India,
which was the richest country on earth and a great country in each term till 17th
century, today is in no way comparable to its previous position.
Apart from looting trillions of rupees from India, British did destroy our
knowledge base and tried to make us forget our great Indian cultural heritage.
Historical
Facts:
How
the seeds of intellectual slavery were planted in us can be seen by this historical
fact:
When British were
trying to sustain their rule over India, British parliament sent
historian/politician "Lord Macaulay" to figure out how it can be
done. He came to India for the analysis and gave the following statement in
British parliament in 1835.
“I have traveled
across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a
beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high
moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer
this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her
spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her
old and ancient education system, her culture,……for if the Indians think that
all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own,……they will
lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we
want them, a truly dominated nation.”
When I see myself & around me, I find that
he became successful in his dream of dominating our country. Because our
generation’s mentality is "Speaking english is cool. Western culture is
better than ours. Whatever is western is better."
English
education was imposed on us to attract us towards western culture (so
that we forget our culture & consider it inferior and subsequently lose
our self-respect), and western products.
How
Language affects our development:
Does education in
English (foreign language) affect us?
Yes.
Language experts say that speaking a foreign language influences how we
interpret the world. It attracts you towards that culture and subsequently changes
your thought process.
If
you do your primary/higher education in foreign language, your knowledge base
becomes very weak. If you gain education in your mother tongue your
knowledge base becomes very strong (because you are emotionally attached to
that knowledge), which is very necessary for fundamental research.
This
is the reason that India is far behind in doing inventions/innovations and fetching Nobel
prizes. While other smaller countries are way ahead of India,
because they get education in their mother tongue.
Many bright students who
could to better in research/invention/innovation are denied opportunities of higher
education because of lack of knowledge of English (which works against India’s
development).
And
because of lack of depth in fundamental knowledge of science and technology,
India is not able to come up with innovative products. And this is the reason;
Indian consumer market is majorly dependent on products of MNCs, which is big
loss to our economy because billions of Indian money goes into the country of
origin of those MNCs every year.
Comparison with other
Countries:
If
we judge a country's richness by per capita GDP, you will see all the countries
which are richer/more developed than India use their mother tongue as the
official language.
Following
are a few examples:
Germany,
France, Italy, Japan, USA, China, Canada, Russia , Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina,
Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Taiwan, and Singapore.
There are many other
countries who use their mother tongue as their official language and language
of education and even then are way ahead of many English speaking countries.
Among
top 10 economies of the world (by their nominal GDP) India is the only country
which provides higher education in a foreign language (English). And India
which uses English as language of education is at 140th rank in per
capita GDP.
What could have been better:
There is a misconception that Indians get jobs because they are educated in English. The fact is that crores of Indians are considered unemployable because of lack of knowledge
of English.
Had
we used Sanskrit/mother tongue as the language of education since 1947, we not only
could have given jobs to all our people but, would have created jobs for whole
world as well, because then we would have been leading the world with our knowledge power. We would have been leading in research/inventions/innovations
in the same way as we were leading before British invasion.
Need
of the hour:
Because of poor
leadership and lack of visionaries in politics we could not do it in 1947, but it is high time we start educating our children only in our mother tongue/Sanskrit (other
countries have already started teaching Sanskrit to children, as it has been
found most suitable language for development in all fields) to become the world
leader, otherwise India will always remain a follower and will be in
intellectual slavery for centuries to come.
Jai Hind.
Contributed By: Rahul Khedkar, PGP2012-14. He can be reached at pgp12033.rahul@iimraipur.ac.in.
