English: The Queen’s Language Ruling The World

During Gandhiji’s stay in South Africa in 1905-06, he, his wife and children used to share a home in Johannesburg with an English couple, Henry and Millie Polak. Later on while writing on his stay in Africa, Gandhiji mentioned about the Polak family. He said that he and Polak often used to have firing discussions on providing children English education. It came out from his writings that Gandhiji was not in support of providing children English from their infancy. On the other hand, Polak was in complete favor of this language.

He argued that when we empower our kids to talk and learn English ways of life, we actually provide them a universal point of view. These children can survive in any part of the world as it has become a universal language. This debate between the queen’s language and others that exist on the world continues till today. The India soil has witnessed so many such debates since many decades. In the 1920’s, Gandhi and Tagore had a debate on print about the acceptance of English as a prime language in India. Opposed to Gandhi, the Indian laureate Rabindranath Tagore supported this language as a way of illuminating the lives of the India people and strengthening their knowledge about different cultures and languages.

After the Independence, the brilliant, maverick socialist Rammanohar Lohia launched and led ‘Angrezi Hatao Andolan’ in India. It was a movement that basically targeted to banish the English influence from the Indian roots. But Lohia was stopped by the Tamil intellectuals and politicians who feared that in the absence of English, the Hindi language would take the prime position and this may become a threat to the Tamil language. In Northern part of India also, this fire of English education has spread rapidly. Chandra Bhan Prasad has chosen to build a temple dedicated to the 'Goddess English' in his own home state of Uttar Pradesh. This had fueled many Indian language scholars to oppose it as this might had destroyed the roots of Indian languages.

Standing on this 21st century, we now can say that the language of the western people is ruling the world. We may count many factors behind this popularity. The intercommunity marriages have opened the way for English to be the prime language even in Indian households also. The second is its wide spread popularity around the world. People find this language easy than other languages that exist in the world, especially in India. In English, we play with just 26 letters; where as in other languages there are different signs and symbols that we have to learn about other than the alphabet. Whether one approves of it or not, this rush to learn English is unstoppable. Rammanohar Lohia and his followers have lost the battle to banish English from the imagination or learning experience of the Indian child. There is no harm in giving our kids a strong base of English language, but at the same time they should have developed a close familiarity with their mother tongue also. Every language has a benefit of its own. Even the corporate sectors also look for people who know multiple languages and can communicate well in all these languages.