Introduction: Situating the Vernacular in a Divisive Postcolonial Landscape

The stronger sense of 'postcolonial' emerges when we consider this seeming paradox: that it takes anticolonial struggles to produce neocolonial conditions. The postcolonial condition is the perspective one enters when one has resolved that paradox, relished that irony of history, and moved on. Postcoloniality in this sense is not confined to any particular kind of geopolitical space: it applies equally to the experience of diasporic and autochthonous communities, settler colonies no less than to territories of indirect rule, South African apartheid no less than to Indian democracy. Resisting any simple periodising correlations, the postcolonial condition is not one of power secured and centrally exercised in certain times and places. It is rather a dispersal, a moving field of possibilities which everywhere carry within them the mutually entailing, intimately cohabiting negative and positive charges of both power and resistance.

(Pechey, 1994: 153)

But the problem of voice is a problem of multiplicity as well as a problem of representation. How many voices are concealed beneath the generalizations of reported speech in much ethnography? And how many voices clamor beneath the enquiries and interests of the single ethnographer? How can we construct our voices so that they can represent the diversity of voices we hear in the field? How can we construct ... a dialogue that captures the encounter of our own many voices with the voices we hear and purport to represent? The problem of voice ('speaking for' and 'speaking to') intersects with the problem of place (speaking 'from' and speaking 'of'). (Appadurai, 1988: 17)

The landscape of the postcolonial encounter is dotted with revisionist histories that attempt to go 'beyond the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath' (Gandhi, 1998: 16) and this book is an effort in this direction. In general, the task of postcolonial studies has been to revisit, remember and question the colonial past, while simultaneously acknowledging the complex reciprocal relationship of antagonism and desire between the colonizer and colonized. While several instruments of power were used in the colonizing process, several have stayed in the postcolonial aftermath, including the crucial instrument of language (Dua, 1994, 2001; Rajagopalan, 1999). Because postcolonial contexts harken back to colonial pasts (that relatively frozen stance of always looking over one's shoulder as one proceeds ahead), the idea of how much of the colonial is embedded in the postcolonial voice is fraught with tension and complexities. Where does one end and the other begin? At what point is the postcolonial voice a voice with its own legitimacy? Built into this murky notion of 'voice' are various shades of power and resistance, which together form a nexus that is constantly at play in postcolonial worlds, with particular contexts making this notion more palpable than the others. While this prism-like nexus – of voice, power and resistance – gets enacted in various forms in different contexts, the components of the nexus remain the same.

One realm where this nexus is apparent is in the domain of education and it is the ways in which this nexus gets played out in different schooling contexts that informs the heart of this book. Located specifically in the area of English and Vernacular language teaching and learning, the book offers a relatively multifaceted sketch of the dynamics between English and the Vernaculars and the ways in which these dynamics are complexly embedded in a range of macro-structures in India, and the forms this nexus takes in the larger language teaching enterprise. While the book does not, by any means, discount the role of the British Raj in the creation of the English–Vernacular divide (Guha, 1997; Naregal, 2001; Pennycook, 1998), it does seek to go beyond the Raj to address some current language-related issues. Several researchers (cf. Phillipson, 1992; Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 1995) have called attention to the ways in which the global spread of English threatens local, Vernacular languages and the power differential built into English and regional languages in multilingual cultures. Certainly, much of what is presented in this book can be interpreted in this light. Powerful macro-structures – including institutional policies, larger state and nation-wide policies and pedagogical materials – do align with each other to shape, produce and perpetuate power/knowledge inequalities between those who have access to English and those who do not. (Indeed, researchers such as Bruthiaux [2002] argue that enhancing Vernacular education is a crucial step toward improving basic living standards in the developing world.) However, because realities on the postcolonial ground are more complex, it is equally important to understand how the English–Vernacular divide is resisted, specifically mitigated and bridged (Canagarajah, 1999). 'English and Vernacular knowledge' – their teaching and learning, and their general production and consumption – then, from this integrated perspective, needs to be understood as an embedded, multi-pronged enterprise whose general functioning include both a complex domination and an equally complex resistance. An intent throughout this interpretive project, then, is one that attempts to understand some local complexities involved in the general (tertiary-level) English–Vernacular enterprise with a view to discerning how students, teachers and institutions are located vis-à-vis each other in this larger endeavor. By closely documenting where and how college-going students get situated in the English–Vernacular canvas, the ways in which tertiary-level English disadvantages students educated in the Vernacular and the ways in which teachers and institutions work at integrating English and the Vernaculars, I am arguing that any understanding of English and Vernacular education has to begin first by locating them side by side (as opposed to arranging them in a hierarchy). Doing so is the first step not only in addressing language-related inequalities on the postcolonial ground but in recognizing ways in which English and the Vernaculars while simultaneously divided and dichotomous from some points of view are also simultaneously overlapping and conjoined.

Setting the Stage

The area of postcolonial studies in the last decade seems to have burgeoned into a sub-discipline of its own, so much so that there appears to be little consensus regarding its scope and content. Some of the dissension seems to spill over into the realm of whether to hyphenate the term or not, with some critics believing that...