Compulsory Individuality and the Trans/national Family of Nations: The Girl-Child, Bollywood Barbie, and Ms. Worldly Universe

Abstract

The worlds that I grew up in were trans/national and hybrid. Like many middle-class and upper-middle-class peers in India, I grew up in multiple languages: Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, and English—in many accents. I grew up in urban India where many of us got contradictory messages about swadeshi and videshi.1 Our economics textbooks told us that if only we would reproduce less and control our population, our amazing culture would crawl out of poverty and underdevelopment. At my Catholic English medium school, learning Hindi, Bengali, and English was unevenly coordinated with Malayalam, the language of home. Hindi was the language, second only to English, that promised national and trans/national mobility. The worlds of Hindi presented many inconsistencies to me. It was the postcolonial State’s language of national identity that marked the songs of Independence and Republic Days,2 the tongue of politicians, and Doordarshan.3 It was at once revered for its purity (shudh Hindi or pure Hindi) and its national authenticity by our school instructors and politicians, and ridiculed by some of us from English medium schools because Hindi instructors and speakers had funny accents when they spoke in English. But most of all Hindi, especially the competent shudh speakers, represented to many of us the xenophobic postcolonial Hindi-Hindu culture that hegemonically saturated much of our lives.