Empowerment and Quiet Resilience: Exploring Linguistic Marginalization, Resistance, and Educational Assimilation Among a Denotified Tribe in Rural India (Poster 16)

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Mother tongues in India are powerful ideological constructs for organizing social life (Bonfiglio 2010; LaDousa 2010, 2014). Drawing on qualitative ethnographic research on two mother tongue speech communities in a rural region in the state of Maharashtra, this paper examines language ideologies about Marathi, a language of power and official regional language of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, and Banjara, spoken by a forcibly settled nomadic denotified Tribal community, formally branded a “criminal tribe” (Ramaswamy and Bhukya 2002). Banjara-speaking parents, educators, and students question whether their mother tongue has any place in formal education. Their educational aspirations and practices contradict India’s 2020 National Education Policy which aims to integrate more mother tongue use into pedagogy at all levels of education. Marathi emerges in circulating linguistic practices and language ideologies within Banjara communities as a language necessary to mitigate social stigma in classrooms and the broader community over their own mother tongue. Additionally, Banjara leaders and educators resiliently navigate constraints, forging their own path to empower Banjara students through education, creatively utilizing resources to advance educational equity. Thus, this poster reconsiders definitions and socially structuring applications of mother tongues stemming from stigmatizing colonial-era identity labels for formally criminalized castes and tribes. Overall, educational privilege and caste discrimination make visible Banjara student identities by bringing to light colonial vestiges in prevailing contemporary social structures, educational bureaucracy, and languages in education (Mohanty 2006; 2019).

Author

• Jessica Chandras, University of North Florida