Some of our children who are lucky enough to be born in families who can afford to spend three to four times more on their primary school bill than what an average lower middle class family makes in an entire month were cautioned last week by a certain enterprise to not use Punjabi within the premises of their school. Because, somehow, in all their wisdom, they suddenly thought that speaking in a vernacular tongue might make their students a bit less cultured and, God forbid, slightly more vulgar.
Pathetic that it was, the story obviously jolted us. How could they do such a thing and be so derogatory against the language of our fathers, we all asked. Our overactive social media rose with a kneejerk, and many a proverbial storm in a teacup were witnessed. We lamented the decision, demanded an apology, shared timeless poetry of Bullay Shah to prove our love for the language, and even made some dirty jokes in Punjabi, befittingly directed against this outrageously foul decree.
But as always it is with such cases, business went on as usual, because there was nothing earthshattering in this story after all. If anything it was a reflection of our own attitudes towards our regional languages. Let there be no doubt that while the administration of the school in question is as wrong and misguided as it is possible to be, the burden of blame is shared by all of us.
Our neglect of our culture, history and heritage, and our desire to change the ‘medium’ of our thoughts and actions have finally brought us to this point where our elite, and other who want to join this league, are happily paying such businesses huge amounts of their hard-earned money to take our future away from our past. The very past that, at least in theory, contains the essence of our identity.
So we can protest all we want, but it is a fact that the forces that influence the education market will always shape their policies to meet the demands of the consumers. Make no mistake, this has happened because we have let it happen. Consider for a moment our fascination with the thing called ‘English medium education’, and you will realise the magnitude of this problem. As a nation, almost all of us have come to believe that schools that use a foreign language to instruct locals are somehow imparting the right kind of education. And if this is not enough, we are also trying to replicate the same behaviour in our homes as well.
A considerable number of families believe that fluency in English is more important than knowing the regional languages. We all have seen that mothers these days, especially the one who attended college or university at some point and later became housewives, no longer pass on their respective mother tongues to their children. Instead they feed them English, as much as they themselves know.
It is unfortunate that our middle class is collectively shying away from Punjabi, and other regional languages. These languages were already threatened by Urdu in the urbanised family unit, which is now increasingly adopting English as a yardstick to measure their false sense of accomplishment with. And all of this naturally suits the English medium mafia that is minting money by exploiting this collective inferiority complex. As long as we are willing to pay them to make our children something that we are not, incidents like this will keep on happening.
No one should know it more than us that languages define identity, and when they are mocked in a way this school tried to mock Punjabi they trigger retaliation. We are living in a time where our quest to resonate with the globalised world is erasing the outlines of who we really are. And this is not a good idea. We need to stop breeding a hybrid generation that won’t be able to own any language as its own and suffer as a result from an identity crisis that will have no remedy.
We must also realise that English at its best cannot be more than a tool of communication for us, but Punjabi, as well as other vernacular languages, is a storehouse of our collective wisdom. It contains the soul of our idiom and defines the limits of our hopes and dreams and imagination. Along with the rest of the beautiful languages that are spoken by the people of Pakistan, Punjabi truly encapsulates what it means to hail from this part of the world. Nothing about it should ever embarrass us. Ever.
The market might still force you to send your children to these fancy schools, and send them you must because you live in a harsh world, but our homes are ours. Let’s run them with some confidence and sense of propriety for our identity.
The writer is a graduate of LUMS and currently serves as an MPA of Punjab. She tweets at @hinaparvezbutt