With one in every 12 persons in the world being a young Indian, what the future holds for India’s young people is a critical question before us today. This book is a reflection by scholar and language researcher G.N. Devy on the acute crisis of knowledge and education in our country that has been caused by the double wounds of the varna-divide and colonialism, which left a painful legacy.
Quality education is crucial not only for good jobs for our young people, but also to prepare them for citizenship and democracy in the 21st century. For India to build strong foundations in education and research, we should not only discuss important issues of teaching staff, resources, infrastructure and autonomy in our educational institutions, but also examine at a deeper level how knowledge is produced and how education is transacted in India, what imbalances exist in these systems, and how they can be addressed to provide a vision of education that is truly inclusive and empowering for all.
Devy points out that not only did British colonial rule destroy the traditions of knowledge that existed in India, it imposed a language that took the place of the mother tongues for higher order cognitive work, thus undermining knowledge production. Even today, English is seen as the language of knowledge; although research has shown time and again that mother tongue education in the early years and primary school helps a child to grasp abstract concepts better, the ‘English medium’ continues to make inroads even in this early phase of a child’s education.
Devy, who led the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), a comprehensive documentation of India’s languages, points out that languages continue to disappear: of 1,652 ‘mother tongues’ listed in the 1961 census of India, of which 1,100 were assessed to be languages, only 800 are in existence today. That is, 300 languages have disappeared in the last 50 years.
This imbalance in the intellectual relationship, between the West and what the West regards as the rest, has continued much beyond the colonial period in the form of the West’s intellectual domination. Devy quotes the great African writer, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: “The Eurocentric basis of seeing the world has often meant marginalizing marginalising into the periphery that which comes from the rest of the world.”
But the colonial encounter, Devy points out, is not the whole story. There is yet another wound with which knowledge production in India must contend, and that is the deep wound of caste divisions and social injustice.
Devy offers the visions of some of India’s foremost education thinkers.
First, Gandhi’s vision of education as freedom, and the realisation at least in part of that vision in the work of the Gujarat Vidyapeeth, whose students took part in the Dandi satyagraha as part of their education.
Devy also dwells upon Aurobindo’s vision of education as a means to a higher consciousness, and of integral education; and Rabindranath Tagore’s vision of education as the realisation of one’s own potential. Finally, he discusses Ambedkar’s powerful vision of education as the essence of a modern and just society, and indeed the first step in his message to his followers: “educate, organise, agitate.”
The Crisis Within: On Knowledge and Education in India ; G.N. Devy, Aleph, ₹399.
