National Education Policy (NEP) promises a lot for a transformative change in the education sector. However, NEP in the current political landscape disciplining universities and learning spaces, it conveys a gap between the document and reality. Here, “Multilingualism and the power of language” section of NEP will be examined in regards to language and its significance to indigenous communities.
I remember, I was learning four languages- English, Hindi and Meitei, both in Bengali script and Meitei script (introduced as a pilot project) – when I was in my first or second standard. I get to speak my mother tongue, Rongmei, only at home and my village, Namthanlong. My siblings and my friends from my village, we all went to the same school in Imphal and the domineering role of the languages being taught at school was overwhelming and it defined the space of school. In such a set up, speaking our mother tongue with students from our village invited stares, sometimes mockery and laughter which made us feel apologetic. This led to avoiding friends from our village at school premises, and at times when we mingled, we spoke in low tone and sometimes, we spoke among ourselves in Meitei language. This made things difficult, even to maintain friendships with them.
The school also encouraged English speaking and whoever found speaking anything but English were penalised. The condition as such slowly galvanised into making me feel ashamed of our mother tongue and being a tribal. Whenever my parents came to school to drop us or pick up, I tried my best not to speak to them in our mother tongue when my classmates were around.
As the learning graph picked up, I found myself ahead of most of my classmates in learning Meitei language, Bengali and Hindi. I vividly remembered the day when our class teacher acknowledged and appreciated my quick learning ability, she called out my name in the class and gave a special mention but in no time, she went on to use my ability as a reference point to remind and shame students from dominant community that a tribal student (hao-macha) was ahead of them. At that young age, I could barely understand the implication of those words from the teacher, somehow, I sensed the power she was wielding. Perhaps that was my first know-how about how power operates. I began to pick up English, it provided an enabling medium for me to excel and be at par with my classmates from dominant (non-tribal including Tajongmei) communities (1). This was the experience I had in school days, yet the approach directed towards tribes as unequal beings was felt from time to time implicitly and sometimes explicitly.
After I moved to University of Delhi, I felt the geographical gap, quality of education, and the kind of access I had in Imphal. English proved to be a means for me to get access to various spaces in university and city life. Yet, the experience at the university level is different, as the English language is replete with privilege, preservation of class and caste, and exclusion. For the racial othering at us, through conversation in English (sometimes in Hindi) I get to know more of how others perceive and make of us, tribes. Knowing English and Hindi and being acquainted with Bollywood, Hollywood, football, tennis, etc broke the barriers in making friendship with people in the college. It is in English that I get to speak back at them apart from having conversations. Seniors during my first year at college informed us to speak in English outside the college as the chances of experiencing racism is less, alluding to the assumed fact that racism is class based – which is not. Yet till today, I still feel and experience the power dynamics embedded in language, this includes my experience in having correspondence with publication houses, some experiences were blatantly racist and condescending. Our mother tongue which is laden with our culture, indigenous knowledge system, history etc rarely made it to conversations which took place at school, college, university, bar, mall, cafe, canteen, seminar, workshop, office etc. The distance between myself and our roots more often than not, comes off as an identity crisis. Looking at NEP, the emphasis and promotion of mother tongue is a noble one, how this is going to be implemented is not known. English language bears an ambivalent character, it serves as an enabling medium to get access and opportunities in varied ways for marginalised students, and on the other hand, it reeks of privileges which favours the upper class and caste. This norm of English as all-embracing will remain as long as it is manifested with power, privileges, and parlance for universalism.
English language with its colonial legacy and eurocentrism can never dissociate itself from its long-standing power and influence. That said, in a current set-up constrained by material conditions, inequality, racism, casteism, and political landscape, English as a language provides an opportunity to overcome or resist these constraints in our everyday life. Decolonial methodology involves using English language by giving it back in a language known to oppressors, agents, enablers and centrist. Through this method, indigenous/tribal peoples can lay a claim on authorship and own their knowledge system. While at it, mother tongue must be preserved, spoken, taught and learned along this whole process so that one’s community identity is not subsumed into the tendency of seeing them as ahistorical; cultures to be regressive, and custom as outdated, etc. This significance looks bleak in the NEP, especially for various ethnic tribal communities in the states of north-eastern region. Circumstance and context must come into play when it comes to language and its relevance, for our tribal community in Manipur speaking ‘English’ is an act of resistance to immediate overarching socio-political conditions and history residing in languages like Meitei, Bengali and Hindi. In the NEP’s three languages to be taken up by children, two of the three have to be native languages of India. I am wondering here, which are the languages a student in one particular geography (read Imphal here) must take up, and how about when their family moves to another state. Coming back to our tribe, we do not have script and our knowledge system centres around oral tradition- transmitted orally from one generation to another. Yet, our Rongmei literature is written in both Bengali and Roman scripts, a testimony of how oral tradition of indigenous tribal community is being sidelined for written literature. Moreover, this unfortunate practice in knowledge production is a remnant of Bengali cultural imperialism and the British colonialism. The tradition of overlooking oral tradition continues. In the current NEP, there is not a single mention of oral tradition and oral history, and with a special emphasis on languages mentioned in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India for investment and improvising language learning, the hardship staring at tribal students is alarming!
1. Tajongmei in Rongmei language is the same as the word Mayang used by the Meiteis.
Richard Kamei is a Phd Scholar at TISS Mumbai and a first generation learner. He belongs to the Rongmei Naga Tribe. He is from Namthanlong Village in Imphal West, Manipur.
WeRetrospect
Brother Richard, it is still thought that multilingualism is an obstacle to further cooperation, it is limit on worldly achievements, multilingualism is divisive, it is thought that monolingualism is normal and desirable state of affairs.
In European countries, language and nation coincide.
Marginalization of the languages and cultures of minority people in the European states can be seen as a form of internal colonialism.
Even in countries where minority languages are recognised for some purposes, what this means varies in practice. By minority language I mean one with a relatively small number of speakers living within the domain of a more widely spoken language, whose knowledge is usually necessary for full participation in society. Swedes in Finland probably have the best legal protection of any minority group in the world. The next strongest position is held by minority languages which have limited (often territorial) rights.
This is the case in Canada, where certain provinces are officially declared bilingual, and others, like Ontario (where the national capital lies), are not. It would be naive, however, to assume that bilingual (multilingual) countries were created to promote bilingualism, rather than to guarantee the legal right to more than one language in a society.