The autodriver said to me, with a mixture of relief and sheer gratitude, “You speak Kannada, madam! I don’t know English, and nobody here speaks anything but English.” I joked: “That’s what happens when you come to M.G. Road.” After a pause he said, “I know four languages: Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi.” “What more do you want?” I cried. “Isn’t it enough?”
Apparently it isn’t enough. In our multi-lingual city, English is crown prince. Everyone stoops to kiss the hem of its robe, everyone yearns to embrace it. It is the language of aspiration.
The Tamil-Kannada rows of the past appear to have faded away. Complaints against “these Hindi-wala outsiders” who refuse to learn Kannada are heard less often than before. The English Jagannatha (the root of ‘juggernaut’, as you’re probably aware) is moving relentlessly ahead, grinding down native tongues. I overheard a telling conversation on Namma Metro. Three college-students, two male and one female, were conversing in Hindi as they brushed up on their meagre Kannada vocabulary. “O-nimsha, o-nimsha,” said the girl. “That means ‘one minute’,” said one of the boys. The other added, “For aage the word is munde.” “No one speaks Hindi in college, yaar,” the girl complained. “In college?” the first boy retorted scornfully. “In college it’s all English, English.”
The labouring classes, which are desperate to better their children’s lives, believe English to be the Open Sesame to a brighter future. I strained my ears to catch what the woman sitting in front of me in the bus was instructing her son. She said in Tamil, “You must talk in English when they ask you. You must say, I am studying in this class, I come from this school, all that you must say when they ask you.” The small boy wearing a grey-and-white uniform replied petulantly, “I don’t know English.” Was she preparing him for an oral test in class or for admission to a new school? A tiff broke out between them, with the boy stubbornly refusing to utter a word in English and the mother threatening him with something I couldn’t quite catch. Finally, she announced in halting tones the words he should repeat: “I studying Class Four.” I took a closer look at her, at the bobby-pins in her hair, the synthetic red sari trimmed with plastic zari, orange cotton blouse, single red glass bangle on her right hand, thali hanging from a turmeric yellow thread. Could she not afford a gold chain for her thali? Or had it been sold to educate the son? I could only imagine her life-story.
In a Big 10 bus one afternoon, I asked the conductor in Kannada what the fare to Mekhri Circle was. He replied in English, “Sixteen rupees.” As if practising how to pronounce it right, he put on an accent while he repeated, more to himself than to me, “Six-teen, six-teen, six-teen.” Was he attending ‘Spoken English’ classes in his spare time? My image of the Bengaluru bus conductor crumbled there and then. I’ve always looked upon the conductor as the archetypal torchbearer of Kannada who never fails to chide passengers who can’t speak the language. Here was one who was using English in response to my Kannada!
There was more to come, in the same vein. At Vasantnagar, women climbed aboard with their toddlers. Two unrelated mothers simultaneously put on their teacher hat and started English lessons. To my left, the days of the week; behind me, the months of the year. The babe-in-arms who lisped “January, February” forgot June and stopped at August. The “Sunday Monday” boy, who sounded a tad older, maybe two to three years old, went directly from Thursday to Saturday and then decided to chant numbers one to ten. I could hear the women correcting mistakes, intoning the right words, dinning them in. Preparing for admission to kindergarten? I wouldn’t be surprised, considering that I’ve heard a young mother in our apartment complex reciting English nursery rhymes aloud every morning while pushing her five-month-old baby in a pram.
The juggernaut is invincible. With the Supreme Court ruling that parents have the right to choose the language in which their children get educated, the fate of Kannada-medium schools appears to have been sealed, because parents are certain to pick English — whether they’re the elite who opt for ‘international’ schools, or the under-privileged, who are helplessly drawn to the dubious ‘English-medium’ shops that sprout in every street corner. Ideally, we should learn all subjects in our mother tongue and acquire additional communication skills in English and other global languages. You might point out that in a cosmopolitan city such as ours, we wouldn’t find enough teachers for every language spoken here. So learn in Kannada, then. The mother tongue will anyway continue to be spoken at home.
I realise that I’m probably the worst example of submission to the juggernaut. I speak my language but am illiterate. A convent school stole my tongue and replaced it with a pink plastic appendage sticking out of my mouth, like a red nose on a clown. It is a tool with which I express myself, and I dare say I wield it fairly competently. But imagine how much more creative I could have been, had I the use of my natural tongue — flesh and blood, warm and alive.
