Jessica Chandras

George Washington University

“Parallel Prestige Languages: English and Marathi in Higher Education in Urban Maharashtra”

This paper shows how regional languages play a role that is overlooked in largely English-only higher education in urban India. Thomas Babington Macaulay and his minute on education delivered in 1835 during the British colonial era is often cited to be a catalyst for popularizing not only education in English but anglo-centric forms of knowledge in education in South Asia (Evans 2002). The British colonial period may have provided fertile ground for English-only education in contemporary regional realities in South Asia but liberalization of India’s economy in the 1990’s made way for education in English to be part of India’s stake in a competitive global market, in which English is seen as a necessity (Battacharya 2016, Proctor 2015). In this paper resulting from seven months of ethnographic research in educational institutions in Pune, Maharashtra from 2016-2017, I describe the linguistic reality of social science classrooms in higher education to show that English is often not the only language used in classrooms. Marathi and Hindi to some extent are incorporated into classrooms in both sanctioned and unsanctioned ways to varying degrees. I argue that regional languages are used parallel to English in some higher educational institutions to resist language shift away from vernaculars towards English in a way which also defines a role for regional languages to be prestige languages along with English in India’s highly competitive education system. Marathi in higher education in Pune can therefore provide some students with a competitive edge, social advantage, and opportunities within higher education and beyond.

Jessica Chandras is a PhD candidate at the George Washington University in Washington, DC in Anthropology. Her dissertation research is based in Pune, Maharashtra on education and language mediums, and socioeconomic class identity and language ideology. She received a BA with honors from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2010 and completed a thesis on language and identity among indigenous Mexicans in Oaxaca before shifting her focus to urban India. She currently is the book review editor for Student Anthropologist, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Association of Student Anthropologists and is a joint researcher on a project documenting air quality, pollution, and asthma through The Asthma Files in Pune through the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research.