoke. As is clear, for him language was not a goal in itself, not a matter to be pursued till it attained communicability. In this regard, he practised a break with the previous phase of linguistic stability and decided to move in the direction the country as a nation required. An essential ingredient of expression as well as bridging gaps, language would finally be a means for something else. In his scheme of things, language was meant to convey ‘thoughts and feelings’, a means of bridging gaps. To quote, Language is a means, not an end. Now that our language has acquired a stable form we should move on and turn our attention to the content and the aim for which that foundational work was started in the first place. The language in which works like Bagho bahar and Baital pacchisi initially marked the peak of service to literature has now become a suitable medium for enquiry into scholarly and scientific matters. (The Oxford India Premchand 2004: Appendix) 101

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Significantly, the expression ‘Language is a means’ projects the viewpoint of a colony whose resources are exploited by a foreign power to address its own economic needs. It is true that language is an act in itself; nonetheless it is secondary to the resistance that a colony may launch against its adversary. Also, language in concrete life contexts is inseparable from what it does as well as ‘carries’ – ‘content’ in the sense Premchand uses it. Let us catch the thread from the point mentioned earlier in the discussion. Ever since the famous Indian Revolt of 1857, language had been a major issue with the large populace in India. In the 1870s and 1880s, it had become imperative to spread a rational humanist message across communities and cultures in India. At the core of it was secular thought. A vast educational programme was drawn up to this end, and the plan aroused great interest in both British administrative circles and the Indian intelligentsia. From the British point of view, there was a background to this development. Introduction of English as a subject of study through literary texts caused a dichotomous situation in the early nineteenth century. It created a section of people who underwent an attitudinal change – they came to espouse the cause of modernity and freedom. At one level, they were elites seeing the hidden layers of experience in contemporary conditions. At another level, they drew closer to ordinary masses who suffered because of ignorance and orthodoxy all around. It fell on the educated elites to free the poor from custom. All of a sudden, the Englisheducated Indians became carriers of progressive ideas and to them the ordinary mass of people looked for the way out. The imperialists saw the task at hand of approaching the ordinary folk directly and profitably. The point to consider in the post-1857 scenario was the issue of education being imparted through English language. It was a yes-no situation, as the imperialists saw it. For ideas to reach the common people, use of an Indian linguistic medium was required. Still, English would help in moulding people along lines of modernity and change. Michael Edwardes has observed: In all educational establishments, there was an emphasis on the purely literary type of syllabus. The 1882 commission had noted the dangers of such an impractical attitude, and had suggested that courses in commercial, engineering and agricultural subjects should be offered by selected schools. These proved mainly unsuccessful because, again, this was not what most Indians wanted. It was also an unpalatable fact that English education was creating a large number of unemployables – people who could find no jobs suited to their qualifications. In India’s industrially 102

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backward economy, it was believed that any real effort to train technicians would (as a government resolution of 18 June 1888 phrased it) merely ‘aggravate the present difficulties by adding to the educated unemployed a new class of professional men for whom there is no commercial demand. (Edwardes 2011: 242) Clearly, Edwardes is talking of language itself being an act but has brought in, much like Premchand, matters involving broader policies and vision. Also, the reference to ‘India’s industrially backward economy’ is a significant fact guiding considerations of language as a means to impart education that may prove useful for uplifting economy. The desirability of such a policy that linked with higher education was commented upon later in a conference called by Curzon in 1901. Edwardes says that the conference met in private, and its deliberations were not publicized. The conference was attended by education officials and members of the central government, the viceroy himself presiding. All but one of its members were government officials, and no Indians were present. In his opening speech, which was of great length, the viceroy examined the trends of government policy over the preceding seventy years. His main criticisms were directed against the emphasis on an English literary education, and the fact that plans for establishing technical schools had not been implemented. Part of the reason for this, Curzon insisted, lay in the lack of enthusiasm displayed by the middle and upper classes, but the British government had also been at fault. It had been unwilling to expand technical education because it feared that this might only increase unemployment. . . . As for the universities, Curzon was astonished by the complete absence of ‘a history, a tradition, a genus loci, a tutorial staff of their own.’ They were, he implied, not universities at all. (Edwardes 2011: 242–243) Here, one sees a critique of the technical education on one side and a positive projection of the liberalist knowledge-oriented paradigm on the other. Edwardes brings in universities and talks of their aim of providing history and tradition in appreciative terms. But the dialectic soon unfolded itself dramatically, tells Edwardes, as Curzon extended his view of history and tradition to finally come to the opposite conclusion. In 103

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Curzon’s opinion, English education played the role of introducing indiscipline and resistance. To quote: ‘There exists a powerful school of opinion’, he [Curzon] said,‘which does not hide its conviction that the experiment of English education was a mistake, and that its result has been disaster'. When Erasmus was reproached for having laid the egg from which came forth the Reformation, ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but I laid a hen’s egg, and Luther has hatched a fighting cock.’ This, I believe, is pretty much the view of a good many of the critics of English education in India. They think that it has given birth to a tone of mind and to a type of character that is ill-regulated, averse from discipline, discontented, and in some cases actually disloyal. (Edwardes 2011: 244) In Edwardes’s opinion, this ‘formed the basis of Curzon’s desire for reform’ under which he would remove emphasis from English and astutely adopt Indian languages – this would enable him to generate approval among Indian masses for British policies. Unless the negative influence of Englishknowing Indian elites was countered, the education policy of the British regime, so it thought, will remain flawed. Edwardes’s view is worth considering: In pursuit of his aim to encourage the vernaculars, Curzon placed great emphasis on the importance of elementary education. The English language was all very well for universities, he said, ‘but for the vast bulk it is a foreign tongue which they do not speak and rarely hear’. The need to extend government influence over the masses seemed essential to Curzon. The activities of political extremists had convinced him that an educated minority would be able, when it so desired, to manipulate the illiterate majority for political purposes, just because that minority was ignorant and uneducated. The consequences of seditious activity would, he believed, be lessened if the government could inhibit the growth of the English-educated minority while, at the same time, educating the masses. (Edwardes 2011: 244) We have used earlier the word ‘dialectic’ to describe the paradoxical nature of policies that rulers pursue generally. As far as the British regime was concerned, it introduced and later chose to withdraw English from its 104

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educational programme. Could English be withdrawn effectively from the scene as if it was just an instrument of use by the regime? Also, what would happen if the regime took up the cause of India’s numerous ‘vernaculars’ in the situation – would they fulfil expectations of the policymakers? The issue copes with an unknown territory, of a life stream in which different forces working at cross purposes are active. The issue has been considered by numerous analysts ever since.1 This account of the British view offers an insight into the regime’s policies about education and language that had only one major interest to serve – hegemonisation of India’s ordinary masses. The double-edged weapon – the language issue – had become recognised as the latent power of India’s masses. At the same time, its mighty users, the colonial authority, sought measures to contain it, if not altogether use it to further their cause. Was the idea lost on the Indian intelligentsia? One can answer that in the 1880s and 1890s, there was a limited realisation in India’s political circles that masses were to be mobilised primarily through Indian languages. The turn of the century showed a bias in favour of elite Indian leadership to steer masses through the anti-British struggle. To that end, the message and the well-chalked out plan of action would be conveyed to the ordinary folk for execution. The ordinary colonial subject would not be drawn into the struggle intellectually; instead he would be asked to follow that which has been thought over and decided for him to do – broadly he is to follow the command, not be a participant in its articulation. Conversely, the British strategised to lay out a plane of parity where through use of the native language, he would be made to think on his own and reach a conclusion that his intellect forged. The paradox could not have been grasped clearly. In literature, however, there were lone voices of writers such as Tagore who believed in reinterpreting themes than merely preaching and propagating views. For this reason, Tagore bore the brunt of critics within India who considered him to be essentially philosophical in orientation. He did remain so throughout his literary career. At the same time though, he took up concerns of the common people at the grassroots. He also had at his disposal the dialogue form that the literary fiction provided. Rather than philosophically, Tagore viewed the issue literarily; this in turn compelled him to make his characters speak in an idiom the listener understood. It is fascinating how the fictional form necessitates deployment of ordinary vocabulary and speech rhythms at the hands of the writer. Understandably, language brought into being a process in which creative articulation met demands of communication at a crucial moment in India’s political history. Tagore’s choice of Bengali language for fiction was significant in this regard. Close to a dialect in the nineteenth century, Bengali assumed 105

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in Tagore’s authorial practice the stature of a full-fledged language capable of capturing subtle nuances of emotion and thought. That this could be occasionally achieved in verse, too, only affirmed that dialects with imaginative effort could work wonders. The years of India’s history we are concerned with also constitute the period of Premchand’s growing up – he was born in 1880 and began writing in the late nineties. Initially, he wasn’t exactly sure of the literary mode to adopt but the nationalist sentiment being in the air, he elected the contemporary themes. In the opening years of the new century, he published the short story collection titled Soze Vatan (‘The Lament of the Nation’) that led to the wrath of the authorities who termed the book ‘seditious’, the word Curzon had used at the time. Voicing protest, the book drew the attention of writers and the educated middle class but did not reach those Curzon had called masses. The stories in the book used words such as matribhoomi (motherland) and deshprem (patriotism) that were highly provocative, apart from defining sentiment of a new kind. Visualisation of an integrated country raising its head against an enemy raised questions of a new identity and being. Whereas ‘Mother Earth’ was common, ‘motherland’ evoked ideas of re-viewing the surroundings in which family got extended to embrace strangers far away from one’s neighbourhood and place. Could it be called the beginning of awareness that moved towards history? Premchand faced an issue embedded in the happenings of the previous decades, particularly 1857. Modern India historian Bipan Chandra has noted: To arouse political consciousness, to inculcate nationalism, to expose colonial rule, to ‘preach disloyalty’ was no easy task, for there had existed since 1870 Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code according to which ‘whoever attempts to excite feelings of disaffection to the Government established by law in British India’ was to be punished with transportation for life or for any term or with imprisonment upto three years. . . . In all cases, nationalist journalists, especially of Indian language newspapers, had a difficult task to perform, for they had to combine simplicity with subtlety – simplicity was needed to educate a semi-literate public, subtlety to convey the true meaning without falling foul of the law. They performed the task brilliantly, often creatively developing the languages in which they were willing [writing], including, surprising enough, the English language. (Chandra 1988: 104–105) 106

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As per Chandra’s viewpoint, the writer in India sensed the need; he had to think of the purpose all the time, which was to oust the exploiting dispensation of colonial power. That the task was performed ‘brilliantly’ reflected a mind entirely focused on the goal as well as creative capability of the highest order. This was done in the framework of a uniting India, forgetting differences of regional aspirations or religious beliefs. One could call it the process of nation-building. Premchand was a ‘nationalist journalist’, to be sure. He constantly grappled with the contemporary reality for knowing and grasping its true nature, seldom engaging with individual preference, philosophical search for fulfilment and broader spirituality. Premchand chose to be a journalist in the literal sense, too, editing journals all through his life where he would comment on day-to-day happenings. Chandra’s phrase ‘to educate a semi-literate public’ applied to Premchand the way it would not apply to any other Hindi writer before or after him. He became a household name in North India more in terms of education, manners, interpretation and information than aesthetic value. Indeed, in the process he gave to the Hindi–Urdu language/s a unique character of speech-rhythms, rural ethos, continuous moulding and remoulding of usage, irony, sarcasm and stress on deeper truths. Did Premchand connect with ideology or perspective consciously? We observe that his committed ‘educational’ act followed a long process of apprenticeship in literary expression, with the language aspect being important in the course of writing. There was not a rich vocabulary in Urdu–Hindi of the period, nor could it qualify to be a language in the sense we understand the term; it was a mere dialect used in verbal communication with simple sentence structures and poor grammar. Behind every use of word lurked a shade from one or other neighbouring dialect that took away from the focus of the spoken/written sentence. Yet, such a linguistic medium would be the medium in which masses would realise hidden potentialities of comprehension of the world they lived in. In the initial years, Premchand toyed with Persian words and expressions; with these he was fairly well conversant and laboured to convey the intent not close enough to the context he was writing in. Talking of the early Premchand post-Soze Vatan, Francesca Orsini has remarked: Then quite suddenly after this collection, his formula changed: in place of romantic and/or patriotic story-lines, the focus is on ordinary practices, values and characters in society. These are then shown to be highly problematic, and the crisis that they inevitably produce can be resolved only through a change of 107

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perspective, which usually involves a ‘change of heart’ on the part of one or more characters. (The Oxford India Premchand 2004: Introduction.xii) Here, the ‘change of perspective’ refers only to the technique the writer adopted, not to the inner struggle he went through for attaining a level of effective communication for achieving the nationalist aim. In effect, Premchand’s role was that of an enlightened citizen than of a writer wedded to one or the other aesthetic ‘formula’. For Premchand and his other contemporaries, the challenge existed in the domain of classical languages, Persian and Arabic on the one side and Sanskrit on the other. The Urdu–Hindi dialect meant a medium confined to short phrases and half-sentences. In fact, as indicated, even word meanings were not fixed. In the situation, the writer’s task was to expand vocabulary with help from other dialects of the region and those words from classical languages that were relatively simple and easy to use. The contemporary conventions of phrase, openings of sentences and styles of addressing the reader had to be pruned for purposes of crispness, brevity and direct conveying. Premchand learnt these and in due course prepared a mature base of communication. Inspiration came from the spoken word, and around this the style of modern prose was constructed. The language thus forged denoted a combination of different dialects and speech rhythms. Should it have been called Urdu–Hindi, a mixture? Or conversely, could the word be Urdu or Hindi alone, or yet again a hidden mixture – Hindustani? With the stabilisation of prose, the issue of language assumed a new dimension – it attracted the notice of the political interests taking part in the anti-British struggle. Whereas the message of freedom had a strong secular basis per se, its articulation through a specific language became a matter of concern for many. In course of time, it assumed a communal colouring, too. Different lobbies looked for distinct ways to express themselves, relying exclusively on one classical language for coining and constructing signifiers. At this time Premchand moved towards what he called spoken Hindi or Hindustani, in use actually on the street, and began learning additionally the Devanagri script in which his works would also be published together with the Persian script. This was a decisive phase in his career and the step ensured for a much wider reach than was possible through Urdu alone in the Persian script. It requires reiteration that Premchand chose the spoken idiom that could best be described as Hindustani to reach the widest readership of the time. The purpose of Premchand, and his contemporaries who worked in tandem, was the same as of the British regime that aimed to ‘educate’ the masses along lines of 108

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the respective political needs. What separated the two were the mutually antagonistic messages contained therein. However, the pulls and pressures from the Sanskrit and Persian/Arabic lobbies multiplied, and the stage was set for exchanges of highly emotive arguments from both sides. Premchand preferred the middle path that kept the nationalist writers together, letting them remain united in their resolve to free the country from the British yoke. For him, the initial stage of linguistic stability and growth had to be successfully crossed under the name of Hindustani that enriched itself more and more from help in the two classical sources – Arabic–Persian and Sanskrit. Ironically, even as Premchand was a candidate for adoption by Urdu as well as Hindi lobbies, both the quarters felt bitter that they could not have full share of him. The painful saga has been described at some length by Premchand’s writer-son and biographer Amrit Rai in his book Kalam Ka Sipahee (The Soldier of the Pen), a comprehensive account of Premchand’s life. We are informed in the book that, on 24 April 1936, an agreement was reached in the presence of Mahatma Gandhi regarding acceptance of ‘Hindi and Hindustani’ rather than either ‘Hindi’ or ‘Hindustani’. Rai informs that Those who attended the meeting presided by Mahatma Gandhi, included Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, Seth Jamnalal Bajaj, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, Purushottamdas Ji Tandon, Kanhayyalal Maniklal Munshi, Kasturba Gandhi, Shrimati Kamalabai Kimbe, Munshi Premchand (who had rushed to Nagpur to attend the meeting), Maulana Abdul Haq, Kaka Kalelkar, Jainendra Kumar, Makhanlal Chaturvedi, Jaychandra Vidyalankar, Shankarrao Dev – all being the big guns of Politics and Literature. According to Rai, Gandhiji’s argument was that ‘Hindi’ denotes a language full of Sanskrit words and ‘Hindustani’ is understood as one that draws words heavily from ArabicPersian. For this reason, let ‘Hindi or Hindustani’ be the chosen word for adoption. Premchand’s view was a bit different in this regard. He said, ‘The word “Hindi” is hated by Urdu as much as “Urdu” is hated by Hindi. And this distinction doesn’t refer to the word alone. The way Hindi is being written, it uses Sanskrit words no end. In return, the way Urdu is written, it uses a whole vocabulary of Arabic and Persian. What lies in the middle of the two languages is Hindustani that lays claim to the spoken tongue, 109

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that doesn’t deny entry to words from either language if they are in common use. Hindi may not be very fond of “Hindustani”, but Urdu has no issue with “Hindustani” since it considers “Hindustani” its very own.’ Rai tells us that Premchand took this logic to the next phase of discussion later in the open session and ventured clear difference with Gandhiji to make a strong case for the adoption of ‘Hindustani’ by Bhartiya Sahitya Parishad – ‘Indian Literary Association’. This made Premchand extremely unpopular in Hindi. In Rai’s words, ‘Premchand had taken a courageous stand and the supporters of Urdu were greatly happy on this account’ (Rai 1982: 626–628).2 Clearly, Premchand understood the complexity of the matter and wished to be fair to the contending parties – it was Hindustani alone that aligned with the linguistic medium evolved along political twists and turns of the day. To conclude, the debate concerning the choice of language in North India at the turn of the twentieth century centred on simplicity and lucidity of expression that wasn’t possible with conventional forms of Hindi or Urdu. Interestingly, Premchand chose to make his writing available in both Hindi and Urdu simultaneously, believing that his main purpose was to carry his message to a wider readership. In the process, he transformed Hindi and Urdu, enriching them both with common speech rhythms and usage as well as borrowing words freely from different dialects. This, he thought, was of crucial importance when secular interests of the country expressed through freedom struggle were paramount. Apart from writing novels and short stories to good effect and taking his ‘Hindustani’ closer to the nationalist needs, Premchand effectively argued in favour of a language capable of not just conveying feelings and emotions embedded in the immediate experience but also carrying rational-scientific ideas with a bias for modernity and humanism.

Notes 1 Amit Chaudhuri has observed: One of the most common reasons offered to explain away the inaccessibility of Indian literatures is that India possesses an alarmingly and endlessly multifarious, confusing number of tongues; it was into this Babel that the English language arrived and established a semblance of coherence and unity. English comes to be identified, thus, with modernity, and the proliferating, uncontainable vernaculars with the ‘natural’ state of things in India. In actual fact, the rise of the vernacular was directly

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and profoundly connected to the rise of the Indian middle classes. The ‘traditional’ state of affairs in India, itself a result of centuries of crossfertilisation, was a multilingualism akin, in at least one way, to the state of things now in its urban centres: official or devotional literary languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, or Braj Bhasha, rather than mother tongues, were usually employed for the purposes of writing and composition, just as, these days, some people speak in one language and ‘choose’ to write in English. (Chaudhuri 2001: xx–xxi) Chaudhuri has argued for the distinctive nature of Indian languages. For him, the evolution of Indian languages is aligned with conditions prevalent in India, not necessarily with the introduction of English by the British. Chaudhuri has failed, however, to note the nationalist upsurge that necessitated the growth of Urdu–Hindi or Hindustani as a cohesive, unifying factor in what he calls ‘endlessly multifarious, confusing number of tongues’. 2 My translation from the original Hindi.

References Chandra, Bipan. 1988. India’s Struggle for Independence: 1857–1947. New Delhi: Vikas. Chaudhuri, Amit. (ed.). 2001. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. London: Picador. Edwardes, Michael. 2011. British India: 1772–1947. New Delhi: Rupa (first published in 1967). Premchand. 2004. The Oxford India Premchand. New Delhi: Oxford. Rai, Amrit. 1982. Kalam Ka Sipaahi (The Soldier of the Pen). Allahabad: Hans Prakashan (first published in 1962).

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9 ANALYSIS AND MODERNITY The language debate in the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad Probal Dasgupta

Haraprasad Shastri’s 1901 paper Baanggaalaa Byaakaran, ‘Bangla grammar’, initiated a debate about how the newly established literary academy of Bengal, the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, should go about formulating principles of grammar and usage for a modern variant of Bangla. I provide, as an appendix to my chapter, an English translation of this important archival text, which played a key role in the modernization of the language. The present chapter offers an account of the ‘grammar debate’ that took place in 1901–1902 – a debate recognized in Bengal as the first step enabling the emergence of a modern, popular register in written Bangla. That Haraprasad Shastri was already established as an eminent figure guaranteed that his paper would receive serious attention. He was a major intellectual; he had been mentored by Bankim Chandra Chatterji and was steeped in Sanskrit and the traditional learning. True to the spirit of Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Shastri wanted to empower the public by modernizing the linguistic and cultural settings of society in Bengal. One of Shastri’s crucial interventions was his publication, with a contextualizing preface, of a set of texts he had discovered in Nepal – the tenth-century-CE Buddhist verse compositions known as the Caryaapadas, in a language that he identified as old Bangla. It was the philological and linguistic analysis of these Caryaapadas that later made possible the monumental work of Suniti Kumar Chatterji, who changed the face of Indian linguistics in the 1920s. Shastri’s contribution to the historiography of modern languages was a strike for modernity. A far more visible and direct intervention by Shastri on modernity’s behalf took the form of forcefully articulating and defending – in the

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1901 paper we are discussing here – his view that the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad should analyse the speech of the people and arrive at a new standard language. Such a standard, he argued, would enable writers in Bengal to move away from the archaic diction that had become entrenched and was making education inaccessible to the masses. Shastri was in favour of the new type of linguistic analysis exemplified by Rabindranath Tagore, who began to report the results of his investigations at meetings of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad and to send his texts for publication to such periodicals as the Sahitya Parishad Patrika and Bangadarshan. Tagore’s analysis of the spoken language was presented not as a manifesto for a new, modernized written language, but as descriptive work; at the same time it looked like the first step in a programme of inquiry and intervention. Shastri welcomed this programme. Not everybody did, however. Traditional pundits like Sharacchandra Shastri and Satishchandra Vidyabhushan, who represented the canon, opposed these modernizers. After Rabindranath Tagore, in his analysis of Bangla primary and secondary derivatives, stressed the need to describe Bangla as an independent language on its own terms (Tagore 1973a), Sharacchandra Shastri (1901) criticized both Tagore and his sponsor Haraprasad Shastri. In his article, Sharacchandra Shastri argued that continuity with the greatness of Sanskrit was desirable as it made Bangla a great language that would remain durable for centuries and that the choice of an archaic diction in writing that was distant from the speech of the masses was desirable as this choice made Bangla equally accessible to learners from all parts of Bengal. He attacked Tagore’s descriptive efforts both because they would encourage the rise of a populist register in Bangla writing and because Tagore, clearly ignorant of the intricacies of the Sanskrit grammatical tradition, was committing solecism after solecism as he was venturing into a field that he, as a poet, was unqualified for. Tagore (1902) responded to this critical article; Sharacchandra Shastri wrote a rejoinder (1902). It would be unfair to say that these writings simply reaffirmed the positions expressed in their original articles; a few crucial points of difference became apparent – for example Tagore’s claim that the Bangla finite verbs korilo ‘did’ and koribo ‘will do’ are derived from the Sanskrit participles kṛta ‘done’ and kartavya ‘to be done’ elicited from Sharacchandra Shastri the counterclaim that they were from Sanskrit finite forms and that Tagore’s contrary opinion was not better established on any scientific grounds. This and related empirical issues would be resolved only in 1926, with the publication of the monumental work of Suniti Kumar Chatterji, who explicitly acknowledged the role of Tagore – a friend of his – as a major pioneer in the linguistic description of modern Bangla. 113

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After this sharp exchange, it was time for the community to work towards some sort of cooling down so that work could go on. Satischandra Vidyabhushan (1902) expressed a conservative view similar to that of Sharacchandra Shastri but adopted a conciliatory tone and praised Tagore’s analysis of non-Sanskritic Bangla words, which also, in Vidyabhushan’s opinion, deserved serious grammatical description. Intervening from the modernizing side, a major modernizer who was the secretary of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Ramendrasundar Tribedi, came out in support of Haraprasad Shastri and Rabindranath Tagore (Tribedi 1902). However, for institutional reasons, in order to ensure that the Parishad did not entirely lose the support of its traditionalist members, Tribedi stressed the necessity of retaining Sanskritic analysis of the Sanskrit words in Bangla and correspondingly a need for some balance between the new school and the old. His article, however, made his sympathy for the new trends entirely clear. It is important to emphasize that this debate was taking place at a time when Tagore was forty and was not yet at the height of his prestige or socio-cultural authority and when Suniti Kumar Chatterji, who changed the face of the linguistics of Indian languages, was only eleven. The visible face of the modernizers capable of wielding some authority at that time was Haraprasad Shastri, whose article ‘The Grammar of Bangla’ inaugurated the debate. I provide a translation of that text in the appendix. It is worth our while to take a look at the afterlife of these themes in later debates about the general nature of the language–society interface. The dichotomy of an archaic written standard and a popular spoken variant of the same language has been variously theorized. The most frequently used articulation is in terms of ‘diglossia’ and was proposed by Ferguson (1959); the Sadhu/Cholit conceptualization in terms of which this historical process was steered, and experienced, precedes and grounds his conceptualization of diglossia. In this frequently cited paper, Ferguson notes that certain languages, including Arabic and Greek, exhibit a sharp formal and functional cleavage – which he calls ‘diglossia’ – separating an H (‘high’) variety of the language, used in writing and/or in formal settings, from an L (‘low’) variety restricted to informal contexts of speech. It is important to note that Charles Ferguson cut his linguistic teeth on the descriptive study of Bangla (Ferguson 1945). Note also the importance of the Sadhu vs. Cholit cultural contestation in the recent history of the language; when Ferguson was doing his doctoral fieldwork, the victory of Cholit over Sadhu in the public space was far from complete. One may thus assume that his 1959 article was written with some awareness of the indigenous debates in Bengal – supplemented, no doubt, by what he had 114

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learnt from other sources. Ferguson sought to generalize not just over the phenomena, but over the conceptualizations as well. The historical study of diglossia theory will involve contextualizing Ferguson’s early work in terms of its roots in his knowledge of the history of Bangla. Such inquiry cannot be attempted here. Until it is undertaken, a discursive gap will continue to separate Anglophone publications purporting to represent the state of the art of a linguistics-embedded ‘diglossia theory’ from academic reflections on these issues published in Arabic, Bangla, Greek or Telugu that go back to earlier endogenous conceptualizations in the domain of vertical code cleavage. Anglophone linguistics-embedded diglossia theory rests on two early papers that delineated the field of inquiry: Ferguson (1959) and Fishman (1967). Joshua Fishman argued that the code cleavages Ferguson had highlighted were to be seen as special cases where the H and L terms of the diglossic pairing happened to be varieties of the same language. Underplaying the formal unity of the language structure (a unity definable in terms of what the H and L varieties share), Fishman drew attention instead to the functional differentiation of a speaker’s repertoire into distinct formal and informal strata of verbal ability. Focusing on migrants in the United States who use English for public purposes and, say, Spanish in their private lives, Fishman proposed to describe them as diglossic bilingual speakers, in contrast to Ferguson’s diglossic monolinguals. Some studies of South Asian sociolinguistic scenarios drawing both on Ferguson’s conception of what we may call ‘classical’ diglossia and on Fishman’s approach to ‘extended’ diglossia are collected in Krishnamurti et al. (1986), the proceedings volume of a 1980 conference Ferguson attended. There Ferguson argued that his take on classically diglossic languages threw some light on options available in their diachrony that were due to the specificity of diglossia (his remark was made in response to a question and has never been reported in print). The reexamination of classical diglossia in Bangla by Singh and Maniruzzaman (1983, reviewed in Dasgupta 1990) – an attitude-based study of the status of the rising L and declining H varieties of Bangla in specific domains – sidesteps the issue of where English is located in the verbal repertoire of a speaker of Bangla, and by the same token sidesteps Fishman’s extension of diglossia. Dasgupta’s (1993) work – a diglossia-theoretic study focusing on the location of English on the South Asian map but also paying some lateral attention to the sociolinguistics of Bangla – uses Ferguson’s conceptualization to make sense of the specific history of Bangla; it also employs Fishman’s apparatus at the level of the pan-Indian alignment of H English with L Indian languages. However, that study 115

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critiques the structural-functionalist account of languages as codes that the Ferguson–Fishman debate presupposed. Viewing languages as sites of discourse, Dasgupta (1993) proposes that the cognitive content associated with the H and L poles of a discursive system dyad gets negotiated as part of the management of a diglossic process. This proposal forms part of the broader transition from structural-functional studies of verbal behaviour towards generative and related investigation of the knowledge of language and of cultural/cognitive systems surrounding it. Once other scholars take part in that transition and associate it with vital academic moves made in related disciplines, it will prove possible to take the debate further.

References Chatterji, Suniti Kumar. 1926. The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language. London: George Allen and Unwin. Dasgupta, Probal. 1993. The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome. New Delhi: Thousand Oaks. Ferguson, C. A. 1945. ‘A chart of the Bengali verb’. Journal of the American Oriental Society. 65(1): 54–55. ———. 1959. ‘Diglossia’. Word. 15: 325–340. Fishman, Joshua A.1967. ‘Bilingualism with and without Diglossia; Diglossia with and without Bilingualism’. Journal of Social Issues. 23(2): 29–38. Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju, Colin Masica and Anjani Sinha (eds). 1986. South Asian Languages: Structure, Convergence and Diglossia. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Shastri, Haraprasad. 1901. ‘Baanggaalaa Byaakaran’ (Bangla Grammar). Sahitya-Parishad Patrika. 8(1): 1–7. Shastri, Sharacchandra. 1901. ‘Nuton Baanggaalaa Byaakaran’ (The New Bangla Grammar). Bharati. 1308 (Agrahayan [Bengali era]): 461–491. ———. 1902. ‘Byaakaran o Baanggaalaabhaashaa’ (Grammar and the Bangla Language). Bharati. 1308 (Phalgun [Bengali era]): 172–191. Tagore, Rabindranath. 1973a. Baanglaa krit o toddhit ‘primary and secondary derivatives in Bangla’. Rabindra-Racanāvalī vol. 12. Calcutta: Visvabharati. 382–96. [Originally published in 1901, Sahitya-Parishad Patrika 8:3.] ———. 1973b. ‘Baanglaa byaakaran’ (Bangla grammar). Rabindra-Racanāvalī vol. 12. Calcutta: Visvabharati. 564–578. [Originally published in 1902, Bangadarshan Paush 1308.] Tribedi, Ramendrasundar. 1902. ‘Baangglaa Byaakaran’ (Bangla Grammar). SahityaParishad Patrika. 8: 4. Uday Narayan Singh and Maniruzzaman. 1983. Diglossia in Bangladesh and Language Planning. Calcutta: Gyan Bharati. Vidyabhushan, Satishchandra. 1902. ‘Bhaashaar Sahit Byaakaraner Sambandha’ (The Relation between Language and Grammar). Bharati. 1308 (Magh [Bengali era]).

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Appendix THE GRAMMAR OF BANGLA Haraprasad Shastri

In Bangla, about 250 grammars of the language have been written. Most of them have been published in the last ten years and have been addling the brains of the boys in Bengal and reaching into the pockets of their elders. Bengalis are not entitled to take any pride in the fact that so many grammars have appeared, for all grammars of Bangla are being produced by authors of two sorts under two patents; there are the pundits sponsored by the Mugdhabodha patent, and then again there are the schoolmasters working for the Hiley patent. The moment one opens any book of one patent, one finds the phonetic articulations of letters and rules of combination; the moment one opens any book of the other patent, one finds a fivefold classification of words into viśeṣyas ‘nouns’, viśeṣaṇas ‘adjectives and adverbs’, sarvanāmas ‘pronouns’, kriyās ‘verbs’ and avyayas ‘indeclinables’. The rest of the book under the first patent is a bunch of translations of sūtras from the original Sanskrit; the rest of the book under the second patent is a bunch of translations of rules from the original English. That Bangla is an independent language, that it has arisen through Pali, Magadhi, Ardhamagadhi, with admixtures from Sanskrit, Persian, English and other languages, is a point that never crosses these authors’ minds. Some of them even put the two patents together and produce a kind of khichri. This is a wonderful substance. It completely lacks rationality, not to speak of any reference to facts. Consider an example: the authors of grammars of Sanskrit after serious cogitation reached the conclusion that all words must be divided into two classes. So they wrote: there are two types of word – those ending in nominal sup suffixes and those ending in verbal ting suffixes. They work with the principle that an endingless verbal root or nominal stem cannot be used in a text. So they arrange for every verbal root to take a ting-type ending and for every nominal stem to take a sup-type ending; they are willing to add a pointless ending to an indeclinable and later delete it, but they absolutely refuse to admit that a 117

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word can be used without any ending whatever. However, the grammarians of Bangla stated that indeclinables do not take any ending. Suppose an observant boy were to ask, in the sentences Raam Raabonke maarilen ‘Rama killed Ravana’ and Keshab aam khaailen ‘Keshav ate a mango’, why should the words Raam, Keshab and aam not be regarded as indeclinables? Our grammarians would have nothing to say in response. They have seen Sanskrit grammarians postulate endings everywhere, so they have to postulate them also. They have seen English grammarians set up parts of speech, so they have to establish two parts of speech as well. Without this, they cannot flaunt their learning and sell their books; but they completely fail to see that indiscriminately stealing rules of two kinds from grammars of two kinds reveals their illiteracy. You see, in the grammar of Sanskrit, nominal case endings are distinct from the kaarakas, the participant roles that nouns play. Roles are a semantic matter; case endings pertain to the form of the word. Sanskrit has plenty of case endings and plenty of roles; some of the case endings originate for reasons that have nothing to do with roles; this is why Sanskrit grammar on cogent grounds distinguishes roles from case endings. The definition of roles in Sanskrit intimately links the noun bearing a role to the verb it is connected to; but in English, case is defined quite differently, in terms of indicating the condition of the noun, which goes to show that English cases and Sanskrit roles are entirely distinct from each other. The possessive is a case in English, but there is no role that corresponds in Sanskrit to the genitive; however, several grammars of Bangla have taken the Sanskrit notion of a sambandha-pada ‘relational noun’ and passed it off as yet another role, since their authors are confused about the difference between roles inspired by Sanskrit and cases inspired by English. In English, cases form a single subject matter. The possessive has an ‘apostrophe plus s’ and some specific changes in the plural, hence the postulation of a possessive case, a decision consistent with the rest of their system. The subject of a passive sentence carries the nominative case in English without difficulty. But if an author mixes the two systems and speaks of the subject of a passive sentence as instantiating the agent role, the whole thing goes topsy turvy; we have seen several grammars where the entire topic of endings is left out of the discussion, resulting in confusion of this sort. Some of these books claim that in the agent role, sometimes the noun takes the locus role, as in Chaagole paataa khaae ‘goats eat leaves’ (where the word for ‘goats’ actually carries the locative case ending), or that an instrument role noun takes the locus role, as in churite kaaṭe ‘he cuts with a knife’ and mukhe khaae ‘he eats with his mouth’ (in both these examples, the instrument role–bearing noun carries the locative case ending). By confusing roles and case endings in this way, 118

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many grammars create terror in the boys’ minds. If instead case endings and semantic roles are separated, if their effects, definitions and contexts are disentangled while teaching, with some care, what role is associated with what case endings, what word brings what case endings in its wake, what meaning is associated with what case ending, then the whole business of grammar can be explained to the boys. Even the forms of case endings have become an object of confusion. Someone writes, the endings look like this:

First case Second case Third case Fourth case Fifth case

[Singular]

[Plural]

h ke, re, y, te daaraa diyaa, e, y ke hoite theke

raa digoke, der diger, daaraa digoke, diyaa digoke diger, hoite diger, theke

and so on

Somebody else leaves a blank instead of the visarga for the first case singular. Whatever the case endings are in Sanskrit, there must be corresponding ones in Bangla, for otherwise the Book of Goddess Chandi would be polluted. We inquire, how did daaraa and diyaa turn into case endings? Nothing that does not become an intimate part a word’s body can count as its ending. In aamaadiger daaraa ‘by us’ and aamaar daaraa ‘by me’ the genitive form of aamaadiger ‘our’ and aamaar ‘my’ gives away the fact that here the pronoun serves as a relational word; how then can the word after it count as an ending? In the sentence Churi diyaa kaaṭibe ‘Cut it with a knife’ the word diyaa ‘with’ in Bangla is formally a non-finite verb with ‘knife’ as its object; on what grounds are we to call diyaa the case ending for the instrument role? And yet we find all the grammars stating that diyaa is the case ending for the instrument role; we wonder how we can believe that grammarians use their brains when they write. And then we find that digoke has been turned into a case ending, but do we ever actually say digoke? In the western Rarh variety one does say digge, and our older documents show aamaar digorer, but digoke is never observed, never uttered. In the period when aamaar digorke was current, digor was not a case ending. Digor is a Persian word – it denotes a collectivity. If we are 119

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to identify a case ending here, the bit that crystallizes is der. Given the compulsion to find some case ending, only der can be called one. But this der is a case ending for the undergoer role, for relational words and for the location role as well. Many Prakrit grammars have no recipient role; Bangla does not have one either, but Bangla grammars of both types – the Mugdabodha patent and the Hiley patent – have chosen to postulate the recipient role. A couple of grammars provide Dhopaake kaapoṛ dilaam ‘I gave clothes to the washerman’ as an example of the recipient role. That Rajakasya vastraṃ dadāti does not instantiate the recipient role, that Sanskrit grammarians have racked their brains over these constructions, seems to be unknown and unheeded. These grammarians of Bangla take it that the term sampradāna for the recipient role indicates an action of giving, and they conclude that surely giving clothes to a washerman counts as giving, making the washerman a recipient. But Sanskrit grammarians define donating as a process that involves the destruction of one’s own ownership rights over an item and the establishment of someone else’s ownership rights over that item; giving clothes to a washerman neither eliminates one’s own property rights nor creates such rights for anybody else; how, then, does such giving count as an instance of donating, and how does the washerman bear the recipient role? Let us consider sandhi. On the fourth or fifth page of any Bangla grammar we see the sandhi section starting with ‘if an a or an aa is followed by an aa, the two join to form an aa, which is attached to the preceding consonant.’ If an intelligent boy inquires, why should Raam aaiso ‘Raam, (please) come’ not mutate into Raamaiso, why should Takhon Abinaash bolilo ‘Then Abinash said’ not be converted into Takhonaabinaash bolilo, the pundit has no answer. Sanskrit grammar has provisions for sandhi between neighbouring words in a sentence; this is why some grammarians place the sandhi section right after the characterization of the noun. Bangla, however, does not perform sandhi between neighbouring words in a sentence; thus it is inappropriate to put the exposition of sandhi rules at the start of the grammar; if those rules are taken seriously, one will end up saying Pnaac pon bicaali kinilaam, tathaapyaaṭcaalaakhaanaa bnaadhaa hoilo naa ‘I bought five pons [an indigenous measure] of straw, and yet the thatching of the cottage remained unfinished’ and the like. The idea of placing sandhi rules early in a Bangla grammar is indeed a clear sign of thoughtlessness. A recently published grammar, written in Sanskrit, of the Kashmiri language begins with the statements sandhiḥ padeṣu ‘sandhi applies within a word’ and na vākyeṣu ‘not in a sentential context’. Kashmiris are endowed with good sense that Bengalis obviously lack; 120

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many grammars of Bangla offer specimens like ‘if the final n of a word is followed by l, then the n is replaced by an l and the preceding vowel is nasalized, as in vidvā~llikhati’ and ‘if a word-final e or o is followed by an a, then that a is deleted and is replaced by an avagraha marking the deletion site’. What do you think one feels like doing to such authors? It will be pointed out by some that not presenting sandhi at the beginning of a grammar will mean that a boy who sees words like joddopi ‘although’, oddaapi ‘to this day’, atoebo ‘therefore’ and itostato ‘hesitate’ will not realize that these examples instantiate sandhi. The answer to that objection is that first of all such cases are few and far between; and secondly these items are sandhi-welded products that we have received from Sanskrit and that we use as single words. We have no desire or inclination to analyse them, nor is there warrant for such a procedure. And if the point is that such a small number of Sanskrit words can compel us to begin our grammar with sandhi rules, then we should treat identically the products of English synthesis that we use in Bangla, such as maanoaari goraa ‘a white soldier attached to a man-o’-war’. The same goes for Persian words, such as Siraj Uddaula and Nizam Ulmulk. And Hindi words; and French words. It has been claimed by many that when two or more words in Bangla are combined to form a compound word they undergo sandhi. We disagree; in our view even the context of compounding does not elicit sandhi unless the word is taken from Sanskrit; consider rail way ‘railway’, jacket aasten ‘jacket sleeve’, nilaam istaahaar ‘auction notice’, Baanggaalaa itihaas ‘history of Bengal’, Sangskrito obhidhaan ‘Sanskrit dictionary’, tumi aami ‘you and I’ and so on. Compound words that have come from Sanskrit do indeed exhibit sandhi, for example mahaasay ‘sir’, debaalay ‘temple’, biddaalay ‘school’ and kusaason ‘mat made of grass’. The point is that Bangla itself, as a language, does not use sandhi either in compounds or in non-compound constructions. Another context where the question arises is that of derived words; the same point holds there as well; words that undergo primary and secondary derivational processes in Sanskrit and are accepted in Bangla display sandhi, but ordinary Bangla words do not. Baaṛi-waalaa ‘land-lord’ and ghoṛi-waalaa ‘clock-maker’ are examples of secondary derivatives; de-on ‘giv-ing’, la-on ‘tak-ing’, lo-iyaa ‘having taken’ and jaa-iyaa ‘having go-ne’ are examples of primary derivatives. Words taken from Sanskrit are best treated as individual entities. Those who wish to go in there and analyse them should feel free to study Sanskrit grammar to that end. Sanskritists are going to say either that all words in Bangla come from Sanskrit or that huge numbers do, making it impossible to disconnect 121

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from Sanskrit grammar. We do not accept this claim. The written language had indeed gone in for large doses of Sanskrit words due to the influence of the much imitated style of (Ishwarchandra) Vidyasagar, but that diction has fallen into disuse. Knowing that the Bangla word tel ‘oil’ comes from Sanskrit taila, Prakrit tella, Old Bangla tela, we inquire, if we choose to write simply tel, what should this action pollute the Book of Goddess Chandi? If we consult authoritative Sanskrit works on alamkaara, we find that precisely the decision to use taila attracts censure as a case of aprayuktatva, anachronistic usage. The word kaaj ‘work’ derives from the Prakrit word kajja; some contemporaries anxious to demonstrate their erudition echo the Sanskrit source kaarya by insistently spelling modern kaaj with the Bangla letter yj, which indicates an old y source and a modern j pronunciation; we ask our readers to adjudicate between the j spelling and the yj spelling. When we show affection to our children, we call them jaadu ‘darling’; the pundits feel sure that the word comes from yaadava, so they write this as yjaadu, but what does a term of endearment for children have to do with the Yadavas? It makes no sense to draw such a connection. If linking a child to the Yadava dynasty has an endearing connotation, why should making the child a scion of the Raghava dynasty not have the same effect? In fact the word jaadu is not derived from yaadava; Sanskrit has a term of endearment jaata used for children, which becomes jaada in Prakrit, leading to the Bangla jaadu. In other words, to write the word as yjaadu in Bangla is a serious solecism. There are several cases of two words current in Bangla, one taken from Sanskrit and one descended from a Prakrit source, of which we use the Sanskritic variant in writing and the Prakrit-modified variant in speech: oddo/aaj ‘today’, kollo/kaal ‘tomorrow’; why? Would it reduce our clarity if we were to use aaj, kaal in writing as well? As far as we can see, it makes no difference at the level of communciation; why then do we choose to avoid the chalit (current) word, using the obsolete Sanskrit word instead and forcing children to consult enormous conversion charts between the two sets of words? First we make stupid decisions, and then we cope with the mess we have made by killing ourselves memorizing sandhi rules. Speaking of the classification of words reminds me of a funny story. There was a brilliant grammarian of Bangla who noticed that, among non-verbs, some words do not undergo declension, and other words do; the ones that are not declined are called avyaya in Sanskrit, so this gentleman decided that the ones that do get declined should be called savyaya. The word savyaya is as absolutely unheard of in Sanskrit as it is in Bangla. Even if someone does choose to derive it as a possible form in Sanskrit, 122

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the result of that operation does not yield the meaning this gentleman has in mind. We have already remarked that Bangla nouns have a declensionfree form in several cases and should count as avyaya. In fact Bangla has at most three or four case endings. Of these, the ending e is usable with several participant roles, so what is the point in drawing an enormous diagram tabulating singular and plural against Sanskrit style first case, second case, third case, fourth case and so on? English has only two cases, Bangla has four or five, so it will not do to get rid of case altogether. Especially the fact that cases have to do with the form of words and that participant roles are a matter of their meaning needs to be made clear to learners in their childhood so that this understanding becomes part of one’s core knowledge. One of the particularly egregious inventions of the Bangla grammarians is the class of ‘hybrid verbs’. They claim that aahaar karaa ‘to do ingestion, i.e. to eat’ and procaar karaa ‘to do propaganda, i.e. to propagate’ are hybrid verbs; in other words, the verb is part noun, part verb; the two constituents combine, making the verb a hybrid. Not even fourteen generations of Panini’s ancestors could have risen to the heights of such inventiveness. The Bangla grammarians argue that, if aahaar karaa is not a verb, then a sentence like anno aahaar koritechen ‘he is eating rice’ cannot assign the patient role to ‘rice’ and that consequently hybrid verbs must be recognized. In reply, it may be observed that the verb kare ‘does’ has the object aahaar ‘ingestion’ and therefore cannot take anno ‘rice’ as its object; the word anno is the object of the primary derivative aahaar. In Sanskrit, the subject and the object of every primary derivative take the genitive case, but Bangla does not change the form of the object of a primary derivative. But those who wish to display great erudition are unwilling to admit that the words of Sanskrit and those of Bangla may have different properties; thus, noticing that the derivative verb aahaar does not impose a genitive on its object, they proceed to throw the poor word aahaar itself into the verb. A few Bangla authors have gone so far as to force a genitive on the object in such constructions and to write anner aahaar koritechen ‘he is performing ingestion of the rice.’ There is more to say. Forms like aahaar koritechen or anno aahaar koritechen are from the bookish diction or saadhu bhaashaa; do we normally talk like this? We usually say tini khaaite (or bhaat khaaite) bosiyaachen ‘he has sat down to eat (or to eat rice).’ But we are so sick that we are unwilling to put down on paper what we normally say. Familiarity breeds contempt. However, this ‘contempt’ is entirely inappropriate; it is doing harm to the language and is not doing any detectable good. It is filling up the 123

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language with many ways of expressing a few thoughts and blocking the growth of new thoughts. The boys are being forced to stuff their heads by memorizing a bunch of pointless words and their meanings. We have already observed that at the very start of a Bangla grammar there is a chapter dealing with the places of articulation of speech sounds and their principles and that the chapter is absolutely redundant. Sanskrit grammar has a real need for such a chapter, for it is important to identify homorganic segments; this is why Bopadeva (the author of the Mugdhabodha grammar), after indicating the places of articulation of the sounds, states Eṣāṃ yo yena samaḥ sa tasya tatra tataḥ ‘among these, a segment that is identical to the segment immediately preceding it in the word or construction in question is implemented as an extension of the articulation at the same place of articulation.’ But nothing in Bangla grammar calls for principles of extended articulation of a segment at word boundary. And yet we see that the grammars of Bangla have gone far beyond the Mugdhabodha grammar of Sanskrit in their elaboration; that grammar did not deal with aspiration and its absence, with semivowels and stops and fricatives. But Bangla grammarians act as if these topics are an essential part of the articulation chapter. Bopadeva did not worry about why this or that sound should have the place of articulation that it does. The grammarians of Bangla, trying to get to the bottom of all this, have come up with results that are occasionally amusing. One of them writes that the three sibilants and h are ūṣma sounds, ‘fricatives’, because their production involves the passage of hot (uṣṇa) air through the mouth; that the anusvāra and the visarga are ayogavāha sounds because they have the same place of articulation as the segment immediately preceding them. The only Sanskrit grammar that uses the term ayogavāha is that of Pāṇini. In his work, ayogavāha sounds are those that are not brought into the initial enumeration and yet carry out the work of the grammar. Compare this with the sense of this term that has been proposed by Bangla grammarians. In our view, there is no need to retain this chapter in a Bangla grammar at all. Seven-year-old boys, helped along by the teacher’s cane, somehow memorize this chapter, but there is not a single place in the language where the principles of this chapter find any application. Yet another fault in the very ‘bismillah’ of Bangla grammars must be mentioned: the authors claim to be writing grammars of Bangla but begin with the following definition: ‘Bangla grammar is the discipline whose knowledge enables the learner to write, read, and speak the Bangla language correctly.’ In other words they take the word vyākaraṇa from Sanskrit but its definition from English grammars. In Sanskrit, the term vyākaraṇa 124

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is defined as vyākriyante vyutpādyante śabdā anena ‘that which segments words into constituents and traces these to their sources’, in other words what one would call ‘etymology and derivation’ in English. Indeed, in the Mugdhabodha and other grammars of Sanskrit, the job of the grammarian ends with the account of the finished word; what is called ‘syntax’ in English does not preoccupy the Sanskrit grammarian. But a grammar of English is divided into five sections – orthography, etymology, syntax, punctuation and prosody, occasionally adding figures of speech as well as composition, but Sanskrit handles orthography in a separate discipline called śikṣā, syntax in a discipline called vādārtha, prosody in the discipline of chandaḥ and figures of speech in that of alaṃkāra; Sanskrit has no disciplines dedicated exclusively to punctuation or to composition. Our vyākaraṇa is nothing but etymology; if an author defines vyākaraṇa as subsuming everything that an English grammar handles, is this a valid definition? The answer is immediately apparent. Many authors of Bangla grammars have begun to see the point, which is why they eschew the term Bangla vyākaraṇa and write Baanglaa bhaasaatatto, Baanglaa bhaasaabodh instead. We confine our discussion here to a few obvious points; it should be possible to provide a fuller account on some other occasion.

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10 ‘ENGLISH EDUCATION’ IN LATE-NINETEENTH- AND EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIAN FICTION T. Sriraman

Perhaps the greatest gift of English education to Indian literary history and culture was the novel form itself. While our country has had a long, ancient tradition of storytelling – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are themselves known to have had several older oral sources – the novel as a medium of storytelling, as we generally know it today, is typically a Western, and, more specifically, in the Indian context, a British, import. This will be attested by the fact that the novel form took birth in the Indian languages as well as in Indian English writing only in the second half of the nineteenth century. A variety of reasons have been adduced for the late arrival of the novel in the Indian literary scene such as (a) the basic Indian preoccupation with religion and metaphysics; (b) the relative unimportance of the individual in a group society; (c) the lack of a historical sense; (d) the inattention to contemporary phenomena, to the here and now and (e) the late emergence of prose. While there were developments in the nineteenth century that substantially affected all these factors, thanks mainly to colonial interventions, it is the last that concerns us here. That the emergence and increasing use of prose were a prerequisite to the birth of the novel is demonstrated in the fact that it was the Augustan Age in English literature (known as the Age of Prose and Reason) that also saw the birth and early growth of the novel. A similar pattern is observed with regard to English in India as well as the regional languages, which witnessed an increasing use of prose in the nineteenth century as a ready form of communication, discourse and debate on all matters of social, 126

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cultural or political importance. So far as English writing in India is concerned, while the first collection of poems (the one by Henry Derozio) written by an Indian in English was published in 1827 and the first Indian drama in English (Krishna Mohan Banerji’s The Persecuted or Dramatic Scenes Illustrative of the Present State of Hindoo Society in Calcutta) in 1831, the first Indian novel in English (Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife) appeared in serial form only in 1864 (and was published in book form only in 1935). It is important to note that Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s essay ‘A Defence of Theism’, regarded as the first original prose publication of significance by an Indian author writing in English, appeared in 1817 and was followed by several more prose writings by Ram Mohan Roy himself as well as by others. It is worth noting too that the earliest novels in the Indian languages were authored by writers who had (a) received English education in some form or other and (b) pioneered the use of prose in their own languages. For example Pyari Chand Mitra (1814–1883), called the Dickens of Bengal, the author of Alaler Gharer Dulal (1854), the first novel in Bangla, had received English education at the Hindu College, Calcutta, and was a journalist who wrote both in English and in Bangla and played no small part in the introduction of simple Bangla prose. Mayuram Vedanayagam Pillai (1826–1889), the author of the first novel in Tamil, Pratapa Mudaliyar Charittiram (written in 1857 and published in 1879), translated several law books into Tamil, besides writing a manual of ethics in Tamil and composing innumerable Tamil songs set to Carnatic music ragas that are sung even today. He had received his early education (in English and Tamil) from private tutors, passed the law examinations and worked as a district munsif. A. Madhaviah (1872–1925), another of the novelists discussed in the present chapter, was a civil servant who had done his B.A. from Madras Christian College and also worked there as a lecturer. Besides authoring three novels in Tamil and eight in English, he published several volumes of poetry and prose in both the languages. Krupabai Satthianadhan (1862–1894), the third novelist whom we discuss here, who had received English education from her own family as well as European missionaries in Maharashtra, wrote several articles in English on contemporary events and issues. Mayuram Vedanayagam Pillai bemoaned the absence of prose writings in Tamil. In fact, he begins his Preface (written in English in 1879) to the first edition of Pratapa Mudaliyar Charittiram thus: ‘It is accepted that there are no prose works in Tamil. People grieve over this lack,’ and he goes on to claim, in the next sentence, that he wrote ‘this fictional work’ to redress this lack. He says that he composed the novel also to illustrate the ethical 127

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doctrines elucidated in his other prose works (‘Preface’ to Pratapa Mudaliyar Charittiram, hereafter cited as PMC: i). Pillai goes on to say in the course of the novel – in which the male and female protagonists serve as mouthpieces for the author’s views on several contemporary issues such as women’s liberation, social and linguistic snobbery, corruption in officialdom including the judiciary – that social reformation can be brought about only through the medium of prose classics (vachana kaaviyangal) and not through poetical works (seyyutkal). It is certain, he declares, that there will be no progress in this country so long as there are no prose works in our native languages (PMC 1879: 332). Even more importantly, Pillai affirms (through his heroine Gnanaambal) that the task of spreading the use of prose in Tamil for purposes of social education and reform is a mission enjoined on the English-educated as well as a privilege conferred on them. He asks, ‘Can anyone else compose noble prose works other than those who have mastered the State languages as well as the native languages?’ (PMC 1879: 332). (By ‘state languages’ (rajabhaashas), Pillai means English, French and other European languages.) Conversely, those who study only the state languages are people who live only for themselves and are of no use to the society at large (PMC 1879: 332–333). Such persons are not only evil themselves; they also mislead Europeans. The Europeans who came here earlier studied the native languages of this country with great care. [One is reminded of the good work of people like Max Mueller and Sir William Jones] Now, since our own nationals have given up our languages, Europeans too regard those languages as being without any substance. [The Macaulays and Charles Grants!] Isn’t it unwise to make foreigners despise our languages? (PMC 1879: 333) Pillai and other early Indian novelists were of course greatly influenced by British models, not just in naming the new form – in Tamil, for instance, though words like pudinam and naveenam (‘new work’) were sometimes used to refer to the genre, the English term (pronounced as naaval ) has stuck and is no longer regarded as a loan word – but also with regard to the aims and techniques of fictional creation. Pillai says, for instance: Some novelists present human nature as it exists and functions. As these present people of low character, callow youths tend to 128

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emulate those examples. In writing this story I have not followed such a method. I have depicted my famous characters as entirely virtuous. In this respect I have followed the moral outlook of the famous English author, Dr Johnson. (‘Preface’ to PMC 1879: iii–iv) And Pillai proceeds to quote a long passage from The Rambler in which Johnson asks why characters who serve as examples of virtue and nobility cannot be presented in works of imagination, unless they are stories based on historical events. As for technique, although Pratapa Mudaliyar Charittiram, which contains a few instances of supernatural intervention and several incredible events and acts, should, strictly speaking, be regarded as a romance rather than as a realistic novel, the author has basically designed it in the picaresque tradition where we follow the fortunes of the female and male protagonists. There are however innumerable interruptions to the main plot, but these are in the form of anecdotes and sub-stories (from India as well as abroad) told by the protagonists themselves along with disquisitions on contemporary events and strong moralizing comments. The other novels that we study here are more closely knit. Another feature of these early novels derived from British models is the extensive use of authorial comments and interventions (in the manner of Henry Fielding) designed to ‘place’ characters and events evidently to prevent the attribution of unacceptable moral intent to the novelists. This seems to have been necessary, especially with a new form deliberately created to be more accessible and more entertaining than poetry or plain discursive prose. Here is Madhaviah addressing his readers, after his hero gives some evasive replies to his friend’s queries: But look carefully. His mind, which valued truth more than his father’s welfare – [As a child he had refused to provide false testimony to save his father from a criminal charge] – , took recourse to a flimsy excuse to hide from his dear friend Gopalan the rush of emotions he felt when he first saw Savithri. Now he goes further lying blatantly, trying to hide a whole pumpkin in a plate of rice, saying he would like to go to Ariyur only because he has not been there for quite some time. Was that the truth? Would that mind, suddenly, without reason, sprout such a petty wish? Let that be. Let us pose another question. Did the Gopalan mind believe what the Narayanan mind made him say? Not at all. It surmised that the reason was something else and would eventually surface. 129

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Why then did he not question his friend? Only because Gopal was afraid that Narayanan might be offended thinking he did not want to take him along. Is this what true friendship is all about? Anyway, one should not probe too deeply in such matters. Furthermore, even if he had taken the liberty and asked for an explanation, there is no doubt that the Narayanan mind would have found some excuses and not let the truth out. (Padmavati 2002: 86–87) After this psychological explanation of stated and unstated motives, the author immediately adds the moralizing comment: Friends, note how even the most honest of men at times deviate from the truth to satisfy the base instincts of selfishness, selfesteem and egotism, sacrificing their innate wisdom. Just as even a stone wears away with the continuous crawling of ants, good sense is replaced by evil from small beginnings. As one gets used to it, the earlier disgust for evil is subdued and the mind reconciled. (Padmavati 2002: 87) What do we learn from these novels about the agencies, institutions and individuals responsible for imparting English education? It must be stated immediately that, except in one case (Saguna in Krupabai Satthianadhan’s autobiographical novel), it is only the males who receive English education (or even native education) in a formal mode. In a context where English education was looked upon by most nationalists and traditionalists as worldly, materialistic and corrupting, how do the teachers and institutions come across to the authors and characters? Krupabai Satthianadhan (a second-generation Brahmin convert) adopts a somewhat ambivalent attitude with a mixture of colonial-Christian contempt for native Hindu Sanskrit learning and a mild anxiety not to throw away whatever was good in that tradition. Although there is no overt mention of Christianity in Kamala: The Story of a Hindu Child-Wife, the point of view at the beginning of the following portion from the novel, as elsewhere, is obviously critical and judgmental: Ganesh was come of a learned family. His father and his grandfather were shastris, noted for their learning and their bigotry. (italics added Kamala 1894: 53)

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However, in the next few lines, the perspective seems to shift towards the old order recalled with some nostalgia: But in these days Sanskrit learning is not appreciated, and those old days have gone when young men of high descent congregated in groves and temples and sat at the feet of learned shastris and pandits, wearing the mendicant’s garb, begging their meals and spreading their days in chanting hymns to the gods. The groves are no more the resort of the wise and the good. Sanskrit learning is despised and English learning is all in all, for it pays best. (Kamala 1894: 53) But once again there is a swing towards an authorial, ‘neutral’ perspective: So, much against his will the old shastri sent his only son Ganesh to an English school. The old man in his inmost heart had the greatest contempt for English learning, which he regarded as not only superficial but also as antagonistic to the Hindu religion. But he was forced to yield to the influences of the times, and he felt no doubt some satisfaction at the success of his son, though he had his own misgivings as to the influence the new training would have on the young man’s religious belief and conduct. (Kamala 1894: 53) Ironically, the teachers at the English schools themselves, many of them at least adequately learned in three languages – the regional language, Sanskrit and English – seem to have adopted a more tolerant and inclusive attitude. For example the morning and afternoon sessions at the Christian Missionary School in Padmavati start with a brief prayer from the Bible. ‘Some foolish parents’ object to this and refuse to send their children there. But the ‘sterling qualities’ of the teacher, Rajagopala Iyer, set at rest all misgivings and a majority of parents have no reservations about enrolling their students in the school. He used to point out that the Sandhyavandhanam slokas state that just as the water raining from the skies falls at various places but ultimately flows into the ocean, prayer in any form or name is ultimately accepted by Kesava, the god of gods. What was important was instilling an element of piety in the minds of the students. (Padmavati 2002: 38–39)

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There would have been stronger grounds for suspicion of attempts at indoctrination and conversion when it came to institutions of higher learning founded by European missions where the teachers themselves were Christian missionaries. A. Madhaviah, an alumnus and for some time a teacher of the Madras Christian College, talks about it in two of his novels. He grants that the institution ‘was established and is run by padres who have come to this country from Scotland to spread Christianity’. Its guiding principle and hope was that ‘with the spread of education and the development of the mind, true faith would automatically establish itself ’. Most of the teachers were padres, and classes started with prayers and readings from the Bible. Prizes were instituted for students excelling in the study of the Bible. However, ‘the number of students converting to Christianity on this account is negligible.’ The service of the padres, who spent the greater part of their lives away from their European homes and worked on meagre salaries, and often even provided assistance to poor students, was commendable indeed considering that all their efforts were ‘made on behalf of Hindus, Muslims and others who decry the Christian religion’ (Padmavati: 179). The noble and selfless endeavours of Rev. Dr William Miller, principal of the college, receive mention in this novel as well as in Thillaigovindan where he is referred to as ‘one great missionary teacher’ (Thillaigovindan: 79). ‘He remained a bachelor making the Goddess of Learning his bride, his students his sons, and their care the ruling passion of his life’ (Padmavati: 180). There is no mention of any institutions for women’s education in any of the novels except Saguna, although Protestant Christian missionaries had started schools for girls as early as the eighteenth century and had set up a good number of them in the nineteenth. Whatever education the women acquire is only through the men or boys. Saguna, a secondgeneration Christian, receives instruction from her father and her brother before she goes to a school run by European women missionaries. She gets admission to the medical college in Madras but is unable to complete her course owing to poor health. In Krupabai Satthianadhan’s other novel, Kamala, an attempt is made by the heroine’s husband Ganesh to ‘train’ his wife but his efforts are frowned upon by the entire family who accuse him of ‘forgetting his manhood’ and ‘disgracing himself ’ in acting thus. Even his father, who, in spite of his contempt for English learning (as already mentioned), used to hold long conversations with his son about college life, now adopts an attitude of sullen silence (Kamala: 73–74). In Clarinda, a historical novel set in the eighteenth century, the early education of the heroine, an orphan born in a family of Brahmin courtiers 132

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in the Tanjore palace, is in Marathi and Sanskrit and is imparted by her grandfather. In a way, the English education that she receives later from the Englishman, Henry Lyttelton (after he rescues her from a forced sati), is only a reinforcement of the values instilled in her by the traditional lore bestowed on her by her grandfather. When barely twelve, she is already a ‘champion of her sex’ (title of Chapter IX of the novel) and protests to her grandfather (the learned ‘sanyasi’), while reading a passage from Sakuntala that says ‘How even in untutored brutes, the female sex/Is marked by inborn subtlety’: ‘O Babaji, this is not fair, and you know it;’ exclaimed the girl. ‘I wish you would tell me why we are so slandered. This is not the first instance, nor Kalidasa the first poet, even within my little knowledge. Bhartrhari is full of it; they never miss a chance to have a fling at us.’ (Clarinda 1915: 50–51) However, forced to marry against her will after the death of her grandfather and pushed into an environment of superstition, patriarchy and male and female intrigue, she does not realize her potential or gain agency and empowerment until she is rescued and educated by the Englishman. In all the other novels, it is the men or boys who take the initiative to provide some kind and degree of education to the girls. In Padmavati the little girl agrees to take lessons from her cousin Narayanan only on condition that he marries her – he does eventually – and lets her keep her puppy. It is made clear that education of any kind for women is possible only through such means. For instance, there is one wish that Narayanan is unable to fulfil even after marrying Padmavathi: to provide her training in music. But that was not possible. It was unthinkable that a man could be her teacher and, among women, only prostitutes were equipped to teach music. Apart from the fact that getting one as a teacher for Padmavati was too revolutionary an idea, totally opposed to custom, it would also entail an expense he could not afford. (Padmavati 2002: 213) The heroine of Muthumeenakshi receives a kind of lifelong education from her brother’s friend Sundaresan who eventually marries her after she goes through a child marriage and is widowed. The novel is interspersed with long passages – spoken mainly by Sundaresan – on the benefits of 133

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education, especially English education, for women. The events and vicissitudes of the girl’s life – child marriage, oppression, widowhood, more oppression, widow remarriage and the consequent ostracism and the move towards conversion to Christianity at the end – are all placed and evaluated in the context of education for women. Attempts at teaching women are not always sustained or successful, particularly in view of possible romantic diversions. Thillai Govindan, determined to teach his wife both Tamil and English starting from the alphabets, devises ‘a new, comprehensive method of teaching’ with grammar and literature side by side, but at the end of the first year, he finds that he ‘had been teaching her only the conjugations of the verb “to love” in both the languages, as well as in the mute language of the eyes’. The only other reward he himself reaps is to get ‘plucked in his own examination’ (Thillai Govindan 1903: 104–105). The novels also contain debates and arguments about the motives for acquiring English education. Since the general belief at the time was that English education was necessary only for securing government jobs, it seemed automatic and logical that women did not require such education, or even native education, as they could not take up any employment outside the home. A male character in Padmavati cynically and frivolously says that the purpose of education for girls is only to enable them ‘to write love letters’. ‘It seems an educated girl of the north corresponded with her lover and eloped to Madras’ (71). (Incidentally, that is the only kind of use he puts his own learning to.) However, he is immediately contradicted by the hero, Narayanan: To say women should not be educated because they would start writing clandestine love letters is like saying that because fires are destructive, no stove should be lit in any house. Education is important for one’s character as fire is for one’s comfort. Anything on earth can be put to bad use! The main benefits of education are development of our native intelligence and faculties and understanding of basic ethical values. Money and status are secondary. Only if you accept this can you understand the importance of women’s education. (Padmavati 2002: 72) Later in the novel Narayanan begins to teach his wife Padmavati English as he believed that unless a wife could fully share her husband’s joys and sorrows, she could not be considered a companion for 134

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life. His cherished desire was that his wife should appreciate the beauty of English literature and be able to share the immense delight he derived from the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Tennyson and the like. (Padmavati 2002: 211) In several places the novels make it clear that it is basically an ‘English’ idea that the wife should be a companion and sharer and to fulfil that role she needs education. He [Ganesh] found her, moreover, eager to get information about everything, and wonderfully quick of comprehension, and with the English idea he had imbibed regarding women’s love and education he thought of striking out a new line and developing Kamala’s mind and so training her to be a real companion to him. (Kamala 1894: 73) However, as we noted earlier, Ganesh does not succeed in his efforts owing to opposition from the rest of the joint family and, what is worse, still desiring female companionship, he is driven to the company of Sai, whose education has made her ‘a bold, clever woman wielding a dreadful power over others’ (Kamala: 81). The debate on the need for and the merits of English education in fact starts with the first novel in Tamil. The protagonists of Pratapa Mudaliyar Charittiram, even as they abominate and ridicule the snobbery that English learning (especially ‘a little learning’) produces and deplore the resultant neglect of native languages and literatures, however affirm that theirs is not a plea against the learning of the ‘state languages’: We are not saying that State languages like English and French should not be learnt. As the rules, regulations and legal procedures that we need to follow are all formulated in those languages, how can we administer the State if we are ignorant of them? (PMC 1879: 330) But there are higher uses and motives too: Moreover, since the books in those languages contain several useful matters relating to life in this world as well as matters of 135

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ethical and spiritual import, it is certain that the more we study them the more our knowledge will broaden. (PMC 1879: 330) It has been said that snobbery is the great running theme of the British novel ever since its advent in the seventeenth century till at least about the end of the twentieth century. The basis for such snobbery was the class structure of British society. It was to be expected that the Indian novel (in English as well as in the native languages) in its emulated function of social criticism should concern itself with the same theme. And what field or domain could hold richer potential in this regard than the (in)famous caste and patriarchal structure of Hindu society? The Indian novel continues to this day to illustrate, expose and critique casteist and patriarchal ideologies and snobbish attitudes in various forms and degrees. However, in the novels we are discussing, it is the new English-educated (or rather English-using) caste of Indians and the snobbery associated with them that come under scrutiny, usually mild and witty. Surprisingly it is the English-educated Indian Christian protagonist of Saguna who is most offended by the air of affectation and artificiality that seem to go with some members of her own class. There is, for instance, Prema who ‘talked English as her mother tongue, for she went to a European school’ and who always spoke of her parents as Ma and Pa (79). She read English novels and spoke of young ladies of society wearing long trains and not short skirts. Like many a novel-reading girl she lived in a world of her own making and enjoyed it. She knew that the native Christian community was very small, and that there was no society to speak of, neither long trains nor short skirts. Her mother wore a saree. But she attended an English school, and her thoughts were influenced by those with whom she mixed. (Saguna 1895: 80) And then there is the native Christian barrister who is always talking about ‘home’, meaning England. ‘Oh! bother it all’, he exclaims to Saguna in a bored tone during a party, ‘You ought to see the parties at home. We manage differently there I assure you’ (146). There are a few characters in the other novels whose English learning is superficial but who like to show off whatever little they have learnt, like the son of a rich man in Muthumeenakshi who ‘had read enough English to crop his hair, dress fashionably, and affect superior manners, and he 136

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had stopped his studies at that. Such English words as “Sir”, “rascal” and “damn beggar” were always intermingled with his speech’ (79–80). In fact, it is not just the use of English but the sartorial and cultural habits that are associated with ‘English’ that often cause amusement and provoke ridicule. The English-educated government official in Padmavati wears ‘ritually unclean, washerman-washed clothes’, ‘Tiruchirapalli footwear’ and ‘a silver wristwatch’ and ‘sports whiskers’ (94). In the same novel a lady who is negotiating a wedding alliance for her daughter is said to belong to ‘the tribe of English widows’ because she ‘sat on a chair and talked with easy familiarity’ (125). But it is something more than snobbery that is satirized in Pratapa Mudaliyar Charittiram when the heroine (who, dressed as a male, is the ruler of a small kingdom) addresses a group of lawyers. She objects to the unnecessary use of English in the courts of justice. The author, Mayuram Vedanayagam Pillai, was himself a district munsif and, as elsewhere in the novel, is evidently speaking through the character: We hear that in the Tamil courts established under the British Government, there are some lawyers who present their arguments in English instead of Tamil. The language of our country is Tamil. But the language used in the courts is not Tamil. The judge is a Tamil. The lawyer who presents his case is a Tamil. The other lawyers and the litigants are all Tamils! Thus when all are Tamils, we cannot understand who these lawyers wish to gratify by speaking in English. (PMC 1879: 322) The speaker refuses to accept the excuses offered for the use of English in courts, for example that they speak English because they cannot speak well in Tamil (‘Can there be anything so disgraceful as being unable to speak one’s own language?’), that the law books are all in English and that there are no proper Tamil equivalents for many legal terms (‘It will not be very difficult to find equivalents and if there are still some which are untranslatable, only those terms can be used in English.’) and that they would forget their English if they argued in Tamil (‘If their English is of a kind that will be so easily forgotten, how long is it going to dwell with them?’) (322–323). But the clinching argument against the use of English in courts concerns the aim of all judicial investigation and examination: It is the responsibility of the court to get to the truth in every legal case and administer justice. And how will the truth emerge 137

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unless the arguments of the lawyers and other transactions are carried out in a language that the people understand, and not in a language that they don’t? . . . If the interrogation in courts of law, the orders, verdicts and judgments are fully comprehensible to all the citizens, won’t it help them in their own lives, to be on their guard against straying into evil ways? The people flock to the courts and wait to watch the proceedings only in order to acquire moral discrimination. What wisdom will they attain if the proceedings take place in a language that they do not understand? Is it not like a slap on their face? (PMC 1879: 324–325) The debate about the language of the courts continues to this day. Generally speaking, it is the regional languages, rather than English, that are now used, especially in the lower courts, though judgments are still delivered in English. However, reservations have been expressed, for instance, about members of tribal communities, charged with offences or called as witnesses, being placed in a court environment where only the standard regional language is the medium. The snobbery is often seen as the outward sign of moral decadence and corruption. A character in Pratapa Mudaliyar Charittiram quotes Francis Bacon (whom he describes as ‘a versatile scholar’) on the dangers of ‘a little learning’ and goes on to narrate the history of someone who displayed such vanity on account of his English learning that he disowned his own parents. Even in English he had avoided reading books of an ethical import but read only the work of ‘enemies of scriptural learning’ such as Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, David Hume, John Tyndall and Voltaire (PMC 1879: 193). Elsewhere in the novel it is alleged that as the books and matters taught in the schools set up by the British government are all worldly and materialistic (laukik) and divorced from ethical and spiritual concerns, the people educated in those schools develop into worldly wise and atheistic persons and, the moment they secure employment, they look upon money as their only god and to earn it commit all kinds of unholy acts (PMC 1879: 286). That takes us to the question of what ‘English education’ is generally taken to denote in terms of reading and knowledge. All the three novelists whom we have discussed are evidently ‘English-educated’; Krupabai Satthianadhan was taught by her father and brother before spending some time in European schools and in the medical college; Mayuram Vedanayagam Pillai and A. Madhaviah graduates from colleges. In the works of both Pillai and Madhaviah there are frequent quotations and 138

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citations from English literature put into the mouths of the major characters and in authorial comments and interventions. The authors quoted or cited include Shakespeare (of course!), the Romantic poets, Tennyson (frequently cited), Pope, Thackeray, Scott and Browning. We are led to believe that the major characters, especially the males, and Saguna (the autobiographical female persona), have all internalized British literature sufficiently to be able to allude to authors and works to elucidate convictions, attitudes and states of mind. Thus Sundaresan narrates to Muhumeenakshi the story of Princess Ida (as narrated in Tennyson’s Princess and perhaps also as retold in one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas) to highlight the need for women’s education to improve the condition of women but also to stress that ‘man’s cause and woman’s are bound together and are not separate’ (Muthumeenakshi 1915: 21–23). Sometimes male chauvinistic views can also be buttressed by citations. Gopalan in Padmavati reads from a ‘poem by Pope’ (The Rape of the Lock?), which says that women can be described only by their appearances, not by attributes of character (Padmavati 2002: 156–157). Elsewhere in the same novel we are told about ‘an English play’ (evidently The Merchant of Venice) in which ‘the poet expressed his views on the qualities of music, and of the untrustworthy nature of the man who could not appreciate music’ (Padmavati 2002: 144). When Narayanan unjustly suspects his wife of infidelity, he recalls ‘Tennyson’s lines about the evil effects that would follow when a husband permitted his unfaithful wife to continue to live in his household’ and blames himself ‘for not killing her like Othello’ (Padmavati 2002: 272). There were of course the starting difficulties and bewilderment when initiated into English education starting from zero level. The eponymous hero of Thillai Govindan wonders at ‘the glorious arbitrariness and irregularities of English pronunciation’. The first words he and his friend are taught, ‘know’, ‘go’, ‘to’, ‘put’, ‘cut’ and the like, ‘made us stare in amazement and despair’. The hero’s uncle, who had already a very fair knowledge of Sanskrit (‘the well-made’ native language), declared that ‘English was the language of barbarians’ (Thillai Govindan 1903: 50–51). (It is the same uncle who later introduces Thillai Govindan to the American and British atheists.) The same opinion about English as a mlecha bhasha and its native speakers seems to be echoed in Clarinda where we are told how ‘these Feringhis’ do not name themselves after gods or saints but ‘give themselves all sorts of curious names, stone, wood, hill, dale, crow, bear, black, green’ (Clarinda 1915: 66). And, finally, what did English education do to, and for, the society depicted in these well-peopled novels? It must be said immediately that the world of these novels does by no means represent a cross-section of 139

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Indian, or even Hindu, society. Although there are sporadic references to exploitation and oppression of the lower castes – for example subjugation by the Moghul and the foreigner is called ‘a just retribution for the oppression of the weak by the strong among us’ (Clarinda 1915: 193) – it is the abuses and injustice within the Brahmin community that are foregrounded in the novels. All the major characters belong to the upper, Brahmin, caste (except Lyttelton in Clarinda, the Englishman for whom ‘Brahmin and pariah were the same’ though it is a Brahmin girl whom he marries). Even the Christians in Saguna are Brahmin converts and have very limited contact with the lower-caste converts. However, generally speaking, very few of the male characters (except the sanyasis in Kamala and Clarinda and to a lesser extent the protagonists themselves in all the novels) may be said to truly represent the noble tradition of Brahminical learning. It is, by and large, a superstition-ridden, ‘bigoted’ (to use Krupabai Satthianadhan’s word) Hindu society (whether of the eighteenth century, as in the historical novel Clarinda, or of the late nineteenth century as in the other novels) peopled by Brahmin landholders (many of whom are landgrabbers as well), oppressed child brides and exploited and humiliated child widows, a society where widows cannot remarry but where widowers can, where a widower father can go looking for a bride for his son and then marry her himself, where fathers of young men and women can ‘keep’ mistresses, where women can be forced to commit sati. It is certainly a society in dire need of reformation. But it is also a world where the young people, mostly men and some women too, hold out (often distant) hope of a progressive future. ‘English education’, in spite of all the hazards it brings and the temptations it holds, is indeed a beacon of such hope, even if it is seen only hazily and intermittently. In all fairness, there is some room given to the advocates of Orientalist (as against Anglicist) education. There are isolated attempts as part of a nationalist discourse that social reformation is possible within the bounds of Hindu tradition: Clarinda’s grandfather, the sanyasi, maintains, for example, that practices like early marriages, denial of education to women and the taboo on widow remarriage are all late distortions of ancient tradition and that a knowledge of the scriptures and puranas, when they are properly interpreted, can still usher in reform. But such defences of tradition and attempts at a healthy revival of it amount to little in a predominantly patriarchal structure, and it is only the ‘new’ education that is seen to offer hope, even if it leads to a change of religious faith. In two of the novels under study (the autobiographical Saguna and the historical novel Clarinda), change comes about only through the radical step of conversion to Christianity; in another (Muthumeenakshi) conversion seems the 140

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only option left for the ostracized couple. Pratapa Mudaliyar Charittiram, though authored by a Christian, while offering a great deal of social and cultural criticism, generally steers clear of religious-denominational issues. Kamala, while making no mention of Christianity, presents a depressing picture of ‘Hindu’ society, the persistent and recurrent term carrying a load of colonial-Christian bias and condescension. It is Padmavati that, on the whole, seems to offer a realistic, poised perspective accepting a blend of the old and the new. It is perhaps in Saguna that the impact of English education, as well as that of Christianity, is deep, obvious and pervasive. Though there isn’t any mention of the books and authors who have influenced the protagonist, the impact of Enlightenment and Romantic literature is seen in the very way she relates to her environment. It is essentially an individualistic, Protestant way, with the idea of a personal god rather than a communal god, with epiphanic moments of self-realization and god-realization coalescing into communion with nature. The tone and tenor of the discourse get almost Macaulayan when the protagonist’s father, in his search for ultimate truth, sees the very many-sidedness of Hinduism as its greatest imperfection or when he feels shocked at the ‘low tone of morality pervading the Krishna stories’ (50–51). As Chandani Lokuge says, in her Introduction to Saguna, The strongest force in Satthianadhan’s life is Christianity, reinforced by the Arnoldian system of education to which she was exposed from early childhood, and Romantic literature, which was to develop into one of her lifelong loves. . . . page after page in Saguna is devoted to Romantic word-painting of the natural scene, and integrated with Satthianadhan’s close union with the landscape quintessential to the Wordsworthian experience. The union, however, can never be with the land of the old order (however beloved and beautiful it be): shadowy, dark and mystic, a ‘primitive’ land of bigotry and paganism. It could be reclaimed, but only when Christianity recreated it in Edenic glory. (Saguna 1895: 2) It is as though English education and Christianity work hand in hand to effect a transformation or as though the process of transformation initiated by English education could only be completed by an acceptance of Christianity. Thillai Govindan presents a realistic picture of what happened – and is perhaps still happening – eventually to most people after exposure to 141

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English education and after varying periods and degrees of struggle trying to reconcile the old order with the new. The protagonist here, whose fascination by the British and American atheists (courtesy his uncle) has been already mentioned, makes several attempts at revolt and reform but finally settles into compromise and conformity. The novel was republished in London and addressed to British readers. The British critic Frederic Harrison concluded his Introduction to the novel thus: ‘It is a curious book – how far literal memoirs, how far invention, we need not inquire. But it is a fascinating picture of the contrasts and confusions of Hindoo antiquity suddenly plunged into the whirlpool of modern Europe’ (Thillai Govindan 1903: viii). The ‘contrasts and confusions’, tensions and dilemmas are neatly captured in the following words spoken by Narayanan in Padmavati. His friend and college-mate Gopalan has married a girl-bride, and now his father wants him to go through the ‘nuptial’ (consummation) ceremony immediately even though Gopalan himself says he would like to wait till he completes his F.A. examination. He asks Narayanan, ‘Do I look to my convictions or heed my father’s wishes?’ Narayanan came up with a balanced evaluation. ‘It isn’t fair to blame you. We all face this conflict. If we were like our forefathers, things would have been easier. English education has given us new ideas about the harmful aspects of old, established practices. Hence the dilemma. Do we please our parents who brought us up and gave us that education? Or do we follow the principles the new education has taught us? By doing so, we would not only prove ourselves selfish, but also cause mental agony to our parents in their old age and earn their curses. We’re forced to make compromises, go against our conscience and lose self-respect, while the education we have received with such difficulty becomes meaningless and hollow. On the whole, no end of botheration is caused by this English education. This dilemma is also the real reason why our nation, though under a civilized rule, is unable to make steady progress. But I do believe the situation will improve with time, and good sense will prevail. But until then tensions are unavoidable.’ (Padmavati 2002: 90–91) But the novelists are equally concerned about the other danger: that there may come about a time and situation when there will be no doubts and dilemmas, when ‘English’ will sweep away everything – things of value 142

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as well as things of no worth. Ironically, this fear is articulated clearly by Krupabai Satthianadhan for whose family ‘English education’ did result in a distinct break with the past. And she is speaking here not just about Christian converts: Nothing is so startling in these days as the unconscious imitation of English customs and manners by the people of India. The fault, if indeed it can be called a fault, is characteristic not only of native Christians, but of Hindus as well. It is not because the manners and customs are English that they are unconsciously imitated, but because they are looked upon as necessary concomitants of a higher stage of civilization. Probably the change is inevitable, and it is useless to try to prevent it, but I sincerely hope that my countrywomen, and for the matter of that, my countrymen also, in their eagerness to adopt the new will not give up the good that is in the old. (Saguna 1895: 80) It is more than a century since these novels were written. But the tensions and dilemmas continue, so does the hope.

References Madhaviah, A. 1903a. Muthumeenakshi (Tamil). 1915. Translated into English by one of his granddaughters. Madras: Law Printing House. ———. 1903b. Thillai Govindan (English). 1916. Republished in England with an Introduction by Frederic Harrison. London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd. ———. 1915. Clarinda (English). Tondiarpet, Madras: Cambridge Press. ———. 2002. Padmavati Charithiram (Tamil). 1898. Trans. into English as Padmavati by Meenakshi Tyagarajan. New Delhi: Katha Classics. Pillai, Mayuram Vedanayagam. 2001. Pratapa Mudaliyar Charittiram (Tamil). Chennai: New Century Book House, 1994 (first published in 1879). (The translations from the novel quoted in the chapter are mine.) Satthianadhan, Krupabai. 1998a. Kamala: The Story of a Hindu Child-Wife (English). Ed. with an Intro by Chandani Lokuge. New Delhi: Oxford University Press (first published as a book in 1894). ———. 1998b. Saguna: The First Autobiographical Novel in English by an Indian Woman. Ed. with an Intro by Chandani Lokuge. New Delhi: Oxford University Press (first published as a book in 1895).

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Part III LANGUAGE DEBATES Textbooks and teaching

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11 FIRST TEXTBOOKS IN ENGLISH IN INDIA Shreesh Chaudhary

Printed, or even written, textbooks as we know them today, were uncommon in India until about the 1820s. Portuguese brought a printing press in India in the sixteenth century, but they used it only for printing sacred texts. The British occupied political power in India in the mid-eighteenth century, but had no printing press. They printed neither sacred nor secular texts. Muslims had the thriving culture of book production,1 but they believed in copying sacred texts by hand. The first printed copy of the Holy Qur’an appeared in the mid-nineteenth century from a Hindu press in Lucknow2 and was not as highly regarded as a handwritten copy. First books appeared in significant numbers from Father William Carey’s printing press at Serampore in Bengal in the early years of the nineteenth century.3 Later more ‘textbooks’ appeared when School Society and School Book Society were formed in Kolkata and other cities in the early decades of the nineteenth century.4 India has a tradition of learning non-native languages.5 It had ‘textbook’ kind of works even before English came here, but they were not printed, neither were they available in hundreds of copies. Even when somebody commissioned their writing, and somebody sometimes put them down in the written form, they were not custom made for the teacher and students in the class, as we see them today. For learning Sanskrit, for instance, most children began with the Amarkosha,6 which was a glossary cum thesaurus, and gave the learner many nouns of the basic word list that would be used in the course of learning the language in the first few months. Then followed works like Laghu Siddhanta Kaumudi7 and other texts that had been in use for centuries and had helped people learn Sanskrit successfully at a time when teacher was the only source and memory the only archive. 147

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A similar tradition prevailed for learning Persian, another popular foreign language in India before English. There were some known texts like baagh o bahaar, kissaa totaa mainaa, gulistaan and dastaan e bostaaan. One first listened to them and then read and recited them almost daily and, thus, got them by heart. Finally, to them one applied principles of word and sentence formation as taught by the teacher. Sanskrit tradition does not seem to have emphasized writing so much as Persian did. Sanskrit teachers insisted on ‘standard’ pronunciation of each sound and cluster of sounds, as well as on stress and intonation. They also insisted upon semiotic gestures that accompanied recitation of the sacred texts. Persian tradition also emphasized pronunciation and overemphasized spelling and writing skills.8 Calligraphy was an art, and, in a community that discouraged visual image of any kind, as devout Muslims did, God’s words written in artistic designs answered a need. Spelling test was an important part of learning Persian, as was recitation in Sanskrit. To be called a kalamnawiis, that is a pen-master, was a big compliment acknowledging one’s skill in writing Persian, just as to have Sanskrit texts and aphorisms in the kanTh, that is throat,9 was a big achievement in learning Sanskrit. Instruction and illustration was mostly bilingual, but the ultimate test of achievement in learning both Persian and Sanskrit was the ability for a discourse and dialogue in the language. So when the need for learning English language was felt in India, in about the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, it was not the case that India had no tradition of foreign language learning, and English came in a vacuum. India had a tradition, which was mostly bilingual, teachercentred, memory based rather than script based and so on. Compared with the numbers and percentage of population learning English today, few learnt Sanskrit or Persian. They got individual attention and were well taken care of. Compared with the numbers of people and institutions teaching English today, Sanskrit or Persian had few teachers, but they were highly respected and sought after, or approached, regardless of difficulties, ethnicity and distances. As many Hindus as Muslims learnt and taught Persian, though fewer Muslims took to Sanskrit. However, this tradition had few ‘textbooks’.

Grammar-translation method With the advent of Europeans in India in large numbers during sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, grammar-translation method gained popularity. European Christian missionaries and others came to India in large numbers. Many came without a word of the local language, and this 148

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was a serious handicap in their plans of expansion of both Christianity and commerce. There was, as we have seen earlier, a tradition of learning Sanskrit and Persian, but these languages were not very useful tools for contact with the masses. Learning local languages was the best bet for this purpose. But there was little, or nothing, by way of written, let alone printed, grammar, vocabulary and collection of tales and verses in these languages. Europeans, mainly the missionaries, then took to preparing glossaries, grammars and chrestomathies in the local languages. With the help of these source books, they translated their Holy Bible and Testaments and prepared new books about their prophets and religion in the new language. This approach came to be known as ‘grammartranslation method’ of language learning10 and proved very fruitful. A large number of these adult Europeans were in less than a year able to give discourses and engage in conversations with the local people in the local languages and were, thus, able to execute their scheme of expansion of commerce and Christianity. They found enthusiastic support from their patrons back home. So when the need arose in India for learning English, it was not the case that people did not know how to learn a foreign language, but they knew little else. In yet another respect, the conditions for learning of English were different from the conditions in which Sanskrit and Persian had been learnt. These Oriental languages had been in India for centuries and there had been a tradition of learning and using them. The learners of the language lived among the users of the language. Sanskrit and Persian learners, at any time a relatively small number, were learning these languages among a relatively large numbers of Indians who could use and teach the learners these languages. For English, the situation was different. Relatively far too many Indians wanted to learn English for which there was little by way of tradition, and still less exposure to the language in use. Yet it is remarkable how so many Indians in a relatively short period of time learnt so much English that they were employed by the British in their factories and offices in large numbers. At the end of the seventeenth century, only the few Indians that worked with the British, mainly as their domestic servants and as their agents and helpers in the market, knew a few words of English needed for their business. The British mostly spoke the language of these servants and agents. But a significant change occurred in India’s attitude to English and in the frequency of use of English by Indians after mid-eighteenth century when, following the Battles of Plassey in 1757, and of Buxar in 1764, the British acquired territory and political and military powers in India, and needed help to administer the territory they had acquired. In addition 149

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to maintaining law and order, now they had to administer justice there. This meant that the judge needed to know the language of the people. The other option was for the people to learn the language of the judges. For nearly three decades, the East India Company tried to administer justice within its territory through Sanskrit and Persian scholars serving as interpreters within the British courts. But soon the British suspected that the interpreters were often guided not by facts, but by bribe and other considerations. Then, following a relatively long and intense debate, the company decided to go for English in its Supreme Court in India. In 1783, English was given the status of the sole language of this court. This led to a spurt in the popularity of English among Indians. India now needed people who knew English and could write petitions, read orders and notices and speak and explain to the British on behalf of the litigants.11 And as the British territory, powers and responsibilities grew in India, so did their need for English-knowing Indians. East India Company became the biggest employer, and ability to use and understand the English language became the most valuable economic skill.12 A relatively large number of Indians began learning English with the help of whatever material was available then. They also requested the British and Indians who already knew English to help create relevant material for learning English. On 23 April 1789 the following appeal appeared in a Kolkata newspaper from a group of Indians: We humbly beseech any gentleman will be so good as to take the trouble of making a Bengali grammar and dictionary in which we hope to find all the common Bengali country words made into English. By this means we will be able to recommend ourselves to the English Government and understand their orders, this favour will be gratefully remembered by us and our posterity for ever. (in Chaudhary 2009: 433s) Similar requests were made also by the native princes who were sure that English was going to be the sole language of power soon. Father Bartolomeo, a late-eighteenth-century Dutch priest, notes in his journal how he was requested by the Raja of Travancore to prepare bi/trilingual grammars and dictionaries: The King13 had learned English for several months, and spoke it exceedingly well. As he observed that English was as familiar to me as the Malabar, he sent to me in the evening his Chamberlain, 150

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Payampalli Curipu, to request that I would explain to him, in the Malabar language, the parts of speech of the English grammar, because he was always at a loss respecting them. He had indeed an English master, but he was not able to give him a proper explanation, in the Malabar language, of the precise meaning of these technological terms. I immediately wrote them down on a piece of paper, and arranged them in two opposite columns, the one in English, and the other in the Malabar language. The King found my explanation perfectly clear, and ever after called me his Guru or preceptor. (in Menon 1985: 199) A little later again Father Bartolomeo says: I carried along with me the Malabar, English and Portuguese grammar which I had composed at Chittiyati and which the King had required from me that the ministers of the Court might learn English and Portuguese by the assistance of the Malabar language . . . When I delivered to him (i.e., the King) the grammar, his joy seemed to be beyond all description. In my presence he sent for the two lords of the Bedchamber, showed them the grammar, advised them to study it diligently, and represented to them how important it was that princes as well as statesmen on account of their continual discourse with the Europeans should acquaint themselves with these languages. . . . The King presented me with a gold bracelet, a gold style for writing on palm leaves, and a small knife for cutting these leaves to the proper size. (in Menon 1985: 294)

Books and journals and book societies By this time, Europeans, like the priest mentioned earlier, and many others in secular callings, to answer their own needs, had been preparing bilingual and even trilingual glossaries and chrestomathies, listing frequently used Bengali and Hindustani, also called Urdu or Moors, or Hindi, words with their English equivalents. Because these lists, or glossaries, were bi/trilingual, they helped the British learn the Indian languages and the Indians learn English. These books became popular. Some titles were: Gladwin, Francis. Undated. The Persian Moonshie: the English Persian Vocabulary. Publisher Unknown. 151

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Gladwin, Francis. Undated. The Epitome of Modern Law: English translation of Alfaz Adwiyeh: A Dictionary of Medical Terms by N.N.A. Hai Shiraji, Physician to the Mugal Emperor Shah Jehan. Publisher Unknown. Dyches, Thomas. 1716. A Guide to the English Proper for Beginners, Showing a Natural and Easy Method to Pronounce and Express Both Common Words and Proper Names in Which Particular Care Is Taken to Show the Accent for Vicious Pronunciation. Published by the Danish Mission. Hadley, Capt., George. 1772. Grammatical Remarks on the Practical and Vulgar Dialects of the Indostan Language, Commonly Called Moors with a Vocabulary English and Moors. Publisher Unknown. Hadley, Capt., George. 1776. Introductory Grammatical Remarks on the Persian Language, with a Vocabulary English and Persian. Publisher Unknown. Richardson, John. 1777. Dictionary of Persian, Arabic and English in Two Volumes. Publisher Unknown. Forster, H. P. 1779. Vocabulary in Two Parts: English and Bengalee and Vice Versa. Calcutta: Publisher Unknown. Anonymous. 1786. A Dictionary of English and Hindosthanee. Calcutta: Publisher Unknown. Anonymous. 1787. A New Spelling Book. Calcutta: Publisher Unknown. An English Bengali Vocabulary Together with Grammatical Introduction. Calcutta, 1788. Anonymous. 1793. Ingreji O Bengali Bokebilari (English and Bengali Vocabulary). Calcutta: Clarendon Press. Anonymous. 1799. A Vocabulary in Two Parts: English and Bengalee. Calcutta: Publisher Unknown. Anonymous. 1799. A Vocabulary: Persian, Arabic and English. Calcutta: Publisher Unknown. East India Company also took a few hesitant steps to help. In 1780, while sending a hundred copies of Richardson’s dictionary to Calcutta for sale, the Court of Directors wrote to the Council of Fort William on 12 May 1780: We have granted leave to Mr Richardson14 to send 100 sets of his dictionary . . . and have allowed his attorneys to pay the amount of the sale thereof into your cash for Bills of Exchange on us provided the same does not exceed one thousand pounds sterling. (in Patwardhan 1971: 484) 152

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Interestingly enough, with the growth of the English overseas commerce grew the transoceanic voyage to India and to North America. In some not very indirect manner, these two, that is commerce and interoceanic voyage, also helped the growth of journals and prose literature in English. They were useful diversions on long voyages from and to ‘home’. And though, during different periods of their colonial history, these journals arrived in India late by nearly a year to six weeks, they had many readers, not necessarily only among the Anglo-Indians, as the British in India were called then, but also among the Indians. Whenever and wherever available, Indians read them with the help of glossaries and learnt English. Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), the great social reformer, is believed to have learnt English in this manner.15 Before the end of the eighteenth century, enough people knew English in India to support production of English language journals here. The first English newspaper in India was India Gazette, which began publishing in Kolkata in 1774. It was soon followed by the Government Gazette, which was read for official information and for pieces on science and literature. In the following decades, several other English periodicals appeared. The following were among the relatively popular journals then:16 Daily: Bengal Harkaru, India Gazette, Calcutta Courier, John Bull Triweekly: India Gazette, Bengal Chronicle, Indian Register Half-weekly: Calcutta Courier, Calcutta Gazette Weekly: Literary Gazette, Oriental Observer, Bengal Herald, Reformer, Philanthropist, Enquirer, Hickey’s Gazette Monthly: Calcutta Monthly Journal, Bengal Sporting Magazine, Christian Observer Quarterly: Calcutta Magazine & Review These journals had a relatively large Indian readership. In 1833, nearly 20 per cent of all copies of the Englishman were sold to the Indians and, following the Indian culture of sharing books, were read by nearly as many Indian as the British readers. But even in the 1830s, books were relatively scarce and difficult to come by in India. There are many and interesting accounts of how Indians managed to read English in spite of the dearth of English books of any kind in India until the mid-nineteenth century. Reporting an extreme case, a British traveller says: The passion for English knowledge has penetrated the most obscure, and extended to the most remote parts of India. The steam boats, passing up and down the Ganges, are boarded by native boys, 153

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begging, not for money, but for books. . . . Some gentlemen coming to Calcutta were astonished at the eagerness with which they were pressed for books by a troupe of boys, who boarded the steamer from an obscure place, Comercolly. A Plato was lying on the table, and one of the party asked a boy whether that would serve his purpose. ‘Oh, yes’, he exclaimed, ‘give me any book; all I want is a book’. The gentlemen at last hit upon the expedient of cutting up an old Quarterly Review, and distributing the articles among them. (in Joshi 1994: 124) Julia, wife of a British judge posted at Rajahmundry in today’s Andhra Pradesh in South India, noted in her diary in the mid-1830s, So many people apply to us for books, that we are going to set up a lending library, to be kept in the school-room. (in Maitland 2003: 123) The reading room is established and much approved. The doors are opened before six in the morning, but there are always people waiting outside, ready for the first moment they can get in. . . . We have plenty of suitable books, in English, Hindostane, Tamul, Gentoo. (in Maitland 2003: 164) We lately received a petition, signed by the principal people, chiefly Mussulmans, in several of the surrounding villages, begging us to supply them with the books of the same kind as those in our reading room, mentioning the names of several that they particularly wish to have. (in Maitland 2003: 165)

India demands English Obviously, a more organized effort was required to answer the need for books and other material for learning English. To answer this need, citizens interested in promoting English and Western education in general came up with the idea of a ‘Book Society’ in Kolkata. Accordingly, Calcutta Book Society came into being in 1816. The East India Company did not officially participate in it, but its officers and other Europeans joined this society. Later the company gave some financial assistance to 154

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Table 11.1 Copies of school books sold by Calcutta School Book Society in 1834 Books in

Copies sold

Books in

Copies sold

English Sanskrit Arabic Hindustani

31,640 16 36 3,384

Bengali Hindi Anglo-Asians

5,754 4,171 4,525

the Book Society. This society was soon followed by similar bodies in other presidency towns. They collected subscriptions and donations from their members and others and provided financial and managerial support for the production and distribution of ‘school books’ in English and some modern and classical Indian languages. But the sale of English books far outnumbered those in all other languages put together. At a profit of less than 10 per cent, books were made available to schools and individuals and proved seminal in the growth of English in India. Table 11.1 is highly illustrative.17 The Elements of English Grammar and The Geography of Hindustan sold most. Because they subsidized the publication of books in English and in the modern Indian languages, and the latter did not always sell enough copies to recover even the cost, the finances of these societies were stretched. Eventually, they applied for and obtained an assistance of 6,000 rupees annually from the East India Company.

Literature enters English curriculum We may bear in mind that there was no tradition of teaching and learning English as a non-native language anywhere in India until about the end of the eighteenth century. Consequently, there was no textbook or any other kind of material designed especially for teaching English language. But by about the end of the eighteenth century, written literature in this language could boast of a history of at least 400 years of continuous output. By this time English literature had a popular base in England. Plays and poems had established themselves as literary genres, and they were written, published and read widely. Novel, and prose literature in general, was in its infancy in the early nineteenth century. Short stories were still some decades away. And more importantly, periodical magazine journalism had brought literature within the reach of practically any literate person. They serialized the publication of novels and encouraged the genre of short pieces, leading to the birth of short stories in English. Jane Austen (1775–1817), Charles 155

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Dickens (1812–1870), Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) and many other well-known and not so well-known writers in English began this way. These magazines were published in relatively large numbers and were sold cheap, for a penny or two, and were affordable practically by anyone. Still more importantly, these magazines and journals found a big group of patrons among passengers and crew of the ocean-liners doing the voyage between the UK and India. Among their cargo, these vessels also carried English books and journals for sale and distribution in India. Literature, therefore, was not the only option in the name of language learning material; it was also interesting to the learners and available to them as authentic exposure to the standard form of the language. Literature, thus, entered English curriculum in India early, even before the end of the eighteenth century. The Delhi College offered a variety of different original courses in English. As Andrews (2003) notes, as part of English poetry, Goldsmith’s Traveller and Deserted Village, along with Pope’s Essay on Man, were part of the first course. Milton’s Paradise Lost was included in the second year, and Shakespeare’s plays were studied in the highest class. Richardson’s Selections too figured in the first course, and Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and Burke’s Essays and Speeches were among the later inclusions. Andrews also notes that Burke was very popular with this generation of students, probably for the then fashionable ornate style. By about the 1820s, the curriculum had begun stabilizing, and a substantial input from the classics of English literature became part of the curriculum. A record of public examinations of school students of the time shows what they were taught in schools: On . . . 23rd (Jan., 1824) the children educated . . . by Benevolent Institution were examined by Dr Marshman, the Secretary, in the presence of numerous and a highly respectable company. After the boys had been examined in Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Grammar, and Geography; some of the ablest of them recited various pieces they had committed to memory, and read a chapter in Bengalee in a manner highly pleasing. A number of them gave an account of the books they had in the course of the year taken out of the small Juvenile Library. Pleased with the improvement made by these youths, and the prospect it presented of their future useful work . . . the Committee then proceeded to the Girls’ School Room. . . . Their progress in reading and writing was afterwards examined, and appeared to augment the general satisfaction. (Das Gupta 1959: 5) 156

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All reading, writing and recitation mentioned in the previous report, except the one mentioned otherwise, was done in English. For yet another examination, a report says, The examination concluded with some specimens of English recitations, poetic and dramatic; in the latter the quarrels between Edward and Warwick and between Brutus and Cassius were delivered with energy and feeling. (in Das Gupta 1959: 206) William Shakespeare’s plays seem to have been prescribed texts then. Testing their comprehension and asking for recitation and elocution motivated students to understand the given texts in their entirety. Accounts from South India report a similar approach. Julia, wife of the district judge at Rajahmundry, noted in her diary in the mid-1830s: We went yesterday to the examination of a native school of caste boys – not Christians, but they learn to read the Bible for the sake of the education they receive in other respects. . . . They answered extremely well in English , questions on Scripture, geography and history and wrote English from dictation. (in Maitland 2003: 34) Much English language education in India, at least in its early years, was influenced by the curriculum at the Hindu College of Kolkata, which was mostly Euro-centric. At the annual examination here in 1831, for instance, out of 106 questions in geography only 13 were related to India. History of Greece and Rome, England and Europe and even Arabic countries was taught there.18 Soon, as a result, there were Hindus in Kolkata, Sister Nivedita says, who ‘in loin clothes, seated on door-sills in industry lanes, said things about Shakespeare and Shelley that some of us would go far to hear’ (Joshi 1994: 146). For much of the nineteenth century, English curriculum seems to have been predominantly literary, not only in the East India Company– supported institutions but also in those that Christian missionaries ran through charity collected in Great Britain or India. Soon a course in English literature was also introduced. At Alexander Duff ’s Free Church Institution, the English literature curriculum had the following:19 Poetical Reader, Cowper’s Poems, Milton’s Paradise Lost, with Minor Poems, Pollock’s Course of Time, Selections from Southey, Montgomery, 157

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Campbell and Wordsworth, Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination, Young’s Night’s Thoughts, Bacon’s Moral and Civil Essays and Advancement of Learning, Whatley’s Rhetoric, Schlegel’s History of Literature, Hallam’s Literary History of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Foster’s Essays, Select Essays from the North British and Other Reviews, and various works of the London Tract and Book Society. Among texts taught in the course on natural and revealed religion were the Bible, Paley’s Natural Theology, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress . . . and among those taught in philosophy John Stuart Mill’s Logic, Reid’s Inquiry and Essays, Thomas Brown’s Lectures, Abercrombie’s Intellectual and Moral Powers, Whitewall’s Moral Philosophy, Bacon’s Novum Organon, Plato’s Dialogues, and Butler’s Dissertation on Human Nature. (Viswanathan 1989: 54) This was the curriculum at a private school in Kolkata in 1852. But many government-supported schools, as Viswanathan notes, were not very different. The following occurred almost everywhere: Richardson’s Poetical Selections (Goldsmith, Gray, Addison, Poe, and Shakespeare), Orway’s Venice Preserved, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, Pope’s Illiad by Homer, Milton’s Paradise Lost (the first four books), Addison’s Essays, Johnson’s Rasselas and Lives of the Poets, Paley’s Moral Philosophy, Goldsmith’s History of England, Bacon’s Essays, Novum Organon, and Advancement of Learning, Malkin’s History of Greece, Pinnock’s History of Greece, Horace Wilson’s Universal History, Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments, Abercrombie’s Intellectual Powers, and Whitewall’s Moral Philosophy. In addition, specially compiled prose readers were brought out in several volumes for each class, some of which were prepared by Macaulay when he was president of the Council on Education in India. (Viswanathan 1989: 55) In the initial classes there were books on grammar and vocabulary, as there were books to teach alphabet and composition. Many of these books came in a series of first to third or fourth reader. After familiarity with these early readers, students began reading works of literature, moving, finally, on to the classics. For the few years when Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), for instance, attended school, he was started on Peary 158

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Sarkar’s First and Second Reader. These readers were followed by McCulloch’s Course of Reading, which still had graded texts. But by the time he was fifteen, Tagore was translating passages from Macbeth into Bengali (Das Gupta 2006: 66–67). It was so even by the time Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) came to school in the mid-1880s, nearly ten years after Tagore, in a different region and milieu. In the middle school, Mahatma Gandhi’s English syllabus contained: 200 pages of prose from Addison’s Spectator and 750 lines of poetry from Milton’s Paradise Lost were prescribed for study, with 200 lines from the latter to be memorised. Moreover, Morell’s Analysis and Adam’s Grammar were to be studied along with Pathmala, Part V, for translation from Gujrati into English. The oral test in English reading, carrying 40 marks, was no less important than the written test comprising translation into English and composition, carrying 30 marks each. The oral test was thorough and searching; weaker points were noted; individual and general remarks noted how the performance was assessed. (Upadhyaya 1965: 33) In the middle school, Mahatma Gandhi got 57/100. The examiner, however, noted he was ‘weak in parsing’. Gandhi had pages from Richardson’s Selections and from Pride and Prejudice, the classic novel by Jane Austen. But, presumably, this syllabus was tough. Along with Mahatma Gandhi, thirty-seven other students appeared at the matriculation examination, but only two of them passed.20 Advent of ELT material

It was felt that the curriculum was harsh with learners by creating for them challenges, both of the language and of the content. The latter, it was felt, could be simplified.21 ‘Formerly,’ Nirad Chaudhuri (1897–1999), the well-known historian, says, Indian boys were being taught English from textbooks meant for use in England, or from the English classics. But when I was young the education authorities had had a sudden inspiration that it was too much of a burden for young Indian boys to have to cope with English ideas in an English background in addition to having to master the intricacies of a foreign language. In 159

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pursuance of this theory our English textbooks were being Indianized as the administration of India was Indianized later. Thus it happened that while my brother read things like: ‘O Brignall banks are wild and fair And Greta woods are green.’ Or, ‘Why weep ye by the tide, ladie? Why weep ye by the tide I’ll wed ye to my youngest son And ye shall be his bride.’ and also read fine stories from books like Andrew Lang’s Animal Story Book and Kipling’s Jungle Book, I was being forced to repeat: ‘The fox sat on the mat’ ‘The dog is in the well.’ And at the next higher stage to read about three Mussalmans eating chilly and rice. I, however tried to make amends by reading my brother’s text-books two years in advance of him, . . . I am still unconvinced that inflicting ‘fat cats sitting on mats’ on little Indian boys is the best method of making them learn English.’ By the early twentieth century, the grip of literature on English curriculum had begun weakening. Now books remained nonliterary even in and beyond middle school section. Obviously, there was need for bringing in more manageable stuff. There was need also for more and easy-to-understand grammar and vocabulary books. In 1899, for instance, appeared J. C. Nesfield’s English Grammar and Composition, which became a landmark book and prescribed text for English curriculum at schools in nearly all of North India. Nesfield was the inspector of schools in Agra, the then capital of the United Provinces of Agra and Awadh, and in the course of his duty he toured schools and saw the difficulties that students faced for want of an appropriate book in English grammar and composition. Within one book then, he wrote the essential rules of grammar of the English language for use in India: orthography, etymology, syntax, punctuation and prosody. Today this book is not quite as popular as it used to be, but the book went into many editions and appeared even in bilingual editions.22 By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Indian teachers of English were also producing grammar and vocabulary books for their students. 160

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Describing the early education of his elder brother, Sir Ganganatha Jha (1872–1941), the eminent Sanskrit scholar of the early twentieth century, notes: My brother used to be taught a book in which I remember there was a glossary of Hindi and Urdu or Persian terms. . . . I forget the exact name of the book. Munshi Kali Prasad conceived the plan of a similar glossary of English and Hindi terms which later . . . he got printed. (Jha 1984: 49) According to another account, the first president of independent India, Rajendra Prasad (1884–1963), also wrote a composition book in his college years, and it became popular in North India. By about the first decades of the twentieth century, many students were using more books written by Indian teachers of English than by the British. Describing his first textbooks in English, Hari Mohan Jha (1908–1984), the doyen of modern Maithili literature, writes, ‘In English, I read Nesfield’s Grammar, Rakhal Das’s Composition, Gangadhar’s Translation.’23

Conclusion By about 1900, there remained no doubt about the future of English in India. It was growing rapidly, and relatively large numbers of students were learning it, as Table 11.2 shows. By 1882, over 60 per cent of the primary schools were teaching English.24 By 1890, the proportion of English-educated graduates to the population was thirty-eight to a million. There were, thus, enough English-knowing Indians now to fill in business and government offices. They held nearly

Table 11.2 Schools and colleges in India under the imperial government, 1860–189225 Year

Schools

Students

1860–1861 1891–1892

142 4,872

23,165 473,294

College 1860–1861 1891–1892

17 104

161

3,182 12,985

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all the minor appointments in the government.26 They also held some not so minor appointments in the government. There were Indians in the viceroy’s council of state and there were Indians in the Indian civil service helping the British administer the far corners of India, as they were there in other services and departments. Nearly all of these people knew English, and nearly all of these schools and colleges had used texts and textbooks of the kind mentioned earlier. In India, the evolution of textbooks for learning English appears to have been guided by pragmatic considerations. Teachers and learners used all that was available – letters and memoirs, journals and newspapers, plays and poems and so on. English literary texts reflected a different culture, but they brought authentic language in all their numerous varieties and nuances, which would have been impossible otherwise. Literary texts created the ambience of English culture and authentic language around the learner. Had Gandhi not read extracts from Pride and Prejudice of Jane Austen, as a prescribed text for him in his school years, he would not have dubbed the British promise of independence at a later date as a post-dated cheque on a collapsing bank. Literary texts created the culture that held and gave meaning to the language. Indian learners did not hesitate in using all that was useful and available. And then they created what was not available, such as grammars and glossaries, collections of essays and poems. They adopted methods, such as translation, that were not orthodox, but that guaranteed results. All of this together promised a certain minimum level of proficiency among learners in the language in limited time and costs. An unbiased examination of available evidence does not support the view held by people like Viswanathan27 that imposition of English literary studies in India was a colonial mask for the cultural conquest of India. There was only one so-called unpleasant episode in this otherwise happy story. In the beginning, all skills, including speaking, were emphasized and attended to. But as the numbers grew and competent and willing teachers were not available in adequate numbers, learning and teaching of speaking in English took a back seat. Speech and listening were neglected; the emphasis shifted to reading and writing skills, spelling and punctuation and so on. As a result, English that generally evolved in India was not quite idiomatic as it was among the British. It was allegedly bookish and pompous. The British called this general body of English written in India ‘Baboo English’.28 But learning English through the kind of textbooks that were used in India ensured that unlike in Africa and in many Pacific islands, and elsewhere in Afro-Asian countries, English in India did not end as a pidgin. It took standard grammar, vocabulary, spelling and punctuation, but 162

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a different accent. The pattern of textbooks perfected by the end of the nineteenth century continues without a significant change. And all this together has ensured a robust growth of English in India, such that today India is the largest English-speaking nation, and the English language is a national asset for this country.29

Notes 1 See Habib (2005). 2 Thanks to mass printing, the first affordable copies of the Qur’an became available in the 1850s. For the first time in the history of the Qur’an, thanks to the Naval Kishore Press of Lucknow, copies of the Qur’an could be bought for one-and-ahalf rupees, and even a common Muslim could think of having one. See Ulrike (2007:14) for a description of Navalkishore Press. 3 See Marshman (1859). 4 For an account of these societies, see Chaudhary (2009), Chapter VI. 5 See Chaudhary (2009). 6 Joshi (Undated: Translator). 7 See Ballantyne (1891/1981). 8 A popular insight from the tradition of learning and teaching of Persian in India goes as follows: ek nukte ke her fer se khudaa zudaa ho gayaa, that is by the wrong use of a diacritic, God became alien. 9 Actually, to have something kanThasth meant to have it by heart. 10 For a note on some features of ‘grammar-translation method’, see Chaudhary (2012). 11 In mid-1830s, the wife of a judge at Rajahmundry, part of Madras presidency then, noted, ‘The boys only in fact wish to learn English in hopes of making money by it, obtaining in places in court.’ See Maitland (1843/2003: 130). According to Viswanathan (1989: 90), ‘James Mill made one of the first systematic arguments linking the employment of Indians with prior instruction in English literature, even if through translation.’ 12 English became the new arthakarii widyaa, that is the new money-making skill. 13 From Menon’s (1878/1985: 199) account, it is not certain which king he refers to. But it appears most likely that it could be Maharaja Raja Rama Varma, in the year 1784, the time Menon talks about. 14 Richardson was a senior company official in Kolkata. 15 Raja Ram Mohan Roy was the Dewan, that is the Persian secretary, of Mr Dibgy, then collector of Bhagulpore, now in Bihar. Roy had access to the correspondence of the European and Indian journals subscribed to by Digby. He read them all diligently and learnt the language so well that the English priest who carried his letter requesting the East India Company’s support for English education in India to Governor General Amherst observed that even many educated British did not write English as Roy did. See Sarkar (1913/1962). 16 Carey (1901/1906: 290–293). 17 Ayyar (1987). 18 For details of the courses here, see Chattopadhyay (1990: 250–263). At the Queen’s College in Banaras, the undergraduate syllabus included, among other things, the

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

following until about the end of the nineteenth century: English – Prose and Poetry, A Classical Language, and History of Greece and Rome. See Jha (1976: 12). Footnote 15: Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, 1852–53, Appendix D, General Reports of Public Instruction in the North-Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, 1843–4 by J. Muir, 32: 450–451 cited in Viswanathan (1989: 54). See Upadhyaya (1965). Chaudhuri (1998: 132–133). See Chaudhary (2010:157–164). Jha (1984: 49) – translation of the cited part from Maithili is mine. Kachru (1994: 497–533). See Krishnaswamy and Krishnaswamy (2006: 56). Mahmood (1895: 255). See Viswanathan (1989). See, for instance, T. W. J. (1890) and Wright (1891/2009). Saxenian et al. (2002).

References Andrews, C. F. 2003. Zaka Ullah of Delhi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ayyar, Chandrika. 1987. Educational and Intellectual Pursuits. Kanpur: Prajna Prakashan. Ballantyne, J. R. (ed.). 1891/1981. Laghu Siddhanta Kaumudi: A Sanskrit Grammar by Varadaraja. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Carey, William H. 1901/1906. The Good Old Days of the Hon’ble John Company. Calcutta: I. R. Cambay & Co. Chattopadhyay, Dilip Kumar. 1990. Dynamics of Social Change in Bengal: 1817–1851. Calcutta: Punthi Pustak. Chaudhary, Shreesh. 2009. Foreigners and Foreign Languages in India: A Sociolinguistic History. New Delhi: Foundation Books and Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Condemned without crime: Grammar-translation method. In Francis Peter, ed. Indian Voices in ELT. Chennai: Viva Books. Chaudhuri, Nirad C. 1998. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House. Das Gupta, Anil Chandra. 1959. The Days of John Company: Selections from Calcutta Gazette, 1824–1832. Calcutta: Government Printing Press. Das Gupta, Uma. 2006. Rabindranath Tagore: My Life in My Words. New Delhi: Penguin. Habib, Irfan. 2005. Persian Book Writing and Book Use in the Pre-Printing Age. Lecture given at the National Mission for Manuscripts, New Delhi, 2005. Jha, Harimohan. 1984. Jiiwan Yaatraa. Patna, India: Maithili Akademi. Jha, Hetukar. (ed.). 1976. The Autobiographical Notes of Mahamahopadhyaya Dr. Sir Ganganatha Jha. Vol. XXX, Parts 1–4 special edition. Allahabad, India: The Journal of the Ganganatha Jha Kendriya Sanskrit Vidyapitha Allahabad. Joshi, Kanhaiyalal. Undated. Trans. Amarasingh Wirachit Amarkoshah. Delhi: Chowkhamba Orientalia. Joshi, Svati. (ed.). 1994. Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Kachru, Braj B. 1994. South Asian English. In Robert Burchfield, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 497–553. Krishnaswamy, N., and Lalitha Krishnaswamy. 2006. The Story of English in India. Delhi: Foundation Books. Mahmood, Syed. 1895. A History of English Education from 1781 to 1893. Aligarh: MAO College. Maitland, Julia. 1843/2003. Letters from Madras. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Marshman, John Clark. 1859. The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman & Ward Embracing the History of the Serampore Mission. Vol. I. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts. Menon, Shankara. 1878/1985. History of Travancore. Cochin: Text Book Pvt Ltd. Patwardhan, R. P. (ed.). 1971. Fort William-India House Correspondence. Vol. VII (1773– 1776). New Delhi: National Archives of India. Sarkar, H. C. (ed.). 1913/1962. The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy. Collect. Sophia Dobson. 1900. Calcutta: D. K. Biswas and P. C. Ganguli. Saxenian, A. L., Y. Motoyama, and X. Quan. 2002. Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley. San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California. T. W. J. (collect. and ed.). 1890. ‘Baboo English’: Our Mother Tongue as Our Aryan Brethren Understand It, Amusing Specimens of Composition and Style, English as Written by Her Majesty’s Indian Subjects. Calcutta: H. P. Kent & Co. Ulrike, Stark. 2007. An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India. Ranikhet, India: Permanent Black; Bangalore, India: Orient Longman. Upadhyaya, J. M. 1965. Mahatma Gandhi as a Student. Bombay, India: Bharatiyas Vidya Bhavan. Viswanathan, Gauri. 1989. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Wright, A. 1891/2009. Baboo English as ‘Tis Writ. London: Fisher Unwin.

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12 ANGLICIZED–SANKRITIZED– VERNACULARIZED Translational politics of primer writing in colonial Bengal Nandini Bhattacharya

The Shishubodh, however, still holds its grounds in the village schools with its absurdities and obscenities, and we can have little hope of supplanting it till we can bring out a cheap primer of 50 pages selling for one anna. (Long 1850: xxv) The British Empire . . . is universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest which exists, or even existed on the face of the globe . . . [The] extension of the English tongue and with it English literature and habits of thought, as also Christianity, over so large a portion of the earth’s surface, is perhaps the most extraordinary fact connected with the history of modern civilization. (Chambers 1874: 256, 263)

This chapter traces the primer-writing project in nineteenth-century Bengal, in terms of an ‘anglicization–Sanskritization–vernacularization dynamic’ and in terms of its ‘translational politics’. The primer revolution in Bengal, initiated with the publication of a twelve-page Bangla Lipidhara (Rules for Writing) from the Serampore Missionary Press in 1816 in Chinsurah in colonial Bengal, at the behest of Serampore missionaries William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward, represented paradigm shifts in indigenous education system(s) from the till then prevalent ones in the Bengal presidency.1 What was revolutionary (and unprecedented) in such cultural shifts was not so much the legitimization of English (and Western pedagogy) in 166

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public-funded institutions and/or the popularization of English-language primers in nineteenth-century Bengal2 (which were, admittedly, its more apparent features) but a more complex process of translation, whereby the vernacular (Bangla) bhasa primers came to be shaped by and bear the burden of Anglicist and Sanskritist assumptions. In tracing the historical imperatives that led to the formation of a new genre called primers (and readers), the chapter revisits the ‘politics’ of its production in colonial Bengal between 1815 and 1900. At the same time, the chapter explores the specificities of this polycultural, polylingual and translation-induced ambience3 within which nineteenth-century primers were produced.

Anglicized! The chapter begins by explicating these distinct (‘anglicist’, ‘Sanskritist’, ‘vernacularist’) but interrelated positions and ways in which they informed the primer revolution. ‘Anglicization’ implies the naturalization of English and Western learning in the wake of Anglicist positions crystallizing themselves within Indian education debates.4 It also connotes an evangelical zeal (especially on the part of Scottish reformers in India) taking up the cause of English in India (and reformation of pedagogy on modern European lines) as intrinsic to the redemption of Indic morals and character. James Long’s two-pronged critique of the indigenous primer (in this case Shishubodhak) – that it was ‘absurd’ and ‘obscene’ (refer to the earlier quoted lines) – more or less sums up the Anglicist reformist thrust. These two distinct Anglicist positions (the absurdity and obscenity of indigenous pedagogical traditions) were most cogently articulated by Charles Trevelyan5 (1888) and Charles Grant6 (1792). Charles Grant in the fourth chapter of his Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals emphasizes that ‘the Hindoos’ are a degenerate race and ‘they err, because they are ignorant’ (Zastoupil and Moir 1999: 83).7 Also, as conquerors and a superior race, the British had made practically ‘no serious attempt to recal [sic] the Hindoo to the dictates of truth and morality’ and that ‘the true cure of darkness is the introduction of light’ (Zastoupil and Moir 1999: 83). The introduction of English knowledge systems is thus an ethical and civilizing necessity, enabling the redemption of the ‘natives’ from a morass of ignorance and immorality. The modern primer in Bengal was culled in specific response to such discursive structures. Iswarchandra Bidyasagar’s8 replacing the life stories of God Vishnu (traditionally taught in indigenous primers such as Shishubodh) with the life

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stories of Valentine Duval (a shepherd boy who rose, through diligence, to become an eminent historian), Grotius Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Herschel Linnaeus and various European scientists and explorers in his Charitabali (a collection of eminent lives) in direct translation of Chambers’ Exemplary and Instructive Biography,9 and establishing thereby the subgenre of life narratives in the modern primer-corpus, is a case in point. In fact, Bidyasagar’s recasting of Chambers’ Exemplary and Instructive Biography, and the secularist cultural assumptions that such a recasting involved, drew considerable flak from contemporary figures such as the satirist-playwright, Amritalal Basu. Amritalal’s Puratan Panjika (a record of old times) accuses Bidyasagar of tampering with the pedagogic tradition that enjoined Bengali children to read ‘lives’ of indigenous gods and mythological figures in their primers. The replacing of such ‘god-lives’ with ‘lives’ of strange European figures such as Duval in his Charitabali was an act of cultural travesty. Amritalal notes that while Bidyasagar’s primers are technically in Bengali, they are ‘English’ in their essence and fundamental assumptions: Our much-respected Bidyasagar had rejected this noble example of the remorseful Sri Krishna beginning lessons with commoners at Sandipan Muni’s pathshala in the chapter ‘Gurudakshina’ and instead presented the Hindu boys with the story of Duval, the shepherd. Probably Bidyasagar had feared that this story [Gurudakshina] will breed superstitious beliefs in the minds of our boys, as the concluding section of the story contains some fantastic incidents. When the royal students seek to pay their master’s remuneration, Sandipan asks for the life of his son – who had been drowned and devoured by a crocodile; Sri Krishna fulfils the command of his teacher by dissecting the belly of the crocodile and restoring life to the dead body of the boy; the incident is completely absurd. However, the English are not afraid to give their little boys fairy-tale books filled with fanciful and absurd stuffs. We are still to hear that an English life has been utterly ruined due to false notions carried on from fairytales. (Basu 1924: 204–205) Charles Trevelyan’s position (in chapter four of On the Education of the People of India 1888) on the other hand is far more complex. Condemning Indic learning as ‘a lack’ and as producing ‘sluggishness, mediocrity, absence of spirited exertion’, he extols the new system of anglicized education in which ‘multitudes of upper and middle classes flock to our 168

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seminaries to learn . . . all that English literature can teach them’ (Trevelyan 1888: 287). Unlike Grant, however, Trevelyan is of the belief that Asiatic races (and especially Hindoos) are perfectible and that English can play a redemptive role in helping such people rise up the racial (and evolutionary) ladder. According to Trevelyan then, the popularity of English among Indians is automatic and not forced as English ‘is a much easier language than either Arabic or Sanskrit’ (Trevelyan 1888: 288), takes far less time to acquire and is hence accessible, democratic, modern and by implication racially superior. It is also a ‘natural’ source of all European knowledge – ‘it must be admitted that English must be cultivated for the sake of knowledge it contains’ (Trevelyan 1888: 293). However, Trevelyan’s real intent is to not promote English learning per se but to ‘anglicize’ Indic knowledge systems (and Indic languages), which existed till then as a mere symbolic order bereft of ideas/knowledge. This move on the one hand contains the classical languages of Sanskrit and Arabic as grand, but ghettoized, mummified and dysfunctional in contemporary situations. On the other, the vernaculars are reduced to ‘dialects’; their ideological contents are scooped out and reduced to mere shells so that English knowledge (ideas) may be suitably injected into them. Such ‘anglicized’ vernaculars are then encouraged to dialogically engage with other ‘anglicized’ vernaculars and a ‘national’ culture that is Indic in script and grammatical in structure (in so far as an external system of signification is concerned) but English in content, spirit and ideas (knowledge) is discursively imagined into existence. Trevelyan’s plan of ‘translation’ that actually creates modern Indian knowledge systems in general and primers in particular is worth quoting in some detail: If English is to be the language of education in India, it follows, as a matter of course, that it will be the scientific language also, and that terms will be borrowed from it to express those ideas for which no appropriate symbols exist in the popular dialects. . . . The introduction of English words into the vernacular dialects will gradually diminish the distance between scientific and popular language. It will become easier for the unlearned to acquire English, and for the learned to cultivate and improve vernacular dialects. The languages of India will be assimilated to languages of Europe as far as the arts and sciences and general literature are concerned. . . . And above all, the vernacular dialects of India will, by the same process, be united among themselves. . . . Saturated from the same source, recast in the same mould, with a common science, a common standard of 169

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taste, a common nomenclature, the national languages as well as the national character will be consolidated. . . . No particular effort is required to bring about these results. They will take place in the natural course of things by the extension of English education. (Trevelyan 1888: 94–95) The Indic vernacular is thus encouraged to flourish but simultaneously reduced to a ‘dialect’ that is ‘part’ of a larger and ideologically stable English ‘whole’. It is this expansive and insidious process of creating ‘translated’ languages and ‘translated men’ (with due respect to Salman Rushdie and his Imaginary Homelands) that I would like to foreground and denote as the process of ‘anglicization’. It is such a process of ‘anglicization’ that would explain the primer-writing strategies in colonial Bengal. Again, efforts in this direction of Iswarchandra Bidyasagar (the creator of the iconic Barnaparichay) may be called up as evidence. Bidyasagar systematically translated Scottish primers, especially those produced by the Chambers brothers – William and Robert – right down to their sub-generic specificity (the alphabet books; the readers; the books of physical and natural sciences; books of natural science; life narratives of eminent people; moral science books; books on myths and fables suitably secularized-sanitized) to create a corpus of Bengali primers that were Bengali in language, sanskritized in grammatical structure and cultural assumptions, but English-European in spirit and essence. Again, Amritalal Basu’s memoirs Puratan Panjika10 points towards the politics and the cannibalizing intent of such a pedagogic process. He exposes the systemic ‘anglicization’ and destruction of an indigenous pedagogic process at the behest of comprador high caste Hindus such as Iswarchandra Bidyasagar, Madanmohan Tarkalankar and Akshaya Kumar Dutta. The Bengali boys read Aesop’s Fables in English and Kathamala in Bengali, Rudiments of Knowledge in English and Bodhoday in Bengali, the Moral Class Book in English and Nitibodh in Bengali, Chambers’ Biography in English and Charitabali in Bengali, Buffon’s Natural History in English and then again Charupath II in Bengali; therefore though learning Bengali as a language, all indigenous characteristics, ethnic sensibilities and religious feelings began to be erased from the minds and lives of the new generation-Bengalis. (Basu 1924: 207)

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Sanskritized–vernacularized Such naturalization and legitimization of Anglicist positions notwithstanding, this process of cultural shift required a degree of willing acquiescence on the part of indigenous people in colonial India. In Bengal, the Hindu upper-classes (chiefly) embraced-incorporated English as coterminous of and producing European/modern knowledge systems. Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir’s collection of Indian education debate documents trace this complex process whereby the ecumene (a group of opinion makers in the public sphere) comprising of eminent Hindu bhadralok such as Ram Kamal Sen, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Dwarakanath Tagore (grandfather to Rabindranath) and Radhakanta Deb came to support, encourage and accept such shifts. Such acquiescence was not entirely selfless but informed by the bhadralok classes’ agenda of formulating a complex Anglicist–Sanskritist– vernacularist dynamic within which such pedagogic shifts could take place and through which such a group could assume cultural preeminence in India. ‘Sanskritist’ carries the charge of legitimizing/normalizing uppercaste Hindu male assumptions regarding knowledge structures formulated through differentiations and deliberate exclusion and ‘otherizing’ of women, ‘lower castes’, Muslims and indigenous ‘tribes’. No one expresses the ‘Sanskritic’ position as cogently as Iswarchandra Bidyasagar – the principal of Sanskrit College in Kolkata and the Bengali educationist-ideologue. Bidyasagar’s opinions (though expressed in more general terms in relation to the development of Bangla literature) is worth perusal, considering Bidyasagar’s centrality in the modern Bangla primer production process. On 12 April 1852, Bidyasagar prepared a project entitled Notes on the Sanscrit College. Bidyasagar’s recommendations in the same, I feel, sum up my argument in the most apposite manner, Bidyasagar’s recommendations sum up this complex Anglicist–Sanskritist–vernacularist-dynamic that is securely underpinned by European knowledge structures, is leavened by Sanskritic cultural assumptions and gestures towards a vernacular language that is informed by both. As Bidyasagar notes in ‘Parishishta’: 1) The creation of an enlightened Bengali literature should be the first object of those who are entrusted with the superintendence of education of education in Bengal; 2) Such a literature cannot be formed by the exertions of those who are not competent to the collect materials from European sources and to dress them in elegant, expressive and idiomatic Bengali;

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3) An elegant idiomatic Bengali style cannot be at the command of those who are not good Sanscrit scholars. Hence the necessity of making Sanscrit scholars well versed in the English language and literature. (in Mitra 1969: 723) As Bidyasagar notes, neither the European with mere English language competence (and cultural outsider status) nor the neo-literate vernacular speaker was culturally competent to fulfil this task. It required the competence of a Sanskritist who also had the other two competences. Thus, ‘it is very clear . . . that if students of the Sanskrit College be made familiar with English literature, they will prove the best and ablest contributors to an enlightened Bengali literature’ (in Indra Mitra, Karunasagar Bidyasagar, end note 5: 723). The illumined reader of my essay would be quick to note that the Sanskritic position is again a complex triad where the Bengali bhasa expressive container infused with European-English ideas/ knowledge is further shaped by the inflections and cultural assumptions of Sanskritic learning. The modern primer in colonial Bengal was produced within the crucible of this complex three-pronged dynamic and was translation-imbued in diverse and multiple ways. The last bastion of indigenous learning – the pre-colonial Bangla primer Shisubodhak, for example (the same that James Long had described as holding ‘its ground in the village schools’ despite its ‘absurdities and obscenities’ and that needed to be ‘supplant[ed]’), was modernized through reprints that signified cultural shifts. These reprints incorporated a page of English alphabets alongside the usual print of vernacular alphabets! Modern Bangla primer writing began with European missionaries and colonial administrators directly translating or adapting (primarily) Scottish primers.11 As European education extended its scope, the Calcutta School Book Society could no longer fulfil the demands of the times. Educationists with a strong Sanskritic background such as Iswarchandra Bidyasagar, Madanmohan Tarkalanakar and Akshaya Kumar Dutt came forward to fill up this vacuum. James Long describes this process of anglicization of the Bangla bhasa in terms that are almost Foucauldian: the love for Bengali books increased along with the extension of English schools. . . . The spread of English schools in Bengal has led to an increased demand of vernacular educational works. Besides this there are three Government Normal Vernacular Schools at Calcutta, Dacca, Hooghly in operation, supplying a superior class of teachers to explain in vernacular difficult 172

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books on Euclid, Algebra, Natural Philosophy, Physical Geography. . . . Hence while the Sanskrit Press in 1857 printed 84,220 volumes of vernacular educational works, the School Book Society, though receiving from Government a grant of rupees 500 monthly, printed only 32,000. (Long 1857: xxiv) At the cost of repeating myself, I note that while it seems that the ‘Anglicist’ imperatives were more powerful and dominant in shaping education projects in general and primer production in particular in colonial Bengal and that the ‘Sanskritization’ of knowledge structures was subsumed within such overarching, normalizing Anglophone-Eurocentric projects, it was in reality a narrative of complex interanimation. This Anglicist-Sanskritic discursive dyad was rendered more complicated, with the ‘vernacularists’ staking their claims regarding shaping of pedagogy in colonial Bengal. The primer-writing project of nineteenth-century Bengal is played out within this complex Anglicist–Sanskritist–vernacularist discursive triad, with every position informing, animating and producing the other. This dialogic, polycultural, polylingual, translation imperative– induced ambience was almost always informed by imperial power structures, but it was also a space within which the cultural preeminence of the Hindu upper-caste male was etched out definitively, by the end of the nineteenth century. The centrality of this particular group and the normalization of cultural assumptions of this group as unquestionably ‘Indic’ and ‘national’ must be traced back to this process of cultural debate, dialogue and interanimation.

Primer writing in bengal The primer (derived from Latin ‘primus’ and connoting the child’s first printed book) project in colonial Bengal in particular and India in general must be related to the arrival of European modernity, print culture and ‘secular’ assumptions via the colonial intervention. The cultural specificity of the modern primer project can be gauged from Ashis Kastagir’s candid declaration in the editorial note Sankalan Prasange to his anthology of Bangla primers (Bangla Primer Sangraha, Kolkata: Pashchimbanga Bangla Academy, 2000 n.page) that ‘primer’ has no Bengali (or for that matter, Indic) equivalents. Some of the most well-known and popular nineteenth-century primers – readers produced in response to/translation–recasting of English language texts – are discussed in this section. Also discussed are the sub-genres of 173

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modern primers – that is the book of alphabets and simple words teaching children to read and write; books introducing children to objects, natural phenomenon and rudiments of physical and chemical science; biographies of eminent people; moral science books; books on letter writing; biological sciences or natural history and fables and myths. All these subgenres that formed the staple of school teaching in Britain (and a great many of them were contributed by Scottish educators) were transported into colonial Bengal unaltered, and many such English primers ran into several editions. This polycultural, translation-imbued process of primer writing in colonial India (and not simply within the Bengal presidency) was achieved through a larger and more complex process of translating, recasting and receiving Romantic pedagogic ideas emanating from Swiss-French and German origins. The reference is to the British cultural reception of Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi’s (1746–1827) and Friedrich Froebel’s (1782–1852) educational ideas. Pestalozzi revolutionized the teaching–learning process by identifying anchauun (impressions) from an object – as the cornerstone of a child’s educational process. Pestalozzi believed that exposing children to objects would trigger off reactions that would in turn enable the student to remember, recount the object and relate it to others. This method (more popularly known as object lessons) also based on the Romantic belief in a child’s innate abilities to learn and his or her perfectible qualities. Pestalozzi also put a substantial premium on education enabling the child to become self-reliant and self-sufficient and facilitating the child’s achievement of self-maturation. Significantly, the Swiss educator’s system was contoured on the premise that learning should be democratized and reach out to the poorest of the poor. It emphasized the preeminence of ethics in the teaching–learning process, and this feature (apocrypha has it) harks back to Pestalozzi watching in dismay, teachers pushing aside students in their rush to exit from an earthquake-ridden building first. Pestalozzi’s ideas came to Britain via figures such as David Stow, a Scottish educationist. Stow was instrumental in replacing the mechanical Bell and Lancaster monitorial system with a more enlightened student-centric education system. It is to Stow and his famous Glasgow school that Britain chiefly owes its reception of Pestalozzi’s revolutionary ideas regarding children’s education. Stow was in turn also influenced by George Combe (another Scotsman) and the principles of phrenology. Significantly, phrenology as a system of thought insisted on the perfectible and improvable qualities of the human mind. The Pestalozzi method of object lessons, self-reliant reading, cheap and affordable education for all and ethic-centricity of children’s education found its finest expression in primers mostly emanating from Scottish 174

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sources, and Edinburgh in particular. The name that comes chiefly to one’s mind is that of the Chambers brothers, William and Robert. It is their efforts at encoding the principles of Pestalozzi that found fruitful soil in the Scottish Presbyterian ideology that informed colonial Bengal. Besides enumerating the historical processes by which the primer revolution took place in colonial Bengal, my chapter will chart the complex polyculturality of primers in Bengal. It examines this complex dynamic in terms of primers produced by pre-eminent educationists of nineteenthcentury Bengal – such as Iswarchandra Bidyasagar, Madanmohan Tarkalankar and Akhshay Dutt – in translation, recasting and adaptation of British European primers.

Bidyasagar in a Translated World This part of the chapter examines the relational complexities of Chambers’ primers (in English) and Iswarchandra Bidyasagar’s primers (in Bangla). It may be noted that the Chambers brothers were by no means original and owed their primer writing and editing abilities to Swiss and German sources. Let us take the example of Iswarchandra Bidyasagar’s Barnaparichay (Introduction to Alphabets, 1858), the pre-eminent among Bangla and Indian primers and one that achieved a paradigm shift in primer writing. The success of Barnaparichay (parts one and two) is the stuff of apocryphal legends, and the numerous editions it ran into set the tone for many imitations in Bengali and other Indian bhasas.12 Coming out in 1858, and following the Queens Proclamation enunciating the colonial government’s policy of non-interference in Indian religious practices and plurality of beliefs, Barnaparichay and other Bidyasagar primers set a benchmark for ‘secular’, ‘factual’ and’ morally sound’ educational texts. Barnaparichay was, however, a fundamental recasting of Chambers’ First and Second Books of Reading and the ideological imperatives encoded therein. The engraved illustrations in Chambers’ First Book conveying moral lessons where the binaries of good and bad are posited unequivocally are replicated by Bidyasagar in his Gopal and Rakhal stories. Take, for example, the picture of a ‘good’ boy playing with a hoop in Chambers’ First Book of Reading. The following description, using simple words and short direct sentences that encourage a child to find correspondences between a picture and written word, states: Do you see this boy? He is good and tells no lies. He loves the hoop but will not take the hoop, or a top, or a ball if it is not his. 175

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He will not push or hit or cuff. . . . He likes fun, but is not rude. He is at the top of his class, and all the boys love him. He will not hurt a worm or a fly. God loves good boys and girls. (Chambers 1845: 16) Dwitiyabhag (part two) of Barnaparichay notes: The Ghosal’s have a boy named Gopal. Gopal is six years old. Gopal eats whatever is given and wears whatever is available. He does not create a bother by demanding good food and clothes. He obeys his parents and never goes against their bidding. He loves his brothers and sisters and never beats them. These are the reasons why he is loved dearly by his parents. . . . He can remember lessons taught [in school] with ease and repeat them better than anyone else. (Bidyasagar 1858: 6) The unnamed British ‘good’ boy ‘who tells no lies’ and ‘who will not push or hit or cuff ’ and whom ‘God loves’ is translated as Gopal who eats and wears whatever is given, who never hits his brothers and sisters, who can repeat lessons with ease and whom his parents love. An additional Bengali context is created by situating Gopal in the household of an upper caste Bengali family – the Ghosals. The refractive indices of this cultural transposition are fairly simple and require little articulation. In a colonized province where material pleasures of food and clothes are hard to come by, the Bengali child Gopal’s goodness is predicated on his ability to restrain such desires. Also, Bidyasagar places Gopal, the good boy, within the more recognizable ambit of a Bengali family replete with siblings, and Gopal’s tender-hearted qualities are proved (unlike those of the British good boy) by his not cuffing or hitting his brothers and sisters. Also an English (and Christian) God who ultimately sanctions such goodness is replaced by a more recognizably secular equivalent – the Bengali father and mother. So anglicized in spirit were these new Bangla primers by Iswarchandra Bidyasagar, Madanmohan Tarkalankar and Akshaya Chandra Dutt, and so close adaptations – translations of their English or Scottish originals that when the orthodox Christian missionary John Murdoch attempted to replace Bidyasagar’s Barnaparicha with primers–readers published by the Christian Vernacular Society, a section of the missionaries sent a letter defending Iswarchandra Bidyasagar and Akshay Kumar Dutta with the following: Dr. Murdoch speaks of Missionaries using secularist and Brahmist reading books. This is misleading. The truth is that they are chiefly 176

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the productions of two men, one well known Hindu reformer, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, and the other Okshoy Cumar Dutt, [who was one of the best of the early Brahmists]. Their books are for the most part translations of English books. Of those by Bidyasagar, the Bodhoday treats of, the five senses, the metals and other rudiments of knowledge, the Kathamala is a translation of Aesop’s Fables and Charitabali is a collection of brief biographies of celebrated men . . . Charupath in three parts is a series of entertaining essays on Natural History and Astronomy, interspersed with a few good biographies, and some good moral lessons. (Murdoch 1872: 11–12) The reference to Natural History informs the modern reader regarding the close correspondence between Buffon’s text and Dutt’s Charupath. Incidentally, Charitabali has also been recommended by James Long as a good translation of both a generic form of biographies and literal translation of the contents of Chambers brothers’ edited Biography: We have just received a work translated by a Pandit of the Sanskrit College, Iswar Chandra Sharma from Chamber’s Biography, containing the lives of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Hershell, Grotius, Linacuss, etc. This translation reflects the highest credit of the ability of the translator and we hope he will proceed with a series of works on the same plan. (Long 1850: 132) Discussing the importance of Bodhoday in child education and referring to the imminent need for an updated, modernized version of this ‘translation’ of Chambers’ Rudiments of Knowledge, an official letter recommends Chandranath Basu’s Nutan Path (New Reader): The reader in use for many years was Bodhoday, a Bengali adaptation of Chamber’s Rudiments of Knowledge by the late Pundit Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, C.I.E . . . but having been written about half a century ago, it was, believed to be to some extent wanting modern requirements. . . . Such a Reader entitled Nutan Path was brought out during the year by Babu Chandra Nath Basu MA BL, Bengali Translator to Government. (General Report on Public Instruction in Bengal, 1894 –1895: 65) 177

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I would also, at this point, focus on the peculiar biculturality of prefaces and frontispieces of such primers. Iswarchandra Bidyasgar’s Bodhoday (that was an adaptation of Chambers’ Rudiments of Knowledge) has as its frontispiece the following words Rudiments of Knowledge by Iswarchadra Vidyasagar. Calcutta: Printed at the Sanskrit Press, 1852 followed by, as second frontispiece in Bangla font, literally translating the English one as Bodhoday: Iswarchandra Bidyasagar Pranita. Kolikata: Sanskrita/jantre/dwitiobar/ Mudrita, 1852. While the ‘Preface’ to the Chambers brothers’ edited The Rudiments of Knowledge or The Third Book of Reading for Use in Schools and Private Instructions states that: Although very great pains have been taken, in this little volume, to express ideas in the most simple language, it has been found absolutely unavoidable in many cases to use words by no means familiar to young persons. (Chambers 1840: n.page) Bidyasagar’s first advertisement prefacing his text Bodhoday notes in literal Bangla translation: Bodhoday nana ingraji pustak hoite sankalita hoilo. . . . Madhye madhye agatya jeje aprachalita duraha shabda prayog karite hoiache pathakganer bodh soukarjyarthe pustaker sheshe ei sakal shabder artha likhita hoilo. [Bodhoday is a collection derived from many English texts. The unfamiliar and difficult (abstruse) word/terms that I was compelled to use interspersed in the text have been glossed at the end of the text. (Bidyasagar, Rudiments of Knowledge: Bodhoday, n.page) Bidyasagar’s Bodhoday proceeds to translate Chambers’ object lessons in The Rudiments verbatim ‘Introductory Lesson’s’ subheading Of God and Works of Creation as Ishwar O Ishwarsrishtha Padartha and another subheading Mankind as Manabjati. The little changes come when Bidyasagar must include some local knowledge and when he must replace culture specific terminologies. While Chambers’ writes: All people have likewise a national name, by which people are known from people of other nations. If we are born in England we are called English; if in Scotland, we are Scotch. (10–11) 178

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Bidyasagar notes that: Lokmatrei janmabhumighatita upadhi thake. Bangladeshe amader nibas, ei nimmitte amader Bangali bole. Eirup Orissa desher nibasi lokeder Oriya kahe, Mithilar nibasidigake Maithil; England nibasidigake Ingrej (Bidyasagar 1852: 13) I find the expression janmabhumighatita/upadhi (descriptive titles/affiliations issuing from one’s place of birth) fascinating as it replaces the English ‘nation’ with Indic janmabhumi (motherland) and thus avoids the complications of pinpointing a subject people’s ‘nationality’ or the lack thereof. Janmabhumi also carries charge of Bengali subnationalism, and the passage goes on to identify other jatis of India such as Maithilis and Odiyas. Significantly Bodhoday clubs all British as Ingrej-English people refusing to tease out the ethnic differences articulated by Chambers between the English, the Scots and the Irish. Bidyasagar’s Bodhodaya translates Chambers’ Rudiments and naturalizes thereby the principles of science as applied to the physical, material and social world. It translates and renders normative ‘the authority of God, parents and government’ as encoded in the Anglicist-European scheme of things. It conveys the idea of a humankind as one human species endowed with reason, but also teaches differences between various Indic jatis while clubbing the English as one. It is this complex process of translation that renders the nineteenth-century Bangla-primer experiment fascinating. I would at this point love to incorporate an idea for which I am indebted to Sumit Sarkar13 but which I hope to extend to its logical conclusion. The refractive angularities in this recasting of Chambers’ primers (and by extension Pestalozzi’s object-lesson method) is to be discovered in Bidyasagar’s primers and their rendering of a bleak, pitiless world. It is a world where the Bengali child learns to expect nothing, and harden himself or himself against every deprivation. The concept of joyful ‘learning’ and intellectual ‘growth’ is entirely absent in Bidyasagar’s grim world of the Bangla primer. Neither Pestalozzi (whose very humane vision of children’s upbringing attracted modern European educators) nor Chambers’ primers (where a great deal of Pestalozzi’s belief regarding the perfectible possibilities of the child through object learning is encoded) enunciate the kind of subliminal cruelty and harshness of the world of Barnaparichay. The plausible explanation is that Bidyasagar had internalized (like any sensitive intellectual) the deprivation and humiliations of colonial subjectivity and discriminations in-built within such a system of subjugation. 179

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It is these perceptions that inform his primers (in the two parts of Barnaparichay) and inflect his portrayal of child characters that are enjoined to robotic obedience of their elders and betters. It is a world where the Bhubans (the bad, disobedient boys) are hanged to death, but not before they have cruelly bitten off their aunt’s earlobes as just punishment for failing to rear them up in accordance to harsh moral dictates of the world (refer to the last lesson of Dwitiya Bhag of Barnaparichay). The nineteenth-century Bangla primer is peculiarly ‘translated’ (vis-àvis its European ‘original’) in that it teaches the Gopals (the good boys) to recognize education as a strategy of survival (with minimum dignity) in a harsh, punishment-ridden, fear-laced world. The Bangla primer, with the express intent of ‘improving’ the child’s mind, encouraging him to grow intellectually and welcoming him into a joyous world of discovery through learning, would arrive only with the coming of Rabindranath Tagore’s Sahaj Path.

Notes 1 William Adam, a Unitarian missionary (and later close associate of reformereducationist Raja Ram Mohan Roy), after his study of the educational status in Bengal villages at the behest of Lord Bentinck in 1832) noted in his 1832 report that a diverse system of education existed in pre-colonial Bengal. Hindu religious schools imparting Sanskritic training were called tols, Muslim schools imparting Islamic training were called madrasas and both were funded by wealthy benefactors. There were also Persian schools training students (Hindu and Muslim) for Mughal administrative positions. But the most widespread, popular and locally funded institutions of learning were the village pathshalas. These, according to Adam, taught some ‘reading, writing arithmetic . . . zamindari and mahajan accounts’. 2 My study is based on the examination of education-related documents released by the colonial government (as anthologized in The Great Indian Education Debate); documents, tracts of Christian missionaries, teachers and indigenous educationists invested in the various school book/textbook society movements; physical examination of nineteenth-century textbooks; primers of nineteenth-century and their advertisements/claims and memoirs of contemporary ideologues–writers recording their childhood reading experiences. 3 The process of complex cultural translation of the primer in colonial Bengal must be situated within the larger translation initiated by the colonial government, the European missionaries and the educated ‘natives’. The Calcutta School Book Society translated Dr Andrew Bell’s The Madras School; or Elements of Tuition (1808) and published a 500-copy edition, which was soon exhausted; there was a conscious effort to introduce Joseph Lancaster’s systematization and quantification (in a graded manner) of school education following Lancaster’s The British System of Education (1810). D’Anseleme appointed Tarini Charan Mitra, Radhakanta Dev and Ramkamal Sen to translate moral tales from English and Arabic

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4

5

6

7

8 9 10

11

languages into Bengali. Accordingly the Calcutta School Book Society published Nitikatha in 1819. Dr Felix Carey translated Goldsmith’s History of England in 1819, and Pearson translated Andrew Bell’s The Madras School in the same year. The year 1820 also saw the translation – adaptation of Buffon’s Natural History. Louson began a series describing animals in Bangla and named it Pashwabali. Brojomohan Majumdar, Maheshchandra Palit and Haruchandra Palit translated Fergusson’s Introduction to Astronomy at the behest of the Calcutta School Book Society. Lord William Bentinck’s (the then governor general of India) resolution dated 7 March 1835 that ‘the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science amongst the Natives of India, and that all the funds appropriated for the purposes of education would be best employed on English education alone’ clinched the Anglicist position. But this so-called process of anglicization in nineteenth-century colonial India was by no means a simple process as this chapter will go on to argue. Charles Trevelyan was appointed by Governor General William Bentinck in 1833 (after H. H. Wilson) as the director of the General Committee for Public Instruction (GCPI). Coming from an evangelical background and firmly believing in the need to ‘civilize’ India through Western learning, Trevelyan (along with his brother-in-law T. B. Macaulay) was pivotal to the crystallization of the Anglicist position. Both were, however (contrary to popular perception), acutely responsive to the evolutionary capabilities of Hindus as a race. European education, they felt, could minimize the gap between Caucasian and Asiatic races. Charles Grant, a Scottish evangelist, served the East India Company twice from 1768 to 1771 and 1774 to 1790. His virulent anti-Orientalist stance and belief in the role of Western learning in redeeming Indian people from the slough of superstition, ill-founded beliefs and ‘unnatural wickedness’ is expressed in Observations on the State of Society among Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain (1792). Page numbers of Grant’s document are taken from Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir’s anthologizing of the same in a book entitled The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999). Page numbers of education debate documents by Charles Grant, Charles Trevelyan, Thomas Macaulay and William Bentinck are taken from this anthology. In consonance with Bangla pronunciation, Vidyasagar is spelt as ‘Bidyasagar’. Refer to title page/frontispiece in Appendix I. I am grateful to Gargi Gangopadhaya’s unpublished thesis on children’s leisure books in nineteenth-century Bengal (Reading Leisure 2013, Department of English, Jadavpur University) for this invaluable piece of information. I also acknowledge my intellectual debt to her. This piece emerged largely as a result of animated exchanges within the precincts of the National Library, Kolkata. The Bangla pedagogic system in colonial India owes its strong Scottish association to Raja Rammohun Roy. Significantly, Rabindranath Tagore recounts his pedagogic training as being shaped by Dr J. M. McCulloch’s A Course of Elementary Reading ( Jibansmriti). Rev. Dr McCulloch’s (minister of Kelso and later of Greenock and former headmaster of the highly successful Circus Place School in Edinburgh) ‘reader’ of 1827 was so successful that there were fifty-three editions by 1882 in Britain. McCulloch’s book was one among many such ‘reading books’ penned by well-known Scottish teachers like Arthur Masson, William Scott and

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Alexander Barrie. These became extremely popular from 1820s in England as well as in colonial India. Some of the popular Scottish primers in colonial India were (a) Alexander Duff ’s First Instructor; (b) Alexander Barrie’s Collection of English Prose and Verse for the Use of Schools, Selected from Different Authors (1800, Edinburgh); (c) Lindlay Murray’s Spelling Book; (d) Lennie’s English Grammar; (e) J. M. McCulloch’s A Course of Elementary Reading in Science and Literature (53rd edition Edinburgh); (f ) William and Robert Chambers’ Rudiments of Knowledge (1848); (g) Chambers’ Biography; (h) Leitch’s The Juvenile Reader; (i) Chambers’ First and Second Book of Reading; ( j) Chambers’ The Moral Class Book (1847). 12 Long’s Returns Relating to the Publication of Bengali Language Texts, 1857 (as published in the Bengal Library Catalogue in Calcutta Gazette, 1867–1890) enumerates the popularity and publication history of Barnaparichay. The first edition was published in 1855, and 152 editions of the primer had been published till 1890. Nine editions and 53,000 copies were published between the years 1855 and 1857. Both the ninth edition (5,000 copies) and the tenth edition (10,000 copies) were published in 1857, at the price of nine pies per copy. Subsequently the price rose to one anna. The highest number of its circulation in a year was 2,50,000 copies. The second part of Barnaparichay (1855) ran into a total number of 140 editions and was published till 1890. The year 1857 saw the publication of its sixth and seventh editions and was priced at nine pies. Later it sold for five paise. 13 ‘The peculiar bleakness of the world of Varnaparichay remains puzzling: it is almost as if Bidyasagar sometimes is fighting a part of himself, suppressing an inner Rakhal (the disobedient bad boy) projecting the path of discipline and obedience as something made necessary by a heartless world. Varnaparichay ends with a really strange and cruel tale, quite out of place one would think, in a children’s primer. Bhuban, an orphan boy, spoilt by his loving aunt, becomes a thief, is condemned to be hanged, and as a parting ‘gift’ bites off his aunt’s ears while saying ‘goodbye’ (Sarkar 2008).

References Basu, Amritlal. 1924. Puratan Panjika. In Shashibhusan Dutta, ed. Masik Basumati. Vol. 2, issue 2. Calcutta: Basumati Sahitya Mandir. 203–207. Bidyasagar, Iswarchandra. 1852. Rudiments of Knowledge: Bodhodoy. 2nd edition. Calcutta: Sanskrit Press. http://hdl.handle.net/10689/5997 (last accessed on 07.12.2015). ———. 1858a. 11th rpt. Barnaparichaya: Pratham Bhag: Asanjukta Barna. In Khastagir, ed. Bangla Primer Sangraha. Calcutta: The Sanskrit Press. 1–24. ———. 1858b. 8th rpt. Barnaparichay: Dwitiyo Bhag: Sanjukta Barna. In Ashish Khastagir, ed., Bangla Primer Sangraha. Calcutta: The Sanskrit Press. 1–24. ———. 1869. Charitabali or Exemplary and Instructive Biography. 14th edition. Calcutta: The Sanskrit Press. Chambers, Robert. 1874. History and Present State of the British Empire. Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers. 256, 263. Chambers, William, and Robert Chambers. (eds.). 1840. Rudiments of Knowledge: Or the Third Book of Reading. Chambers Educational Course. Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers.

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———. (eds.). 1845. The First Book of Reading: Adapted for Intelligence of Children under Six Years Old: Chambers Educational Course. Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers. Gangopadhaya, Gargi. 2013. Reading Leisure: Print Culture in Colonial Bengal. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Jadavpur University. General Report on Public Instruction in Bengal: 1894–1895. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press. Grant, Charles. Part of Chapter IV of ‘Charles Grants Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain particularly in respect to morals. Written chiefly in 1792’. In Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds. The Great Indian Education Debate. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. 81–89. Khastagir, Ashis. (ed.). Magh 1407, January 2000. Bangla Primer Sangraha 1815–1855. Kolkata: Pashchim Bangabangla Academy. Bengali. Long, James. Returns Relating to Publications in the Bengali Language in 1857: Calcutta Gazette, 1857–1890. ———. 1850. ‘Early Bengali Literature and Newspapers’. Calcutta Review. 8: 132. Mitra, Indra. 1969. Rpt. 2015. Karunasagar Bidyasagar. Kolkata: Ananda Publishers. Bengali. Reply to the Calcutta Missionary Conference to the Pamphlet of Dr. Murdoch on the Reading Books chiefly used in Mission schools in Bengal. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press. Sarkar, Sumit. 2008. Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society. In Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, eds. Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 118–145. Trevelyan, Charles. 1888. ‘Chapter IV’: On the education of the people of India. In Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds. The Great Indian Education Debate. London: Longman 95–142. Document 28, 281–303. Zastoupil, Lynn, and Martin Moir. (eds.). 1999. The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press.

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13 ‘THE POET’S PEDAGOGY’ Rabindranath Tagore’s English primers Amrit Sen

While Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali primer Sahaj Path has received wide critical attention, a series of English primers written for the students of the Brahmacharyashram have hardly been discussed. The volumes Ingraji Sopan (English: A Bridge Course in two parts, 1904), Ingraji Srutisiksha (Spoken English, 1906), Ingraji Sahajsiksha (Rapid English, 1929) and Anubad Charcha (Translation, 1917) reveal Tagore’s keenness to incorporate English as part of the pedagogic process of Visva-Bharati. While Tagore strongly supported the use of Bengali as the medium of instruction at Patha-Bhavana and Siksha-Satra, the international outlook of his holistic model (Visva-Bharati’s motto being, ‘where the world makes its home in a single nest’) of education spurred him to incorporate English as a model of communication. This chapter will seek to explore the various aspects of this pedagogy as analogous to Tagore’s overall pedagogic dimension. It will juxtapose his English and Bengali primers to point out how the very acts of everyday activity would be the basis of education and enjoyment rather than an abstract grammatical model, while the refection of rural Indian realities would be the context in which English would be learnt. Finally, it will look at Rabindranath Tagore’s use of translation as a pedagogic method of learning English to facilitate an interaction with a more global history. English was thus being used as a part of creating the imagined community of Santiniketan in an attempt to balance the international character of the school while remaining alert to the local context of Santiniketan.

 While Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861–1941) other literary achievements have been analysed in detail, his experiments with primers in Sanskrit, 184

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Bengali and English have hardly received critical attention. As his institution moved from the Brahmacharyashram to Visva-Bharati (1901–1921), Tagore wrote a series of English primers Ingraji Sopan (English: A Bridge Course in two parts, 1904), Ingraji Srutisiksha (Spoken English, 1906), Ingraji Sahajsiksha (Rapid English, 1929) and Anubad Charcha (Translation, 1917), which reveal his keenness to incorporate English as part of the pedagogic process from the basic level and the earliest stage of the school. This chapter will seek to explore the various aspects of this pedagogy as analogous to his overall vision of education. It will juxtapose his English and Bengali primers to point out how the very acts of everyday activity would be the basis of action and enjoyment rather than an abstract grammatical model, while the reflection of secular rural Indian realities would be the context in which English would be learnt. Finally it will look at Tagore’s use of translation as a pedagogic method of learning English to facilitate an interaction with a more global history as a tool for his idea of Visvabodh or ‘world consciousness’. Tagore started his experimental school in 1901 titling it as Brahmacharyashram and posited it as an alternative to the prevalent European model of education. Tagore was following the ideas of his father, Debendranath, who in his Santiniketan trust deed had specified that the trust should create scope for the practice of the Brahmo religion, establish a school and organize a rural fair (Bhattacharya 2010: 6). Rabindranath Tagore broadened the scope of the school and based his ideas on three notions: the close interaction with nature and rural realities rather than the claustrophobic confinement of the urban classroom, the inculcation of joy and a penchant for creativity. Recollecting the mundane and claustrophobic experience of his own education in childhood Tagore wrote: I have my natural love for life, for nature, and for my surroundings where I have my dear ones; and to be snatched away from these natural surroundings with which I had all my inner deeper life of relationship, and to send me an exile, to the school, to the class with its bare white walls, its stare of dead eyes, frightened me every day. When I was once inside these walls, I did not feel natural. It was absolutely a fragment torn away from life and this gave me intense misery because I was uprooted from my own world and sent to surroundings which were dead and unsympathetic, disharmonious and monotonously dull. It could not be possible for the mind of a child to be able to receive anything in those cheerless surroundings, in the environment of dead routine. And the teachers were like living 185

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gramophones, repeating the same lessons day by day in a most dull manner. My mind refused to accept anything from my teacher. With all my heart and soul I seem to have repudiated all that was put before me. (Tagore 1996a: 641) Tagore’s ideas on education saw childhood as a time of self-formation, especially in its ability to understand its own context in both environmental and social terms as well as relate to the global: This is another factor creating the atmosphere of this place. Our boys are very natural in their relationship with those foreigners, guests and visitors. My idea is that the mind should find its freedom in every respect, and I am sure that our children have through their early training freedom from the barriers of country and race and creeds and prejudices. We have in our neighbouring villages some primitive people who need our help. And we have started some night schools and our boys go there and teach them. Then you have the village work in connection with our institutions and those boys who have the opportunity to study the conditions of our village life and to know how to help them efficiently through scientific and up-to-date methods of cultivation and of fighting diseases. To impart not merely academic information, but how to live a complete life is, according to me, the purpose of education. (Tagore 1996b: 644) The journey of the Brahmacharyashram started with five children including the poet’s eldest son. Tagore initially struggled to free his school from caste identities (Brahmin students did not touch the feet of non-Brahmin teachers): he successfully got rid of it by 1904 and the school immediately took on an international dimension with the Japanese student Hori San joining in 1903. By 1907, the school was attracting students from different states. One interesting fact remains that Santiniketan in its initial years was known as a reform school for naughty children! English was included as a subject right from the inception and from the earliest class. Interestingly while Tagore took copious help for writing the Sanskrit primer from the Sanskritist, Haricharan Bandopadhyay, he himself took on the responsibility of composing the English primers in their entirety. Tagore not only produced the six volumes over a period of thirteen years, he also regularly took classes in English at various levels 186

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in his school. Other eminent English teachers who took regular classes in Santiniketan included C. F. Andrews, Tejeshchandra Sen, W. W. Pearson, Alex Aronson. Sahaj Path, the Bengali primer, was written only in 1930. Thus many of these textbooks were actually written on the basis of his pedagogic experiences and experiments unique to Santiniketan. In a letter to Sudhangshubikash Roy in 1906, Rabindranath Tagore wrote: ‘Why are you asking for text books? I am writing text books everyday as I continue to teach the children’ (Tagore 1992: 1252). In fact, an interesting letter to Kshitimohan Sen talks about Rabindranath Tagore’s initial doubts about the efficacy of his primers. He even asked Kshitimohan to consider if necessary Dwijendra Lal Roy’s primers in English (Tagore 1992: 1254). Like many of his other efforts, this too was thus the work of an amateur and necessity driven to suit his ideas of education as they evolved in the classroom situation. Only 200 copies of Ingraji Sopan were published, and it is to be noted that even in his first attempt at a primer Samskrita Darpan (1904), Rabindranath Tagore had strongly disapproved using grammar directly as a method of teaching: I strongly disagree to the process in which a child is taught the grammar of a language even before he is familiar with the language itself. So, when my own children were to be taught Sanskrit, I decided to compose a primer myself. In it the functional aspects of a language were to be taught initially, followed by a gradual introduction to grammar. (Tagore 1992. In Rachanavali 16: 1250) Interestingly Ingraji Sopan was written in 1904 at the peak of Rabindranath Tagore’s participation in the nationalist movement against the Partition of Bengal. Many of his songs written during this period talk of an overwhelming Bengali identity while his manifesto for a nationalist society Swadeshi Samaj was also published in 1904, where Tagore talked about atmashakti and the necessity to bridge the gap between the urban intelligensia and the rural poor. Yet, even at this stage, his writings on the Ashram reveal his willingness to negotiate with European modernity. The incorporation of English may be seen as part of this trajectory in Tagore. Tagore was aware of the interesting and rich trajectory of the language primer in Bengal. While the earliest Bengali primers were all published by the missionaries, after 1853 there was a flurry of Bengali primers by Bengalis themselves. The initial text was Sisusiksha (1849, written by Madanmohan Tarkalankar and subsequently revised by Ishwarchandra 187

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Vidyasagar), which was followed in quick succession by Vidyasagar’s Barnaparichay (1855), both volumes enjoying a stunning success and enjoying several editions within a span of two years. Two things stand out in these two early primers. Both prioritize education as the factor that contributes to material success arguing Lekhapora kore jei/garighora chore shei, one who studies hard/Leads a good life (Khastagir 2006: 209). Thus the Gopal (the good, diligent, academic boy) replaces the Rakhal (truant, playful, wild boy) as the new ideal of childhood subjectivity. Sibaji Bandopadhyay’s painstaking research on the binary between the Gopal and the Rakhal draws attention to the interesting subject position of the Bengali intelligentsia towards colonial modernity. With the proliferation of the empire and the location of its capital in Kolkata, modern education became both a source of livelihood and a vehicle for participation in the process of modernity. Thus the prioritization of English over Sanskrit, and what is fascinating, the implicit disciplining of the child into a normative, obedient self that could create a faithful workforce for the colonizers, happens within the overarching idea of the superiority of Western education. It was this hierarchy of cultures that Rabindranath Tagore sought to protest against in his writings on Santiniketan. The second interesting aspect, as Shibaji Bandopadhyay points out, is the changing attitude to caste and religion. In Sisusiksha, faced with the question ‘Who are you’, the child answers, ‘I am a Brahmin, my name is Ramnath’ (Khastagir 2006: 204), but the Sanskrit textbook is replaced by the Bengali Sisusiksha. The primer balances the new secular education with the older religious education through lines like Bed Chare/Khed bare (‘If you forget the Vedas/You will regret it’) or Brahmoposhana sakoler kora uchit (‘Everyone should worship Brahma’) (Khastagir 2006: 218), but the overall marker of identity is a new education. With Vidyasagar the primer goes wholly secular and wholly empirical, without any reference to caste or religion. Indeed we never know the caste identities of any of the children mentioned. Reverend John Murdoch (1819–1904), the president of the Christian Vernacular Education Society, attacked Vidyasagar between 1871 and 1881 in six different volumes for his rank materialism, arguing: Bidyasagar’s reforms are purely social . . . he has kept himself entirely aloof from the Brahmo Samaj movement . . . his primers are not simply written by a secularist but as SECULARIST. In the sixty seven pages . . . there does not seem to be single allusion to God or a future state . . . the grand argument against telling lies is that a boy will be disliked by others if he does so . . . what low miserable morality . . . It may rather be 188

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characterized as an AESTHETIC MORALITY. This is the most fitting epithet to be applied to a moral teaching, which ignores God and a future state. (quoted in Bandyopadhyay 2005: 59) The first major English primer by a Bengali was surely provoked by such directions. Peary Churn Sircar’s First Book of Reading for Native Children was published in 1850. Drawing upon a distinguished career as a teacher and headmaster in Kolkata and Barasat schools, Sircar divided his book into eight chapters. Interestingly Sircar posited tables in a bilingual pattern to thaw out the sound structures in Bengali and English. The empirical details paid extensive attention to the Indian context and details, so that his volume could be acceptable to Indian schools. As an anonymous reviewer added: The greatest asset of these books is that the details were familiar to students. Thus while reading the senses of sight, ear and mind were exercised. Peary Churn has confessed that in many places he has changed the names and contexts to incorporate them into in his texts. He was aware that otherwise these stories would never be appealing to Indian children. (in Basu 2001: 79) In 1875 Sircar’s primers were so popular that Macmillan procured the copyright and Sir Robert Lethbridge revised Sircar’s text. These new volumes included illustration that highlighted the local context of the pedagogy, a feature that Rabindranath Tagore was to improvise on in Sahaj Path, the series of Bengali primers illustrated by Nandalal Bose. Peary Churn also encouraged the translation of Bengali phrases in his copious instructions: ‘Pupils should be often exercised in explaining other phrases like those in the lessons and in translating into English such Bengali phrases as can be translated with words that they have learnt’ (Sircar 1969: 36). Peary Churn’s primers were, however, politically conservative. Thus lesson 23 begins with the phrase: ‘The Queen is Good’ (Sircar 1969: 38) followed by the phrase ‘He is in awe of her’. References to God and praying are repeated in the text, and the whole of lesson 7 is dedicated to Him: God made me. He gave me all the good things that I have . . . we cannot see God, but He sees all that we do . . . we should thank God for all the things that we have . . . I wish I could love him, 189

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praise Him and Fear Him as I ought to do. I will pray to Him to help me to do so, and keep me from all the sins. (Sircar 1969: 59) Was it because of this conservatism that the majority of the missionary schools in Bengal readily accepted the First Book as a textbook including the Baptist Mission School and the Church Mission Schools? Interestingly Sircar retains the binary of the Gopal–Rakhal identity, reiterating the identity of the child in bookish knowledge: A bad boy does not go to school, or learn his tasks. He tears his books and plays when he should read. He does not mind what is told him. No one loves him. He will be a dunce all his life. He will be of no use when he grows to be a man. . . . What a sad thing it is to be bad! (Sircar 1969: 57) The key to Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas on the importance of writing English can be located in a short essay Ingreji Sekha (‘Learning English’) published in 1919. Emphasizing the importance of primary education in the mother tongue (Tagore was to famously compare the mother tongue with breast milk), Tagore writes: When we learn our own mother tongue in our childhood, our only tool is commonsense. The power of this commonsense can be understood by the fact that a child can lay the foundation of his customs and daily activities of life within five years without making any effort. (Tagore 1992, in Rachanavali 15: 885) Once he is exposed to the foreign language, Tagore points out the conflict of cultures: We have no idea about the customs and ways of life of another culture. Our own cultural and syntactical patterns continually impinge on the new knowledge and language at every step. What do we do at this stage? Our minds do not merge these two ways of language, they seek to compare and contrast and draw patterns of usage. This method of comparing with our mother tongue and what we know is the correct way of learning another language . . . i.e., if we superimpose the language over 190

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the mother tongue, only then will the similarities and contrasts be alive to him. (Tagore 1992, in Rachanavali 15: 886) Rabindranath Tagore thus argues for primers specially designed for Indian conditions instead of a wholesale imitation of the British primers: These primers are meant for Europeans to learn the English language because they are similar in structural patterns. They do not apply for our context. Our children can take the help of this method when they learn Hindi. To teach the English language functionally requires a lot of time that our schools can hardly afford. In the residencies of the foreign returned Bengalis where such education is imparted, the children thrust Bengali away. This disregard for and defeat of the language is almost akin to the pain of death. (Tagore 1992, in Rachanavali 15: 887) Rabindranath Tagore’s entire methodology in Ingraji Sopan was based on the mobile and active surroundings of the ashram. In an essay titled Ingraji Sikshar Arombho (‘Beginning English’, 1919), Tagore writes: The verbs are the dynamic part of a language. The nouns and the adjectives are static, it is rather the verbs that provide them with motion. Whatever moves attracts the mind and therefore I feel that education in any foreign language should begin with the verbs. (Tagore 1992, in Rachanavali 15: 887) Thus Ingraji Sopan has three essential steps: 1 2 3

The teacher indicates an action that the child has to perform. Nouns and adjectives are added to the verbs. Concepts of tense and agreement of the verbs with the subject are gradually shown. Next questions are formed and so on as the child is taken through such formation. Only then are grammatical rules explained to the student.

As Pramadaranjan Ghosh pointed out: The aim of Ingraji Sopan was to lead to sentence formation, not merely through the abstract teaching of grammatical rules, 191

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the verbs were taught, then small sentences were formed and then these short sentences were enlarged with adverbs and adjectives. Then the tenses were changed, transformation of sentences was attempted and the notion of active and passive voices was introduced. Along with this exercise, children listened to texts like Tom Thumb, Jack the Giant Killer, Cinderella and other classics. (Tagore 1992, in Rachanavali 16: 1253) While the efficacy of this pedagogy is open to question, what is interesting is the departure that Rabindranath Tagore was making in keeping with the overall ideology of his education. First and foremost, he was taking the element of language education out of the confines of the classroom into the openness of the natural environment with activities associated with the tree, the ponds, the leaves, the fruits and the bushes just to mention a few instances. Thus the primer had copious activities associated with the process of learning a language, in keeping with Tagore’s ideas that the mobility of the child’s perception had to be taken into account in imparting any form of education. Education became integrated in the familiar environments of the child’s daily activity. Here are a few random examples from Ingraji Srutisiksha: Sit down to eat. Wash your right hand. Pour your dal on the rice. Mix them well together. Eat slowly. Take some curry with the rice. Squeeze a piece of lemon over it. Put a pinch of salt into it. Eat. Drink your milk. Drink a little water. Wash your hands. Rinse your mouth. Wipe your hands and mouth. (Tagore 1992, in Rachanavali 14: 78) or Lean against this tree. Shake that branch. Pluck a leaf from that branch. Go to the field. Watch the farmer till the land. Now scatter the seeds on the ground. Water the seeds. (Tagore 1992, in Rachanavali 14: 77) As Tagore was to point out in the preface to Ingraji Sopan: These are the drills for learning the language. The teacher will instruct the students to perform certain actions in English. When they are able to do so, it will be clear that they have understood 192

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the words. In this way before they start reading passages many English words will enter their consciousness. (Tagore 1992, in Rachanavali 14: 22) Another interesting aspect was that Rabindranath Tagore was cutting across the rigid moral academic position that the earlier primers were seeking to construct. Instead of the bookish, memory-oriented meek subject of Gopal, Tagore was freeing the primer of any moral action and instead encouraging the independent, inquisitive playful child. Relentlessly, these primers were alerting his students to the rural community that surrounded Santiniketan, a project he mentions in Swadeshi Samaj. Brajendranath Seal’s note on university reform that argued for a change in the teaching of English at the lower classes was quoted as a preface for Part II of Ingraji Sopan: We learn a language in short more by learning it spoken than by artificial exercises in syntax or idiom – conversations, questions and replies to questions as in the Robinson lessons of the elementary German school. Constant and familiar use of certain forms of clauses and phrases, the sentence taken as the unit of speech rather than the word, the cooperation of the tongue and the ear in reciting page after page, these are the surest and the most rapid and the most powerful means of learning a foreign language. (Tagore 1992, in Rachanavali 16: 1258) Brajendranath Seal was to also write to Tagore ‘Your genius and imagination in designing these primers has left Bengal grateful to you’ (Rachanavali 16: 1257). Unfortunately, Tagore’s experimental pedagogic process was discontinued even in Santiniketan after the poet passed away. As in the case with Vidyasagar, the books are entirely devoid of caste identities. Taking into consideration the fact that Rabindranath Tagore had managed to surpass the issues of caste in his Brahmacharyashram after much initial resistance, it gives us an indicator about his ideology of the school. One major issue, however, was the absence of a single Muslim name in the case of a child. This might be due to the fact that very few Muslim students joined Santiniketan in the initial years of the school. The primers, however, steered clear of references to religion as a source of activity. While we find references to farmers and doctors, there is not a single reference to God, the priest or the temple or the activity of praying. It is as if Tagore had decided to segregate religion from pedagogy in the very early years of the ashram itself. 193

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While the primers developed their own methodology, the text that was meant for senior students titled Anubadcharcha took an interesting approach to translation as pedagogy through a simultaneous process of translation and retranslation in senior classes. In the preface Tagore wrote: In this volume we have collected different types of writings. The intention is to familiarize students with different styles of English. I believe that over two or three years if the practice of translation and retranslation is practised then the student will develop a proficiency in both languages . . . English and Bengali have different notions of expression. As a student realizes the difficulties of translation he becomes aware of the salient characteristics of each language. It is because of this that I consider the method of translation as ideal for the learning of a foreign language . . . everyday the teacher will translate a paragraph from Bengali to English and retranslate it the very next day while explaining the rules of syntax to the students and correcting them at every step. (Tagore 1992, in Rachanavali 14: 95) Rabindranath Tagore was far more conscious to identify the differences between languages while respecting the modes in each. Thus identities could be respected even while being aware of the differences. The fact that Tagore wrote primers in three languages and repeatedly talks about the uniqueness of and respect for each language is a clear indicator that he was veering away from both the colonial model of education and a distinctly nationalist model towards a more cosmopolitan vision. An analysis of the selected passages reveals interesting principles of selection. The local contexts of the early primers make way to more global concerns including scientific, geographical and astronomical discoveries including new research on germs, great whales, Haley’s comet, Galileo and Quinine. There are a number of passages on Greek history and myths including the life of Alexander the Great and Rhodophis and King Solomon and separate passages on Mesopotamian history. Clearly the process of translation was also a process of sensitizing the student to wider more global perspectives in science and culture. Interestingly, the passages also reveal repeated references to Galileo, Kepler and the critique of superstition including a passage about the idea that the world would supposedly end in the year 1000 CE. There are stray passages that are interesting in the mockery of the powers of the Englishman. One such passage describes a Japanese man being harassed by two Englishmen on the streets of Chowringhee and overwhelming a whole horde 194

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of Europeans with the skill of Jujutsu. It may be recalled that Rabindranath Tagore had actually hired a Japanese teacher to instruct his students in Jujutsu; so the delightfully postcolonial moment of resistance could also dovetail within his wider pedagogical strategies in Santiniketan. The Far East seems more than adequately represented with copious references to Chinese and Japanese culture. The few local references largely speak about travel experience, especially to Srinagar. The only two specific references to Hindu mythology are about Jimutbahan and an unknown Brahmin, both of which talk about the glory of sharing knowledge and the idea that where we exist in parity with others, we come in contact with the infinite. Quite clearly the volume is adjunct in Tagore’s idea of a Visva-bodh or a parallel study of cultures through a parallel study of languages. Rabindranath Tagore had indeed articulated elsewhere the ideal of his school: It is a medium for connecting India to the world . . . here the universal study of man must find its place . . . the age of nationalism is nearing its end . . . a new future of international cooperation is being built and first efforts must be made in the fields of Bolpur. I intend to make that space beyond nation and geography – the flag of universal man must be planted there. When the races come together, as they have done in the present age, it should not be the gathering of a crowd. There must be some bond of relation, otherwise they will knock against one another. Our education must enable every child to grasp and to fulfill the purpose of the age, not to defeat it by acquiring the habit of creating divisions and of cherishing national prejudices. (Tagore 1947: 7) Is there a latent recognition in these passages of the importance of English as a link language to impart knowledge of science and technology and to evolve a process of translation through which a language of scientific writing could be evolved in Bengali too? One is reminded of Rabindranath Tagore asking Promothonath Sengupta to write a primer on VisvaParichay (Our Universe) or Jagadananda Ray to write science primers for children. Interestingly none of these passages talk about religion at all. It is as if translation is seen as a particular facilitator in defining a more globally aware secular self as part of the earlier adulthood. If any Indian myth is invoked at all, the focus is on the act of giving. A comparison between the English primers and Tagore’s Bengali primers (Sahaj Path) is an interesting exercise. Sahaj Path makes a far more 195

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imaginative appeal to the child’s psyche through its almost effortless rhymes and its attractive pictorial qualities. The English primers lack both the poetic felicity of language and pictorial embellishment, but one must remember that they were some of Rabindranath Tagore’s first attempts at writing textbooks and he was yet to gather around himself artists like Nandalal Bose who could put the aesthetic perspective to a language primer. In the case of the English primer there seems to be an interesting transition from recognizable daily activities to a more global base of scientific and historical knowledge. While both sets of texts consciously avoided mention of religion they were predominantly directed at Hindu and Brahmo students. In 1906, the linguist Dr Mohd. Shahidullah had written: It is a pity that our children have to read stories of Ram, Shyam, Gopal etc. He learns that Gopal is a good boy. He is not even aware what kind of a child Kasem or Abdullah is. From this point on the surmises that Muslims are inferior, they do not have great individuals. Hindu children feel that they are superior. (in Dutta 2013: 31) In Sahaj Path we have only two Muslim names – Jaynal/Dhorellal and Tamij Miar ‘Ghorar Gari’ but copious references to Sachi Sen, Mani Sen, Bashi Sen, Madhu Seth. Several things strike us as we look at the primers of Tagore. The first is the attempt to write primers in all three languages while respecting the uniqueness of each language and their roles in the formation of identity. Tagore was also keenly aware of the new colonial subjectivities that were being nurtured and debated in these primers. He accepted the secular democratic pattern of the primer from Vidyasagar while recognizing Peary Churn Sircar’ s creation of a local cast and context in which the primer was grounded. However, in his innovation through the use of education through action and nature rather than through rote memory, he was going back to the basic tenets of his pedagogic theories. Clearly, this established an alternative notion of the child’s selfhood that sought to emphasize the joyous nature of education. Ultimately the texts meant for senior students through the process of translation and retranslation bring out Tagore’s emphasis on the idea of Visva-Bodh and the coexistence of multiple identities as one of the fundamental aspects of his Visva-Bharati. The early English textbooks were thus part of the discourse of identity formation that was being debated in the imagined community of Santiniketan. 196

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Note All translations unless indicated are mine.

References Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji. 2005. Aabar Sisusiksha. Kolkata: Anushtup. Basu, Swapan. 2001. Pearycharan Sarkar (A Biography). Kolkata: Paschimbanga Bangla Academy. Bhattacharya, Gautam. 2010. Santiniketan. Santiniketan: Santiniketan Trust. Dutta, Milan. 2013. ‘Bikolpo Barnaparichay?’. Arek Rokom. 1(12) (June): 29–33. Khastagir, Ashish. (ed.). 2006. Bangla Primer Sangraha (1816–1855). Kolkata: Paschimbanga Bangla Adademy. Sircar, Peary Churn. 1969. First Book of Reading (1850). Calcutta: Macmillan and Co. 1871. Tagore, Rabindranath. 1947. ‘Thoughts on Education’. The Visva-Bharati Quarterly. 13(1) (May–October): 1–7. ———. 1992. Rabindra Rachanavali. 16 vols. Kolkata: Govt. of West Bengal. ———. 1996a. My school. In Sisir Kumar Das, ed. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore. Vol. III. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 641–644. ———. 1996b. Sadhana: The realization of life (1913). In Sisir Kumar Das, ed. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore. Vol. II. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 275–345. Tarkalankar, Madanmohan. 1849. Sisusiksha. Calcutta: The Sanskrit Press. Vidyasagar, Ishwarchandra. 1855. Barnaparichay. Calcutta: The Sanskrit Press.

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14 LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ODISHA Some issues and perspectives Ramesh Chandra Malik and Sunita Mishra

Though it is commonly believed that Macaulay’s Minute marks the beginning of English education in India, it can be seen as the culminating point of a series of events. In 1677 the first English teacher Ralph Orde was appointed to teach English to English children at the white town of Fort St. George in Chennai. He also taught Portuguese to Indian children. Between 1804 and 1816, a network of missionary schools were set up in the south of India in Vizagapatnam, Ganjam, Travancore, Bellary and Chennai. With the setting up of the Supreme Court in Kolkata in 1773, there was an increased demand for English and in 1817 the first college that later became the Presidency College was set up in Kolkata to impart English and European knowledge. In 1826 English became the medium of instruction in the Hindu College, Chennai. With such massive expansion of English, the stage was probably set for Macaulay to come and make the famous declaration of 1835. Interestingly, Macaulay’s announcement was about spending the funds granted in 1813 by the Charter Act of the East India Company, which said, After defraying the expenses of the military, civil and commercial establishments, and paying the interest of the debt, in manner hereinafter provided, a sum of not less than one lakh rupees in each year shall be set apart and applied to the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India. (Basu 1935: 6) 198

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Macaulay, however, gave it a definitive direction when he said, ‘All the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed on English education’. This of course was interestingly in violation of the objection raised by the board of directors to the public notice of Wilberforce in 1793. The board had objected to his notice to introduce English education in India, saying that it would be suicidal and would end in the expulsion of the British from the country. America was stated as a case in point. In his famous Minute of 2 February 1835, Macaulay stressed on the following issues: (a) English should replace Persian and (b) English should be introduced as the medium of instruction in all the institutions of learning. Unlike some of his predecessors, he did not think it necessary to translate Western knowledge into vernaculars because educated Indians would eventually do it and take care of the education of their countrymen. In his own words, English education would eventually create ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and intellect’ (in Chaudhary 2009: 492–505). This all-English Macaulay–Bentinck model of course met with resistance. What followed was a watered-down version of this, in Auckland’s resolution in 1839, where we have the reiteration of the resolution to provide funds to teach European knowledge through English but simultaneously grant funds to the Oriental Institutions (Mukherjee 2009: 159). Auckland suggested that the English language . . . (should be) fixed once and for ever as the medium of instruction in the higher branches, and the Indian vernaculars in the lower. English was to be taught wherever there was a demand for it, but it was not to be substituted for the vernacular languages of the country in the elementary instruction of the people. (Hunter 1891: 5) Along with this, there was also a resolution to replace Persian with the respective vernacular languages in 1835.

The language problem in Odisha When debating the benefits of education in English or the vernacular languages was the larger concern in most parts of India, Odisha had a slightly different battle to fight. Before the British system became operative, the court language of Odisha was Persian. But a very few Odias spoke 199

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the Persian language perfectly and fluently. So, ‘the key posts were held by outsiders who had knowledge of Persian’ (Samal 1977: 13). Later, Bengali and English were the dominant languages of administration. The Odia Amalas did not have proficiency either in Persian or Bengali or English and hence had no chance to participate in the British administration. Hence, Muslims from outside Odisha and Bengalis were preferred for administrative positions. This left the Odia speakers disadvantaged. As Samal observes, they all were excluded from every job such as the police, revenue and salt departments. Walter Ewer also comments: ‘The exclusion of the genuine Hindu inhabitants of Orissa from every situation tended to check the diffusion of the knowledge of the British system of administration’ (in Mukherjee 1964: 137). Phakir Mohan Senapati vividly describes the situation in his Utkala Bhramana. He says: The Kammas (Telugus) have occupied the South; the North has become the home for the Bengali’s; the West has gone into the Maratha’s hands . . . the Marwari’s, the Kapodia’s the Bhojpuri’s, and the Modi’s have taken over the trade and commerce. The Oriyas till the land and cut the paddy plants, but the Gujaratis enjoy the harvest. The judges, the pleaders, all are foreigners. Even the clerk in the post office is not a native. (in Mohanty 2001: 59) Whether it was genuinely difficult to appoint Odias because not many of them were literate or whether this became a convenient excuse for interest blocks at the time to secure employment for speakers of other languages is of course a debatable issue that requires a separate investigation. But the fact remains that language education became the key to the development and upward mobility of the locals in Odisha. At this point of time there were even suggestions and predictions that English should and would become the language of the court and the people. But since most administrative and financial transactions had to be carried out in the local language, teaching and learning of Odia too remained an important concern for both the administration and the educated locals. The main obstacle in spreading Odia education was the shortage of textbooks in Odia. As Mohanty points out, ‘One major stumbling block in the progress of Oriya was the shortage of printing material’ (2001: 60). To alleviate this situation, in the early nineteenth century, attempts were made by the British government and various missionaries to establish printing presses and educational institutions to start teaching in Odia and also introduce English education. The establishment of the printing 200

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press, the Cuttack Mission Press, in 1838 was an important event in this context. Although this press was set up to encourage missionary activity, it also promoted the printing of other material like primers, textbooks, dictionary and grammar. And in many ways all this paved the way for the growth of nationalistic feelings and the eventual demand for a separate state. Gradually, there was a growing demand for textbooks. In the 1840s, attempt was made by the Central Education Council to get school textbooks written in vernacular languages. Remunerations were offered for the purpose, and a series of English textbooks that were to be translated to local languages were selected. Interestingly, around the same time, Charles Grant was strongly advocating education in the English language. He was of the opinion that it would largely improve the ‘pitiable condition of the Indians’. But there was a strong resistance to this movement by orthodox parents who feared the loss of religion and challenge to the caste system. Generally, it was the middle-class Odia population and a part of the lower classes who were eager to become part of the new education system, and eventually there was considerable spread of English education. This led to a period of hectic textbook writing in both Odia and English by scholars and creative writers, among whom Senapati, Ray and Rao (Byasakabi Phakir Mohan Senapati, 1843–1918; Kabibara Radhanath Ray, 1848–1908 and Bhaktakabi Madhusudan Rao, 1853–1912) formed the famous trio. This movement went a long way in consolidating education in the vernacular. Despite resistance from certain quarters, around this time, there was a growing awareness of the need to spread English education. During the governor generalship of Lord William Bentinck, English education began to spread in Odisha, and English schools or Zilla (district) schools were established in the different districts. One of the first English schools was established at Puri in 1838; in 1841, a higher-class English school was established at Cuttack, and in 1853 another English school was established at Balasore. Gradually, among the middle-class people of Odisha, there developed a willingness to send their children to middle and higher school education where ‘English was not only taught as a language but was also the medium of instruction except in some of the lowest classes’ (Samal 1977: 269). Simultaneously, English learning was encouraged by sponsoring scholarships to students in middle English and vernacular schools where English was taught as an additional subject. Significantly, it was after these initiatives that there appeared a serious threat to the Odia language in 1867. There were attempts to prove that Odia is a dialect of Bengali; hence, Bengali should be made the medium of education. This triggered the language movement between 1868 and 1873. 201

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This movement gained support and popularity because of a complex multiplicity of interdependent factors. Important among them was the romanticization of a unified Odia identity and language. The other was rooted in economics, which emerged because the Odias did not have access to administrative positions and other privileges. The third, which stemmed from the second, was the politics over the writing and sale of textbooks. The Odia-speaking population being distributed in areas that demanded three different languages, apart from English, was a major factor in this movement. If this was the need of the Odia people, the resistance to granting them the territory with Odia as the language of administration and education also sprang from the same reasons. It meant loss of jobs for some in the field of education and loss in the business of textbook production for some others. On 9 December 1868, in a meeting of Cuttack Debating Club, Rajendra Lal Mitra, an influential Bengali Indologist, delivered a speech in which he said, ‘The first thing anyone would do who really desired to promote the wellbeing of Orissa would be to abolish the Oriya language and introduce Bengali; for, as long as Oriya remains, it will be impossible for Orissa to progress’ (in Samantaray 1983: 230). That the economics of textbook production was at the root of his argument becomes clear in the following letter he wrote to John Beames: As note-worthy instance, I may mention that a few years ago I prepared a map of India in Bengali, and it brought me a profit within one year of over six thousand rupees. The same map was subsequently translated in to Uriya, but even the School Book Society could not venture to undertake it on their own account and the Government at last had to advance, I think, some two or three thousand rupees to help the publication. The map, however, fell still-born from the press, and almost the whole edition is, I believe, now rotting in the godown of its publisher. Let but the Government introduce the Bengali language in the Schools of Orissa, and the Oriyas, instead of seeking grant-in-aid from Government and private individuals for occasionally bringing out solitary new books, will have the whole of our Bengali publications at their disposal without any cost, and would be united with a race of thirty millions without which they have so many things in common. (in Boulton 1993: 71)

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This situation, of course, was resolved by 1870 with the help of able administrators like John Beames. In one of his rejoinders to Rajendra Lal Mitra, he said, If Oriya is to be suppressed because it is only spoken by a few millions of people, it might also be urged that Dutch, or Danish, or Portuguese, should be obliterated also. (in Mohanty 2001: 67) In response to the protest movement from the masses, the Bengal government set up a committee headed by W. C. Lacey and in 1869 the lieutenant governor issued an order in favour of using Odia as the medium of education. It required, in the middle class anglo-vernacular schools to teach all subjects in Oriya – the literature of Orissa being taught as far as it extends: English would of course be taught and Bengali optional. . . . And in the lower vernacular schools to teach Uriya only. (in Mohanty 2001: 68) It is important here to recognize the role of English and English education in this entire movement. The primary players in the language movement and the makers of modern Odia literature – Phakir Mohana Senapati, Radhanath Ray,1 Madhusudan Das, Gaurisankar Ray, Jagan Mohan Lal, Ramasankar Ray, Gopal Ballav Das, Chandramohan Maharana and others – were educated in English and also stressed the need for spreading English education. Phakir Mohana Senapati, in his autobiography, talks at length about how he was interested to learning English at the young age. He says: I wanted to learn English. I collected a copy of the First Book and began reading it at the bank of gadagadia with the help of my friends present there. . . . One of my friends was the Second Master of the Government School. He taught me only for a few days and, with the help of the dictionary, I myself read some English books, such as The Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, History of Bengal, Reverend Lalabihari’s Govind Samant, the Bible and Marry Lamb’s Shakespeare’s Tales. Sometimes, in my profession, this smattering of English came in very useful. (Our translation: Senapati 2006: 80)

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In addition, there were attempts to develop journalism in English at this point. Some of the papers that were initiated in English from different parts of Odisha were Cuttack Standard (1868), Orissa Student (1886), Mayurbhanj (1879), Orissa Patriot (1888) and The Ganjam News (1896).2 This was also the time when the need for English education was being talked about in various Odia newspapers and periodicals like the Utkala Dipika (1866), Utkala Darpana (1873), Utkala Madhupa (1878), Sambalpur Hitaisini (1889) and Utkala Sahitya (1897). These were also the places that carried notifications, government notices, extracts of important reports and advertisements (often in English). Eventually, over the years, the Odia language was restored in schools. English education too gained ground, and there was an active interchange of ideas and information. Knowing English along with Odia was considered necessary for purposes of administration, education and literary creation.

Modern education and bilingual dictionaries With the formalization of structured education in Odia and English, it became essential to have good bilingual dictionaries. Sometimes they were commissioned and prepared specifically for use in schools, and at times the already-existing dictionaries were prescribed. We find the mention of the commissioning of one such dictionary prepared by A. Sutton in the year 1845 mission report. It says, The Sanscrit and Oriya vocabulary for the Govt. schools, announced in the last report as having commenced, has, during the year, been finished, printed and paid for. (quoted in Samantaray 1979: 5) An advertisement for the book said: The following work has been prepared for the use of the government schools in Orissa, and is intended to contain most of the current words of Sanscrut origin, with their synonyms or definations in the common language of the people (Cuttack, 15th August, 1844). (in Samantaray 1979: 7) Probably, the dictionaries formed part of the reference material used to translate and even to write textbooks during the 1870s. Probably, these dictionaries were used by locals to read and write in English3 or even while teaching in the classrooms. 204

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The rest of this chapter will try to look at the writing and production of some of the bilingual dictionaries that played an important role in bringing ‘modernism’ to Odisha. The first bilingual dictionary in Odisha was written in 1811. Like in other states in India, it was done by missionaries for the following reasons: 1 2 3 4

To translate the Bible and spread missionary activities among the locals To teach and prepare textbooks in the vernacular and English To translate documents pertaining to finance, agriculture and other administrative fields into the vernaculars To learn English for obtaining jobs in the administration and for upward social mobility

In Odisha, some of the first bilingual dictionaries were from Odia to English. Probably, this was prompted by the immediate need of the locals to master the English language for various purposes – jobs related to court and administration being the most important among them. Apart from these, there are also early dictionaries that give translations from English to Odia, primarily for the use of Englishmen who had to have basic knowledge of the local language for purposes of administration and missionary activities. The following are some of the dictionaries written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

A Vocabulary Ooriya and English for the Use of Students (1811) by Mohun Prasad Thakoor4 An Oriya Dictionary in Three Volumes (1841) by Amos Sutton5 An English and Oriya Dictionary (1873) by Rev. W. Miller An Oriya and English Dictionary (1874) by William Brooks English and Oriya Dictionary (1874) by D. R. Rout and J. S. Rout The Concise Oriya-English Dictionary (1916) by Rev. R. J. Grundy A Comprehensive English-Oriya Dictionary (1916) by J. G. Pike and Gordon S. Wilkins (a popularly used dictionary in Odisha till today)

The first use of these dictionaries was the practical need of communicating with the local people for trade or administration and to learn the local languages. The Christian missionaries who came to propagate their religion felt it necessary to learn the languages of the people to be able to converse with them in their mother tongue. The first dictionary of Mohunprasad Thakoor in 1811 was an Odia-to-English dictionary, probably meant for Odia speakers to learn English. The dictionary, like many other dictionaries of the time, arranged words according to topics or disciplines. Some of them are given in Figure 14.1. 205

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GENERAL INDEX Of God

Of Metals and Stones

Of Spirits

Of Apparel

Of the Universe

Of Food

Figure 14.1 Headings under which words were arranged Source: Takoor, Mohunpersaud Takoor, 1811. Vocubulary, Ooriya and English, for the use of Students. Serampore: The Mission Press.

Figure 14.2 Odia words and English equivalents, along with Odia pronunciation for the English speaker Source: Takoor, Mohunpersaud Takoor, 1811. Vocubulary, Ooriya and English, for the use of Students. Serampore: The Mission Press.

This kind of arrangement suggests that the learners probably had very specific needs like knowing words for medicinal purposes, theology, law or documentation of familial/social system, and finding the English equivalent of words was important for communication, or specific kinds of writing and documenting. In the dictionary, apart from the Odia-toEnglish equivalents, there was a column where the Odia words had been transcribed in English letters followed by the English equivalents. This was probably done to help the English speaker know the Odia pronunciation of the word and reproduce it when necessary. A sample of it has been reproduced in Figure 14.2. 206

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At times, the Odia letters used here show that the dictionary maker was not familiar with some of the sound clusters that form an important part of the Odia alphabet system. Also, at places, it records the ‘nasalized retroflex’ /n/, which is very pronounced in Odia as the ‘dental’ /n/. This is a clear indication that either the compiler or the informers were not native speakers of Odia. The 1874 dictionary of William Brooks shows a big improvement in this regard. Further, if the words in Mohunprasad Thakoor’s dictionary have the local flavour of various regions, the later dictionary is much more standardized. It shows a distinct move towards the language variety that formed part of the print culture and academic diction in the twentieth century. In 1889 a Dwivasi (bilingual) dictionary was published from the Cuttack Printing Press. Apart from the English equivalents, this dictionary provides (in the third column) the pronunciation of the English words in Odia. Definitely, it was meant to help the Odia speakers pronounce the English words appropriately. A part of this dictionary has been reproduced in Figure 14.3. We have seen earlier that the dictionary of Mohunprasad Thakoor in 1811 had the transcription of Odia words in English. This dictionary, again, with the transcription of English words into Odia to aid the English pronunciation, shows a definite spread of English education among the local population and a felt need to learn and master the language. Further, this dictionary gives English proverbs on every page and provides their local equivalent – often in Odia and sometimes in Sanskrit. This again is a definite indicator of richer and active linguistic exchange where the local

Figure 14.3 Odia words and their English equivalents, along with their pronunciation for the Odia speaker Source: (Author Unknown) Collected from Srujanika. Electronic Version of Odia Dictionaries. 2009. Bhubaneswar.

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Figure 14.4 The title page of The Dwivasi Source: (Author Unknown) Collected from Srujanika. Electronic Version of Odia Dictionaries. 2009. Bhubaneswar.

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population did not want simply English equivalents but was beginning to engage with the language in all its dimensions. Figure 14.4 shows the title page of the book. An analysis of the few dictionaries done in the previous section shows that English learning through the grammar translation method was predominantly a requirement for survival in the beginning. But gradually English education took roots, and there was serious engagement with English in certain circles in Odisha. In a way, the growth of Odia nationalism, the language movement and the demand for separate statehood were concurrent with the spread of English and English education in Odisha. As we see, one cannot have a proper perspective of the growth of Odia identity, the literature, the formation of statehood and most importantly the establishment of Odia as an independent language unless we see it in the context of language teaching, that is the teaching/learning of both English and Odia. This is more or less true of all states at a particular point in the history of colonial India when states were formed on the basis of languages and the language of the state was determined as the officially approved language of the court administration and education. But in the case of Odisha this became a very important point in its history and in the formation of Odia nationalism because of the strong Odia language movement, which was initiated due to the serious linguistic threats from the neighbouring linguistic communities. In this context, the role of English education cannot be overstated. Pedagogically, the English language education paved the way for the creation of an educated middle class whose ideas fuelled passion for Odia nationalism and modernism.

Notes 1 Radhanath Ray was known for his proficiency in English. Sri Durgacharan Rai in his Radhanath Jibani says, ‘By virtue of his perseverance and provate study Radha Natha acquired deep proficiency in English’ (p. 1162). Radhanath also encouraged his son Sashibhusan Rai in his personal letters to learn and master English. In a letter dated 29 August 1896, he says: ‘Nothing will give me greater pleasure than to see you write good English with fluency. It depends entirely on constant study and practice’ (Rai 1998: 370). 2 A study of these journals is beyond the scope of this chapter, but the period of their publication, the growing awareness of the need for English education at that point of time and the then prevalent strong sense of nationalism among the educated middle classes allow us to draw the inference that these English journals would have had a role in shaping a sense of nationhood among the educated Odia-speaking populations. 3 Phakirmohan Senapati states in his autobiography (quoted here) that he learnt English with the help of dictionaries.

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4 Mohun Prasad Thakoor was the assistant librarian of Fort William College. And the previous year he had compiled an English–Bengalee Dictionary. This is interesting because as early as 1811 it is a dictionary from Odia to English for students who wanted to use English. Samantaray gives us a review of this dictionary, which says, ‘The Ooriya language is the vernacular dialect of the province of Orissa, and as no dictionary or vocabulary of it has been as yet printed, the present work will be of considerable utility’ (Samantaray 1979: 4). 5 The first volume of this dictionary is an English–Oriya dictionary, which also contains introductory grammar. The second volume is an Oriya–Oriya dictionary of synonyms. The third volume is an Oriya–English Dictionary, which primarily contains official and what he calls meteriamedica (medical terms). These dictionaries were important because they had a direct impact on teaching of Odia in schools. The education report of 1843 says: It may be stated that the council concurred on the local committee’s suggestions for the provision of Ooriya class books and the latter body having reported that the Pundit (Pundit Bidyabhusan, the Pundit of Cuttack English School) had completed and printed an Ooriya grammar . . . which was for sale at 6 annas a copy; and Mr. Sutton a vocabulary of 200 pages . . . at 3rupees a copy. They were authorized to subscribe for 300 copies of the former and 250 of the latter for the use of the schools.

References Basu, B. D. 1935. History of Education in India under the Rule of the East India Company. 2nd edition. Calcutta: Modern Review Office. Boulton, J. V. 1993. Phakirmohan Senapati: His Life and Prose Fiction. Bhubaneswar: Orissa Sahitya Akademi. Chaudhary, Shreesh. 2009. Foreigners and Foreign Languages in India a Sociolinguistic History. Delhi: Foundation Books. Hunter, William Wilson, Edward M. Hance, Emily Crawford, Philip Magnus and E. F. M. MacCarthy. 1891. State Education for the People. London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd. Mohanty, Panchanan. 2001. ‘British Language Policy in 19th Century India and the Oriya Language Movement’. Language Policy. 1(1): 53–73. Mukherjee, Alok. 2009. This Gift of English. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Mukherjee, P. 1964. History of Orissa (Vol.VI). Cuttack: Utkal University. Rai, Durgacharana. 1998. Radhanath Jeevanee (Biography of Radhanath). Cuttack: Friends’ Publisher (first edition 1941). Samal, J. K. 1977. Orissa under the British Crown (1858–1905). New Delhi: S. Chand. Samantaray, Natabar. 1979. Adhunika Odia Sahitya Bikasara Prustabhumi (Development of Modern Odia Literature and Its Foundation). Bhubaneswar: Smt. Gangabai Samantaray. ———. 1983. Odia Sahityara Itihasa (1803–1920) (History of Odia Literature (1803– 1920)). Bhubaneswar: Dr N. Samantaray (first published in 1964). Senapati, Phakir Mohan. 2006. Phakir Mohan Granthabali. Ed. Krushan Charana Behera and Debendra Dash. Cuttack: Grantahamandira.

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15 THE QUEST FOR SAHITYA Rise of literature in colonial Orissa Siddharth Satpathy

Rise of Oriya literature: revisiting Natabara Samantaraya It is not a new observation that Oriya literature, sahitya, emerged as an academic discipline in the 1870s. Natabara Samantaraya says as much in his classic Odia Sahityara Itihasa: 1803–1920.1 He observes that literature did not feature as a subject to be taught in colonial school syllabi before 1867. Instead, expertise in grammar and language (vyakarana o bhasa jnana) received marked emphasis in the curriculum. Pupils cultivated their abilities in these subjects and were tested on the same in diverse examinations. The larger colonial philosophy of school education and textbook production emphasized dissemination of general information (sadharana jnana bitarana). Possibly deemed unfit as a vehicle for the dissemination of general information, literature received no recognition as a subject worth teaching in schools. Samantaraya argues that a significant change in the larger philosophy of colonial education seems to have occurred around 1868–1870, and literature was introduced in schools. In subsequent years, literary education received increasing attention in the Oriya public sphere. Textbooks were composed. Manuals on teaching literature were published. Popular periodicals discussed the subject of literature for the benefit of general reading public at large.2 Samantaraya ascribes the historical change of 1868–1870 to the efforts of Radhanatha Raya. Radhanatha was perhaps the finest poet of the time: he is widely believed to have ushered in the modern era in the history of Oriya poetry. More significantly, he was a top-order colonial bureaucrat in the department of education: in this capacity, he had a direct and powerful say over the fate of schools and their curriculums. In Radhanatha,

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Samantaraya sees a fine embodiment of the educated and assertive Oriya middle class whose emergence in the last three decades of the century had a causal relation with the emergence of Oriya literature as an academic discipline. Emergence of Oriya literature as an academic discipline brought in its wake intense debates on what kind of literature was worthy of being taught in schools. Samantaraya would agree that such debates led to the slow evolution of a new and modern Oriya literary canon in the last decades of the century. Unhappy with what passed as high literature in the traditional canon, proponents of literary modernity set out to fashion a new canon and, according to them, a more proper awareness of what constituted high literature. Some composed more ambitious original poetry; others wrote school textbooks on literature. Together they aimed at a new and more elevating literary canon. What, then, one enquires, constituted the newness of this literature? Better still, what precisely can be termed modern about the poetry of these new authors? Samantaraya suggests that modern literature is an artistic articulation of the fusion of Eastern and Western intellectual traditions.3 He offers a nuanced study of modern Oriya poetry by Radhanatha and Madhusudan Rao and goes on to submit that the newness consists in the Oriya poet’s attempt to creatively blend a Western model of literature, which was available via colonialism with local content. Radhanatha would thus combine Western literary forms, styles and themes with local Oriya history and geography to write a new kind of poetry. In Nandikeshwari, for instance, he borrows from Byron and Ovid to narrate a tragic romance that is set in mediaeval Orissa. His realist narration and simplified poetic diction, both resourced from the West, marked clear breaks with pre-colonial Oriya poetic tradition. It also helped him to camouflage the generous liberties he was taking with the history of mediaeval Orissa so as to create a new sense of the past among the educated middle class. Madhusudan, a follower of the brahma dharma, was more given to the questions of religion and ethics. As a reform movement, brahma dharma was an intellectual fusion of Eastern and Western spiritual ideas and practices; Madhusudan’s poetry bears the stamp of this fusion. In keeping with the brahma emphasis on creating an irreproachable personal character and a refined spiritual life, Madhusudan led a campaign against what he deemed obscenity (aslilata) in poetry. In his target was a pre-colonial Oriya literary convention: explicit description of physical intimacy between the hero and the heroine. Madhusudan’s satirical fragments, ‘Bhandarasayana Kavya’, ‘Sabas Sahitya Charcha, Sabas, Sabas’, for instance, participate in 212

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this campaign. The colonial brahma campaign against obscenity had a source of inspiration in metropolitan Victorian prudery. To return to Samantaraya’s larger thesis on the newness of the Oriya canon in the last three decades of the nineteenth century: a sort of self-conscious fusion of Indian and Western intellectual and cultural traditions constituted literary modernity.4

Literary modernity: towards a micro-history of Bhava Samantaraya is well known for the wide-ranging and exhaustive survey he offers of the literature written in Oriya in the nineteenth-century. As opposed to his macro-historical thesis about Oriya literary modernity, this chapter seeks to forward a micro-historical argument. For my analysis, I choose a particular concept – bhava, sentiment – that is perhaps the most frequently employed category in late nineteenth-century Oriya reflections about poetry and literature at large. The chapter proceeds to offer two broad arguments. Both of them are built around this category of bhava. First, literature evolved as a discipline not in isolation but in conversation with other disciplines such as grammar and history. In this context, Oriya literary modernity was marked by an expansionist consciousness: literature kept expanding its normative boundaries to include within its ambit what were conventionally deemed nonliterary subjects. Bhava played a crucial role in this process of evolution. As a category, it had a janus-like quality. Looking inward, it helped literature to demarcate its disciplinary boundaries. Looking outward, it prompted literature to see, as it were, literariness in the discursive world at large. Second, as a colonial academic discipline, literature often faced the task of negotiating its relationship with the pre-colonial literary canon in Oriya. The process of negotiation involved the practice of borrowing older pre-colonial categories and lending them new and surplus meanings and responsibilities to shoulder. In this sense, Oriya literary modernity emerged as a surplus discourse. A fundamental category of early modern Oriya aesthetics, bhava acquired surplus meanings in the late nineteenth century. Prominent educationists of the time retained bhava or cultivation of elevating sentiments, particularly those of devotion and piety, as the cherished aim of a literary education. Simultaneously, in their mobilizations, bhava begins to refer to a new disciplinary regime of pedagogical surveillance. The more they sought to emphasize bhava, the more deeply anxious they grew that teachers and pupils of literature were unable to appreciate the value of elevating sentiments. 213

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Taken together, these arguments enable the chapter to describe literary modernity in Oriya as a surplus discourse that was marked by an expansionist consciousness. In other words, literary modernity in Oriya consisted of synchronic comparisons with other academic disciplines and diachronic negotiations with pre-colonial aesthetic genealogies. Attention to these comparisons and negotiations will offer a finer grasp of the historical process through which literature consolidated its status as an academic discipline and of the formation of literary modernity in colonial Orissa at large.

From grammar to bhava Bhuvaneswar Datta published the Model Questions on Oriya Literature: Sahityabisayaka Adarsha Prashnavali in 1879.5 As the title suggests, it is a compilation of questions on Oriya literature, which seeks to help pupils prepare for various school-level examinations in the subject. But, more importantly, it has a long preface addressed to the teachers of literature, Sikshakamananka Prati Katipaya Upadesha. This preface, scholars would agree, inaugurated the tradition of self-conscious reflection on literature as an academic discipline in colonial Oriya public sphere. At this inaugural moment, literature does not seem to have a well-defined and secure disciplinary status. The preface has the primary responsibility of carving out a defined space for the discipline. It does so by comparing and contrasting literature with other disciplines. On the one hand, it differentiates literary education from grammar and language pedagogy. On the other hand, it aligns literary education with history pedagogy. We will first consider Datta’s observations on literature and grammar. We will return to his opinions on literature and history in the following section. The preface endeavours to impress on the reading public that literary education is not merely a teaching of grammar (vyakarana) and language. ‘Only a very small number of teachers entertain’, Datta writes, A firm opinion on how to teach literature so that it becomes truly beneficial to students. Most think that teaching grammar is the only purpose of literary education. So they consider themselves successful if they manage to impart to the students lessons in grammar. (Datta 1879: 1) Datta proceeds to issue a caution, ‘As long as this flawed opinion does not perish, it is only futile to expect that the true purpose of literary education will be fulfilled’6 (Datta 1879: 1). The preface does not dismiss an education in grammar as such since it is essential for learning languages. ‘I do not mean to say’, Datta writes, ‘that the [high] degree of attention 214

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being paid to grammar these days should be reduced. Grammar serves as the door to language. Hence, it goes without saying that any slight shown to grammar is a grievous error’7 (Datta 1879: 2). However, Datta firmly makes a case for literary education as something more than merely a teaching of grammar. Literary education, according to the preface, aims at creating an internal experience. It requires the student to cultivate a robust understanding of the diverse subjects that he reads in a literature textbook. These subjects could range from history to mythology, to geography, so on and so forth. ‘While teaching literature’, Datta writes, we need to ascertain first whether the students have understood the taught subject (‘bujhiparile ki nahin’), whether they have properly understood it or not (‘hrudayangama hela ki nahin’). Only after this aim is fulfilled, one could proceed to ask questions about grammar.8 (Datta 1879: 2) To drive his point home, Datta constructs a fictional scene in a literature classroom: a traditional teacher of literature, one who would aim at rules of grammar rather than the cultivation of proper understanding, is quite surprised to come across a modern, enlightened colonial school inspector who emphasizes the latter. ‘The subject being taught in the class is bastu vichara’, Datta writes, ‘the inspector poses a question to the students, “Write what you know about the origins and uses of camphor.” The immensely surprised teacher poses a counter question to the inspector, “This is not history, why should you ask such a question to the students? Ask about karaka, samasa or abyaya.” Datta goes on to issue an admonition,‘Teachers only reveal their own ineptitude by raising such objections. A literary text includes subjects of a historical, pauranic or geographical nature. But many a teacher do not consider it their duty to explain those subjects to the students’9 (Datta 1879: 2). We will return to the reference to history in this fictional scene. Here, it would suffice to say that by creating a hypothetical dramatic exchange between hapless students, an utterly surprised traditional teacher of literature and an authoritative and enlightened colonial school inspector, the preface forges a connection between literary education and an internal experience and understanding of a given subject. More importantly, it presents this emphasis on internal experience and understanding as a dramatic departure from the convention, as a novel phenomenon in literature pedagogy. This emphasis on internal experience and understanding is most urgent when it comes to poetry, particularly, poetry that gives expression to 215

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uchha bhava or elevating sentiments. Pedagogy of poetry, the preface submits, should pay attention to the issues of lyricism and ornamentation. It should sensitize pupils to the distinct nature of poetic diction. ‘While teaching poetry’, Datta writes, ‘one should pay attention to the virtues of lyricism and ornamentation. One should explain to students crucial differences between the languages of poetry and prose.’ However, particular esteem is reserved for the kind of poetry wherein elevated sentiments find expression. Pupils should learn such poetry by heart: it would help them to cultivate a refined interiority (manasika utkarsa); ‘if students are made to learn by heart and memorize the kind of poetry wherein elevated sentiments find expression’, Datta writes, ‘it would help them cultivate a refined interiority’10 (Datta 1879: 2). The preface thus eventually makes a connection between literary education and the cultivation of a refined interiority via a perusal of elevated sentiments. Repeated exposure to and a thorough understanding of the elevated sentiments expressed in literature help the reader cultivate a refined interiority. Datta moves literary education away from its traditional moorings in the more established disciplines of grammar and language pedagogy and attaches to it an emphasis on bhava. Elevated sentiment or uchha bhava as it is called in the preface operates as a marker to fence the disciplinary boundaries of literature in late nineteenth-century colonial Orissa. It quickly acquired the proportions of a keyword in Oriya literary modernity of the era.

Rachana and history Bhava was not the only keyword of colonial literary education. Rachana – composition, realist prose narrative – was another. If an emphasis on bhava enables Bhuvaneswar Dutta to differentiate literary education from grammar pedagogy, rachana helps him to align literature with history. Both literary education and history pedagogy require a pupil to cultivate his skills of composition and acquire a mastery over realist prose. It is in its narrative aspect that literature finds reason to forge alliances with history. This sense of alliance comes through in a passage from the preface. It begins with a lament that Oriya students of literature are particularly poor in their narrative skills; ‘The practice of anulikhana’, Datta writes, is mostly absent in the schools of Utkala. If we had followed the convention of asking students to write passages about what they read in their own language, we would not have so many of them with so pathetic skills in composition. Let alone other subjects, very few students can write summary accounts of even historical 216

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subjects. Even though composition is not the primary aim of history pedagogy, still then, for the sake of enhancing memory skills, if we employ the students to write, in keeping with proper methodology, summary accounts of history, it will improve many fold their powers of narration.11 (Datta 1879: 3) Powers of realist narration or rachana shakti is thus what both literature and history pedagogy aim to cultivate; if this is a secondary aim for history pedagogy, for literary education in late nineteenth-century Orissa, this seems to be a quite important goal. To return to the fictional scene in a literature classroom that Datta constructs, when the colonial school inspector asks students to write about the origins and uses of camphor, he offers them an exercise in realist narration. The traditional teacher who equates literature with grammar is surprised. ‘But this [literature] is not history! Why do you ask such a question?’ he responds. His opposition helps the preface to dramatize the advent of a new epistemological order where narration – more accurately, narration in realist prose – is no longer considered the sole prerogative of history pedagogy, and it comes to be taught as a crucial part of literary education. His opposition draws attention to how the preface constructs and presents the relationship between two emerging academic disciplines: though realist prose narrative is closely associated with historiography, history pedagogy affords it less attention. Literary education begins to include prose-narrative in its ambit and affords it more emphasis. Literature pedagogy aims to cultivate realist prose with the full consciousness that it forges an alliance with historiography. It seems that this desire to form an alliance was one sided. It was literature that was more interested to find common cause with history. On its part, history pedagogy was caught up in a complex position. On the one hand, at the level of normative theory, history sharply distinguished itself from literature. On the other hand, at the level of empirical praxis, history mobilized literary genres and forms to cultivate its narrative aspect. History thus fashioned its disciplinary identity through an oscillation between the normative and the empirical. This becomes clear if we turn to another archival document, the Model Questions, History of India: Adarsha Prashnavali, Bharatavarshara Itihasa. Co-authored by Bhola Nath De and Haris Chundra Sarkar, it was published in the same year as Datta’s Model Questions on Oriya Literature, 1879.12 It is quite possible that these model questions on history and literature were conceived as companion projects. The prefaces to these 217

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volumes pay homage to Radhanatha Raya as their common source of inspiration.13 Model Questions, History of India does not feature any self-reflexive commentary on history pedagogy. In the absence of self-reflexive commentary, we rely on a perusal of the questions in the collection to arrive at general conclusions. First: we will turn to those questions in the collection that work to fashion the normative identity of history. These are theoretical in their orientation and appear at the very beginning of the volume. I maintain the chronological order in which they appear: ‘What is history’ ‘What is the purpose of history’;‘Whether or not reading history generates a tendency in the reader to desire and do good of his nation (desha hitaisita brutti)?’; ‘History is chiefly divided into how many categories?’; ‘What differentiates old from modern history ( puratana o adhunika itihasa)?’; ‘Presently, the English are our masters ( prabhu atanti). Whether or not a perusal of their history will be beneficial to us?’ ‘What aspect of a country should we broadly acquaint ourselves with before we go on to read its history?’; ‘What is the correct meaning of the miraculous events (asadharana ghatana) we encounter in history?’ and ‘What are the differences between history and biography ( jivana charita)?’14 (De and Sarkar 1879: 1). A chronological reading of these questions leads one to make preliminary observations on the normative status of history as a discipline. Oriya pupils learn to associate history with the nation: reading history inspires the reader to work for national well-being. This desire for national wellbeing is caught up in a master–slave dialectic: presumably, the more one peruses the glorious history of the English masters, the more one desires his or her own national well-being. Oriya pupils also learn that history is written in different forms: some of these forms are more modern than others. Possibly, the older form of historiography does not properly explain the nature of supposedly miraculous events. In this context, it is important to differentiate modern history from literature: particularly, from certain genres of literature, which might look suspiciously like history, such as the biography ( jivana charita). History thus fashions its normative disciplinary identity by forging a close association with the ideas of nation and national well-being. But important for our discussion is the point that history makes a conscious effort to distance itself from literature. Second: we will now turn to those questions in the collection that instruct the pupils in the praxis of historiography. The praxis of historiography demands that students cultivate their powers of prose-narration. Towards this end the volume mobilizes the very literary genre from which it normatively seeks to distance itself, namely biography, jivana charita. Divided into diverse periods such as ‘Hindu Rajatva’, ‘The Mughal 218

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Empire’, ‘Story of the Marathas’, ‘The European Merchants’ and ‘Orissa’, the collection includes questions like, ‘Write biographies ( jivana bruttanta) of Ramachandra, Ydhisthira, Duryodhana, and Krishna’, ‘Write a short biography ( jivani) of Mahmood Ghazni’, ‘Write a short biography ( jivani) of Rana Sanga’, ‘Write a biography ( jivani) of Shivaji’, ‘Write biographies ( jivani) of the famous French military commanders in India’ and ‘Write the life histories ( jivana bruttanta) of Haider and Tipu.’15 Students are thus expected to cultivate the art of composing biographies in praxis even though they are instructed to distinguish modern historiography from the literary genre on a normative register. As a discipline history thus chooses not to include its narrative aspect in the normative project of self-definition. If we read these model questions together, literature pedagogy seems to force on history an awareness of its narrative aspect. And it is in this aspect that it sought to make common cause with history. This making of a common cause can be read as an expansionist move since literature forces history to confront, as it were, its literariness. This expansionist consciousness finds fuller and clearer articulations towards the end of the century. We will return to those articulations. Presently, a brief reflection on the relationship between bhava and rachana, the keywords of Oriya literary education, is in order.

Bhava and rachana: synchronic negotiations As keywords of literary education, bhava and rachana worked in close proximity. Bhava, as we would discuss a little later, was an older pre-colonial category of Oriya poetics, while rachana, in the sense of realist prose narrative, was a new phenomenon. Together, they constituted the idea or experience known as literary in late nineteenth-century Oriya public sphere. Even a very brief perusal of Model Questions on Oriya Literature reveals how closely did these categories operate. Let us consider two particular questions. The first addresses a poem titled Nirbasitara Vilapa; the speaker of the monologue finds himself marooned on a lonely island and takes the opportunity to extol the value of human fraternity and society. The second addresses another poem titled Nija Sainya Prati Shivaji; it is also a dramatic monologue where the speaker, the famous historical warrior Shivaji, exhorts his soldiers to wage a heroic war against invaders. Both the monologues are from a collection of poetry, Kabitabali, by Radhanatha Raya and Madhusudan Rao, the prime movers of literary modernity in Oriya.16 The model questions are, ‘Retaining the [overriding] sentiment of the poem Nirbasitara Vilapa, narrate the entire story in simple prose’ 219

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and ‘What aesthetic sentiment saturates the inspiring words of Shivaji, and what particular thoughts and feelings find expression in them?’17 I draw attention to how the model questions require the pupils of literature to combine their critical appreciation of elevating literary sentiments with a cultivation of their skills of prose narration. As the keywords of late nineteenth-century literary education, bhava and rachana worked in tandem: if sentiment required elaboration and explication through realist prose narration, in its turn, narration relied on elevating sentiments to sustain the reader’s interest. Engaged in the task of evolving a secure disciplinary identity for itself, literary education mobilized the categories of bhava and rachana to construct comparisons with other academic disciplines, most notably grammar and history. I use the phrase ‘synchronic’ to describe these comparisons. It needs to be noted that grammar and history were in the process of evolution themselves. The term ‘synchronic’ helps to refer to these comparisons and negotiations between simultaneously evolving academic disciplines in colonial Orissa. The synchronic negotiations literature initiated featured an expansionist trajectory. As markers of the literary domain, bhava and rachana had a janus-like quality. Looking inward, they helped literature to demarcate its disciplinary boundaries. Looking outward, they prompted literature to see, as it were, literariness in the world at large. That is, literature discovered bhava and rachana wherever it looked at. In other words, the normative boundaries of literature kept expanding to include a wide range of discursive traditions within its ambit. This expansionist consciousness finds its fullest articulation in the Utkala Sahitya.

Sahitya rajya: an expansionist discourse The Utkala Sahitya was the most influential literary periodical in early twentieth-century Orissa. From its inauguration in 1897 till the demise of its charismatic founding editor, Viswanatha Kara, in 1934, the periodical remained the most crucial site for discussions on literature, its pedagogy and its role in Oriya society at large. In its editorial pages, Kara unfurled his vision of a literary imperium, or sahitya rajya. He conceived literature territorially, as a kingdom, a rajya and insisted that all affairs concerning human life and society should find a place within this kingdom. In other words, the literary imperium included within its territorial boundaries all varieties of discourses on human life, religious, historical and economic. True to this vision, Kara published essays on religion, history and economy besides novels, poetry, and literary criticism in his periodical 220

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that bore the title ‘Utkala Sahitya’, literally, ‘literature in Oriya’, alternately, ‘Orissa literature’. I will conclude this section with a long quotation from an editorial essay in the Utkala Sahitya. Here Kara confronts the question as to where to draw the normative boundaries of literature. Some of his readers were unhappy that he published essays on religion. They felt that a literary periodical should refrain from religious discussions. Kara’s response lent full voice to the expansionist trajectory that was inherent in literature since its inception as an academic discipline: We have said it earlier, and say it now as well: religion does not fall outside the boundaries of literature. In a larger sense, all aspects of human life and society can and should fall under the purview of literature. Otherwise, what is the utility of literature? Literature is not only about a little pleasure; it is a most effective means to progress. The little pleasure inherent in literature also works as an aid in this path [of progress]; it helps human heart to remain joyous, and bear the hardships of work life. What ever that may be, we will never agree to banish the best aspect of human life from the realm of literature. We will never hesitate to publish well argued and rich essays on all religions in the Utkala Sahitya.18 (Nayak 1999: 200–201) Literature is a most effective means to progress since it enables an appreciation of elevating sentiments, uchcha bhava. Pursuit and cultivation of elevating sentiments also gives pleasure. Through out his writing career, Kara was preoccupied with uchha bhava, and we will return to it later in this chapter. Here, let it suffice to take note of Kara’s territorial conception of literature as a realm, sahitya rajya, and his desire to include all aspects of human life within its pale. This expansionist consciousness marked literary modernity in colonial Orissa.

Colonial philosophy of education: interiority and individuality Scholars would agree that a new philosophy of pedagogy acquired discursive power in colonial educational institutions towards the close of 1860s. Literature emerged as an academic discipline in this changed intellectual environment. The present section of the chapter will enquire into this new philosophy of education. 221

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As our point of departure we will analyse a conduct book on pedagogy, the Manual of Teaching: Siksha Vidhana. Dwarakanatha Chakravarty compiled it in Oriya; I use its ‘new edition’ published in 1881.19 Chakravarty worked as the superintendent of the Normal School at Cuttack. It was in the Normal School that Oriya literature was first introduced into the curriculum around 1868–70.20 The conduct book will thus lend us an access to the philosophy of education that acquires discursive power in the decades when literature emerges as an academic discipline in colonial Orissa.21 The new discourse on education the Manual of Teaching constructs puts emphasis on interiority or antahkarana and individuality or svabhava. First, education is an interiorizing discourse; that is, it seeks to create in a pupil a sense of refined interiority (sumarjita, antahkarana, manara utkarsa sadhana). Second, education is an individualizing discourse; that is it seeks to create in a pupil a well-defined awareness of his individual disposition and subjectivity (svabhava). Both interiority and individuality are related philosophical categories. The Manual of Teaching does not self-consciously reflect on them. It is adequate for our purposes to say that interiority is a preceding category; that is, it is possible to think of interiority without thinking of individuality but not vice versa.22 As an interiorizing discourse, the new philosophy of education displays a moral bent. The Manual of Teaching expects an ideal teacher to possess a refined and polished interiority. He is expected to be a jitendriya, literally, one who has conquered or has complete mastery over his own sense faculties. If a teacher is not able to govern oneself, he cannot expect to be able to govern others. He is expected to set the example of his own flawless conduct and character before his pupils who will, in turn, emulate the standard.23 One particular injunction the Manual of Teaching puts forth will make the moral quality of being a jitendriya clearer. An ideal teacher should conquer his own propensity towards anger and irritation. If students do not understand a subject even after he explains it repeatedly and grow inattentive to what he says, a teacher should not lose control over his temper. Instead of castigating the students, he should introspect and conclude that there might be flaws in his own method of teaching and consequently adopt other more helpful modes of explanation. And if the unavoidable necessity of administering corporal punishment arises, the teacher must deal it out not in a state of anger, but in a calm and composed state of mind. The quality of being able to conquer his own irritation and anger will constitute the ideal teacher as a jitendriya.24 In the final analysis, cultivation of a polished interiority, the training to be a jitendriya is eventually associated with happiness. A refined interiority 222

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enables students to do great and benevolent work (mahata o mangalakara karya) and find happiness in this world (sukha).25 As an individualizing discourse, the new philosophy of education features a disciplinary character. It seeks to cultivate in each pupil an awareness of his particular individual disposition, his subjectivity, svabhava. This is supposed to be accomplished through the practice of disciplinary surveillance. The Manual of Teaching requires teachers to keep a close watch on each and every pupil and to look into his interiority (manara gati nirikshana). Teachers are also required to keep a regular written record of the flaws and qualities they discover in each pupil. Through these practices of close observation and record keeping, teachers are supposed to produce individualized knowledge on each pupil and his disposition. This knowledge of a pupil’s disposition guides a teacher’s conduct towards him: if a pupil is known to be of a timid disposition, the teacher is supposed to be more encouraging in his conduct towards him (utsahadana). Similarly, a teacher was supposed to be truthful in his demeanour (sarala byabahara) towards those pupils who were gentle and hard working. And those pupils, who were rough, could expect the teachers to be mildly harsh on them (kimchita kathina byabahara). Through these various modes of conducting themselves, teachers are supposed to effectively classify and govern (shasana) the students. In its emphasis on producing individualized knowledge on each student and on classifying and governing students accordingly, the discourse on education in the Manual of Teaching sought to cultivate in each student a sense of his particular individual subjectivity.26 The priority that literary education lent to elevating sentiment, uchcha bhava, and realist prose narrative, rachana, needs to be situated in the context of this new philosophy of education and its emphasis on interiority and individuality. If elevating sentiments correspond to a refinement of interiority, realist prose corresponds to the documentation of individual flaws and merits. The colonial literary project, thus, aimed at a refinement of interiority through a perusal of elevating sentiments and a narration of individual subjectivity in realist prose.

Traditional literary education: a critique The Manual of Teaching contrasts the new model of education it advocates with the older model of education prevalent in the chatshalis, the traditional rural schools of Orissa. The conduct book offers a short but important critique of the traditional model of education: it defines the improvement it brings to pedagogical practices in opposition to, as it were, 223

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the backwardness of the traditional model. Here is what Chakravarty has to say about the chatshalis: In the schools of this province, the accepted practice is that the teacher first writes down a few letters on the soil. Pupils learn these letters by repeatedly writing over them. After a few days of such practice in over-writing, pupils learn to write on their own. In course of four or five months pupils acquire the alphabet in this manner. Then they . . . proceed to read from the Koili, Gopibhasa, and the Rasagrantha. The pupils learn only to recognize the letters and read mechanically. They are hardly aware of the meaning of the words (‘sabdartha’). Neither do they learn to appreciate the more subtle sentiments (‘bhavartha’) of the narratives they read. It is also doubtful whether the teachers themselves know any better. Any ways, this model of education is not at all beneficial in the present times. These days, it is not particularly beneficial to learn to merely read from the Koili and the Gopibhasa. . . . Increasingly, people are showing a robust inclination for good poetry (‘uttama kavya’), history, geography, mathematics, and geometry.27 The critique of the traditional education unfolds on two registers. On the one hand, the traditional literary canon – consisting of Koili, Gopibhasa and Rasagrantha, all classics of early modern Oriya bhakti poetry – is not properly taught. Pupils are not encouraged to properly engage with it. Their experience of the canon is confined to merely reading or reciting it as opposed to cultivating a proper understanding or an appreciation of its sentiments or bhava. On the other hand, the taste of the times has changed, and people are showing an inclination for a different literary canon, one that consists of ‘good poetry’ as opposed to the traditional poetry. Thus not only the traditional method of teaching literature but also the traditional consensus on what counts as good literature are put under question. As opposed to the traditional model of education that neither features a good literary canon nor promotes a proper appreciation of it, the new model of literary education lends emphasis on good poetry that gives expression to high sentiments (uchcha bhava) and a proper appreciation of such poetry. A sincere perusal of elevating sentiments expressed in literature helps the reader cultivate what the new philosophy of education values most, a refined interiority. 224

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A modern anxiety? As we saw, the critique of traditional literary education revolved around the crucial category of bhava: the chatshalis did not have a canon that gave expression to elevating sentiments; also, their methods of pedagogy did not encourage students to cultivate a proper appreciation of the canon they had. Ironically, bhava quickly became a source of anxiety for modern literary education as well. The more it emphasized bhava as a touchstone of literary sensibilities, the more anxious it grew that modern Oriya readers of literature were not able to appreciate elevating sentiments properly. Prominent educationists of the time were worried that modern literature pedagogy failed to cultivate in the pupils an ability to value bhava. This anxious sense of failure accompanied the emphasis that literature as a colonial academic discipline put on bhava. Two examples would clarify the point. The anxiety over bhava finds articulation in Madhusudan Rao. Rao is deeply disappointed with the standard of literary education prevalent in modern schools, vidyalayas. Literature is badly taught in most schools of Orissa: nowhere does it acquire the form of, as it ideally should, bhavashiksha, an education in sentiment. And, again, caught up as they are in the charms of recitation and grammar, most teachers themselves do not appreciate bhava. He says: The standard of literary education (sahitya siksha) in the [vernacular] schools of Orissa is absolutely poor. It is most disheartening when we compare it with the standard of literary education prevalent in English medium high schools, and notice the glaring difference between the two systems. Oriya literary education is mostly reduced to a mere learning of alphabets (akshara siksha) and words (sabda siksha). Almost nowhere do we see it acquiring the form of an education in sentiment (bhava siksha), true knowledge (tatva siksha) and composition (rachana siksha). Most teachers are content if a student is able to merely recite from the literature textbook, if he is able to merely say the synonyms and etymology of a few words. It does not matter whether he is able to appreciate the meaning and sentiment of [a given] essay or not ( prabandhara bhava bujhantu ba na bujhantu). This is mostly because the teacher himself does not properly understand the meaning (bhava) of the essay.28 (Rao 2011: 574–575) 225

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This anxiety over bhava finds expression in a slightly altered form in Viswanatha Kara, the editor of the literary periodical Utkala Sahitya. Instead of the word bhava, Kara employs a synonymous word – chinta, idea or thought – to articulate a similar anxiety.29 If Madhusudan is unhappy with pupils and teachers of the modern schools, Kara is unhappy with perhaps the entire reading public in Orissa. Most of the educated class (shikshitashreni) in Orissa, he laments in an essay titled ‘Sahityacharcha’, are not fond of reading books. And those who read do not do so according to the proper method (prakruta paddhati anusare nuhan). Either they read English novels and dramas of an inferior quality, or they choose to ignore the higher aims (uchcha uddeshya) of the finer books they read. In consequence of flawed habits of reading their thoughts gradually lose depth (chintara gavirata krame bilupta hue). And their minds grow so perverted (mana epari bikaragrasta hoi pade) that they are left with no inclination to peruse thoughtful (chintapurna) books. They would spend hours in frivolous and idle gossip; but if the conversation takes a turn towards high and elevating thought (uchcha chintara katha utthapita hele), they lose their cheerfulness and search for ways to leave the place.30 Why is it that bhava becomes a frequent subject of conversation and a source of anxiety in colonial Oriya public sphere? Why is it that modern Oriya literature pedagogy puts emphasis on bhava and then simultaneously grows anxious that it is not able to inculcate in the pupils an ability to appreciate it? It is perhaps because bhava is now expected to do more than what it was doing as a category of literary criticism and of intellectual thought at large in the pre-colonial, and early modern era. It is now expected to be the category around which a new interiorizing and individualizing discourse of education is built. The anxiety over bhava that we encounter in colonial Oriya public sphere eventually refers to the surplus responsibilities it was made to shoulder as a category of thought.

A genealogy of bhava: diachronic negotiations and a surplus discourse Though it is perhaps the most frequently employed category in modern Oriya reflections about literary education, and literature at large, in itself, bhava is not a new or modern category. It is a fundamental category of pre-colonial Oriya aesthetics. If we could write a short history of bhava it will help us to analyse the surplus that modern educationists and litterateurs invest in the usage of this pre-colonial category. This surplus constitutes the site from which arguments need to be made about the newness of the literary sensibility that emerged in late nineteenth-century 226

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Orissa. This is a site where categories are not so much borrowed from Europe, but rather a site where older pre-colonial categories acquire new lives and surplus meanings, a site of diachronic negotiations between the present and the past. It is in this sense that I argue that literature emerges as a surplus discourse in late nineteenth-century Orissa. For a short history of bhava in early modern Oriya literary discourse, we will turn to Jagannatha Dasa’s Bhagavata, particularly to the section that is most popular as Rasa Panchadhyayi.31 The Manual of Teaching mentions both as prescribed texts for literary education in the chatshalis of Orissa. It seems bhava siksha is an integral feature of early-modern Oriya bhakti poetry. Here bhava refers to the sentiment of devotion and love. Poetry teaches the art of devotion to the reader. In this sense, bhava siksha features in Jagannatha Dasa’s Rasa Panchaddhyayi. The bare plot of the early modern narrative is as follows: Krishna is engaged in divine sport with the gopis on the banks of river Yamuna in Vrindavan. Unfortunately, the gopis grow insolent and proud (garba): they consider themselves to be more perfect devotees of Krishna than even the deities in heaven. The all-knowing Krishna decides to teach the insolent gopis a lesson in humility and all of a sudden disappears from the sport-arena. Devastated and inconsolable, the gopis search for Him in vain. They are humbled. They pray and plead for the Lord to return. Eventually, the kind Krishna takes pity and reappears in their midst. Sport begins anew but not before there is an exchange between the gopis and Krisha on the nature and practice of bhava. It is to this exchange that we turn to explore the early modern project of bhava siksha. The exchange begins with the gopis posing questions on the perplexing nature of bhava; some are devoted to people who love them; that is, the sentiment of devotion and love finds fulfilment when it is mutual. Some continue to love people who do not necessarily love them back: that is the sentiment of devotion need not depend on a return gesture in kind. And finally some, like Krishna, miffed gopis allege, do not love people who are devoted to them. How then, the bewildered gopis wonder, should one think of the nature of bhava?32 Krishna responds with assuring words. The worldly people love only with the expectation of a favour in return. There is no dharma of genuine affection in such love. Some people love without any expectation of a return favour. It is like the love of a father or a mother for their child. This is niskama bhava, and such devotion eventually leads to Visnu. Some do not love people who are devoted to them. Such people are either realized saints who are indifferent to the world, or they are merely insolent and hard-hearted (atma badima). The latter are surely sinful.33 Krishna then comments on the nature of genuine devotion 227

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through a simile. Suppose a poor man receives a fortune; he grows very fond of it and guards it with his life. Then suppose, he loses the fortune just as suddenly as he had received it; he grows miserable and continues to dwell upon the lost fortune. He even forgets his food and drink. Thus dwell true devotees on the Lord. Finally, Krishna goes on to assure the gopis that their single-minded bhava has bought Him over and that he is grateful to them for their bhava for Him.34 Then the divine sport resumes. It seems bhava shiksha in Rasa Panchadhyayi means cultivation of the right sort of devotional disposition. Literature pedagogy in the chatshalis where this early modern narrative features as a prescribed textbook aims at a similar cultivation of the sentiment of devotion. The gopis who form the internal audience in the narrative as well as the pupils in the traditional school learn to grow out of self-centred insolence and cultivate a self-less devotional disposition that transcends desire. Modern Oriya imagination cannot think of a project of literary education without the category of bhava, perhaps because traditionally bhava shiksha had been at the centre of literary education. In fact, when modern literature pedagogy speaks of elevating sentiment or uccha bhava, more often than not, it speaks of the sentiment of devotion. Here is Madhusudan Rao for whom reading and teaching poetry is explicitly a spiritual experience. ‘O Teacher,’ he writes addressing a hypothetical teacher of poetry in a modern school, you have taken up the responsibility of teaching poetry. The students are sitting before you utterly dejected. You also, in a dull manner, are explaining to them the meaning of the words. You hardly pay attention to the beauty and the bhava of the poem. How will you teach the tender-heart pupils about the beauty of poetry? How will you groom the newly blooming hearts of the pupils? How will you teach them the glory of the divine poetry that is written across the enchanting blue sky adorned with the sun, the moon and the stars and make their hearts generous and noble? How will you make your pupils listen to the grand hymn of the Master of the Universe that is heard in the solemn sounds of the sea?’35 Both traditional and modern literary pedagogy thus converge on a cultivation of a devotional sentiment. In this sense, traditional literature pedagogy aims at a refinement of interiority, marjita antahkarana, just as much as does modern literary education. Modern literature pedagogy differs from traditional literary education in its disciplinary aspect. Modern pedagogy seeks to cultivate in each 228

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pupil an awareness of his particular individual disposition, his subjectivity, svabhava. This is supposed to be accomplished through the practice of disciplinary surveillance. Bhava is made to bear the weight of a surveillance regime. It bears this surplus responsibility of a disciplinary category. In the preceding quotation from Rao, bhava is accompanied by an interrogation of the teacher of poetry. The ‘how will you’ form, which simultaneously asks a question and shows the way, accompanies the devotion, the elevating sentiment that saturates Rao’s prose piece on the pedagogy of poetry.

Conclusions This chapter revisits Natabara Samantaraya’s thesis: a self-conscious fusion of Indian and European intellectual and cultural traditions constituted the experience known as literary modernity in Oriya. And, the dominant categories of this discursive fusion were European: be it Radhanatha’s realist narration or simplified poetic diction or Madhusudan’s notion of obscenity. The purpose of revisiting this thesis is not so much to challenge the idea of cultural fusion. Rather, it is to explore the historical experience of fusion on a more particular or micro level to see if any Indian category, aesthetic and intellectual, played any role in it. In this context the chapter makes an argument for literary modernity as a surplus discourse. The idea of surplus enables us to locate such sites of cultural fusion where categories are not so much borrowed from Europe, but rather where older pre-colonial Indian categories acquire new lives and surplus meanings. These are sites of diachronic negotiations between the present and the past. A fundamental category of early modern Oriya aesthetics, bhava acquired surplus meanings in the nineteenth-century public sphere. Colonial educationists could not think of a project of literary education without the category of bhava, perhaps because traditionally bhava shiksha had been at the centre of literary education. However, they invested a surplus in their mobilizations of this pre-colonial category: a new disciplinary surveillance, also, realist prose narration. The literary domain was one among many sites of cultural fusion. Historically, such sites evolved together. That is, literature evolved as an academic discipline not in isolation but in conversation with simultaneously evolving disciplines such as history. Literature initiated synchronic comparisons and negotiations with other emergent disciplines. These synchronic negotiations featured an expansionist trajectory. The normative boundaries of literature kept expanding to include a wide range of discursive traditions within its ambit. This expansionist consciousness 229

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found its fullest articulation in the notion of a literary imperium. As the marker of the literary domain, bhava played a crucial role here as well. It had a janus-like quality: looking inward, it helped literature to demarcate its disciplinary boundaries. Looking outward, it prompted literature to see, as it were, literariness in the world at large.

Notes 1 Samantaraya (1983: 95–147) [1964]. See the chapter ‘Adhunika Pathyapustakara Adi Parichaya’. 2 Ibid., 130–131. 3 Ibid., 259–260, 316–317. 4 Ibid., 255–371. 5 Datta (1879). Henceforth MQOL. 6 Ibid., 1. sahitya ki ritire shikhaile chhatramanaka prakruta upakara darshiba ebisayare atialpa sankhyaka shikshakanka astha dekhajae, adhikamsha shikshaka bibechana karanti je vyakarana shiksha sahityara ekamatra uddeshya; tenu semane vyakarana sambaddhiya bisayamana chhatramananku shikhai parile apanaku krutakarya mananti. Ehi vranta samskara jetedina paryanta tirohita na heba tete dina paryanta sahitya shikshara prakruta uddeshya sadhita hebara asha durasha matra. 7 Ibid., 2. upara likhita mantabya dvara mohara emanta bolibara tatparya nuhen je, vyakarana prati bartamana jeun parimanare manojoga pradatta heuachhi sethira hrasa hebara uchit. Vyakarana bhasara dvara svarupa, tenu vyakarana prati anastha darshaibara je nitanta gurutara truti eha bolibara bahulya. 8 Ibid., 2. sahitya padhaiba samayare adhita bisaya chatramane bujhiparile ki nahin ebam taha semanankara prakruta rupe hrudayangama helaki nahin sarbaprathame eha dekhibara abashyaka. Ehi uddeshya siddha hela uttaru vyakarana sambadhiya prasna pacharibara uchit. 9 Ibid., 2. Bastu bichara padha heuchi, parikshaka chatra mananku pacharile “karpurara utpatti ebam byabahara sambandhare jaha jana taha lekha.” Shikshaka chakita hoi kahile eta itihasa nuhen, apana ebhali prasna kahinki pacharila? Karaka, samasa, abyaya pacharantu. Ehipari apatti utthapana dvara sikshaka mane kebala apanara anupajuktatara parichaya dianti. Sahitya granthare aitihasika, pauranika athaba bhugola sambandhiya kathara ulleka thae matra aneka shikshaka sehi bisayamana chatramananku bujhai deba apanara kartabyara anga mananti nahin. 10 Ibid., 2. padya adhyapana samayare chhanda ebam alankara prati drusti rakhibara abashyaka. Gadya ebam padyara bhasara bailakshanya chhatramananku bujhaidebara uchit. Parantu jeun kabita manankare uchha bhabara adhika sphurti achhi sehi kabitamana chhatramananku mukhasta karaile tatdvara manasika utkarsa sadhita hoipariba. 11 Ibid., 3. anulikhana pratha praya kaunasi utkala bidyalayare prachalita nahin. chhatramananku pathita bisaya apanabhasare lekhaibara riti prachalita thile rachanare semanankara epari sochaniya apatuta sadharanatah lakhita huanta nahin. anya bisaya teniki thau aitihasika bisayamanankara sarasangraha suddha, ati alpa chhatre kariparanti. jadicha rachana itihasa sikshara mukhya uddeshya nuhen, tathacha smrutira sahajya nimante supranalimate chhatramananku itihasa sarasangraha lekhibaku prabrutta karaile tatdvara rachana shaktira bahuparimanare unnati hebara sambhabana.

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12 De and Sankar (1879). Henceforth MQHI. 13 Writing the preface to MQHI in January 1879, De and Sarkar acknowledge their debts to Radhanatha, By the permission and advise of our respected teacher Srijukta Babu Radhanatha Raya, the honorable joint inspector of schools, we compile this Model Questions on history. Since the honorable teacher has edited the manuscript, and has given permission for an immediate publication of the volume, we are grateful to him, and humbly request the officials of the education department that we would consider our efforts justly rewarded if this volume . . . is inducted into school curricula. ambhamananka pujaniya sikshaka srijukta babu radhanatha raya bidyalaya samuhara ja i mahashayanka anumati o upadesha anusare itihasara adarsha prashnabali namaka ehi pustaka pranayana kalu. Sikshaka mahashaya ehara pandulekhya samsodhana kari shighra prakasha kariba nimante anumati debaru ambhemane anugruhita hoi shiksha bibhagara kartrupakshiya mananka thare etiki matra prarthana karu achhu je . . . ehaku sadare bidyalaya samuhare prachalita karaile parishrama saphala janana karibu. Writing his preface to MQOL four months later in June, Datta is even more forthcoming in acknowledging debts to Radhanatha, It will not be an exaggeration to say that the widely honored Babu Srijukta Radhanatha Raya is the [real] compiler of this volume. He has composed most of the questions included in the volume. It is only out of a sense of kind affection for me, and solely for my benefit, he gave his unfinished manuscript to me. I refrain from writing more since I do not think that writing more grateful words will be the just reward of the favor he did to me. ehi pustakara praneta bahu manyaspada srijukta babu Radhanatha Raya atanti kahile atyukti heba nahin karana ehi pustakara adhikamsha prasna tahanka kruta, kevala ambha prati sneha basharu ambhara upakara nimmitta pustaka khanda samapta nohunu ambhanku pradana kari achhanti; etadartha ambhe ethare kaunasi krutajnata suchaka bakya prayoga kale je ukta upakarara uchit puraskara heba, eha namani kshanta rahilu. It seems quite likely that Radhanatha conceived these volumes on history and literature as companion projects. Reading these compilations together will grant us a better understanding of the evolution of literature and history as academic disciplines in colonial Orissa. 14 Ibid., 1. ‘Itihasa ki?’ ‘Itihasara uddeshya ka’n?’ ‘Itihasa patha dvara desha hitaisita brutti uddipita hue ki nahin?’ ‘Itihasa pradhanatah kete bhagare bibhakta?’ ‘Puratana o adhunika itihasara prabheda kan?’ ‘Inrejamane samprati ambhamanankara prabhu atanti. Emanankara purba bibarana patha dvara ambhamanankara kaunasi subhaphala phalli pare ki nahin?’ ‘Kaunasi deshara itihasa siksha kariba purbare tatdeshiya keun bisayara sthula brutanta shiksha kari rakhiba uchit?’ ‘Itihasara asadharana ghatanara prakruta artha ki?’ ‘Itihasa o jivanacharitara prabheda kan?’ 15 Ibid., 3, 4, 10, 18, 20, 22. ‘ramachandra, judhisthira, duryodhana o krusnankara jibana brutanta lekha;’ ‘mamudra jibani samkshepare lekha;’ ‘rana sanganka jibani samkshepare

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16 17 18

19

20 21

lekha;’ ‘shivajinkara jibani lekha;’ ‘bharatavarsastha bikhyata farasis senapati mananka jibani lekha.’ ‘haidar o tipura jibana brutanta lekha.’ Rao and Rai (1887). Datta (1879: 13, 29). ‘nirbasitara vilapara bhava gheni sarala gadyare samudaya bisaya it lekhi jaa?’ and ‘shivajinka utsaha bakya keun rasatmaka ebam sethire keun bhavara bisesa sphurana lakhita hue?’ Nayak (1999: 200–201). See ‘Kaifiat’. It appeared in the Utkal Sahitya,Vol. 1, No. 11. [kehi kehi ambhamananku janai achhanti je sahitya patrikare dharmara alochana kariba uchit heu nahin, tatdvara patrikara nama asarthaka heuachhi] . . . ambhemane kahiachhu o bartaman madhya kahuachhu je dharma sahityara sima bahirbhuta nuhen – bistruta arthare manaba jibana o samajara sarvabidha vyapara sahitya madhyare sthana paipare evam paiba ekanta uchit. Ta nahele sahityara upajogita keunthare? Sahitya kebala kimchit ananda sambhogara bisaya nuhen – eha unnatira gotie prakrusta upaya. Sahityra antarnibista ananda tikaka madhya ehi pathara sahayaka. Eha manaba hrudayaku sarasa kari kathora karma kshetrara klesha bahana karibaku sakshama kare. Se jaha heu, manaba jibanara sarbashrestha bisayaku sahitya rajyara simaru nirbasita karibaku ambhemane adau raji nohun. Ambhemane sakala dharma sambandhare juktijukta o saragarbha prabandha utkala sahitya re prakasha karibaku kadapi paschatpada hebu nahin. Chackravarti (1881). ‘Chackravarti’ will be spelt ‘chakravarty’ for ease of reading. I do not have access to the original edition. The Normal School was established in Cuttack in 1869. Since SV was explicitly meant for use in Normal Schools in Orissa, the original edition must have been published not before 1869. See Mohapatra (1995: 119). Samantraya (1983: 130). Besides, like the authors of the model questions discussed before, Chakravarty belonged to the modern intellectual circle at the center of which stood Radhanatha Raya. In the preface to the revised new edition of MTSV, Chakravarty writes, My good friend, srijukta babu Radhanatha Raya has kindly perused the book from the beginning to the end, and has revised certain sections of it, and has even added certain new subjects to it. Hence, we remain tied to him in the bonds of gratitude. This time round, the honorable government has given us a helpful grant of 150 rupees to defray the expenses of printing. We remain grateful to the government for encouraging such a noble work as the publication of the Manual of Teaching. It is hoped, this manual will be of particular help to the teachers of the native schools and pathsalas. mo dbandhu srijukta babu Radhanatha Raya e pustaka khandika adyopranta dekhi dei achanti, aau kaunasi kaunasi sthana samshodhana o sthana bishesare nutana bisaya madhya sannibesita karideiachhanti. sethipain tahanka nikata krutajnata pashare baddha rahilu. ethara sikshavidhanara mudranartha mahamanya gabarnmenta ambhaku ta150 nka dei bishesa sahayata kari achhanti. epari satkaryara utsahadana nimante ambhe gabarmentanka nikata badhita rahilu. e pustaka deshiya pathashala shikshaka o abadhana manankara bishesa upakari heba, e rupa asha karajae.

22 Chakravarty (1881: 1–2, 12). 23 Ibid., 6. ‘Teachers should be jitendriya. How can he govern others who cannot govern his own sense faculty? A teacher’s disposition and behaviour should be

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flawless. Students can easily learn ethics if they always see before them the good behavior of their teachers.’ sikshakankara jitendriya heba uchita. jeun byakti apana indriya mananku shasana kari napare, se anyaku keun prakare shasana kari pariba? sikshakankara svabhaba o byabahara dosashunya heba abashyaka. shikshakankara uttama bybahara sabubele darshana kale, pilamane ati sahajare nitisiksha kari paribe. 24 Ibid., 9, 13. 25 Ibid., 1. ‘A teacher’s primary task is refinement of the mind. The mind of the youth is so flexible that it can be turned into any direction. If it [the young mind] is well cultivated, it can accomplish great and benevolent deeds. Otherwise it becomes the source of great mischief. We live in this world which gives us thousands of reasons to be joyful; but if the mind is not illumined by the light of knowledge, then it becomes the source of all unhappiness.’ manara utkarsa sadhana karibara sikshakankara pradhana karma . . . balakamanankara mana ede namanashila je jeun adaku ichha sehi adaku phera jai pare. uttama rupe karsita hele tatdvara ati mahat o mangalakara karya sampadita hoi pare, taha nahele maha anarthara mulibhuta hue. sahasra sukhara adhara svarupa ehi abani mandalare thai jebe mana jnanalokare pradipta na hue tebe samasta asukhara karana hoi uthiba. 26 Ibid., 12. ‘Teachers should always keep a watch on the flights of their mind, and when they see a singular flaw or quality in them, they should immediately write it down in a notebook. By this means, teachers would easily come to know about their individual dispositions. It is a duty to behave towards a pupil in accordance with his nature. Give encouragement to those who are fearful in their disposition; behave well with them who are polite, good natured, and work hard to acquire an education; and show some harshness to them who are quite spoilt.’ sikshaka sabubele semananka manara gati nirikshana karuthibe, ebam jetebele semanankara kaunasi bisesa dosa ba guna dekhi paribe tatkshanat eka khanda pustakare taha lekhi rakhibe. ehi upaya dwara sikshaka anayasare semananka swabhavadi abagata hoi paribe. jebalaka jementa prakruti samparna tahara prati tadanujayi byabahara kara kartabya. jeunmane bhiru swabhava semananku utsaha dana, jeunmane ati bhadra, sushila o lekhapadha sikhibare atyanta parishrami, semananka prati sarala byabahara, ebam jeunmane atishaya dusta, semananka prati kinchit kathina byabahara prakasha kariba. 27 Ibid., 25–26. e deshiya chatashalire praya ehi prakara riti dekha jae je prathamatah sikshaka dui chari gota akshara mruttika upare khadire lekhi dianti, ebam balaka mane taha madanti. kichhi dina ehi rupa atibahita hele semane sehi akshara talare svayam lekhibaku siksha karanti. ehi pranalire praya chari pancha masare barna siksha samapta hue. tadanantara semane sataraphala siksha kari, koili, gopi bhasa, rasagranthadira patharambha karanti. balakamane kebala barna chinhi padhibaku sikhanti, sabdartha o bhavartha kichimatra abagata huanti nahin. semane jeun abadhananka nikatare siksha karanti, semane madhya taha jananti kin a sandeha. se jaha heu, bartamana jepari samaya upasthita hoi achhi ethire etadrusha sikshare bishesa phala labha hebara sambhavana nahin. e kshane koili gopibhasa kimchit padhibaku parile, athaba desha prachalita pranalire anka kasibaku siksha kale bishesa upakara darshita nahin. uttama uttama kavya, itihasa, bhugola, anka, kshetratatvadi siksha karibaku lokamanankara vasana kramasha adhikatara prabala heuachhi. 28 Rao (2011). See ‘Pathyapustaka Adhyapana,’ 374–375. utkala vidyalaya manankare sahitya sikshara mana atyanta sochaniya. uchcha inraji skul manankare sahitya sikshara sahita tulana

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29

30 31 32

kari ubhaya ritira praveda dekhile mana ekabeleke hatasa hoijae. utkala sahitya siksha adhikansha sthalare kebala akshara siksha athaba sabdasiksha matra ate. kintu eha praya kaunasi sthanare bhava siksha, tatva siksha, evam rachana siksha rupare parinata hoithibara dekhajae nahin. chhatra mane sahitya pustakaku anai padhigale evam prabandhara bhava bujhantu ba na bujhantu dui charita sabdara pratisabda evam byutpatti kahi parile sikshaka santusta hoi rahanti; karana sikshaka nije prabandhara bhava samyak rupe bujhi nahanti. Etymologically, the word bhava conveys a range of meanings: feeling and sentiment, idea or thought and meaning or purport. See Praharaj (1936: 6076, 6077). Also see Dash (2013: 630). Both Praharaj and Dash suggest bhava and chinta as synonymous words. Nayak (1999: 29–30). See, the essay ‘Sahityacharcha.’ The essay was published in 1896 in the collection Vividha Prabandha. Mishra (1995). The 30–34 chapters from the 10th skanda of Jagannatha Dasa’s Bhagavata is called Rasa Panchadhyayi. Mishra (1995: 86–87), 33rd adhyaya, 16 stanza. ‘Holding both the arms of Hari, the women of Gopa spoke with anger. They said, ‘listen o Lord of our lives, we saw a strange thing. Some are devoted to people who love them. Some continue to love people who do not necessarily love them back. And some, like you o Lord, do not love people who are devoted to them . . . O Lord please remove these doubts.’

harira beni bhuja dhari, kope bolanti gopa nari / bolanti shuna prana natha, ambhe dekhilu biparita / bhajanta jane ke bhajai, na bhajile ba bhaje kehi / bho natha tohara parae, bhave na bhajanti thokae / se benikula na bhajanti / bho natha pheda manu bhranti. 33 Mishra (1995: 87), 33rd adhyaya, 17–19 stanza. ‘Hearing this, Krishna reassures the young women of Vraj, and says with a smile, “listen o all the women of Gopa, people love according to their own dispositions. The worldly people love only with the expectation of a favor in return. There is no dharma of genuine affection is such love. Such worldly love disappears when it does not find reciprocation. Some people love without any expectation of a return favor. It is like the love of a father or a mother for their child. Such people are great indeed; they eventually go to Visnu. Some do not love people who are devoted to them. Such people are either realized saints who are indifferent to the world, or they are merely insolent. The latter are as sinful as those who go against their own guru.” ’ shuni bolanati krusna hasi, varaja jubati ashvasi / shuna sakala gopanari, je jaha bhave priti kari / eka areka upakare, bhajanti samsara bevare / tahin suhruda dharma nahin, bhava na dekhile chhadai / bhava na dekhile bhajai, tata janani praya hoi / tankara boli badapana, se pai bisnura charana / thoke bhajile na bhajanti, atma badima prakashanti / se guru droha papa pain, ki aba atmarama sehi. 34 Mishra (1995: 88), 33rd adhyaya, 20–21 stanza. ‘Those who are devoted to me, thus is their disposition. [Suppose] a poor man receives a fortune; he fondly guards it with his life. Then [suppose], he looses the fortune. He grows miserable and continues to dwell upon the lost fortune. He even forgets his food and drink. Thus are my devotees. On the earth, they remain thus devoted to me. I know of your devotion; it is bereft of duplicity. I will not be able to return this favor of yours in years to come. O maidens of Gopa, you have shattered even the fetters of household with devotion. You are liberated from the chains of birth and rebirth. You have bought me over with your devotion.’ mote je bhakati karanti, emanta hoe tanka mati / daridra jenhe dhana pai, pranu adhika sambhalai / puni harai sehi dhana, bisada hoe tara mana / bhalai dhane mana dei, kshuda

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trusnahin na lagai / tesane hoi mora loke, bhakati karuthanti loke . . . tumbhara bhava mu janai, chhanda kutila maya nahin / aneka kalehen tumbhara, shujhi na pare upakara / gruhara mayara shankuli, bhave katila gopa bali / tumbhara janma bandha nahin / mote kinila bhava dei. 35 Rao (2011: 371–372). See ‘Kavita Adhyayana’. he sikshaka! tumbhe kavita padhaibara bhara grahana kariachha. chhatramane tumbha nikatare mriyamana bhavare basi achhanti. tumbhe nije mriyamana bhavare sabdara artha kahideuachha. kavitara saundarya, kavitara bhava prati tumbhara kichhimatra drusti nahin. tumbhe kipari sukumaramati balaka mananku kavitara saudarya sikhai pariba? tumbhe kipari chhatra manankara nutana hrudaya kusumara shribardhana kari pariba? tumbhe kipari sunila gaganapatare jeun ravi chandra nakshatramayi mahakbita likhita hoiachhi, sethira mahima chhatramananku bujhai semananka pranaku udara karipariba? tumbhe kipari samudrara gambhira dvani madhyare chhatramananku brahmandapatinkara mahastaba shunai pariba?

References Chackravarti, Dwaraka Nath. 1881. Manual of Teaching: Sikshya Vidhana. Balasore: De’s Utkal Press. Dash, Sarveshwar. 2013. Vidyapuri Odiya-Inraji Abhidhana. Cuttack: Vidyapuri. Datta, Bhuvaneswar. 1879. Model Questions on Oriya Literature: Sahitya Bisayaka Adarshaprasnavali. Cuttack: Cuttack Printing Company. De, Bhola Nath, and Haris Chundra Sarkar. 1879. Model Questions, History of India: Adarsha Prasnavali, Bharatavarshara Itihasa. Balasore: Dwarka Nath De. Mishra, Vanamali. (eds.). 1995. Jagannatha Dasanka Rasa Panchaddhyayi. Cuttack: Friends Publishers. Mohapatra, Mahesh Chandra. 1995. Adhunika Siksha O Odisha. Cuttack: Grantha Mandira. Nayak, Archana. (ed.). 1999. Nirbachita Rachanavali: Visvanath Kar: Selected Writings of Visvanath Kar. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Praharaj, G. C. 1936. Purnnachandra Ordia Bhashakosha: A Lexicon of the Oriya Language. Cuttack: The Utkala Sahitya Press. Rao, Madhusudan. 2011. Bhaktakabi Madhusudan Granthavali. Cuttack: Gayatri Prakashini. Rao, Madhusudan, and Radha Nath Rai. 1887. Kabitabali: Part I. 2nd edition. Balasore: De’s Utkal Press. Samantaraya, Natabara. 1983. Odiya Sahityara Itihasa: 1803–1920. Bhubaneswar: Natabara Samantaraya.

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16 MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION IN INDIA AND THE ENGLISH-ONLY MYTH A. Giridhar Rao

The crisis in learning India’s rural schools

India’s ‘crisis in learning’ (Banerji 2014) has been meticulously documented since 2005 by the Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER) – a citizenled survey of about 600,000 children. These surveys test reading and arithmetic skills in every district of rural India. As their website explains, Children in the age group 5–16 are tested in basic reading and basic arithmetic. The same test is administered to all children. The highest level of reading tested corresponds to what is expected in Std 2; in 2012 this test was administered in 16 regional languages. (asercentre.org > ASER Survey > Overview) The survey finds that in 2014, in government and private schools in rural India, only 48 per cent of enrolled students in the fifth grade are able to read a grade two text. That is, 52 per cent are not able to do even that. Over half of the children are at least three grade levels behind where they should be. Further, this is a declining trend: 59 per cent students were able to do this task in 2007 (see ‘Data Query’ on the ASER website). Among children enrolled in government schools, this proportion has dropped from 51 per cent in 2006 to 42 per cent in 2014 (Wadhwa 2015: 19). Even in India’s best-performing states, Kerala (67 per cent) and Himachal Pradesh (75 per cent), a quarter to a third of the children are at least three years behind (ASER 2015). This is in rural India and mostly in the mother 236

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tongue. (But see the section on children of Indigenous Peoples and linguistic minorities.) Before we turn to urban India, let us note the rapid growth of private schools in rural India. From 19 per cent in 2006, private-school enrolment has grown to 31 per cent in 2014 (Wadhwa 2015: 19). As Chavan reports, Private school enrollment in rural India is increasing at about 10 per cent every year or about 3 percentage points per year. In the election year of 2014, about 41 per cent of all of India’s primary age children will be in private schools, and by the time 2019 elections come around, private sector will be the clear major formal education provider in India. (2013: 4) Private tutoring too has expanded considerably. Further, increasingly government schools have an English-medium section side-by-side with non-English-medium sections. However, private and government schools are often only nominally English-medium. The actual teaching happens in the regional language (Mohanty et al. 2010: 217, 223–227). Whether in rural or urban environments, there are, of course, many household factors that contribute to a child’s learning: parents’ educational levels (especially the mother’s); parental involvement in education; family income; and paid, private tuition. As the ASER 2009 report shows, once those factors are controlled for, the contribution of private schools to the child’s learning seems negligible in many states. As Wadhwa notes, ‘Once we control for characteristics other than the type of school the child goes to, the learning differential between government and private schools falls drastically . . . from 20% to a measly 5%’ (Wadhwa 2010: 7). But the role of paid, private tuition is emerging as a significant factor in learning outcomes. Overall, about a quarter of Std. 1–8 rural children in India pay for some private tuition (with wide variations: 72 per cent in West Bengal, 14 per cent in UP and 5 per cent in Rajasthan). Surprisingly, there is hardly any difference between tuition-paying children in government (24 per cent) and private (23 per cent) schools. But the reading ability of Std. 5 governmentschool children jumped from 37 per cent (for those without tuition) to 52 per cent (with tuition). The jump was even more striking for those who lived in katcha houses – 29 to 47 per cent. The gain was much less for private-school children without tuition (62 per cent) and those with tuition (69 per cent). Wadhwa concludes:‘Even after we control for other household characteristics and parents’ education, learning levels of poorer children improve significantly with tuition – about 12 percentage points’ (Wadhwa 2014: 11). 237

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India’s elite schools

What about India’s elite, urban schools? In 2011, Educational Initiatives and the IT company Wipro together published Quality Education Study (QES), a study of eighty-nine ‘top schools’ (as the report called them) – all urban-Indian and English-medium. It concluded that ‘performance in class 4 is found to be below international average’. However, Indian students catch up in the eighth grade, ‘mainly due to their higher achievement in procedural questions (i.e. questions that require straightforward use of techniques or learnt procedures to arrive at the answers)’ (EI-Wipro 2011: 8). This study also compared students in these schools to an earlier study (conducted by the same organizations). As in the ASER reports (noted earlier), ‘Learning levels were found to be significantly lower than what was observed in 2006 in the same schools tested and on the same questions.’ The fall was highest in mathematics and English. The study remarks: ‘Our top schools don’t promote conceptual learning in students. QES results show that there has been a further drop from the already unsatisfactory levels of 2006’ (EI-Wipro 2011: 8). A recent international comparison was the 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test which compared fifteen-year-old boys and girls from seventy-four countries and territories in mathematics, science and reading; India figured seventy-third. Students from only two Indian states participated. The report concluded that the 15-year-old student populations in Tamil Nadu-India and Himachal Pradesh-India were estimated to have among the lowest reading literacy levels of the PISA 2009 and PISA 2009+ participants with more than 80 per cent of students below the baseline of proficiency. Around one-fifth of students in these economies are very poor readers. (Walker 2011: 22; also see Pritchett 2012)1 Given such a comprehensive failure, it is not surprising that Indian students enter higher education and the workplace with inadequate language skills. As Puri (2008) reports, one company says that it ‘rejects 92–93% of applicants for poor English’. Another puts the rejection rate for non-engineering graduates applying to the IT [information technology] and IT-enabled sector, both in ‘voice’ and ‘non-voice’ roles, at 82–83%, for lack of soft skills, 238

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including written and oral English. About 65–75% of applying engineers are rejected for the same reasons. These grim figures reflect a more general malaise, says Puri: The teachers make an important fundamental point, which I hear repeated, time and again, by teachers in other institutions. These problems have their roots in students being language-impoverished rather than just English-impoverished (that is, demonstrating a poor ability in regional languages too), and being virtually cut off from the humanities stream from senior school.

The larger context: mother tongues and other tongues The foregoing remarks should be seen in the context of what worldwide research tells us about mother-tongue-medium education. Decades of work confirms that learning is most effective when a child has eight to ten years of good teaching through the medium of the mother tongue, accompanied by a gradual introduction of other languages, first as subjects, then partly also as teaching languages. This ensures a solid, cognitive foundation for learning non-language subjects. It allows acquisition of other languages while retaining and developing the mother tongue. And it results in better learning of other languages, when compared to nonmother-tongue teaching models (Skutnabb-Kangas 2008).2 These facts are routinely ignored the world over in assimilationist language policies for indigenous peoples, as Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) notes in her monumental study Linguistic Genocide in Education. She calls it ‘genocide’ and justifies that label using international human rights law. This is a process of ‘silent ethnocide – a low-intensity warfare through formal education’ (Pérez et al. 2010: 372). This silent ethnocide has given birth to many movements of Indigenous resistance (see Meyer and Maldonado Alvarado 2010 for an account of many of them from Central and South America). It has also resulted in disastrous educational outcomes. In India, if Indigenous children attend school at all, the medium of instruction is the dominant regional language, not the child’s mother tongue. Together with other infrastructural barriers, this situation ensured that in 2010–2011, of the 23.5 million enrolled Indigenous children, over a third were ‘pushed out’ before the fifth grade. And by grade 10, among Indigenous children in the state of Odisha, the dropout rate was 86.4 per cent for boys and 84.5 per cent for girls (GOI n.d., Tables 2.5–2.7, 2.13–2.14). 239

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ASER (2012: 62) reported that ‘a quarter of all rural children attend primary schools where the medium of instruction is different from their home language’. In another report they observe: Children whose home language is different from the school medium of instruction face enormous additional problems at school. Given the lack of bridging mechanisms to enable a smooth transition from one language to the other, these children tend to attend school far less regularly. Whereas across both classes, about half of all children whose home language was the same as the school language were present in school on all three visits, this proportion is far lower among children whose home language was different from the school language. . . . Learning outcomes for these two groups of children are unequal to begin with and these differences accentuate over the course of one year, both in [grade] 2 and in [grade] 4. (Bhattacharjea et al. 2011: 68–69) The diversity of India’s ‘linguistic commons’ is being systematically eroded by the language policies of its education system (Rao 2011: 13). So, the urgent educational task in India continues to be to strengthen the mother-tongue-based government-school system. But this does not mean a rejection of English. However, it does mean rethinking the two most common fallacies about English-medium education in India. The first fallacy is that of ‘early exposure’. This argues that the earlier the child begins English, the better. The second fallacy is that of ‘maximum exposure’. This claims that the more subjects one teaches in English, the better (Phillipson 1992, Chapter 7; see also Phillipson 2009: 12, 218). Early-exit and early-transition to teaching in a non-mother tongue have repeatedly been shown to give poor results (for a recent case-study from Ethiopia, see Benson et al. 2010, and, more generally, the wealth of references in Heugh and Skutnabb-Kangas 2010; see also Mohanty et al. 2009). Teaching everything in a foreign language is precisely what promotes rotelearning without understanding and kills creativity. In the state of Odisha, the coordinator of an education project kept an ‘education diary’ where he documented the large gap between the enlightened policies of the federal government in New Delhi and the situation in the schools to which the Indigenous Koya children go. Only after his patient explanations did the teachers realize that it is possible for the children to learn both the mother language and acquire the chief regional

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language – that language acquisition can be additive, not necessarily subtractive (Mishra 2008). What is true for Koya-speaking children being taught in Odia holds for Odia-speaking learners being taught in English.3 As English in India becomes ‘nativized’ (Annamalai 2004: 153–155), it is called upon to serve many functions. Among those are the aspirations of the traditionally marginalized – as a tool for social advancement and to equalize opportunities and to re-calibrate historical power equations (Mukherjee 2009; see also Rao 2009). In order to serve these needs too, English-medium education in India needs to reconfigure its relationships in the language economy of India. Its gatekeepers in the education system need to redefine English not as ‘a piece of real estate’ (Dasgupta 1993: 203), but to see its inclusive potential in the project of social transformation. The realities in India include the challenge of the special needs of the first-generation learners, for whom English is a foreign language not reinforced outside the classroom, and . . . the challenge of mass education in English from primary school, whose teachers have a minimal command of English and cannot serve as models for grammar and pronunciation. In addition, these teachers do not have training in second language teaching. (Annamalai 2013: 207) Annamalai goes on to say that the challenge is to prevent the goal of equal access to economic opportunities through English from producing unequal educational outcomes with regard to English. If this challenge is not met squarely, there is a danger of blaming the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy for not availing themselves of the newly opening economic opportunities, due to their inability to learn English well. Inequality will thus be rationalized, if not justified. (Annamalai 2013: 207) An English-medium-only education thus not only gives poor educational results, but it also increases social inequalities. To realize the vision of India’s RTE Act and the state’s social justice agenda, the learner’s linguistic human rights need to be respected.

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Moreover, for citizenship in an increasingly ‘glocal’ world, we need a mother-tongue-based, high-level multilingual education that includes English.

Notes 1 There are, of course, difficulties in drawing general conclusions from standardized achievement tests (see, e.g. Popham 1999). However, in India’s case, several sources identify the problems with the education system. 2 Indeed, early and mid-twentieth-century voices strongly recommended school education in the mother tongue for children in India. This was true of Maulana Azad writing in the 1940s (Azad 2010; also see Habib 2010) and, prominently, Gandhi. From the many instances one could give (Bose 1960), here is one: ‘The medium of a foreign language through which higher education has been imparted in India has caused incalculable intellectual and moral injury to the nation. We are too near our own times to judge the enormity of the damage done’ (Gandhi 1938: 279). 3 In this context, even the preliminary results from the MLE Plus (multilingual education) project are promising. The project is running in Odisha in ten indigenous languages and nearly 200 schools. ‘The MLE Plus approach takes off from exhaustive ethnographic survey of the everyday practices and knowledge of the communities with a view to using the cultural practices to evolve a set of classroom as well as community based activities’ (Panda and Mohanty 2009: 298). Initiatives like these will perhaps persuade policymakers and communities to rethink education strategies.

References (All online sources visited December 2015) Annamalai, E. 2004. ‘Nativization of English in India and Its Effect on Multilingualism’. Journal of Language and Politics. 3(1): 151–162. ———. 2013. India’s economic restructuring with English: Benefits versus costs. In James W. Tollefson, ed. Policies in Education: Critical Issues. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. 191–208. ASER (Annual Status of Education Report). 2012. Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2011 (Provisional). http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20 Reports/ASER_2011/aser_2011_report_8.2.12.pdf ———. 2015. Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2014 (Provisional). http://img. asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ASER%202014/fullaser2014 mainreport_1.pdf Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam. 2010. Words of Freedom: Ideas of a Nation: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. New Delhi: Penguin India. Banerji, Rukmini. 2014. ‘From Invisible to Visible: Being Able To “See” the Crisis in Learning’. Brookings Institution. May 22. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/ education-plus-development/posts/2014/05/22-india-learning-banerji

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Benson, Carol, Kathleen Heugh, Berhanu Bogale, and Mekonnen Alemu Gebre Yohannes. 2010. The medium of instruction in the primary schools in Ethiopia: A study and its implications for multilingual education. In Kathleen Heugh and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, eds. Multilingual Education Works: From the Periphery to the Centre. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. 32–61. Bhattacharjea, Suman, Wilima Wadhwa, and Rukmini Banerji. 2011. Inside Primary Schools: A Study of Teaching and Learning in Rural India. Mumbai: Pratham Mumbai Education Initiative. http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/Inside_Primary_ School/Report/tl_study_print_ready_version_oct_7_2011.pdf Bose, Nirmal Kumar. 1960. On Education: Selections from Gandhi. Ahmedabad, India: Navjivan Trust. http://www.mkgandhi.org/sfgbook/nineteenth.htm ———. 2013. Uphill battle ahead as outcomes go downhill. . . . ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) 2013. Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2012 (Provisional). http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ ASER_2012/fullaser2012report.pdf Dasgupta, Probal. 1993. The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome. Language and Development series. New Delhi: Sage. EI-Wipro. 2011. Quality Education Study. Educational Initiatives and Wipro. http:// www.ei-india.com/wp-content/uploads/Main_Report-Low_Resolution-25– 01.pdf Gandhi, M. K. 1938. ‘Higher Education’. Harijan. 9 July. In Complete Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 73: 21 February 1938–8 September 1938: 278–283. http:// www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/gandhi-literature/mahatma-gandhi-collectedworks-volume-73.pdf GOI (Government of India). n.d. Status of education among scheduled tribes. In Statistical Profile of Scheduled Tribes in India 2013. Ministry of Tribal Affairs. http:// tribal.nic.in/WriteReadData/userfiles/file/Section%20Table/Section2Table.pdf Habib, S. Irfan. (ed.). 2010. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and the National Education System. New Delhi: National University of Educational Planning and Administration. http://nuepa.org/New/Download/Publications/1-Maulana%20Abul%20 Kalam%20Azad%20Book%20.pdf Heugh, Kathleen, and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas. (eds.). 2010. Multilingual Education Works: From the Periphery to the Centre. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Meyer, Lois, and Benjamín Maldonado Alvarado. (eds.). 2010. New World of Indigenous Resistance: Noam Chomsky and Voices from North, South and Central America. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Mishra, M. K. 2008. The magic of the mother tongue: Lessons with Koya children. https://goo.gl/ujnBWj Mohanty, Ajit, Minati Panda, and Rashim Pal. 2010. Language policy in education and classroom practices in India: Is the teacher a cog in the policy wheel? In Kate Menken and Ofelia García, eds. Negotiating Language Policies in Schools: Educators as Policymakers. New York and London: Routledge. 211–231. Mohanty, Ajit, Minati Panda, and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas. (eds.). 2009. Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. 164–175.

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Mukherjee, Alok K. 2009. This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Panda, Minati, and Ajit K. Mohanty. 2009. Language matters, so does culture: Beyond the rhetoric of culture in multilingual education. In Ajit Mohanty, Minati Panda and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, eds. Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. 297–314. http://nmrc-jnu.com/nmrc_ img/NMRC3.pdf Pérez Jacobsen, Susanne, A. Giridhar Rao, and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas. 2010. Book review. In Lois Meyer and Benjamín Maldonado Alvarado, eds. New World of Indigenous Resistance. Noam Chomsky and Voices from North, South and Central America. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010. Language Policy. 9(4): 371–374. http://www. springerlink.com/content/q16x8155ln7l2511/ Phillipson, Robert. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. Linguistic Imperialism Continued. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. PISA (OECD Programme for International Student Assessment). 2009. Database PISA 2009: Interactive Data Selection. http://pisa2009.acer.edu.au/interactive.php Popham, W. James. 1999. ‘Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Educational Quality’. Educational Leadership. 56(6): 8–15. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educationalleadership/mar99/vol56/num06/Why-Standardized-Tests-Don%27t-MeasureEducational-Quality.aspx Pritchett, Lant. 2012. The first PISA results for India: The end of the beginning. Ajay Shah’s blog. 5 January. http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.in/2012/01/first-pisa-resultsfor-india-end-of.html Puri, Anjali. 2008. ‘English Speaking Curse’. Outlook. 24 March. http://www.outlook india.com/article.aspx?237015 Rao, A. Giridhar. 2009. English: A gift imposed and sought. In Alok Mukherjee, ed. This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Muse India 28. http://www.museindia.com/ viewarticle.asp?myr=2009&issid=28&id=1776 ———. 2011. ‘Linguistic Diversity in the Knowledge Commons’. Common Voices. 7. http://iasc2011.fes.org.in/common-voices-7.pdf Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. 2008 [2000]. Linguistic Genocide in Education or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. ———. 2008. Language, education and (violations of ) human rights. In Symposium on Linguistic Rights in the World, the Current Situation. Geneva: United Nations. http:// www.linguistic-rights.org/tove-skutnabb-kangas Wadhwa, Wilima. 2010. Are private schools really performing better than government schools? ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) 2010. Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2009 (Provisional). http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publica tions/ASER%20Reports/ASER_2009/Aser2009ReportFull.pdf ———. 2014. Private inputs into schooling: Bang for the buck? ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) 2014. Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2013 (Provisional). http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ ASER_2013/ASER2013_report%20sections/aser2013fullreportenglish.pdf

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———. 2015. Government vs private schools: Have things changed? ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) 2015. Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2014 (Provisional). http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ ASER%202014/fullaser2014mainreport_1.pdf Walker, Maurice. 2011. PISA 2009 Plus Results: Performance of 15-Year-Olds in Reading, Mathematics and Science for 10 Additional Participants. Melbourne: ACER Press. http://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=pisa

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17 ENGLISH STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA Caste, class and power Arun P. Mukherjee

Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity describes a slum girl Manju’s struggle with her college curriculum in English literature: Today’s assignment was eighteenth century Restoration drama and Congreve’s The Way of the World. Manju hadn’t read The Way of the World, nor did her professors expect her to. Except in the best colleges, dominated by highcaste, affluent students, Indian liberal arts education was taught by rote. At her mediocre all-girls college, founded by Lions Club, she was simply required to memorize a summary the teacher provided for each literary work on the syllabus, then restate it on the test and, later, on state board exam. (Boo 2012: 59) Even the summary is hard for Manju to grasp as she cannot distinguish between Millamant, Mirabell and Petulant, the three major characters in the play. She says to her friend:‘Everyone is telling lies and tricking people to get money, but where my teacher wrote what the story means, I don’t understand.’ In my chapter, I wish to examine the assumptions, and power, that underpin the English curriculum that Manju, a Dalit, slum-dwelling student of University of Bombay, whose home is in constant threat of demolition by the Mumbai municipality, is forced to ‘read’, a curriculum that serves as a gatekeeper to her future. 246

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I posit that the curriculum makers that designed the curriculum Manju is subjected to did not consider whether or not she had the linguistic ability to read the British texts. Nor did they consider whether Manju would find any reflection of her own life in the prescribed texts.

 My chapter reflects on the caste and class implications of English studies in contemporary India by juxtaposing the experience of a contemporary low-caste (other backward caste in official terminology) woman undergraduate, Manju Waghekar, in Mumbai with my own experience of studying in a government undergraduate college in a mofussil town in the 1960s’ India. I was startled by the similarities in our experience, even though Manju went to college forty-five years after I did. I have come to believe that it is because of my caste and class privilege that I have fared better than Manju, in terms of both my grades and my success in cashing in my English education for a wellpaying job. Narratives of undergraduate student experiences are rare, and I have to thank Katherine Boo’s documentation of Manju’s life in her powerful book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity for giving me an insight into a contemporary English undergraduate student’s experience against whom I could measure my own and thereby draw some disturbing conclusions about my profession as a professor of English. I was encouraged in my task by the comments of Ania Loomba, Heather Murray and Biddy Martin who all complain about the paucity of accounts of matters pertaining to pedagogy and actual classroom practices. The three major texts published in India, that is Svati Joshi’s (1991) Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History; Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s (1992) The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India and Susie Tharu’s (1998) Subject to Change: Teaching Literature in the Nineties, address important matters such as the persistent hold of the Anglocentric curriculum in Indian universities, the top-down institutional structures where the teacher has little say in determining the manner and content of his or her teaching and the resulting alienation of the teacher, but the undergraduate student is only a spectral presence in these accounts. I hope that my account of Manju Waghekar’s and my own undergraduate experience will lead to further work in this area. Katherine Boo’s book documents the lives of the residents of a Mumbai slum, Annawadi, now demolished, which was situated near the Sahar International Airport and several five-star hotels. Boo followed the residents’ day-to-day life for three-and-a-half years, from November 2007 247

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to March 2011, to write her account. While I found all the stories about the precarious lives of the Annawadi inhabitants profoundly engaging, one particular story, that of Manju Waghekar, a nineteen-year-old young woman from the OBC Kunbi caste, struck particularly close to home for me as a university professor of English. Manju, whose family migrated to Mumbai from the parched fields of Vidarbha, and whose mother somehow managed to provide for a college education to her, has opted for English literature as one of her options for her B.A. degree. Boo interweaves the story of Manju’s battle for mastery over the prescribed texts with the narrative of her precariously balanced life to raise troubling questions for those of us who have taught students like Manju as well as gone through a similar rite of passage ourselves. Boo’s story of Manju Waghekar is a flesh and blood, life narrative of how a poor woman from an OBC caste manages to jump through the hoops set by the education system and get her B.A. degree. The first time we meet Manju, she is grappling with the plot of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway: The plot of this novel Mrs. Dalloway made no sense whatsoever to Manju. Doing her college reading, Asha’s daughter felt so sluggish that she feared she’d caught dengue fever, or malaria again – hazards of living thirty feet from a buzzing sewage lake. (Boo 2012: 50) Mrs. Dalloway literally makes her feel sick, as sick as she had been when gripped by dengue and malaria, both rampant diseases that mostly kill thousands of poor people across India. The metaphor Boo uses to describe Manju’s response to this canonical text quite forcefully suggests that the text is as dangerous to Manju’s well-being as killer diseases like dengue and malaria that plague her in real life. Manju’s ordeal recalled for me my own struggles with the canonical novel that was prescribed for me during my master’s at the University of Saugar in Madhya Pradesh. Like Manju, my nineteen-year-old self did not have the linguistic or technical mastery to grasp either its stream of consciousness style or its portrayal of the experience of a middle-aged English woman’s weariness with life. It would take me almost another decade to comprehend the text, only to wonder why it was, and is such a big deal for a lot of people. And it would take me another two decades to gather the courage to challenge the ethnocentric universalism that valorized certain white/bourgeois experiences while excluding a vast swath of others. 248

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The next time we encounter Manju, she is wrestling with Congreve’s The Way of the World: Today’s assignment was eighteenth-century Restoration drama and Congreve’s The Way of the World. Manju hadn’t read The Way of the World, nor did her professors expect her to. Except in the best colleges, dominated by highcaste, affluent students, Indian liberal arts education was taught by rote. At her mediocre all-girls college, founded by Lions Club, she was simply required to memorize a summary the teacher provided for each literary work on the syllabus, then restate it on the test and, later, on state board exams. Manju had a gift for memorization – she called it ‘my by-hearting’. But she found the characters in The Way of the World hard to keep straight. (Boo 2012: 59) Here is the dirty but poorly kept secret of our profession: Manju and a lot of students neither read the text nor are expected to. Even the teacherprepared summary is difficult for Manju to grasp as she cannot keep the three major characters of the play, Millamant, Mirabell and Petulant, sufficiently apart. Nor does she fully comprehend the meaning of the play, as interpreted by her teacher. She tells her brother Rahul: ‘Millamant, Mirabell, Petulant – have you ever heard such names? And there are so many more,’ she told Rahul after a while. ‘Everyone is telling lies and tricking people to get money, but where my teacher wrote what the story means, I don’t understand’ (Boo 2012: 59). Without fully comprehending, Manju ‘by-hearts’ her teacher-dictated plot summaries, sentence by sentence, as she goes about laundering, cooking and cleaning for a family of five: ‘As she cleaned the two-burner stove, she repeated, ‘Themes are love affairs, social position, and money.’ Roaches, a hundred of them, scattered. . . . ‘Mirabell seeks social advantage through marriage to the beauty, Millamant . . . In Congreve’s drama money is more important than love’ (Boo 2012: 61). As a professor of English, it was painful for me to read these lines as they took me right back to my own undergraduate student days in a college, simply named, Government Degree College, in a small town in Madhya Pradesh called Tikamgarh, where I studied from 1960 to 1964. Like Manju’s professors, my professors, too, dictated plot summaries. They read aloud from their sheets, pacing around the room, and we wrote down every word. Even in summary form, it made little sense to me why the lady of Shallot got into a boat to go to the island and why the mirror 249

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cracked. While the Romantics made some sense as they spoke about the beauty of nature and made me into an admirer of sunsets, which earned some social prestige for me for my ‘sensitive’ nature, I did not get any of the Tennyson or Browning poems. Another professor did not dictate, but his lectures on Merchant of Venice, As You Like It and Hamlet remained as incomprehensible as the plays themselves. I would try to delve into the texts on my own, but Shakespeare’s arcane, Elizabethan English, was completely undecipherable to me at this time in my life as an undergraduate in Government Degree College, Tikamgarh. We had three professors of English in our college. The third one spent many class hours reciting the first stanza of Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra. And he recited it so many times that I still hear it in my head in his ponderous voice: Grow . . . old . . . along . . . with . . . me The . . . best . . . is . . . yet . . . to . . . be The . . . last . . . of . . . life . . . for . . . which . . . the . . . first . . . was . . . made I was barely seventeen years old when this poem, along with those of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson, was bestowed upon me by my elders to educate me in the ‘beauties of literature’. But I obviously lacked the linguistic capability to get to the wisdom of these words. The teacher never explained who Rabbi Ben Ezra was and who he was talking to. Alok Mukherjee’s This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India suggests that my experience with the teaching of Rabbi Ben Ezra or Shakespeare was by no means singular but was replicated for him in a college in Kanpur: We had no idea what Shylock’s being a Jew meant, as we did not know that there was something called anti-semitism. He was the universal ‘tragic hero’ or villain. Browning’s ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ was presented to us as a universal meditation on death by an old man. Like Shylock, Rabbi Ben Ezra was never identified as a Jew, nor the poem examined in the context of Judaism. Hardy we read in terms of fate, destiny, tragic flaw, women – all universal themes, again. . . . Some of these concepts and ideas we understood, others we learnt by rote from the professors’ lectures to be regurgitated in examinations. (Mukherjee 2009: 13–14) 250

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His and my prose curriculum, in Kanpur and Tikamgarh, consisted of essays of Bacon, Addison, Steele, Charles Lamb, Hazlitt and some moderns like Stephen Leacock and G. K. Chesterton. These essays were the most comprehensible part of the curriculum, and, therefore, the only part of my B.A. English education that I partially grasped and got some joy from the achievement of grasping them. I also had to read Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria. As in Manju’s reading of Congreve’s plot summary, the meaning of the text as a whole eluded me, even though a few bits and pieces made some sense. Although I did very well in the final examinations and ended up with a first division in my B.A., the only one from my college to do so, I performed this feat because kunjis were bought for me, and, like Manju, I ‘byhearted’ the plots and themes and was able to write about the universal truths and the human condition. Kunjis, as Alok Mukherjee suggests in his book, mattered a great deal in one’s performance in the examination: They were called kunjis in Hindi, which literally means keys. The great attraction of these kunjis for us was that they not only provided an explanation and analysis of the text, including a glossary of words, phrases and allusions, but they also discussed all the topics that were typically asked in the examination papers. For each topic, the kunjis included essay-type answers with ‘relevant’ excerpts from a variety of critical works. (Mukherjee 2009: 18) Ania Loomba (1998) documents that kunjis remain more important for her students in an elite University of Delhi college than her lectures (84). In my case, Tikamgarh being a small town, kunjis for English texts were not available there and my parents specially ordered them for me from Sagar, where the university was located. Manju, on the other hand, has only the professor-dictated summaries to guide her. She trips over many words in the plot summaries and is angry with her mother who has reneged on her promise to buy Manju an English–Marathi dictionary. Manju submits herself to the torture of ‘by-hearting’ these summaries as she considers the knowledge of English to be an escape route from the slum: It didn’t much matter whether a person learned the language by studying Congreve or by Chase Manhattan Visa Card dialogue at Personaliteez Spoken English or one of the training courses for international call-center work. Competence in English – a 251

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credential bespeaking worldliness and superior education – was a potential springboard out of the slums. Her own English was still slow and wooden, though good enough to be the second-best in Annawadi. (Boo 2012: 60) Manju’s ambition is to become ‘Annawadi’s first female college graduate’ (Boo 2012: xvii). There are only two people in Annawadi who know any English: Manju and Prakash who used to study in a private school before his father’s death after falling from a train, which landed him and his family in Annawadi. Manju’s mother and brother who do not know English ‘took umbrage that the language of India’s former colonizers was considered requisite for decent jobs in offices and hotels, when Marathi was just as venerable a language’ (Boo 2012: 60). Thus, Manju’s struggle with Shakespeare, Congreve, Marlowe and Virginia Woolf is not simply about acquiring ‘a love of the best that has been thought and said in the world’ (Mukherjee 2009: 25n), but about getting herself out of grinding poverty. There is a yawning gap between Manju’s objectives in learning English and of those who designed the curriculum that she has to somehow show competence in. There are hardly any narratives of how students like Manju, from, as we euphemistically say, ‘the weaker sections of society’, cope with English education in general and English literary education in particular. The pedagogy of dictation and ‘by-hearting’ – in my college we called it ‘rattafication’ – that both Manju and I were subjected to, forty-five years apart, casts a dark shadow on the student. Reading about Manju made me relive the miasma of anxiety that surrounded me as I tried to survive my English curriculum. I should not have suffered so much anxiety as my father had done his master’s degree in English in the 1930s at Forman Christian College in Lahore. However, he was not of much help as a tutor as he remembered little of what he had been taught. A lasting memory for him was that of a British professor who could recite hundreds of lines of poetry by heart. According to my father, he would enter the class, close his eyes and begin reciting. My father spoke repeatedly about this professor’s amazing memory and style of recitation. I realized, when studying for my master’s degree, that poetry was not for explaining but for reciting in an emotionladen voice, to produce a sort of incantatory effect. Professor C. Swaminathan had left the University of Saugar two years before I arrived there in 1964, but a former student of his, who was my high school teacher, tutored me in the Swaminathan method of reciting poetry as a preparation for graduate studies. She recited, with great fervour, Shelley and 252

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Keats’s odes, and I had to repeat after her. There is much I have forgotten, but I still remember the first few lines of these odes and the high-pitched voice in which I learned to recite them. As my high school teacher told me, one had to open oneself to the music of these words, and not every one had the sensibility to do so. Alok Mukherjee has described in depth the ideology of English literature education in India as the development of a sensibility that responded to the beauty of art. Manju Kapur’s novel, Difficult Daughters, portrays Professor Harish Chandra as a lover of sunsets, poetry and Western classical music, all unvitiated by any reference to day-to-day material realities of his household. B. N. Patnaik (2012), in his ‘The Story of an Eminently Forgettable Teacher of English’, recounts how his desire to teach King Lear was thwarted by his senior, Professor N. K. Mishra, on the grounds that he did not have the requisite emotional maturity: He flatly but affectionately told me that I was too inexperienced to teach that great play. According to him, the teacher of King Lear had to have a certain level of emotional maturity to be able to imaginatively experience the grief of a father who was the victim of his children’s ingratitude. (Patnaik 2012: 4) Professors Mishra and Swaminathan’s examples suggest that one could not assume to have understood an English text until it evoked the right emotion in one. Unfortunately, reciting like Professor Swaminathan, learnt second hand, had no transformative effect on me, and I continued to feel inadequate to the task of mastering English literature. Manju’s and my experiences as students of English expose a deep faultline: those who had the power to make us read these texts, which we did not actually read, never wondered whether sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds, growing up in social environments where English was seldom spoken, could understand them. For these designers of curriculum, the canonical British texts spoke of the human condition. Many of my professors at the University of Saugar constantly reiterated that if we did not appreciate a great literary work, the fault lay within us, that we would grasp it once we had reached a certain level of maturity through dint of hard work. One would have hoped that by Manju’s time, that is 2007, the primacy of the universalist claims about British canonical texts would have eroded. However, as Joshi, Sunder Rajan and Tharu’s anthologies and Alok Mukherjee’s book demonstrate, the writers of University Grants Commission’s guidelines continue to pay allegiance to them. 253

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The ugly truth is that I derived no joy from my English education. It would take me almost a decade after my master’s, obtained in 1966, to attain a fluency in English that would make me a confident reader and interpreter of texts. I have spoken in my book, Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space, about my surprise when I discovered that the curriculum and the pedagogical protocols of the 1970s at the University of Toronto were quite similar to those of the University of Saugar (Mukherjee 1994: 3–8). Once again, I wrote essays on formal beauties of the texts I didn’t really believe were beautiful. My fellow students at the University of Toronto advised me to ‘give them what they want’, and I learned quickly. So when in the late seventies, the heady winds of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement reached my Canadian campus, and we learnt words and phrases like ‘patriarchal oppression’ and ‘dead white males’; it felt as though a great burden had been lifted. I participated enthusiastically in the canon wars on North American campuses and remember the time when the American Senate was worried about the disruptive tendencies of postcolonial theory and Edward Said’s work. While the canon wars did not succeed in transforming the discipline, which remains an ongoing struggle, they did expose some truth claims of our discipline as hollow. Speaking about Canada, where I teach, while the canon remains the raison d’etre of the discipline, some changes have come about and more are in the offing. Market pressures, also known as changing demographics, force some English departments, including mine, to offer courses that will fill up classrooms, and so, along with courses on the canon, one can also find courses on world literature and on detective fiction, science fiction, vampire fiction, food in fiction and so on. Many humanities programmes are experiencing lower enrolments as university education has got costlier and jobs scarcer. And as enrolments drop, teaching jobs also shrink. As a result, the future of the coverage model, popularly referred to as ‘from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf ’, is at risk. I, therefore, am filled with wonderment when I see how deeply entrenched the canonical British curriculum remains in universities across India. I do not know why Manju Waghekar should be subjected to it. There are more effective, more joyous ways to learn English than to read vapid summaries of texts by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Congreve and Virginia Woolf, especially at her age and in her circumstances. Those who foisted this curriculum on Manju are some professors who have the power to determine what will be taught. They should have to justify their criteria of selection and omission. They should know that Manju 254

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is not reading these texts for herself but ‘by-hearting’ plot summaries and themes provided by her teachers. And teachers of English should admit that the system is broken and causes immense harm to students like Manju. Alok Mukherjee suggests that this Anglocentric curriculum is a deliberate act of gatekeeping: by the government, by certain institutions and by those who he calls, in Gramschian terms, ‘state intellectuals’. I have heard many pronouncements over the years about the need to teach students like Manju through vernacular languages. However, it is Manju who has read the social reality with clear eyes: those who know English have all doors open to them. If the university system, funded by public taxes, thwarts her aspirations, then it does irreparable harm to her and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, like her. Her curriculum designers and deliverers owe it to her to figure out how to teach her English in an enjoyable and effective way. I wonder why, for a change, they do not ask Manju to describe a day in her life as a writing assignment. The civilizing mission of English literary studies that, according to Alok Mukherjee, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and that has continued to hold sway until recently no longer enjoys universal acceptance. In a May 2013 speech, delivered as a keynote address at the annual meeting of the Writers’ Union of Canada, Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell had some unpalatable words to say to those who are worried about the demise of book-reading culture: There are failures on all sides here. The failures do not, by themselves, diminish the value of liberal arts education generally, but let us admit that such education does not guarantee good citizens, and also that there are many exemplary citizens who have not attended a single literature class or read a word of Plato. Reading Sense and Sensibility may give you a better appreciation of the joys and sorrows of love, but it need not. You don’t have to be a sociopath to find that prolonged exposure to the mind of fictional others leaves you with just about the same level of regard for real people as before. . . . For some, the problem is that the modern novel is so closely associated with bourgeois life, a mode of consciousness that we ought to usher off the historical stage. (Kingwell 2013: 18) Kingwell says that civilizational claims for literature amount to ‘a form of special pleading’. ‘Nothing is more depressing,’ he says, ‘than to realize that some students can pass through years of forced ingestion of 255

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challenging texts without experiencing a glimmer of either goodness or truth’ (Kingwell 2013: 16). The erosion of the ideology of the civilizing mission has already led to budget cuts and shrinking of humanities programmes as a whole. At department meetings, my colleagues constantly fret about becoming a ‘service department’, that is teachers of introductory English courses to pre-med and engineering students. Is that future inevitable? If we accept Alok Mukherjee’s Gramscian model of alternative hegemonies, then the teachers of English in India will have to put forward forceful ideas about education that people consent to. The essayists in the Joshi, Sunder Rajan and Tharu volumes speak of powerlessness, cynicism and alienation. I look forward to a volume that reports on the profession’s political mobilization, both in places of work and in the larger society. I hope that one day, the future Manju Waghekars will not have to read plot summaries of texts that make them feel feverish with dengue or malaria but will be offered texts and classroom strategies that will entice them to read and hone their English. Stanley Fish’s (2009) ‘The Last Professor’, a review of Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, suggests that the profession is in trouble globally: ‘Healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished.’ However, I feel hopeful for the profession’s future in India as aspirants like Manju will continue to desire English for the foreseeable future. The challenge is to put Manju’s interests and aspirations at the centre of their endeavours. Postscript: As Katherine Boo’s text did not tell me about the division Manju received in her B.A. as well as whether any gates opened for her after attaining her degree, I wrote to Boo to ask her these questions. Here is what she wrote: Manju was second division, and a year later completed her Masters part 1. But then her mother arranged her marriage to a lecturer in a village not far from Akola. She is currently teaching English to 12 graders in a private school. Her pay is very low but she enjoys the students and is continuing to develop her English.

References Boo, Katherine. 2012. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. New York: Random House.

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Fish, Stanley. 2009. ‘The Last Professor’. New York Times, 18 January, 2009. http:// opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/?_php=true&_ type=blogs&_r=0 (last accessed on 24.03. 2014). Joshi, Svati. (ed.). 1991. Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History. New Delhi: Trianka. Kapur, Manju. 1998. Difficult Daughters. London: Faber and Faber. Kingwell Mark. 2013. ‘Beyond the Book,’ Harper’s Magazine. 327:1959 (August 2013): 15–19. Loomba, Ania. 1998. Teaching the bard in India. In Susie Tharu, ed. Subject to Change: Teaching Literature in the Nineties. New Delhi: Orient Longman. 33–51. Mukherjee, Alok. 2009. This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Mukherjee, Arun. 1994. Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space. Toronto: TSAR Publications. Patnaik, B. N. The Story of an Eminently Forgettable Teacher of English. An address delivered to the Researchers’ Association, Odisha, 22 January 2012, Hotel Akbari, Cuttack. Publication details not available. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. (ed.). 1992. The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Tharu, Susie. (ed.). 1998. Subject to Change: Teaching Literature in the Nineties. New Delhi: Orient Longman.

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