The
progress achieved over the last few decades in India is marked by a series of
revolutions. The green revolution, for example, achieved self-sufficiency in
food; the white revolution accomplished a similar victory in milk production.
We may envisage the advent of yet another revolution that will provide the
foundation on which any other future revolution in India would roll out. We may
describe it as the revolution of knowledge or, poetically, an Exultation of
Light.
Although
there has been a lot of talk by visionaries like Shri Sam Pitroda and late Shri
Abdul Kalam, Indian society is plagued by a severe starvation in terms of
knowledge. Knowledge always begs the question of a medium, a receptacle, a language
in which that knowledge is captured. There is an ocean of knowledge in English
and other world languages. But the fact that only a very tiny portion of it
percolates into Indian languages leads to a kind of mental malnutrition, a grim
fact of which our societies do not seem to have yet fully grown conscious of.
A
few revealing statistics are in order. If we accept the Wikipedia as a standard
repository of knowledge, the relative numbers of articles in English and other
dominant world languages, compared to those in Indian languages, are quite
disappointing. The number of Wiki articles in English, Swedish German, and
Chinese in millions are 5.7, 3.7, 2.2 and 1 respectively. Corresponding figures
(again in millions) for some of the highest scoring Indian languages are: Hindi
(=0.1), Urdu (0.068), Tamil (=0.1), Telugu (0.06) and Bengali (=0.034). Similar
comparisons may be drawn between the largest of Indian libraries and the best
libraries in the world. The largest library in the world, the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC, has 162 million holdings. The second position is
occupied by the British Library in London with 150 million holdings. By
contrast, the largest library in India, the National Library of Kolkata has
only 2.2 million books while the Anna Centenary library has 0.5 million books.
It is noteworthy that in both these measures (Wiki articles and libraries) the
figures corresponding to the dominant languages of the world and Indian
languages differ by about two orders of magnitude. It appears that Indian
society does not particularly fancy knowledge; it wishes to live in a void
where knowledge is uninvited.
It
is not difficult to see that a society that lives in a vacuum of knowledge sits
in a precarious position, with uncultivated inner potential, unrealized outward
opportunity. Nowhere is the deficiency starker than in matters of our history.
Nearly every lay Indian believes that India had a glorious and resplendent past,
a picture painted in our epics. The ultimate objective of any social
progression is then a regression back to that past glory – a perfect Ramarajya.
It is shocking to note that the lay Indian scarcely distinguishes between
mythology and history. Not many understand that Ramarajya was a mythical
concept, it did not exist in the historical timeline, like the pyramids or the
dinosaurs. In popular Indian imagination, demons and demi-gods, god-kings and
gnomes, yakshas and yatis all mingle freely transcending all boundaries of
space and time. There is a need to ameliorate this situation by infusing a
massive amounts of material, in both mythology and history, into Indian
language literatures.
Why should our knowledge of mythology be
confined to our own epics, itihaasas, and myths, the 18 puranas? Our children
would do well to familiarize themselves with Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, Arabic, Persian, Japanese,
Chinese, Korean, North and Central American mythologies. In the domain of
history, it would be a splendid project for the community of Indian historians
to create an extensive body of literature pertaining to world history in every
Indian language. It could be a voluminous, prodigious and an encyclopedic work,
running into about ten thousand pages, aggregating all of known human history.
It must be written, however, in an easy language, keeping the lay Indian reader
in mind. Access to such a scholarly body of literature will give a strong
fillip to every one of our creative endeavors –
films, TV, novels, poetry, music,
dance and drama. It will have a positive influence on our polity, may inspire
deep social reforms, or suggest more effective forms of governance. Such a
profound historical awareness will equip our societies to defend themselves
against the malicious influence of bigots and zealots and cultural fanatics,
who mislead whole generations through vigorous propaganda buttressed only by
backward scholarship. It will give our
society a more objective perspective of our past, of our place among the world
cultures, and, most importantly, of the secure and glorious future that we are collectively
trying to envision and co-create.
Another area that benefits from a massive infusion of
knowledge is the domain of Science. Science in India is generally considered
the special preoccupation and prerogative of “science students” and
“scientists.” Scientific research is an esoteric affair confined to the ivory walls
of our universities, these “temples” of learning, - an unfortunate anachronism that prescribes a
religious attitude even in areas that demand perfect objectivity. The
future of the humanity, at least as envisioned by futurists, like Arthur
Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Michio Kaku and others, is a world that is shaped and
upheld by a scientific outlook. We are living in an era that sees a progressive
encroachment of Science in areas that were off limits for science in the past.
A scientific, empirical approach even to seemingly intractable questions like
the nature of Consciousness and God, is being attempted today. Therefore, Science
must be permitted to step off its hallowed altars of educational institutions
and walk among the commoners. Science must be shaped as a tool for individual growth
and handed out to the common man. Vast tracts of untested or obsolete belief
systems permeate the Indian mind today. The next generation of Indians would
ideally grow on strong traditions of scientific empiricism, reconfirming, to
the extent possible, data that is inherited from the past, and allowing all
that does not stand the test slip quietly into oblivion. A
massive effort must be undertaken to create comprehensive, easy-to-understand,
scientific literature in all Indian languages.
To new-create such a great body of literature, in so
many languages, in a meaningfully short social and historical duration, would
be nothing less than asking for a miracle. It is only pragmatic, therefore, to
depend on translated writings to achieve such an end. Translation work is
sometime looked down upon in India. But in history there have been large translation
missions that have had a tremendous regenerative influence on the societies
that supported them. A remarkable example was the Toledo experience. In the
ancient Spanish city of Toledo, a massive translation work was undertaken with
royal support stretching over the 12th and 13th centuries.
It was initiated by Archbishop Raymond in the 12th century, and saw
its consummation under the reign of King Alphonso X. The translation was initially
done from Arabic sources to Latin, but in the later stages to the native
language of Spanish. Such large scale translation movements in Europe were
thought to be the redeeming power that dragged medieval Europe out of the dark
ages, ushering in the scientific and cultural Renaissance. On similar lines,
massive translation efforts must be undertaken in every single one of the
Indian languages.
There
must be a government policy by which all the public university faculty must
contribute in a variety of meaningful ways to rural education in India. (Such
initiatives have been taken up, albeit in slightly tyrannical form, in the
Maoist regime, as a part of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.) They can visit,
for example, government schools and give lectures. The aim of these lectures,
delivered in lucid and native language, is not merely to help the village kids
in test taking, but to inspire them and expose them to the most impactful ideas
of the modern world. Or they can write books, or train and motivate government
school teachers. It must not be a million disconnected efforts.
All that must be done as a part of a grand, solid, coherent, and
well-thought-through framework.
In
his later life, Late Sri Abdul Kalam often spoke of a mission called PURA –
Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas.
The aim of this mission was to bring the high quality urban facilities
to the villages. It is a laudable goal but will have to face the challenge of
funds. I propose an intermediate step that can greatly facilitate realization
of the aims of PURA. One may call this mission - Providing Urban Knowledge Amenities to Rural Areas (PUKARA). Move the knowledge that makes the urban world
tick, knowledge that is behind urban wealth and urban energy, to the rural world.
Make that knowledge available in local language literature in village
libraries, teach it in village schools. Access to modern knowledge in native
tongues will greatly empower rural India. (At IIT Madras, with funding from the
Institute, a group of us have undertaken a modest project that publishes
popular science books in Indian languages and send them freely to rural schools
and NGOs engaged in educational activities. Currently the work is confined to
Tamil and Telugu, due to constraints in access to human and financial
resources. But we hope to expand to other Indian languages over the years.)
The section
that we condescendingly call the “masses” must be empowered through knowledge,
which must be abundant, affordable and accessible in local languages. Once
people learn, they can uplift themselves by creative, inspired self-effort.
Right now in India most of the visible progress, - all the ‘shaking’ and the
‘moving’, - is driven by the English speaking section, or at least the section
that is influenced by the knowledge available in English. English puts you in
contact with the great progressive movements of the world. All that movement is
driven by knowledge of a very specialized kind, which is present in English and
other world languages. If such knowledge is also ported to Indian languages on
a massive scale, we can anticipate the Second Wave of growth in India, similar
to the First Wave that occurred with the birth of the IT industry in the ‘80s
in India. When that happens, the groundswell
of creativity and energy that will be unleashed in our country will probably be
unprecedented in human history.
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