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Shefali Chandra (
sc23@illinois.edu
) is Assistant Professor of South Asian History and Non-West Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Historical studies on the English language and the English education project in colonial India have furnished us with important information on the numbers of schools and institutions, the relationship between Western education and the English language, the content of the curriculum, and colonial and nationalist administrative debates on the matter (Kumar 2005 ; McCully 1940 ; McDonald 1966 ; Ramanna 1985 ; Seth 2007 ; Viswanathan 1989 ). While in no way insignificant, these works only tangentially account for the independent "social life" of the English language, how it transcended colonial presence, and how it carved new constituencies of privilege and desire beyond a rather narrow realm of colonial-native institutional interactions. Scholarly work that does discuss the long life of English in Indian society has focused on the literary aspects of the language, skillfully analyzing the production of a bicultural/bilingual investment in the literary forms and tropes now central to a transnational bourgeois modernity (Joshi 1991 ; Sangari 1999; Trivedi 1995 ), the shaping of reading practices around the English novel in India (Joshi 2002 ), or the postcolonial curricula of English literature departments in metropolitan India (Spivak 1993 ; Sunder Rajan 1992 ). But languages produce power beyond and despite their written forms. Literature forms only one aspect of the cultural inventory of English, and as I demonstrate here, we need a far deeper understanding of how the language shaped and was actively coded with socioculturally specific meanings. With the exception of Veena Naregal's rich study on the mutually reinforcing relation between English and Marathi from 1830 to 1881 (2001), we have yet to learn how the language moved beyond its original, colonial, and institutional settings to interact with and actively shape existing cultural practices, ideologies, and belief systems on a wider social terrain.
In this article, I trace the gendered and sexualized route traversed by the English language in nineteenth-century western India. More specifically, I argue that contests over gender, caste, and erotic desire bolstered the cultural authority of English and, with that, imbued the language with a "native" phallogocentric power.1...