Postcolonial Language Ideologies: Indian Students Reflect on Mother Tongue and English

Abstract

The 2020 National Education Policy (NEP) proposes a revision to the Indian education system. The document foregrounds “mother tongue,” a concept that has been highly salient in India since the mid‐nineteenth century, by specifying that students should learn in it. But it makes little mention of English, despite its importance, and the desire for it, at every level of education. The construction of nation and language in the NEP begs a question: how do the constructions, foci, and relative silences of policy resonate with people's understandings and uses of languages? This article incorporates interviews at an engineering university in western India, the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, to examine graduate students' reflections on mother tongue in relation to their multilingual practices on campus and at home. The students exhibited a range of ideological perspectives on mother tongue and English that are not addressed in policy measures. Using the heuristic of postcolonial semiotics, we show that the students were unable to simultaneously identify with the nation (via mother tongue) and English. We contribute to linguistic anthropology and South Asian studies by foregrounding people's metadiscourse in how they make sense of, and ultimately problematize, constructions of colonial and postcolonial policy.