by Mark Tully
Nowhere is this failure more obvious than in Tamil Nadu. It is the one state in India where the television service, which is controlled by the central government, cannot transmit its Hindi news bulletins – even though Hindi is meant to be the national link language. Hindi, not English, is seen as a colonial language in Tamil Nadu – part of an attempt by the Aryan north to dominate the Dravidian south.
The battle against Hindi has been fought by the Dravidian parties, who have used the Tamil language and regional chauvinism to establish a hold over Tamil Nadu politics. They have ruled the state since 1967. The Dravidian message was spread through the Tamil cinema. The founder of the original party – which, like all Indian parties, has split into factions – was a film scriptwriter. The most famous Dravidian chief minister – M. G. Ramachandran, or ‘MGR’ – was a superstar actor. He had always played the role of a hero, a protector of the poor and oppressed, and so came to be seen as the incarnation of righteousness in the minds of millions of Tamils – particularly women. Although no one could argue that MGR provided an effective or honest administration, his faithful fans never blamed him. During the last three years of his life he was so ill that he could barely speak, but they did not lose faith in his leadership. When he died, in 1987, the state shut down. Millions of people flocked to his funeral in Madras, and those MGR fans who couldn't get there held funerals of his images. Grief even drove some of them to suicide.
I arrived in Tamil Nadu just after the election to the state assembly held a year after MGR's death. His wife and the film heroine who was close to him in his later years had quarrelled, both claiming to be his true successor, and so the Dravidian movement was divided yet again. MGR's arch-enemy, the Tamil film scriptwriter Karunanidhi, was returned to power – the beneficiary of MGR's failure to leave a political last will and testament.
One of Karunanidhi's early acts was to announce that children in Tamil Nadu government schools would start learning English only in the third year; earlier they had been taught English from the day they started school. Karunanidhi thought this a necessary gesture to show that he was a better Tamil patriot than MGR, but he did not intend it to be a serious attack on English. He needed English in his state, and indeed throughout the rest of India, otherwise Hindi would be the only possible link language.
The trouble with English is that it links only the élite. Because the teaching of English is so bad in most schools, less than 3 per cent of Indians are reasonably competent in the language. The British Council feels that Tamil Nadu is probably above the average and reckons that there is no ‘zero level of English’ in the state, which apparently means that everyone has at least some acquaintance with the language. If that is true, I can only say there is plenty of 0.001 level English in Tamil Nadu.
In Madras I found that, in spite of the Dravidian movement, the English-speaking élite had an effect on Tamil Nadu which had been and still was out of all proportion to its size. I was told of a small and courageous publishing firm which was doing something to redress the balance. I travelled to its office in a brand-new scooter-rickshaw whose driver, judging by his reaction to my attempts to urge caution, was certainly pretty near the zero level of English. The office was above a paint shop in one of the not-so-smart parts of central Madras. There I met S. Ramakrishnan, one of the partners of Cre-A Publications. He spoke excellent English but had chosen to publish in Tamil.
‘It was an ideological, not a commercial, decision,’ he told me. ‘We want to do in Tamil what has not been done before. We have to extend the language, so that people can express themselves.’
Ramakrishnan believed that the use of English by the élite had stunted the development of Tamil. He said, ‘As a publisher, I find that English is not a healthy thing. It limits the possibilities of the expression of experience. If I want to write a critical essay on film or theatre in Tamil it will be very difficult. Unless we do most of our communication in Tamil, a large section of the people will not be able to understand wide areas of experience. There will just not be enough Tamil works for them.’
Cre-A Publications is attempting to fill the gap by publishing Tamil books in new fields, but it is meeting with customer resistance. It found, for example, that a health-care manual had sold well because everyone was concerned about their health, but a book on environmental issues flopped. It flopped, according to Ramakrishnan, because ‘it was outside Tamil-speaking people's consciousness’. The élite, however, are very environment-conscious – the environment is debated ad nauseam in the English-language press – but the English-speakers are not interested in reading Tamil.
‘A well-educated Tamil household’, Ramakrishnan said, ‘will happily spend fifty rupees on an English paperback but will not think of buying a Tamil book. As they are the ones with the money, this severely limits our markets. Then we face competition from other Tamil publishers – particularly from what are known as monthly novels. They are printed on the cheapest possible paper and sell for only two rupees. It's difficult to wean people away from them, and from the same sort of romantic and sensational stories brought out in serial form in Tamil magazines.’
Nevertheless, Cre-A was making a valiant effort. One of its latest ventures was a Tamil translation of Kafka's The Trial. I couldn't imagine that that would bite deeply into the monthly novels' circulation.
Before I left Delhi I had been to see one of India's leading educationalists, Father Kunnankal, who had infuriated the old boys and parents of St Xavier's, one of the capital's leading day-schools, by changing the medium of instruction from English to Hindi. He came too from the south – from the state of Kerala, and so his mother tongue was the Dravidian language of Malayalam – but he also spoke fluent Hindi and, of course, English. As a result of his pre-Vatican-II Jesuit training, he could converse in Latin as well, although he told me that he did not find many people to talk to in Latin nowadays.
Father Kunnankal pioneered the change to Hindi at St Xavier's because he believed very strongly that the influence of English as the language of the élite was harming his country. Sitting in a small, spartan room in the residential quarters of St Xavier's, he said, ‘I take the problem of English very seriously. It is the main cause of the dividing of India, and we are a deeply divided society. I often wonder whether we really want an equitable and egalitarian society. If we do, education should be a major measure for achieving it.’
‘How’, I asked, ‘does English language as a medium divide society?’
Father Kunnankal was not wearing his habit – not even a clerical collar – but that did not make him any less austere and distant. When I asked that question he looked at me in astonishment, and I was reminded of the occasions at my public school when a form master had discovered that I hadn't done my prep.
‘Of course it makes all the difference,’ the priest said. ‘It is very clear that education should be in the vernacular. If English continues, then all the best jobs go to those educated in that language. The pressure for English-language schools is also maintained. The educational entrepreneurs – including, I am afraid, all too often the Church – say, “If you want English, we will provide it.” Meanwhile the government will go on teaching in the vernacular. That means you will get all the relatives of bureaucrats and ministers studying in private English-medium schools and they will have no personal interest in improving the government education.’
‘How did you manage to persuade the parents and old boys of St Xavier's to accept Hindi?’
‘The basic argument I used was that teaching in Hindi would not lower academic standards. I found many of the parents who spoke English had been educated in a vernacular language and I pointed out to them that I had too. With great reluctance they agreed to the change, but by now we have proved that you can have quality education in Hindi.’
‘But what would you do about a link language? You are never going to persuade southern Indians to accept Hindi.’
‘Well, I don't know about persuading. It could have been
done if we had taken a courageous decision at independence. There has been at least one other occasion since then when I feel the nation would have been prepared to accept any decision the government took, but I had better not say when because I don't want to be accused of meddling in politics. The point is that English cannot be our national language. Apart from being foreign, it is only spoken by perhaps just 50 million people. Hindi can be understood by three-fifths of the population. The over-zealous propagandists of Hindi have created this opposition to it. The English-speaking élite have been only too happy to do what they can to foster this attitude. They despise Hindi and want it to be despised.’
In Madras I found that the Church, as one of the ‘educational entrepreneurs’, had moved into the Tamil market, but it was still under strong pressure from its customers to provide English-medium schools. Presentation Convent is situated in large grounds known as Church Park, on Mount Road – potentially one of the best commercial sites in Madras. The Presentation nuns were an Irish order, but there had been a ban on new foreign missionaries for many years and the Madras convent was almost entirely Indian. The nuns originally provided education just for the élite, but now they look after nearly 4,000 girls in three schools and one teacher-training college. Church Park was no longer its old spacious self. Sister Pamela – one of the senior nuns – told me, ‘If we put up another five-storeyed building, we could fill it three times over.’
She was taking a class of trainee teachers. Two wore the habit of a Roman Catholic congregation. Only one wore a sari and the rest were in green skirts and white blouses. They had all just left school. Sister Pamela was sitting in front of a blackboard – the only educational aid I could see in the classroom. She was fair-skinned by the standards of the south, because she was an Anglo-Indian. When Sister Pamela invited me to ask the class why they had chosen to be educated in English, they all gave the well-tutored reply: ‘Because it's an international language.’
‘What about your national language?’ I asked. That stumped the girls. Eventually one said, ‘I don't mind Hindi.’ The future teachers had given no thought to India's language problem – to them it was natural and right that English should be ‘the medium of instruction’. Sister Pamela then dismissed the class, and the girls trooped obediently out on to the verandah. We went to the sister's office, where she explained the different educational institutions on the campus.
The newest was the Sacred Heart Tamil-medium school, started just seven years ago. The sister said, ‘We find there is a demand for that school from drivers and people like that. The politicians and the bureaucrats who are always going on about Tamil, they send their daughters to our English-medium schools. They put a lot of pressure on us, because there is a great shortage of places in good English-medium schools.’
I told Sister Pamela of a college principal I had recently met in northern India who carried a revolver to protect himself from angry parents whose children he couldn't take because demand so far exceeded the supply of places. Sister Pamela said, ‘It's not that bad here, but sometimes they do try to put pressure on us.’
‘Do you succumb?’
‘We try not to – let's leave it at that,’ she replied firmly.
I then asked why there was such a demand for education in English.
‘It has a snob value. Nowadays also, I am afraid, most parents want to send their children abroad for further education. They are only keen on them becoming doctors or engineers, and a foreign training puts you in a much better position whether you want to get a job or set up on your own.’
Very few Indian children go to foreign universities before getting an Indian degree. The shortage of places at good Indian universities – especially engineering and medical colleges – has created a narrow, highly competitive, exam-oriented education system which puts frightening pressures on schoolchildren. The best engineering students disappear down the brain drain; the doctors all want to practise high-tech medicine which has little or no relevance to the health of the vast majority of Indians. I asked Sister Pamela why the Church was helping to provide this élitist education.
‘Things are changing now. I have already told you that we have started a Tamil school here. We have also closed down our élite boarding-school in the hill-station of Kodaikanal. The religious orders used to specialize in these English schools, although there were some exceptions – for instance, one of our schools here was founded as part of an orphanage for Anglo-Indians. At the same time, our parishes do run schools for ordinary Tamils.’
Those who argue in favour of Western culture and values for India claim that they have provided the only egalitarian challenge to the ‘iniquities’ of the caste system. This argument falls down on many counts – not the least being that down the centuries Hinduism has thrown up several reformist movements without the help of Western values. The changes in the inequable class system in Britain were brought about by the industrial revolution and the wealth it produced. If India had been allowed to have its own industrial revolution instead of being forced to contribute to Britain's, who can say what influence that would have had on the caste system? What is more, the Church – which was supposed to be in the vanguard of the drive to ‘civilize’ India – itself fell victim to the caste system.
Christianity in southern India is very old. Tradition has it that St Thomas the Apostle was martyred in Madras. When the Portuguese Jesuits came in the sixteenth century, they found Syrian Christianity firmly established in Kerala. Obviously they could not let well alone, and a battle ensued – which is undecided to this day – between the proponents of the Syrian and the Latin rites. Kerala still has the only Roman Catholic cardinal loyal to the Syrian tradition.
The British brought with them further divisions to trouble Indian Christianity. St Mary's church in the fort in Madras claims to be the oldest Anglican church east of Suez. Consecrated in 1680, it still stands, with its spire and rectangular nave a remarkable tribute to the style of Nicholas Hawksmoor. The guidebook in St Mary's records an early Anglican chaplain's concern about the influence of the Roman Church on his flock.
We are told that ‘Master Patrick Warner, the Chaplain of Fort St George, was much exercised in his mind because the English soldiers took unto them as wives the native Portuguese women and allowed the marriages to be conducted by Roman Catholic priests. In 1676, therefore he wrote a long letter to the Directors [of the East India Company] complaining of the backsliding of soldiers, the drinking and dicing of Writers and Factors, and the sinful toleration of Sir William Langhorne, who had actually fired a salute in honour of the foundation of a Roman Catholic church within the walls of ‘White Town’.
There was also rivalry between the Anglicans and the Catholics for Hindu souls. In numerical terms the Catholics won, but neither of the Churches made any great headway with orthodox Hindus: the bulk of their converts came from the untouchable community and the tribes. One Roman Catholic friend of mine still refers to Harijan converts as ‘powder-milk Christians’, and there is no doubt that these people – the poorest of the poor – were attracted by the missionaries' promises to feed their bodies, rather than the prospect of spiritual nourishment. Nevertheless, the Harijans also expected Christianity to give them the dignity that they were denied by Hinduism, but here they were to be bitterly disappointed – especially by the Roman Catholic Church.
In many churches in Tamil Nadu, Harijans were separated from the rest of the congregation by a screen. They were not even united with the rest of the Church in death – special parts of cemeteries were set aside for them, and in at least one place, Trichinopoly, they had a separate burial-ground. The Church did little to educate Harijan Christians, concentrating its efforts on schools for the élite. As for ordination, that was almost unthinkable. A Catholic schoolmaster told me recently that, in the Krishna diocese, upper-caste Catholics still objected to taking Communion from a Harijan priest because they believed that the host would be defiled.
The Roman Catholic Church no lo
nger insults its Harijan Christians so openly, but they are still very much a deprived majority. In the diocese of Madras, Harijans make up about 80 per cent of the membership of the Church yet they are represented by just five of the 200 diocesan clergy. There is only one Harijan bishop in Tamil Nadu – some say he is the only Harijan bishop in India – and he was not the man his community wanted.
In 1972, the see of Vellore fell vacant. The vicar-general was a Harijan, and his community felt that he should become their bishop. The Church thought otherwise, so the Harijan Christians went on the rampage, burning churches and threatening their clergy. The Church eventually compromised by appointing a Harijan to the diocese of Ootacamund, an ecclesiastical backwater in the Nilgiri Hills. Now the Church faces a new challenge from militant Harijans who are no longer prepared to accept casteism in the Church. They call themselves ‘Dalit Christians’. Dr B. R. Ambedkar, the Harijan lawyer who wrote the Indian constitution, first gave his community the name ‘Dalit’, which in Sanskrit means ‘oppressed’.
In Madras there is a very active Dalit movement among the Christians. I met one of its young leaders – Paul Panneereselvan of the Dalit Liberation Educational Trust. He had recently organized a rally of Christian Dalits in Madras to demand that the government give them the same educational and job opportunities – ‘reservations’, as they are known – which had been given to Hindu dalits since independence. He had apparently faced stiff resistance from the Roman Catholic archbishop, resistance he overcame only by threatening to start a movement for a separate Dalit Church. Paul took me to meet two priests who had been helpful to him.