Prema Nandakumar reviews Bharathi Karuvoolam, the letters that Bharathi wrote to the Hindu (which, I mentioned earlier in this blog) and edited by A R Venkatachalapathy, and finds it very useful:
All the letters come to us with suitable Tamil translations. The appendices include an interview with Bharati that tells us of the poet’s “forcible and pointed English”, the replies and comments by others on Bharati’s letters and S. Satyamurti’s obituary: “So long, however, as the Tamil language lives, and there is a spark of patriotism in Tamil India, Subrahmanya Bharati’s songs will live.” This has been proved very well by this recent, priceless research of our intrepid scholar, Venkatachalapathy.
PS: Prema Nandakumar approvingly quotes Bharathi’s recommendation on medium of instruction in schools:
… the Bharatian spirit comes to the fore when he advocates Tamil as the medium for teaching, long, long before our new rulers woke up to the reality: “…one’s mother-tongue is the only natural and human medium for imparting instruction. If anyone should doubt this, let him go and make enquiries of educationists in Japan, Scandinavia, England, Italy, Mexico or any other land where human beings are human beings. Speaking of the Tamil country, especially the blunder of using a foreign medium becomes shocking because the Tamil language happens to be far superior to English for accurate and scientific expression …”
While there might be a strong case for using the local language as the medium of instruction, I doubt if any language can be said to be inherently superior for accurate and scientific expression.
