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Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Every  October 5 is being celebrated as Indian English day by several equal medium education lovers in India. This is 203rd   year of the birth of English medium school education in India. The first English medium school in Calcutta was started by William Carey a British missionary, who came from a cobbler family background. He came to India in 1793 and settled down in famous Serampore and began his educational agenda. In 1817 in association with Raja Rammohan Roy he started the first English medium school on October 5^th. That is also International teachers Day.

During these 203 years English medium school education in India who learnt English? Who lost out by being out of it? This history of school education needs to be examined. This is very important now because the New Education Policy of the Narendra Modi’s central Government talks about teaching in regional language in the disguise of mother tongue from class one to eighth only in state Government schools but not in all schools.

All the central Government run schools remain only in English medium. All the private schools run by small, medium and big educational entrepreneurs continue to run their schools in English medium. Some schools run by the monopoly industrial houses are modelled on British and American school education model. They do not have even one regional language subject in their entire teaching and learning process till 12^th grade.

In historical terms the largest number of people in India are Shudras, who roughly constitute about 56 per cent of Indian population. This includes Jats, Gujjars, Patels, Yadavs, Reddys, Kammas, Kapus, Velamas, Naikers, Nairs, Marathas, Lingayats, Vakkalingas and so on who are competing in the general pool. Apart from these castes all OBCs  who come under the reservation category are part of the Shudras. Followed by these communities there are 18 per cent Dalits and 7.5 per cent Adivasis.

From all these communities if you see the writers in English in any field of life  the Shudras  are absent. Those who write theory( political, social and spiritual), fiction, poetry, journalistic, art critique and so on in English are from Dwija communities. At all India level the castes that constitute Dwijas are Brahmins, Banias, Kshatriyas, Kayasthas and Khatris.

How  did they  acquire  command over English but not the Shudras who constitute such a massive population? All of them are also not very poor. The reason lies in  the history of language and education in India. Before Sanskrit landed in India in 1500 BCE people who spoke Pali and other regional tribal languages that built the Harappan civilization including cities like Harappa Mohenjo Daro and Dholavira had their own languages. Without advanced language among people building urban civilization is impossible.

Rigveda was the first Sanskrit text written India. In the Vedic period the Shudras were declared the fourth varna- that was equivalent to slaves. Sanskrit was a banned language for them. Huge punishments were imposed if they learnt reading and writing in that language.

From the 13^th century, the Turkic and Afghan rulers came in and Persian was slowly made the ruling and textual language in India. Instead of opposing Persian the Dwija castes learnt Persian and became adiminitrators and interpreters to the Muslim rulers. In the whole of Mughal rule, the Persian language spread all over India. Mostly Brahmins and Kayasthas, apart from Muslims, learnt that language and migrated to all parts of India to get Government jobs. The migration of Brahmins and Kayasthas to Hyderabad state and Mumbai province (Bal Thakere family for example, who are Kayasthas) is a standing example. The Muslim rulers also did not think of educating tillers, artisans and improve the skills of agrarian masses in Persian language. Their illiteracy also caused low production in  the agrarian sector.

Gradually Hindi and Urdu emerged from Persian. These were also called Hindustani languages. Hindi adopted Sanskrit letters whereas Urdu adopted Arabic and Persian letters. But communicability between these two languages even now is structural. All those North Indian languages that use Sanskrit script like Bengali, Marathi, Gujrathi have mutual  understanding and exchanges between Hindi and those languages. That is the reason why people from those states understand and speak Hindi very easily.

The Shudras who were spread in the rural areas as cultivators and artisnal instrument producers were never taught Persian because the same culture that they are meant to do manual labour but not meant for intellectual work was continued by the Muslim administrations. In 1839 Persian was abolished by the East India company and English was made the administrative language. The Dwijas, mainly Brahmin and other Dwija youth who started learning English from 1817 entered the English administration. No Shudra could get into a Government job even in the British period after English was adopted as teaching and administrative language.

The first known person who learnt English in personal friendship with British officials was Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a Brahmin jagirdar. Mahatma Phule was the first Shudra to join an English medium school in 1841. Dadabai Nauroji, a Parsee  studied in English and went to England for business and became a politician. Mahatma Gandhi seems to be the first Bania to study in English both at home and in England. Later  the only Shudra, having come from a landed family, to study in England was Sardar Vallabai Patel. But he did not write much in English.

However, quite surprisingly hardly Shudra landlords sent their children to study in English to England. In Telugu states for example Kattamanchi Ramalinga Reddy seems to have been a well English educated Shudra, within India. But the Shudra landlords also did not continue his heritage. They were happy with their landed power in the villages. They did not aspire for national status by learning a common national language. Now they are realising the importance of English medium education.

What caused the underdevelopment of whole Shudras, apart from Dalit and Adivasis, was that they have not learnt a national language that could connect people living in different parts of India. They did not learn Sanskrit, Persian, and later English which were national and international languages.

Now the only way out is that the Shudras/Dalits and Adivasis have to learn English along with a regional language in which they do their production-related tasks. English will become their national and international language and the regional language will be their day to day production and functional language. Once those who know English do involve in agrarian production the quality of Indian agriculture will radically change.

It is important that India as a nation recognises  that English is a national language and celebrates October 5th as Indian English day. Any language that survived for more than two hundred years is a national language. Every language in India has a language day. English was born as school education language in 1817 and lived as only Dwija language. This situation should change. English is also our language now so that every food producer can learn that language without thinking that it is not our language. In a globalised world, every farmer should have command over a global language, which is only English. Let there be no global conspiracy to stop English medium education to the poor and food producers of Indian villages.

 Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is well known writer in English and Telugu and a social activist

https://countercurrents.org/2020/10/why-the-farmers-need-english-education-indian-english-day-diary/

Kshatriyas, who never took to modernity, are now beginning to assert themselves politically and in the film industry.

Sep 22, 2020 | Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide, Kangana Ranaut’s rebellion against the Shiva Sena government and also the so-called drug culture of Bollywood is not mere politicking – it has deep caste dimensions as well. The Indian media, particularly the English media, is trying to avoid this question or perhaps they are ignorant of it.

Sushant and Kangana are emerging actors in Bollywood from the Kshatriya community. Bollywood, unlike other regional language film industries, is controlled by Brahmins, Banias, Kayasthas, Khatris and a few Muslims who got out of the conservative controls of Mullahs.

Kshatriyas, as a historical ruling varna after independence, did not emerge as a modern, English-speaking and westernised community. It remained more conservative until the very recent past. Bollywood gradually emerged as a modern industry of English educated, bilingual – Hindi and English – speaking and writing operators with a westernised capitalist culture.

Right from the beginning, the Hindi film industry was imitating Hollywood in several entertainment and film production forms. It is quite regressive at its core, even if had pretensions of modernity, which was a good marketability factor. Most top actors and directors are well exposed to the west, though the producers may come from various backgrounds. It has been open to foreign-born men and women as actors and technicians from the very beginning. All these factors gave it a cosmopolitan dimension.

Brahmins, Banias, Kayasthas and Khatris took to the film industry swiftly, as they got reformed during and after the nationalist movement. With the RSS/BJP coming to power in 2014, there is a cultural conflict in the industry and quite a few of them took a strong pro-Hindutva stand as they saw the writing on the wall. Otherwise Bollywood culture was always in conflict with Hindutva culture policing. However, still many are uncomfortable with communalism, religious conservatism and culture policing.

The Kshatriyas remained outside this industry, as they were confined to their feudal Hindu culture. Their women are still today more male-controlled than the women of any other dwija community.

Kshatriyas fell from their social pedestal when they were reluctant to pursue English-medium education unlike the other dwija castes such as Brahmin, Bania, Kayastha and Khatri. This affected their political chances too.

Brahmins took to English-medium education and benefited – from Raja Rammohan Roy to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to Atal Bihari Vajpayee (and in between, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Morarji Desai and P.V. Narasimha Rao) – the Brahmin domination was very visible in Delhi. From Banias emerged Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to Rammanohar Lohia to Narendra Modi (with an OBC certificate). They have their roots in English education and their industrial capital accumulation (though Modi is not English educated, his support base of monopoly Bania capital is unparalleled). And from Kayasthas came Subhas Chandra Bose to Rajendra Prasad to Jayaprakash Narayan to Lal Bahudur Shatry to Jyoti Basu. Inder Kumar Gujral and Manmohan Singh, who became the prime ministers of the nation because of certain political circumstances that favoured them are from a Khatri background.

The most visible Kshatriya politicians were V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar who became prime ministers and both of them were not liked by media at all. Chaudhari Charan Singh (Jat) and H.D. Deve Gowda (Vokkaliga) were Shudra prime ministers who also did not have that sophistication and good English education. From that position, they represented the rural peasant economy and culture. On its part, Bollywood has not had too many Shudras and Dalits in high end operations of the industry.

What is interesting is that both V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar were pro-poor and Singh’s pro-OBC/SC/ST position is well-known. They were not leaders of Kshatriyas as such.

Till Yogi Adityanath emerged from a Kshatriya background by using the Ram mandir issue as his trump card, there was no strong leader among them. Yogi, with his in Hindutva robes as a saint (exactly like Vishwamitra, whom Brahmins opposed), reached the level of a commander of Hindutva forces. An example of the conflict between Kshatriya and Brahmin in UP was seen in the recent killing of gangster Vikas Dubey in an ‘encounter’.

Kshatriyas as a community are now organising themselves, moving away from a position of victimhood. They have formed a Sri Rajput Karni Sena, which protested en masse against the film Padmavat in which Deepika Padukone (a Saraswat Brahmin) acted. Now the Karni Sena has reached Mumbai to ‘protect’ Kangana, apart from the central police protection that she is provided, with Yogi has backed. Kangana Ranaut found taking a pro-BJP stand useful in standing up to the Shiv Sena. (Though Uddhav Thackeray’s family is a Chandriasena Kayastha Prabhu, but the regional party has a lot of support of the Marathas and also OBCs.)

Kangana, in her initial years, had said that she would not survive in Bollywood because of lack of fluency in English and her small-town roots. But she has, and now she has reached a stage where she can fight Rhea Chakraborty, who is part Bengali Brahmi,n and also attack a stalwarts like Jaya Bachchan (by birth a Brahmin, married to a Kayastha).

Kangana has taken an anti-Congress posture with a strong nationalist Hindutva image. She described Shiv Sena as a ‘Sonia Sena’.

In her 2019 film Manikarnika, Ranaut dons the role of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi. As a co-director, Kangana was able to distort the historical Lakshmibai into a reformist and feminist ideal of Kshatriya women. Though Lakshmibai was born in a Brahmin family, she became Kshatriya by marriage and Kangana cleverly used that in her portrayal.

Her foray into modelling and cinema was opposed by her family, unlike the families of Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra (a Khatri) who encouraged their daughters to take up any career they liked. Kangana’s family is not exposed to western life-styles like those of Padukone or Chopra or Aishwarya Rai and Shilpa Shetty (both the well-educated community of Bunts).

Kangana Ranaut comes from a community which has a history of being ruling classes with great antipathy towards anything modern. The  Kshatriyas have no large investments in Bollywood, unlike other dwijas and Muslims. Her boldness comes from her present political location. Yogi Adityanath is now planning a film city in UP to undercut Mumbai’s importance. Ranaut too wants to undercut Bollywood’s monopoly as the national (Hindi) film industry. This is not a new road map for the whole film industry with a monolith, Hindutva-nationalist idea. This is part of their ‘One Nation One Cultural Nationalism’ project. Kangana fits the bill perfectly.

Kangana is an emerging heroine and producer with the backing of an entire community. The entire Kshatriya community is upset with Sushant Singh Rajput’s death, and it forced the Central government to investigate the death by sucking in Rhea Chakraborty. Again, Chakraborty was supported by Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury in parliament by his open statement that she is a Brahmin from Bengal and hence being harassed. With Kangana also attacking Jaya Bachchan, things are becoming more and more murky.

Kshatriyas are strong supporters of the RSS because the only non-Brahmin head it had was Rajendra Singh (Raju Bhaiya), a Kshatriya, and it was during his tenure that the Ram Janmabhoomi temple issue was re-opened. The RSS cannot afford to ignore Kshatriyas in the organisational structure. They are beginning to make their presence felt. Kangana is a person to be watched, not just in cinema but in politics too.

However, as of now they are the weak link in the dwija social force in terms of exposure to modernity and English-medium education. Though historically they are big meat-eaters, some of them are turning to vegetarianism to fit into the RSS’s food culture. Interestingly, Kangana is said to have turned vegetarian in a filmy culture where Brahmins and Banias have become meat-eaters.

Sushant Rajput’s untimely suicide and Kangana Ranaut as a fighting heroine have made the right-wing media give more attention to the community. In Uttar Pradesh, Brahmins tried to promote Parushurama with the support of Samajwadi and Bahujan Samaj parties after Vikas Dubey’s encounter. Now it is Kangana all over.

Yogi Adityanath has organised the Kshatriya community like no other community in the past. Kangana’s surge can be seen as Kshatriya challenge to the Bollywood industry and the old hegemonic communities within the dwija camp in other fields as well.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author.
https://m.thewire.in/article/film/kangana-ranaut-kshatriya-bollywood 

https://m.thewire.in/article/film/kangana-ranaut-kshatriya-bollywood

In this extract from ‘Rebels with a cause: Famous dissenters and why they are not being heard,’ TT Ram Mohan explores anti-caste activist Kancha Ilaiah’s formative years.

KANCHA ILAIAH/ FACEBOOKNEWS BOOK EXCERPT  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 – 10:52TT Ram Mohan

Ilaiah is one of the foremost intellectuals of the Sudra caste, traditionally regarded as the lowest of four castes in the Hindu religion. He is a familiar figure on television. He appears frequently on issues related to Dalits: violence against them, affirmative action, Ambedkar, Gandhi. He also appears in discussions on Indian politics, especially where these relate to Hindutva and the activities of the Sangh Parivar. In his now familiar, high-pitched voice, he makes his points forcefully. He uses strong words to characterize those whose politics he loathes—‘fascist’, for instance. 

Ilaiah champions the cause of the lower Sudra castes (there is hierarchy even within the Sudra caste) and the Dalits, formerly called the Untouchables, who were regarded as beyond the pale of the caste system. Dalit is an expression that Ambedkar used towards the end of his career to refer to Scheduled Castes. It means ‘suppressed and exploited people’. Kanshi Ram, founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), now led by Mayawati, used the expression Bahujan, which means ‘majority’, to refer to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes (OBCs), all categories that exist in the Indian Constitution. 

Kanshi Ram preferred not to refer to Dalits alone as he did not want to separate them from the other two categories who shared their plight. Ilaiah groups the Scheduled Castes and OBCs together in the expression ‘Dalitbahujan’ to connote the majority that is suppressed and exploited by the upper castes who constitute a minority. (He grants that Scheduled Tribes may also be included in the expression. Ilaiah believes that the Dalitbahujans have nothing in common with the other Hindu castes. They cannot be called Hindu at all. He finds the very idea of a homogeneous Hindu order, implied by Hindutva, revolting. null

Ilaiah has been called a modern-day Ambedkar. He echoes the rage of Ambedkar against an order that has kept millions in backwardness for centuries. Like Ambedkar, he has strong academic credentials and an appetite for digging out unpleasant facts obscured by the mainstream narrative on Hinduism. 

Ilaiah, who has taken to calling himself Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd to affirm his origins, was born in a small village in Warangal district in what is today the state of Telangana. His family belonged to the Kurumaa sheep-grazing caste. His father, he told me, was ‘an innocent man’ who was mostly away from home grazing the herd. The dominant figure in the family was his mother who also happened to be the head of the community of about twenty-five shepherd families, each with about a hundred sheep and goats. 

Having a woman as head was something of a necessity. The men were away most of the time. A head was required for settlement of disputes that arose within the shepherd community or between the community and others. Besides, the sheep were an important source of income through the manure they produced when they rested at night on agricultural land. The owners of the land were willing to pay significant amounts of money for the herd to spend the night on their land. The leader of the shepherd community would negotiate the sums with the landlords. 

An individual of the same caste had migrated from another village and had become the police ‘patel’ or head in the village. He coveted the leadership of the community and was looking for an opportunity to grab it from Ilaiah’s mother. He colluded with another leader of the shepherd community to dislodge Ilaiah’s mother. 

It was common during festive occasions for people to get drunk and get into minor fights. On one such occasion, a fight erupted between Ilaiah’s mother’s team and the police patel’s team of about fifteen persons. Ilaiah’s mother rushed to intercede. The police patel and his team, who were on the spot, beat her up badly and she sustained serious internal injuries. A quack administered some medicine. It resulted in tetanus. Ilaiah’s mother passed away. Ilaiah was in the ninth standard at school at the time. Ilaiah regards his mother as an inspiration for his own rebellion. 

Ilaiah was part of the first generation in Dalitbahujan history to go to school. His school was housed in a thatched hut and had one teacher. There were seven students in his class. Ilaiah studied up to the fifth class. Thereafter, he moved to a school 8 km from his village. A local landlord rented him a small room and Ilaiah cooked for himself. For high school, he moved to the taluka town of Narsampet where he studied up to the eleventh class, followed by one year of pre-university studies. He topped his school in the eleventh class. He did his BA in English literature in this college. He then moved to Osmania University, Hyderabad, where he did his master’s in political science, MPhil and doctorate. 

Ilaiah became acutely aware of caste while at school. Everything about the upper-caste children was different, although they had all been born in the same village. Their food habits, the stories they were familiar with, their religious practices and symbols (including the sacred thread they wore) were all alien to Ilaiah and to his companions from the lower castes. The gods and goddesses that Ilaiah encountered—Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva—were all unknown to him. The gods and goddesses that he was familiar with found no mention in the textbooks. null

The Brahmin teachers resented having to teach Sudra children. They saw the Sudra children as coming from families that did lowly farm work. The heroes of the upper-caste children, the names that Ilaiah encountered in textbooks, belonged to a different world. This early experience at school led to his overwhelming conviction that Dalitbahujan culture and the culture of the upper castes were poles apart. 

Entering university, Ilaiah found his teachers silent on caste discrimination, however radical their views on other matters. Like the teachers he had encountered at school, they did not approve of lower-caste people in their classrooms. They considered them undeserving. They felt that the lower-caste people would only cause standards in higher education to fall. Of course, they wanted better wages and living conditions for the lower castes. But this should happen in their own villages and within the agrarian economy. 

Excerpted from ‘Rebels with a cause: Famous dissenters and why they are not being heard’ by TT Ram Mohan, published by Penguin Random House. The book is available on Amazon here.

https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/how-anti-caste-activist-kancha-ilaiah-s-mother-was-inspiration-his-rebellion-133170

An earth shaking book

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 When I was reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, even before completing the book I realised that a Black sister had come to our older house of 3,500 years from an old house of 400 years.

She told us that you have to pull it down and build a new one. She told us the story of the oldest house (Germany the original home of Aryans) where caste actually was born. I realised that with the Second World War it was pulled down and rebuilt. In the USA they are on the way to pulling down their old house. Their caste practitioners, the Whites, are on the way to reconciliation.

Isabel Wilkerson tells a remarkable truth: Caste is in the bones of Indians and Americans whereas race is in the skin of humans. Aryans are the creators of the caste virus, which has been eating away the bones of Indians for longer than any other humans on the planet.

The bones of us Indians are full of caste smell that no English educated Brahmin sister in American or European universities realised with tool in hands should be checked, or at least a discussion should be begun on the condition of this house. Our Brahmin brothers who had an education of millennia in Sanskrit, in Persian and now in high class English at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard never wanted anybody to allow the house to be understood.

Our Brahminic sisters from Bengal, Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and so on achieved many things in the old house. Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley, Indira Nooyi and so on are doing so well in the old house, but they never wanted the Americans know about the rotting bones in the older house to which they belonged.

Having settled in the USA many Brahmin women wrote many books and got awards from the global power house. But nobody wrote about the older house, about the disease that struck our bones, not just skin. And it has been there for 3,500 years making us stink.

The pandits who returned to the older house after learning high-end engineering skills at American universities to manage the IITs and IIMs and other high-end universities sold a story for dollars around the world about Indian democracy just like old house democracy. They said that the freedoms given here reveal the truth.

However, they said it is better than the system in the oldest house, near which Hitler was born and where he grew up to become a dictator, using the symbol of the bone disease – Swasthik – to make the world, and wanted to see the oldest house of racism and casteism spread the world over. Luckily he was defeated by Russians.

There are many dictators in the older house in the garb of constitutional democracy but we do not know how to fight them.

Our Brahmin-Bania brothers and sisters told stories about their problems with their names or married life there and here (by writing novels like The Namesake or Life Is What You Make It) after migrating to the old house. Jumpa Lahiri and Anita Desai kind of writers from the old house make more money from the Indian book market than any writer living in the older house.

Our Dwija men talked about their marriages and older house customs within their Aryan homes. They talked about A Suitable Boy and The Glass Palace and so on. Vikram Set and Amitav Ghosh kind of writers occupy the high tables of all literature festivals and win awards. But they never wrote about the disease that came from the Aryan race as far back as 3500 BCE to this older house.

Tony Joseph writes in Early Indians that this disease called caste which is eating the Indian bones came here in the third wave of migration of Aryans to Sindhustan around 1500 BCE.

But a sister of ours with roots from the same Africa as the first settlers’ colour (of Ando-Africans) thousands of years before the Harappan rural and urban civilisation was built, without any problem of racism and casteism, comes to see our plight and tells us the truth opposite to M.K Gandhi’s truth. In Harappan times we all were as black and as beautiful as our Isabel is. We later got mixed up after the Aryan migration.

We were not sure our Brahmin-Bania sisters were original Aryans. Brahma, Indra, Agni, Vayu and so on (all Rigvedic gods, and Avestan demons) who did seem to have migrated from the oldest house, never seem to have brought women with them.

The Brahmin, Bania and Ksatriya women who suffered Sati, child marriage and permanent widowhood were, perhaps, our Ando-African sisters taken over by the early migrants from what is now Germany, which Isabel calls the oldest house, and over millennia got their present colour, complexion, texture.

But now they do not like to marry the blacks in the old house–with Kamala’s mother Shyamala being an exception.

In the 1970s and 80s there was a feminist wave in the older house. The Brahmin-Bania women were very active only to make themselves better educated but not to see our plight of 3,500 years. There were communists, liberals and secularists among them. They saw only our outward poverty but not the disease in the bones.

Since their skin was far lighter than ours, its beauty found all the place in Bollywood, though in the old house Hollywood accommodated many black brothers and sisters. Our men and women are unfortunate not because of their skin problem but because of their bone problem.

As our Euro-American Dwija male and female pandits wanted to hide the collapsing beams, leaking roofs stinking walls of this older house from the Western world of opportunities, our Black sister now broke open the doors of the actual living older house.

She called America old house where there is ‘infrared light’.

She called Germany the oldest house of racism and caste giving us a new clue of analysis.

India is inbetween the two, suffering the worst although Buddhism, Chritianity and Islam exist here. The Swasthic and Trishul rule the roost from the Nagpur headquarters.

But our sisters, leave alone brothers, did not want any light in the older house so that there could be all round darkness, and no outsider could light a torch to check what lies inside. Many Whites from the East India Empire days came here. They believed what our Aryan Brahmins told them.

Dear sister Isabela, we thank you for your visit to our older house. We thank you for carrying our doctor’s (B.R Ambedkar) portrait in the folds of your clothes through the thoroughly checking airports, as it was your beloved gift. When even the black brother-officials did not know who he was, and when you told them he is the Martin Luther King of India, we felt so excited that our Brahmin-Bania brothers and sisters cannot hide their Caste under their skin now. It will reach their bones too.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is an Indian activist and author

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is published by Penguin, 2020

https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/14/19337/A-Black-Sister-Came-Saw-the-Older-House-and-Told-Us-to-Pull-it-Down

Till the end of the 14th century, English was primarily a farmer’s language in England, unlike Telugu, which evolved in the opposite direction.

KANCHA ILAIAH SHEPHERD31 August, 2020 9:36 am ISThttps://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=https://theprint.in/opinion/mirror-image-textbooks-in-andhra-will-make-students-realise-english-is-easier-than-telugu/491729/&layout=button_count&show_faces=false&width=105&action=like&colorscheme=light&height=21

The Andhra Pradesh government has come out with a revolutionary education plan for students from Class I to VI. It has decided to publish what are known as ‘mirror image’ school textbooks in two languages—English and Telugu. Each book will have the lessons printed in both languages, side by side. This will go a long way in solving the problems faced by students and teachers in government schools where the medium of instruction is English. The experience will make them realise how learning in English is easier compared to Telugu. It is easier to learn English alphabets and sentence formation, too, than any other Indian language.

Those who believed in the saying ‘Desa bhashalandu Telugu Lessa (among the nation’s languages, Telugu is the best)’ never cared to develop the Telugu script to suit the tongue of a child who came from an agrarian family. Most of the written text in Telugu is very different from the Telugu that the masses communicate in while working in the fields. Engaged in their productive activities of life—tilling the land, harvesting the crop, and preserving food items at home and outside—people speak what is known as praja bhasha (people’s language), whereas book writing takes place in pandita bhasha (language of the pandits). The pandita bhasha is nothing but Sanskrit, which never was a field and kitchen language. Even in Brahmin households—where only men are known as pandits—Sanskrit was not allowed to be the home and kitchen language of women. Once that language was dubbed in Telugu letters and imposed on the working class, the mismatch became real. This led to the stunting of children’s creative learning.null

English over Telugu

English, on the other hand, evolved in the opposite direction. Till the end of the 14^th century, English was primarily a farmer’s language in England, and was not used in church because Greek and Latin were the accepted divine languages, even in the Anglican Church. English evolved and developed in the farm fields before it became a ‘book language’.

It was only after the peasant’s language was adopted as God’s prayer language that English became richer in print and spoken forms. Even German and French prospered after they were accepted as prayer languages. This can easily be called the greatest revolution among Europe’s peasantry. Once a language is accepted as divine, its growth would entirely be different. In Hinduism, Telugu or any other Indian language such as Hindi, Marati, Gujarati, Bengali and so on, is not considered divine even now in big temples. This is yet another reason for the stunted growth of Telugu.

Another major issue that hinders language development is the reluctance of the canon to adopt a new vocabulary. Unless the alphabet is simplified and words from farm fields and tribal areas enter the written text, Telugu or Hindi or Tamil or Bengali will not get enriched. The Andhra government’s plan to introduce ‘mirror image’ textbooks will go a long way in enriching the legacy of the Telugu language.

Semester, a new experiment

The Andhra government is also adopting the semester system in school education from this delayed academic year—another first. It should prove productive in the long run because two assessments in one academic year will ease the burden of performing in a heavy syllabus from students’ shoulders. This is, in fact, a non-European-American model in school education and is worth trying. Unlike the Euro-American model, India never developed a system that could use technology to reduce the weight of heavy school bags. The new system would mean students will have to carry books relevant only to that particular semester.null

Teachers need to do a lot more to constantly improve learning abilities and creative thinking among children. The Indian school education system, so far, has stressed on rote learning, which does not encourage creative thinking. For students who would become part of this new experiment in Andhra Pradesh, the process of creative thinking should begin and must grow by the time they finish sixth grade. The ‘mirror image’ books along with individual effort on their part will improve the English of the teachers. That will, in turn, help students. Teachers must realise that there is a teacher in every child.

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Also read: The mother tongue fanatics are keeping India a poor, backward country

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Teaching ‘dignity of labour’ creatively

The New Education Policy (NEP) proposes to teach students about different vocations from Class VI onwards, in a bid to help them make informed career choices in future. Taking the cue from NEP’s spirit, schools in Andhra need to gradually move to a 5+3+3+4 system, away from the 10+2 model by abolishing Intermediate. The present model provides high school education in a village only up to Class X. But underprivileged students drop out because they cannot go to intermediate colleges—both government and private—in far off cities. The new system allows every student to complete school without leaving the village. Even a small village, which has 50 children, can have a high school up to Class XII. The new system, if implemented across the country, will change the very nature of school education in India.https://6cba2acc36a20a8b613238b99792d017.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Children who struggle to focus on studies while living in residential schools in urban centres, away from their families, can better manage the load of high school syllabus. The NEP also extends the duration of all under-graduate courses to 4 years. This is to ensure that every graduating student confidently enters the job market.

Euro-American systems mandate post-schooling of adults taking place away from the family set up. Students should live on their own, irrespective of their family’s economic status. This is one reason why higher education is not affordable to all in many Western countries. In India, this system may not work because of huge economic disparities. Here, we should learn from China — a country that has the same school-going population like ours, but a society and a State that values ‘dignity of labour’, thereby providing equal opportunity.

In India, teaching ‘dignity of labour’ must start by making children kitchen-friendly. Books from Class VI onwards must include theory lessons on cooking, making students realise the importance of the daily chore. Parents must train their children to cook and perform basic household duties, irrespective of the child’s gender. The Andhra government is giving money (Rs 15,000 per year) to mothers as part of the ‘Amma Vodi’ scheme. Such state support would ensure mothers play a positive role in the child’s education.

Schools, during parent-teacher meets, must ask the guardians to teach their children the ‘dignity of labour’ by assigning them various household duties. That’s nothing less than creating a cultural asset and a lesson children will never forget—no work is small and no work is undignified. It should also be the responsibility of teachers to track the students’ progress in learning household work.

Schools should also arrange sessions on imparting basic agrarian knowledge through which students could learn about cultivation. Chinese students learn to soil their hands from the fourth grade onwards. States can adopt their own methods and models to teach and make students practice the ‘dignity of labour’ through such activities. Andhra Pradesh has made a good start. If the state builds upon this and continues to tread this path, it will emerge as the most creatively positive investor and giver of scientific education to its citizens of tomorrow, of whom the country will be proud.

The author is the former director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad and a well-known author. Views are personal.

https://theprint.in/opinion/mirror-image-textbooks-in-andhra-will-make-students-realise-english-is-easier-than-telugu/491729/

in India — by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

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What is known as Devulapally Venkateswar Rao (DVR) defenders team, attacked my recent article on Usaa Barber. One of their objects was to assert that DVR, a vegetarian conservative Brahmin, who pretended to be a revolutionary is intellectually superior to the Shudra communist intellectual Tarimela Nagi (TN) Reddy. I take this attack as the appropriate occasion to compare and contrast the role of Shudra leaders and Brahmins in Indian communist movement.

T Nagi Reddy was a student of M.A. Economics and the most brilliant of all the communist leaders of India of his times right from student days. He was the author of India Mortgaged and also held the positon of students’ union president of Banaras Hindu University in his college days.

DVR claimed that he was a great revolutionary intellectual and Nagireddy was his follower. This is a joke to say the least. Nagi Reddy as student Union President has shaken the British administration and wrote a brilliant monograph for his M.A course on economic ideas of Muhammad Bin Tughluq, who was being portrayed as a mad man by the whole range of nationalist leaders, including the communist Brahmins like P.C.Joshi, Dange, Ranadive and so on.

So far none of these so-called Nagi Reddy followers published that monograph. Nagi Reddy’s argument, as I remember from reading it in the 1980s, was that Tughluq printing currency by using copper and leather by avoiding using silver and gold was the most advanced economic thought in India and even the world of his times. He laid the transitory road map to printing paper currency from leather and calling him mad for that betrays the ignorance of Indian economists and historians of his times. Even later, the Brahminical economists did not change their mad Tughluq narrative.  Let us not forget the fact that when Nagi Reddy was studying in the Banaras Hindu university most conservative Brahmin Vedantic philosopher Sarveppally Radhakrishnan who converted the Rastrapathi Bhavan into a vegetarian Tamil Brahmin Bhojanashala, was the Vice-Chancellor and he must have been doubly opposed to him as he was brilliant and a Shudra from Andhra (Rayalaseema). He knew very well what varna/caste was the Reddy-Kapu community of Andhra belongs to. Subsequently, Nagi Reddy was expelled from the university for his militant activism.

Two groups which are claiming the Nagi Reddy ideological tradition must be having his early writings, particularly his write up on economic ideas of Tughluq must be released to Countercurrents.org so it should be available in public domain. The DVR group, in the 1980s, was headed by Bhaskar Iyer and the Nagireddy group was headed by Simhadri Subbareddy. The Iyers were anti-Periyar brahmin force that spread all over India to oppose social change. The Nehruvian state gave all sorts of central jobs to them with contempt against Periyar, the greatest Shudra revolutionary after Mahatma Phule.

The DVR defenders must release all of Nagireddy’s early writings and also of DVR’s if any as student intellectual. Then a comparison of their contributions would be easy. Both of them were of the same age–exactly born in 1917. Let the readers decide who is of greater intellectual calibre and why that communist Shudra intellectual thrown to the corner history at the all India level? For instance, look at what Wikipedia in its very small bio on Nagireddy says about his early education and the commitment that he had to socio-economic change. It says “Tarimela Nagi Reddy (1917-75) often called “TN”, was a communist politician from Andhra Pradesh, India. He was born in a wealthy family in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. He completed his schooling from the Rishi Valley School India (English medium), Andhra.  He would later study at Loyola College in Chennai and at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi. During his student days, he got involved with nationalism and Marxism. His political activities got him jailed in 1940, 1941 and 1946. He revolted against his father who was a landlord and donated his land of over 1000 acres to landless labourers.”

Andhra, unlike Bengal and Kerala, produced many outstanding Shudra communist leaders, including Puchalapally Sundarayya (a Reddy), Chandra Rajeswar Rao (a Kamma), Kondapally Seetharamaiah (a Reddy) Chandra Pulla Reddy, apart from Nagireddy. There was only one outstanding Dalit communist revolutionary in that whole team, and that was KG Satyamurthy an underappreciated young colleague of them, a brilliant poet and slogan generator. For a long time, he was seen as a Brahmin due to his Brahmin-sounding name Satyamurthy. His caste background came into the public domain only after he came out of the Maoist party and worked with Usaa Barber. Now his full story is available in a book Ants Among Elephants written by his sister’s daughter Sujatha Gidla from America.

The communist movements of India of all streams have, so far, not produced a Nagreddy level intellectual and Satyamurthy level poet and Sundarayya level organiser and a mass leader.

Look at the list of Brahmin leaders in the communist stream at the national level. M.N.Roy, P.C. Joshi, Dange, B.T.Ranadive, E.M.S.Namboodripad, D.V.Rao, Charu Majumadar, Vinod Mishra, Sitaram Yechuri and the list would be too long. All of them were projected as great intellectual leaders without producing any original text. Namboodripad has become the communist Adi shankara of Kerala with his not so original books being in every village library. The Kerala Nairs–leave alone other Shudra caste leaders, never contested his theoretical authority on communism. S.A. Dange wrote a book discovering socialism in Vedas and no Shudra leader in the country challenged him.

All other Brahmin leaders, writers and poets and did not reflect the agrarian and industrial productive masses because Brahmin childhood life always even today is anti-production and anti-labour. They never soiled their hands. As Gaddar says their hands never became ‘Matti-Chetulu’ (soiled hands) but they always lived with “Vatti Chetulu” (empty hands) with a mischievous pen in the hands. They were in every stream of Indian thought as leaders–nay, as the priests.

They produced vedic and puranic minds but not production-oriented and creative minds. Simply because dialectically Indian Brahmins are always outside production without understanding the relationship between land, nature and labour as a Shudra/Dalits could understand they are bound to fail every revolution. That is the reason why though communist streams lead by Brahmin intellectuals failed to cause any revolution in India whereas the same Brahmin leadership in Congress and RSS/BJP succeeded, because they operated in the Vedic, Kautilya and Manu structures and successfully fooled and enslaved the Shudra/Dalits and continue to rule. Communism as an ideology of releasing massive production forces and was supposed to establish egalitarian distribution and never could have been led by Brahmins. Having led by them, it failed as expected. Their caste/varna cultural roots negate all their efforts. As Marx rightly said, their consciousness is conditioned by Brahmin anti-production and anti-egalitarian living process and communism is opposite of that. From the communist camp, they handed over India to Congress and RSS/BJP Brahmins quite successively. They did not even succeed as much as the Nepali Brahmins succeeded in bringing the communist party to power by seriously attacking the Kshatriya monarchy and Brahmin liberal party of Nepal. We can see them in power today. But where are the Indian communist Brahmin intellectuals today?

DV Rao (only known Brahmin in Telugu region) was promoted to the Communist Party of India central committee, with a Brahmin support at the Politburo and central committee level at a very young age. He was projected as intellectual in a usual brahminic channel of promotion through rumors and not through worth and work. That fact that Sitharam Yechri was also promoted like that in our generation is well-known straight from Jawaharlal Nehru University to the central committee and Politburo and till today that party does not find a single SC/ST leader suitable to become Politburo member. Isn’t it a classical example of Brahminic manipulation of highest order? Does that party have any sense of shame? Absence of shame and guilt is one of the fundamental characteristics of a Brahmin. If the communist Brahmins have a basic sense of accountability and shame they would have assembled at some Ambedkar statue and kneeled before him and asked for forgiveness for their ancestors cooking up caste and untouchability. But they never do that. They behave as if they were the real productive force of India. They talk of rubbish secularism in a country of such brutal caste and untouchability.

None of the above leaders’ credentials matches that of Nagi Reddy. The only leader who could be said to be above him with long term mass work was Sundarayya. But Sundarayya lacked Nagireddy’s originality and linguistic skills in thought and ideology. D.V.Rao an intellectual Vaman before a giant intellectual Mahabali was said to have been always intellectually, ideologically and morally above him. See how this brahminic, as dull as a communist document kind of write up, in this website, says about Nagireddy and D.V “TN was an illustrious comrade-in-arms of DV Rao for decades, and died in 1976, while DV Rao died in 1984 (both were born in 1917, both died while leading UG lives). TN was always in the central leadership, and both are always and inseparably referred to as founder leaders of APCCR and later UCCRI-ML”

Since DVR was from the central leadership even before the days 1964 split, TN was always treated as his follower. However, DVR could not match the intellectual talents and mass mobilization abilities of T Nagireddy. He was never allowed to get into the CPI central committee. Unfortunately, the Shudra leaders in the communist stream thought that they should hold gun or shout slogans on the roads and get beaten up by the police and go to jail but never sit and read and write like Marx, Lenin and Mao. That job was left to uncreative Brahmins.

The problem in the communist parties was deep-rooted, Brahmin leaders whose intellectual capacity about a new thought was dogmatic and they should have realised that. The Shudra civil society all over India along with the Dalits should have given rise to more leaders and Brahmins should have gone into the cadre system as they were not suitable to do any creative thought production. They should have worked in the productive fields learning from them. But from the days of S.A Dange, P.C Joshi to Sitaram Yechuri, DV Rao included, they claimed great intellectual leadership. They did not change their privileged historical path of reading and writing uncreatively. One of the main reasons for they continuing that was many Shudra leaders like Sundarayya, Chandra Rajeswarao were weak in the English language, but Nagireddy did not have that handicap. His English and intellectual capabilities were far ahead of P.C Joshi, Dange, B.T.Randive, Namboodripad, DV Rao and others.

The second problem of Brahminism in communism was that the Shudra leaders at all India level always remained inferior with the historical baggage of Shudraness, which they never identified and fought like Ambedkar in the general nationalist movement. Brahmins were everywhere in those days and also even now. They control temples with the power of priesthood; they control political parties with all India English medium education and the social and financial capital that came from all kinds of sources. Media was in the hands of Brahmin intellectuals which would promote if a leader belongs to the Brahmin caste. International connections were in the hands of Brahmins. Even Shudra landlords were regional language educated without many outside connections. Their village, region or their state was their operational domain. Even feudal Shudras behaved like backward peasant mind as Lenin opined.

But most tragic part of Indian communist movement was that the Brahmin leaders were most uncreative and most manipulative. It was in this atmosphere till 1964 and later a brilliant communist intellectual leader was limited to Telugu region. He was not allowed to write much because the party channels closed all creative writing possibilities for the party members. Even today except for Nagireddy’s book India Mortgaged, there is no other book that engages general readers on economic issues. He could have written many original books but he could not. P.C. Joshi, Dange, Ranadive, or D.V Rao has not written a single book with a title that attracts readers’ eye like India Mortgaged. After Dadabai Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British Rule in India with a theory of Brain Drain, this is one of the classic books that could be read with interest.

Let me narrate a personal experience in the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee where I worked with K.Balagopal (General Secretary, K.G Kannabiran (President), G.Haragopal (Vice-President) and I was one of the joint Secretaries. All three come from Brahmin background, which they have not chosen as I did not choose my Kuruma (Shepherd) background. Our birth in families and castes was accidental. My self and Balagopal were writing in English on many issues. A campaign to project Balagopal as a great intellectual even from the very dais where I was invited to speak was a regular thing. Haragopal would say if only if he were to continue in his profession of mathematics, he would have brought a Nobel Prize to India. But now he is like Bertrand Russell –a great philosopher and civil rights thinker. Balagopal would be right there on the dais to speak at the end as mastermind of all-generation civil rights thinker. He would not say a word against Haragopal, who does praise business if someone is Brahmin. They would never take my name as a worthy intellectual anywhere. It was this Haragopal who stopped me from becoming a professor in the Hyderabad Central University in the 1990s with all the pyravi (network) resources at his command.

We should not be deceived by the superficial ideological lables such Left, Liberal or Right. Rather, a few consolidated castes such as Brahmins, Banias, Kshatriyas, Kayasthas and Khatirs (The Dwija Bhadralok of India) form a gang who, all over the country, saw to it that no Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi joins central universities, IITs, IIMS and so on as faculty with a bogus theory that they were/are not suitable even in the reserved posts, keeping all the backlogs. Only when their relatives or Dwija youth came to the interviews, they were found eligible and were made faculty members. This is also the case in media. Even Reddy, Kamma, Jat, Gujjar, Yadav, Patel, Maratha youth were also denied jobs quite deliberately and they talk of secularism. They never allowed the reservation system to be implemented in the private sector.

When I was part of them, my book Why I am Not a Hindu was published in 1996. It received all kind of reviews ranging from praising to attacking the book that was published widely in English media. It has gone into the brains of university students all over India. It underwent many reprints. But they never refer to the book; never discuss it either appreciatively or critically. Total silence was the rule. Balagopal would write reviews on all kinds of books but never wrote anything on Why I am Not a Hindu, even after it was translated into Telugu and was influencing people all over.

Whenever there would be a discussion on great poets only Varavara Rao and Kaloji Narayana Rao (another liberal Brahmin, who was given Padma Bhushan award by friend P.V. Narsimha Rao as Prime Minister) get mentioned. They would never talk or discuss the great poetry of Shivasagar (KG Satyamurthy) or great lyrical writing of Gaddar.

D.V.Rao was great intellectual but Nagireddy never figures, K Balagopal was a great civil rights philosopher, Kancha Ilaiah never figures and Varavara Rao was great poet, never Shivasagar and Gaddar figure. This is Brahminism in its worst form as it came through the communist channels that destroyed creativity of others–Shudras/Dalits/Adivasis. The road then was smooth to Congress Brahmins to rule and now the BJP/BJP Brahmins to come to power. The communist Brahmin intellectuals now are shifting the base to US/Europe and private universities, schools, colleges within India.

To fight this massive inbuilt Brahminism in Indian communism, we need audacity, tenacity and far more intellectual rigour than them. Usaa Barber joined me in this fight and remained in the fight till his death. The tragedy like many Shudra/Dalit communists faced, he too did not acquire grip over English, which was and is communist Sanskrit. I managed it, as I said in my memoirs by reading and re-reading Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto itself.

Nagireddy though came from a feudal Shudra family, knows what agriculture was, what tilling of land was, what labour was. Luckily unlike other feudal Reddys, Kammas, Velamas, Jats, Yadavs, Gujjars and so on he got an opportunity to study in one of the best schools, college and university in India itself, unlike the Dwija intellectuals of his time. Most Dwija intellectuals of his time have studied in England. If he were to ask one simple question when all caste people are being described as Hindu why only Brahmins were heading all the temples as priests, why only Brahmins and Banias (as there was Bania Gandhi as leader of the Congress) were heading all political parties, including the communist party–CPI? Why are only Brahmins in the media? Why are only Brahmins literary figures? Why were only Brahmins peetadhipathis? Why only Brahmins were journalists? And most importantly, why Brahmins were not in the production fields, at tilling the land, at planting, at cutting the crops and grazing the cattle? Why as a community were they eating better food all over the country and living in better houses and wearing better clothes?

No doubt he was in a better intellectual train than that of Kattamanchi Ramalinga Reddy, once the Vice-Chancellor of Andhra University. If only he read Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste and understood he would have raised a question: why all these Brahmins put together did not produce one Voltaire, leave alone Marx, at any stage of Indian intellectual history. He would have realized the role of Varna/Caste in Indian history. From that intellectual train, he would have got into an intellectual flight. He missed that flight and died at an early age when he was just 58.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is political theorist, social activist and author

https://countercurrents.org/2020/08/can-brahmins-bring-revolution-an-assessment-through-the-prism-of-tarimela-nagi-reddy/

in India — by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, not just in his personal capacity, but in his capacity as the Prime Minister of 130 crore Indians quite unexpectedly re-defined Rama totally in a different way than how the RSS/BJP have shown him to us for the last thirty years since 1989. He did that at Ayodhya and at the Ramajanma Bhoomi temple Bhoomi poojan on 5 October 2020. Hence it has great historical significance .

I will first reproduce certain parts of his speech as it is very important to fully grasp what he has said in Bhoomi poojan speech.

“just as the dalits, downtrodden, tribals and all walks of society assisted Gandhi ji in the fight for independence, in a similar manner, the pious task of the construction of Ram Temple began today with the support of the people of India.

Rama had equal love for his people but he had a special attention towards the poor and the oppressed.

You will find Rama in different forms, in the different Ramayanas, but Ram is present everywhere, Rama is for all. That is why, Rama is the connecting link in India’s ‘unity in diversity’.

Lord Rama teaches – “no one should be sad, no one should remain poor”.

Lord Rama gives social message that all the people, both men & women should be equally happy. Lord Rama gives message “Farmers, Cowherds should always remain happy”. Lord Rama orders “the old, the children and the doctors should always be protected”

Lord Rama calls for protecting the one who seeks refuge is the responsibility of all.

That is “Rama speaks, thinks and acts according to time, place and circumstances”.

Lord Rama teaches us how to grow and move with time.

Lord Rama is the advocate of change and modernity.

He also taught us how to face challenges and how to seek and attain knowledge.

We need to respect the sentiments of all. We need to be together,progress together & trust one another”.

Rama in the PM’s speech is a modernist. He stands for abolition of poverty and all inequalities– man-woman, caste, poverty that results our human exploitation and stands for diversity. Rama here talks about the safety of the doctor who treats many patients not that he himself cures diseases.

Rama does believe that this nation should be better than heaven. This is a very seriously different interpretation of Rama who came through the RSS/BJP discourse that was let loose on the nation mainly L.K.Advani during the whole of Radhayatra and subsequently till the Bhoomi Poojan by massively displaying an image of Rama with a powerful bow and sharp arrow at the enemy.

Now Rama is for all and every one. The PM says “Lord Rama teaches – no one should be sad, no one should remain poor”.

The old story and understanding of Rama was different. This interpretation of the PM of Rama from Ayodha from the podium after he has done bhoomi poojan, no doubt, after violating the Governmental dictum that Pandit Jwaharlal Nehru laid down, that no Prime Minister can break the constitutional mandate of secularism by involving in such religious functions. However, he tried to portray that Rama himself is secular.

The secular intellectuals in India would have a problem with this kind of examination of Modi’s Rama instead of opposing the Bhoomi Poojan and temple construction in a secular constitutional democracy by the Prime Minister. What they do not understand is that the Shudra/OBC/Dalit understanding of religion and their future. The secular intellectuals, most of them having come from the Dwija (Brahmin, Bania, Ksatriya, Kayastha and Khatri communities) with English medium education and international connections do not bother about the consciousness levels of Shudra/OBC/Dalits Modi’s redefinition of Rama can bring forth another demand from these sections: what will be their status in that Rama temple which will be built by all means. As of now they do not have priesthood right in such temples. Their children do not get admission in Brahmin theological Sanskrit schools. Their labour will be critical to build the temple. Even Jats, Yadavs and Kurmis of UP are Shudra modern slaves around such temples.

The discourse around Rama Mandir is in relation to Muslim minorities and their future in India hereafter. But there is a more fundamental issue than that. That is caste and women’s oppression right from the days of writing of Ramayana by Valmiki. Ramayana was no text that did not subscribe to caste and women’s inequality. Various modes of caste and women’s oppressive process, as part of varnadharma and brahminic patriarchy, are inscribed into the text.

The PM has referred to many versions of Ramayanas of not just within India but in many other countries. Ramanujan’s essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas” was forcefully removed from Delhi University syllabus by pro-Hindutva teachers few years back. But the PM’s speech only affirms his thesis.

Since the PM as the head of the Indian Government has defined Rama in modernist way hence this definition cannot be abrogated from anywhere from intellectual discourse. Those who agree with it and disagree with it have to engage with it.

I do not want to reproduce how Advani and many RSS/BJP leaders earlier adopted Rama for their agenda to brow beat the Muslim minority and constructed a Hindu monolith. That is known very well.

I will leave the Rama Vs Muslim question to Muslim scholars to debate whether PM’s speech has postive or negative impact on their lives here after after the grand temple is built.

Further as many RSS/BJP leaders said earlier that this temple is going to be more significant than the Vatican of Rome and the Mecca of Saudi Arabia will have to be taken up by Christian and Muslims scholars who are more well versed on issues of comparative religion.

What I am concerned here is with abolition of caste agenda. The women’s question would have to be taken up by women writers and thinkers from all caste background.

The PM’s speech at Ayodhya provides a strong basis for abolition of caste and untouchability with a proper law by the Indian parliament, notwithstanding the reservation laws. This law has to resolve the conflict between the modern spiritual equality of all those who are said to belong to Hinduism as the RSS/BJP are constructing and spiritually discriminatory laws inscribed into Agamashastras. This is a major issue in order to make the Hinduism to be treated as a religion like Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, not just a way of life, by the rest of the world.

The Indian parliament has to firmly resolve to abolish caste in India and it should be taken up by Modi to affirm his understanding of modern Rama. Let us not forget that he has projected himself as an Other Backward Class Prime Minister both in 2014 and 2019 elections. The Shudras and OBCs, leave alone Dalits, as of now have no right to become the priest in this Rama temple, who stands for social justice of all, as Rama is an advocate of change; he himself changes according to times and facilitates modernism, according to the PM in his Bhoomi poojan speech.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is Political Theorist, Social Activist and Author

https://countercurrents.org/2020/08/when-the-pms-rama-is-different-from-that-of-rss-bjp/

It is being said that the Ram Mandir will be more significant than the Vatican of Rome and the Mecca of Saudi Arabia. But will it change the status of Dalits and Shudras?

KANCHA ILAIAH SHEPHERD7 August, 2020 8:35 am ISThttps://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=https://theprint.in/opinion/what-about-dalit-priest-at-ayodhya-ram-mandir-even-communist-intellectuals-wont-demand-it/476475/&layout=button_count&show_faces=false&width=105&action=like&colorscheme=light&height=21

The Ram Mandir bhoomi pujan in Ayodhya Wednesday was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and governor Anandiben Patel. Besides being the only woman on the stage, Patel was also the only Shudra present at the ceremony. Among the priests who performed the bhoomi pujan ritual, there was not a single Shudra — not even from Yadav, Jat, or Kurmi communities of UP, let alone from one of the Other Backward Classes and Dalits.

We can only predict this, since we do not know the name of all the priests who participated in the ritual — but Shudras, historically and even now, have not been given a spiritual right to Hinduism or trained in Hindu theological schools and colleges.

The construction of this upcoming Ram Mandir in Ayodhya would not have been possible, and the RSS-BJP would not have achieved their goal, if not for the participation of Shudras in Babri-Masjid demolition in 1992 and the subsequent BJP government formation in 1999, 2014 and 2019. It is Shudras and Dalits who are engaged in food production work in these hard Covid-19 times for the survival of all, including the temple system, but their work is not accepted as spiritually respectful and hence they do not get the right priesthood, even though they are considered as Hindus. This discrimination is purely due to caste. Around Ayodhya and elsewhere in UP, even the temple maintenance, food and resources come from the labour of Shudras and Dalits. The RSS-BJP defines all of them as Hindus. But they do not have the spiritual right to become a priest at the Ram Mandir and study in Sanskrit gurukuls even in the 21st century.

Ramayana, too, mentions the Varna dharma theory and lists the four caste categories — Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra. Ram himself is known as a Kshatriya king; his guru Vasishtha as a Brahmin.

We do not know what the status of the Vaishyas was during the time of Ramayana. Most probably, they would have been cattle owners and grazers, while Shudras were ‘slaves’ assigned different tasks of production and were in service of the Dwija castes. At the time, there was no notion of one religion called Hinduism under which all four caste groups were clubbed together.

Even if we leave aside all other historical issues and opinions of modern writers, the RSS-BJP consider Hinduism as one religion, which includes all Shudras and Dalits. But what about their spiritual rights? If Ram belongs to all and if we have to fulfil, as PM Modi said, the dream of Mohandas Gandhi to bring about a so-called “Ram Rajya” in India, the inclusion of Shudras and Dalits is a must. When they were defined as Hindu and mobilised into what they called the ‘Ram temple movement’, caste-based assignment of duties in temples should have been abolished too, at least theoretically.

Denial of spiritual inclusion

Did the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ask for this spiritual inclusiveness? PM Modi, in his bhoomi pujan speech, said Ram was a believer in total equality and can be a source of modern development. His re-interpretation of Ram as a divine force and developmentalist is positive. In fact, Modi said Ram accepts both man and woman as equal. This argument goes against the theory of respecting parampara (tradition) that RSS ideologues have been propounding ever since the organisation was founded in 1925. The RSS has never talked about gender and caste equality.

But the RSS-BJP aren’t the only ones to be blamed. The Congress intellectuals, too, never allowed a discourse around equal spiritual rights on the pretext that they believe in secularism and hence do not go into religious affairs and that such issues must be left to the religious organisations. They, therefore, did not do anything to abolish caste in Hinduism and also in civil society when they were in power.

The Communist intellectuals also do not raise such questions under a false theory that they do not believe in religion, and believe in atheism. This again is a false argument to wash hands off the issues of caste and religious inequality since both West Bengal and Kerala, where they were in power for a long time, saw many of their leaders and cadres actively participate in Hindu religious activities. They have shut their eyes to the two major issues of India — caste and religion.

Denial of English education

These questions are passed off in the intellectual and party organisations because the national-level discourse is conducted by people largely belonging to five communities — Brahmin, Bania, Kshatriya, Kayastha and Khatri.

Earlier, there was a strong Sanskrit-educated force among these five communities but now there is a far more English-educated intellectual force among them. The vernacular voice in national and mainstream media on the topic of religion is largely invisible. Unless the debate is intensified at the national level, every ruling party, including the BJP, can take the Shudras and Dalits for granted.

Another problem is the absence of English-speaking intellectuals from Shudra communities, including Jats, Yadavs, Gujjars, Patels, even though there are a number of regional political leaders who want to manage votes and rule their states. They do not have a transformative philosophical and ideological agenda. This is a major deterrent because they are unable to impress or cater to the urban, English-speaking audience.

The RSS-BJP raise the issue of inequalities within Muslim society, particularly gender inequality, on all platforms. But Muslim intellectuals lack this courage to raise caste and other inequalities inherent in Hinduism.

Shudras today do not have the intellectual power because they have been historically denied education, which Brahmins and other Dwija castes held as their prerogative.  They also did not acquire literary status when Persian and Urdu were dominant languages. They were kept engaged in production and services, and continue to be a resigned force when it comes to becoming modern intellectuals. They obeyed the priestly Brahmins earlier and now follow whatever RSS-BJP tell them today without asking for equal rights. This is a tragic status of a major productive community, which feeds the nation with its labour power.

Ram Mandir and equality

Ram Mandir is different from other Hindu temples. It is a temple that is being projected as historical and there is talk that it will become more significant than the Vatican of Rome and the Mecca of Saudi Arabia. According to Home Minister Amit Shah, the bhoomi pujan in Ayodhya is the start of “a new yuga (era)” in 2020.

PM Modi has said that the figure of Ram at the upcoming Mandir will reflect justice more than any other divine figure in the world. If that is what this temple stands for, what about abolishing caste and gender inequalities in the spiritual and religious system that Ram represents? Why is there a total silence on caste inequality, particularly the representation of Shudra in the core team of priests who work at temples? It is the priests who decide what shloka should be recited and what etiquette should be followed inside the temple premises. Priesthood is an important position within religion and for attaining the status of spiritual command.

Will the RSS-BJP assure Shudras and Dalits that there will be Hindu theological school and college in Ayodhya where admission will not be based on caste but religious background alone?

The problem is that the mainstream media in India won’t allow this debate.  The fact that most media organisations are run by members of mainly Dwija castes makes it all the more difficult for such a debate. They are also confident that there will not be a movement in India like #Shudra/DalitLivesMatter along the lines of #BlackLivesMatter.

To conduct a major movement peacefully at the national level, the Shudra/Dalit communities need a large number of highly modern, English-educated intellectuals who can take their space in today’s media. But where will they come from?

The author is a political theorist, social activist and author. Views are personal. 

https://theprint.in/opinion/what-about-dalit-priest-at-ayodhya-ram-mandir-even-communist-intellectuals-wont-demand-it/476475/#

by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Usaa Barber (Uppumavuluri Sambashivarao) (1951-2020)- a well-known social reformer, anti-caste ideologue and anti-brahminism fighter succumbed to COVID-19 on 25th July 2020. He died because of the Indian medical system that could not reach to a stage where it could meet the challenge posed by the new coronavirus. After Savitribai Phule and her son Dr.Yashwantharao died of Bubonic Plague in 1898, Usaa Barber (whom I named so), as committed as Savitribai and Mahatma Phule for abolition of caste and untouchability, died of the brutal COVID-19 pandemic

Usaa was a legend in many ways. From his student days, he has been a staunch atheist and used to compose songs and poems to motivate the masses. For a boy who came from a poor barber family from a village, Brahminkoduru near Tenali, which was known as centre for cunning brahminism in Andhra Pradesh this was surprisingly a bold step by a barber boy. Such a beginning of his was unexpected. A barber has to lead a slaves life by going from house to house to shave the heads of those rich unproductive castes, who keep insulting them. They were supposed to behave like skilled slaves and eat the meagre food that they offer and survive.

In the 1960s, a barber going to school in that region was rarest of rare thing. Usaa was put in the school and later in the college by his elder brother. His school teacher seems to have given a date of birth – 19th February, 1951.

But unusually this barber boy, instead of shaving the heads of brahmin poojaris who needed to have a clean shaven head with a scalp like that of Mahatma Gandhi’s at the apex of the head to perform pooja, archana, and offering pure vegetarian food items to brahmanized Hindu Gods, revolted against their God itself. The poojari’s life and pooja was ultimately to make money to lead the life without doing any productive work either in the family or at community level. A barber had no right to enter the temple along with Dalits. Ages together, Poojaris habituated to live as parasites and justify this sort of life as holy and worthy by their so-called spiritual fascism.

God for them is free a food and  good life provider. This deception was understood by this atheist barbar quite early in his life. The barbers of that area in those days were designating themselves as Nayi Brahmins to get some respect but that respect was never to be given by brahmins. They treated them as spiritual and social slaves meant to shave their body on a daily basis for priests and their women who became widows so that they must have to lose their beauty, dignity and human life and live like a brahmin female slave within the four walls of the house.

Brahminism of Andhra was brutal. Brahmin reformers like Gurijada Apparao and Kandukuri Veereshalinam Panthulu initiated some reform for better life of their own brahmin women but a barber’s life remained unreformed and unupgraded. Leaders, writers and thinkers were not supposed to come from that community even in the freedom movement. They were supposed to shave the leaders’ heads and give them beautiful and clean shape for their elegant public appearance. That was considered to be their contribution to nationalism, without any respect and livelihood.

If any barber aspired for the role of a leader, he would be snubbed and pushed back into his shaving job. The Indian freedom struggle was not anti-caste or struggle for change of the millennial occupational stagnation and indignity of labour. Nobody had a right to change their oppressive caste occupation. The lower caste occupations – in fact all productive occupations – were treated as undignified, unequal to the most unproductive occupation like pooja and purohityam. No brahmin god was pro-production and the Shudra productive god images were pushed into what they cunningly called the ‘little tradition’ by the brahmin intellectuals of the freedom movement. The communist intellectuals having come from the same cultural roots did not think of changing it, rather they reinforced it with loud silence.

Usaa Barber joined the radical left movement once it began. He was in jail during the emergency. Later worked in the Tribal areas to conduct an armed struggle. In plain areas he mobilised farmers and labour for irrigation and drinking water resources. He contested elections and challenged the so-called conservative communists of CPI in Nalgonda district of Telangana. Worked with me to expand the notion of human rights to starving masses, caste atrocities and women’s rights in the 1980s. He was a tireless mass lover and lived with them. He got expelled from his party for his stand on Ambedkar and anti-casteism.

Usaa compared and understood the civilized barbarism with brahmanised radical left and started writing and speaking against their loud-silence on caste culture in Telugu quite eloquently. All communist intellectuals were upset, angry with him. If only he was to come out of a radical Maoist party he would have been, perhaps, attacked physically as there was a bad culture of accusing every dissenter as a police agent. But he was from moderate Tarimela Nagireddy (a Shudra Reddy) and Devulapally Venkateswar Rao (a Brahmin) group. Democratic centralism destroyed the sense of democratic dissent in the communist structures of India. That was most unmarxist culture but well developed in those structures. Once brahminism operates as democratic centralism it uses only Vishnuchakra to resolve differences.

Ussa was the first full-time worker rebellion in Telugu region and oppressive caste leader who, within no time, was identified as leader, writer, thinker, poet and song composer, of course, singer. Singing in the revolution was always left to Dalits/Shudras, as Gaddar and many others did all their life without having a stature of leaders. Though they were popular among the masses, they were never given a leader’s stature.

This boy started questioning the very existence of their God in the temples. Afterwards this man challenged Brahminism in communism. This was what the first barber Upali did by joining Gauthama Buddha’s system as his close confident during 6th Century BCE. After that, in the known history, only Usaa Barber did that at a very young age. He never turned back.

He was in a haste to fight the exploitation and oppressive system, hence joined the most militant Naxalite (Moist) movement to kill the enemies as soon as possible with a barrel of gun. He mobilized the poor Dalits and Shudra (Other Backward Class) labouring masses to rebel against landlords and oppressors. Meanwhile in 1975 the emergency came in. He was arrested and kept in Rajahmundry jail for two years.

Then he went into a deep tribal area called Kondamodulu and organised tribals to fight for their lands with bows and arrows. He was a tribal among tribals eating everything from root to raisin and rat to rabbit. After that he shifted to Nalgonda to organise farmers to fight for irrigational and drinking water and became a famous peasant leader. He contested from Motkuru constituency in 1984 against a Communist Party of India landlord leader and lost the election. He was not sparing anybody.

He realised that even in the revolutionary movement brahminism was playing a key role. There was a Brahmin (pure vegetarian) leader called Devulapally Venkateswar Rao (DVR) who was claiming all theoretical authority on Marx, Lenin and Mao as if they were like Vedavyasa, who wrote Mahabharat, Kautilya, who wrote most dangerous Brahmin-State craft boo – Arthashastra and Manu who wrote Manudharmashastra that was burnt by Ambedkar. Their’s was a culture of read and recite among their families hence they would pick up quotations from Marx, Lenin and Mao’s writings and write funny documents and ask the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi cadre to apply to them to the concrete conditions of India’s class system, as if there was no caste in India of their mind. What an understanding of concrete conditions of India!

Usaa sensed DVR’s brahminism in the revolutionary movement. DVR was treating a much better revolutionary leader, Tarimela Nagireddy, who is a Shudra and the author of a famous economic theory book ‘India Mortgaged’ as an unworthy leader. Usaa stood by Nagireddy to finish DVR’s revolutionary Brahminism. But Nagireddy never saw brahminism in communism and died unsuccessful.

Usaa was married to a Brahmin woman within the party. The DVR’s camp tried to set his wife (Padma) against him. But he could take her with him. She finally became a State Government officer with a Mangali (barber) caste certificate. He was the first man to successfully navigate an extreme inter-caste married life between a barber and a brahmin by converting Padma into his caste and she became the bread winner to support his full-time socio-political work and educated their only daughter Hima Bindu. Both of them lived all along with an unfriendly kitchen at home.

The caste-blind communist brahminism did not realise a barber whose home preferred food was/is mostly meat and fish across the Telugu society and country and that was/is their pride food culture. Padma comes from a family that could not even tolerate the smell of meat and fish. Her family, caste, even her ‘out eating’ system was always confined to pure vegetarianism as their God was believed to be a vegetarian at home and also in the brahmin society. All Shudra gods are considered to be meatarians. Usaa’s childhood food was his god’s food who he rejected even that gods too in later life and turned to Buddha.

Her food culture was not a choice based but was a caste trained food culture. Communists should have understood caste is in the blood and class is on the body. Both of them had to struggle a great deal to navigate with two opposite food and work cultures as wife and husband. Like Gandhi, DVR also thought that all Indians should become vegetarian only to die after his communism comes to go to Hindu swarga. But they managed with great difficulty to be under one roof till their death as Padma died in 2015 in his lap. Thereafter, Usaa became a Buddhist and carried his work.

In the process of fight against DVR’s so-called Braminic-Marxist theory, Usaa mastered Marxist-Leninst theory quite seriously. Later he developed differences with Nagireddy group leaders on understanding Mahatma Phule and Ambedkar and integrating it into caste-class revolutionary movement, in the context of Karemchedu Dalit massacre in 1985.

Though the main leaders in Telugu states were Shudras (Kammas and Reddys), their intellectual rigour was very weak and could never perceive the role of Brahminism in the communism. That was a green snake in the green grass. A barber who knows how to identify snake of any colour anywhere and kill it, he located this green snake in the green grass. None of the leaders who hailed from Shudra upper caste background studied the history of Hinduism and Buddhism as rival schools to the Brahminism. And, none of them read what Ambedkar wrote on Indian history.

In the life of the Indian communist movement only Brahmins wrote theory who never had an agrarian or artisanal productive mind. And, they only became intellectual leaders — a tragedy at that. This was a paradox. Dange, Ranadive, Charu Mazumdar, EMS Namboodripad, DVR, Vinod Mishra and so on became leaders and dreamt of becoming like Lenin or Mao. Hence Marxism became Vedamantra but not scientific theory that could adopt to caste cultural conditions. Usaa challenged that communist brahmin heritage. No Kamma, Reddy, Jat, Yadav, Nair, Patel, Maratha could become well-known theoretician from the communist ranks. This barber changed that hallow Shudra house into an intellectual Saloon.

No Shudra leader could acquire an intellectual and philosophical stature even from the communist school exactly on the lines that happened in the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) school. Usaa even with his limited English could perceive this. The RSS Brahmin intellectuals construct a consent system among the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi activists about the Hindu spiritual system, which is completely under the grip of Brahmins as priests, philosophers as part of necessary parampara. Productive Shudras have to live as spiritual slaves.

The communist Brahmin intellectuals never allow a serious discourse on Hindu spiritual system quite consciously as that would overthrow their hegemony in the communist structures, under the rubric that they believe in atheism not in religion. They refused to realise that no Shudra could become a priest in a temple like Tirupati or Jagannath, while being treated as Hindu. Usaa has opened this shell of silence in the communist ranks. The bogus theory of base structure and superstructure are separate guarded the Hindu brahminical system in the communist parties. Usaa told them that ‘these two structures are interdependent and you are operating on hypocritical humanism’.

He was expelled from the Nagireddy group, few others along with me in 1986 on the same question of caste and Ambedkarism. He worked with me in human rights protection and feeding the poor people dying of drought conditions in Mahabubnagar district. In 1987, I wrote a small book ‘Annihilation of Caste – A Marxist Approach’ in Telugu he helped in that project. The communist brahmins mainly tried to make State as the agent of attack leaving the oppression that the Dalits/Tribals/Shudra faced related to caste atrocities as a myth. Caste according to them was/is a myth; class was/is material reality. They decided to see only the human body not the soul.

This theory came from Bengali and Marathi brahmin intellectuals into the communist revolution exactly on the line as it came into the RSS from Maharashtra Brahmins. This barber realised that this deceptive ideological framework certainly does not allow even social reform, leave alone revolution.

The Shudra/Dalits who worked in leftist structures believed as Marxism was given divine truth, as such brahmin nationalism is God-given truth in RSS. In both mainstream communist parties also Shudra/Dalits could not become intellectual leaders as they could not in RSS till today. In the CPM’s Politburo, there is not a single Dalit/Adivasi member even now. This is where caste disease destroyed human creativity.

To sustain such brahmin intellectual hegemony many wings — literary, cultural, student and so on were started in communist parties. The Brahmin youth were trained to read and write. Others were made to do the mass work, as if it was like tilling land again in the revolution, which no brahmin does. And they became poojaris of Marxism. Usaa became an all-rounder in this struggle. He became a poojari of his own gods –Phule and Ambedkar, and started shavings the head of brahminism, rather clean.

They abused him as renegade, reactionary and lackey of imperialism. Usaa said ‘my foot — get lost’. His tongue and pen became sharper and shaper. He travelled into the nook and corner of two Telugu states prepared youth for a leaderless #Black Lives Matter# like leaderless #Shudra/Dalit Lives Matters# movement any time in future.

Usaa Barber a college drop-out leaving after his II year B.Sc perceived this quite well. So far no communist leader in Bengal or Kerala or Maharashtra did that. We do not even know even a single Shudra/Dalit intellectual leader from these two states even though the communists ruled them for decades.

In the literary and cultural field in Telugu states P.Varavara Rao led that strategy of Brahmin control. In organizations, a Brahmin is given the hold to control the written word. Even if others–Shudras/Dalits/Adivasis come into that field marginalizing their written word or making it invisible has been a historical strategy. Varavara Rao with his friends did that quite consistently.

Since the communist movement gives more weightage to written word–the theory–they made Marx as a Brahmin in India and others could never counter it with a strong autonomous strategy of written word. Usaa hence started his own journal, a small youtube studio in his house at the time of his sudden death. Corona took him away from his busy work. However, he made it difficult for the communists to continue their long-time caste-blind approach and continue the brahminism in future–a life that never rested till he breathed his last.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, a long-time associate of Usaa Barber, Political Theorist and Author

https://countercurrents-org.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/countercurrents.org/2020/08/usaa-the-greatest-revolutionary-barber-after-upali-died-of-covid-19/?amp_js_v=a2&amp_gsa=1&amp&usqp=mq331AQHKAFQArABIA%3D%3D#aoh=15965280962451&csi=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fcountercurrents.org%2F2020%2F08%2Fusaa-the-greatest-revolutionary-barber-after-upali-died-of-covid-19%2F

The new education policy’s proposal to reduce the importance of English in schools will hinder progress.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) lived in India just for four years, from 1834 to 1838. Yet he left unerasable footprints on Indian soil. During his time in India, he decided to introduce English into the education of Indians by deploying government resources in schools and colleges. He argued that Sanskrit and Persian, which were the medium of instruction under the East India Company before the British Crown took over the Indian administration, should be done away with from schools.

Today, many English-educated Indians deride Macaulay, perhaps for giving that language to them and what they also call the ‘un-Indian’ English culture. Only very few who are also English-educated admire him occasionally. Those who criticise Macaulay come from all schools of thought: extreme right, extreme left and centrist liberals.

But vast numbers of Indians who are outside the English-speaking milieu – food producers, such as the Shudra, Dalits and Adivasis, who work in the fields – do not think about Macaulay. For them, their local languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarathi or tribal languages and so on – are the medium of instruction in schools and colleges. The English language, with its global accessibility, is too far away from them. Yet, Macaulay also has admirers among Dalits and OBCs who feel that English is a language of liberation and have taken to it as a way of progressing in life and in their careers.

Now, with the new National Education Policy somewhat demoting the status of English by giving a priority to Indian languages for the first few years of school education, the issue becomes pertinent. Are Macaulay and his ideas irrelevant and un-Indian? Is Macaulay’s presence fine in private English medium schools but not good for government-run schools, where the poor children study?

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Quite consciously, from the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, the so-called ‘anti-national Macaulay’ English education has been confined to expensive private schools, where only very rich Dwijas could afford to educate their children. Even rich Shudra landed gentry did not send their children to good English medium schools. Many Dwijas, in fact, preferred to send their children to Christian missionary schools.

Both Macaulay’s detractors and admirers are able to speak and write in the English language; they were educated either in Indian English medium schools, colleges, universities or institutions like IITs and IIMs or foreign universities.

What was the state of education before Macaulay?

There was hardly any modern college that used Sanskrit and Persian as the medium of education until 1834. Anyway, education in Sanskrit and Persian was meant for the Hindu Dwijas (Brahmin, Bania, Ksatriya, Kayastha and Khatris) and Muslim feudal lords, who perhaps were either Pathans or Arabs or Dwijas who converted.

Unlike the Christians, Muslims never allowed the non-Muslim Shudras and Dalits into their schools. Some Dwijas – mainly Brahmins – managed the system of education in Persian, in collaboration with rich Muslims. But that did not help them with employment, even when it was the official language, because the bureaucracy and legal systems were dominated by Brahmins.

School education in these languages was not available to Shudras, Dalits and Adivasis of India, who were the main food producers then, as they are now.

Actually the earliest missionary teaching of the English language to Dwija children was started in 1817, as a private affair, by William Carey (1761-1834) in association with Rajarammohan Roy in Culcutta. He came to India in 1793 and died here in 1834, the year in which Macaulay arrived. Carey established the Serampore College in 1818, the region’s first degree college in the English language. Which caste and class of youth were able to access this college? Would it have been Bengali Shudras and Namashudras? No way.

Also Read: Language Policy: Education in English Must Not Be the Prerogative of Only the Elites

What Macaulay proposed to the British administration was to make English part of the state education policy to replace Sanskrit and Persian. While Indian Muslim feudal lords refused to send their children to English medium schools at the cost of their Persian and Urdu education, the Brahmins of Bengal and Kerala had no such inhibitions. They were among the earliest to do so, setting aside Sanskrit education.

Dwija Hindus wanted to become pleaders, officials and clerks in the government offices as ‘middlemen’ (not many women were allowed to hold these positions then) between the British colonial rulers and the Indian Shudra-Atishudra masses.

The term Shudra-Atishudra was first used by Mahatma Jotirao Phule, the first Shudra person to be educated in the English language. In the Bengal region, whether any Shudra or Namashudra was allowed to go to school – leave alone one with English as the medium – is not known. In Maharastra, where Phule and Dr B.R. Ambedkar came from Marathi and English education, which was accessible to some Shudra and Dalit social forces in subsequent years. But in Bengal, it still remains a Bhadralok preserve. From Rajarammohan Roy to Jyothi Basu to Mamata Banerjee, English and thus power, are in their hands only.

Busts of Mahatma and Jyotiba Phule.

Why is Macaulay important?

Why is Macaulay dear to the Shudras, Dalits and Adivasis now? The Indian state and civil society have to move towards a mode of education that imparts global and Indian knowledge – even within the framework of competing nationalisms – to all children in the English language.

It is also important to remember that the ideological attack on Macaulay did not lead to a total divorce from the English language. Among the ruling classes, whatever is their ideological and political position, their children are educated in English medium schools.

But quite consciously, this language has been kept away from the rural agrarian, productive masses. This has led to the creation of two nations—English-speaking India and mother tongue-speaking Bharat. A small number of English-educated Indians, in this globalised world, have taken the lead in every sphere of life. The rural masses cannot catch up with the globalised, English-educated Indian ruling and business classes unless they too acquire that language, right from their time in school.

From tribal areas to our metropolitan urban centres, Indian school and college education has to be in one common language, with the same content and course levels. Unless all children do not read and write one national and international language – English – the creation of a national, advanced intellectual discourse will not be possible. Even the production of new scientific knowledge is linked to a globally communicable language. Teaching children science in their mother tongue is not going to help.

‘Will alienate people from Indian culture’

The common argument that English medium education will alienate people from Indian culture has proved to be deceptive propaganda. The Shudras, Dalits and Adivasis have had a very bad experience with the ‘divine distancing’ of Sanskrit, which was the ‘national language’ in ancient and medieval times, from their lives. The agrarian masses have been deceived on the issue of language for quite a long time. Now these same forces are trying to deceive these productive masses by keeping their children away from English, by labelling it Macaulay’s “colonial conspiracy”.

Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has broken the myth that Macaulay’s English is anti-national or un-Indian. He has decided to introduce English as the medium of instruction in all government schools. When the same Macaulayputras tried to oppose it, the rural productive masses responded by saying, “You hypocrites, send your children to Sanskrit medium schools, but our children need to study in English.”

The diabolical nature of Hindutva is all around us. A time has come to abolish the two-language nation – one English speaking and the other in their mother tongue – and see that all Indians speak and write only in English. Regional languages can be used for local purposes. Macaulay and his ideas have to be re-evaluated in light of the modern world.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author.

https://m.thewire.in/article/education/macaulay-english-medium-new-education-policy