Language Centres at a Crossroads

After almost 40 years, India is revamping its National Education Policy (NEP) to provide "a framework for the transformation and reinvigoration of the education system in order to respond to the requirements of fast-changing, knowledge-based societies while taking into account the diversity of the Indian people, their traditions, cultures, and languages." (NEP-2019:35). The new policy emphasizes the value of multilingualism as a cornerstone of teaching pedagogy. Multilingualism is a necessity for India (as of much of the developed world), for learning and expanding one's horizons, enriching learners intellectually and culturally and equipping them with the structures of expression, vocabulary, idioms, and literature of more than one language.

Indian education was traditionally a guru-shishya (teacher-disciple) relationship built up over many years in isolated retreats (ashrams). The system reached its apogee in universities like Takshashila and Nalanda. Due to invasions and colonizations, the system was gradually replaced by the elitist British mode aimed at creating an English-speaking middle-class for routine administrative jobs. This paper seeks to examine the way English was established as an 'elitist' language and as a 'lingua franca,' despite the rich, expressive and scientific nature of Indian languages, both classical and modern. The New Education Policy emphasizes the need to impart multilingual education in (i) the learners' mother-tongue(s), (ii) in a national language and (iii) in an internationally used language. In this way, it aims to minimize the colonial view of English as the language of the cultural elite, to return the power of a multilingual perspective to education as India approaches another cultural crossroad.

Crossroads implies not only the ending of a journey, but also the simultaneous opening up of multiple options for further self-exploration. In the Hindi novel Surju Kei Naam (2006) the protagonist Sukurmani travels many linguistic and political crossroads– from India to Bhutan. Her multiple dislocations impact her by enriching her multilingual competencies. Centering our query on the novel and its English trans-creation To Surju, With Love (2017), we examine (i) cultural and communication issues of domestication and foreignization and (ii) problematic areas of translation in terms of 'faithfulness' and 'equivalence.' We conclude by looking at the viability of multilingual translations for academic purposes in a wider global context. (364 words)

लगभग 40 वर्षों के बाद, भारत नई नीति शिक्षण की आधारशिला के रूप में बहुभाषावाद के महत्त्व पर जोर देने के लिए अपनी राष्ट्रीय शिक्षा नीति (NEP-2019) को संशोधित कर रहा है। भारतीय शिक्षा प्रारंभ से एकांत स्थल (आश्रम) में पारंपरिक गुरु-शिष्य (शिक्षक-शिष्य) से सम्बद्ध थी और तक्षशिला और नालंदा जैसे विश्वविद्यालयों में इसकी चरम परिणीती परिलक्षित थी। उपनिवेशीकरण के दौरान, शिक्षा व्यवस्था को धीरे-धीरे अभिजात वर्ग की ब्रिटिश प्रणाली द्वारा बदल दिया गया जिस का उद्देश्य अंग्रेजीभाषी साधारण वर्ग को तैयार करना था। इस पत्र में हमारा यह जांचने का प्रयास होगा कि भारतीय भाषाओं की समृद्ध,अभिव्यंजक और वैज्ञानिक प्रकृति के बावजूद अंग्रेजी को अभिजात्य भाषा 'और लिंगुआ फ्रेंका' के रूप में कैसे स्थापित किया गया। अपने जांच बिंदुओं को हिंदी उपन्यास "सुरजू के नाम" (2006) और इसके अंग्रेजी रूपांतरण "टू सुरजू, विथ लव" (2017) पर केंद्रित करते हुए, हम घरेलू और विदेशीकरण और अनुवाद के समस्याग्रस्त क्षेत्रों के सांस्कृतिक और संचार मुद्दों की जांच करेंगे। एक व्यापक वैश्विक संदर्भ में अकादमिक उद्देश्यों के लिए बहुभाषी अनुवादों की व्यवहार्यता को देखकर निष्कर्ष निकालने का हमारा प्रयास होगा।

References:

• Dimri, Jaiwanti. Surju Ke Naam. New Delhi: Bharatiya Jnanapeeth, 2nd ed. 2010.
• To Surju, With Love. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2017.
• Kasturirangan, K. et al. National Education Policy -2019. New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2019.

Prof. (Dr.) Divya Saksena is Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at IMS Unison University, Dehradun, India. She received her M.A. and M.Phil. degrees in English from Delhi University, India, and her Ph.D. from The George Washington University, USA. With over 23 years teaching and research experience in India, the USA and Canada, she has published and presented papers on Shakespeare and D H Lawrence in the USA, India and France. Her current research interests are Curriculum Design, Anglophone Literature and Gender Studies.

Prof. (Dr.) Jaiwanti Dimri is a bilingual writer and translator in Hindi and English, a critic and academic. During her teaching career of thirty years she has taught in India and in Nigeria, Bhutan and the United States. Her fictional works in Hindi have been translated in English, Telgu and Marathi. Some of her notable publications are: To Surju, With Love which is a self-trans-creation of her Hindi novel Surju Kei Naam, The Images and Representation of the Rural Woman, The Drukpa Mystique: Bhutan in Twenty First Century and a Hindi translation of Bhutanese writer Karma Ura's The Hero with Thousand Eyes.