English in India

When I was looking through the blog lists we were required to read for class, the title "Black Girl Dangerous" was the first one to catch my eye. It was a blog of many different authors that wrote about their life experiences.

As I looked through the list of authors, I came across the name Chithira Vijayakumar. "Hmmm, sounds Indian," I thought to myself. As I opened up her latest blog post, the first line read "I learnt to read Malayalam the easy way: by lying on my grandmother’s stomach, brown skin painted with the silverfish of my mother’s and my uncle’s births. By listening to her read the daily newspapers out to me." Let me just say, when I saw the word "Malayalam" in the first few words of this post, my eyes grew wide with excitement. I couldn't believe there was a Malayalee blogger, that I was able to visualize all the places she was talking about. She was from Kerala, which also got me super excited.

Her blog was about learning English there in Kerala. India was taken over by British rule for many years. Even after Indians gained their independence, they required English to be a language that was taught in all schools. Vijayakumar's blog taught me that this was still existent. I really didn't know that this was required in Kerala, because my dad went to grade school there and doesn't know much English.

She writes of how there was a rule that no student could speak Malayalam in the school, or they would get fined. I found this absurd. Why wouldn't you be able to speak the language of your state? Did they want the language to fade? I figured keeping the language alive would also keep the culture rich.

I was shocked to see that this rule still exists in India. Students are fined even more than in the past if they even mutter a single Malayalam word.

I personally think this is such a dumb rule. It's not bad that they want the students to learn English, I feel as though it is kind of necessary. But it should be taught as a second language. Here in elementary school, we were taught Spanish. But they didn't force us to know it for the rest of our lives. I think it is beneficial to know more than one language but this rule is taking it a bit too far.



http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/11/tongues/