If one goes to an elitist English-medium school and asks
the principal, or whoever condescends to grant an audience, one finds out that
one’s mother-tongue---assuming one is a Pakistani---is held in supreme contempt.
I once asked a certain principal whether Punjabi children had the right to be
educated in Punjabi even in the junior most classes and she gave me the kind of
look one reserves for the mentally handicapped. And yet the UNESCO position
paper, Education in a Multilingual World (2003)
says clearly:
(1) Mother tongue instruction is essential
for initial instruction and literacy and should be extended to as late a stage
in education as possible.
(2) Communication, expression and the
capacity to listen and dialogue [should be encouraged], first of all in the
mother tongue, then, [if the mother tongue is official [or national] language
in the country, as well as in one or more foreign languages.
(3) Measures should be taken to eliminate
discrimination in education at all levels on the basis of gander, race,
language, religion, national origin, age or disability or any other form of
discrimination.
As we can all see, our English-medium schools violate all
these principles and with the utmost arrogance. They force small children,
children of the ages of three and four whose tongues can hardly lisp words of
their own languages, to speak English. They force their teachers, some of whom
very wisely keep using Urdu, to put up the pretence of talking in the totally
incomprehensible English to their tender pupils. And, of course, these schools
discriminate against children on the basis of wealth, urban culture and
English. They charge unaffordable tuition fees discriminating against the less
affluent; they have the audacity to interview parents and exhibit contempt for
those who produce food and clothes for them (the peasants and the workers); and
they discriminate against parents who do not know English saying that children
must be exposed to English at home. Even worse, they send material written in
English to children’s homes and create the kind of snobbish atmosphere where
those who cannot speak English feel ignored, held in contempt and marginalized.
As for the Urdu-medium schools, the schools which most
children attend, they are less snobbish than their English-medium counterparts.
However, they too look down upon Punjabi and are completely ignorant of other
minor languages. Indeed, it comes as a surprise to most people that Pakistan
has sixty nine languages and not just the six or seven we keep hearing about.
These small language communities are not always so small that it should be
impossible to teach them in their mother tongues. Some have hundreds of
thousands of speakers and are spoken in fairly large contiguous areas. For
instance, Balti, spoken in Baltistan has over 300,00 speakers; Burushaski,
spoken in Hunza, Nagar and Yasin Valleys has over 70,000 speakers; Kalami,
spoken in Kalam and Dir (Kohistan) has over 70,000 speakers; Khowar, spoken in
Chitral, has over 250,000 speakers and Gujrati, spoken in the old city of
Karachi, has several thousand speakers. The children of these language
communities are, however, educated in Urdu or maybe English but not their own
mother tongue.
I once happened to go to Kalam (Swat) to a school where
very small children were being instructed in Pashto. This was the teacher’s
mother tongue and also of a few students. Most children, however, were speakers
of Kalami. When asked questions the children remained quiet. The headmaster explained
to me that Kalami children were slow learners and very shy. However, the more
likely explanation was that they were struggling with an alien language in an
alien atmosphere---the school. And this is a story which is repeated all over
Pakistan---indeed, all over the world.
This is cruel towards the children because, by denying
their mother tongue we are denying them the easiest means for understanding the
world. What they do is to memorize sounds and it is only later that they start
internalizing concepts. Even worse, we are denying them their identity. What we
are conveying to them is that your language, your identity as a people, is
worthless. If you want to become worthy of respect you must become like some
dominant, alien, community. This is an insult but children internalize it and
show contempt for their own people, their language, their culture, their
values, their history all their lives.
Moreover, this process of
weaning children away from their languages kills these languages in time. As
more and more people shift to the languages of power (English and Urdu in that
order in Pakistan) the indigenous languages become obsolescent. Finally, they
are no longer passed on to children. Then, with the death of the last speaker,
the language dies. This is an infinitely sad thing to happen. After all, a
community is shaped by its language. The community dies; its world view dies;
its music and folk tales and jokes and riddles---all die! And along with it the
traditional knowledge the community might have possessed---such as of herbs,
food, animals, healing methods, education---also disappears.
This is a great loss but
communities allow it to happen because the market conditions imposed by society
are such that they cannot afford to maintain their language. Moreover, being
regarded as inferior jargons, the community itself feels ashamed of its
languages. Thus they become unwitting accomplices in the murder of their own
mother tongues. That is why some people call this phenomenon ‘language suicide’
rather than ‘language murder’ which it really is. But it is ‘murder’ if you
consider the market pressures, the policies which create that pressure, and the
attitude we have towards the languages of our ordinary people.
These being the conditions,
can something be done to promote the smaller, or the marginalized, languages of
Pakistan? Certainly a lot can be done. First, the government must make
instruction in the mother tongue compulsory in the first three years of school.
This will mean that Punjabi will be the medium of instruction in most Pakistani
schools. However, children whose parents or grandparents came from the
Urdu-speaking parts of India should have the right to be educated in their
mother tongue i.e. Urdu. Punjabi children, whose families no longer speak
Punjabi, must, however, be educated in Punjabi. Books, films, games and other
material will have to be made in not only Pashto, Balochi, Brahvi, Siraiki and
Hindko but also Khowar, Shina, Burushaski, Balti, Gujrati and so on. Material
giving information on AIDS, family planning, women’s rights, children’s rights
can also be provided in the mother tongues. Most of this material will,
however, be audio or audio-visual. This is achievable because Papua New Guinea,
with over 840 languages and only 5 million people, has published material in
hundreds of languages and teaches children in more than 220 of them. The
literacy rate is 81 percent for males and 63 percent for females. This is more
than we have achieved and we too can make it happen. But for this to happen we
shall have to teach our school administrators and teachers---especially those
from elitist English medium schools---that they have no right to look down upon
our languages or stop children from using them.