Reducing this complex relationship between multilingualism and education to a simple three-language formula is unrealistic and arbitrary, like the Procrustean bed, forcing languages into rigid categories. First of a two-part series.
India’s approach to languages in education has been reactive rather than proactive. Conflicting linguistic identities and aspirations in the post-colonial multilingual society led to socio-political compromises taking precedence over pedagogical prudence.
Full coverage: The Great Language Divide
This became quite evident in the ambivalence toward English in the deliberations in our Constituent Assembly. The language of the colonisers was expected to go with the British rule. However, the push and pull among the multiple native languages led to the ad hoc solution of English as an official language for 15 years along with Hindi (The time limitation on English had to go due to protests in South India) and a conspicuous absence of any Constitutional provision for national language. The initial declaration of 14 languages as “official” languages in the VIIIth Schedule was equally tentative and arbitrary. The role of English in education was reinforced since the dual school system could not be abolished.
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Unfortunately, many languages were considered our problems rather than resources. Amid conflicting identities and aspirations of the Indian languages, English was seen as a neutral ‘third party’ language. The tentativeness of the national stand on languages in post-independent India has led to a vicious cycle of language conflicts and power games enshrining English as the most powerful language of India and pushing the major Indian regional languages, including Hindi, to the second tier of the hierarchy and the tribal and minority languages to the bottom.
Origin and evolution of three-language formula
The three-language formula (TLF) was mooted by the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE) in 1956 to ensure some uniformity with respect to languages in school curricula across the country.
The CABE suggested mother tongue (MT) or regional language (RL) (or a composite of MT, RL and classical language Sanskrit) as the first language (L1) to be taught. There were alternative choices for the second (L2) and third language (L3) slots from English, Modern European Languages, Hindi (in non-Hindi areas), and Modern Indian Languages. The Chief Ministers’ Conference in 1961 simplified the 1956 TLF and proposed RL or MT (when the latter is not the RL) as L1, Hindi or any other Indian language in non-Hindi areas as L2, and English or any other modern European Language as L3.
The state governments chose RL as the first language to be taught, ignoring the MTs of tribal and other linguistic minorities. The choice of RL as L1 and the medium of instruction (MoI) was convenient; the choice of MT as L1 for the tribal and linguistic minority children would have necessitated four languages to be taught - MT, RL, Hindi and English. Further, the TLF was not applied in the Private English Medium (EM) schools. Between 1964 and 1966 the formula continued to be modified by different bodies of the Ministry of Education seeking to deal with growing resistance to Hindi and the anomalies due to the dual school system. The 1964 modification suggested MT or RL as L1, Hindi or English as L2 and one MIL or a foreign language (not covered as L1 and L2) as L3.
Role of mother tongue as medium of instruction
The education commissions since 1964 stressed the role of MT as the medium of instruction (MoI). The 2005 National Curriculum Framework (NCF) emphasised the role of MT as the MoI in school education while seeking to operate within the broad TLF. However, the diverse forms of education across the country, continuation of the dual school system and liberty of the states to interpret and implement the national recommendations led to the failure of the TLF in achieving a common language in education policy for the whole country.
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NEP 2020 was the first policy with a clear emphasis on India’s multilingualism and education in MT as the MoI up to Grade 5 (preferably Grade 8 and beyond). NEP 2020 also remained committed to the TLF. The National Curriculum Framework 2023 elaborated on the NEP2020 and suggested a roadmap for education from the MT (or the most familiar language) as the language of first literacy (R1) to three languages and multilingualism. The NCF2023 suggested literacy development in two other languages, R2 and R3, in the Preparatory stage (8-11 years) and the Middle stage (11-14 years), respectively, targeting the development of proficiency in three languages by Grade 10. The NCF2023 makes it open for the states to decide the choices of the three languages subject to the condition that at least two of them need to be native to India.
Three-language formula as a Procrustean bed
India, with over 780 languages, ranks fourth in linguistic diversity. For the average Indian, to be or not to be multilingual is not a choice; multilingualism is a natural lifestyle we all grow up with. From early childhood, people navigate various communicative forms without concern for boundaries between languages.
While one may subjectively identify a range of communicative forms as a mother tongue or as a language, the boundaries between them remain fluid. Mother tongues and languages are ascriptions of the community of users who take a range of communicative tools to subjectively define their bhāsā. Linguists and entrepreneurs of linguistic identities may question or debate the categories, but languages do belong to their users who comfortably navigate through different zones of communication without any self-consciousness of borders and binaries of languages. The diversity of communicative patterns constitutes part of growing up in India’s multilingual reality and the choice of languages is functional, not political. Reducing this complex relationship between multilingualism and education to a simple “three-language” formula is unrealistic and arbitrary, like the Procrustean bed - forcing languages into rigid categories.
It is unfortunate that the beauty of our multilingualism is lost in the archaic structure of the TLF which has raised many problems and solved none. The limitations of the three languages are exposed with many of the non-Hindi states unwilling to accommodate Hindi even as a third language while the expected learning of another Indian language (preferably a South Indian language) never happened in Hindi (with over 56 MTs grouped under it) region.
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As the ground-level conditions change with globalisation and the undue impact of English and free-for-all interpretations and implementations, the fossilised structure of the TLF stands as a bridge to nowhere, like the Choluteca Bridge in Honduras (The hurricane Mitch in 1998 not only washed the roads to and from the bridge but also changed the course of the Choluteca River. The bridge stands without a river underneath and any road leading to or from it).
(To be continued)
