Recently, one of the famous publishers tweeted, ‘So when Shakespeare was writing, who was writing in India’. She might have been teasing the Twitterati. I replied that various Ramayanas were being composed in various Indian languages and had Britain not colonised half the world, Shakespeare would have remained a local bard in a cold island, somewhere in the backwaters of Europe. I am a great admirer of Shakespeare, but I do not consider him the greatest writer who ever lived.
In my school, an Anglo-Indian teacher was hired by our headmaster to teach us special English. For most of the students, English and Hindi were equally alien. The teachers were forced to teach even English and Hindi in Malayalam as it happens in most village schools in Kerala. It was not because teachers lacked the skill, but any other approach would have alienated the average student from studies.
That year, the Kerala Government had decided to make the translated version of Indulekha, the first novel in Malayalam written by an anglophile barrister, O Chandu Menon, a century ago, as a study material. The Anglo-Indian teacher was shocked to find that instead of Dickens or Jane Austen, she would be teaching a translated version of some country writer, as she put it.
She spent the major part of her class ranting against the idiosyncratic decision of the education department. We were happy when she stopped coming to the school. It gave us some free hours to play cricket and escape from a stifling language class. Much to our dismay, she returned after a week. Her opinion on country literature had undergone a sea change. She said Chandu Menon’s novel is as good as many classical English novelists. Though it sounds condescending to my ears now, three decades back her wholesome praise on the native writer made us feel good. Perhaps, we were not savages as we were taught to believe.
We are still weighed down by the baggage of colonial rule. In our school textbooks, we teach Kalidasa is the Shakespeare of India. The Sanskrit dramatist and poet lived a thousand years before Shakespeare. More people would have perhaps watched Shakuntalam than Romeo and Juliet until now. No doubt, Romeo and Juliet is a wonderful play, but the plot, characterisation and climax had left me scratching my head in confusion.
The heroine drinks a potion that would put her into a ‘coma’ for 48 hours. The hero does not know this, so he commits suicide. Heroine wakes up and finds her lover dead. So she also promptly commits suicide. It sounds pedestrian to put it that way; it is the bard’s great language skills that elevate the story. But a story should make sense despite the language. Else, it is lyricism and not a story. Compare this with the characterisation and climax in Shakuntalam.
The story is more powerful in the original Mahabharata version. The heroine is rejected by the hero. She does not commit suicide. Instead she brings up his child as a single mother and is reunited with the remorse-filled father. Our country, Bharat owes her name to this heroine’s son, Bharata. The stories of single mothers, whether it is Shakuntala or Sita of Uthara Ramayana, who bestow their greatest revenge on their lover or husband who had forsaken them by bringing up a son who could outdo his father, appear more modern and life affirming to me than the heroines who commit suicide.
How many of our students learn at least a translated versions of Kalidasa or Bhasa? How many students know about Chilapthikaram? It would be difficult for a layman to read classical Tamil, Kannada, Odia or Sanskrit. The language fanatics insist on imposing such heavy works on students, thus making them hate their culture and language. Thanks to the tough syllabus and teachers who are stingy with marks, students earn their least score in their respective mother tongues. This prompts them to take languages like French or German as second language in schools, alienating them further from our culture.
A generation believes, if at all they have heard about him, that Chanakya who lived in the third century BC, who wrote Arthashastra and who laid the foundation of the richest empire in the world of those days, is the Indian Machiavelli. To put the record straight, Nicola Machiavelli was a part-time playwright and a minor Italian diplomat of a city called Florence in 15th century Italy. Florence would have been the size of an average Indian wayside town in the medieval era. In his spare time he wrote a book called Prince, in which he said unscrupulousness is a norm of the ruler. He never found an empire nor wrote a treatise on polity that influenced empires for the next 2,000 years.
Yet Chanakya is the Machiavelli of India and not the other way round. Samudragupta, the emperor who ruled an area six times that of France and who never lost a war, is called India’s Napoleon. It is amusing and tragic. This is no call for hating English, but for getting rid of the colonised mindset. English has given us many great advantages as it has turned out to be the language of science and technology. It helps us spread our soft power and culture. But it should not be allowed to invade our inner space. For us, English is not a language but a tool for advancement. Like any tool it has to be handled carefully.
Looking back, the decision of the Kerala education department to teach a Malayalam novel in English was a good idea. It is high time we started teaching translated versions of classics from various Indian languages. Once a generation is proficient with its own culture, they would know how to wield this powerful tool better. And they would enjoy the writings of the Bard of Avon or Dickens even more.
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