English as a facilitator of social mobility in India

Abstract

In the introduction to the book he co-edited, Social Justice through Multilingual Education, Mohanty (2009: 3) mentions how, while conducting research in a remote underdeveloped area of the Indian state of Orissa, he came across a schoolboy who asked him about the purpose of his research. The schoolboy told him that indigenous tribal people in ‘this part of the world’ were the subject of too much research, but ‘nothing has changed, nothing will’ (ibid.). Mohanty (ibid.) notes that the encounter had a lasting impact on his thinking and academic work. This is reflected in the ideas underpinning the above-named book that focuses on the question of designing education in a manner that brings social justice to learners. One of its central points concerns the role of English in the Indian education system. It focuses especially on the debate of whether an English-medium education for speakers of minority languages further endangers their language. There are two seemingly intransigent approaches to the role of English in the Indian education system that shape the instrumentality vs. identity debate in language policy research. The instrumentality approach promotes English as a means of socioeconomic mobility for disadvantaged communities (Vaish, 2005; Weber, 2014). The identity approach argues that English-medium instruction leads to cultural alienation of schoolchildren and proposes mother-tongue-based multilingual education as the alternative (Skutnabb–Kangas et al., 2009; Mohanty, 2010). In this paper, I take a closer look at this debate by examining its four key aspects, namely the ‘decolonising’ role of English, language hierarchies, the linguistic double divide, and the problem of defining the term mother tongue. On the basis of this investigation, I describe the challenges this debate poses for policymakers, and explain why the instrumentality approach is a better way of addressing these challenges.