The notion of cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bourdieu 1991) has been used by educationists (e.g. Delpit 1988; Lin 1996; Luke 1996) ‘to describe the disadvantaged position of ethnic and linguistic minorities and to problematize the notion that state education in modern societies is built on meritocracy and equal opportunity’ (Lin 1996: 394). Defining cultural capital to include language use, skills and orientations, attitudes, dispositions and schemes of perception that a child is endowed with by virtue of socialization in her/his family and community, Bourdieu argued that familial socialization bestows on children of the socioeconomic elite the right kind of cultural capital (also called habitus) for school success. Children from disadvantaged groups, with a habitus incompatible with that presupposed in school, are not competing with equal starting points with children of the socioeconomic elite.
They are placed in an unfair game where the rules are already laid down by the privileged class who are way ahead of them in the race. Hence, the reproduc-tion of social stratificareproduc-tion.
The key to understanding the socially divisive role that English plays in India lies in understanding the two major features associated with situations of symbolic domination (Bourdieu 1991): first, the formation of a language-in-education policy that legitimized and consolidated the place English occupies today in the symbolic market, as discussed in the previous section. Second, the perpetuation of the uneven distribution of symbolic capital across different social groups, with the dominated group having the most limited access to symbolic resources, an aspect I turn to in this section.
In the socioeducational landscape of India, English and the privileges associated with it remain inaccessible to those who are disadvantaged because of their economic situation, their caste, or both. As a result, English is increas-ingly implicated in the production of socioeconomic disadvantage and new subaltern identities, opening up life opportunities and possibilities for some, while closing doors and erecting barriers for others. The divisive nature of English is thus at the core of class-based inequalities, its differential value being most strongly located in the English–Vernacular divide. In India, students are generally educated either in EM or VM schools. While theoretically all stu-dents can ‘choose’ which types of school they want to attend, such ‘choice’ is socially conditioned because of a number of intersecting factors, including socioeconomic and familial reasons. EM schools are generally well funded and
provide English immersion to students, who already have access to English symbolic capital in the home and out of class. These students have the good fortune (literally in terms of wealth and also metaphorically) to receive instruc-tion from well-trained teachers familiar with up-to-date methodologies and classroom techniques, whereas those who study English as a subject in the VM schools are often taught by teachers with inadequate training or qualifications who resort to outdated methods of teaching, and who in turn, receive little support by way of enhancing their professional skills.
Referring to the immense power/knowledge differential that exists between those who have access to English and those who do not, Ramanathan (1999), in her study on the English–Vernacular divide in Gujarat, likens the privileges associated with EM education to the unequal power relations that reside between the inner and outer circles of countries (Kachru 1985) that result from the privileged standard-setting position of inner circle countries (Phillipson 1992; Pennycook 1994). She observes how even within an outer circle country such as India, an English-related inner–outer power dichotomy appears to exist, where the Indian middle class assumes a position of relative power through access to English in Circle 1, with Dalit or lower-caste students and students from so-called Other Backward Classes (OBCs) placed in Circle 2 (Figure 8.1).
The Dalits and the OBC students, who are also typically the most economi-cally and educationally handicapped, are unable to acquire proficiency in English because they lack the requisite cultural orientation, or habitus, to use Bourdieu’s term. When these students enter tertiary education on the fringes of Circle 2 with poor English language skills, they seem to struggle more
Circle 1:
The Indian Middle Class
Circle 2:
Dalits and OBCs
Figure 8.1 Inner and Outer Circles of Power in India (from Ramanathan 1999).
than others. The importance of developing English language skills for future studies and jobs is well understood among students even though the govern-ment is careful not to overtly stress the importance of English above the indig-enous languages for political reasons. They, however, often find English difficult to learn, uninteresting and irrelevant to their daily life. Deep in the rural interiors of India, similarly, students find themselves forced to learn English and have mixed feelings towards it. They live in a lifeworld where few have adequate linguistic resources to use English and even if they had, they would find it unnatural and pompous using it. They are thus placed in a frustrating dilemma, universally recognizing the importance of English for their future but at the same time having little access to the symbolic capital necessary for successfully acquiring it. Ramanathan notes the irony of their predicament as follows:
These are the students most in need of English yet English seems farthest from them. Their economically disadvantaged status does not permit them to enroll in language classes in the city, nor does it afford them access to other realia available to learners in Circle 1: the Internet, newspapers, TV shows in English, and English movies. They realize more and more that they need to be computer literate for the simplest of jobs, but to gain access to knowledge about computers they have to first become fluent in English – that is, they have to develop the language that allows them to enter and become part of Circle 1. For most, however, their worst fears become reality: they never really gain fluency in English or entry into that circle and thus never become qualified for the jobs they desire. (Ramanathan 1999: 228–29)
Similarly, describing the advantage of EM in higher education and employ-ment as a mirage for a majority of students who receive poor education and whose command of English is poor in the end, Annamalai, cautions that the often cited success stories of Indian students who get into professional, mana-gerial and academic positions, nationally and internationally because of their mastery of both English and subject knowledge can be misleading:
These highly successful students are most likely to have studied through English medium in well-funded schools. They are also likely to have come from families that have used English as a second language for at least one preceding generation and to have had exposure to reading materials and conversations at home. These students already have a solid cultural and linguistic foundation in English; their education merely supplements this advantage . . . A much larger population is made up of first-generation learners from poor families, who do not have access to the same kind of support at home as their middle class counterparts. Thus, a
social advantage for the minority of students has been misleadingly projected as the advantage of English-medium education. (Annamalai 2004: 189)
Ramanathan demonstrates how the two types of schools – EM and VM – generate two broad sets of class-based and class-indexed ideologies and prac-tices which ‘slot students into invisible grooves’ (Ramanathan 2005: 38), and which create and sustain well-entrenched ‘gulfs’ and ‘chasms’ in Indian society.
She attrributes the privileged access that the Indian middle-class student has to English literacy to what she calls a shared assumptions nexus – ‘a collective syndrome of values, assumptions, perspectives, motivations, behaviours and world view that the middle class has by sheer virtue of just being so, a nexus that seems to remain out of reach for low-income vernacular medium students’
(Ramanathan 2005: 6) – much like Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. She goes on to describe how macro-structures such as institutional and larger state- and nationwide policies as well as curricular and pedagogical materials align ‘in specific ways so as simultaneously to engage in combined relations of power to empower the upper and middle classes in particular social ways that directly yield certain social goods’ (Ramanathan 2005: 6). The assumption nexus is thus a construct that helps to explore the ways in which the values and aspirations of the Indian middle class dovetail with this complex socioeducational system and to explain how the overall apparatus works to maintain the status quo.
This hegemony of the middle class is further strengthened by particular socioeducational structures and practices that have become firmly entrenched.
Some of the institutional practices which keep English out of reach of the lower income and lower caste groups and push them into the outer circle include practices such as (a) tracking students into college-level streams that bar some students from EM instruction; (b) teaching English literature rather than the English language throughout India, which limits English to the elite and mid-dle class; and (c) using grammar translation methods, all of which inhibit the communicative competence of these students and help to keep them in their disadvantaged positions and out of Circle 1.
For instance, that the teaching of English literature has deeply entrenched roots in the Indian soil from colonial times is common knowledge. But those familiar with Viswanathan’s (1994) analysis of the beginnings of English liter-ary studies in India would also know how the development of what counted as
‘education’ and ‘literature’ in Indian schools was intimately tied up with colo-nial power relations and the creation of docile colocolo-nial subjects. Ramanathan’s (2005) study shows how current practices in literature teaching in the Indian context become not only entirely counter-productive but assume a neocolonial
impact, when they become associated with gatekeeping functions in streaming students, when they force teachers to resort to translation methods instead of a meaningful interpretation of texts and spawn the widespread use of study guides and rote memorization, and when they create cultural dissonance and alienation between students and the overly Western themes found in the course material. Her depiction of the complexity and conflict surrounding literature teaching, which places the EM and VM students in ‘unequal grooves’, and devalues the vernacular, ties in with Viswanathan’s historical account of the development of a construction of an English literature ‘canon’ in India as a form of social, cultural and political control.
Thus, although motivation to learn English is very strong, the cumulative effect of practices such as those described by Ramanathan combined with the poor infrastructure and quality of instruction available to them keep the poor-est and most disadvantaged students from learning it. A compounding factor is the lack of autonomy on the part of both institutions and teachers. This partially explains why much of the teaching is exams oriented, why teachers opt for particular methods, why the students resort to memorizing and using study guides to get through the exams as well as why English-speaking skills are not emphasized (Ramanathan 1999: 228). Learning English in this way is not only high in social and intellectual cost. It is also highly counter-productive.
The domination of the symbolic market by English and the perpetuation of the uneven distribution of English linguistic capital has continued to construct
‘social failures’ out of the majority of the children in India. There is a widening gap between the rich and the poor and educational researchers cannot ignore the role played by educational institutions, policies and practices in the repro-duction of social stratification based on the possession or the lack of a mastery of English.