I received a very pointed understanding about these issues when I brought up my own children in total English. They were not made to be in any Malayalam talking area. Even though this statement may mean that they were cut off from society, the actuality was that they were more in contact with others, with such things as age difference and other powerful social differences not mattering to them.

However, in the small village I was forced to live in at a particular time, it did create some social problems. For the first time, the teacher class came across persons, of local genetic breed, and also youngsters, who they couldn’t address with a Nee. For, it was not effective, for it was incomprehensible. It was a very funny situation, wherein the teacher class couldn’t enforce their traditional right to suppression and subordination.

The force that these types of words have on an individual is not quite understandable in English. For example, the lower persons really enjoy the thrill of having the opportunity to address an elevated person with a Nee, and refer to with an Avan. The effect it has on the other person of refinement is quite discernable. As if he is being despoiled with no shield of defence in his possession. The Indian police know this, and use it very effectively. The moment they get their hands on anyone who they want to despoil, all they have to do is to use the lower grade words. Even if the other person is a great leader, he literally goes into abominable levels.

When my children were moving around the place with no concern for the degrading words, for they simply couldn’t understand it, it was a very strange experience for everyone, which they had never even dreamt of in their wildest dreams.

The issue became more acrimonious when these youngsters started taking English training for persons who were very much senior to them in age. Their training was simply to interact with them, and make them talk, sing, play indoor and outdoor games, and simply go walking for long and short hiking trips. However, in all these interactions, I had to give a very stringent word to the trainees that no words of lower indicant levels should be used to the young trainers. No words or usages signifying Nee, Aval etc. Both males and females were in the training programme.

It was then that the local teaching class, especially those under the leadership of the local Marxist Party started their committee meetings to face this totally unheard of awkward situation, wherein the children who should be under the uneducated teacher were doing the training. A number of police cases of not educating the children came up, with the nonsensical Compulsory Education Act being the main legal support.

The issue here was that the teachers had the right to address a child with a Nee, and refer to him and her with an Avan and Aval, respectively, both of the lowest indicant level. The same right which the Indian feudal lords, the zamindars had over their vassals. English was erasing this right of theirs.

Even though the children’s court gave a verdict in my favour, ultimately, due to a lot of family pressure, the two of them were put into school. The extended family members did bear a grudge against me, for not teaching the children Malayalam. It was literarily akin to what happened to the aborigine children in Australia when they were brought up in English.

The extremely feudal quality, lower caste, crude-word-using persons, who could have various claims upon the children, by connecting to them by various routes of domination, as uncles, aunts, elder brother, elder sister, younger brother, younger sister etc. were all totally cut off from their privilege to use the lower, subordinating words on the two of them.

Moreover, the various persons who became connected to them, both young and old, did get mental elevation from their association with them. All this was not borne with equanimity by the so-called extended family members. It was they who did really act in the sly to see that the children are put in the schools, to be brought into the same levels as other children in the society.