“She will control my son”: Navigating womanhood, English and social mobility in India

Abstract

Through its colonial, class-and caste-based history, English in India has come to be seen as a powerful resource that opens doors for those who 'have' it and holds back those who do not. For women, English ostensibly offers various promises in addition to employment: progressiveness and 'empowerment'; and the potential for upward mobility through marriage. Yet, the conversion of English capital for English-speaking Indian women proves to be intensely complex in practice, as many find themselves forced to navigate between shifting moral regimes attached to 'tradition' and 'modernity'. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in an NGO in Delhi that offers free English training to 'disadvantaged youth', this paper explores how English capital is managed by young women striving to attain middle classness through English, and how their class, caste and gender positionings are negotiated across particular time-space configurations as they seek to become English speakers.

“RIPEnglish”: Race, class and ‘good English’ in India

“…What this article has not been able to account for is how these positioning practices are further affected by gender (see Highet, 2022) or caste. This raises questions about the extent to which a raciolinguistic perspective could be a productive lens through which to explore the effects of caste relations (for further discussion, see Chandras, this issue), particularly given numerous scholars' warnings about the dangers of conflating race with caste (Banerjee-Dube, 2014).…”

“…The association of English with a particular middle‐classness is so potent (Highet and Del Percio, 2021a, 2021b) that the inability to command the language comes to be perceived as the only obstacle to social mobility: “the reason for their social backwardness” (Roy, 2015, 525). While many have shown this promise to be somewhat elusive and misleading (Duchêne and Daveluy, 2015; Highet, 2022; Tabiola and Lorente, 2017), the supply of and demand for English education and training centers have boomed over the last few decades.…”

Pressing times, losing voice: critique and transformative spaces in higher education

“…This, in our view, provides scope for further interdisciplinary engagement with sociological studies of higher education and educational research of pedagogy, as these bodies of literature embark on theoretical attempts to reimagine alternative pasts and futures by rethinking the role of the university and the social relations among those who inhabit it. Indeed, language scholarship driven by anti-capitalist and decolonial agendas has for some time now centred on how the embodiment of semiotic activities that turn communicative practices into recognisable models of personhood -that is, ways of being and doing -within the daily life of individuals, groups and institutions constitutes a key locus for potentially (dis)enabling larger structures of inequality (for example, Dlaske et al, 2016;Lorente, 2017;Del Percio, 2018;Sunyol and Codó, 2020;Garrido and Sabaté-Dalmau, 2020;Pérez-Milans and Guo, 2020;Highet, 2022).…”