Please join CGS in welcoming Mithilesh Mishra (UIUC) and Asha Sarangi (Jawaharlal Nehru University) on Wednesday, March 29th at 12PM (CST) on Zoom for their third lecture in this semester's series on contemporary nationalism, "Language and Politics in India."

Description: The relationship between language and politics in different parts of the world has been a rather turbulent one. It has been analyzed from a variety of analytical and philosophical perspectives within the specific social, anthropological, historical, economic, cultural and political contexts. Owing to the complex and dense inter-linkages between language and power, a number of field and sub-fields have emerged focusing on this relationship with newer methodological and thematic concerns. At the same time, it is important to explore and examine the sites where language and politics interact. This inter-face reproduces and reinforces scales of social hierarchies, political power, cultural and economic inequalities.

In this presentation, Dr. Sarangi and Dr. Mishra look at the multiple domains where language and politics interact in case of India after independence. Among these are education, occupation, administration, state ideology, caste and class hierarchies, regional diversities and differences, cultural differentiation and gender discrimination. The constitutional provisions entailed in the PART XVII of the Indian Constitution show how the language question in the Constituent Assembly Debates resulted in the constitutional provisions for the protection and language rights especially for the linguistic minorities. This lecture situates these issues within the larger problematic of linguistic nationalism -- explored in the first two talks of this series.