This book examines language contact and shift in Nepal, a multilingual context where language attitudes and policies often reflect the complex socio-cultural and socio-political relationship between minority, majority and endangered languages and peoples. Presenting the results of a 15-year study and making use of both quantitative and qualitative data, the author presents evidence relating to speakers' opinions and perceptions of mother tongues including English, Hindi, Nepali, Sherpa, Dotyali, Jumli and Tharu. This book explores an under-studied part of the world, and the findings will be relevant to scholars working in other multilingual contexts in fields including language policy and planning, language contact and change, and language attitudes and ideologies.
This book explores the development of multilingual policy in education in Nepal in sociopolitical and historical contexts and examines the frameworks of language use in schools. It investigates the dynamics and factors that influence the process of construction and appropriation of the policy of multilingualism in education. The book surveys the language situation in schools and discusses how it is impacted by local language positions, societal power relations, ideological and identity contestations, and the attitude, language behaviour and resistance of key actors. It highlights the role of pedagogy, linguistics and politics that govern the policy of multilingual education. The author assesses the prospects of a multilingual approach to learning via teacher preparation, curriculum and learning material development, coordination of actors and institutions, and resources available in schools. The book presents Nepal’s linguistic background while discussing how multilingualism in education recognises local languages to improve the quality of learning in classrooms in ethnolinguistic communities. Evaluating the use of local languages in classrooms, it explores monolingual, multilingual and language maintenance frameworks of multilingualism in education. This book will be of interest to teachers, students, and researchers of education and educational studies, linguistics, sociology of education, school education, language studies, sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, public administration, ethnolinguistics, and sociology of language. It will also be useful to educationists, policymakers, linguists, sociolinguists and those working in related areas.
Increasing inequalities, political movements and violent extremism across the world cause social and political instability in which education is enormously implicated. Placed firmly in this wider global context, this volume explores interactions between education and armed conflict during the 'People's War' (1996 – 2006) in Nepal. Building upon theoretical concepts that deal with multifarious links between education and conflict, Tejendra Pherali provides a critical analysis of the contentious role of education in the emergence of conflict, as well as the effects of violence on education. Pherali engages with sociological and political theories to analyse the emergence and expansion of armed rebellion and discuss implications for peacebuilding and social transformation. He argues that education in Nepal played a complicit role in the conflict, primarily benefitting the traditionally privileged social groups in the society and hence, perpetuating the existing structural inequalities, which were the major causes of the rebellion. Schools, trapped in the middle of the conflict between the Maoists and the security forces, became a significant political space that facilitated critical education, providing intellectual strength to the violent rebellion. Exploring education after the conflict, the author argues that the reconstruction should adopt a 'conflict-sensitive' approach to deal with issues concerning educational inequity, social exclusion, and political hegemony of the privileged social groups. The volume provides invaluable insights into post-conflict opportunities and challenges for educational reforms that align with inclusive democracy, social justice and equitable development.
In Search of Home explores new, yet less explored space of urban poverty – rehabilitation housing that houses the displaced poor and increasingly dots the peripheries of Indian cities. It examines the politics of the poor focusing on law, citizenship and gender. Contesting the assumption that illegalities emerge due to lack of legal rights to property, this ethnography of the everyday narrates how the rehabilitated poor despite legal residence experience 'citizenship in limbo', suspended between an illegal past and an imagined future of full citizenship. The book details the flexible governance of such neighbourhoods, studying how the state produces illegalities, and how state institutions and actors stand to gain. By looking at how systemic corruption draws urban poor groups into webs of exchanges with the state, de-radicalising and co-opting the poor, it exposes the gendered underbelly of urban poor struggles, uncovering the role women play in eliciting the paternalism of the state.
Comparativist scholarship conventionally gives unbridled primacy to external, material interests–chiefly votes and rents–as proximately shaping political behaviour. These logics tend to explicate elite decision-making around elections and pork barrel politics but fall short in explaining political conduct during credibility crises, such as democratic governments facing anti-corruption movements. In these instances, Baloch shows, elite ideas, for example concepts of the nation or technical diagnoses of socioeconomic development, dominate policymaking. Scholars leverage these arguments in the fields of international relations, American politics, and the political economy of development. But an account of ideas activating or constraining executive action in developing democracies, where material pressures are high, is found wanting. Resting on fresh archival research and over 120 original elite interviews, When Ideas Matter traces where ideas come from, how they are chosen, and when they are most salient for explaining political behaviour in India and similar contexts.
How do borderland dwellers living along militarised frontiers negotiate regimes of state security and their geopolitical location in everyday life? What might 'freedom' mean to those who do not resist captivity engendered by borders? Focusing on the predicaments of a double-minority, Freedom in Captivity examines the affective attachments, political imaginaries, and ethical claims-making among the Shia Muslims of Kargil. In contrast to calls for freedom in the Kashmir Valley, Shias on the frontiers of Kashmir have sought belonging to India. Yet they do not entirely succumb to its hegemonic ideological boundaries. Departing from the dominant focus on physical cross-border mobility, this book is an invitation to reimagine borderlands as cartographies of ideas, cutting across spatial scales. Based on original ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2021, this monograph offers a unique long durée insight into the lives of people residing at the intersections of the biggest states in Asia.
Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world, which meticulously shows how theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.