Decolonizing the English Classroom: Exorcising the Bogey of Macaulay.

Dr K M Sherrif Reader, Dept. of Studies in English Kannur University Decolonizing the English Classroom is a notion which has come up at a time when decolonization of economies and political dispensations have come to acquire more siginificance than decolonization of the mind, which is what decolonizing classrooms is all about. This paper attempts to problematize the issue by briefly discussing some of the whys and hows of the process. First,the assumption that an English classroom is essentially colonial unless proven otherwise. As a language which colonialism imposed on Indian societies, this is a natural response to hegemony of English in our curriculum. The neo-colonial hegemony of the USA in world politics has hardened the attitudes of anti-colonial intellectuals towards the language, although the Nehruvian argument of window to the world is sometimes grudgingly accepted. Ngugi Wa Thiongo (4-33) has pointed out that a language is not merely a means of communication, but a carrier of culture. In a different context, Lawrence Venuti (17-29). discusses the asymmetrical relationship between hegemonic and marginalized cultures, in which the former is always the giver and the latter the taker. There are a number of questions which are required to be asked here. Is a language or a culture a monolith so that one can say unambiguously that the English language carries the colonial culture? Are there colonial attitudes which are relatively independent of the use of any particular language and which deserve more immediate attention than those associated with the use of the English language? Is the English classroom (by English classroom, I mean a classroom in which either the English language or English Studies is taught) in Kerala today colonial in its various aspects, curriculum, pedagogy and the relative roles of teachers and students? If it is, what are some of the ways in which it can be decolonized? Further, other questions like how applicable, the paradigms for decolonizing the mind offered by self-assumed Western specialists in the subject are, or to put it bluntly, whether they can be trusted at all needs to be asked. First, what culture, to use Ngugi Wa Thiongos terminology, does the English Language carry? For us who have grown up on a staple of nationalist rhetoric and have had nightmares of Macaulay, as children have had of bogeys, the answer is at the tip of our tongues: British colonial culture. Yes, the language served as an instrument of colonial subjugation after Macaulay, as it did in other parts of the world which came under British colonial rule. It was offered to the natives as a charm that conferred magical powers. The indigenous languages were condemned as trivial and worthless in comparison to English, a single shelf of books in English being considered worth more

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than everything that was written in all Oriental languages put together. When English literature was introduced in Indian colleges and universities, the canonized texts were constructed not only as models for the glory of English literature, but also as statements of the superiority of British culture legitimizing British rule in India. The valorization of Shakespeare was the most obvious instance of this assertion of cultural superiority. Shakespeare was taught, till recently, as a separate paper in all post-graduate courses. But does the English language or English literature necessarily carry the colonial culture? Let us see. More than six centuries ago, in 1381 an event of cataclysmic proportions shook English society: a peasants revolt which nearly pulled King Richard II down from his throne. One of the motivating forces in the revolt was a poor Lollard priest named John Ball whose sermons fired the rebels imagination. Here is an extract from one of his sermons preached in 1377: Why are those whom we call lords, masters over us? How have they deserved it? By what right do they keep us enslaved? We are all descended from our first parents, Adam and Eve; how then can they say that they are better than us... At the beginning we were all created equal. If God willed that there should be serfs, he would have said so at the beginning of the world. We are formed in Christ's likeness, and they treat us like animals... They are dressed in velvet and furs, while we wear only cloth. They have wine, and spices and good bread, while we have rye bread and water. They have fine houses and manors, and we have to brave the wind and rain as we toil in the fields. It is by the sweat of our brows that they maintain their high state. We are called serfs, and we are beaten if we do not perform our task... Let us go to see King Richard. He is young, and we will show him our miserable slavery, we will tell him it must be changed, or else we will provide the remedy ourselves. When the King sees us, either he will listen to us, or we will help ourselves. When we are ready to march on London I will send you a secret message. The message is "Now is the time. Stand together in God's name." (John Simkin). In another, undated, sermon which gave the English language one of the most egalitarian of slogans Ball said: "When Adam dalf, and Eve span, who was thanne a gentilman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and that servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord" Ball ended his sermon by recommending "uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the great lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in future." (Dobson, 373). More than five centuries after the Peasants Revolt in England, peasants in a faraway corner of the world rebelled against the Lord and the State. They were fired by the same egalitarian ideals of John Ball, but mediated by another religion: Islam. Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden were part of the cosmology of the Mappila peasants of Malabar. When they raided the Nilambur Kovilakam, they are almost certain to have asked John Balls question to themselves: When Adam delved and Eve Span/Who was then the Gentleman? Ali Muslariar was the Mappila Insurgents John Ball.

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Unfortunately none of his sermons have been preserved for posterity. So we have no way to know if they invoked the myth of the Garden of Eden. But reason tells us that they would have. I V sasis film 1921 has been more than a little unjust to him in presenting him as a thoroughbred Gandhian. Neither Ali Muslaiar nor his lieutenant Varikkunnath Kunhammed Haji knew any English. Even if they had had access to the English language, it is doubtful whether they would have come across John Ball and his sermons in any history of the England they might have chanced to read. For them and their followers English was the language of E F Thomas the Malabar District Collector, notorious for his repressive measures, and therefore to be hated and opposed with all their might. The Mappila Muslims are still coming out of their bitter animosity to English as the carrier of colonial culture. William Langland, whom English literary history has marginalized for the last six centuries, was a contemporary of both John Ball and Geoffrey Chaucer. While Chaucers Canterbury Tales provides the much clichd portrait gallery of idyllic England, Langlands Piers Plowman gives a heart-rending picture of the other England: the England of the Serfs and Cottars, the England of the impoverished peasantry. It is easy to see the line of descent in the canon of English literature from Chaucer to Rudyard Kipling through Dryden and Tennyson. Langland who is outside this canon perhaps requires more attention from us. Perhaps a Comparative Literature Course with a decolonizing agenda can take up a project that links Piers Plowman with Changampuzhas Vazhakkula. S K Pottekkatt records a memorable experience he had in post-war London. As he was out on a walk in the city an old beggar woman suddenly extended her hand at him and cried: Gimme some coppers! (599) This was in the metropolis of the empire in which the sun never set. The beggar womans Cockney English cannot be any more colonial than Pottekkatts Kozhikkodan Malayalam. Living in a univocal world, we are more wary than ever of anything in the the English language or American literature that smacks of neo-colonialism. Our suspicions can be trained, with some justice, even on Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, two early proponents of the American Dream (justified because the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 precedes both ) It is also possible to discuss Mark Twains highly dubious attitude towards slavery. And, of course, business management bestsellers and personality development handbooks are on the firing line. It is rightly argued that as long as Uncle Sam with precision bombers in one hand and bottles of soft drinks in the other breathes down your neck you can never stop worrying and start living. But not all of Uncle Sams children have wallowed in the celebrated American way of life. Many of them were, in fact at his throat. They boldly exposed the CIA machinations all over the world. During the Vietnam War they collected blood not for the American army, but for the Viet Cong. Christopher Bones monumental work The Disinherited Children: A Study of the New Left and Generation Gap records the history of a whole generation of American youth who rebelled against American neo-colonialism. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki the atom bomb was the trump card of American neo-colonialism. But the beat poet Allen Ginsberg told the American establishment categorically: Go fuck yourself with your atom

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bomb! It is a sobering question in our decolonizing discourses why no Indian poet asked the Indian nuclear establishment to do the same after Pokhran II. Many more instances like the above can be cited. Condemning the English language un-problematically as the carrier of colonial culture will amount to insulting the memory of the marginalized sections of English speaking societies across the ages. The task of the English teacher is to make that vital distinction between John Ball and Macaulay, between Chaucer and Langland, between Shelley and Tennyson, between J R K Rowling, one of the best representatives of the neo-colonial literary face of English and Allan Sillitoe, the proletarian fictionist, whose novels portray the working class of urban England who have had no stake in British imperialism. It is through a drastic revision of the syllabus inherited from the colonial educational system that should constitute the most serious attempt to decolonize the English classroom. In fact what should happen is a close monitoring and emulation of attempts to rewrite the canon in English speaking cultures, as is certainly happening in the US and Canada in the context of the reassertion of writing by blacks, first nations and other marginalized communities. Such a rewriting of the canon will also rehabilitate a poet like Eugene Pottier, author of Internationale, the anthem of the working class the world over, in any course on European poetry. The first stanza of the English translation of Internationale reads: Arise ye starvelings [or workers] from your slumbers Arise ye criminals of want For reason in revolt now thunders and at last ends the age of cant. Now away with all your superstitions Servile masses arise, arise! We'll change forthwith [or henceforth] the old conditions And spurn the dust to win the prize. There are colonial attitudes which are manifest in the most unexpected contexts and which originate from the most unexpected sources and which have nothing to do with either the use of the English language or an English studies curriculum. P Kunhiraman Nair the canonized Malayalam poet who, among other things, has been described as the Mahabali of Words, in his controversial autobiography Kaviyude Kaalppaadukal (The Poets Footprints) laments the indifference of the average Malayalee towards Kathakali. He is however delighted by the Euro-American patronage of the performing art: The dumb charade (which the people who invented it gave a decent burial to) fascinated the White Man, who found it a performing art of world standards. Kathakali clung to the White Mans support. And he did not let it down. It was recognized as the most intricate performing art in the world.(122) This extract from the autobiography of a poet whose poetry has been used to power a strident assertion of Malayalee nationalism should certainly persuade us to rethink various issues related to colonialism and cultural nationalism. Perhaps the Malayalam classroom is as much in need of decolonizing as the English classroom. Other issues like the agenda of early Orientalism and the collaboration between the colonial administration and the Savarna elite, though certainly relevant in this context, are beyond the scope of this paper.

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Another instance of prevailing colonial attitude in our culture is the uncritical acceptance and valorization of Western theoretical formulations. In fact many of our literary theoreticians and professional readers of literature are identified as this or that theorists or philosophers disciples. It is thus possible to identify a whole generation of Barthists, Derridans or Foucoldians in Malayalam literature. There is also a long tradition in Malayalee culture of investigative literary journalism which seeks to identify the original Western texts from which texts in Malayalam have borrowed, plagiarized or lifted wholesale. M Krishnan Nair, the late literary columnist was, undoubtedly, the doyen of such literary detectives. Many of these literary detectives are not academics, and only a few of them have anything to do with the teaching of the English language or English Studies. The notion that the whole of modern Malayalam literature is cloned from Western sources is a colonial notion which has to be combated both in the classroom and outside by a determined set of students, teachers and academics with the aid of Comparative Literature Studies. Perhaps the most obvious instance of colonialism at play is the manner in which the English language is taught in the classroom and the uncritical acceptance of the paradigms of the discipline called English Language Teaching (ELT). In fact the very name English Language Teaching is problematic. Do we have a discipline called MLT, or Malayalam Language Teaching? Even the most fervent Malayalee nationalist would scoff at the idea. Learning English cannot be, on the average, more or less complicated than the learning of any other language. Entering the world of the English language is equated to Alices entering Wonderland in Lewis Carols famous novel. The effect is heightened by the hype surrounding the learning of English and the halo around the heads of certain ELT expects. It is this hype and halo that makes us accept notions like fluency techniques floated by smooth-talking commercial ELT operators uncritically.1 Practical experience suggests that the vendors in the streets and parks of UAE know more things about learning English than all the ELT experts put together. In fact it is the conscious trivialization of the whole process of learning of the English language, the cultivation of the attitude that it is childs play to learn English, any language for that matter, that constitutes the most obvious method of decolonizing English in the classroom. After the work of Chomsky and other post-structural linguists, this attitude is certainly grounded in sound theory. It is the kind of attitude that makes people compose doggerels like the following: Once I went to Ponnani There I met a Kalyani Sitting on an athaani Eating some biriyani. Note that the doggerel faithfully follows end-rhyme, the staple of English poetry. On the other hand the suggestions of decolonizing English through provincializing it or creolizing it floated by post-colonial theorists like Ashcroft has a number of pitfalls. For one this approach, as has already been indicated, disregards the
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Kev Nairs book on Spoken English aggressively marketed with expensive advertisement campaigns has sold thousands of copies in Kerala.

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subaltern assaults that have occurred on the language in English speaking cultures. For another, as pointed out by Ngugi Wa Thiongo, however much English (or any other European language ) is creolized, it is still recognized as English. As Ngugi has pointed out, it is more profitable to work in ones mother tongue and use English or other European languages only when necessary. Provincializing English or another European language ironically perpetuates the old colonial hierarchies. The Babus should be satisfied with Indian English for all practical purposes. But the whiz kids better get into the best training centre for IELTS or TOUFEL if they want to go places. The ultimate way to decolonize the learning of English in the classroom is to get rid of the awe and veneration in which most of us hold the language and its literature. English is a language like any other and can be learned like any other. It does not require any special skill other than the skills that are required to learn any language. The vendors in the plazas and parks of UAE, or the seamen in the Merchant Navy can set all doubts on this score at rest. Like the famous character in the Malayalam film Pazhassi Raja let us look the Americans, the British, the Australians and the Canadians in their faces and say: Sayppe, Sayppe, Assalaamu Alaikkum! (White man, peace be upon you!) Reference Bone, Christopher. The Disinherited Children: A Study of the New Left and Generation Gap. New York: Schenkman, 1977. Dobson, R B. The Peasants revolt of 1381. Bath: Pitman,1970. Kunhiraman Nair, P. Kaviyude Kalppadukal. Kottayam: DC Books, 2005. P.122. Pottekkatt, S K. Sanchara Sahityam. Vol.I. Kottayam: DC Books, 2003. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translators Invisibility. London: Routledge, 1995. Wa Thiongo, Ngugi. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1986. John Ball The Learning Curve. 20 Jan. 2002 . <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ YALDballJ2,html>