Worldly wise to pick up languages early

Amit Shah is right about language being a fundamental way by which we understand a country, especially the cultural-geographic region one lives in. A child raised speaking, hearing, reading and writing, say, Gujarati, encounters a slightly different India from one raised in Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam or Punjabi. Words arrive carrying luggage. They contain information, jokes, hierarchies, affections, insults, histories and social arrangements. The Bengali 'adda', Hindi 'jugaad' and Tamil 'anbu' don't merely label things but also illuminate various shades of Indian - indeed, human - experience. Which is why Shah's argument for the 'mother tongue' - and for learning other Indian languages - should be extended beyond Indian languages.

If knowing Kannada can make an Assamese child's India larger, knowing French, Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish or Japanese can make her world larger still. Translation provides the map, while language lets you walk the streets. The sensible educational ambition, therefore, should not be to replace English with Indian languages, or Indian languages with English, but to produce children who are promiscuously comfortable with several tongues. And start early.

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Young children acquire languages with an enviable lack of ceremony: no terror of accents, adult mortification at getting a pronunciation or gender wrong, or baggage. They listen, imitate, blunder, proceed. By adolescence, language-learning too often becomes 'homework'. By adulthood, a KRA. India's multilingualism shouldn't be treated as sombre duty but as collecting language skills. Have children hone their mother tongue. Then give them several stepmothers. The more languages they inhabit, the less foreign the world becomes, and the more they grow confident.