Postcolonial Language Ideologies: Indian Students Reflect on Mother Tongue and English

Abstract

The 2020 National Education Policy (NEP) proposes a revision to the Indian education system. The document foregrounds “mother tongue,” a concept that has been highly salient in India since the mid‐nineteenth century, by specifying that students should learn in it. But it makes little mention of English, despite its importance, and the desire for it, at every level of education. The construction of nation and language in the NEP begs a question: how do the constructions, foci, and relative silences of policy resonate with people's understandings and uses of languages? This article incorporates interviews at an engineering university in western India, the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, to examine graduate students' reflections on mother tongue in relation to their multilingual practices on campus and at home. The students exhibited a range of ideological perspectives on mother tongue and English that are not addressed in policy measures. Using the heuristic of postcolonial semiotics, we show that the students were unable to simultaneously identify with the nation (via mother tongue) and English. We contribute to linguistic anthropology and South Asian studies by foregrounding people's metadiscourse in how they make sense of, and ultimately problematize, constructions of colonial and postcolonial policy.

“RIPEnglish”: Race, class and ‘good English’ in India

“…This elitist positioning, as we have seen, can be to some extent mitigated by appealing to liberal discourses of diversity and representational politics (#LoveYourIdentity) or by instructing viewers to “BE PROUD” of their national language. In the context of highly contested debates over the imagination of the Indian nation (Hall, 2019), these moves allow actors to distance themselves from the figure of the English‐speaking, Western‐facing (post)colonial elite and appeal to popular anti‐English nationalist discourses (see, for example, the near erasure of English from the BJP's 2020 National Education Policy (LaDousa, Davis, and Choksi, 2022; LaDousa and Davis, 2022), or recent appeals from the home minister Amit Shah to replace English with Hindi as the country's lingua franca, all under the guise of progressive politics). Yet, much like the #LoveYourIdentity discourse demonstrated, actors do so while reaping the benefits of their proximity to English, profiting from the anxieties they ostensibly seek to dispel and reinscribing the colonial, racial, and class logics that they are both constrained and enabled by.…”

(Out)Caste language ideologies: Intersectional raciolinguistic stigma and assimilation from denotified tribal students' perspectives in rural India

“…India's recent overhaul in 2020 of the National Education Policy (NEP) dictates that whenever possible, there should be greater use of and support for mother tongues, defined as students' home and often first languages and languages of comfort, in education (LaDousa, Davis, and Choksi 2022; Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India 2020). Mother tongues can be an umbrella term for official state languages (LaDousa 2010, 2014) and languages spoken at home “without formal training” (Pattanayak 1981, 50).…”

“…In India, educational spaces bring into focus differences among students' linguistic backgrounds, socioeconomic classes, education aspirations, castes, races, and religions (LaDousa and Davis 2021, 2022; LaDousa, Davis, and Choksi 2022; Mathew 2018). However, there is never only one category or a binary of either/or designations of identities functioning to uphold social structures of exclusion and inclusion, especially in education.…”

Implementation and Impact of Language Policy: The Case of Kyrgyz Students

“…1). Covert policies often lead to confusion in heuristic self-identification in postcolonial societies (LaDousa et al, 2022). A dominant language can "establish hegemony in language use" (Tollefson, 1991, p. 16) and win without written policies (Schiffman, 2002).…”

“…In some countries, citizens identify with one language even though the state promotes a multilingualism policy, as in the case of Luxembourg (Horner & Weber, 2010). In other countries, heuristic selfidentification must often be refined, as in contemporary India, where citizens often cannot simultaneously identify with their mother tongue and English (LaDousa et al, 2022). There is also an identity type in which part of the same ethnic group believes that the language of another ethnic group can be its mother tongue (DeLorme, 2005;Csernicskó and Fedinec, 2016;Tulum and Zubalov, 2022).…”