The illustration caught our attention: Which is more powerful: The lion or the mosquito? At first glance, the power of the lion cannot be questioned. And yet the lion , though protected, faces extinction, while the mosquito cannot be vanquished. We sat cross-legged on thick mats around the circumference of a large room, participants in a week-long seminar on Gandhian philosophy, which was held in the small town of Kausani during my third month of fieldwork . The discussions covered issues of personal and social change, including critique of modern assumptions about development, education, and language hierarchies in India and themes of truth, nonviolence, and love. Powerful word pictures and stories sent ripples of laughter around the room and caused us to ponder. Something lower on the pyramid, though seeming less powerful, may actually be more important.
Among the participants were ten Kumauni young women and their teacher who had become my friends as we lived and worked together at Lakshmi Ashram girls’ boarding school. Although they were village girls wearing simple clothes, they spoke with confidence as they introduced themselves individually to the group and described their understanding of the conference themes in Hindi . “Although Gandhi-ji was a small man, he did so much,” Sunita said, using the Hindi suffix ji to show respect. “People think about how to get a job and earn money, but that is not what is most important.” Later she added, “Society is based on cooperation with each other.” Her friend Mahima summarized Gandhian values similarly: “We can do big things through small things that bring about a change” (H; PQ:07Sep301). Later I will tell more of Sunita ’s story, how powerless she felt in the face of her family’s financial instability, and the ways in which she seems small: as a woman, as the child of rural farmers, and as a Kumauni.
I entered the scene as a researcher: a student of educational linguistics, grounded in sociolinguistics and educational anthropology, using ethnographic methods to explore themes that were relevant to my research while remaining purposefully open to local priorities and perspectives. Through my research, I attempted to understand a local situation as it was perceived locally—specifically the language and education situation in the Kumaun from the perspectives of rural Kumauni young women and in light of their dreams or aims for the future. I describe how each language is valued in its context, how national-level policies are taken up and contested in local discourses , and how language and culture influence educational opportunities and identity negotiation for minority youth.
The Kumauni people of the Himalayan foothills , numbering over 2 million, are one of several linguistic minority groups in the Hindi-speaking state of Uttarakhand .2 While incorporated peacefully into the Indian political system for generations, Kumaunis are often considered to be a “backward” mountain people in the eyes of their neighbors in the plains, and their language, though linguistically distinct, is sometimes considered to be a substandard variety of Hindi. Kumauni is the language of the home and the village in the rural Kumaun. Hindi is the language of wider communication in the region and the language of government schools and administration. English and Sanskrit are taught as school subjects . Language and education issues in the Kumaun thus include both language acquisition, with concern for learning English in particular, and language shift , with questions about the use, value, and long-term prospects for the Kumauni language. Language policies from the national to the local level influence those trends, even as those policies are shaped by local language ideologies and the ecological relationships among the languages. Through my analysis of India’s multilingualism as seen from the Himalayan foothills, I highlight the voices of those seldom heard, particularly Kumauni young women and educators. I describe the linguistic ecology from a local perspective, providing a glimpse of India’s multilingual complexity through the lens of specific language and education situations in the Kumaun.
The Ecology of Language
Throughout my fieldwork in the Kumaun region of North India, I often heard catchy metaphors and analogies, used to draw attention to a particular issue and to provide a new perspective. Women I heard referred to as “the backbone of the hills .” They take primary responsibility for cultivating the terraced fields in a region with a long history of male labor-migration. I picture a group of women walking single file along a hill-side trail, balancing bundles of firewood or fodder on their heads. Regarding language, I heard the expression: “Every mile the water changes, every four miles the speech” [Hindi: Kos-kos par badale paani, chaar kos par baani]. I discuss later this reference to linguistic variation and the naturalness of multilingual practices in the Kumaun. Living in the Himalayan foothills, with views of the magnificent snow-capped peaks, I could appreciate ecological metaphors for describing languages. Sometimes the distinction between language and dialect is a matter of perspective, as is the distinction between mountains and hills. The types of trees in different forests also provide a new perspective on the relationship among languages, as insightfully described by young Govindi in the concluding chapter.
Stepping back to a broader perspective and to the theoretical foundations of my research, I use the ecology of language metaphor to explain my purposes and approach in describing and analyzing the language and education situation as experienced by young women and educators in the Kumaun. A thorough description of the relationships among languages and their social environment in a given context, reflecting an ecological perspective, involves attention to the agency of local actors and the policies, discourse , and ideologies that surround them. The ecology of language metaphor draws attention to the multiple contextual factors influencing languages and, as I emphasize here, the speakers of those languages. Attention to the relationships among languages within their social contexts heightens awareness of multilingual realities and issues of power between and among linguistic groups (Haugen 1972; Blackledge 2008). In the ecology of language metaphor, languages, like living species, are seen as changing over time , as influenced by other languages in their linguistic environment , and as facing the threat of extinction in the face of more powerful languages (Hornberger 2002). Such power dynamics among languages in turn influence the speakers of those languages, particularly linguistic minorities whose home language(s) differ from the powerful language(s) of the nation.3
Connections between language and the environment have inspired research from various perspectives in recent decades (Fill 1998; Fill and Mühlhaüsler 2001). An ecological perspective recognizes the importance of diversity , interaction, and wholeness (Fill 2001), and the interrelationships and interdependence within systems (Mackey 2001). Scholars have described the ecology of language evolution (Mufwene 2001), language shift (Mackey 2001), language acquisition (Leather and Dam 2003), language learning (Van Lier 2006), and the ecologies of specific linguistic contexts (Creese and Martin 2003, 2008; Goodman 2013). As with any metaphor, we should be cautious about over-extending the comparison. Linguistic diversity is in many ways different from biological diversity, for example, linguistic boundaries are fuzzy, languages are always adaptable, and their survival depends no...
