(M)other Tongue Aspirations: Negotiating Banjara Language, Identity, and Education Policy in Rural India

Abstract

In linguistically diverse India, mother tongues serve as a totalizing ideological construct for organizing social life. India's 2020 National Education Policy (NEP) aims to integrate mother tongues into all levels of pedagogy for equitable education, yet this policy has produced contentions between two competing institutional and ideological conceptions of mother tongue in rural India. Banjari speakers, a socially and linguistically segregated Tribal community, report that they see no use for their mother tongue in formal education over Marathi, which the NEP promotes as the state's official regional language. We analyze the language ideologies through which the NEP commensurates the categories of mother tongue and regional language in education, and track the resultant effects of this commensuration on marginalized Banjara parents and educators. Marathi emerges as a language necessary for Banjari speakers to mitigate social stigma in classrooms and the broader community without leading speakers to identify with it as a mother tongue. Mother tongues thus remain ideologically linked to limited domains of use when policy implementation contends with Banjari speakers’ aspirational future-making and belonging.