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The IUP Journal of English Studies

Global English and the Postcolonial Other

Article Details

Pub. Date	: Sep, 2020
Product Name	: The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type	: Article
Product Code	: IJES30920
Author Name	: Om Prakash Dwivedi
Availability	: YES
Subject/Domain	: Arts & Humanities
Download Format	: PDF Format
No. of Pages	: 11

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Abstract

By situating the problematics of Global English in the context of India?s decolonization?a nation, which according to the 2011 census, has only 10 percent English speakers?the paper highlights the flawed postcolonial epistemology and the way it ignores the alternative knowledge traditions available in other languages. It also attempts to raise and examine questions on the role of the remaining 90 percent of the population and the way they imagine and construct the postcolonial India. What role do these large sections of the Indian population have, if any, in registering their voices to narrate the nation? What kind of resistance strategies are needed to counter this Euro-centric hegemony? Set against the backdrop of such pressing questions, the paper suggests that one needs to fervently engage with and reinvent ways to energize the rich Indian traditions available in languages other than English. The paper argues for an imperative need to contextualize new methodology and pedagogy to offer resistance to the English hegemony and for a more effective cognitive decolonization.

Introduction

The entire project of decolonization seems to have taken a wrong turn if we look at the body of writing available to us in the form of postcolonial literature. The empire not only continues to dominate but has transformed into an invisible coercive force that gives very little space to alterity. As the bilingual Indian writer, Nagarkar (1995, 180) posits the problem, ?Those who have English are the haves and those who don?t are the have-nots. . . . English is a mantra, a maha-mantra.?

Such a problematic and muted relationship of English with other languages takes us back to the issue of language and power. It does not take much to understand the way language has been used as a technique to control, dominate, and at times also to offer resistance. It is no doubt that English language has acted as a double-edged sword. It is through the language exercise that structuration of identities takes place. The creation, organization, and distribution of language inevitably lead to identity, differences, inclusion,