Languages of nationhood : political ideologies and the place of English in 20th century India.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of English and Dept. of History, 2011.My research studies the relationship of language and national identity in postcolonial India, with a particular emphasis on the English language. Language politics in India has historically been polarizing, and is already the focus of a significant body of work. Research has focused especially on the trajectory and ramifications of the Hindi-Urdu (or Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani) controversy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which interwove the discourse of nation and linguistic nationalism with that of religion and authentic “Indian-ness.” Discourses of language community and of resistance to linguistic hegemony have been the other major focal point of the existing repertoire, especially with respect to Tamil in south India. This theme has also been analyzed extensively in the context of the linguistic reorganization of states, where the question of national (dis)integration and the potential threat of separatism inherent in the official recognition of geographic and cultural boundaries is front and center. Finally, important debates on the constitutional objective of universal empowerment periodically thrash out the implications of the Indian education policy and the effects of language-related legislation. While each of the above threads is extremely important, the political significance of the English language in postcolonial India has remained largely neglected by academia. The language has been integrated into the cultural fabric of the country in very specific ways. Generally considered the language of power and opportunity, it has a certain socioeconomic purchase that emphasizes class differences and carries echoes of the social stratification from the colonial period. At the same time, local linguistic patterns make this English peculiarly Indian, even as its lexicon is co-opted into the regional languages. Most importantly, English continues to be politically ambivalent, even sixty-two years after India’s independence, as is apparent in its constitutional status: it is the co-official language of India along with Hindi, but only as long as the non-native-Hindi-speaking states do not sanction its removal. My project situates English in the historical and political context of twentieth century India. I examine the political and semi-literary writings of three gargantuan personalities of the Indian national movement--Jawaharlal Nehru, freedom fighter and India’s first Prime Minister, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, freedom fighter and icon of non-violent resistance, and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, civil rights activist, political theorist, India’s first Law Minister, and architect of the Indian constitution--to demarcate the complexities of English in public discourse. The use of these three figures is particularly useful as, between them, they are representative of the three strongest currents of political discourse on language, which contend that (a) too close a focus on cultural identities detracts from the larger national project of development and universal empowerment, (b) linguistic (and other cultural) identities both constitute and signify communities of belonging and exclusion, and (c) literacy and linguistic facility in the language of power is the means to empowerment, but this principle is highly problematic in a multilingual, resource-strapped society. My examination of a combination of literary-historical works and political documents about current events by Nehru, Gandhi, and Ambedkar establishes the existence of a dichotomous pattern of native/foreign, traditional/modern, and inclusive/exclusive in their engagements with English. This pattern, I argue, is a signifier of twentieth-century India’s fraught relationship with its own past, and of how the diverse class, caste, and cultural experiences that constituted the emerging democracy defied attempts at simplification. It also testifies to the larger problem of how a conflict between governmentality and the complexities of equal recognition in a self-consciously multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-ethnic state is perceived. Each individual figure’s attempt to resolve this felt (but not entirely theoretically understood) tension is telling, as it as it lays bare his understanding of the substance and functioning of democracy: Nehru emphasizes the iterative and piecemeal nature of achieving ideological objectives of the state, Gandhi underlines that governance as well as nationhood is often an article of faith, and Ambedkar makes clear that if the principle of equality should not be compromised, adherence to neat narratives of self must be. Finally, I demonstrate that public discourse about English in India generally conflates the politics of identity with the politics of multiculturalism. Regional movements demanding the demarcation of states on linguistic lines as well as the official language controversies are manifestations of protonationalist tendencies that claim specific cultural identities, I argue, while discussions of the sociological problem of ensuring equality of treatment as well as opportunity in a self-proclaimed multilingual nation-state are symptomatic of a crisis of inclusion. The historical and textual analyses and the theoretical exposition that accompanies them make my project relevant not just to South Asia specialists, but also to political theorists and anyone interested in the politics of multiculturalism, language, and democracy