Bangladeshi manager speaking English and subtitled in British educational video “How fair is fashion?”

The other day I watched a show about global textile production. How fair is fashion? by British educational media producer Pumpkin TV is an excellent resource explaining the circuits of cheap clothing for consumers in the global North, huge profits for multinational fashion and retail corporations, and the exploitation of textile workers in the global South. The film was shot in Bangladesh and features stories such as those of an 18-year-old woman, who has been working in a textile factory in Dhaka for seven years. Working 100 hours a week, she earns the equivalent of between 40 and 50 USD per month. Together with her husband she lives in a small room in a slum where they share toilet and water facilities with around 10 other families. The mud track leading to the dwelling doubles as an open sewer.

She is one of thousands of workers working for a factory in the Rupashi Group, which has contracts which many well-known clothing brands. On the day the film crew was visiting they were making shirts for Forever 21.

All the workers interviewed for the film spoke Bangla while managers, policy makers and a high-level union official spoke English. The language choices in the film are thus reflective of a well-known divide in Bangladesh: that access to English and proficiency in English is a marker of privilege.

A new wave of thinking about English and development has recently started to argue that English is vital to development and that to improve the lot of people like the 18-year-old garment worker English would be indispensable to her. English in Action, a UK-funded English language teaching program for development in Bangladesh, is an example:

The Programme’s goal is to contribute to the economic growth of the country by providing communicative English language as a tool for better access to the world economy. The purpose of EIA is to significantly increase the number of people who are able to communicate in English, to levels that enable them to participate fully in economic and social activities and opportunities. (English in Action)

Sounds good. However, watching How fair is fashion? revealed one problem with this theory. The problem was that the show treated all Bangladeshi speakers – irrespective of whether they were Bangla-speaking workers or English-speaking elites – as incomprehensible to the British viewer. Both Bangla-speaking and English-speaking Bangladeshis were presented as requiring mediation to become intelligible: Bangla was translated and English was subtitled. The image provides an example: The general manager of Rupashi group says “We are number three now. Our target is to become number two, and then one.” in English at the same time that the subtitles appear in English.

I have blogged about the politics of subtitling English speakers to other English speakers before. As I pointed out there, subtitling some varieties of English but not others to an English-speaking audience serves to mark the subtitled varieties as illegitimate.

The subtitling of educated Bangladesh English constitutes a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the assumption that being able to communicate in English has anything much to do with development. To assume that being able to communicate in English will enable Bangladeshis – or anyone else in the global South – “to participate fully in economic and social activities and opportunities” fails to recognize that language is never just about communication.

Linguistic exchange is always also an economic exchange, as Bourdieu explains:

[U]tterances are not only […] signs to be understood and deciphered; they are also signs of wealth, intended to be evaluated and appreciated, and signs of authority, intended to be believed and obeyed. (Bourdieu 1991, p. 66)

Subtitled speech is a sign of lack of wealth and authority. Only Bangladeshis who speak English can be rendered illegitimate in this way as the translation of Bangla is simply a marker of linguistic difference rather than a linguistic hierarchy.

The elite Bangladeshis featured in the film are competent speakers of English (you can listen to the excerpt with the General Manager of Rupashi Group and judge for yourself). However, linguistic competence does not necessarily translate into legitimate competence:

The competence adequate to produce sentences that are likely to be understood may be quite inadequate to produce sentences that are likely to be listened to, likely to be recognized as acceptable in all the situations in which there is occasion to speak. (Bourdieu 1991, p. 55)

If the English of competent elite Bangladeshi speakers of English is not acceptable on the global stage (however valuable it may be in the local linguistic market), what likelihood is there that English teaching will turn ordinary impoverished Bangladeshis into global players? Hamid’s (2010) analysis of the gap between policy discourses about the promise of English and the reality of the implementation of English language teaching in Bangladesh paints a gloomy picture of high expectations, inadequate resource investment, and poor outcomes. Essentially, he finds that the current policy of “English for everyone” doesn’t produce much competence in English because it is severely under-resourced, and, where donor-funded, unsustainable and poorly integrated with the local environment.

If I were a cynic, I’d argue that the whole point of universal English language teaching is not actually the acquisition of linguistic competence but the recognition of the legitimate language; not to learn how to speak English but to learn how to recognize legitimate – “metropolitan” or “global” – English; to learn one’s place in the linguistic hierarchy and thus to accept one’s inferior position as a natural and incontestable fact. I am not a cynic and I follow Bourdieu in seeing the disparity between knowledge of the legitimate language (always a limited resource) and recognition of the legitimate language (always much more widespread) as a function of the linguistic market.

While proponents of universal English language teaching for development may not intend to collude in linguistic domination, they fail to achieve any of their well-intentioned aims because they ignore the fact that language is not only about communication but also about legitimacy – an error Bourdieu (1991, p. 53) calls “the naïvety par excellence of the scholarly relativism which forgets that the naïve gaze is not relativist.”

While I’m pessimistic about English for development, How fair is fashion? ends on an optimistic note by featuring a cooperative in rural Bangladesh producing for People Tree, a fair trade fashion label. The garment worker interviewed there earns about the same as her Dhaka-based counterpart. However, in contrast to the factory workers in Dhaka, she has fixed hours and works from 5-9; she has a proper contract and the cooperative also provides childcare and schooling for her children; above all, more autonomous and diverse, there is dignity in her work.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hamid, M. Obaidul (2010). Globalisation, English for everyone and English teacher capacity: language policy discourses and realities in Bangladesh Current Issues in Language Planning, 11 (4), 289-310 DOI: 10.1080/14664208.2011.532621

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?