New Languages of Schooling: Ethnicity, Education and Equality in Nepal

Mother-tongue education has remained a controversial issue in Nepal. Scholars, activists and policy-makers have, on the one hand, favored mother-tongue education from the standpoint of social justice. Against these views, others have identified this as predominantly groupist in its orientation and not helpful in an imagination of a unified national community. Taking this contention as a point of inquiry, this paper aims to explore the contested space of mother-tongue education to understand the ways in which people position themselves within the polarizing debates of ethnicity-based claims on education in Nepal. Drawing from the ethnographic fieldwork in mother-tongue education school, in this paper, I illustrate that the students made meaning in their everyday world by maintaining the multilingual repertoire that included their mother tongue, Nepali and some English; multilingualism was used as a strategy for mother-tongue education. I propose a notion of simultaneity to explain this attempt to seek membership into multiple groups and display of apparently contradictory dynamics. The practices in these schools, on the one hand, display inward-looking characteristics through the everyday use of mother tongue, the construction of unified ethnic identity and cultural practices. On the other hand, there were outward-looking dynamics of making claims in the universal spaces of national education and public places. The salience of these processes is the simultaneous membership to multiple groups, claims over public spaces and in the spaces of nationalism, hitherto associated with Nepali. This paper illustrates that contrary to the essentialist categories espoused in both nationalist discourse and ethnic activism, students in these school display affiliation to multiple languages and identities that were seen as neither incompatible nor binary opposites

Nepal: Between the 'Local' and the 'Global' of the National Education

Education in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands is a critical reference guide to development of education in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Comoros Islands, Maldives, Mauritius, Seychelles and Zanzibar. The chapters provide an overview of the education system in each country, focusing particularly on contemporary education policies and some of the problems countries in this region face during the processes of development. Key themes include the practice of implementation of educational policy and the impact of global and local educational decisions on societies. Due to the demographic scale and the cultural diversity of India, the volume contains a particularly extensive coverage of the distinctive educational issues in this country. Including a comparative introduction to the issues facing education in the region as a whole, this book is an essential reference for researchers, scholars, international agencies and policy-makers

Introduction: Language, Education and the Nepali Nation 1

Every morning, students in Jagat Sundar Bwonekuthi (JSB) School gathered in the main hall to sing their school song. Students, lined up neatly in their class rows, sang this song in Nepal Bhasa, one of the 123 minority languages in Nepal. The song portrays an image of Nepal with diverse terrain – hills, mountains and Tarai – where different groups speaking different languages are the ‘jewels’ that adorn the country. This discursive move to invoke the love for one's country, while declaring the love for one's mother tongue (matri bhasa), was one of the important ways in which JSB sought to institutionalise their mother tongue as the language of education. In this context, the school song simultaneously positioned ethnolinguistic identity as national identity, the one that does not hinder but bolsters the notion of Nepali nationhood. A few months later, I continued my fieldwork in another school that used Dangaura Tharu as the medium of instruction: Jana Kalyan Higher Secondary School ( JKHSS) in Kapilvastu. In the very first meeting at JKHSS, the teachers discussed extensively on the new multilingual textbook that they had been using in primary level, that is, Grades I–III. Showing me the textbook with Dangaura Tharu and Nepali language scripts simultaneously printed on every page (more discussion on this in Chapter 4), JKHSS teachers explained, ‘Each language has its role.’ I was often told during our conversations, ‘Mother tongue cannot replace Nepali because Nepali is the contact language

Anthropological Perspectives on Education in Nepal: Educational Transformations and Avenues of Learning

This chapter is an introduction to the volume. Offering an overview of the field of ethnographic research on education in Nepal, it places the volume within the context of this and the larger scholarly debate on education processes in South Asia. At the same time, it argues that Nepal provides a unique case for exploring educational transformations because of the peculiar position that Nepal—as a nation-state and a scholarly realm—holds in the South Asian region. Moreover, it argues how the volume as a whole situates Nepal on the global map of educational anthropology as a discipline

Sustainable Development Goals in Nepal: Prospects and challenges

Nepal has committed to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. The country stands at a critical juncture at the moment. Nepal is looking forward to graduating from being a member of the Least Developed Country (LDC) category. This progress has been hindered first by the decade-long armed conflict between 1996 to 2006 and now as a result of the massive earthquakes in 2015. Nonetheless, Nepal has made a substantial improvement in development indicators, showing encouraging progress towards SDGs, even while these developments are unevenly distributed across various income groups, social groups, and geographical region. With the promulgation of a new Constitution in 2015, Nepal has taken significant steps towards decentralising service delivery and working towards inclusive development. It is still too early to comment on the performance of local bodies under its provisions, but the broad range of power and responsibilities enjoyed by the provincial and local governments provides a promising opportunity to make progress towards achieving the SDGs

Language, artificial education, and future-making in indigenous language education

This paper examines how language-based artificial intelligence is envisaged to imagine new futures for indigenous languages. It draws on the visions, programmes, and plans of six language initiatives that are developing language technology for often-marginalised indigenous, tribal, and minority (ITM) languages, such as Gondi, Maithili, Rajasthani and Mundari, in India. We note three distinct discourses: (1) technological optimism in utilising these new opportunities by claiming space for otherwise-marginalised languages, (2) the imperative for collaborative and collective work in order to address sparse datasets, and (3) the need to negotiate the contested nature of imagining a new collective future. This paper argues that indigenous language technology is not just a technical project but a contested process of subverting linguistic hierarchy through the ‘active presencing’ of these languages. Overall, the paper emphasizes the need for a nuanced approach that recognizes the interplay between technology, language education, and broader social and political factors