Why Can't Kantabai Be My Child's Guru?

 Is Kantabai becoming your child’s guru? 

That’s how a recent full-page advertisement of the Genesis Global School in Noida began. “When your child is wasting her after-school hours at home,” the pitch went on, “someone else’s child is mastering her dribbling in our basketball court. While your child is learning your maid’s language, someone else’s child is learning a foreign language…”

Hopefully, the ad got your attention not for what was intended – publicising the five-star school – but for its shocking elitist tone. There’s the obvious class-bias that makes the rich think they are born entitled to trod on the poor and all that they represent. To the creators and sponsors of this repugnant ad, I have two simple retaliatory questions: 

• Why can’t Kantabai be my child’s guru? 
• And why should some opinionated and prejudiced faculty member at Genesis be instead my child’s guru? 

It may seem an exaggeration but “global” education like this will only deepen the divide between India’s haves and have-nots.

That point made, I want to move to another that I found equally enraging, if not more. It is the inherent and distinct language bias in the ad. Your children, the ad preached, would only be a loser if she spent time learning your maid’s language. Instead, it was suggested, he or she ought to be mastering a foreign one at Genesis. I hope you are equally repulsed. Why should a maid’s language be inferior to any other language, Indian or foreign?

I am no linguistic romantic or idealist. If a language has to survive, a thriving economy must be built around it. Why else do you think there is a sudden rush to learn Mandarin? The central reason why languages are dying – and there’s one that perishes somewhere in the world every fortnight – is because its speakers find no economic incentive to learn, speak and teach it. That’s also the reason why “foreign” languages offered at schools like Genesis do not go beyond the few profitable ones like French, German and Spanish. You think Genesis and its ilk offer foreign languages like Swahili, Amharic, Berber or Inuit? For that matter, even Arabic or Persian? I wish they did.

It’s fair for a school to offer languages that promise better careers for their students. I can’t challenge that. But does that give them, and us, a carte blanche to denigrate other languages? What can you expect of an “international” or a “global” school that insists Kantabai’s fascinating creole of Marathi, Hindi and English is inferior to French? And will any foreign-educated faculty at Genesis be able to match Kantabai’s vast repertoire of folk tales? The thought that the language and culture of the poor and marginalized must be inferior should only evoke revulsion. Languages thrive among the marginalized, often more than in privileged circles. Verlan, a spunky language that borrows words from French and inverts the syllables, has flourished in the Parisian suburbs known for their poor immigrant neighbourhoods.

Linguistic discrimination of the Genesis kind, something many Indians are guilty of, makes for the first blow to the plurality of languages that India enjoys. This unique diversity is under increasing threat and biased grooming at schools like these can only speed up the unfortunate process of linguistic homogenisation. Even the relatively well-off Hindi suffers from this as its speakers replace words, even entire phrases, in Hindi with those from English. Ever noticed how numbers in Hindi in the Devanagari script have nearly vanished? Take any Hindi paper and you will see that numbers are written in their Latin form. You probably missed this significant shift, which proves my point that Indians haven’t learnt to respect indigenous linguistic traditions. You also probably don’t take offence when Hindi or any other Indian language is rendered in ads in the Latin script.

It is because of this inferiority complex that, for example, a waiter at a five-star will make it a point to speak in halting and incomprehensible English when he and his guest can speak fluently in Hindi. Languages, other than English, seemingly are not suited to air-conditioned environs. No child must grow up feeling that the language spoken at home is inferior to English or a foreign language. The fact that so many children today in India look down on their mother tongues and speak barely passable versions of indigenous languages must stand as an indictment of our educational system and families who have collectively failed to develop any attachment among them to Indian languages. 

And it is the convent, “international” and “global” schools that have done more damage than any other. Many of them actually forbid their students from speaking any language but English. Government schools, despite their poor quality, fare much better and deserve more support for the stupendous task they do of keeping indigenous languages alive. It is clear that schools like Genesis before going global must inculcate and respect all that’s local – that includes Kantabai, her language and her culture.