It is always an interesting experience to watch televised “national news” beamed from National Capital Region (which is a short-hand for Delhi and the areas around Delhi that have been appended to meet the ravenous appetite for “cosmopolitan” living at the cost of devastating long-existing rural communities) studios, with “national” experts telling the viewers the most important issues of the day for the “nation.”
The glitzy presentation and the earnest tone would make you believe what you saw is what matters. It set me thinking of the education-related and educational institution issues that have received greatest media highlight in recent times. Broad topics like replacement of German by sub-continental languages in Kendriya Vidyalaya schools, National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) syllabi and textbooks and the battle over their ideological slant to more micro-issues like four-year degree programme in Delhi University, students union elections of universities in Delhi, dropping of an essay on Ramayans from the syllabus by the History department of Delhi University, library entry in Aligarh Muslim University and so forth are some of the things that gripped the “nation.”
What is common to these things that received maximum highlight? To use a Bangla expression, all these issues belong to that super-subsidised set of institutions (compared to those funded by state governments) whose tiki/shikha/hair-tuft/choti is tied to the central government in Delhi. It just so happens that an overwhelming majority of the Indian Union’s citizens have nothing to do with central boards or central universities.
They do not get the kind of subsidies that are taken for granted by Delhi-sponsored institutions. They do the task of education based on mettle alone, without the central subsidy props to heighten or brighten them. The disproportionate focus on Delhi-sponsored institutions tells you that the portrayers of reality also have a stake in the perpetuation in this skewed nature of things.
Hegemony is no omnipotent god – it needs committed cadres who understand that value of the shikha to themselves and hence have a stake in the perpetuation of this status-quo. The present power of the Delhi ideology comes from years of centralised decision-making in education by the virulently rootless (intellectual roots situated in Europe of 1960 or in the River Ganga banks of 500 BCE are equally alien). We must identify the relationship between the beneficiaries of power/subsidy and the favourite media “concerns” in the education sector and also realise that the nature of what they are concerned about and what they aren’t concerned about isn’t accidental.
For instance, it is never about geographically differential resource allocation – Maharashtra, West Bengal, Karnataka, Kerala and Orissa together have as many central universities as Delhi. But in its purest form Delhi (less of a place and more of an ideology of power, being at the apex of clientelist networks like the USA), the concept is more powerful than the place, though the place and its people are an important part of the power of the concept.
There is a way in which Delhi ideology works that is quite interesting. It is not as if everyone follows it, but due to subsidy-powered differences, it creates a hierarchy that forces others to align themselves with the ideology or be left out. Indeed, central government policies punish those state boards, institutions and universities that don’t fall in line. From that starts a trend to tend towards Delhi.
Language is a crucial component of this ideology. Deracination is the ultimate objective, well hidden under the Delhi ideology’s call for “national integration,” as if a Tamil, in Tamil Nadu, sticking to Tamil in daily interactions and considering herself only a Tamil is an inadequate human being, who needs to be reformed into something else.
The ideology first instills inferiority complex and then parades the fruits of converting. The elites of so-called “vernacular” origin are the easiest to sway. With their unassailable social locus and non-negotiable inherited privilege, they make the “cosmopolitan” quantum leap. They jump ship and still control the narrative about the deserted ship. It is just perfect.
I consider myself fortunate that my parents chose a school for me where learning Hindi was not mandatory. Apart from my mother tongue, Bangla, there was some choice about what sub-continental language I have to learn. I came to know much later that in most other parts of the Indian Union and those schools in West Bengal who followed boards and syllabi imported from Delhi, this was not the case.
In fact, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu are among the very few states of the Indian Union where one can finish schooling without ever having to learn Hindi compulsorily. Everyone else learned Hindi in what is touted to be a diverse, multi-lingual nation-state! By way of standard, the West Bengal board had a gradation in terms of First language, Second language and Third language – with first, second and third corresponding to a decreasing order in terms the breadth and toughness of the syllabus.
In my secondary and higher-secondary examination, my first language was Bangla and my second language was English. English was merely a “medium” in my school and in my head – a code to decipher certain kinds of knowledge, a tool of expression in certain settings. Those among us who are confident in the power of the limbs that gods have given us naturally, use the alien but useful tool not as a crutch for daily walking but for certain specialist functions – mostly for ensuring upward social mobility and communicating with people who don’t know our mother-tongue. For much else, there is the mother tongue.
A certain class faces immense discomfort and intellectual challenge to continuously talk in their mother tongue even for a day. But for most others, not being able to talk in their mother tongue for a day is a source of discomfort. This latter discomfort is hard to explain to those who can afford to be rootless “world citizens” by dint of affluence, connections, the bright light of tongue erudition and mobility, all of which act as filters, resulting in the creation of a largely homogenous contemporary liberal urban class.
This is the urban consumer class that has money as well as the right kind of “taste.” Big business, swadeshi and bideshi, loves them. This non-diverse crowd loves the subcontinent’s diversity in the same way that the very cooking-skill challenged me likes good biryani cooked by others. With the right kind of “erudition,” one can reinvent this skill-less self into a biryani “aficionado” or even “specialist.”
Diversity-lovers consider it degrading to be comparable in any way to the diverse multitude. Knowledge is not power, distance is. Diversity is to be “celebrated” but not produced – Modi-lovers and haters are united in this attitude. They occasionally try to cover-up this unity by condemning each other. All the condemnations are Made in Delhi.
The vast number of the rooted “provincials” (that is the majority of the people) in whose names and with whose money this sordid, almost private spectacle is played out, are mere spectators.
For a plural Indian Union, a rebalancing of power is needed. Token, domesticated, tooth-less diversity needs to be replaced by an insurgent pluralism that would be for parity between languages and would work towards creating an equally subsidised playing field across all public institutions, whether controlled by the state government or the central government. Then we shall come to know which contemporary bright ones owe their “brilliance” to subsidised, focused light.
