CHENNAI: Malayalam and other regional language departments in colleges here are facing a crisis of sorts. For, they do not have students and in some cases, even professors.
The Nandanam Arts College’s Arabic and Hindi department has not had a single student since 2008.
Commenting on the issue, a professor says, “When the professors were there they did not have any students, so there was nothing to teach. By 2013, both the professors retired.
Since then the books in the department library have been shifted to the main library and the classrooms have been shut down. But the department is still working on paper.” The Telugu department in the college too has no students.
The Quaid-E-Millath Government College, meanwhile, has shut down all of its minority language departments, including Hindi, Urdu and Telugu. The college now offers only Tamil.
Professors point out that the situation has not been like this always. A Radhamaniamma, who retired as head of the department after 30 years of service in the Malayalam department, points out that there was a time when they had to apply to the university to increase the sanctioned seats to accommodate the large numbers of students who applied for the course. “Our sanctioned seats for a BA class were 10 but at one point we had to increase the number of students as around 19 students applied. The total number of students in three years was around 45 at one point,” she points out.
She points out that the decline really began after the Advanced Language Courses for minority languages was stopped at the school level. “There were schools providing Advanced Malayalam, Advanced Telugu and so on in their Class XII arts streams. But since 2011, this has been stopped. That’s when minority language departments like ours were affected,” she says.