The danger to the university is all the greater in a country like ours. For here the university is apt to be increasingly subjected not merely to the pressures of a confused nationalism but also to those of caste and linguistic chauvinism. These pressures are manifested in a variety of demands, including the demand for state intervention in order to make the university bend to the strident cry of the mass man. Most of his demands are understandable as an outburst of urges that have for centuries been denied a legitimate outlet by an iniquitous social order. However, explanation is no justification. Each demand may by itself be perfectly reasonable in the abstract. And yet the extent to which it can claim satisfaction, and the manner in which it should be satisfied, will have to be determined by relating it to commonly accepted national objectives and the priorities dictated by the scarcity of human and material resources. It may happen that on such an examination many of the demands put forward by the new inheritors of power turn out to be against their own long-term interests. The demand for the regionalization of the universities is of this kind.
The core of this demand consists in the insistence that English be replaced by the regional language as the medium of instruction at all stages of university education. The argument advanced in its support is not only plausible, but to a considerable extent valid – provided it were considered in isolation from the multi-dimensional context in which the university has to function in this country. For it is true that for the majority of men, instruction and understanding are both easier in the mother tongue than in any other language. Also, if all higher education is imparted through the mother tongue, diffusion of knowledge and culture can be both rapid and wide-spread. And this is conducive to the growth of democracy, to which we are committed.
To my knowledge these are the only two sound reasons in favour of the regional language as the medium of instruction in Indian universities. And if India were Europe, there should have been no political justification for denying the regional language its 'natural' place in the higher culture of the community. But India is not a group of sovereign, unilingual nation states, each having its own political and economic order, its own army and foreign trade, and each free to go its own way, irrespective of the fate of the others unless it affects its own interests in an adverse manner. India is a multilingual federation of more than a dozen linguistic units, none strong enough to develop or even survive as a free community, except as art of a single modern polity. At the same time, each group is morbidly zealous of its own language, so much so that even all-India parties have not been able to take up an unequivocal position on issues involving linguistic passions.
In a situation like this, the regionalization of the university would mean a permanent set-back to the process of national integration. It would result in the splintering of the country's elite into so many linguistic groups, rendered immobile beyond their own region for lack of a sufficiently developed medium of communication that is equally accessible to all. No society can develop as a cultural unit unless its elite shares the same traditions and draws sustenance from the same pool of experience, In pre-British days Sanskrit provided for centuries such a common bond to it all over the country. With the founding of the universities, English took its place and led to the emergence of a new elite which still guides the destiny of the nation at least at the national level. Once English is replaced by the regional languages in the universities, it will merely be a matter of time before this elite disintegrates, leaving a vacuum in the country's life that no amount of rhetoric can fill. Standards of efficiency will inevitably go down in administration, industry, the professions and even in the universities themselves. Regionalization would make it impossible for us even to catch up with the rest of the world in the fields of knowledge and technology. It would thus condemn India permanently to the position of third-rate nation in both the economic and cultural fields.
The usual reassurance on this score lies in the hope that if Hindi is developed as a national language, in the course of time it will take the place of English without any deterioration of standards or a disintegration of the intellectual leadership of the country. This, however, is an extremely fallacious argument. For one thing, Hindi is not acceptable to nearly forty-five per cent of the Indian people – and whether one likes it or not, one must take this fact into account. Secondly, except for the statistical fact that Hindi is understood by about forty-two per cent of the population, there is nothing to recommend it on grounds of intellectual viability. This, otherwise, might have partly justified its imposition. Nor would translations serve to compensate for the deficient development of Hindi as of any other Indian language.
