Ideologies of Mother Tongue at an Indian University: From Stage to Discussion

Research Articl

Disparate Markets: Language, Nation, and Education in North India

In this article, I explore the ideological underpinnings of the Indian government\u27s language policies in the school setting, and I investigate why they fail to be compelling to residents of Banaras, a city in North India. The multiple language markets that exist in India are incommensurate and subvert the government\u27s language policies in multiple ways. By exploring the uneven quality of these markets, this article illustrates the especially complicated dilemmas in which postcolonial nation‐states are implicated

Of Nation and State: Language, School, and the Reproduction of Disparity in a North Indian City

Banaras, a city located in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, offers its residents many types of schools for pre-university education. This article argues that only some schools, those bifurcated by a distinction between ones that utilize Hindi and ones that utilize English, cater to those people who belong to what a large number of media venues and scholars call India\u27s new middle class. By using the growingly salient notion of language ideology, this article explores the ways in which particular constructions of the Indian nation and state emerge from discursive reflection on schools in Banaras. When reflecting on the language in which classroom practice occurs in a school, people in Banaras foreground the nation as an organizing idiom, whereas when reflecting on school practices such as the collection of school fees and the affiliation of a school with an administrative board, people in Banaras foreground the state. By tracing the very different parameters of moral judgment that emerge within the two domains, this article calls for the study of constructions of the nation and state that illustrate the possibilities of their conceptualization in tandem

In the Mouth but not on the Map: Visions of Language and Their Enactment in the Hindi Belt

While scholars working in colonial and post-colonial North India have devoted a great deal of attention to language variation, they have largely ignored the discursive use of names for language varieties. In this article, I investigate the ways that speakers enter into dialogic relationships with distinct voices, in the rubric of Bakhtin, depending upon which names for language varieties they mention. I reflect upon conversations between residents of Banaras, a city of approximately two million in North India, in which names for language varieties cluster into three sets. Each set of language names invokes particular language ideologies constructed in India\u27s colonial and post-colonial past. The first two sets—one comprised by “Hindi” and “English” and the other comprised by names for more local varieties—intersect official notions about the proper fit between language and its context of use. The third set does not. In order to account for the third set, in which speakers forego official, authoritative descriptions of languages, I note that interactional phenomena, in addition to ideological dimensions of language, are crucial in understanding the ways that people differently reflect on language varieties in practice

Hindi Is Our Ground, English Is Our Sky: Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India

A sea change has occurred in the Indian economy in the last three decades, spurring the desire to learn English. Most scholars and media venues have focused on English exclusively for its ties to processes of globalization and the rise of new employment opportunities. The pursuit of class mobility, however, involves Hindi as much as English in the vast Hindi-Belt of northern India. Schools are institutions on which class mobility depends, and they are divided by Hindi and English in the rubric of “medium,” the primary language of pedagogy. This book demonstrates that the school division allows for different visions of what it means to belong to the nation and what is central and peripheral in the nation. It also shows how the language-medium division reverberates unevenly and unequally through the nation, and that schools illustrate the tensions brought on by economic liberalization and middle-class status.https://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/books/1092/thumbnail.jp