Hostname: page-component-5f745c7db-hj587 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-06T06:41:49.625Z Has data issue: true hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Language, Script, and Advertising in India’s Hindi Belt: Institutional Voices in Flux

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Chaise LaDousa
Chaise LaDousa*
Affiliation:
Hamilton College, USA
*
Contact Chaise LaDousa at 245 Kirner-Johnson, 198 College Hill Road, Clinton, NY 13323 (cladousa@hamilton.edu).
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Certain combinations of languages and scripts have come to take on indexical properties within the world of advertising in northern India. Such properties are regimented by what is on offer—commercial items, government services and information, schooling, and coaching services. An exploration of changing conventions in advertising since the 1990s, a period of accelerated liberalization in India, reveals that there have been especially dramatic changes in education and coaching services. By considering combinations of language and script as partly constitutive of the voice of an institution, this article accounts for the changing possibilities for the articulation of institutional distinctions and the ways institutional voices commoditize aspects of personae during the last twenty-five years or so in northern India.

Type
Articles
Information
Signs and Society , Volume 8 , Issue 1: Sign and Script in South Asia: Media and Semiotic Mediation , Winter 2020 , pp. 155 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This article includes arguments presented at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association and the Annual Conference on South Asia in 2016, the New York Conference on Asian Studies in 2017, and the first meetings of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology in 2018. People in institutions in India made all of the fieldwork reported on herein possible, and I have promised them anonymity.

References

Agha, Asif. 2003. “The Social Life of Cultural Value.” Language and Communication 23:231–73.10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00012-0CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Agha, Asif. 2005. “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1): 38–59.10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.38CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Agha, Asif. 2011. “Meet Mediatization.” Language and Communication 31 (3): 163–70.10.1016/j.langcom.2011.03.006CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ahmad, Rizwan. 2008. “Scripting a New Identity: The Battle for Devanagari in Nineteenth Century India.” Journal of Pragmatics 40 (7): 1163–83.10.1016/j.pragma.2007.06.005CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ahmad, Rizwan. 2011. “Urdu in Devanagari: Shifting Orthographic Practices and Muslim Identity in Delhi.” Language in Society 40:259–84.10.1017/S0047404511000182CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aneesh, A. 2015. Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Annamalai, E. 1991. “Satan and Saraswati: The Double Face of English in India.” South Asian Language Review 1 (1): 33–43.Google Scholar
Annamalai, E.. 2004. “Medium of Power: The Question of English in Education in India.” In Medium of Instruction Policies: Which Agenda? Whose Agenda?, edited by James Tollefson and Amy Tsui, 177–94. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist and edited by Michael Holquist, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Benei, Veronique. 2008. Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.10.1515/9781503627154CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhattacharya, Usree. 2013. “Mediating Inequalities: Exploring English-Medium Instruction in a Suburban Indian Village School.” Current Issues in Language Planning 14 (1): 164–84.10.1080/14664208.2013.791236CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhattacharya, Usree. 2018. “The Right to Education Act (2009): Instructional Medium and Dis-citizenship.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 253:149–68.10.1515/ijsl-2018-0028CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brass, Paul. 1990. The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 4, pt. 1, The Politics of India since Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chidsey, Meghan M. 2018. “The Language Medium ‘Divide’: Ideologies of Hindi-English Use at Four All-Girls’ ‘Public Schools’ in North India.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 253:27–54.10.1515/ijsl-2018-0022CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choksi, Nishaant. 2014. “Scripting the Border: Script Practices and Territorial Imagination among Santali Speakers in Eastern India.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 227:47–64.Google Scholar
Choksi, Nishaant. 2015. “Surface Politics: Scaling Multiscriptality in an Indian Village Market.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 25 (1): 1–24.10.1111/jola.12070CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choksi, Nishaant. 2017. “From Language to Script: Graphic Practice and the Politics of Authority in Santali Language Media, Eastern India.” Modern Asian Studies 51 (5): 1519–60.10.1017/S0026749X16000470CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chumley, Lily, and Nicholas Harkness. 2013. “Introduction: Qualia.” Anthropological Theory 13 (1–2): 3–11.10.1177/1463499613483389CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Faust, D., and R. Nagar. 2001. “English Medium Education, Social Fracturing, and the Politics of Development in Postcolonial India.” Economic and Political Weekly 36:2878–83.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan. 2016. “Sociolinguistic Differentiation.” In Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates, edited by Nikolas Coupland, 113–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781107449787.006CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gal, Susan. 2017. “Qualia as Value and Knowledge: Histories of European Porcelain.” Signs and Society 5 (S1): S128–S153.10.1086/690108CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gal, Susan. 2018. “Registers in Circulation: The Social Organization of Interdiscursivity.” Signs and Society 6 (1): 1–24.10.1086/694551CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gal, Susan, and Judith T. Irvine. 1995. “The Boundaries of Language and Disciplines: How Ideologies Construct Differences.” Social Research 62 (4): 967–1001.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan. 2019. Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781108649209CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goswami, Nirmali. 2017. Legitimising Standard Languages: Perspectives from a School in Banaras. New Delhi: Sage.Google Scholar
Harkness, Nicholas. 2017. “The Open Throat: Deceptive Sounds, Facts of Firstness, and the Interactional Emergence of Voice.” Signs and Society 5 (S1): S21–S52.10.1086/690041CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irvine, Judith T. 1990. “Registering Affect: Heteroglossia in the Linguistic Expression of Emotion.” In Language and the Politics of Emotion, edited by Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, 121–61. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, edited by Paul Kroskrity, 35–83. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. (1957) 1971. “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb.” In Selected Writings II: Word and Language, 130–47. The Hague: Mouton10.1515/9783110873269.130CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jayadeva, Sazana. 2018. “‘Below English Line’: An Ethnographic Exploration of Class and the English Language in Post-liberalization India.” Modern Asian Studies 52 (2): 576–608.10.1017/S0026749X16000639CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jayadeva, Sazana. 2019. “English-Medium: Schooling, Social Mobility, and Inequality in Bangalore, India.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 50 (2): 151–69.10.1111/aeq.12287CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khubchandani, Lachman M. 2003. “Defining Mother Tongue Education in Plurilingual Contexts.” Language Policy 2 (3): 239–54.10.1023/A:1027372700861CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Robert D. 2001. “The Poisonous Potency of Script: Hindi and Urdu.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 150:43–59.Google Scholar
Kumar, Krishna. 2018. “Introduction.” In Routledge Handbook of Education in India: Debates, Practices, and Policies, edited by Krishna Kumar, 1–10. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kumar, Nita. 1998. “Lessons from Contemporary Schools.” Sociological Bulletin 47 (1): 33–49.10.1177/0038022919980104CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LaDousa, Chaise. 2002. “Advertising in the Periphery: Languages and Schools in a North Indian City.” Language and Society 31 (2): 213–42.10.1017/S0047404501020164CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LaDousa, Chaise. 2005. “Disparate Markets: Language, Nation, and Education in North India.” American Ethnologist 32 (3): 460–78.10.1525/ae.2005.32.3.460CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LaDousa, Chaise. 2006. “The Discursive Malleability of an Identity: A Dialogic Approach to Language ‘Medium’ Schooling in North India.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16 (1): 36–57.10.1525/jlin.2006.16.1.036CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LaDousa, Chaise. 2007. “Liberalisation, Globalisation, and Schooling: An Interview with Krishna Kumar.” Globalisation, Societies, and Education 5 (2): 137–52.10.1080/14767720701425628CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LaDousa, Chaise. 2012. “On Mother and Other Tongues: Sociolinguistics, Schools, and Language Ideology in North India.” In Making Sense of Language: Readings in Culture and Communication, edited by Susan Blum, 2nd ed., 544–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
LaDousa, Chaise. 2014. Hindi Is Our Ground, English Is Our Sky: Education, Language and Social Class in Contemporary India. New York: Berghahn Books.10.3167/9781782382324CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LaDousa, Chaise. 2018a. “Language Medium and a High-Stakes Test: Language Ideology and Coaching Centers in North India.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 253:103–24.Google Scholar
LaDousa, Chaise. 2018b. “Mind the (Language-Medium) Gap.” In Handbook of Education in India: Debates, Practices, and Policies, edited by Krishna Kumar, 81–96. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
LaDousa, Chaise, and Christina Davis. 2018. “Introduction: Language and Schooling in India and Sri Lanka: Language Medium Matters.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 253:1–26.10.1515/ijsl-2018-0021CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Majumdar, Manabi. 2018. “Access, Success, and Excess: Debating Shadow Education in India.” In Routledge Handbook of Education in India: Debates, Practices, and Policies, edited by Krishna Kumar, 273–84. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Majumdar, Manabi, and Rahul Mukhopadhyay. 2018. “English Immersion and Bangla Floatation? Rendering a Collective Choice Private.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 253:79–102.10.1515/ijsl-2018-0024CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mirchandani, Kiran. 2012. Phone Clones: Authenticity Work in the Transnational Economy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Muralidharan, T. 2012. “Try Taking Civils without Coaching.” The Hindu, June 11, 2012. https://www.thehindu.com/features/education/careers/try-taking-civils-without-coaching/article3515468.ece.Google Scholar
Nadkarni, M. 1994. “English in Mother Tongue Medium Education.” In Second Language Acquisition: Socio-cultural and Linguistic Aspects of English in India, edited by R. K. Agnihotri and A. L. Khanna, 130–42. New Delhi: Sage.Google Scholar
Nakassis, Constantine. 2016. Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226327990.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nakassis, Constantine. 2019. “Poetics of Praise and Image-Texts of Cinematic Encompassment.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 29 (1): 69–94.10.1111/jola.12217CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patel, Reena. 2010. Working the Night Shift: Women in India’s Call Center Industry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.10.1515/9780804775502CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peirce, Charles S. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. 2 vols. Edited by the Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press [cited as EP].Google Scholar
Poonam, Sigdha. 2018. Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World. Gurgaon: Viking.Google Scholar
Proctor, Lavanya Murali. 2014. “English and Globalization in India: The Fractal Nature of Discourse.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24 (3): 294–314.10.1111/jola.12056CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramanathan, Vaidehi. 1999. “‘English Is Here to Stay’: A Critical Look at Institutional and Educational Practices in India.” TESOL Quarterly 33 (2): 211–31.10.2307/3587718CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramanathan, Vaidehi. 2004. The English-Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Ramanathan, Vaidehi. 2005. “Ambiguities about English: Ideologies and Critical Practice in Vernacular-medium College Classrooms in Gujarat, India.” Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 4:45–65.10.1207/s15327701jlie0401_3CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandhu, Priti. 2014. “‘Who Does She Think She Is?’ Vernacular Medium and Failed Romance.” Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 13 (1): 16–33.10.1080/15348458.2014.864210CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandhu, Priti. 2016. Professional Identity Constructions of Indian Women. Studies in Narrative 23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/sin.23CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandhu, Priti. 2018. “English Medium Education, Patriarchy, and Emerging Social Structures: Narratives of Indian Women.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 253:55–78.10.1515/ijsl-2018-0023CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description.” In Meaning in Anthropology, edited by Keith Basso and Henry Selby, 11–55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language and Communication 23 (3–4): 193–229.10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00013-2CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 2005. “Axes of Evals: Token versus Type Interdiscursivity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1): 6–22.10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.6CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tarlo, Emma. 1996. Clothing Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Vaish, Viniti. 2008. Biliteracy and Globalization: English Language Education in India. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.10.21832/9781847690340CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verma, Manindra K. 1994. “English in Indian Education.” In Second Language Acquisition: Socio-cultural and Linguistic Aspects of English in India, edited by R. K. Agnihotri and A. L. Khanna, 105–29. New Delhi: Sage.Google Scholar