Archive for September, 2009

Birth, control, and the pill

29 September, 2009 at 2:54 am · Filed under Angst ·Tagged

The oral contraceptive pill: few women would deny its role in female emancipation because of the control it provides over reproductive choices. A post over at the Gender Across Borders blog (a recent find, and one of my favourite haunts of late) on contraceptive advertising in the US set me thinking.

Contraceptive ads in India have come a long way since the antiseptic, sanitized ads of Nirodh and Mala D—government products, freely available at all public health centres, and probably still the only affordable choice for the lower and middle strata of society. The ads centred on family and spacing children. Which is not surprising, given the audience they targeted—people who would probably not be comfortable with any public discussion of birth control. (Anyone from that pre-remote-controlled-TV generation will have plenty of fun memories of squirming parents and other elders, of forced loud conversations, deliberately and hastily started to drown out the ads … while children giggled.)

The 1990s saw a radical change in contraceptive advertising, at least as far as condoms were concerned. Kamasutra (and Pooja Bedi) started it all off and others followed—Moods, Kohinoor. The focus of these ads is unmistakably on the pleasure of sex. Instead of the “anti-pregnancy device” rhetoric that Nirodh projected, they play upon “attitudes toward sex” and promote the condom as “an intricate part of the pleasure of sex”.

Fine. But hold on to that bit about pleasure. Remember that condoms are male contraceptive devices.

What about the pill? Well, after Mala D, I remember seeing ads for several other brands of pills, mostly in women’s magazines such as Femina. And they emphasized the ‘hassle-free’ life pills promised. That is, their focus was on unwanted pregnancy: with control over pregnancy, women had greater freedom to do other things in life. I don’t recall any that spoke about the pill making sex a pleasurable act for the woman.

Today we have the emergency contraceptive pills—Unwanted 72 and the I-Pill. Ads for both these pills clearly target the modern, urban woman. One depicts a distraught young woman rushing, furtively, to an abortion clinic, and the other shows young women crying their hearts out because “they didn’t take precautions”. In both cases, the message is clear: use the pill if you want to avoid messy abortions and unwanted pregnancies.

There’s no denying the fact that the fear of pregnancy weighs heavier on a woman’s mind than on a man’s, since it’s an unequally shared burden, but is this a stereotype being promoted here? (Apparently there is already opposition in India to the way in which emergency contraception is being advertised: that it will encourage promiscuity,  that its message of a “tension-free” life is misleading, that it sends out wrong signals about abortion.)

Advertisements for the pill seem to promote it as a lifestyle drug. As the GAB post puts it: “as whimsical and enticing as any for clothes, shoes, or makeup,  showing pictures of young, smiling, healthy women,  and how much easier their lives are with the pill.”  There are even ads in the US depicting the supposed benefits of pills, such as cures for acne, PMS, etc.

The trouble is, as GAB asserts, “the pill is not a shoe, or mascara, and it is never a choice made in a vacuum.”

Also, ads for both condoms and the pill deliberately do not show the other side of the coin. While promoting the pleasure of sex, condom ads are silent about the risks of sexual behaviour. Similarly, oral contraceptive ads that speak of an easier life for women say nothing about their side-effects which all women who use pills know exist. But that’s the way ads function I guess.

What really bothers me is that the underlying rhetoric of contraceptive advertising  is gendered: pleasure for the man and protection for the woman.

Why? Why is contraception portrayed as a means of ensuring pleasure for the man, and as protection from the havoc of pregnancy for women?

Because pregnancy is the woman’s headache?

Because women have to think about sex in terms of procreation, not pleasure?

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Navarathri

26 September, 2009 at 12:33 am · Filed under Angst

The nine nights.

When God is a woman, and every woman is a goddess, we are told. Even if they’re violated, abused, humiliated, and unacknowledged by their men who genuflect before the Goddess.

Some break free and surge, like Ganga, towards new worlds, raging against the meshes of male expectations and guilt over unkempt homes.

And then there are the lesser goddesses. Who wake up at the crack of dawn, cook and wash for their family,  walk three miles to clean Ganga’s house (so she can surge and rage) and then go home for some abuse.

Not all women are goddesses. What’s sauce for Draupadi and Kunti isn’t for Soorpanaka.  She has to be taught a lesson.

To be a goddess, you have to suffer like Sita, not Urmilla.

Oh, and last year along the same lines . . .

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Linguistic hierarchy and multilingualism

20 September, 2009 at 11:28 pm · Filed under Language ·Tagged

The hullabaloo over Shashi Tharoor’s Twitter comments, at least in cyberspace and the English language television channels, makes me wonder: what is a subject worthy of “national debate” and who decides? Like the vast majority of people in this country, I travel by train, II class, so the “cattle class” debate (as indeed the austerity drive) means little to me. However, that the debate has now become one about (not) knowing English disturbs me profoundly because an earlier issue of a Union Minister’s inability to speak English merited little attention. MK Azhagiri, minister from Tamil Nadu, put in a request to be allowed to speak in Tamil during the Question Hour in Parliament because of his professed lack of fluency in both English and Hindi. The Parliament Secretariat turned down his request citing “practical difficulties” as the reason. Apparently he cannot avail of the services of a translator because this is a privilege only MPs enjoy.

Yes, Hindi and English are the designated official languages, so insisting on their use for official purposes (such as in Parliament) is well in keeping with the law of the land. But isn’t it patently unfair to non-Hindi speakers that English and Hindi are covert requirements for becoming Union Ministers? I see no reason, other than sheer cussedness, why he shouldn’t be allowed a translator.

This is an old debate I know. Those of us south of the Vindhyas have Tamil Nadu to thank for the fact that Hindi hasn’t been imposed on us. But what has the other option, English, given us? Wasn’t English supposed to dilute the obvious discrimination against non-Hindi speakers that the official status of Hindi entails?

I don’t particularly fancy Azhagiri; he’s Union Minister today only because his father had bargaining clout with the Congress. But let’s for the moment forget this, and just focus on the predicament of a minister from Tamil Nadu (it could very well be Kerala, AP or Karnataka).  Hindi is out of the question, given that he’s from Tamil Nadu. But why not English? In fact the man holds a postgraduate degree which means that he must know English — the de facto medium of higher education in this country. However, here we enter thin-ice territory. “English medium” is one of the great Indian farces – that sacred cow which, to paraphrase S. Nagarajan1, we will neither take care of nor let die in peace.

I can very well imagine that the minister would have been reluctant to display his inadequate English in Parliament for the simple reason that lack of command of English in this country is very often seen as a sign of inferior education and abilities. Legend has it that Indira Gandhi once came back from a UN conference livid because she was unable to understand the English spoken by an Indian delegate. The fact that the delegate was at that distinguished diplomatic level suggests that he would have earned his stripes, but not necessarily English as expected from the elite of this country.

The upshot is that those who enjoy the benefits of private-school education will corner the best jobs. For the vast majority of non-Hindi speakers, the choice between Hindi and English is a choice between Scylla and Charybdis.

I’m not of course denying the importance of English. Whether or not we like it, we will have to persist with English; the educational system has to be made to deliver. That is of course the most obvious solution, though not the best one. But then linguistic chauvinism is probably one of our defining traits as a people: no linguistic community can bear to have another community’s language higher up in the complex linguistic hierarchy that our multilingualism has generated, even if that means adopting a foreign tongue, the tongue of our former colonizers, a tongue spoken, with any degree of comfort, by less than 10% of the population. Thanks to this chauvinism, English monopolizes domains of power — education, governance, commerce.

In multilingual societies, languages naturally exist in hierarchical relationships that are often institutionalized. English in India is often spoken of as the default language used because it is the only language shared with another speaker; this is only deceptively innocuous. English is also used because it is regarded as the appropriate language for a particular communicative context.

As P.D. Tripathi2 argues, the universal importance of English is an ideological production:

To think of English as the language of inter-state communication (except perhaps at the miniscule top) is to ignore the reality of everyday life, and to assume that before its advent there was no communication and that there cannot be any now without it, between one part of the country and another. The lowly worker from Bihar based in Calcutta or Bombay does not use English, which he does not know, to relate with fellow workers, equally deficient in English, from other parts of the country.

With Kapil Sibal threatening to fortify this hierarchy, with his English-Hindi-regional language formula, I shudder to think of what the future holds.  What makes such a position atavistic is that in the world outside multilingualism is gaining ground.

Let me point you to this study (tedious download required, but worth it) commissioned by the British Council to forecast the future of English in the 21st century. It suggests that the monopolistic position that English acquired in the 20th century is set to change by the middle of the 21st century, as it will become part of an oligopoly with a few other languages, each with its own sphere of influence.

The World Wide Web, which was largely instrumental in the rapid rise of English in the last half of the 20th century, is already today a far more multilingual space than it was in the 90s, and this trend can only grow. The study predicts that the languages that will increase in terms of number of speakers are Hausa and Swahili in Africa, the regional languages of India, Tok Pisin in Oceania, Russian, Mandarin and Arabic. If this is the future of the world, then the argument that Hindi will be a national unifying force only seems pernicious: why should the onus of achieving such national unity lie more heavily with non-Hindi speakers?

There are no easy solutions, I grant, but here’s one that I have:  give official status to a few more regional languages, specifically, one each from the four corners of the country — Tamil from the south, Bengali from the east, Gujarati/ Marathi from the west and Assamese/Manipuri/Mizo from the NE. Along with English and Hindi.

All of these need not compulsorily be taught in school; however,  all official transactions and communication can take place in and will be translated into these languages. While this will not do away with the hierarchy altogether, we’ll at least be casting the net wider. Complete linguistic justice is perhaps a pipedream, but we must take steps towards making the situation more egalitarian.

More importantly, what such a solution will also accomplish is to give translation and the teaching of languages the much needed shot in the arm, as more and more translators and people who speak two or more Indian languages will be in demand. In other words, employment generation based on intrinsic, internal needs.

For those who scoff at the idea of a market for Indian languages, here’s an interesting question from Graddol’s study (cited above): Jurassic Park grossed 6m $ in India in 1994, but in which language?

1 Nagarajan, S. 1981. “The Decline of English in India: Some Historical Notes.” College English 43, no. 7: 663–670.

2 Tripathi, P.D. (1992) “The Chosen Tongue”.  English Today, vol 32, no. 8, 4 October, pp 3-11

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More on English in India

14 September, 2009 at 10:12 am · Filed under English, Indian English ·Tagged

Thanks to a ruptured ear-drum (the left one) I’m convalescing, and reading to keep the  pressure of fretting over the classes I’m losing from rupturing  the other ear-drum as well. So here’s something from the reading—an extract from an essay by Probal Dasgupta* on the “war between the forces favouring the unchecked spread of English, and the forces that strive to maintain cultural plurality”  examined primarily through an analysis of Braj Kachru’s book The Indianization of English: The English Language in India (OUP, N. Delhi: 1983)

I’m posting here just a small bit (for obvious copyright reasons) in response to one of Kachru’s comments, because it links in some way to  my previous post.

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In the preceding I have attempted to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. I have argued that a pragmatic or functional view is essential in understanding the uses of English in unEnglish contexts. It is especially true now, since English has already attained the status of a universal language whose functions vary from situation to situation, from one continent to another. (Kachru:237-38)

One would have thought that the descriptive imperative would have led to a comparison with French or Russian, which too are used as major link languages in non-native social contexts. At least French has obviously developed interference varieties; I am less sure about Russian; one would have expected to learn something about these matters from a general chapter such as this.  That one does not is perhaps an indication that the pragmatic attitude K advocates functions as an alibi — an indication that the point is to accept the spread of English as ‘a universal language whose functions vary from situation to situation, from one continent to another’ just as it was once okay to speak in positive terms of ‘the Empire where the sun never sets.’  In those days, liberal thought was in favour of domestication of the imperial system on a country-by-country basis; the system had to operate in a manner suited to the local needs of each area, as befits the grandeur of a benign despotism. Today, the concept of appropriate technology has taken the place of such earlier thinking. ‘Appropriate English’ is one variant of this concept; the metropolitan groups in power get to decide what technology, what religion, or variety of atheism, what economic system, and what language should be imposed on the peripheral regions, and the specifics of this imposition will vary from one place to another so that the domination is locally effective.

I am not proposing a conspiracy theory. Surely only the consent of the governed, and in this case an active and enthusiastic sort of consent on their part, can permit a system of domination to continue. Anyone who suggests that it is the fault of the native speakers of English that English is spreading the way it is must take into account the evident popularity of English as an international medium in many non-English-speaking societies today. However, it is clear that the situation that is emerging is extremely beneficial to the native speakers of English, and gives them a lot of cultural power. Since many native speakers of English also have global power of other sorts, again with the consent of collaborators in a host of satellite nations, and again with much sophisticated defence of the exercise of such power in terms of notions like ‘pragmatism’ and ‘appropriate technology’ it seems natural to link the linguistic dimension of the present imperial power system with other dimensions which have received more attention in Third World intellectual circles. If such a link is deliberately not made, one begins to ask what the function of concepts like ‘pragmatic’ and ‘descriptive’ is.

* Dasgupta, Probal. “On the Sociolinguistics of English in India.” Explorations in Indian Sociolinguistics. Eds. Rajendra Singh, Probal Dasgupta and Jayant K. Lele. Sage Publications. New Delhi: 1995

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From amnesia to language death

11 September, 2009 at 9:22 pm · Filed under Language ·Tagged ,

Something traumatic happened to me last weekend. (Okay, now that I have your sympathy in advance …) An elderly couple, relatives on the spouse’s side, came visiting, unexpectedly. (No that isn’t the traumatic part, not even for them.)   Which is something I really dread (unexpected visits I mean) for there’s no saying what ghastly state of untradition I could be in on any given day. Anyway, to get to the trauma. In the course of our conversation, which was in Telugu, I used the word “recession” which my guests did not understand, and for the life of me I couldn’t recall what the word for it in Telugu is. Not that I don’t know; I come across it often enough on TV and the Telugu newspaper I read. It was just one of those frustrating tip-of-the tongue moments of amnesia; and right after they left I remembered.  A traumatic state of temporary amnesia that set me off brooding thus: will our mother tongues survive the onslaught of English?

Technically, a language dies  when its last speaker dies. Or, as David Crystal* puts it, when its second-last speaker dies because then the last speaker has no one to speak to.

It is this dramatic situation of the last speaker of a community that Crystal uses as the theme of a play that he wrote in 1998, Living On. Here’s an extract from that play illustrating the state of mind of the last speaker of a community, as he talks to a linguist recording his language:

When I wake up in the morning my head is no longer full of the sound of the rhythms of my language, as once it was. Your language is there now, making me think in strange ways, forcing my thoughts into strange rhythms. I have begun to forget how it was. Every day, I feel my language slipping away. The words which were my life are slowly leaving me. They are returning to their home, where they were born. I could no longer tell our stories well.

Sounds chillingly familiar, doesn’t it?

Maybe it’s just my frazzled, frenetic, feminine mind that’s jumping from amnesia to language death. But the fact is that language death is a very real possibility for languages dominated by another, especially if that dominance is in the economic and educational spheres. Lest you think I’m crying wolf -

According to this piece in Outlook, India tops UNESCO’s list of countries having the maximum number of endangered dialects. The US follows closely behind with 192, and then Venezuela with 147.

And here’s the source for those statistics – Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing, first published in 1996.

Also, Ethnologue’s report on endangered/nearly extinct languages: http://www.ethnologue.com/nearly_extinct.asp.

What the alarming statistics suggest is that of the nearly 6,900 languages in the world, half may be in danger of disappearing in the next several decades.

Most people are either unaware or frankly don’t care that so many of the world’s languages are dying. As Crystal points out, while most us are aware, to a greater or a lesser degree, of the crisis facing the world’s bio-ecology, only a tiny proportion have any awareness at all of the crisis facing the world’s linguistic ecology. Yes, languages have come and gone, but, again as those statistics show, it is the scale, the rate at which languages have been dying since the second half of the 20th century, that is unprecedented.

The rise of dominant world languages has had unmistakable consequences for minority languages; while English is clearly implicated here, it is not the only culprit. Spanish in South America, Arabic, Russian and Chinese in Asia have replaced many local languages in Asia and South America.

Ultimately,  why should we care? Why don’t we just let languages die and allow one language to remain, thus solving the world’s communication problems in one fell swoop?

Because if  language is perhaps the most important behaviour that makes us human, then every language is a repository of some form of human wisdom.  As Crystal puts it, quoting Ezra Pound: ” No single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.”

Your language is you.  So it’s self-preservation, really.

* Crystal, David:

- The Language Revolution. Polity Press, 2004

- Language Death. Cambridge University Press, 2000

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