TY - CHAP
T1 - “We are in English-medium right but still we are Indian”
T2 - the discursive construction of (il)legitimate English speakers
AU - Highet, Katy
PY - 2024/6/10
Y1 - 2024/6/10
N2 - Language ideological debates over English in India have emerged at various moments throughout the country’s shifting political economic conditions, from colonial occupation, to Nehruvian socialism, to the new economic laws that have characterised the last three decades, and the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism. While the continuing tensions over the status and role of English in India today are indicative of conflicting political visions for the Indian nation, there is nonetheless a widespread acknowledgement that, for many marginalised Indians, their future stability and success hinge upon access to English. This discourse finds its roots in colonialism and class/caste stratification but has been exacerbated through neoliberal reforms that frame English education as a self-evident path to social mobility. Obscured by this discourse, however, is the unequal allocation of symbolic capital: not all practices of English – and not all speakers – are constructed as legitimate. Drawing on ethnographic data from an English-teaching NGO in Delhi, I show how the discursive delegitimisation of Indian English practices is naturalised through narratives of authenticity that sit in tension with neoliberal framings of English as a globally shared resource. This, I argue, is not only restricted to global struggles over the legitimisation of various English practices and speakers, but also works locally, as different English practices get mapped onto figures of personhood mediated through class and caste. In consequence, marginalised students (and teachers) attempt to distance themselves from delegitimised practices as they negotiate their relationality to the language and their positionality in a larger national and transnational, stratified, imagined community of English speakers. In the wider context of political battles over the definition of the Indian nation and the role that English should – or should not – play within this, the precarious status of the legitimised English speaker in India is ideologically erased.
AB - Language ideological debates over English in India have emerged at various moments throughout the country’s shifting political economic conditions, from colonial occupation, to Nehruvian socialism, to the new economic laws that have characterised the last three decades, and the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism. While the continuing tensions over the status and role of English in India today are indicative of conflicting political visions for the Indian nation, there is nonetheless a widespread acknowledgement that, for many marginalised Indians, their future stability and success hinge upon access to English. This discourse finds its roots in colonialism and class/caste stratification but has been exacerbated through neoliberal reforms that frame English education as a self-evident path to social mobility. Obscured by this discourse, however, is the unequal allocation of symbolic capital: not all practices of English – and not all speakers – are constructed as legitimate. Drawing on ethnographic data from an English-teaching NGO in Delhi, I show how the discursive delegitimisation of Indian English practices is naturalised through narratives of authenticity that sit in tension with neoliberal framings of English as a globally shared resource. This, I argue, is not only restricted to global struggles over the legitimisation of various English practices and speakers, but also works locally, as different English practices get mapped onto figures of personhood mediated through class and caste. In consequence, marginalised students (and teachers) attempt to distance themselves from delegitimised practices as they negotiate their relationality to the language and their positionality in a larger national and transnational, stratified, imagined community of English speakers. In the wider context of political battles over the definition of the Indian nation and the role that English should – or should not – play within this, the precarious status of the legitimised English speaker in India is ideologically erased.
M3 - Chapter
T3 - Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics
BT - Politicising Language
PB - Oxford University Press
ER -