‘Bilingual Teaching, a Basic Need in India’

Prof Y Satyanarayana says teachers must explain concepts in the vernacular language besides English for the benefit of students

An English professor who also teaches poetry in the language of love, Urdu. That’s Professor Y Satyanarayana for all. A true blue Hyderabadi, Professor Satyanarayana, who teaches at the Department of English in Anwar-ul Uloom College in Mallepally in the city, takes anyone by surprise with his proficiency in Urdu, this despite no formal learning in the language. In his 32 years of teaching, even when he believes the standards of Urdu or that of teaching English is declining, one thing he has religiously believed in has been the bilingual method of teaching.

Born into a Hindu Brahmin family of Telugu and Sanskrit scholars in 1957 in Hyderabad, Prof Satyanarayana was exposed to the best of literature quite early in life. His parents, a State Government employee and a homemaker, were part of a literary circle. “When I was 11, I remember reading Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and it made good sense to me,” he says. However, it is the same lack of exposure to literature among today’s youth that he laments the most.

After finishing Class X from St Jones School in Marredpally, Prof Satyanarayana went to AV College for the Intermediate level. He then enroled himself for BA English Literature at Nizam college (1975-78), then worked for a-year-and-half at an advertising firm, and came back to Nizam for his MA English Literature (1980-82). Soon after completing MA, he joined Anwarul Uloom College as a lecturer. While in service, he completed MPhil in 1988 and also obtained a PhD from Osmania University in 1994, spending six months in University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, as a Fulbright Scholar, on the topic, American comedy of 1920s and 1930s in film and theatre.

Lamenting the practice of plagiarism and the lack of originality in the research works, Prof Satyanarayana has refused to supervise or guide scholars. He wonders why our system has not realised that plagiarism is unacceptable. He believes that even at the PhD level, excerpts are often lifted from the textbooks.

Literature is not complex

While admitting that students cannot be blamed entirely for falling standards, Prof Satyanarayana says effective classroom teaching is possible only if the teacher also makes an effort to teach in the vernacular medium too. “Best is bilingual method. How does it help if my students do not understand a word of what I teach? Speaking in Urdu, for me, establishes a connect with them,” he points out. He gives his students a gist of the poetry or prose and translates the difficult words, concepts, ideas, etc, in Urdu. “An Elegy in Urdu is called ‘Mercia’, a graveyard is ‘kabristan’. Sitting in Hyderabad, how do you expect your student to know what Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley means by changing colours of autumn? In my class, I tell them to approach any text critically and try to think on their own feet,” he explains.

According to him, today’s students want the process of learning to be fast. “Instant gratification is the word. Talk about Robert Frost, and they might go through his work on the internet and sometimes find it unnecessary to attend the class,” he says, adding that it is the education system that is flawed and not the advent of technology.

“Students come from a background where they are not exposed to English. The system does not filter you and then expose you to the best of literature when you are not ready for it. If I am not good enough for MA English, I should not do the course. I still come across students who cannot write a single correct sentence in English even at the Intermediate level,” he rues adding that the British model of memory-based system is “convenient”, right from school level, without evoking the need to look at matters critically.

Recalling his initial days of teaching where his first head of the department, Prof AM Vatcha, used to pull him up for his ways of teaching, Prof Satyanarayana says the very disciplined Parsi gentleman believed any language could be taught only in that language. 

On asking how he mastered Urdu, he recollects how the well known Urdu scholar Zeenath Sajida at Nizam College was impressed with his spoken language and how she set him off on the path to learning the language in a deeper manner. “I used to speak Urdu, as I had several Muslim friends. When she noticed me, I asked if she could teach me and she asked to come back on one Thursday, which happened to be auspicious, with one rupee and 25 paise and some sweets as a token.”

The 57-year-old, however, regrets having not acquired any formal degree in Urdu. He has translated several poems of Makhdoom Mahiuddin (a Hyderabadi leftist Urdu poet born in 1908) into English and is mulling a compilation of translation of Urdu poetry along with a former colleague and Persian scholar, post retirement next year.

— rahul.v@newindianexpress.com

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