“Shhh…Sister is coming.“
“Glad you spotted her.”
“So what have you got in your lunchbox today?”
“Kebabs and four pooris. Want some?”
“I love aunty’s kebabs. So delicious. They are my favorite.“
“Okay. She has left. Phew. Why does she take these rounds during our break?”
“Britishers left India but English stayed behind. What’s the need to speak in English when we can read and write in English?”
It must have been 1990. I was the tween who had spotted our school Principal taking rounds during the lunch break that day. It was well-known that she had spies all around. We were fined if the spies or the Sister herself heard any one talking in Hindi within the school premises. I knew my friend wasn’t a spy and she knew I wasn’t one too. So we switched between fluent Hindi and broken English. If a suspicious looking student pretended to stroll around us, we would switch to English. We trusted no one.
English was the medium of instruction in my school. English language was nothing more than a subject and we knew it as English I. Literature was II. The nuns at school did not know Hindi. Teachers knew but they followed the rules. The students never. We made mistakes and were slow in forming sentences. Speaking in English was embarrassing. Teachers and parents believed that practice would make the ten-year-olds perfect. Some even said that listening to English news on TV would help. How was that even possible? The adults never understood the problem. A casual conversation with a friend in English was way out of comfort zone and served no purpose. By then, we were already pouring our hearts out in Hindi. English was a burden.
This is 2019 and it has been many years since then. After high school, graduation and post-graduation, there were a few jobs and life that went by too fast. Not in the same order though.
Yesterday India was playing a game of cricket against England. Against the same country that ruled us for close to 100 years and left English behind. Sitting in the other room, I could hear the English commentary on our TV. At work, English is the only common language. My peers are from US or those parts of India where Hindi is not spoken. So we vent out our frustrations and share life stories in English. There is comfort in having a common language to converse.
It’s hard to switch to fluent Hindi even when there are no spies around.
I studied digital and analog signals in engineering. The switch on English language front was analog. Though I can’t remember the crests and the troughs. I don’t know when I started speaking with ease in this non-native language. It was first the words that came easy and became a part of sentences. Then these words took over more words and shaped themselves into a paragraph. Then came stories and casual conversations.
I make mistakes even today but it isn’t embarrassing anymore.
Today, no one can fine me for not speaking in English. It is more of convenience than compulsion. Those rules in school were important and so was watching news in English. Practice does make one better if not perfect. English is a non-native Indian language and I am glad I know it.
Writing for Yeah Write #429 today
happiness and food 
I think even now in many schools kids are fined/punished for not conversing in English. It can be construed in either ways, a promise for better future or lack of faith on our mother tongue and our abilities to learn later in our lives. There are arguments against each. But what is conclusive is the fact that today we are exchanging our thoughts here in English!
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I know what you mean. I never thought the other way until I read your comment. Thanks for the other perspective, Arvind.
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🙂
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Part of me is sad for young Parul for being forced to use a non-native language. I understand the necessity in the business world, but I wonder what gets lost in the process.
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I must have been confused that time but now I’m grateful else this blog wouldn’t have been a possibility. Thank you for stopping by!
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I too am glad I know the language, else I wouldn’t have been able to read this wonderful piece by you, Parul!
Thankfully, I wasn’t in a convent school and hence there was no such kind of a burden on our head. But, I am glad we had a teacher who made things so simple. All he would ask of us was to express whatever we had in mind in English, be it the story of a movie we watched over the weekend, or how we spent our Sunday. This took away the fear the language could have caused had there been a rule to speak in it.
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That was a good way to teach. It’s hard for non native speakers to learn English or any foreign language for that matter. Thanks Shilpa for sharing small piece of your childhood.
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I was made to listento news all the time. And read telegraph to better my grasp on English. Thankfully no fines in school as equal importance was given to both English and Hindi. But today most if us switch between English and Hindi so fluently that one doesn’t even realize when one language ends and other starts.
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Totally agree! I don’t know when that switch happened.
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English has unified many people, but I feel for the young Parul who was forced to speak it. There is room for more than one language in our lives.
Since you put up the concrit badge, I think you told this story well. It’s good as it stands. But I think this is one you could expand and reflect more on what is gained and lost of culture when a nonnative language becomes dominant. It’s something I’d be interested in reading.
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This is where I went, too. But it might be easier for you or I in the context that many of us in the US are having the discussion about colonization and how forcing people into a colonized language is an early marker of attempted genocide.
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That’s a perspective I did not even think of.
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Thank you, Margaret. I will try to expand this.
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I can relate to your dilemma as a ten-year-old, Parul! We too went through the same situations. And we had spies too! 🙂 We even had similar rules in school as well and English was forced upon us even during lunch-time breaks because the nuns who ran our school insisted we speak the language since English was a foreign language that we hardly ever spoke at home, and it was not going to be easy to gain fluency if we never spoke it to express ourselves in every mood. This is something I understood much later when I became a teacher myself and realised why speaking a language is so important! A bit like, how at home we insist our son always speak the Mother tongue so he is fluent in expressing himself best in the language! Like you, I love the regional langauges but at the same time, also feel glad that I know English.
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I speak Hindi and read and write in English. My funda in life is when the person, I am speaking to, can speak Hindi, then why should we talk to each other in English. You know what I was the designated spy in my class who would secretly note down names of classmates speaking in Hindi and hand over the list to the class teacher. The fine was in monetary terms in my school because the school thought when the children have to ask money from their parents to pay the fine and go through some kind of reprimand at home, they will take to speaking in English.
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I think this was very universally told. Even though it’s outside my direct experience, I can empathize. We had spies (for different reasons) in school too! What a switch at the end. I wonder how it makes you feel to have lost some fluency, or at least comfort, in your native tongue? Very thought provoking piece.
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Parul, I really enjoyed your take on this issue. As a linguist, this is my sweet spot (my Honours dissertation was on second language acquisition and first language maintenance and attrition), and as the niece of several aunts who learned English in school but were too intimidated to ever really speak it, this is very familiar territory.
You did a really nice job of grounding the reader in your early experience of English before showing how it has become a regular part of your everyday life. The distinction you drew between the nuns who didn’t speak Hindi, and the teachers who did, was an important one. It gave a clear picture of who determined the policy directions and mission of the school.
Later, you drew an analogy between learning/using English and the digital and analog signals you studied. It would have been a richer piece if you’d expanded a little on this (especially for those of us who aren’t engineers!).
I really appreciated your reflection on the place of English in the work environment. You raise such a good point about the multiple official languages (and even more non-official languages and dialects) in India, and you lead the reader to reflect on the fact that often those languages are mutually unintelligible and are markers of quite different cultures (?)/ethnicities (?)/practices — I’m not sure what to call it here, but needless to say there are some marked differences in cultural practices between say someone from Kashmir and someone from Kerala. I would have liked to see a little more discussion of the diversity within India (I think that’s something that people who are not from India don’t often encounter or fully appreciate).
There are some historical points that I would have liked to see either expanded on or linked to articles/sources. For example, there’s some controversy over the length of British rule in India, and when that’s measured from. Do we consider the British East India Company (EIC) a governing body post 1600 when it received its charter from the crown to commence trading? Or from 1657 when the crown gained permanent joint stock in the EIC? Or do we measure British rule from 1857/58 subsequent to the 1857 Rebellion? Or from some other date that lies between those extremes? You see what I mean about the debated nature of this history? Resolving this would be several volumes of textbooks, so that’s not what you should aim for, but acknowledging the debate and linking to some sources is often a good way to draw the reader’s attention to it without imposing your own views and then having to defend them in comments.
Most of all, I really enjoyed the dichotomy you demonstrated — being forced to learn this language as a young person and not understanding its usefulness or its future role in your life, in fact resenting its intrusion on your world, to then using the language consistently and naturally as an adult and appreciating its role in your life now. This is a perpetual struggle for so many of us — how many people learned geometry at school and didn’t see the relevance of it, but have used it to build garden sheds or chicken pens or children’s playhouses as adults? No? Only me? Okay, then. But seriously, you’ve touched on something that is a universal struggle; the demands of learning particular subjects in school that seem irrelevant at the time, but that come into their own when we’re adults.
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Yes in schools such rules and spies can be found . If strict rules will not be followed , children never learn to speak english.i think in this era it has become necessary to speak english.
I am an English teacher . I speak , read write and teach in English but I enjoy talking in hindi . I feel emotionally attached to my mother tounge.
Very good piece of writing Parul .
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I like how you’ve taken us into young Parul’s mind and what it was like for her being forced to speak a language she might not have wanted. You’ve shown the change that has occurred over time with the use of language without necessarily saying one is better than the other. This piece reads really well.
Re the content itself on a personal level, I always spoke in English even at home and didn’t really bother to learn my mother tongue Tamil because I didn’t feel like I needed to. I don’t regret it I must confess. Even my Hindi wasn’t strong – living in Bombay meant we used Bombay Hindi which was mixed with English. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing but given where I’m at in life and where I live, I am kind of glad I had a preference for English as it made it so much easier to adapt.
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I read this with interest. This is outside my experience, but you made me feel like I was there with you. Like others have said, I felt bad for the children in such a tough situation.
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Ah! Your post touched such a chord. We had a fine for speaking in Hindi too when growing up in UP. And then the teacher used that fine over the year to buy pencils and give it to all of us. We were so happy for that. Yes, they wanted to ensure that we were fluent in English. I loved Hindi. It was my mother tongue and the first language I spoke. Even today, when I count, I invariably do it in Hindi in my head. Even while playing cards, I am much more comfortable with paan, eint, chidi instead of spades etc. Of course, I always loved English too and later made my career in writing in English. While I can easily switch between Hindi and English, my elder son says that he finds it awkward to suddenly talk in Hindi. That when both of them speak Hindi at home. But like you mentioned, being brought up in the South, their language of choice is English. Both of them are fluent in Hindi but like true cosmopolitan kids, they talk in English all the time. And strangely, we start doing the same. Sigh! I loved the story you shared Parul.
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There was so much that was familiar in your post Parul. The interesting part is that there has been a complete role reversal in this new generation. While we struggled to make friends with English, my children are struggling to speak/read/write Hindi. This, I think is a greater pity. We ended up being fluent in both languages. I absolutely loved the brand of Hindi/Urdu that we spoke, while also enjoying the beauty of English. But my children have lost out on Hindi and that makes me really sad. Of course its our fault to a large extent. Being away from home and interacting with people whose mother tongue wasn’t Hindi made English the prime language for us and that’s what we transmitted to the children.
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I can understand. The story is same if kids in Bangalore. My godchild can’t speak Hindi. She will turn 5 this year and though we laugh, she needs to know her mother tongue.
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You took me back to my school days where we used to get punishments for not speaking in English. We used to secretly converse in Bengali and always in broken English publicly. We also had spies who used to go and complain to sister superior an old catholic nun. Today, I speak more English than Bengali and often have to search for Bengali equivalent of common English words. Just like you, I do not know when this transition happened. Lovely and heartfelt post Parul.
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Thank you Balaka! I have been reading comments and wondering that we all went through the same experience. And here I thought I was the only one. I’m happy you connected with this piece.
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Ha this was the thing in my school too – we were fined 25 paisa for it and it went into the Poor Box – I was in a convent and the sisters were always collecting money for charitable causes.
My 7 YO nephew is fluent in English but Hindi is a big no no – we are worried now but he refuses to acknowledge it. You have to talk to him in English if you want a response. So we have started talking in HIndi amongst ourselves and then he is insecure that he is left out of the conversation. Now he seems to be making an effort – but its a sad state of affair in our Education dept that kids dont know or learn Hindi in school at all.
In present tense – I think in English and yes speaking in fluent Hindi seems difficult to me. This is what this Englishfication has done to us.
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True. I know what you mean. Coming to think of it, in our convent too all such funds went to support the poor and needy.
Thanks for stopping by!
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In my school too we were punished if we spoke in any other language other than English. This was mainly done so that students who had different mother tongues could converse with each other and no one was left out. On important part of this rule was that we learnt not to communicate in our mother tongues when someone who didn’t understand that was amongst us. Today, English is what I’m most comfortable in when it comes to communication, not perfect but comfortable. You know Parul I think it was a good thing we had Sisters who emphasised this rule because when I sit at work these days and there are people who communicate in their mother tongues which I don’t understand, I realise how lucky we were to learn an important lesson in politeness and common decency while some might not have been so.
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I know what you mean. Inclusivity starts there. In my school Naba, we all spoke Hindi. So though it was different, the focus was for the kids to pick up the language and be comfortable with it.
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This brings back so many memories 🙂
I don’t know how it happened but English is the only language I remember speaking as a kid. Although we used the mother tongue with parents and family, we cousins and friends only conversed in English. Studying in a convent ensured we continued with the English though. School, college and work also has always only been about English. Funnily, my thoughts and dreams everything happens in English! I guess I am so used to it now.
I can speak many languages though. I’m most fluent in English, Kannada and Hindi when compared to my mother tongue Malayalam and my husband’s mother tongue Tamil. Since we both too speak primarily in English, it doesn’t matter.
Now that I think about it, it feels like “Angrez chale gaye, hume chhod gaye” 😛
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I think we all had different environments growing up. English was the foreign language from where I come. I don’t know in what language I think. Never paid attention to that 😉
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I’m ashamed to admit that I am more comfortable talking in English rather than my native language. As for Hindi – my girls are embarrassed by my Bambaiya ( even though I know formal Hindi as I studied A level Hindi for my school leaving certificate) ….. But I know what you mean – Marathi as a language is dying and they say that in a few years it will be extinct – thanks to Hindi !!!!!
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On a different note, I have always wondered at the importance we all give to English particularly in India. Yes it’s important but due to this our own languages seem to be getting lost faster than ever before. I truly admire the way the French or the Russians or even Germans have kept their languages going.
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I know what you mean. Look at Mandarin. It’s taught is so many countries.
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