Language

Macaulay’s Ghost: The Unimportance and Importance of English

What stand should one take between the campaign for decolonisation of the Indian mind and that giving pre-eminence to English? We ought to develop a universalism that is attentive to local cultures…
▶08-May-2023
Peter Ronald deSouza

Indo-English and Anglo-Indish

We know about the influence of English on the Indian languages, but we need to understand better how Indian words and phrases penetrated English and the social mechanisms underlying their usage in…
▶28-Sep-2022
Sumit Guha

Counter-Stories: Some Lessons for English Language Pedagogy

"The peak of language capacities is not in simply effective usage, but rather in giving language to that which is hitherto unsaid." An experiment in Bihar responds to the aspiration for…
▶21-Oct-2021
Gautam Bisht

The Politics of Language in Assam

Language has been at the heart of political debate in Assam since the formation of the British colonial province of Assam in 1874, then through the turbulent decades leading to Independence, the…
▶09-Jun-2021
Sanjib Baruah

The Pedagogical Problems of the Census

The policy in the census of ‘rationalising’ languages has a debilitating impact on the speakers of unrecognised languages; they are condemned not to access education in their own languages.
▶07-Jul-2020
Aayush Agarwal, Shivakumar Jolad

The Language of Learning

Should children in Indian schools be taught in their mother tongue or English? This should not be an either/or question. The time to teach multiple languages in primary schools is now, it will mean…
▶13-Mar-2019
Tarun Jain