Back in school, I remember being strictly told not to talk in Urdu during class, unless I was in Urdu class. This applied to talking to my friends or asking to go to the bathroom. It is important to note that everyone around me understood Urdu, so it wasn’t out of respect or inclusion for anyone who would possibly not understand the language, it was purely done because Urdu was seen as the lesser formal language. People who talked in Urdu were looked down upon and were considered not smart or modern enough. 

While there are multiple different ways in which schools in the periphery promote colonist ideas, the one that fazes me the most is how students are penalized for talking in their local languages. It was overwhelming how many South Asians in my discussion group could especially relate to this. 

Timothy Mitchell’s (1988) chapter, Enframing from Colonizing Egypt not only provided insight into dynamics between colonial relationships and how colonial power organizes but after class discussions, also became a window into the colonization and Eurocentrism in pedagogy. 

Mitchell described that the English people perceived restructured Egyptian villages such as Neghileh as neat or more civilized. It is important to notice that colonial restructuring involves a lot of cultural erasure, entailing a replacement of the colonist’s culture with the colonizer’s culture. Colonization transcends the realm of geography and enters a mental, intellectual zone where the notion that the colonizer’s culture is superior, cleaner, and more civilized is deeply instilled into the minds of the colonized. This is not just limited to the texts. I come from Pakistan and I know that when the Indian subcontinent was under the British Colonial rule, Thomas Macaulay, British historian, and politician wrote, “ … a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” (Pritchett)  

During last week’s discussions, my classmates and I talked about our personal experiences with this in addition to how our schools perpetuated colonist ideas during our schooling years. This was not just the case with my elementary/middle school in particular, but most of my friends from my city had similar experiences.

One of my friends from my city was volunteering for her school Science Fair where parents of students were invited. While demonstrating the project, the students including my friend were strictly advised not to pitch the project in Urdu no matter what. If someone asked them to explain the pitch in Urdu, they were ordered to simply repeat the pitch in English. When my friend was done with her pitch in English, a parent failed to understand it and my friend repeated it in Urdu. According to my friend, the parent seemed very apologetic. My friend did not understand why the woman had to feel apologetic about not understanding English when instead the school should have been apologetic for not being inclusive. 

This reminded me of the Bollywood film, English Vinglish, which revolves around an Indian housewife and her struggles with confidence and identity due to her inability to speak English fluently. This is the story of so many South Asian housewives who are afraid to go to their children’s parent-teacher conferences because speaking in their native language will make them seem uncivilized. 

Before I knew it, I found myself talking to my friends in English not only in school but also outside of it. When I stopped studying Urdu as a subject after the tenth grade, my Urdu became incredibly rusty and I could not form complete sentences without placing a word or two of English in them. It is so ironic because this was incredibly embarrassing for me but some of my peers took pride in their broken Urdu. I don’t completely blame the peers though, because colonist ideas are so deeply indoctrinated within us that they take heaps of time and energy to get past. 

To this day I am guilty of not doing my best to unlearn the significance of English in juxtaposition with Urdu. I still speak, listen to, and read more English than Urdu. Thanks to my supportive peers and the amazing local artists and filmmakers back home, I am able to cultivate the significance of Urdu in my heart (the use of the heart as opposed to mind is very inspired by Al-Ghazali) by decolonizing my own vocabulary. 

 

References: 

Mitchell, T. (1988). Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge University Press. 

Pritchett, F. (n.d.). Minute by the Hon’ble T. B. Macaulay, dated the 2nd February 1835. Minute on education (1835) by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Retrieved September 18, 2021, from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html.