Overcoming Colonial Policies of Divide and Rule

Abstract

T chapter1 offers a situated account of English and vernacular literacy practices from a postcolonial perspective. Postcolonial scholarship in disciplines such as cultural studies and English literature has alerted us to the extent to which colonial rule partially created and reproduced negative images regarding “natives” so as to be better able to govern. Within applied linguistics, this awareness provides a necessary sociohistorical background against which to understand current grounded realities around language teaching and learning. Colonial policies in South Asian education— especially the policy of Divide and Rule—created schisms between the English medium (EM) and vernacular medium (VM) of education (Phillipson, 1992). This breakdown assumes neocolonial hues and dovetails directly with local societal stratifications (of caste and class) that exacerbate unequal conditions between those who are educated in the two tracks. Situated in ongoing endeavors in a variety of local contexts in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, where I was raised and schooled, this chapter calls attention to some key educational sites through which these policy-related inequities are reproduced, and some ways in which individual teachers and institutions assume the responsibility to make conditions more just and equal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how a postcolonial research framework allows us to understand not only grounded inequities around language policies in terms of historical colonial pasts but also how fellow humans draw on particular rationalizations to harness the veranaculars and work toward moving us all to more equal footings (Canagarajah, 1997). Increasing discussions around English being a “world” language (Brutt-Griffler, 2002) and the instrumental role it plays in globalization force us now to take stock of the “dominating” role that English seems to be assuming. Scholarship in this realm ranges from researchers questioning mediums-of-instruction policies, to ways in