Kathikawa is an interview series focusing on the issue of the English language learning/teaching in Sri Lanka, which is airs on the YouTube channel ‘The In-between Space’, run by Madhubhashini Disanayaka Ratnayake, Senior Lecturer, Department of English Language Teaching, University of Sri Jayewardenepura. Here she talks to Sasanka Perera, Professor of Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi, writer and critic, about his journey of learning English.
Thank you so much for joining us. Everyone knows who you are, but just to recap, you are the Professor of Sociology and Dean of Social Sciences at the South Asian University in New Delhi. I want to discuss a vital question.
Q: Is it possible for any academic or anyone to involve themselves in academic research without knowing English? And I want to start it from a post colonial angle because all of us whether we are Sri Lankans or Indians, have gone through the colonial process in which the knowledge that we had within our region before colonialism denigrated, and was looked down upon by colonial masters. For instance, Macaulay said even if you collect all the books in all the libraries in India, they will equate one shelf of good English books. We have come through such a history that made us feel incredibly inferior. If we want to proceed with our academic research, are we continuing a stereotype that was put in place during the colonial times or is it something that we cannot possibly ignore? How can we tackle that sense of inferiority when we must learn the language of the oppressor?
A: To begin with, I will not take Macaulay too seriously simply because he was a man of complete ignorance. To come to your question, there was no confusion even in my college days that certain kind of very useful knowledge was produced in this part of the world as elsewhere over a very long period. So, there are many texts that had survived over the years. A simple example is the work scholars like Max Mueller and others did by translating Pali and Sanskrit text to English, French and German over time. That is the exact opposite of the attitude of people like Macaulay. The efforts of the Pali Text Society can also be seen in this context.
Macaulay is merely a kind of an irritant in this scheme of things which I will not take very seriously. But I would rather take seriously the kinds of people who surpassed that kind of intellectual limitations and racism. Now, we can come to the present.
There are a couple of things we must take into account when considering if an academic in a Sri Lankan university who's proficient only in Sinhala or Tamil can really be an academic in that system with a PhD, soundtrack record in teaching and so on. I would say yes to that question. But I would also say he will be a very mediocre academic. Let's not be confused about this. And that mediocrity comes because he or she will be completely closed to other knowledges including about his or her own subject that is not available in local languages.
Let’s take a very limited example. If a person is a scholar of Sinhala, obviously we assume that person will be researching into that language, its history, its socio-cultural background and so. But it is no longer possible, nor is it pragmatic or even reasonable to assume that a scholar of Sinhala can explore the history of Sinhala the language merely through Sinhala language sources only.
For one thing, Sinhala must be located in a larger historical and cultural context, and most valuable historical and scholarly material on Sri Lanka is not even written in Sinhala. It's mostly in English written by scholars who may not even live here. The second problem is, even if one might want to study one’s own language, one also must look at the histories of related languages that have influenced Sinhala, starting from Tamil, Sanskrit and so on and so forth.
Most histories of such languages are also not written in Sinhala. So, if a Sinhala scholar tries to write and research about the history of his own language without referring to these sources, then his work will be marked by a very serious case of intellectual poverty.
The only way you can make sure that the knowledge produced locally is not poverty-stricken is to acquire a tool, which in my mind is a language that will allow you to cross over to these other discourses that are not in our language. So, the short answer to your question is, in today's context, we have to master the languages of the former oppressors simply because now it is our choice, and it is a necessity.
Q: If someone really loves research and is a true follower of knowledge and he simply didn't have the background which helped him learn English, what would you suggest that he does? How would you overcome this barrier?
A: I can say what has worked for me, and therefore also might ideally work for other scholars or even regular people who want to acquire certain kinds of knowledge. If you wait until everything in your field is translated into Sinhala or Tamil, that day will never come, particularly in our kind of country.
The shift from English to Swabhasha began in the 1950s. At first, it came with a lot of preparation and planning as in creating bilingual glossaries and translating essential textbooks at least in Sinhala, but hardly in Tamil. But these efforts never really continued well beyond the first decade so. Even though the shift to Sinhala and Tamil was implemented very quickly, from schools to universities, the kind of intellectual infrastructure that should have followed—like textbooks, glossaries and so on -- didn't really materialise.
So, if you wait for all that knowledge in the world to be available in your own language, it will be a waste of time. We are already so far behind. Hardly anything significant in the last 100 years is available in Sinhala or Tamil. What about the next 100 years? It is also a very expensive process which poorer countries like ours cannot easily afford.
Q: Professor, how is the situation in other countries that can afford this?
A: Well, I think it has succeeded in places where there has been political stability and as a result also stability in long-term planning. Japan and China in the in the east are good examples of that. But it's also the case in the West as in the case of our former colonial master. Quite a lot of the theoretical and philosophical material in social sciences and humanities we today have not come from English language writers.
They have come from French and German. But then within a relatively short period of time, these things have been made available in English via good translations. Today when we read Claude Levi Straus, the French anthropologists or Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist or even the theorists like Jacques Derrida and Michelle Foucault, we read their work via English translations. This has happened not as part of some Government program but because individuals and entities made the effort to publish these things.
To me, if you're serious about knowledge then you must acquire the necessary tool, the ideal language to access that knowledge. It does not have to be English. It depends on one’s interests. In my discipline I would find it useful to have French and German. The bottom line is that if you are serious about knowledge and if translations are not coming to you regularly, then you have to acquire an additional language that is useful.
Q: Given that there is a love for research and there's a love for learning, what methods would someone from a very far away village use to acquire English?
A: I am no longer sure how good the English language teaching is in universities or schools. But my experience in my time was that training was simply not good enough even in the kind of schools I went to. These were important schools but if I stuck only to that school knowledge of English, I wouldn't have made it. So, one shouldn't really depend only on what schools offer. In my case, both parents could speak English. But we did not speak English at home at all as a family, perhaps a kind of a nationalist linguistic decision I’m not going to go into. But what happened was that neither my sister nor I was fluent in English by the time we went through school.
It was a big problem for my parents, and they used to pay us 10 rupees if we spoke in English for one day and sometimes will take us to see a film.
I am a complete supporter of the shift from English to Swabhasha. I never had any confusion about it. It had to be done. The problem is we did not ensure either global knowledge would be made available in our languages or allow our citizens a decent education in English or some other language as a second language to seek such knowledge on their own but for us as we have better resources to teach English than some other language.
Take the example of Bhutan. In the 1950s the king of Bhutan made a decision that the medium of instruction in Bhutanese schools and universities will be English. Now, that has paid off because whenever Bhutanese students come to my classes I am always so surprised that they were fluent in English, which is not the case with Sri Lankans who come to the same classes.
The second example is India itself. That country went through a kind of a shift to local languages too. Different schools, colleges and universities teach in different languages depending on where they are located. But the central universities which are funded by the central Government have more or less maintained their instruction in English.
If you take Jawaharlal Nehru University or Delhi University for example, all postgraduate training is in English while undergraduate education can be in Hindi or whatever the local language might be.
I think of these examples as possible models that we also should have thought about more seriously. Even though it's very late for us and we have lost much time, I still think it's not impossible to come up with a solution as long as there is a political will to implement it.
I think a person in academia or any kind of professional field must not ideally produce knowledge for local consumption only. It should go beyond our borders and the only way to do so is via a powerful foreign language – and English is only one possibility.
When it comes to my writing I am better known elsewhere than in my own country which is unfortunate. But that is only due to the language in which this stuff is written – English.
Q: And precisely because of this professor, one of the things is we did not have infrastructure like publishing houses which would have immediately translated in real time important works. When you said the decision to offer education in Swabhasa was a good one, politically the fact that they didn't do the same in Tamil led to enormous problems later. I was thinking of your childhood and the fact that now you are proficient in almost three or four languages, though initially the input was only in Sinhala. There is a popular theory that giving a child exposure to the mother tongue really does affect the brain very positively, and for me you you're a perfect example of that. Neither of us are psychologists, but the fact is your childhood exposure was mainly to your mother tongue. Is it possible that you are really going to advance more as an academic or an intellectual or even as a person by this kind of exposure?
A: I will still support people being educated in school and high school in Sinhala or Tamil and I think the mastery of your own language is useful, if not necessary. It's useful because through that you obviously come into contact with your cultural setup that you will not be able to go as well through any other means.
But I don't think that will necessarily broaden your horizons beyond a point. But this can lead to parochialism if one has only language at disposal as is the dominant case in our country. Let's put it this way. I think Sinhala or Tamil language education can be offered at school level along with a very robust training in some other second language too.
This combination will give young people access to their own culture and to the world. This second language can be French; German; English or whatever.
Q: Yes to do all this, you need to have teachers first. Yes, what we discuss here may not even be implemented. But just knowing the problems and knowing the positive ways in which you look at local language education I think there is a lot of food for thought. It's so interesting professor one thing that you said about your background. If you were mostly exposed to Sinhala and did not speak English as a child, how did you improve English? What methods did you use?
A: I always found all these very amusing in later times. But in the long term, it didn't do any harm to us. Fore xample, I’m teaching in English now to young people who come from many countries. And my sister is teaching law in English in Australia. But this is not what happens in general because often if you miss the bus, you miss it for good! We didn't lose it in that sense. But clearly it was difficult for me to be fluent in spoken English because of this situation and the same applies to my sister too.
But of course, we have both overcome it. Fluency in using a language comes from practice. That practice was not available to us because of a family decision. But we were always encouraged to read in any language. We were bought a lot of books in both Sinhala and English. So, we got used to reading simple things from a very early time.
And also, at that time the schools I went to did give a reasonable introduction to English as it did to other subjects. So, we had a basic background to grammar and syntax and a certain familiarity with the language. But this is not fluency. But it was still quite tedious. So if my exposure was limited to family circumstances and the kind of very dry didactic English language instruction given in schools then I’m not sure what the outcome for me would have been.
The difference for me came because of my interest in reading that partly came from the family but is also something that I truly cultivated. From a very early age, we got used to the practice of going to the British Council in Colombo and ended up reading some of the books borrowed.
I was surely not going to read on my own volition the likes of Chaucer or Shakespeare and those kinds of utterly boring things, which I still don't find particularly interesting. But I read quite a lot of children's stories, adventure novels, detective, and war stories and so on over time. Many of these works actually created an interest in reading in me and also gave me an introduction to the elegance of the language that I could actually master.
It was reading that gave me a more interesting and rapid entry into the world of the English Language. My reading and writing improved a great deal but not speech. That came much later.
Q: Professor, but what if one does not have the economic strength to support the buying of books? But there are libraries and are even free for people.
A: Yeah. Our public library system is not bad. Even if it's an old book it is still a book as long as it is interesting. Our parents bought us books only during our birthdays or at Sinhala New Year. They could not afford to be too free with their money. I mean they were both Government servants. But there were other sources of books. The British Council library for those of us in Colombo, school libraries and many public libraries. And there was a small private library in Raymond Road Nugegoda where one could borrow books for a few rupees. From there I borrowed detective novels along with my mother also went with me most of the time and she also read those things.
I think the network of libraries are still reasonably good and someone can just visit and there are a lot of things that are available. Even without going to the library, there are lots of things online if you don't mind reading on your phone or on your computer or get a printout from some where. There are more options today than in my time. But all these have limitations too depending on one’s economic background.
Monolingualism will simply eradicate any sense of creativity or scholarship. You will end up being very ordinary and if your goal in life is to be ordinary, then it's very fine. You simply stick to your Sinhala or Tamil linguistic worlds and you will be happily ordinary.
But then, in our university system being ordinary is not such a big problem because you will still be a senior professor; you will still be a Dean and Vice Chancellor and so on. These things have nothing to do with knowledge and the drive for knowledge. If you have that kind of drive, then you have to find ways to acquire that knowledge.
You showed two things. One was that without English you can't advance in knowledge or without knowing another language but not necessarily English. If you are willing to work hard though it might be tedious, you can make it fun by reading love stories, detective novels as you had done. I am extremely grateful professor that you came here to speak. It's such an honour for me to have you.