The English Medium Myth

Every field of serious study in India — engineering, medicine, law, civil services — is conducted primarily in English, a language most students did not grow up speaking at home. Sankrant Sanu's argument is that this arrangement, treated as natural and progressive, is in fact a handicap disguised as aspiration. His book examines the claim that English-medium instruction produces better outcomes and finds it does not survive scrutiny.

Sanu looks at countries that have built world-class scientific and technical institutions without abandoning their own languages, pointing to the accumulated evidence that students learn harder material faster, retain it better, and think more originally when they are not also translating in real time. The costs of the English-medium model fall most heavily on students from non-English-speaking families — which is to say the majority — who must master a foreign language as a prerequisite for accessing knowledge that other countries deliver in the mother tongue.

The book makes the case that language policy is education policy, and that no genuine democratisation of Indian knowledge is possible while the gatekeeping language remains one most Indians learn as a subject rather than live in.