The Curse of Foreign Medium – Mahatma Gandhi

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist

Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

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The Curse of Foreign Medium – Mahatma Gandhi

 

The spirited plea on behalf of the vernaculars as media of instruction of Nawab Masood Jung Bahadur, Director of Public Instruction, Hyderabad State, recently delivered at the Karve University for Women, has evoked a reply in The Times of India from which a friend sends the following extracts for me to answer: Whatever is valuable and fruitful in their writings is directly or indirectly the result of Western culture . . . Instead of sixty, we can go back a hundred years and yet say that from Raja Ram Mohan Roy down to Mahatma Gandhi, every one of the Indians who have achieved anything worth mentioning in any direction was or is the fruit directly or indirectly, of Western education. In these extracts what is considered is not the value of English as the medium of higher instruction in India but the importance and influence of Western culture to and on the persons mentioned. Neither the Nawab nor anyone else has disputed the importance or the influence of Western culture. What is resented is the sacrifice of Indian or Eastern culture on the altar of the Western.

Even if it could be proved that Western culture was superior to Eastern, it would be injurious to India as a whole for her most promising sons and daughters to be brought up in Western culture and thus become denationalized and torn from the people. In my opinion, whatever reaction for the better the persons named in the extracts had upon the people at large was due to the extent they retained their Eastern culture in spite of the adverse influence of the Western. I regard as adverse the influence of Western culture in this connection in the sense in which it interfered with the full effect that the best in Eastern culture might have produced on them. of myself whilst I have freely acknowledged my debt to Western culture, I can say that whatever service I have been able to render to the nation has been due entirely to the retention by me of Eastern culture to the extent it has been possible. I should have been thoroughly useless to the masses as an Anglicized, denationalized being knowing little of, caring less for and perhaps even despising their ways, habits, thoughts and aspirations. It is difficult to estimate the loss of energy caused to the nation by her children being obliged to resist the encroachments of a culture which, however good in itself, was unsuited for them whilst they had not imbibed and become rooted in their own. Examine the question synthetically. Would Chaitanya, Nanak, Kabir, Tulsidas and a host of other reformers have done better if they had been attached from their childhood to the most efficiently managed English schools? Have the men named by the writer of the article in question done better than these great reformers? Would Dayanand have done better if he had become an M.A. of an Indian university? Where is among the easy-going, ease-loving, English-speaking rajas and maharajas brought from their infancy under the influence of Western culture one who could be named in the same breath as Shivaji who braved all perils and shared the simple life of his hardy men? Are they better rulers than Pratap the intrepid? Are they good specimens of Western culture, these Neros who are fiddling in London and Paris whilst their Romes are burning?

There is nothing to be proud of in their culture which has made them foreigners in their own land and which has taught them to prefer to waste the substance of their ryots and their own souls in Europe to sharing the happiness and miseries of those over whom they are called by a higher Power to rule. But the point at issue is not Western culture. The point at issue is the medium of instruction. But for the fact that the only higher education, the only! Education worth the name, has been received by us through the English medium, there would be no need to prove such a self-evident proposition that the youth of a nation to remain a nation must receive all instruction including the highest in its own vernacular or vernaculars. Surely, it is a self-demonstrated proposition that the youth of a nation cannot keep or establish a living contact with the masses unless their knowledge is received and assimilated through a medium understood by the people. Who can calculate the immeasurable loss sustained by the nation owing to thousands of its young men having been obliged to waste years in mastering a foreign language and its idiom of which in their daily life they have the least use and in learning which they had to neglect their own mother tongue and their own literature? There never was a greater superstition than that a particular language can be incapable of expansion or expressing abstruse or scientific ideas. A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers. Among the many evils of foreign rule this blighting imposition of a foreign medium upon the youth of the country will be counted by history as one of the greatest. It has sapped the energy of the nation, it has shortened the lives of the pupils, it has estranged them from the masses, it has made education unnecessarily expensive. If this process is still persisted in, it bids fair to rob the nation of its soul. The sooner therefore educated India shakes itself free from the hypnotic spell of the foreign medium, the better it would be for them and the people.

 

Reference:

Young India, 5-7-1928