Of Long Words and Exhausted Idioms: Impact of Draft National Education Policy 2019 on English Studies as a discipline

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink." said George Orwell in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. As a student of English Literature I have to ponder why this particular image of Orwell's came to mind while reading the draft of the National Education Policy. I also consider it wise to leave the question unanswered at this point. 

English Studies can be accessed from two points––Language and Literature which can blend seamlessly or become two watertight compartments depending on the policies made by the institution and the ways in which the teachers and students interact in a classroom set up. The two access points also function differently at the school and the higher education levels. The conventional formal education system in India at the school level, until today, has dealt with language and literature as almost mutually exclusive. Schools have had a history of having papers named English-I and English-II, textbooks divided into 'readers' and 'workbooks' and so forth. Having been socialised in such a set up, a student pursuing higher education in English Literature is often transfixed with introduction to semiotics and postcolonial theory where both undermine the rigid structures of grammar, syntax and language usage that have been taught in school. Despite the diametrical difference in approaches, one cannot completely separate what happens at the school level from English as a discipline at a Higher Education Institution. 

This essay is an attempt to put together my musings on how the draft National Education policy would affect English Studies as a whole. My argument is based on one particular provision in the policy which I believe would deconstruct and reframe our interactions with English in an academic set up. 

NEP 4.5.1.: Home language/mother tongue as medium of instruction

"The school education system will make its best effort to use the regionally preponderant home language as the medium of instruction. However, the system should also make full efforts to establish an adequate number of schools having medium of instruction catering to significant linguistic minorities in that region." (NEP 80)

The policy suggests the medium of instruction until Grade 5, preferably upto Grade 8 would be "home language/ mother tongue/ local language". This is problematic because it has been proven that the ability to learn a language diminishes with age. This, if implemented has multiple repercussions. Firstly, it would reduce multilingualism and the number of polyglots in India. Secondly, without English, the value of an Indian at the global market would drastically fall.

Thirdly, and pausing the nationalist sentimentality that seems to be driving the core of the policy, English is slowly, surreptitiously establishing itself as the lingua franca when the Indian languages are caught in their own power struggles. However, it has to be taken into account that till today, English is accessible by and limited to the elites but a workable solution would be to make English more accessible as opposed to a violent attempt to push it off its pedestal. 

Fourth, despite the provision given to minorities, implementation of this would tighten language barriers and check migration within the country. 

Lastly and by far the most worryingly, it also raises the issue of translations and their quality. Although the policy makes a provision for An Indian Institute of Translation and Interpretation, it would take time to establish such an enterprise and amass an army of translators for all possible languages with subject specific knowledge catering to different classes in a school. 

The five points mentioned above are an essentialised summation of a more complex situation. The subtle shift in thrust towards home language is well ensconced within the gambit of multilingualism and the three-language formula. This, I believe, has far-reaching consequences. 

Firstly, it puts an inordinate amount of pressure on the teachers to be prepared to teach a unitary idea in multiple languages, also limiting the movement of teachers from one part of the country to another. It also completely goes against the popularly practised models of English Language Teaching where one learns a language by using the target language rather than learning it in translation. Interestingly, the draft policy does not begin to describe teacher competencies with particular reference to language(s) of communication while articulating about the integrated B.Ed programme (NEP 134-136).

Secondly, NEP's argument that "English has no advantage over other languages in expressing thoughts; on the contrary, Indian languages have been specifically developed over centuries and generations to express thoughts in the Indian scenario, climate, and culture" (Page 81, NEP 2019) sounds more like a rhetoric dependent on the glorified histories of the nation. It appears as though the Gramsci-an idea of hegemony is at play where the supremacy of nationalist ideologies seems to manifest itself through intellectual leadership, artistically wrapped with ribbons of decolonisation and national pride. English as a language I believe has transcended the infamy of just being the language of the oppressor and has Indian-ised itself in the last seven decades. It also carries an obvious advantage of being the language of global communication––be it academic realm or the trade world–– which leaves us with one of two options where we one, directly assimilate ourselves as speakers of English along with our home languages or two, invest in a culture of good translations so that knowledge sharing does not become limited. 

At the higher education level, a lot of emphasis is being put on Liberal Education (NEP Chapter 11) while using the imagery of rebuilding universities to the class of Nalanda and Takshashila. One must ponder what role English Studies as we know it today would have in the NEP suggested Indian Institutes of Liberal Arts (IILA), when considerable emphasis is being put on home languages and home cultures and modelled after institutions of past glory.  

This poses an issue because the draft policy does not really define what 'liberal' entails. On the one hand, liberalism comes with a sense of all-acceptance and an intellectual generosity. But, on the other, it also implies a certain amount of erasure of boundaries and letting go of rigid constructs which would contradict the unilateral tones the policy is taking. The Orwell-ian cuttlefish seems to carry more significance now. This deep-rooted ambiguity of liberal arts is hardly explored in the description of the IILA.  One is bound to ask if the NEP's idea of 'liberal' is limited to allowing the student the choice of courses emphasising on native Indian art forms and languages and flexibilities of entries and exit. The NEP, in context of liberal education places substantial importance on professional competence and constitutional values (NEP 230). What would then be the role of dissent? "This idea of development seems antithetical to the idea of a liberal education as well to the idea of critical thinking, which the document says should be included in the common core curriculum of such an education" (Pandya). The question becomes far more relevant when the meaning of 'critical thinking' is gleaned from the policy as being limited to quantitative analyses.  

"The common core curriculum shall aim to develop broad capacities and important dispositions, including but not limited to: critical thinking (e.g. courses on statistics, data analysis, or quantitative methods) . . . " (NEP 229).

The entire policy appears to be in an attempt to create a concrete paradigm for the liberal arts and put together a structure that will fix the definitions of Indian Art and Literature from a hegemonic nationalist purview. "What is finally at stake is not literary texts but Literature––the ideological significance of the process whereby certain historical texts are severed from their social formations . . . and bound and ranked together to constitute a series of literary traditions and interrogated to yield a set of ideological presupposed responses" (Eagleton 56).  It would also be interesting to observe how the policy's insistence on multi-disciplinarity and applicability of research is going to affect the discipline. In summation, my understanding of the draft Education Policy is that it does not place much weight on critical theory and literature angle of English studies but places extraordinary emphasis on the language. The attention on multilingualism will certainly have a huge impact on English studies and what would be expected of an English teacher. 

References:

Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: a Study in Marxist Literary Theory. Verso, 2006.

Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Columbia University Press, 2011.

Kasturirangan, K, et al. Draft National Education Policy (NEP), Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2019.

Orwell, George. Politics and the English Language. Penguin, 2013, https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit, Accessed 14 Aug. 2019.

Pandya, Pratishtha. The 'Liberal' Education Envisaged by the Draft NEP Has No Role for Dissent. 12 June 2019, https://thewire.in/education/national-education-policy-liberal-education-dissent. Accessed 15 Aug. 2019.