The social life of English: Language and gender in western India, 1850–1940

This dissertation explores the process by which the English language and English education built upon and exacerbated gender differences in colonial India. Conversely, it traces the manner in which the social division of gender in these locations shaped the purpose, access to, and content of English studies. Focusing on the western Indian cities of Bombay and Poona, the project has examined government records, reports from the more prominent schools introduced to teach English to Indian girls, newspaper accounts and popular cultural debates over the method and purpose of women\u27s English education, and finally the writings of some of western India\u27s first English educated men and women. The dissertation emphasises the close relationship between ‘English’ and ‘women’ by arguing that the meaning and constitution of both were under constant surveillance and contest. The relationship was inflected by the definition of ‘foreign’ culture, domesticity, the ‘vernacular’ and tradition. The history of English was thus gendered in its formulation. Next demonstrating the symbiotic dynamic between English and ‘the vernacular’, the project argues that the manner in which English came to be separated from ‘indigenous’ languages was vitally supported by the politics of gender difference. This ‘engendering’ of the relationship between the vernacular and English saw the latter take on a curiously masculine authority. The dissertation also traces the growing power of literature as generated by the bourgeois project of refining and controlling a certain kind of desirable femininity. This was deeply imbricated in the ongoing process of delineating social class. The manner in which English literature became synonymous with English supported the relationship between English literary studies and the education of bourgeois womanhood. Finally, the dissertation discusses the manner by which some English educated women and men themselves defined English, and the possibility that ‘English’ provided them with a flight from the determinations of gender and class. The history of Indian English thus intersected in various ways with the production of gendered subjectivities. This project strives to elicit the details of this mutually constitutive relationship