By Jyotirmoy Prodhani
History of English education in India:
The ancient education system of India is a greatly glorified tradition. But this traditional education system of India has been the most exclusionary mode of pedagogy which hardly has any parallel in other civilizations of human history. In ancient India Only the ‘twice born’, the dwijas or the Brahmins had the absolute right over education while some limited access was granted to the wards of the rulers. Manusmriti had given a long list of people who must be barred from education which included the traders, farmers, keepers of animals, widows, and of course the Sudras who were prevented not only from learning the Sanskrit texts, but were also not allowed to read or even hear the recitations of those texts. Severe punishments were specifically coded for the violators of these rules. However, these excluded classes of people could have some access to education during the Muslim rule in the Mediaeval period. One of the highly learned modern men of India Raja Rammohun Ray got his education in this system who became a scholar of Persian and the continental philosophy which he read mostly in Persian translations. Later, he also became a scholar of Sanskrit as well as a major champion of English education in India.
Hindu College (which later became Presidency College and now Presidency University) was established in Calcutta in 1817 following the demand of the Hindu community who wanted to have an English education. Raja Ramomhun Ray was one of its most eminent patrons. However, it was meant only for the ‘the sons of the respectable Hindoos’ to learn ‘English and Indian languages and literature and science of Europe and Asia.’ By 1836 about six thousand students (primarily the Hindu boys) were getting English education in Bengal.
Significantly, the Muslim leaders had opposed the introduction of English education in India replacing Persian. So, they demanded the establishment of a Madrasa for the Muslim students, to which the British government had readily agreed. But soon the Muslim leaders realized that armed with English education, the Hindus marched far ahead of the Muslims in the new era. It took years for the Muslims to be at par with their Hindu counterparts in terms of advancement in modern education and gaining social, economic as well as political power associated with it. In fact, they are yet to fully recover from that setback. Syed Ahmad Khan was a visionary and to provide modern education and English learning to the Muslim learners, he had established the Muhammedan Anglo Oriental College in 1875 which later came to be known as the Aligarh Muslim University.
However, in October 1817, when the Hindu College was established, a new era of education began in India. Subsequently, education in India no longer remained a caste privilege; rather the students from the unrepresented categories of society, including women, found education an accessible pedagogic experience. In the last 200 years or so, in empowering as well as emancipating the masses, modern and secular education had played a very crucial role where English was the key facilitator both as a language and as a means of providing access to the finest texts in science, philosophy, literature and other branches of knowledge. Therefore, the Dalit intellectuals observe 5 October as the Indian English Day to celebrate education in India as an instrument of social empowerment. Following the greater access to modern education, mainly the Dalits and tribal, the table is slowly turning, posing the greatest challenge to the pedagogic supremacy of the Brahmins and the high castes who have been the biggest beneficiaries of education in India across regimes. Dalit intellectual, Kancha Illaiah, in one of his recent articles has argued that the benefits that the high castes had gained through English education, now they want to deny it to the Dalits and the Adivasis.
The reality of the growing competence in English of the Dalits, the tribals, and other subalterns has given the biggest anxiety to the privileged castes in India. Therefore, the attempts to replace English as part of the state policy to neutralise the advantage of the non-castes and the lower castes by confiscating their capacity to control English language which is a global means to access knowledge and gaining epistemic power. It may be noted that the Dalits have gained unprecedented social visibility through the Dalit discourse which is made available in English for the readers of the world. In the case of Northeast India, it has emerged as the region with the highest density of empowered tribes with strong competence in the English language.
English in the Northeast:
In the Northeast, English education has a completely different social history than in Bengal or in the other parts of India as here the caste dimension of English education was completely absent. Caste, in fact, is an alien concept in the Northeast, especially among the ethnic communities. Missionaries were the primary catalysts to start modern education in the region in the mid-19th century which did not essentially begin with the introduction of English alone, but rather with the process of institutionalizing the vernaculars that led to the development of several indigenous oral languages of the region. Contributions of Miles Bronson to the development of Assamese language are legendary. The Welsh Missionary, Thomas Jones is known for developing the Khasi language, Nathan Brown for writing the first book on the Garo vocabulary, Dr. Edwin W. Clark and his wife Mary Mead for developing the Ao language, Dr. Rivenburge for developing the Angami language, and J.H. Lorrain, and F.W. Savidge of Arthington Mission for developing the Lushai or the Mizo language in the late 19th century. However, the list can go on.
So, the history of English education in the Northeast is associated with the rise of the vernacular. Despite the plurality of languages in the region, (with about 225 of the 450 tribal communities of India and about 220 different languages) it is English that has brought the communities closer to each other with a distinct collective identity. Contrary to what the NEP 2020 has defined, in the Northeast, English is not the language of the ‘elites’, rather it is the language of the masses, the commoners. It is even the state language of three of the tribal states of the Northeast. English is a means of ordinary communication, which of course surprises the mainlanders, putting them in a rather embarrassing situation following the sudden reversal of power equation between an elite mainlander and a common Northeasterner. After all, English in the Indian context has evolved as the language of the educated. English education is also instrumental in making Mizoram into one of the most literate states in India. English, in fact, has become a local language of the Northeast where one of the consequences of colonialism has been turned into one of its biggest advantages. English, in fact, is one of the local languages of Northeast now.
Significantly, ‘Northeast literature’ has become a major literary canon worldwide only through the English language. More importantly, the most eminent authors of this literature are the tribal and women authors. Unlike the authors of the IWE (Indian Writing in English) literature, none of them are from any metropolis, rather most of them are from interior tribal villages of the hill states.
Noted African author, Chinua Achebe had argued that it was English that could give Nigeria its national literature. Writings in the ethnic languages could produce only the local literature of the respective communities. English has a similar status in Northeast India. Adoption of Hindi would destroy one of the greatest cultural gains the region could achieve by mastering and postcolonising the language. It took almost a hundred and fifty years for the region to come this far, to be much closer to the world despite being on the periphery. In this respect, no other tribal region of India could achieve what the Northeast could.
Hindi as a language carries the ‘memory of caste’ whereas English has no such memory. (Neerav Patel). Therefore, the Dalit scholars from Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule, Periyar to Kancha Illaiah, Chandramohan S. and others have categorically emphasized the importance of English as a means of emancipation for the socially repressed in India. However, the imposition of Hindi, as an apparatus of hegemony, has an apparent goal of trapping the tribe and the natives of the Northeast in the pernicious fold of caste, whose existence could only be justified by being eternally subservient and inferior to the mainland.
An epistemic battle is at hand for the Northeast now, which is far more complicated than political and physical confrontations. The existence of the Northeast as a distinctive cultural territory with its values and vision now depends on how the region responds to this new challenge posed against one of its biggest social capitals — the English language.
(The author teaches in NEHU)