Pompei Restaurant, Karachi (Source: fcpakistan.com)

A few days ago I had an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Having lived all my life in Karachi, I had until then never heard of the Pompei Restaurant. I was invited there by a visiting British academic, who declined my invitation to have dinner at our house and wanted to meet me at the Pompei instead. He seemed very surprised that I had never heard of the Pompei, which he seemed to know well.

Armed with the Google map directions, I still managed to lose my way but arrived a few minutes before my host.  Stepping into the restaurant was like going down the rabbit hole: I left Karachi behind and entered Europe.

The furniture, the wall hangings, the light music, and the candle lit tables all made me feel as if I had been transported to Italy. I was greeted very politely by the valet and the gentleman at the reception and was taken to the table my host had booked for us. I sat down and looked around. The bar with impressive brass levers to pour beer caught my attention. I asked the waiter for a glass of wine in Urdu but my eagerness was met with a thin smile and the English response: ‘Sir, wine is not served here.’

At that moment, my host arrived. Before sitting down, he handed a bag to the waiter. The waiter took the bag and returned with two menu cards. The menu card was in English only but, despite the fact that English is the main language I use in my professional life, I did not recognize the name of single dish on the menu except for pizza.

My host graciously helped me with the selection of starters and the main course when he realized my ignorance of Italian cuisine. Before the starters were served, my host’s bag was brought back to him and a bottle of wine emerged. The waiter apologized to my host and said he wasn’t allowed to pour the wine for him. My host smiled back in the manner of a man of the world who understands cross-cultural differences and filled our glasses himself.

While savouring the novelty of eating Italian food and drinking alcohol, I did not omit to look around me and take note of the people who had by now filled the place. The majority were foreigners but there were also a fair number of locals. Nearly everyone was drinking alcohol and smoking. English was the only language I heard.

Feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the novelty of it all, it was good my host kept the conversation going by telling me about his interactions with Pakistani scholars, who he had been visiting as a UN ambassador in the previous weeks. His role was to provide consultancy on improving academic standards. ‘You guys don’t know how to write,’ he observed casually. In my mind, I was busy adding all the other things I had discovered in the last hour only that we didn’t know.

When we finished the meal, I of course tried to pay my share. However, I have to admit I was grateful to my host that he wouldn’t allow me. I also have to admit that I tried my best not to stare when he put his hand in his pocket and pulled it back out with a fist full of currency notes. The bunch of currency notes was so thick that he had a bit of a problem picking out 7,000 Pakistani rupee notes out of this thick wad of US dollars. He gave those 7,000 rupees (ca. 70 Australian dollars) in the same manner as if they were worth 70 rupees. We had just spent around 7% of the average annual per capita income in Pakistan on a meal!

I thanked my host for his generosity and we parted ways.

Walking back to my car, I kept on thinking about my experience: I had just stepped out of Pakistan for a few hours without ever leaving Karachi. The material difference between the Pompei Restaurant and its surroundings was spinning in my head. I also thought about the role of language in this world of mirrors. Pompei exists in Karachi because of the development industry and the foreigners who come here as part of international institutions, which are supposed to help our poor economy. But are they really helping by creating islands of opulence that are unrecognizable to the average citizen? For me Pompei seems like a new sovereign state maintained by international money that has come to us from the World Bank, the IMF and other international bodies – ostensibly to reduce the deep and pervasive poverty in Pakistan but practically to be enjoyed by whom?

I was also musing on the intercultural nature of this encounter: a British and a Pakistani academic meeting in an Italy-themed space in globalized Karachi sounds very cool and postmodern and like a coming together in some global, hyprid, even ‘metrolingual’ space. But is that what had happened? To me, the encounter felt as one that accentuated difference and increased distance between people of different cultures. Had this encounter not turned me into someone utterly deficient: an academic who doesn’t know how to write? A customer who doesn’t know how to order? A local who doesn’t belong?

My last thought was about resistance: who is going to resist this new economy and its language? How can we truly achieve meaning in intercultural communication in a grossly unequal world?

Pakistan Swat Valley 2009

Ingrid briefly mentioned Zubeida Mustafa’s new book Tyranny of Language in Education: The Problem and its solution recently. Since then, we’ve had numerous enquiries about the book here on Language-on-the-Move, and I’m pleased to offer a review and more information about language education in Pakistan today. Zubeida Mustafa is well-known in Pakistan as a veteran English language journalist and Tyranny of Language in Education is her first book. It has multiple focuses around language and power, bilingualism, language learning, equity in education, globalization, and, of course, language-in-education policy. Here, the readers of this review need to understand that the author has written this book not for academics but for the general public and policy makers of Pakistan. The book’s central argument is as follows:

The child begins life with an advantage in a certain language, namely his mother tongue or his first language, which he uses to communicate and when learning is imposed on him in another language, he is robbed of this natural advantage … . He is additionally burdened with the handicap of a linguistic barrier that he has to surmount when he goes to school. (p. 6)

It’s hard to argue with this point in Pakistan where the national language Urdu could be said to have been imposed on a hugely multilingual society. Parents and pupils are not usually given a choice to have formal education made available in local languages. Furthermore, the author points out the unsound and unjust language education policies and practices in Pakistan, which she argues have been developed and are being sustained by a small elite class:

Polices should be made for the greatest good of the greatest number and not for a small elite class which formulates state policies and thus ensures that its privileged position is not undermined. (p. 6)

By way of background to Zubeida’s work, let me provide you with further information about languages, education and poverty in Pakistan. Ethnologue lists 72 languages for Pakistan. Out of these, 14 languages have more than 1 million first language speakers. The number of speakers and their percentage of the population differs significantly: Western Punjabi, for instance, has 60.6 million speakers and is spoken by 38.3% of the population but there are also languages which have only a few hundred speakers such as Aer, Bhaya or Domaaki. Overall, 85% of the population speak 14 languages and the remaining 58 languages are spoken by 15% of the population. The key point is that Pakistan’s population is a highly multilingual one.

This multilingual population, however, is not served by an equally multilingual language-in-education policy. As a matter of fact, Pakistan’s language-in-education policy is not explicitly stated. While the policy maintains that comprehensive school language policies should be developed in consultation with provincial and area governments, it does not seem to realize the importance of community, school management and teachers and pupils in the development, sustenance and implementation of a policy. Like all other previous language policies the approach adopted seems to be top-down. The current language-in-education policy of the country maintains that Urdu is the medium of instruction in government schools and English is introduced from Class 1 onwards. Most private schools in the country have English as medium of instruction.

Whether as a result of the policy or other factors, education outcomes are dismal: the literacy rate is 57.7%. For males it is 69.5% and for females 45.2%, and urban populations with 73.2% are more literate than rural populations with 49.2%. Furthermore, most people only receive elementary education. Only 18% of girls and 24% of boys are in secondary schools and only 5% of the population of tertiary age are in tertiary education.

While monolingual language-in-education policies for a multilingual population are certainly one aspect of the failure of education in Pakistan, the linguistic facts only go so far by way of explanation, as I’ve argued before. In my view, the material conditions of deep, widespread and entrenched poverty in Pakistan probably go a much longer way to explain the failure of education in Pakistan. For instance, let me tell you about the actual buildings and spaces of schooling in this country: 32.7% of elementary schools are without boundary walls; 36.6% without drinking water; 35.4% without toilet facilities; and 60% without electricity. These statistics help us understand at a surface level why only 10% children out of roughly 70% enrolled in schools manage to finish their secondary education.

Some more statistics: 23% of Pakistan’s population live below the poverty line of USD1.25 per day. The 2010 Human Development Index has Pakistan in 125th position – out of a total of 169 countries. Shocking inequalities manifest in every sphere of life, the poorest 10% of the population have access to 3.9% of the total national income while the richest 10% access 26.5%. The state of the country can also be measured by the fact that perhaps the cheapest thing in Pakistan is human life. People are killed on an everyday basis. Since 2006, 35,000 civilians and 3,500 security personnel have been killed in a “war on terror” that terrorizes our people.

Coming back to Zubeida’s book, I would say that the author at some places in her work makes attempts to connect language-in-education policy with societal power relations, inequalities and the material conditions in the country, such as chapter 7 titled “Ground Realities,” where the accounts are based on her personal visits to a less-privileged area of Karachi. In these account, the reader can easily hear the fresh voice of the author, which in other chapters sometimes gets lost in the scholarly sources tracing the development and explaining language policy in pre- and post-colonial Pakistan. To me, the key achievement of the book then is that it stimulates debate and puts educational disadvantage in Pakistan back on the table of public debate. However, with much of the work the author draws on, the book also shares particular weaknesses in positing particular interpretations of colonial language policy. These often give inadequate empirical evidence and tend to make straightforward links between past and present. It would not be incorrect to maintain that scholarship produced in this country has largely been overly deterministic in such matters without engaging with the material base of education in Pakistan and exploring what actually goes on in schools in Pakistan. Unfortunately, to date the country does not have one single study that could describe and explain the everyday language practices in specific institutions and explore the interlinked micro and macro levels of language in education in Pakistan. My ongoing PhD work is designed to partly fill that lacuna.

In Pakistan, as elsewhere, scholars all too often take refuge in political constructs and partial historical narratives without attending to empirical grounding and depth. If education in Pakistan is embedded in the power structures of the society, giving rise to inequalities and polarization, we would like to know how such dominance, inequalities and polarization is developed, maintained and implemented.

Private school in Machar, Karachi

Last year the British Council initiated a dialogue about language policy and particularly language-in-education policy in Pakistan, and their report was recently published. The introduction includes the following two statements:

The report […] is the result of two visits made by Hywel [=British education consultant Hywel Coleman] to Pakistan in March and July 2010 taking him to Sindh, Punjab and Azad Kashmir, as well as over six months of desk-based research. (p. 4)

This document is a report on a consultancy visit to Pakistan between 4^th and 17^th March 2010. (p. 3)

While these quotes from the report are inconclusive as to whether the consultant was in Pakistan once or twice, he comes to some sweeping and far-reaching conclusions. The report argues that Pakistan has a language crisis in its schools and calls particularly for the promotion of indigenous languages through making them a medium of instruction in Pakistan.

In principle the idea of promoting students’ home languages is appealing. It certainly touches the heart; less so the intellect, considering the practical, social and political constraints prevalent in the country. The report argues that in contemporary Pakistan, Urdu and English are being imposed on speakers of other languages. This may or may not be the case. The fact is that Pakistanis of all stripes and colors want to learn both Urdu and English from as early as possible because they understand the social and financial implications, and teaching through indigenous languages is a very low priority.

In order to understand language policy and education in Pakistan, and the global South more generally, I think people must experience what it means to live in Pakistan in the present circumstances. In Pakistan the central issue is not the language crisis but poverty. Pakistan is a country where 23% of the population live below the poverty line of USD1.25 per day. The 2010 Human Development Index has Pakistan in 125^th position – out of a total of 169 countries. Pakistan is a country where water is more precious than human lives. People are killed every day, no one bothers. The media report loss of human lives in numbers only. “So and so many people have been killed in this bomb blast, and so and so many people in that suicide attack.” Humanity has simply been numbered in this part of the world: 30 killed, 40 killed etc.

The salary of a private sector university lecturer in Karachi is less than GBP1,200 per year; even so, this is considered a very good salary by local standards. At the same time, it is not enough to put the fees of a good school for their children within the reach even of university lecturers, not to mention the vast majority of the population.

Power cuts for four hours a day are routine in city areas and in villages they exceeds eight hours every day. Imagine living without electricity every day for eight hours! Who gives a thought that the severed heads of the suicide bombers are often the young ones of their family? What makes them go to this extent? Do they have anything in their lives to live for or to look forward to?

Anyone talking about the promotion of indigenous languages among the poverty-stricken multitudes of Pakistan cannot be but alien to the realities of our lives. Why should we care about maintaining indigenous languages in the face of such bitter life experiences? Common ordinary Pakistanis want to have access to socio-economically powerful languages. They know very well that multilingualism is strength and they want to teach their children local, national and global languages at the same time.

Language death, language preservation, language revitalization and mother tongue education are for those who haven’t walked in our shoes. The way I see it they are nothing but distracters from the real issues of grinding poverty, suicide bombings and the energy crisis.

The textbook wall by Ambreen

Have you ever felt a wall of textbooks around you, obstructing your vision and thinking, rather than widening your horizon? That’s how one of my research participants, let’s call him Basil, described his educational experience to me. He felt that he was positioned as an empty vessel by the writers of these textbook, as if he were a brainless creature. When Basil became a teacher himself, he looked back at all those years and wondered why there had been no sources of knowledge other than the single government-approved textbook for each subject.

In Pakistan, textbook production, dissemination and reception has always been highly regulated and structured. School textbooks erect a regulated and guarded wall, purposefully painted with a single color and single texture to hide diversity under its surface; it is manipulated by an elite which decides which ideas, history, socio-cultural values and norms are being walled in and which ones are being walled out.

As a teacher Basil realized that school textbooks in Pakistan neither nurture inquisitiveness among the learners nor do they enhance the intellectual competence of the learners. Rather, they seem to be produced and taught to manufacture consent and produce unthinking beings. They position learners as blank slates devoid of any consciousness, intentions, individual or collective agency, and they act as instruments for casting learners in an identical form and deprive the learner of formats, texts, images, questions, exercises that trigger thinking and give space to the views, interpretations and responses of learners and teachers. In classroom discursive practices, they do not help teachers engage their learners in developing their own identity and confidence in their individual as well as social consciousness. As a result, pupils largely remain dependent on what is published in textbooks and are largely the passive recipients of views, ideas and interpretations which they take for granted to be accurate.

Basil even argued that much of Pakistan’s woes from suicide bombs to sectarian violence are built in these textbooks which each child is made to learn by heart. While Basil’s views may be controversial, they are not uncommon and have now entered mainstream educational institutions in Pakistan. For instance, the Aga Khan University Examination Board (AKUEB) has recently taken the initiative to diversify educational media in Pakistan. AKUEB was established in 2002 to move beyond the single-textbook approach to teaching and testing.

AKUEB has been the subject of harsh critique and and propaganda. Despite these attacks AKUEB works to promote students learning outcomes (SLO) within the approved curriculum rather than single-textbooks, and promotes the use of alternative educational media in its affiliated schools. Though AKUEB-associated schools were and still are legally bound to use the government approved single-textbook, they have been successful in diminishing the authority of the single textbook by providing multiple sources of knowledge. The introduction of alternative educational media has brought multiple discourses into the classroom. Being exposed to multiple interpretations, views and perspectives, young learners begin to see such media as legitimate sources of knowledge and develop an appreciation of complexities, dichotomies, paradoxes, and diversity.

When I asked another group of my research participants, Grade 8 students, to use a metaphor to describe the subject History, their responses included “history is a sermon,” “history is poison which spreads in the whole body and mind,”  “history is an elephant,” and “history is water in a pond.” I think these metaphors provide evidence that education in Pakistan has moved on since Basil’s time and they can be considered as evidence of the emergence of a critical stance in young learners. These young students are developing the habits of thinking, researching, analyzing and above all questioning and bit by bit the wall is being torn down.

Reza’s family, too, got caught up in the turmoil. When he was four, Reza witnessed his uncle being killed for being a Bihari – in the eyes of many Bangladeshis, an exponent of Pakistani domination. However, unlike other Biharis, who have come to be known as “stranded Pakistanis,” Reza’s family managed to flee to Pakistan in 1971.

In Bangladesh, Urdu-speakers such as the Biharis were living symbols of Pakistani domination. In Pakistan, their Bihari-accented Urdu marked them as unwelcome refugees from the East. One of Reza’s earliest memories is of his family being outsiders because they were Urdu speakers in East-Pakistan. However, his outsider status did not change after their move to West-Pakistan.When he started school in Karachi, his peers would often make fun of him and his Bihari accent. To be called a “Bihari” became a daily insult. To this day, Reza remembers running home crying after being teased as “Bihari.” This linguistic bullying had a devastating effect on Reza. He began to avoid socializing and internalized the belief that he and his family were inferior while the speakers of “good” or “unaccented” Urdu were superior. As a Bihari it seemed there was no place to be – unwelcome and abused both in the East and the West.

Soon, Reza transformed himself into a speaker of “unaccented” Urdu, who spoke the same as everyone else in Karachi. As a matter of fact, this dominant accent of Urdu is a mix of the accents of Punjabi, Pashto, Balochi and Sindhi. It was a different story with Reza’s parents. They never quite managed to acquire this new accent, which was far removed from the Urdu spoken in India, where they had grown up. In order to hide his Bihari identity, Reza avoided introducing his parents to others and started to keep a distance from his family.

Reza soon learnt that an even more effective way to gain respect was to transform himself not only into a Karachi-accented speaker of Urdu but an English speaker. He went to an English-medium school and Reza idolized his teachers, who seemed to speak English fluently. Reza, like everyone else, thought those English speakers were educated, enlightened and modern. They were real human beings, and those who could not speak English somehow seemed less than human. Eventually, Reza completed a Bachelor’s degree in English followed by a Master’s degree in English Literature and English Linguistics. By now he had thoroughly escaped his Bihari identity and was “making it” in the world. He pretended to be so in love with English that he spoke it all the time, and he finally got the respect that he had been denied in his childhood.

Even so, and despite all his qualifications, achievements and upward social mobility, he is haunted by the fear that a trace of that Bihari accent might suddenly surface in his speech and expose him as a fraud. He never tells anyone that he was born in East-Pakistan and he makes every effort to keep his children away from the Bihari community. He has deliberately left many good people behind only because of the fact that his association with them would expose him as a Bihari. Above all, he cannot afford to lose any more family members by becoming a member of minority speakers in Pakistan. Despite the massive bloodshed stemming initially from the partition of India and later the creation of Bangladesh, the state of Pakistan still promotes monolingualism in multilingual Pakistan.

Reza’s linguistic trajectory is deeply enmeshed with the upheavals of the 20^th century. A question that bothers him most often is this: Can people do nothing more than strive to escape the prison of their language or is there a way to tear down the prison walls?