Telugu force

Venkat Rao Memorial Aided High School in southeast Hyderabad enrolled 50 fewer students in the current academic year. Yet again, the 80-year-old Telugu-medium school lost out to the many English-medium ones in the vicinity. “Over the last 15 years, the school’s strength fell from over 2,000 to 450, and it is largely because of the lack of appreciation for Telugu,” K Renu, the school’s principal said.

After seeing parents pull out their children on realising that the school isn’t headed the English-medium way, the administration applied to the State government to remodel itself as an English-medium school. It might get the nod in the next academic year. “If we offer English medium, the school cannot sustain the costs of running it. If we don’t, we will lose students and might have to shut down,” Renu said. There has been a strong demand from the Telangana private schools’ associations too, to convert the remaining Telugu-medium schools to English-medium.

It is against this background — a growing affinity for English and English-medium schools — that the K Chandrashekhar Rao-led Telangana government announced in September 2017 a move to make Telugu a compulsory subject for Std I to XII from the 2018 academic year. Soon after, the Andhra Pradesh government, headed by N Chandrababu Naidu, followed suit. Irrespective of the mother tongue and the board of affiliation of the school — State or Central, all students in the two States will have Telugu as a mandatory subject.

While a section of the people criticised the move as ‘insincere’, considering the various orders passed by both governments to promote English-medium schools, officials defended it as a ‘corrective measure’ to uphold the language and Telugu identity.

Tightening the screws

With 7.5 crore speakers, Telugu has the distinction of being the world’s 15th most spoken language. In terms of the sheer number of speakers, it is nowhere near becoming an endangered language (Unesco considers a language endangered when its speakers cease to use it or to pass it from one generation to the next). But there has been a growing sentiment that Telugu is losing sheen and importance due to the influence of English.

“Disappearance of the language was never the concern. It was the increasing dominance of English, which was supposed to work just as a link language. It should be restricted to that,” says Nandini Sidda Reddy, the chairperson of the Telangana Sahitya Academy. He is also a member of the government’s Telugu Language Advisory Committee tasked with easing the shift to Telugu as a mandatory subject, including the preparation of the syllabus, revamping teaching methodologies and handling legal hassles.

In Andhra Pradesh, the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) is in charge of this.

In several pre-primary schools in Hyderabad, three- and four-year-olds are awarded stars when they manage to speak only English throughout the day. In a disturbing development, the State Commission for Protection of Child Rights had brought to light cases of children as young as first graders suffering corporal punishment for struggling to speak in fluent English.

“There is a misconception that Telugu won’t help you make it big in life. But you can’t pin the blame for the current situation on one person or institution. It was a collective mistake, and what we are doing is a corrective measure,” says Prof SV Satyanarayana, vice-chancellor, Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University. He is heading the Telangana advisory committee, which has already submitted its recommendations to the government.

Officials say the need of the hour is to uphold the primary language status in Telugu-speaking States and ward off outside influences. Enforcing it in schools and junior colleges is the simplest way to ensure the next generation carries forward the language.

Changes are being made in other areas too. For instance, the clause in the Shops & Establishments Act mandating display of all establishment names in Telugu is now being enforced more stringently in Telangana. The department of labour is contemplating fines for defaulters.

“If you are living in the Telugu State, learn enough Telugu to read the signboards and interact with the people you are dependent on. We aren’t making other languages obsolete, not even English. I don’t think the State needs to justify this move,” Reddy says.

Among the Telangana committee’s recommendations are three types of textbooks for students with varying levels of familiarity with Telugu — a basic course for those whose mother tongue is not Telugu, a moderate-level course for students whose mother tongue is Telugu but study in an English-medium school, and a slightly difficult-level course for those whose mother tongue is Telugu and who study in a Telugu-medium school. For now, both States are in the process of revamping the syllabus and releasing the final orders.

No hasty decisions

The Telangana advisory committee’s report mentioned that close to 1,370 schools don’t offer Telugu as a language of study. The State-board schools offer Telugu either as a first language or a second language. Even when the medium of instruction is anything other than English or Telugu, it is offered as a second language from Std VI to X.

“A majority of the students in State-board affiliated schools are already studying Telugu. There will now be uniformity in Telugu being taught for all classes irrespective of the medium of instruction,” says Krishna Reddy, joint director, Commissionerate of School Education, Andhra Pradesh.

At State-board intermediate colleges in both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the second-language choices currently include Telugu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu, Arabic, French, Tamil, Kannada, Odiya and Marathi. With the new rule, every language except Telugu is expected to be scrapped.

“The major conflict will be with the Sanskrit language, where the answer scripts are in English or Telugu. Similarly, unless a student leaves the State, they won’t speak French or Arabic. Most of these students aren’t able to string a single sentence in these languages anyway. Better learn Telugu while you live in the State,” Sidda Reddy says.

The intermediate first- and second-year students, numbering around nine lakh in Telangana and around 10 lakh in Andhra Pradesh, will have no option other than Telugu.

Critics point to the additional stress this will impose on the students at a crucial juncture in their academic life. “Of the 2,500-odd intermediate colleges in Telangana, close to 450 offer Hindi as a second language. The students are already under a lot of stress due to the competitive exams and decisions to be made at this stage. All States that have made their regional language mandatory, limit it to Std X. The same should be followed for Telugu,” says P Madhusudhan Reddy, president of the Government Junior Lecturers’ Association, Telangana. “The decision is irrational. If the executive doesn’t address our concerns, we will approach the judiciary,” he adds.

The plight of the CBSE/ICSE students is slightly more complicated. These Central boards specify that the three-language rule is applicable in Std VI-VIII. For Std IX and X, there are only two languages. Depending on the State, the regional language course is offered.

“In Telangana, a majority of the students are already opting for Telugu. Saying that we have to enforce it for everyone from Std I-X distorts the academic pattern of the schools,” says Anjali Razdan, vice-chairperson Hyderabad Sahodaya Schools Complex, and principal of P Obul Reddy Public School.

Further, the higher secondary students have only one optional language.

“Since we operate under Central board, the assessment has to happen there. We don’t know yet how the State government plans to enforce this,” says Razdan.

Ashish Naredi, executive member, Hyderabad Schools Parents’ Association (HSPA) says the government move has generated mixed feelings. “We don’t understand how teaching the alphabet in high school will pan out. Several complications will arise because Hyderabad is a cosmopolitan city and there is bound to be a lot of movement during the academic year,” he says “The government and the advisory board should come up with a practical and non-troublesome implementation. Otherwise, instead of creating love for the language, it will create antagony.”

Concurring with this view against coercion, Ganesh N Devy, chairperson, People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) and a former professor of English, says the rule must be sophisticated enough to leave a small window for those who find it absolutely impossible. He adds that there is enough research to show that a child understands a subject better when taught in the mother tongue. “It would be much better to make the language, in this case Telugu, the medium of instruction at least for the primary section,” he says.

Officials in both States decline to come on record, except to say that offering English medium is a demand-and-supply kind of equation that will backfire on imposing Telugu uniformly across.

“We have learnt from the mistakes of a State like Karnataka, which lost the case even in the Supreme Court when it attempted to make the medium mandatory. We don’t want to take any hasty decisions that would have to be revoked later. For now, as the first step towards preserving Telugu, it will be taught as a language,” said a senior official.

The decision has, by and large, received a positive response from many sections of society, including the tribal communities, which believe it will ease their interactions with the outside world. “Technology, cultural intermingling, loss of traditional livelihoods and other factors have impacted the tribal languages more than the presence of Telugu. In fact, Telugu is what links us to the outer world,” says Kanaka Suguna, teacher and tribal rights activist from Adilabad district.

According to Devy, these basic steps to preserve a language won’t go the full distance. “The best, and probably the toughest way to preserve a language is to create livelihoods for people who speak in it,” he says.

Ayesha Minhaz is a freelance journalist based in Hyderabad

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