The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies) - Hardcover

Chandra, Shefali

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822352605 ISBN 13: 9780822352600

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In The Sexual Life of English, Shefali Chandra examines how English became an Indian language. She rejects the idea that English was fully formed before its life in India or that it was imposed from without. Rather, by drawing attention to sexuality and power, Chandra argues that the English language was produced through conflicts over caste, religion, and class. Sentiments and experiences of desire, respectability, conjugality, status, consumption, and fashion came together to create the Indian history of English. The language was shaped by the sexual experiences of Indians and by native attempts to discipline the normative sexual subject. Focusing on the years between 1850 and 1930, Chandra scrutinizes the English-education project as Indians gained the power to direct it themselves. She delves into the history of schools, the composition of the student bodies, and disagreements about curricula; the way that English-educated subjects wrote about English; and debates in English and Marathi popular culture. Chandra shows how concerns over linguistic change were popularly voiced in a sexual idiom, how English and the vernacular were separated through the vocabulary of sexual difference, and how the demand for matrimony naturalized the social location of the English language.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Shefali Chandra is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, the International and Area Studies Program, and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE SEXUAL LIFE OF ENGLISH

Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial IndiaBy Shefali Chandra

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5260-0

Contents

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND SPELLING..........................................................................................................................................IX1. LEARNING GENDER, KNOWING ENGLISH An Introduction...........................................................................................................................32. "THE PRUDENT AND CAUTIOUS ENGRAFTING OF ENGLISH UPON OUR FEMALE POPULATION" Pedagogy and Performativity....................................................................293. "THE LANGUAGE OF THE BEDROOM" Mimicry, Masculinity, and the Sexual Power of English........................................................................................574. "A NEW GENERATION OF HIPLESS AND BREASTLESS WOMEN ... TO THE FOREFRONT IN EUROPE AND AMERICA" Literature, Social Class, and the Wider World of English.....................835. "I SHALL READ PRETTY ENGLISH STORIES TO MY MOTHER AND TRANSLATE THEM INTO MARATHI FOR HER" Widowhood, Virtue, and the Secularization of Caste..............................1176. "WHY HAD I EVER BEGUN TO LEARN ENGLISH?" Desire, Labor, and the Transregional Orientation of Caste.........................................................................1377. DOSEBAI JESSAWALLA AND THE "MARCH OF ADVANCEMENT IN THE FACE OF OBLOQUY"...................................................................................................1578. EPILOGUE: "I AM AN INDIAN. I HAVE NO LANGUAGE" Parvatibai Athavale and the Limits to English...............................................................................175SALAAMS.......................................................................................................................................................................191NOTES.........................................................................................................................................................................195BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................................................................245INDEX.........................................................................................................................................................................267

Chapter One

LEARNING GENDER, KNOWING ENGLISH

An Introduction

* * *

In 1995 the Marathi-language playwright and novelist Kiran Nagarkar penned Ravan and Eddie, an exhilarating satire on the class, caste, and communal politics of contemporary Bombay city. Nagarkar devoted an entire section of his novel to the mystique of the English language:

There are only two kinds of people in the world. Those who have English and those who don't ... the haves and the have nots.... English is a mantra, a mahamantra. It is an "open sesame" that doesn't open mere doors, it opens up new worlds and allows you to cross over from one universe to another. English makes you tall. If you know English, you can wear a "suit boot," do an electrician's course or take a diploma in radio and refrigeration technology.... If you know English, you can ask a girl for a dance. You can lean Eileen Alva against the locked door of the terrace and press against her, squeeze her boobs and kiss her on the mouth, put your tongue inside it while slipping your hand under her dress.

The versatile allure of English, its ability to signify and thus materialize mysterious resources of social mobility, comes alive in these lines. With a few deft strokes, Nagarkar illustrates how the power of English supersedes form or textual identifications, how it exceeds grammatical, linguistic, or literary definitions. It is more complicated than either its colonial past or its ability to ensure social mobility. Most striking, perhaps, is the narrator's reference to Eileen Alva, a signifier that, in the context of Bombay city, suggests the role of sexuality in carving distinctions between religiously marked communities: the Goan Christian girl next door, in the narrator's mind, is both sexually alluring and sexually available. A deliberately vague notion of English thus produces sexual power and is amplified through it. The language is, indeed, an "open sesame." It is a sign that has disciplinary, especially phallocentric, value. Nagarkar exposes the complicities between class and sexual power, between regional culture and religion, and he does so by stressing the centrality of "woman" in cohering otherwise disparate forms of desire. This is the selective, sexual, and symbolic axis upon which Indian English revolves. Himself a bilingual writer, Nagarkar recognizes that language can never be an unmediated mode of communication, or merely a collection of grammatical rules and lexical signs. Rather, he evokes the swirling world of English, a historically configured constellation of symbolic practices, expressions, possibilities, and prohibitions; an entire world manifested through social and sexual access and expressed immediately in local, communal terms. Assessments such as Nagarkar's go to the heart of the investigations I undertake here.

The Sexual Life of English traces the indigenization of the colonial language of power, the process by which English became an Indian language. My study breaks with commonsense assumptions that the prevalence of English in India marks the lasting success of British colonial culture, the inevitability of an Anglo-American globalization, or the rise to dominance of a pan-regional and cosmopolitan middle class. Instead, I argue that the English language was disciplined and materialized through the unfolding politics of a rigorously policed and sexualized modernity. No simple story of accelerating numbers, of widening social power, or of a mere rupture from a precolonial past, I argue that it was India's sexual politics that domesticated the authoritative power of English. This was accomplished by an array of social actors: colonial and "native," men, women, students, teachers, and writers alike. They first brought the language to a select group of native women, and then they laid down new demarcations between indigenous and invading cultures, vernacular and English languages, normative and prohibitive sexuality, and the parameters of sexual desire itself. In the process, they universalized upper-caste strictures on knowledge and proliferated discourses on sexuality. The disciplinary power of English, its ability to stake differences between social groups and to produce the consenting Indian subject, was generated by the discourses of sex and gender. The ambition of some men to share the language of power with their women and the vociferous outrage that this provoked within native society consolidated existing social hierarchies and built fresh consensus on caste, sexuality, and knowledge. This magnified distinctions between English and vernacular languages. English became the means by which to convey the symbolic, social, and sexual parameters of native womanhood. In this way it was repeatedly unleashed to assert cultural difference not only from the "West," but from other Indians as well.

Women Make English an Indian Language

The Sexual Life of English emerges from a simple observation: far from widening the reach of English to those castes and classes historically excluded from learning, British India's English-educated...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822352605
• ISBN 13: 9780822352600
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar