Multilingual Education in India
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M U L T I L I N G U A L E D U C AT I O N I N I N D I A
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MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION IN INDIA
INTRODUCTION
Multilingualism is a social reality in India. Oral and literacy skills in multiple languages are necessary for meaningful participation in the larger democratic sociopolitical and economic system of the country. Starting with the mother tongue (MT) for family and community level communication, people need languages for regional communication, national level communication and wider communication. Thus, promotion of multilingual competence is widely accepted as one of the goals of Indian education. In a very broad sense, reflecting the fundamentally multilingual character of the society, education in India has been multilingual at different points in history continuing into the present times. But, at the same time, the relationships between different languages and their roles in education have continuously evolved both with micro-level socio-historical processes and also with the dynamics of power structures at the macro-level. These processes have continuously affected the positioning and repositioning of languages in the power hierarchy often leading to marginalization and endangerment of languages. One can perhaps use Hornberger’s (2002) ‘ecology metaphor’ to appreciate how different Indian and Indianized languages and their places in society and education have been constantly negotiated through complex socio-historical processes of language evolution in changing language environments leading to endangerment of languages. The purpose of this chapter is to show that education in India has actively contributed to perpetuation of social and linguistic inequalities in seeking to accommodate to the dynamics of power relationships between languages and the social groups who speak these languages. At different points in history, it can be shown that language education policy has been implemented without any critical engagement with the social history of languages and education. Current educational policy and practices are examined to show that education in modern and postindependence India has reflected the uncertainties arising out of the underlying tensions and ambiguities in respect of sociopolitical and economic positioning of languages and their role in the larger multilingual mosaic. Such uncertainties and tentativeness, it will be argued, have contributed to the failure of language education policy to move from a language-as-problem to language-as-resource orientation (Ruiz, 1984). J. Cummins and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 5: Bilingual Education, 165–174. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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AJIT MOHANTY
From a historical perspective, it is useful to note a recurrent pattern of relationships in India between the role of languages in the broader society and their position in education. At different points in history, despite its widespread and grassroots level multilingualism, Indian society has been characterized by a double divide between
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