4 minute read
Language politics and education: navigating ‘postcolonial shame’ in India and Wales
Mohini Gupta (Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, 2020) is a DPhil candidate researching language politics and education in India and Wales. Her interests originate from her decade-long enquiry into language hierarchies, language stereotypes, language shame, and youth culture in urban India. Here, in our ‘three-minute thesis’ feature, she presents a synopsis of her work.
In 1909, MK Gandhi remarked, ‘Mr Lloyd George is taking steps to ensure that Welsh children do not forget their language. How much more need is there for Indians to preserve their language than for the Welsh to preserve theirs, and how much more keen should we be?’ Linguistic connections between India and Wales go back to the 1800s, when the Welsh missionary Thomas Jones wrote down the Khasi language for the first time and provided the spoken language with a script.
My DPhil research at the Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies highlights the threats faced by Indian and Welsh languages due to a common coloniser since the 1800s, and the oppression that these languages were subjected to through the creation of a language hierarchy in which English was given a superior status. The theoretical underpinnings of my doctoral project are drawn from the discipline of sociolinguistics, primarily focusing on the theory of ‘language ideologies’ and ‘language socialisation’.
According to American linguist Michael Silverstein, linguistic (or language) ideologies are ‘any sets of beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalisation or justification of perceived language structure and use’. My research looks at how language ideologies of the state are reproduced in educational institutions, especially ideologies around the hierarchy between English and ‘regional’ languages. In 2011 Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin explained the concept of ‘language socialisation’ by stating that young people are socialised simultaneously ‘into and through’ language at school. It is through language that students start to learn about the world they inhabit, and comprehend social cues and contexts. Ideas about the self, society, and the nation are primarily formed through an understanding of language. Therefore, language teaching not only reinforces language ideologies, but also propagates cultural ideas about ethical, moral or patriotic values within a nation, and hence becomes important as a field of study.
In terms of education, the ‘Minute on Indian Education’ speech by Thomas B Macaulay in 1835 stated that English must be taught to every Indian for the purposes of ‘intellectual improvement’. Macaulay went on to declare that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. Similarly, the 1870 Education Act in England and Wales ensured that English-medium education was established as superior to Welsh-medium education. This Act was rooted in previous findings by the UK Parliament in an 1847 report which stated that ‘because of their language, the mass of the Welsh people are inferior to the English in every branch of practical knowledge and skill’. In both cases, the argument against the Welsh language in Wales, and Sanskrit and Arabic languages in India, was that they did not contain ‘practical’ or ‘scientific’ information and that the people’s intellectual development and enrichment was impossible without learning English.
These ideologies also translated to discriminatory practices in the classroom where children were shamed for speaking their ‘mother tongue’. Practices like the ‘Welsh Not’ in Wales, where students were made to hang a piece of wood around their neck if they were ‘caught’ speaking in Welsh, ensured that the shame and humiliation attached to the language continued. It was a direct result of these policies that the percentage of Welsh speakers in the country fell from 54% in 1891 to 18% in 1981. In many Indian schools too, practices that punish or fine or parade-around students who are ‘caught’ speaking their mother tongue on school grounds continue to this day.
Such linguistic and educational practices only reinforce cultural and linguistic hierarchies and perpetuate language ideologies among a new generation of students. As a result, there arose a similar sense of ‘postcolonial shame’ in India and Wales attached to learning these languages, since an official and structural hierarchy was created between the languages through education policy. Structural changes in language and education policy led to an internalisation of language hierarchies over the years and gave birth to a generational trauma attached to learning ‘native’ languages in these regions. It is this trend and its impact on the urban, educated youth that I aim to study in my DPhil research through a first-of-its-kind cross-cultural comparison between the two geographical regions: India and Wales.
