New York Times (June 1, 2012)
June 1, 2012, 7:18 AM
India’s New ‘English Only’ Generation
By SARITHA RAI
Sudhir Nagaraj and his wife, Bidisha, live in the mini-India that is
Bangalore. She, a Bengali speaker from a family hailing from India’s
east, heads marketing for a social networking start-up. He, fluent in
the native Kannada tongue of Bangalore, runs a subsidiary of a
multinational telecommunications company. Between them, they speak and
understand half a dozen Indian languages.
LIFE AND LOVE IN THE NEW BANGALORE
Tales of the ambitious youth in India’s outsourcing hub.
Quite ironic then that their daughter, Ahana, six-and-a-half, growing
up in a country with a profusion of tongues, speaks only one language:
impeccable English. And English is the common tongue that binds the
Nagarajs as a family.
In Bangalore and elsewhere in Big City India, factors like great
mobility, a demanding school system and mixed marriages are churning up
a startling consequence: a generation of urban children is growing up
largely monolingual — speaking, thinking and dreaming only in English.
This is a country with 20 official languages including English, some
three dozen languages spoken by over a million native speakers each,
and a few hundred “live” languages.
“How do we define Ahana’s mother tongue?” asks Mr. Nagaraj. He speaks
Kannada with his mother; his wife speaks Bengali with hers. Both
grandmothers live nearby and attempt to converse with Ahana in their
respective tongues. But she responds only in English.
It is an issue that at once cheers and distresses an entire band of
middle-class Indians.
On the one hand, English has opened the doors to great job mobility in
the past decade and much economic success. In a country of so many
varied languages, English is the only linguistic commonality. Yet as
the language increasingly becomes the de facto mother tongue in urban
families, many are dismayed at the trend, contending that its rampant
use will strip them of their sense of Indian-ness.
“English is unifying us with the rest of the world but alienating us
from our familial and cultural roots,” says Mr. Nagaraj, who still
turns to Kannada metaphors when he needs to drive home a point.
Like Mr. and Mrs. Nagaraj, a fifth of India’s population — some 250
million — is multilingual. Many Indians of their generation are
polyglots. They string sentences in English, but insert words from
multiple Indian languages.
But even as scientific evidence mounts that being bilingual or
multilingual makes a person smarter and could shield against the onset
of dementia, many fear that future Indian generations may turn
monolingual. Already, English is the first language many urban children
learn.
Preeti Kumar, a communications professional and her husband, Nipun, who
works in the apparel industry, are native Hindi speakers from India’s
north. However, their two daughters, Eva, who is 8, and Inika, who is
nearly 2, speak only English at home and outside. “They’ve learned
Hindi by watching cartoons on TV,” says their mother.
Even the children of the Kumars’ friends, couples who have a common
language that they grew up with, have adopted English as their primary
language at home, she says.
The situation is exacerbated in diverse Bangalore, where residential
buildings represent a microcosm of India. “Somewhere in this
cosmopolitan-ness, kids growing up with only English are missing
something,” rues Ms. Kumar.
Kavita Sabharwal, who runs a chain of upmarket preschools in the city
called Neev, says that English has become the common language
denominator in families. That is a fraught issue for some parents,
including herself.
“As both an educator and a parent I find myself asking, ‘Where is the
Indian-ness in India?’ Is losing our languages the first sign of our
dying culture? Or, is it the cause? ” she asks.
At her schools, Ms. Sabharwal counsels parents to raise children to
speak a native tongue alongside English. In her home, she has knuckled
down and initiated compulsory “Hindi time” in the evenings for her
children, Dhruv, 10, and Noor, 7.
Her husband, Manish, initially predicted the death of all dinner-table
conversation. Ms. Sabharwal happily reports to the contrary. A year on,
both her children speak Hindi with confidence.
In the lower socioeconomic strata, where learning English is
aspirational, the language is trickling down quickly. Neighborhood
private schools have unstated admission requirements: at 3 and 4, the
child is required to be toilet-trained and speak English.
Parents who stretch their family budgets to get their children into
“English medium” schools see that the language has obvious economic
benefits in an increasingly globalized world. Higher up the economic
ladder, though, it is a matter of convenience.
Rimjhim Chakraborty is 9. Her mother, Pinky, a realtor, speaks Sindhi,
a language from the northwest. Rimjhim’s father, Apurba, who heads
sourcing for a sporting goods multinational, is fluent in both Punjabi
and Bengali. Rimjhim, despite learning Hindi at school, refuses to
answer when spoken to in anything other than English. So that is the
language that rules the Chakraborty household.
That is unfortunate, says her mother, who wants to make an effort to
teach Rimjhim an Indian language. But “between her math homework,
sports, a little bit of PlayStation and television, where is the time?”
Ms. Chakraborty asks.
She ends up scolding Rimjhim in Sindhi. “Not the best introduction to a
language,” she admits.
Then she makes a dire prediction: “At the rate we are going, all Indian
languages will die.”
Saritha Rai sometimes feels she is the only person living in Bangalore
who was actually raised here. There’s never a dull moment in her
mercurial metropolis. Reach her on Twitter @SarithaRai.
_______________________________________________
assam mailing list
[email protected]
http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
