Youth Perspectives on Hindi, English and India's New Politics of Language: Becoming Bharat

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between language and education by focussing on the Hindi language and its promotion by the Indian government over the last decade. By analysing and comparing Hindi in political discourse and education policy with the experiences, expectations and aspirations of young people who have been educated in the language, this chapter finds a widening gulf between what is promised and what is practiced and delivered. The promotion of Hindi over the last decade has become increasingly embedded in the political and cultural projects of the government while, more alarmingly, become dis-embedded from the material conditions that produce and sustain linguistic inequalities in education. What is further misleading is how this promotion of Hindi, which excludes any meaningful focus on education, is increasingly championed in the name of decolonisation. Not only is this not the substantive decolonisation needed in the Indian education system but this chapter also finds that by emphasising pride in language and cultural heritage while de-emphasising the material inequalities between languages and the resources and opportunities tied to them, this new ideological orientation of Hindi threatens to exacerbate inequalities in language education.