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Madhya Pradesh Government’s Proposal Opens a Significant Chapter in India's 200-Year Drive to Provide Medical Education in Local Languages

on Oct 31, 2022

On October 17, Union Home Minister Amit Shah distributed three medical textbooks in Hindi for MBBS students in Madhya Pradesh. The translation of engineering textbooks into regional languages has begun in ten states, including Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Kerala, and Gujarat, according to Shah, who called the event significant.

These publications are in accordance with the National Education Policy (NEP) of the federal government, which encourages professional education in regional languages. The Madhya Pradesh government's published books are simply transliterations.

The Native Medical Institute (NMI), founded in 1822 by the East India Company in Calcutta (now Kolkata), was created to train native physicians for the civil and military establishments of the Bengal Presidency.

To assist the native students, the institution, which provided a three-year program, translated treatises on anatomy, medicine, and surgery from European languages and created a lexicon of medical terms in the local tongue.

"At the Native Medical Institute (NMI), founded in Calcutta in 1822, students were instructed in pharmacology, materia medica, physiology, and anatomy in addition to learning about the Ayurvedic and (Unani) Tibb systems of medicine.

In this setting, medical vocabularies developed initially in tandem with the creation and translation of textbooks, and they continued to circulate in Bengal's burgeoning medical print industry in the nineteenth century.

For instance, the NMI superintendent Peter Breton compiled a multilingual vocabulary of technical terms relating to the human body, providing equivalents in Arabic, Persian, Hindi, and Sanskrit for English words, writes Charu Singh, a historian of science and professor at Stanford University, in an article published last year in South Asian History and Culture journal.

In reality, NIM successfully resisted many attempts to impose English. John Tytler, the institute's superintendent who followed Peter Breton, passionately fought the concept of using just English in the school, although he was only successful for a short time.

The Bengal Presidency's Governor General, Lord William Bentinck, commissioned a committee in 1934 to examine the state of medical education. The committee found that NMI's training was "inappropriate" and recommended the establishment of a medical college "for the education of the natives" that would only teach western medicine.

The commission advised that its pupils have reading and writing proficiency in both Hindustani and English. The destiny of the NMI was sealed a year later, in 1935, by Thomas Babington Macaulay's Minutes, which aimed to show the necessity of providing Indian indigenous with English education.

With the abolition of NMI and the founding of Medical College Bengal (now more popularly known as Calcutta Medical College) in 1835, European medical education in English in India began.

Many orientalists and language activists persisted in their attempts to advance the cause of Indian languages during the next decades, even as the English language became firmly entrenched in institutions of higher learning, even those that taught science. Rajendralal Mitra, a multi-talented figure in the Bengali Renaissance and the first Indian president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, was one such individual.

He published "A Scheme for the Rendering of European Scientific Terminology into the Vernaculars of India" in 1877, a book that gave suggestions for translating Western scientific and medical writings into Indian tongues.

According to Singh's article, Mitra's Scheme for the Rendering of European Scientific Terms into Indian Vernaculars is "recognized by historians of science and colonial modernity as a key moment, marking the earliest Indian intervention in nineteenth-century discussions of the translation of European scientific and medical knowledge."

Similar to this, a 359-page Hindi Scientific Glossary (HSG) was published in 1906 by the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, an organization founded by scholar and education reformer Madan Mohan Malaviya to encourage the use of the Nagari alphabet and language. To assist Hindi writers of articles and textbooks on scientific subjects, the dictionary provided vernacular counterparts of European scientific and technical words.

Early in the 20th century, Hindi nationalism and language agitation were on the rise in north India. A group of university academics founded the Vernacular Scientific Society, also known as Vigyan Parishad, in 1913 to advance science journalism in Hindi.

Ramdas Gour, the society's president, and a university professor, frequently bemoaned the lack of mother tongue instruction at higher education institutions. The Vigyan Parishad launched the science journal "Vigyan" in 1915, which included essays that bridged the worlds of literature and science. Numerous scientific works were also written and translated into Hindi by Vigyan Parishad.

The Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT) was established by the Government of India in 1961, shortly after gaining independence, with the task of "evolving, developing, and defining" scientific and technical terms in Hindi and other Indian languages, as well as publishing technical dictionaries, glossaries, and encyclopedias. About 300 glossaries in 22 Indian languages have so far been published by the commission, with 185 of them being in Hindi.

"We use a Sanskrit-style word-building approach. When creating terminology for diverse Indian languages, we work with educators, scientists, authors, and linguists. The panel has created Hindi translations for 60,000 medical terms so far.

Right now, our main goal is to digitize and put all of our glossaries online in a searchable fashion. We have already completed work on 80 of our 300 glossaries, which will soon be available online and encourage the publication of engineering and medical textbooks in a variety of Indian languages, according to Prof. Girish Nath Jha, head of the CSTT.

He continues, "We will provide publishers funding to translate medical publications into Indian languages using our dictionaries.

Only nursing books and a few English-to-Hindi medical dictionaries and glossaries have been published by medical publishers, albeit not many medical publishers have been eager to publish publications in Indian languages.

The first author of publications in Hindi for medical students may have been Prof. Trilok Chandra Goel, 85, a retired professor of surgery at King George Medical University (KGMU), Lucknow. Japyee Brothers Medical Publishers, located in Delhi, released his first book in Hindi, "Adhunik Shalya Chikitsa Vigyan" (Textbook of Modern Surgical Sciences), in 2015.

But it took Goel over ten years to find a publisher for his Hindi book, although he is the best-selling author of several medical books in English.

The majority of publishers declined to release it, claiming there is no demand for it. According to Goel, who co-authored the book with his son Apul Goel, also a professor at KGMU, Jaypee Brothers finally consented, but only under the condition that the 3,000-page book would be reduced to around 1,000 pages.

Finding the Hindi counterparts of English medical phrases was a challenge, according to the former professor, who claims that creating the book was a herculean undertaking. He claims to have utilized the CSTT's Detailed Glossary of Technical Terms (published in 1991).

But several terms—including hydatid, hematocele, and pyocele—were lacking, and many more were incorrect or misnomers. I had to invent my own Hindi words as a result. Inflammation turned into pradah, hydatid turned into jalboond, etc., he claims. Goel's keen interest in Hindi literature was important in his success.

Goel claims that while writing the book, he ended up creating 400 brand-new surgical words. The state government organization Uttar Pradesh Bhasha Sansthan, which also published Goel's second book Adhunik Shalya Vigyan last year, will publish his upcoming book, a lexicon of surgical words.

Over the years, the country has seen a tremendous increase in the publishing of medical publications, with many Indian authors' textbooks being sought after worldwide.

Although several medical publishers began publishing nursing books in Hindi in the 1990s, the vast majority of health sciences publications in India are still published in English. The first Hindi-language nursing book was published in 1993 by Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers, one of the biggest medical publishing organizations in the nation with 4,000 volumes in the health sciences to its name. However, the publisher has only published one book for medical students in Hindi so far, written by Prof. Trilok Chandra Goel.

The English-Hindi dictionary by UN Panda is its best-selling Hindi book. "The reality is that there is hardly any demand for medical textbooks in Hindi or any other Indian language.

The market for Hindi-language books is unlikely to increase until medical institutions start offering instruction in the language, according to Ankit Vij, managing director of Jaypee Brothers.

"We have translated medical literature by Indian authors into several foreign languages, including Arabic, Spanish, Italian, and Russian.

English has remained the most popular language since India is a diverse nation and it is difficult to translate medical publications into so many other languages. According to Vij, the percentage of Hindi-language books in our overall sales is essentially nothing.

But Goel is optimistic. He believes that when more students from non-English-medium backgrounds enroll in new medical institutes in northern India, they would feel more at ease speaking their native tongue.

The three texts — Anatomy, Physiology, and Biochemistry — that were translated from English for MBBS students in Madhya Pradesh, he believes, "should not seek to write scientific phrases in Devanagari." Even the titles of these Hindi books have remained the same; just the script has been altered to Devanagari.

“It is possible to study science and medicine in Hindi medium if simple and appropriate terminology is adopted for English words” adds Goel.