When and how English should be taught in schools (हिंदुस्तान टाइम्स से साभार)

The topic of teaching English in India is one that generates a lot of heat, especially around the question of when and how English should be introduced in school. On the one hand, parents’ aspirations for their children’s education are rising and much of this hope links English with better opportunities.

On the other hand, there is a point of view that English will dominate and wipe out cultural identities and submerge the rich linguistic diversity of India. Despite different perspectives, in concrete terms, there are clear policies and practices around English teaching in India today. Some years ago, the National Knowledge Commission recommended that English be introduced as early as from Class 1.

Based on the National Curriculum Framework (NCF 2006) textbook content in different states seems to suggest that by the time a child completes eight years of schooling, he or she will be confident and competent with reading, understanding, and appreciating texts in other languages as well as in English.

Lying under the hopes and expectations, opinions and ideologies, is the reality. But large-scale empirical evidence on how much English people in India actually know is hard to come by. One of the only national sources of data on children and English comes from ASER — the Annual Status of Education Reports brought out each year by Pratham. The last ASER report released in January 2013 had estimates of basic reading in English for all rural districts of India for the age group 5 to 16.

The figures indicate that about half of all rural children in Class 8 can read a set of simple sentences and of those who can read about three-fourths can explain the meaning of what they have read. These numbers range from about 90% of children being able to read in Mizoram, Nagaland, Kerala to around 50% (Bihar, Maharashtra, Assam, Karnataka) to much lower numbers in Gujarat (35%).

Strangely, in India, the debates about English are not linked to actual evidence on what children can do. Nor is there much importance given to understanding where children are and how to build from there. Like in many other domains in India, ideological, political and pedagogical positions are strongly held. But we seem to shy away from anchoring these positions on ground realities.

Strangely, even though the NFC 2006 documents state that ‘English does not stand alone’, most debates in India about the acquisition of English do not happen side by side with any discussion on the challenges of learning other languages, including the regional language.

Much of research on language acquisition available in the world today looks at two languages — such studies have usually taken place in western countries where speakers of other languages are being mainstreamed into a largely monolingual society (For example, in the United States, the main focus is how to help Spanish-speakers learn English — two different languages but the same script).

But this is not the case in India. For many children, even in the so-called Hindi-speaking belt, Hindi is the second or third language and certainly for many not the language they speak at home. Adding to this diversity are more issues — scripts may be different, languages may not even have a script and regardless of language, children’s environment is not rich in print.

Time and again, the NCF 2006 focus group paper on the teaching of English dwells on the need to help children learn their first language well. Looking at our own realities, it is essential that we must develop our own ways of bridging between languages and creating our own processes for language development within and across languages.

Even if you ignore evidence, what about learning from experiences? The work that we in Pratham have done with children and languages suggests promising directions for moving forward. First, the more we encourage children to read, to understand, to discuss and, very importantly, to express themselves in the language they are comfortable with, the better they seem to absorb new languages.

More often than not, the weakness in learning a new language has less to do with the new language and more to do with lack of capability, competence and confidence in the original language. Second, if children have print material around them — books, stories, posters, newspapers, slogans — the more they learn how to deal with print.

This is true regardless of the language. (ASER 2012 figures indicate that apart from textbooks, less than 20% of rural households have any material to read.) Third, often comprehension in a new language is much higher than the ability to write or to speak. This ability needs to be taken into account in building confidence to operate in both the new language as well as in the familiar language.

We have found that children respond well to texts that have both languages interspersed. This is different from bilingual texts where both languages are placed side by side.

The debate in India around when and how English should be taught needs to be widened both in scope and substance to encompass the language skills more broadly. More research needs to be done in India to systematically explore how languages can be learned more meaningfully and how they can grow more organically from what children already know. We must think about how we prepare our children to read, to understand and to express themselves.

We must encourage children to have fun in using language differently and appropriately in different situations for different purposes. Serious investment in building strong foundations in language skills will reap rich dividends in all the languages that children use. Whether Hindi, English or any other language, our approach to children in our fertile language landscape must be connected to our realities and suited to our condition, capabilities, needs and uses.

Rukmini Banerji works with Pratham and leads the ASER initiative

हिंदुस्तान टाइम्स से साभार

Despite pitfalls, publishers bet on translated vernacular Indian literature (इकोनॉमिक टाइम्स से साभार)

When asked on a podcast for the New Yorker's website in 2011 what is untranslatable about Japanese author Haruki Murakami, one of his longtime translators Jay Rubin said, "Pretty much everything. I strongly advise people not to read literature in translation because I know what happens in the process." If his suggestion were to be heeded, most of us would not be edified by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Italo Calvino and Saadat Hasan Manto.

While more often than not there is a lot in a book, or a movie for that matter, that falls casualty to the exigencies of translation, there is simply no alternative. While Russian, Spanish, French — and even Japanese, thanks to the popularity of Yukio Mishima and Murakami — literature have long enjoyed the patronage of English readers, the same cannot be said of Hindi, Tamil and Kannada books. This is not for lack of literature of merit in these languages, but owing to a sense of apathy and even condescension of the English-speaking lot toward vernacular writings. Author and translator Ira Pande says this angered her and drove her to translate Hindi literature, both her mother Shivani's and others', to English.

Her translation of Manohar Shyam Joshi's T'ta Professor won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award (now called just the Crossword Book Award) for translation in 2008. Pande says translating the book, which chronicles the life of a school teacher in a Kumaoni village who is obsessed with the English language, was not easy. "Joshi's idiom is so brilliant but challenging to translate. I struggled with it for a year-and-a-half," notes Pande, who has also translated a collection of her mother's interviews with the inmates of a women's prison, and is currently working on Shivani's memoir of her childhood at Santiniketan, near Kolkata.

Translations Now and Then

T'ta Professor is part of a welcome trend of translations of literature, both serious and pulp, in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam, Kannada and other languages. English translations have been around for decades, but more as an exception rather than the rule. While authors like Rabindranath Tagore, who translated some of his works from Bengali to English himself, and Manto, whose Urdu short stories best captured the horror and absurdity of Partition, could be read in English, other regional authors had to be satisfied with readers from their own language.

"There is no cross-cultural bridge between states here. While you could find [Mario Vargas] Llosa, [ Jorge Luis] Borges and [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez even in Tamil, you couldn't find many Bengali or Hindi books in Tamil or English, " says Tamil writer Charu Nivedita, whose unconventional, post-modernist novel Zero Degree was published by Chennai-based Blaft Publications in 2008.   "Translation should have been a top priority in a country of so many languages but it was ignored. We should have set up an institute for translations and not just into English," says former diplomat Pavan K Varma, who has translated poetry collections of Kaifi Azmi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Gulzar. Bengali novelist Mani Sankar Mukherji, who writes under the name 'Sankar', says there was not much interest in English translations earlier. "And I was satisfied with being just a Bengali writer and was also too proud to go to publishers [for translations]," says Mukherji.

Translations in India got a shot in the arm in the 1980s when the Sahitya Akademi started organizing translation workshops across the country, according to a history of translation publishing in India on the website of IIT Madras' National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning. Moreover Katha, a not-for-profit organization set up in 1989, provided an added impetus to translations, which still did not get their due. But that seems to have changed in the past few years with publishers more actively looking for books to translate.

"If you want to publish the best fiction in India it makes no sense not to publish translations," says R Sivapriya, managing editor, Penguin Books India. Since mid-2011, there has been a particular stress on English translations, she adds.

While in 2012, Penguin's literary fiction list consisted of 14 original English titles, there were nine translations, but this year, there are 13 translations and 12 original titles. Harper Collins, which till last year put out four English translations a year, has 10 this year, according to senior commissioning editor Minakshi Thakur.

The Bengali Advantage

Penguin published the best-selling English translation of recent times, Mukherji's Chowringhee, in 2007. It has since sold 50,000 copies, an enviable number not just for a translated book but also for a work of literary fiction, says Sivapriya.

Chowringhee, whose Bengali original of the same name was published five decades ago, revolves around the goings-on in a hotel and its multi-hued occupants.

Besides commercial success, the book received critical acclaim at home and overseas. Reviewing the book for the Guardian, Sri Lankan-British novelist Romesh Gunesekera wrote Chowringhee "has that essential quality of a good novel: the capacity to escape, and help the reader escape, time. You want to turn the pages, but you do not want the pages to end. The words are fresh, and the world of the novel is completely alive, despite being written over 40 years ago."

Mukherji's Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya were made into films of the same names by Satyajit Ray. Mukherji says Vikram Seth, who had read Chowringhee in Hindi and made no secret of his admiration for it, was the driving force behind the publication of its English translation, which Arunava Sinha had done way back in 1992. "The reception to the book was tremendous but I didn't expect Bengalis to rediscover me through the translation," says Mukherji, who is chief adviser on corporate relations at the RP-Sanjiv Goenka group. French and Italian translations of the book have also been published.

Sinha says Bengali had a head start over other languages in translations. "That was maybe because English language publishing was dominated by Bengalis.

But the gap [between Bengali and other languages] is narrowing," notes Sinha, an online media professional who has translated over 20 Bengali books so far, including those of Buddhadeva Bose and Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, creator of the detective character Byomkesh Bakshi. He has also translated Jana Aranya as The Middleman. The English translation of another of Mukherji's books, Thackeray Mansion, will soon be published by Penguin.

Sanjukta Dasgupta, professor of English at Calcutta University, says Bengali literature became attractive to English readers thanks to the popularity of Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Other Bengali authors who find takers in English are Ray, whose Feluda stories have been read by more people than those who have seen his movies, Sunil Gangopadhyay and Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, whose most famous creation is Devdas.

Pulp is Literature Too

South of the Vindhyas, too, translations have gathered momentum. Lakshmi Holmstrom, one of the best-known English translators in the country, has translated several notable Tamil authors, including Ambai and Sundara Ramaswamy. Gita Krishnankutty has done the same for Malayalam, translating books like M Mukundan's On the Banks of the Mayyazhi and Anand's Govardhan Travels.   Both Holmstrom and Krishnankutty are recipients of the Crossword Book Award. Among the most exciting literary events in recent years has been the publication of the two-volume Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. Rakesh Khanna, cofounder of Blaft, says the idea behind the anthology was to go beyond "Sahitya Akademi-sanctioned literature". The first volume, with 17 stories by 10 authors, including Rajesh Kumar and Pattukkottai Prabhakar and published in 2008, contains such delightfully risque lines as "When a voluptuous breast brushes against a man's broad chest, what need is there for special reactors to produce nuclear energy?"

Both the volumes have sold about 21,000 copies, including the e-book version, according to Khanna. Blaft has also published English translations of four novels of Urdu crime writer Ibne Safi. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, who translated all four books in just five weeks, says there is a demand for translations. "Publishers are business people.

They are not doing it just for love," he adds. Faruqi is translating a collection of Mir Taqi Mir. The book is being published by Harvard University Press as part of Infosys chairman NR Narayana Murthy's $5.2-million donation to publish English translations of Indian classical literature under the label 'Murty Classical Library of India'. But translations don't pay: Rahman says he got Rs 15,000 per Ibne Safi book. "It pays for the occasional holiday," adds Sinha.

The upshot of the newfound interest in translations is publishers are also scouting out literature in languages besides Bengali, Malayalam, Urdu and Hindi. Thakur says the publisher is looking at books in Gujarati, Konkani and Kashmiri. "But it's not easy to find translators," she admits. Hindi crime novelist Surender Mohan Pathak concurs. Two of his novels, The 65 Lakh Heist and Daylight Robbery, were published by Blaft but are now out of print. He has a new Hindi novel and a simultaneous English translation coming out in early 2014. "There was a burst of interest in translations 3-4 years ago but it didn't pan out as well as expected," says Pathak, who has written 275 crime novels over 50 years.

Nivedita says the problem with finding translators is there are not many who are equally conversant with both English and the language they are translating from. He hopes to get the English translation of his novel Exile published next year. Pritham K Chakravarthy, translator of Nivedita's Zero Degree and the Blaft Anthology, says she took to translations because she found that the ones she read "cleansed" the original. "It was as if they were being translated for an invisible reader. That's why when I started translating I didn't want to translate upma as suji porridge or dosa as pancake," she notes.

Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, alludes to the liberties the translator takes in his 1941 essay "The Art of Translation" for the New Republic, an American magazine: "The... sin of leaving out tricky passages is still excusable when the translator is baffled by them himself; but how contemptible is the smug person who, although quite understanding the sense, fears it might stump a dunce...!" To illustrate his point, Nabokov refers to the English translation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

"Vronsky had asked Anna what was the matter with her. 'I am beremenna' [the translator's italics], replied Anna, making the foreign reader wonder what strange and awful Oriental disease that was; all because the translator thought that "I am pregnant" might shock some pure soul, and that a good idea would be to leave the Russian just as it stood," he wrote.

"What I struggle with in translation is direct speech. How do you translate the rhythm of speaking in Hindi to English? For tu, tum and aap, all you have in English is a bland 'you'," says Pande. Rubin calls translation "very, very subjective".

He adds on the New Yorker podcast: "I'm thought of as someone who sticks very closely to the original. Murakami himself has said this. [But] I don't think it's anything like his writing when you get right down to it. It's an interesting imitation maybe." Murakami is best known for his genre-bending "pop lit" novels like Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and, most recently, 1Q84. Rubin translated the second book and part of the third.

Despite the pitfalls of translation and paucity of able translators, publishers are looking beyond the safe bets of classics to bring contemporary Indian vernacular literature to English readers. For instance, Penguin is publishing later this month Tamil novelist Perumal Murugan's 2010 novel Mathorupagan as One Part Woman and will in 2015 publish the English translation of a Malayalam novel by KR Meera released this year.

While reading, as a habit or vocation, itself is facing an uphill battle against the myriad entertainments of today, getting readers interested in English translations of Indian literature will require more than resorting to classics and will involve encouraging writing in different languages. After all how good can a commendable translation of an awful book be?

इकोनॉमिक टाइम्स से साभार