Indian Language and Education Policy as Seen From the Kumauni Hills

• In Event: Ethnographic Research in Multilingual Contexts: Microlevel Perspectives on Macrolevel Policies

Abstract

Through extended ethnographic research with a group of young women in the Kumaun region of North India, I was able to hear and analyze their experiences and perceptions of language and education issues relevant to their future prospects and dreams. This paper draws from informal interviews with individuals whose home language, Kumauni, differs from the regional and school language, Hindi, and the languages as school subjects, English and Sanskrit. Their views on language shed a unique light on the national language policies of India, which give constitutional status to 22 languages but leave many other languages and so-called “dialects,” like Kumauni, without official recognition. Similarly, an educational policy change that directly affected the young women with whom I lived in the Kumaun appeared quite problematic from their perspective. Thus, policies that appear beneficial at a more macro level may appear quite different at a local level, where they are also influenced by local interpretations. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate, within the context of a larger ethnographic study, how different perspectives alter the analysis of a biliteracy situation and of particular policies.
Using the concept of different scales, from global to local, has helped sociolinguists in looking beyond micro-macro dichotomies regarding context in analyzing phenomena such as speech events (Blommaert, 2010). This includes analysis of "the jump from one scale to another: from the individual to the collective, the temporally situated to the trans-temporal, the unique to the common, the token to the type, the specific to the general" (Blommaert, 2006: 4). Of particular relevance to this paper is the observed notion that "reality, seen from within one scale-level, is quite different from reality seen from within another scale-level" (11). Canagarajah (2013) has asserted that people invoke scale rather than being shaped by scales: “Interactants construct the context that is operative in their talk by invoking different scales of time, space, and social life" (155). Thus, the ways in which participants in my ethnographic study chose to present and interpret their linguistic and educational circumstances must also be analyzed with reference to their scale choices. This work expands on the emerging sociolinguistic literature on scale, providing detailed ethnographic data to highlight the importance of perspective in analyzing language and education policies.

Author

• Cynthia Groff, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana