What has long been the norm in Indian academic setups, and also among the Indian diasporic academic communities abroad, is being called out now. Yep! I am talking about the (hegemonic) academic ritual of publicly correcting one’s pronunciation and grammatical errors in academics, particularly of the first-generational students from Dalit Bahujan Adivasi (DBA) communities. The recent talk on 21st May 2024 by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak at JNU on W.E.B. Du Bois and the following Q&A section, where she corrected a student’s pronunciation of Du Bois (pronounced as ‘Do Boys’ not ‘Do Bwah’), has created rows in both social media and academic circles. There are some commentaries published on the incident itself and self-reflecting notes recounting similar encounters.
Like many others from DBA communities, I have also personally encountered similar incidents in my academic journey. Rather than commenting on the controversies around Spivak’s talk, here I reflect on how English, as an acquired language, is shaped by a set of larger socio-economic and spatial factors. By (re)telling the story of my ‘imperfect’ English, I intend to problematize and disrupt the academic ritual of judging and policing one’s language proficiencies and to denaturalise English as an acquired language that is heavily marked by caste and class positions.
English was never the ‘natural’ language to me – But so what!
I grew up in a small town in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, access to school education in my town was limited to a few Tamil-medium public/ aided schools and a handful of ‘English-medium’ private schools. Like the burgeoning parental desires for English-medium schooling in the post-reform educational landscape (Mathew, 2016), my parents aspired for English-medium schooling for me and my sister. This is because, as Leya Mathew (2016) aptly points out, “social recognition and economic security was and continues to be entangled with higher education and English proficiencies” (p. iv) and along with it an opportunity for social mobilisation. So, I completed my school education in the low-cost private ‘English-medium’ schools in and around my town. I scored top marks in high school and secured admission to the state’s top engineering college – a step closer to my parents’ dream of being the first graduate in our ‘pedigree’. Bearing this aspiration, when I sat for the Math-1 lecture on my first day, that 60 minutes felt like watching a Tamil movie dubbed in English without subtitles. I got the setting/context – the numbers and operations, symbols, ongoing functions and formulas on the blackboard, but I didn’t understand what was going on in between those settings, i.e. the professor’s conversations with those numbers. In short, that was the first time in my life I was listening to someone speaking in English for a full 60-minute period, inside or outside of the classroom. One comfort was that I wasn’t alone on the ship, many were sailing with me – coming from very similar socio-economic-geographical backgrounds (small towns and villages) across the state. It took me the whole semester to get used to, and fairly understand, the full-length lectures in English. However, my communication and socialisation skills in English weren’t getting any better throughout my graduation. My struggles with English became even harder as I veered towards social sciences in my master’s degree. The unsettling jargon, abstract concepts, and circular arguments had deterred me at times, but my curiosity to understand and unravel the intricacies of the social world kept me going. All this made me wonder what it means to ‘know’ English; and whether the ‘English-medium’ education I had had any effect on my oratory and social skills; Why didn’t I feel the way- English as the ‘natural’ language to think, speak, write and most importantly socialise (Kisana, 2023) – as some of my peers? For a long time, I individualised this as my problem or as I could not cope with the required ‘standards’ in the academic setups, the corporate industries, and the popular culture.
Throughout my schooling, the operational language was always Tamil despite being an ‘English-medium’ school. The books would be in English, but the teacher would translate and teach the concepts in a combination of Tamil and English (words which are difficult or can’t be translated into Tamil), colloquially known as Tanglish. This was or is still the norm in almost all the low-cost private and public schools in the small towns and villages in Tamil Nadu. Also, growing up in a family and in a neighbourhood, where I and most of my friends are the first generational schoolers and graduates, meant that there was a limitation in both access to and availability of reading materials beyond schoolbooks and no reading culture. Given this scenario, interestingly this low-cost ‘English-medium’ schooling and its pedagogic methods were aimed at providing literacy, targeting the first generational schoolers, rather than oratory skills as many elite private schools in urban centres across the country do (Mathew, 2016).
Further, different economies of education, such as private tuition/coaching centres, were rapidly growing which further limited access and constrained aspirations by levying high charges outside the school systems. As I started making sense of how one’s identity, and social-economic-geographical location shape and limit English proficiencies in specific, and literacy in general, I am beginning to accept and understand my English proficiencies as it is. I started owning, making, and discovering my own ‘English’ through whatever tools were available to me at different phases in my life. So, the story of my English is at once a journey of imprisonment and liberation, embarrassment and empowerment, filled with intergenerational aspirations and social mobility.
References:
Kisana, R. (2023, June 30). Laughing like a Savarna. The Swaddle. https://theswaddle.com/laughing-like-a-savarna/
Mathew, L. (2016). Aspiring India: The Politics of Mothering, Educational Reforms and English” (Doctoral Dissertation). Publicly Penn Dissertations. Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/17494825-9c76-4bd1-9005-a47f557f0b35/content
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Vadivel Chinnadurai is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada.