Locating Globalization Through the “Chutkulas” of Multilingual Children at a Suburban Indian Orphanage

• In Event: Language, Identity, and Citizenship in International/Transnational Contexts

Abstract

A homogenized notion of “globalization” is increasingly tested in the developing context of India. This study examines children’s chutkulas (anecdotes) to illuminate: differential language ideologies; their conflicted subject positionings due to language-ideological clashes; and the intervention of “globalization” supposedly leading to the unmooring of linguistic, socio-cultural, and geographical claims to identity. The “chutkulas” were collected during month-long participant observation of seventeen boys at a suburban orphanage. They are examined through a discourse analysis framework, using relevant theories of identity, language ideology, and “globalization.” The study problematizes the notion of “globalization,” hypostasized in scholarship, rearticulating it through a lens focusing on how the “global” is inflected on local practices.

Author

• Usree Bhattacharya, University of California - Berkeley