Tagore in the morning, Shakespeare at noon: My Bengali-medium schooling doesn’t hamper my English-medium job

Let me tell you about the first piece of literature I was formally made to love. It was not Shakespeare. It was not Dickens. It was Rabindranath Tagore’s “Kumor parar gorur gari, bojhai kora kolshi haanri…”. The potter’s bullock cart – going creak, creak, creak – on its way to the market.

I recited it with my classmates in Class 1 on the school lawn, barefoot on dewy grass as Patha Bhavan High School preferred, with the kind of theatrical commitment that only six-year-olds and method actors can muster. Sutapa Di (we dearly called our teachers – didi instead of ma’am or miss) made us recite it with a gentle clap for the cart’s creak. Nobody explained to us then that we were reading a Nobel laureate. We thought we were just making cart noises.

What I did not register then was that Bengali was not just one subject among many others. It was the medium in which every subject arrived. The nitrogen cycle, the French Revolution, the laws of motion – all in Bengali.

By the afternoon of the same day, the same class had a lesson in English. Not English as a foreign curiosity to be cautiously prodded at from a distance, but as a subject of equal standing and seriousness. This was the founding proposition of the school – Patha Bhavan, one of Kolkata’s reputed ones. Built on the educational philosophy of Tagore’s Visva Bharati in Santiniketan and run under the Brahmo Samaj, the school believed that the mother tongue and any acquired tongue could coexist, without cannibalising each other. Both mattered.

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Work in ‘English-medium’

I now work as an editor at a news portal, having spent 16 years before that on newsdesks of reputed English dailies. For all those years, and now, I have done the same essential things – read other people’s reported stories, improved them without breaking them, cut three paras down to one without losing the meaning, and written headlines that must be accurate, urgent, and grammatically airtight in approximately six words.

It is, in other words, a career that has run entirely in English – not just functional English, but English held to a standard where a misplaced modifier or a headline that can be parsed in two ways is a small professional catastrophe. And when people, upon learning of my Bengali-medium background, express mild surprise, I smile with the patience of someone who has been managing this misunderstanding for 16 years and counting.

The Bengali medium, you see, is the first thing they hear. Next, they assume it’s a problem.

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English in Bengali-medium school

The assumption goes like this – Bengali medium means English as an afterthought, a token subject. A person who has studied in Bengali medium and now writes in English must have suffered, struggled, and self-taught their way to competence through sheer grit and a dog-eared dictionary. It is a compelling narrative. It is also, in my case, completely wrong.

My school did not treat English as a consolation prize. It had its own English curriculum, developed independently of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE), and its teaching of English literature, grammar, composition, and expression was of the same standard as Bengali. We read Tagore, Jibanananda Das, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay in the morning and Shakespeare in the afternoon. The school believed that language – any language – was a way of thinking, not merely a way of talking. It was the idea that words, in whatever script they arrived, deserved to be taken seriously.

What this produced, I now understand, was something rarer than bilingualism in the technical sense. Bengali gave me a sense of intimacy: the granular, textured understanding of my mother tongue. English gave me the reach. The two did not compete. They collaborated.

I saw the proof of this early. Not in any newsroom, but in college, where for the first time, students from different boards – ICSE, CBSE , and more – sat together and studied the same subject. And the gap that was supposed to separate those who had learnt of the world in English from those who did it in Bengali turned out, in lecture halls as well as exam centres, to be largely imagined. All of us wrote essays, made projects. Some of mine were better, some of theirs were. But the “Bengali medium” was not visible in any of it.

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Bengali or English: ‘The newsroom does not care’

The newsroom, to its credit, does not care. This is one of journalism’s more functional qualities. Nobody pulls up your school records when a page is waiting. Nobody asks what language you studied the water cycle in when a headline needs to be fixed in two minutes. The copy either holds or it doesn't. The headline either sings or it clunks.

Fluency and literacy are not the same thing – a distinction the newsroom enforces daily, whether or not anyone states it aloud. Being taught every subject in Bengali does not mean having to pause before framing an English sentence correctly. Nor does it get in the way of reading a sentence critically: to hear where it goes slack, where the verb is doing too little work, where the headline accidentally says the opposite of what the reporter intended. That’s an editor’s specific skill, to care about languages as a craft, and comes with years of grinding. And that is what the school foundation teaches you. To care, in equal measure, irrespective of the medium of instruction.

After all, an editor is judged by the page. And the page does not know what language you learnt to read in. It never asked.

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Is the vernacular medium a disadvantage?

But there is a broader conversation. Is Bengali medium – or the vernacular medium – a disadvantage for those seeking a career that requires English? The answer, in my experience, depends almost entirely on what the school did with its English curriculum, and not the language in which one studied history, geography or science.

What the Bengali-medium background did give me – and this English medium cannot replicate by structural design – was a second instrument of judgement at the editing desk. When a reporter files a copy from the hinterlands of Bengal, I can hear the Bengali that lives underneath the English – the choice of words, the expressions, and the underlying emotion. An editor that catches that without needing it flagged is not working with a handicap. That is, depending on the story, the most important person in the room.

It is also the kind of skill no style-guide teaches you. You either grew up with two languages, or you didn't.

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I think about my school’s wager sometimes – the belief that you could give one a Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Guy de Maupassant in the same week, and produce not a confused child but a complete one. The cart from “Kumor para” is still creaking its way to market somewhere in my memory, and the English – tested across 16 years of print deadlines, thousands of headlines, and now a news portal that does not sleep – turned out fine.

The Bengali medium was never an obstacle the world expected it to be. I edit copies in English. I write headlines: six words, accurate, urgent, no ambiguity. And the surprise, when it comes, is never in the newsroom.