Click to play videoBangalore: In Karnataka the subject of English education has been the matter of heated debate for the last few years.
Twelve-year-old Vani Gangadhar is in class VII of the Navachetana School but finds it difficult to even pronounce simple English words.
But Vani, daughter of a coolie, likes to dream big.
"English is what gets you a job. Everyone uses it at work and they go abroad. I also want to go abroad maybe London," Vani says.
There are many first-generation learners like Vani who feel let down because they've been introduced to the subject just two years back.
In thousands of Kannada medium schools across Karnataka, English was introduced as a subject from class I just six months back. Before that, English was a subject only from class V.
Scholars like Prof. Chandrashekar Patil, an English professor who's now president of the Kannada Sahitya Parishat have always believed that every child should be taught in the language he's most comfortable in - his mother tongue.
"Just as mother's milk is a right of the child, mother tongue is also the right of the child. When the child is exposed to one language, there shouldn't be any interference from another language," Chandrashekar Patil says.
But it's an issue that always creates heartburn.
"I'm sorry to say they're hypocrites. They all learn English, send their children to English medium schools and send their grandchildren to English schools," Indudhara Honnapura, State convenor of Dalit Sangharsh Samiti, says.
It's this hypocrisy that has pushed campaigners for rural and backward classes like Honnapura to suddenly take up the cause of English.
They feel the language debate is now becoming a class debate - that the Kannada elite is using the mother tongue theory to make the backward more backward.
It was a European who put together the first Kannada dictionary - the Reverend Ferdinand Kittel, who was an 18th century missionary.
It's two centuries since then and Bangalore has become Bengalooru. But the age-old fight with the Queen's language takes on new colours and forms everyday.
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