Page 317 - Culture Technology Communication

300 Kenneth Keniston

insofar as there is a class (or caste) interest in retaining power, it
will be undermined by facilitating computer access to the non-
English speaking, less powerful (and in India lower-caste) groups
that already threaten the political hegemony of traditional Indian
elites. I do not mean to suggest a conscious conspiracy, but only to
propose that providing local language software to outcasts, tribals,
scheduled castes, backward groups, slum-dwellers and other non-
English-speaking local groups is unlikely to be paramount among
the priorities of the powerful English speaking elites in South Asia.
Two other non-economic factors were once suggested by the head
of a dynamic Indian software firm, who commented critically on a talk
I once gave on local language computing. “You left out two of the cen-
tral factors,” he said, “the role of the Brahminical tradition and our
ambivalent love affair with the English.” By the first, he meant the
traditional Brahmin emphasis on spirituality, transcendence, and
higher orders of thought and action, contrasted with a distaste for all
that is polluted, earthly, and material. “We are happy doing mathe-
matics, astronomy, philosophy, and computers,” he said, “but writing
programs in Telegu or Hindi for the masses seems to many a less
noble activity than programming in English or collaborating with a
top-notch multinational firm in Germany.” As for the “ambivalent love
affair with the English,” he referred to the embeddedness in modern
Indian culture of formerly English games like cricket, the preserva-
tion amongst the Indian upper classes of clubs, schools, firms, institu-
tions, and forms of government associated with the British, and above
all, the continuing use of English as the prestige language of India. “It
is one thing to program in English, which connects us to the wealthy,
powerful and rich nations—to the rest of the world. But to program in
Telegu, Tamil, or Marathi is to descend to the level of the street, to re-
nounce the efforts of a century and a half to become English, to ally
ourselves with the forces of primitivism in our nation” (Murthy 1997).
I cannot judge the validity of these arguments, but their claim is
clearly that in addition to economic calculations, cultural factors
play a role in the absence of vernacular software.

What Is To Be Done?
If local language software is important, and if it is largely absent in
South Asia, the obvious question is, What is to be done?
Many wise men and women in India and elsewhere have an-
swers to this question; mine will be a summary of theirs. First, how-