Opinion Tongue tied

In its best version, the Karnataka government’s order stemmed from a genuine concern for safeguarding regional languages. It may also be in line with the National Curriculum Framework of 2005, which urges a three-language formula but emphasises that a child’s home language or mother tongue is the “best medium of instruction”. But there has been an unmistakable strain of regional jingoism in the state government’s insistence on Kannada. As English-medium schools sprouted in Bangalore, it went into combat mode, de-recognising over 2,000 such schools in 2006.

The political attempt to tap into linguistic chauvinism is not peculiar to Karnataka. In West Bengal, the Left Front government abolished English in government-run primary schools, with appalling results for the state education system. In Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party’s distaste for English was hyphenated with its mistrust of computers. In both cases, the parties had to scale back on a rhetoric that had grown dated and failed to resonate with voters.

For a growing number of people, English is the language of technology and modernity, of jobs and social mobility. Hence the growing demand for English-medium private schools and the mushrooming of English-language centres for those who cannot access it in their regular education. Governments need to recognise this aspirational urge. It is also true that studies have revealed that children learn well in their home language, even as they imbibe other languages, and that in the early years, the world is more intelligible in the cadences of the home language/ mother tongue. But the idea of a mother tongue is complicated in Indian contexts.

A cacophony of “mother tongues” can be heard in the classroom of a metropolitan school. Imposing a single language in a state assumes a linguistic homogeneity that does not always exist. Which language suits a child best? What educational goals should be privileged? These are complex and delicate questions best left to schools and parents to navigate.