A sea change has occurred in the Indian economy in the last three decades, spurring the desire to learn English. Most scholars and media venues have focused on English exclusively for its ties to processes of globalization and the rise of new employment opportunities.  The pursuit of class mobility, however, involves Hindi as much as English in the vast Hindi-Belt of northern India.  Schools are institutions on which class mobility depends, and they are divided by Hindi and English in the rubric of “medium,” the primary language of pedagogy. This book demonstrates that the school division allows for different visions of what it means to belong to the nation and what is central and peripheral in the nation. It also shows how the language-medium division reverberates unevenly and unequally through the nation, and that schools illustrate the tensions brought on by economic liberalization and middle-class status.

A sea change has occurred in the Indian economy in the last three decades, spurring the desire to learn English. Most scholars and media venues have focused on English exclusively for its ties to processes of globalization and the rise of new employment opportunities.  The pursuit of class mobility, however, involves Hindi as much as English in the vast Hindi-Belt of northern India.  Schools are institutions on which class mobility depends, and they are divided by Hindi and English in the rubric of “medium,” the primary language of pedagogy. This book demonstrates that the school division allows for different visions of what it means to belong to the nation and what is central and peripheral in the nation. It also shows how the language-medium division reverberates unevenly and unequally through the nation, and that schools illustrate the tensions brought on by economic liberalization and middle-class status.

List of Figures and Tables

Foreword
by Krishna Kumar

Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Transliteration Conventions
Transcription Conventions

Introduction

Chapter 1. On Mother and Other Tongues: Language Ideology, Inequality, and Contradiction
Chapter 2. Disparate Markets: The Uneven Resonance of Language-Medium Schooling in the Nation
Chapter 3. Advertising in the Periphery: Modes of Communication and the Production of School Value
Chapter 4. An Alter Voice: Questioning the Inevitability of the Language-Medium Divide
Chapter 5. In and out of the Classroom: A Focus on English

Conclusion

References