But ill fares the land of English departments, and this articles discusses the issue in terms of five interrelated problems; a) Faulty Perception, b) Uncompromising Element in the English Culture, c) Sloth, d) The Demographic Imbalance, and e) The Pedagogical Crux.

Faulty Perception
Our colonial legacy has taught us to look at English, to paraphrase Homi Bhaba, as signs for wonders. I think our students seeking admission are simply carried away by their fascination for the cultural superiority English enjoys in our society. Going back to my student days, I remember that I chose English deliberately over Bangla, in which also I had qualified for admission, because I thought by reading English I would be thought of as a superior student. Just as I had no idea why I was taking admission in English, except for this overwhelming attraction for English, admission seekers today likewise have no notion about either what English literature means or what learning the English language means. So, the primary motivation for choosing to study English Literature and Language, which has to come from a student's genuine liking for it, is missing here.

A great many student also come to read English because their parents have wished them to do so. Many guardians who have taken English as signs for wonders, but couldn't study English themselves, and so send their children to study English as wish fulfillment. Still others send their children, especially sons, to study English because of the greater job opportunity available for English students. Many more, and here I may be excused for saying so, send their daughters to study in the English Department as it would enhance their prospects in the marriage market. A suitable girl being constructed for a suitable boy. Many girl students, decked with beauty and charms and a comparatively duller head, just enter the department and go out by the marriage door without completing their degree.

This infatuation has grown out of rather a misplaced perspective regarding the status of English in Bangladesh. The geo-historical and socio-cultural reasons which have turned English into a link language in India do not exist here so as to enforce the use of English as an essentiality in everyday communication. The status of English here is that of a foreign language, and not of a second language.

The Uncompromising Element in the English Culture
English Departments in the public universities teach the traditional canon of the English literature, with, nowadays, the addition of post-modern, critical theory, Diasporic literature and new Englishes. Many private universities however contain a lot more courses on business English and linguistic areas than on literature.

I remember Francis Rolt, who taught English at Chittagong university in the late seventies (he was also a novelist whose book The Last Armenian was a love story centered around the church at Armanitola, Dhaka) surprised our academic committee by wanting to drop Shakespeare from the syllabus. He argued that teaching Shakespeare to students who couldn't even read straight English was impossible.

At that time I thought Francis spoke blasphemy, but now I think differently. The core courses of English Literature have become impossible for the students to deal with since their basic command of the language is so poor. The core courses of English literature have become impossible for the students of literature to deal with. Their basic language skills are too poor. A certain number of students have in them the sensitivity for literature, but their language skills are so faulty that they can't express their opinions. Others may have the language ability to a moderate degree, but they don't enjoy imaginative writings. Students who have both language skills and literary acumen constitute a tiny minority in English departments, in the range of 1 to 2 per cent.

Learning a foreign language means learning a foreign culture. Our students, I think, often miss out on this notion. In the public universities' English Departments students seeking admission have very high scores in SSC and HSC examinations, and because of their thorough rote learning of grammar rules they are found eligible for admission in the Department. Most of these students, on entering, find both the atmosphere of the Department and the cultural milieu of an English department not entirely to their taste.

So, they either turn very passive and mute, shy like potatoes, or turn upstart, cultivating a fashion, after they pass out, of wearing a three-piece suit even in hot summer, as teacher, advocate, or government official.

There's a core element in English language and literature which is more amenable to an urban-based culture than to a village-based culture. For Dhaka University English Department perhaps this problem of getting culturally-attuned students is less than it is in other public universities, as Dhaka has always a greater concentration of urban-based families. Such is not the case with, say, Chittagong University, which because of its ungodly distance from the city is shunned by parents from the city. The private university English departments are luckier in this respect as they also get more students from city-based families, with a more English-friendly cultural environment.

Sloth
Teachers in most of the English Departments as equally de-motivated. The better ones suffer from this inertia, which results from their realization that no matter how much effort they put in to excel in their subject, it is not good enough in the context of English departments abroad.

A promising and talented English professor in a Bangladeshi university may find it difficult to keep up with the advanced developments that other English faculty members in other countries, say, India, are making. So some degree of frustration is rooted in him thereby, and it burns him further as he knows that he can't do anything about it, as the infrastructure facilities he is given to work in are at the best minimum. India, for example, has many established publishing houses that bring out English texts and critical texts on a regular basis. The books published find a ready market, too.

I think much of the problem why an English academic scholarship hasn't grown here lies in what is termed in linguistic pedagogy as 'mother tongue interference'. Many brilliant teachers of English have been cleft by this, and which may not often be obvious, extraordinary tension between Bangla literature and English literature. I don't know whether English teachers in India or Pakistan suffer from this nagging bite of the conscience, but in Bangladesh, as Bengali is a substantial literature on its own, and, as I have pointed out, that English is not a need but an exercise here, therefore, a university English teacher given to serious thinking about life, society and literature, does often remain conflicted about which medium he should express himself.

William Radice, noting this tension to be present in Bangladeshi writers in an interview with Kaldhara, a literary journal from Chittagong, said that becoming a bilingual writer is often difficult and unwarranted. We see, after some time when teachers of English pass their middle stage of life, or say, when they have secured their professorship, they concentrate more on writing in Bangla since it probably provides a better platform to say the things they want to say, as well as provide the scope to reach a greater readership. We see professors of English writing full time in Bangla; those few who do write in English, prolific though they may be, unfortunately however get to be less well-known than the former. Bangladesh perhaps doesn't at the moment have circumstances conducive for English language literary scholarship to thrive. In the future, it probably will.

This also explains another question, which is that in our society English still belongs with a small elite group, English ensures their empowerment and influence. Socially speaking, English is for the elites and Bangla is for the masses. We've not yet found out the way to integrate English into our national life. Amitav Ghosh's contention, in a debate titled "Indian languages versus English," that the debate in itself was meaningless since one's duty was to write in whatever language he felt himself at ease, will sound strange to us.

Do we aspire after Ghosh's kind of owning of English? If not, does English literary scholarship indirectly suffer when whole faculties write not in English but in Bangla? I think this is an unanswerable question.

Demographic imbalance
This is a general problem in Bangladesh educational sector. After independence people have increasingly aspired towards higher studies. Every parent want their sons/daughters to get a Master's degree. Many more students are coming for admission in the universities than there are logistic facilities available for them: dearth of classrooms, accommodation and food, lab and computers, teachers and books are a constantly felt problem. To meet this structural problem many colleges all over the country have been permitted to open Honours and Master's programmes without enough teachers and enough libraries, resulting in the steady deterioration of the standard of higher education. This has given rise to another more crucial problem, which is that many more students with very poor educational background/s are seeking higher education, thus creating an imbalance between quality and quantity.

In this respect the English departments have been directly hit, because in no other subject perhaps the gap between desire and ability is more acutely felt than in English. In the Arts faculty English is always preferred by the admission seekers as their first choice, but by any pedagogical judgment the students who qualify as the best students in the admission test are not good enough to undergo a rigorous graduate program in English.

The Pedagogical Crux
The motivational factor which I seem to have implied as resting in an interest in literature is however facing a challenge from more modern notions of communicative discourses. Books and syllabuses are published and recommended which show a surge of English studies sans literature.

There's no harm in that as long as students show an improvement of their language skills. But the students who come to take admission to Honours courses surprise the teachers by their ignorance of such basic knowledge of grammar like subject-verb agreement in the simplest order, the third person s inflexion, the apostrophe to indicate possession, and capitalization. We often come across expressions like 'He have', 'They has', 'napoleon' (with a small n), 'Boxer and Clover are two horse', and mixture of tenses. All this now happens, I believe, and which didn't happen before, is due to a dearth of supply of literary pieces to the students. Communicative approaches to language learning, based on electronic equipment, can't be successful here as most of the educational institutions are void of these facilities.

Furthermore the Unit System Admission Policy in public universities has meant students ticking off a set of multiple choice questions, which does not either judge their cognitive knowledge or their language power.

After joining Premier University, Chittagong in 2003 I, along with my colleagues, took extreme care in crafting the syllabus. To make up the speech deficiency of students, we encourage the students to talk in English, and keep all their academic activities under constant surveillance. We hold monthly seminars on a regular basis which are run by in-house faculty as well as by teachers from other universities, including some from Dhaka University. These seminars have proved largely fruitful.

But in a private university most of what you do is compromised on admission, at least in the beginning phase. It has to be done, because if you admit fewer students then many of them might drop, and the department will face the prospect of becoming emptied of students. For a private university this prospect is disastrous. It's not unlike a shop, which attempts in every possible way to catch customers. Once the goodwill is established, the shop then can run on a regulated method.

Another problem lies in recruiting teachers. The good young teachers don't want to stay in a private university because of job uncertainty. They even prefer teaching in a government college away from the city instead of a private university.

The Solution
English departments cannot run without an English literary canon. The syllabus may be highly modified so as to include writers from the postcolonial phase, but there has to be a mainstay English literature component. So how do we motivate students into reading the books from the syllabus? One way is to enrich both library book stocks and Internet access. Unaccountably students have developed the habit of refraining from carrying texts into the classroom. This must be discouraged by making books available to them from the library, even through photocopy, or asking them to procure the books from the market. Oxford, Cambridge, and other noted publishing houses publish texts suitable for students. These should be imported in abundant copies.

I personally used to shun notebooks written by the likes of Ramji Lal and company, as they drastically curb the students' imaginative response to literature, but recently I've begun to think that they do benefit the students, and, by extension, am entertaining the idea of requesting my colleagues in Bangladesh to undertake similar projects.

Finally, the notion must be clear that students are reading English and the literature in it for growing an independent frame of mind freed from any colonial hangover; as George Lamming says in a different context: " ... for English is no longer the exclusive language of the men who live in England. That stopped a long time ago; and it is today, among other things, a West Indian language."

However, that feeling is easier to perceive than to materialize, and the Irishman Macmorris's famous question in Henry the V, "What is my nation?" haunts us not a little as we think of giving space to English.

Mohit UI Alam is professor of English at Chittagong University and Premier University, Chittagong.