Education: Most Important Language

In the first flush of nationalism, India declared in its 1949 constitution that Hindi would become the national language by 1965. It would be, Jawaharlal Nehru declared, “the great unifier.” English was to be “phased out.”

Last week, speaking before the states’ education ministers, Nehru reversed his ground. English, he said, would be retained in the Indian educational system as the major language for an “indefinite” period. Added he: “Manpower for industrial, scientific and agricultural purposes cannot be trained in any Indian language in the foreseeable future.”

Behind Nehru’s pronouncement (which was promptly endorsed by the education ministers’ conference) was the knowledge that Hindi has failed to replace English as a national language. With an Urdu base and a Sanskrit script, Hindi is spoken by the biggest single language bloc in all India—roughly 100 million people, most of whom live in Uttar Pradesh, the sprawling area that has traditionally supplied New Delhi with most of its politicians. Hindi has remained largely unknown in southern India, which prides itself on its command of English.

Technical schools have had their own problems. Since 1952 more than 100 Hindi experts have translated 31,000 English scientific terms into Hindi (they plan to translate 300,000 by 1960). But many terms, such as units of weights and measures, have merely been transliterated. And in the field of chemistry the translaters have hit a major snag. When the Hindi vocabulary was first initiated, Indians knew only seven of the 90-odd stable elements known today. As a result, an Indian chemist talking Hindi sounds like a man switching continually’ from English to Hindi in the same sentence. Students entering .engineering schools with little or no knowledge of English have been using their first two years just learning the language in which all available technical books are printed. Repeatedly, Indian educators and engineers have warned that the nation is getting “fifth-rate” technicians.

Nehru drew the obvious moral: “English is the most important language in the world today. If we start training people in Hindi or any other Indian language, we will only produce persons who are inadequately trained for the job.”