Op-Ed Contributor
Goddess English of Uttar Pradesh
By MANU JOSEPH
Published: May 14, 2010
A FORTNIGHT ago, in a poor village in Uttar Pradesh, in northern
India, work began on a temple dedicated to Goddess English. Standing
on a wooden desk was the idol of English — a bronze figure in robes,
wearing a wide-brimmed hat and holding aloft a pen. About 1,000
villagers had gathered for the groundbreaking, most of them Dalits,
the untouchables at the bottom of India's caste system. A social
activist promoting the study of English, dressed in a Western suit
despite the hot sun and speaking as if he were imparting religious
wisdom, said, "Learn A, B, C, D." The temple is a gesture of defiance
from the Dalits to the nation's elite as well as a message to the
Dalit young — English can save you.
A few days later, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, a body that oversees domain names on the Web, announced a
different kind of liberation: it has taken the first steps to free the
online world from the Latin script, which English and most Web
addresses are written in. In some parts of the world, Web addresses
can already be written in non-Latin scripts, though until this change,
all needed the Latin alphabet for country codes, like ".sa" for Saudi
Arabia. But now that nation, along with Egypt and the United Arab
Emirates, has been granted a country code in the Arabic alphabet, and
Russia has gotten a Cyrillic one. Soon, others will follow.
Icann calls it a "historic" development, and that is true, but only
because a great cliché has finally been defeated. The Internet as a
unifier of humanity was always literary nonsense, on par with "truth
will triumph."
The universality of the Latin script online was an accident of its
American invention, not a global intention. The world does not want to
be unified. What is the value of belonging if you belong to all? It is
a fragmented world by choice, and so it was always a fragmented Web.
Now we can stop pretending — but that doesn't mean this is a change
worth celebrating.
Many have argued that the introduction of domain names and country
codes in non-Latin scripts will help the Web finally reach the world's
poor. But it is really hard to believe that what separates an Egyptian
or a Tamil peasant from the Internet is the requirement to type in a
few foreign characters. There are far greater obstacles. It is even
harder to believe that all the people who are demanding their freedom
from the Latin script are doing it for humanitarian reasons. A big
part of the issue here is nationalism, and the East's imagination of
the West as an adversary. This is just the latest episode in an
ancient campaign.
A decade ago I met Mahatma Gandhi's great-grandson, Tushar Gandhi, a
jolly, endearing, meat-eating man. He was distraught that the Indians
who were creating Web sites were choosing the dot-com domain over the
more patriotic dot-in. He was trying to convince Indians to flaunt
their nationality. He told me: "As long as we live in this world,
there will be boundaries. And we need to be proud of what we call
home."
It is the same sentiment that is now inspiring small groups of Indians
to demand top-level domain names (the suffix that follows the dot in a
Web address) in their own native scripts, like Tamil. The Tamil
language is spoken in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where I
spent the first 20 years of my life, and where I have seen fierce
protests against the colonizing power of Hindi. The International
Forum for Information Technology in Tamil, a tech advocacy and
networking group, has petitioned Icann for top-level domain names in
the Tamil script. But if it cares about increasing the opportunities
available to poor Tamils, it should be promoting English, not Tamil.
There's no denying that at the heart of India's new prosperity is a
foreign language, and that the opportunistic acceptance of English has
improved the lives of millions of Indians. There are huge benefits in
exploiting a stronger cultural force instead of defying it. Imagine
what would have happened if the 12th-century Europeans who first
encountered Hindu-Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3) had rejected them as a
foreign oddity and persisted with the cumbersome Roman numerals (IV,
V). The extraordinary advances in mathematics made by Europeans would
probably have been impossible.
But then the world is what it is. There is an expression popularized
by the spread of the Internet: the global village. Though intended as
a celebration of the modern world's inclusiveness, it is really an
accurate condemnation of that world. After all, a village is a petty
place — filled with old grudges, comical self-importance and imagined
fears.
Manu Joseph, the deputy editor of the Indian newsweekly OPEN, is the
author of the forthcoming novel "Serious Men."
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