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Vernacular English : Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India
Title
Vernacular English : Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India / Akshya Saxena.
ISBN
9780691223148
9780691223131
9780691219981
Publication
Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2022.
Manufacture
Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2022
Copyright Notice Date
©2022.
Physical Description
1 online resource.
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
Notes
Description based on print version record.
Access and use
Access restricted by licensing agreement.
Summary
"After India's Partition and independence in 1947, "cleansing" Hindi by removing Urdu words was part of the nation's effort to disavow Islamic influence and to forge an exclusively Hindu "Indian" identity. Sanskritized Hindi was anointed the official language of India in 1950, a move protested by non-Hindi-speaking people; in 1963, lawmakers responded to these protests by making English an associate official language. Itself a language steeped in a history of colonial violence, English nevertheless was chosen to mend the gaps created by the imposition of Hindi and to uphold the ideal of democracy. This book considers English as part of the multilingual local milieu of India (a country where more than twenty languages are spoken) not as a colonial language imposed from without. Through a close study of English in India, from the language policies under British rule to the present day, Akshya Saxena argues that low castes and minority ethnic groups-those oppressed by or denied access to English-have routinely and effectively used the language to make political demands on the state. The book examines the ways that Indians use English in literary, spoken, and visual media, from novels to films to global protest movements, to express and shape their experience within the Indian state"-- Provided by publisher.
Variant and related titles
Project MUSE complete collection 2022.
Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
July 19, 2023
Series
Translation / transnation
Contents
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface. On the Grounds
Introduction. Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone
Elsewhere, or The Problem of English
Vernacular Resolutions
The Promise of the Common: Historical Routes of English in India
The Anglophone, or To Read What Is Not Written
Chapter Descriptions, or Anglophone in Five Speech Acts
Chapter 1. Law: Democratic Objects in Postcolonial India, or India Demands English
A Language of Paper
Administrative Anxieties of the Postcolonial State
The Alliance between Hindi and English
India Demands English (Anxiously)
Satire, or The View from Below
Language Ex Machina: English as an Instrument
Chapter 2. Touch: Dalit Anglophone Writers and a Language Shared
The Dalit Writer and the English Language
Ambedkar, Phule, and the Goddess English of the Bloodless Revolution
Dalit Anglophone Poets
Hindi Dalit Writing and the Sensation of Touch
Reading English after Touch
Chapter 3. Text: A Desire Called English in Indian Anglophone Literature
Caste and Representation in Indian Anglophone Literature
How Does a Dalit Character Sound? Reading Anand's Untouchable
Performing English in Adiga's The White Tiger
Fugitive Fictions
Chapter 4. Sound: The Mother's Voice and Anglophonic Soundscapes in Northeast India
Orality, or English as a Mother Tongue
"Indian Army Rape Us": Political Mothers and the Indian State
A Language of Protest: Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy
Sonic English and the Aesthetics of Witness in Literature from Northeast India
Chapter 5. Sight: Cinematic English and the Pleasures of Not Reading
Seeing, Not Reading
Montage, or Meaning Deferred in Slumdog Millionaire
The Ordinariness of English in Gully Boy
Materiality of English in Hindi-Urdu Cinema
Coda. Radical Anglophony, or The Ethics of Attunement
Notes
Index
Subjects
Genre/Form
History.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Also listed under
Project Muse. distributor
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