English Arrogances - Sachin Jha

Been through those shameful years when English was understood as superior to the vernacular. Where children who spoke fluent English considered themselves superior. In the English medium school I studied in. Which belief we all lived.

Took many years and a wise village to grind those arroganct snobbish views under ones heels.

In the city school recemtly have seen a teacher upbraid a child speaking in Tamil, "Are you a slum child ?".

To face the utter servility of to the white man and his language and his ways ... is the first step to reclaiming our collective dignity.

Via @Sachin Jha

It’s the season of festive get-togethers. Ebullient college-going youngsters (friends’ kids) are back in town for their Diwali break, offering excellent opportunity to dour middle-aged men for charging up on their joie-de-vivre. And it was during the course of one such chat that a young lad hurled the term ‘HMT’ (Hindi Medium Type). ‘Behenji’ followed soon from another quarter. Naturally, i couldn’t resist asking the young lady whether flunking in Hindi was still tacitly cool in LSR(Lady Shri Ram). She only smiled in reply.

I guess it begins before college – this spurning of the vernacular. Because even in school, I remember that it was invariably the best debater in English – and never Hindi – who got to be headboy. In fact, just because he happened to be the best Hindi debater, this upstart called Ravi Sharma was doomed to a fate where his English debating prowess(which was best by a margin)remained grossly underrated.

And unfortunately, it doesn’t always end at that. What sets-in as an innocuous apathy for language soon metastasizes into a robust derision for other aspects of cultural identity. Indeed, the words ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’ seem to have appropriated a corny hue. The more cleanly you steer clear of them, the more emphatically you claim your right of passage into mainstream intelligentsia.

Can’t help being reminded of Origen in the context; the scholar and philosopher who contributed much to Christian theology. Along with Plotinus (the last of the great Greek philosophers), he was a disciple of Ammonius Saccas (the founder of Neoplatonism). Yet Origen’s real claim to fame is for his commentary on the gospel of Matthew. Or rather, for his taking a passage too literally and acting upon it too rashly. The passage? “There be eunuchs, which have made themselves

eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake."

But at least, Origen’s wasn’t an intellectual castration.