In search of India’s lingua franca

Published on September 09, 2007

Deepak was pensive. That seemed to nettle Anjum. “Chewing the cud?” he teased Deepak.

“Was thinking about that workshop Deb ran,” Deepak drawled. “How those bank robots who write letters been told to write the way East India Company baboos did two centuries ago. As though time’s stood still.”

“Why pick on that bank?” said Chhanda. “Almost every sarkari officer writes nothing but baboo English. And, with rare exceptions, so does every schoolteacher; every college lecturer; every university professor; every corporate executive; every politician; every legislator, every Minister. Company baboo English is India’s lingua franca.”

“You make it sound like it’s our Rashtra Bhasa,” Anjum quipped. “How’d you define lingua franca?”

“Simple,” said Chhanda, “- a language used among people whose main languages are different. Baboo English fits the bill.”

“I’d like to believe things aren’t that bad,” Anjum said somewhat weakly.

“But,” said Chhanda, “that’s fact. D’you see anything but baboo English in any printed matter you get? From newspapers? From sarkari offices? From the corporation? From mobile service providers? From the LIC? From industry? From trade? The same old facilities, noted and duly noted and intimated, and same/the same instead of a pronoun, and kindly instead of please.”

“Ah,” said Deepak, “but corporate and NGO baboos now have new buzzwords: facilitate and implement, infrastructure and interface, maximize, optimize and overview. And then they’ve paradigm, parameter, potentialize, prioritize and quantify. It’s the same baboo motto of course: to inflate and sound important. Never to use what you’d commonly use in conversation. When the idea should be always to use the spontaneous language of everyday speech.”

Anjum changed tack: “But you’ve been a teacher all along, Chhanda. Didn’t you shoo your students away from baboo English?”

“God knows I tried,” said Chhanda. “But how much can one teacher do when students absorb nothing but baboo English from everywhere?”

“I bet their textbooks were worded in baboo English,” said Deepak.

“But of course,” Chhanda said. “Against one class in English where I told them to avoid it, they had five classes in subjects that dinned it into them. You can’t blame the students. The education authorities prescribed texts written in horrid baboo English - geography, history, civics, hygiene, what have you.”

“What about classes on writing?” Anjum asked. “Didn’t that give you the chance to get them to write clearly?”

“Sure,” said Chhanda. “And the students mostly did try---but only for the occasional piece of composition. With so many texts, baboo English just drenched their system. Haven’t you seen what the West Bengal school Boards prescribe as textbooks?”

“You mean the muck that the ‘teacher mafia’ churns out,” said Anjum, “and those Boards endorse?”

“Written by those in with the All Bengal Teachers’ Association,” added Deepak. “By rotation. So every teacher close to the mafia gets a chance to rake in money for his muck.”

“Yes, a multi-million-rupee fraud every year. How much must each give to the mafia?” wondered Anjum. “I bet each has to surrender at least 60% of the loot. The mafia wouldn’t allow a book unless the money lines their pockets well.”

“Or maybe more,” said Deepak. “The mafia would give a slice each year to the Education Minister and his cronies too. The Left Front’s been ruling the State for three decades. That means an entrenched racket, and no questions. And maybe the Minister gives a cut to some legislators. Or how come opposition parties never question the racket?”

“And I suppose,” said Anjum, “in the other States, where governments keep changing, the school board mafia milk the publishers to endorse their dross. And make more bucks appointing and transferring teachers.”

“You bet,” said Chhanda. “India’s education system’s fully mafia-controlled.”

“But aren’t we bypassing something?” said Deepak. “Chhanda taught at one of the better schools, before she went on to teach at college. What of the thousands and thousands of third-rate schools we have all over the country? What guidance in writing do their students get?”

“None at all,” said Chhanda. “The students mug muck ‘essays’---churned out again by teachers close to the mafia---to vomit on their exam paper. In English, or the vernaculars.”

“Gosh!” said Anjum. “That means millions of Indians get no training in writing - ever!”

“Well, maybe in some of the better schools they do,” Chhanda mumbled uncertainly.

“Hah! And what’s that mean for the country?” guffawed Anjum. “Maybe a hundred teachers among tens of thousands who teach several million.”

“And that means,” Deepak echoed him, “millions of Indians pass school without ever writing a single sentence on their own.”

“And that means,” said Anjum sadly, “that a whole nation of supposedly literate citizens have never ever written anything but perhaps the odd letter to a friend or relative.”

“And that’s why,” said Chhanda, “every Indian just falls back on the Company baboo’s model. Indians don’t have models for official correspondence. Only what those semi-literate British merchants brought with them in the 17th century.”

“And those models,” said Anjum, “are made to serve to this day - in the Internet age.”

“And it’s those models,” said Deepak, “that baboos in each State translate into our regional languages.”

“And yet,” Deb piped in, “the remedy’s so simple: they’ve only to refer to reformers like Sir Ernest Gowers, who changed the way British bureaucrats wrote. And to Rudolph Flesch. Which is what I did at the workshop.”

“But Indians will refuse all reform,”said Deepak. “Know why? Because Indians been independent 60 years, but John Company still rules their souls!”