9789382993964

NEW NEW NEW NEW Size : 150mm x 230mm • Pages : 236pp

• Year : 2014 • Binding : Paperback • ISBN : 9789382993964 • Price ` 495.00 only

Hindi is Our Ground, English is Our Sky Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India Chaise LaDousa Chaise LaDousa teaches at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. His publications include House Signs and Collegiate Fun: Sex, Race, and Faith in a College Town (2011) and articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals such as American Ethnologist, Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of Pragmatics and Language in Society. His research focuses on language and culture, particularly on the ways in which institutions serve as loci for cultural production.

Hindi is Our Ground, English is Our Sky Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India Chaise LaDousa A sea of change has occurred in the Indian economy in the last three decades, spurring the desire to learn English. Most scholars and media venues have focused on English exclusively for its ties to processes of globalization and the rise of new employment opportunities. The pursuit of class mobility, however, involves Hindi as much as English in the vast Hindi-Belt of northern India.

Schools are institutions on which class mobility depends, and they are divided by Hindi and English in the rubric of ‘medium’, the primary language of pedagogy. This book demonstrates that the school division allows for different visions of what it means to belong to the nation and what is central and peripheral in the nation. It also shows how the language–medium division reverberates unevenly

and unequally through the nation, and that schools illustrate the tensions brought on by economic liberalization and middle-class status.

CONTENTS List of Illustrations • Foreword Krishna Kumar • Preface • Acknowledgments • List of Abbreviations • Transliteration Conventions • Transcription Conventions • Introduction Chapter 1. On Mother and Other Tongues: Language Ideology, Inequality, and Contradiction Chapter 2. Disparate Markets: The Uneven Resonance of Language-Medium Schooling in the Nation Chapter 3. Advertising in the Periphery: Modes of Communication and the Production of School Value Chapter 4. An Alter Voice: Questioning the Inevitability of the Language-Medium Divide Chapter 5. In and Out of the Classroom: A Focus on English Conclusion References Index Foundation Books is an imprint of Cambridge University Press, India.

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07/2014