Asha Sarangi

Jawaharlal Nehru University | JNU · Centre for Political Studies

In this paper, we explore language policy in Independent India from the viewpoint of federalism.

Sumanyu Satpathy, Will to Argue: Studies in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Controversies, Primus Books, Delhi, 2017, 222 pp., ₹850.

About the politics of rhetoric

The linguistic pluralism with its democratic enunciation has remained internal to the political processes of state formation in independent India. Konkani language acquires a distinctive status in debates on language-based political autonomy movements in twentieth-century India. As an inter-state, inter-regional language with scriptal plurality, it...

Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph were world renowned political scientists and iconic academic couple who devoted six decades of their lives to teaching and researching India and South Asia. The liberal-centrist Rudolphian framework is clearly evident in their numerous works. Their writings show the innovativeness and interpretative richness of methodologi...

Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph were globally acclaimed scholars of India at the University of Chicago where they spent nearly four decades of their lives teaching and researching on India and South Asia. Their numerous works done in this intellectual partnership of more than six decades produced paradigmatic shift both methodologically and thematically...

Ajay K. Mehra (ed.), Party System in India: Emerging Trajectories. New Delhi: Lancer Publishers. 2013. 533 pages. ₹ 995.

A number of enumerative practices and discourses were instrumental in defining the politics of linguistic codification, quantification and gradually the shaping of the linguistic identity formation of various communities and groups in colonial north India. The British colonial state systematically pursued the "logic of numbers" through regular cens...

This article locates and analyses the gendered discourses of Hindi and Urdu linguistic identity in late nineteenth-century colonial north India. Using a new concept of language woman, it characterises the multiple discourses of feminisation through three distinctive terms of linguistic femininity, linguistic morality and linguistic patriarchy. Thes...

Language alone can no longer be the basis for division of states. Issues such as size, governance, economic viability and recognition of new identities are equally important to consider the demands for reorganisation of states. Moreover, the social, economic and political context in which reorganisation takes place today is vastly different from th...

Ambedkar consistently argued that the proposed linguistic states would become socially more homogeneous and politically democratic in due course of time. His proposals about the formation of linguistic states emanated from his democratic impulse to accord political and cultural recognition to the term region, otherwise defined predominantly in a ge...

Bernard Cohn was most interested in the historical and anthropological making of the British colonial state in India, especially the modes in which 'colonial' culture and practices were enforced through multiple regulatory mechanisms. His work retains immense relevance even today. In his writings, he ably demonstrated that the colonial state and it...