Thursday, March 25, 2010

ownership of legends?

Games chief has beef with dietary diktat was a fun story to do. Do read and post your comments.
For this story, I tried finding a sports historian but failed miserably. I mailed Ram Guha but he says he doesn't comment on sports anymore. No other name cropped up during the process of writing the story except noted columnists who were at one point in time journalists! Had to avoid, but really, there aren't plenty of sports historians in this country? No wonder we are such a pathetic nation when it comes to sports! And, no, leave cricket out. This is not the only sport we got! Honestly, I have lost all my interest in the game after IPL. I hate the Shilpa Shetty's and Zinta's of the world owning a team. Do you know what that means? Owning a team is owning everyone who is in it. My question is: Can a legend like Tendulkar be owned? Don't you think it is blasphemous?
I so so hate IPL!

Friday, March 12, 2010

MIssing parts of English 3

                                              If you speak English, you are cultured, didn't they say?
                                              Dayanita Singh's exhibition at South Bank Centre. (c) P.S.


English series: Part 3
By Pallavi Singh pallavi.s@livemint.com


NEW DELHI: I dream of an English
full of the words of my language.
an english in small letters
and english that shall tire a white man’s tongue
an english where small children practice with smooth
round pebbles in their mouth to spell the right zha..


When Meena Kandasamy wrote these lines, almost like a petition, pleading that her roots be allowed to flourish in English, she was just 18 and fresh from the unusual loss of her poetic name: Ilavenil.
The Tamil name meant `Spring’ but often became the subject of ridicule for the young Dalit poet when many said it sounded like the name of a train. ``I winced in horror and wept on my pillows. I wanted a name people could accept, a name that wouldn’t point to my Tamil origins,’’ she recalls.
She later adopted her nickname Meena, a common name for women in South Asia, to escape the predicament and in response to any question posed to her in Tamil, she spoke in English. ``I want this new tongue to accept me. I expect it to appreciate my sensibilities, admire my culture and above all, be accommodating,’’ she says.
``As a Dalit, as a woman, you want to be loved, you want to be a part of things, you want to be touched that way, you know, the whole untouchability question.’’
Though a borrowed language, she says English earned her recognition. Poems in Kandasamy’s first book Touch, written in English and published in 2006, have been translated in five languages.
The Chennai-based poet also took up translations of Tamil works of xxx, because to her, English is the language which helps one transcend the immediate circle. ``It doesn’t operate with the Dalits alone. English takes your voice to a larger level and helps in your search for solidarity.. like-minded people, people who want change.’’
Kandasamy’s engagement with English as a means to reach out to a larger audience is part of an emerging struggle in the journey of English in India: the Dalit aspiration for progress and its demand for schools that teach the language.

About 500 kilometres away from where Kandasamy lives, the big step towards teaching of English has already been taken, that too with state support.
In Coimbatore, the second-largest city of the state, a massive English training project is underway. A seven-month old programme designed by the British Council under the Tamil Nadu Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, a flagship programme to put every child in school, is training teachers in government-funded schools to teach communicative English better. The real beneficiaries, says Alison Barrett, head of the Council’s Project English for State Partnerships, are children from marginalised sections who attend such schools.
In Coimbatore, for example, Dalits form 16% of the population, yet hold just about 1.38% of the land, as per a research by the Madras Institute of Development Studies in 2005, and of the school going children in the district, only 12% of children’s fathers are matriculates, says the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2010 released by non-governmental organization Pratham early this month.
For the state, the Dalit population is about 8% as per the 2001 Census and since 80% of these stay in villages and just about 11% of them own land, they end up as agricultural labourers leading to heavy disparities in access to jobs, land ownership and wealth share.
``English thus is a way of accessing socio-economic advancement. English in this country (India) means a language of power and if you don’t give them English, they can not access power structures and effect changes in socio-economic policies,’’ says Barrett.
In Tamil Nadu, where a strong Dravidian movement in the xx thwarted the Indian government’s plans to impose Hindi as the country’s official language, the English Project has brought in its fold 1.25 primary school teachers and 50 lakh children in just a span of seven months.
Thiru. S. Kannappan, Joint Director for the SSA in Tamil Nadu who was involved in Planning, implementation and monitoring, says the project came just at the right time when the learning levels in the language in state run schools were ebbing – just about 22% children in the schools in TN can read easy sentences, the ASER report says.
However, beyond the academic case for English, Dalit activists argue that English is the key to emancipation of people from this community - not just because it opens many doors for job opportunities but also because it helps ease the caste and power structures that come with speaking the regional languages.
Doctor Ambedkar Cultural Academy (DACA), a charitable organization working among Dalits in Madurai, lives by the anti-Hinduism slogan, which essentially identifies the religion as the root cause for all casteist evils. ``In the social order corrupted by Hinduism, education and teaching of English can help build the Dalit youth power. Our struggle is to free ourselves from being an untouchable and becoming human,’’ Anthony Raj, founder of DACA says. Raj says as a Dalit leader, he had to face hostility from the local government, the police, political parties and non Dalits. Today, his organistion, among other things, has been running vocational programmes in Madurai, Theni, Tirunelveli, Dindigul, Ramanathapuram and Tuticorin aiming at the rural Dalit population, the basic skill being English.
Taking off from Tamil Nadu, the quest for English has found newer seekers in states such as Kerala, Delhi, Punjab, Bihar, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh of which the three have the highest percentage of Scheduled Castes population. Bihar, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh account for 40% of the SC population in India, according to Census 2001.
Proportionately, the largest proportion of population of the Scheduled Castes to total population of the State is in Punjab (28.9 per cent), followed by Himachal Pradesh (24.7 per cent) and West Bengal (23 percent).
Anjali Bhawra, former principal secretary (education) for Punjab whose department trained pre-service teachers in English in the state-run colleges for Bachelors in Education, says the initiative generated enormous opportunities for the trainees, especially in private English-medium schools. ``They could see that with the language training, their options in a teaching career had grown manifold,’’ she remembers.
The demand for English in these states, thus, stems from the aspirations of the lower castes to be heard and empowered. From the British times when English remained restricted to an elite class, it has now undergone a transitional change to become an aspirational language as the politics around it changed. Where popular politicians once secured rural votes by promising to banish English in state such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, a powerful lobby is now rooting to extend English to the masses.
In Uttar Pradesh, which has the highest percentage of Scheduled Castes population to the total Scheduled Castes population of the country (21.1 per cent), Dalit thinker and author Chandrabhan Prasad is now promoting the language as the `English Goddess’ – a symbol for Dalit emancipation. ``Not only is the English language spoken everywhere in the world, respected by the people of all the nations, easily learnt but also the people of the English nation are impartial and unbiased—and to whichever nation they go, they do not indulge in the base acts of casteism or communalism,’’ says Prasad, who declared October 25, as the English Day in a last year coinciding with the birthday of TB Macaulay, the British administrator who introduced English education in India.

English’s recognition as the great leveller in Dalit literature is not new, though. In 1911, Tamil scholar and Dalit ideologue Iyothee Thass Pandithar wrote about the necessity of English as the common language in India instead of Hindi. Periyar EV Ramasamy, the father of the Dravidian movement, spoke of how English would banish other languages from even the bedroom and the kitchen -- places where intimacy and culture are supposedly at their pickled, preserved best.

In east India, West Bengal, where English was withdrawn from primary schools in the mid-1980s, faced an intense public pressure to reintroduce the language. ``The demand picked up since people were not getting jobs. The emergence of the IT sector was really a game-changer,’’ says Debanjan Chaudhuri, head of Project English for East India.
The teaching of English thus began, initially from class 6 in the mid-1990s and from class one in the year 2000. The rapid progress of the language was however witnessed among the state’s Tribal and Dalit populationss, where teaching English directly and not through Bengali, the official language of the state, worked well. ``Bengali wasn’t really the mother tongue of the Tribals. Now because of the direct teaching of English, there is no intervening Bengali in the way of teaching the language,’’ Chaudhuri says.
Till date, the English Project with state partners have typically focused on training teachers, developing course materials, providing innovative ELT resources and training to build teacher communities. However, its collaborations with Corporate Social Responsibility Foundations and non-governmental organisations for improving the employment prospects of youth in rural, semi-rural and urban India have brought forth teeming curiosity from unexpected quarters.
At the Delhi-based Aga Khan Foundation, one of its vocational programmes in the Nizamuddin neighbourhood evinced unusual demand from the unemployed youth living in the area. ``All of them aksed us if we could teach them English, when we went to train them in various vocational skills which did not just include English. Mostly, the youth in their 20s wanted to learn the language. Today, even they link it to employability,’’ recalls Meena Narula, one of the project coordinators at the Foundation.
The role of the language is also crucial in India’s story of growth. Last year’s NASSCOM Everest Report on the future growth of Business Process Outsourcing warned that the predicted growth of the ITES sector will depend on reaching out beyond ’ready to eat’ recruits to the estimated 85% of college students who are not currently considered ’employable’. ``English can fill the gap. It is like Bisleri water - you may go for anything to eat but you do need water. Whatever be your personal qualification, you can’t go far without English,’’ says Alka Gupta, founder of the British Academy for English Language in New Delhi.
In a typical class at Gupta’s institute, which has grown to moret than 40 centres all over India in the four years since it was set up, one can find people from various social strata flocking together. ``We have autorickshaw drivers, cab drivers, students from SC/STs and the Other Backward Castes. Tourism industry is fuelling the demand for English-speaking people. Some of the companies have also made English compulsory,’’ she says.
Companies such as Barclays and Nokia Siemens have also been training its staff in communicative competencies to meet the challenges of transforming the workforce. Braclay’s Philipa Mathewson did not respond to email queries sent by Mint.
Gujarat, after a long spell, made English compulsory in its school curriculum only in 1998 and is now hurrying to set up English language labs across the state. ``The government has implemented the policy but there is dearth of teachers now,’’ says Rajendra Singh Jadeja, director of the HM Patel Institute of English in Anand where the state’s first language lab was set up in 1976. ``If Gujarat wants to integrate in the global economy, English is the only way out,’’ says Jadeja.
In a Dalit village in Nagapattinam, notorious for its history of violence against Dalits, English is now vehemently being pursued as a lingustic necessity in replacement to the native Tamil. Here, during one of Kandasamy’s visits recently, she recalls how women were miffed at her attempts to converse in Tamil. ``They were speaking in English. They felt insulted that I chose to speak in Tamil with them,’’ she says.
In her growing years, Kandasamy had felt the same and protested with English in her mouth. Between then and now, she says nothing much has changed.

~Ends~

An edited version of this story appeared in Mint on March 8, 2010.

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