English users and English speakers: the political economy of English under Hindu Nationalism

In Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist India, English occupies a complicated, contested and tense position. On the one hand, it remains synonymous with social mobility, and millions of Indian youth still place their hopes for an escape from poverty in the language. At a national level, English is a key part of India’s attempts to cement its role as a major player on the global stage, particularly through its ability to create a cheap, English-speaking labour force to maintain advantage over rival competitors such as China. At the same time, however, Hindu nationalists’ co-optation of ‘decolonising’ discourses sees them frequently reject, at least discursively, the English language in favour of Hindi or other ‘Indian’ languages. Adopting a political economic perspective, this paper asks how the ideological tensions of the Hindu nationalist stance towards English are managed and made sense of by its proponents. To do so, it focuses on the media output of one Hindu nationalist journalist during a key period in the renegotiation of the management, distribution and valuation of English. Through an analysis of the journalist’s discursive positioning towards English and the wider linguistic ecology of the imagined (Hindu) Indian nation, I argue that these ideological tensions are managed through: 1) the mobilisation of ‘Indian’ English as a means of appropriation and detachment; 2) the (re)negotiation of the value of Hindi through discourses of authentic ‘Indianness’; and 3) the discursive construction of the ‘elite English language speaker’ as an ideological foil to the pragmatic, Hindu nationalist, English user.