Language Policy and Education in India

This book presents a history of English and development of language education in modern India. It explores the role of language in colonial attempts to establish hegemony, the play of power, and the anxieties in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century India. The essays in the volume discuss language policy, debates and pedagogy as well as larger overarching questions such as identity, nationhood and sub-nationhood. The work also looks at the socio-cultural and economic factors that shaped the writing and publishing of textbooks, dictionaries and determined the direction of language teaching, specifically, of English language teaching.
Drawing on a variety of archival sources - policy documents, books, periodicals - this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of linguistics, language teaching, cultural studies and modern Indian history.

M. Sridhar is former Professor, Department of English at the University of Hyderabad, India and is currently Secretary of the Alladi Memorial Trust that renders educational, medical and legal help to the underprivileged. With experience of teaching English at higher secondary and research levels for more than two decades, he is now engaged in teaching school children. He has keen interest in multilingualism and linguistic creativity, and has published in the areas of language, English literature, comparative literature and literary theory. Sunita Mishra is Professor, Centre for English Language Studies at the University of Hyderabad, India. She has published on communication skills, discourse analysis, English in India and English language education. Presently, she is working on the history of English language education in India and critical pedagogy.

Acknowledgements. Contributors. Introduction. Part I: Language Debates: The English Encounter 1. Early English Textbooks and Language Policies of India Alok Mukherjee 2. The Emergence and Growth of Colonial Language Policy and its Clash with the Linguistic Agenda of the National Movement Varoon Bakshi 3. The language Policy of the East India Company and its Impact on Education during British Rule Raj N. Bakshi Part II: Language Debates: The 'Vernaculars' and English 4. Language, Power and Ideology: the Changing Context of Bhasha in India E. V. Ramakrishnan 5. Subject Language: Preliminary Notes on Education around Late-19th Century Hyderabad State Asma Rasheed 6. Interminable Anxieties: Odia Language Movement in Colonial Odisha Subhendu Mund 7. Revisiting the Modern Telugu Debate a Century Later: The Pre- and Post-History of Gurujada Appa Rao's 'Minute of Dissent' N. Venugopal 8. Modernisation of Languages: The Case of Premchand vis-à-vis Hindi Anand Prakash 9. Analysis and Modernity: The Language Debate in The Bangiya Sahitya Parishad Probal Dasgupta 10. 'English Education' in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Fiction T. Sriraman Part III: Language Debates: Textbooks and Teachings 11. First Textbooks in English in India Shreesh Chaudhary 12. Anglicized-Sankritized-Vernacularized: Translational Politics of Primer Writing In Colonial Bengal Nandini Bhattacharya 13. The Poet's Pedagogy: Rabindranath Tagore's English Primers Amrit Sen 14. Language and Education in Nineteenth Century Odisha Ramesh Mallik and Sunita Mishra 15. The Quest for Sahitya: Birth of Literature in Colonial Orissa Siddharth Satpathy 16. Multilingual Education in India and the English Only Myth Giridhar Rao 17. English Studies in Contemporary India: Caste, Class, and Power Arun P. Mukherjee