Speaking Miscommunication: Bridging a Postcolonial Abyss

RADHA SARMA HEGDE

New York University, USA

 

Abstract

The dualistic view of communication as both disease and cure, raised by John Durham Peters in Speaking into the Air, continues to gain traction globally. This view of communication has followed the itineraries of the neoliberal economy and its expectations. Communication today is the site where individual aspirations, market expectations and national interests meet and collide. Taking a cue from Peters of thinking with the past, this essay follows the dualistic narrative in the complex linguistic terrain of India today where the English language and communication serve as a space for defining failure and promoting the remedy of self-development. Engaging with postcolonial examples, the discussion illustrates how narratives of miscommunication are integrated and reinforced in the entrepreneurial space of communication skills training. 

Keywords

English, communication, skills, India, postcolonial, failure

 

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/153 

 

To understand communication, John Durham Peters (1999) writes, is to understand much more. Placing ages and discourses in conversation with one another, Speaking into the Air offers an erudite unravelling of “why the experience of communication is so often marked by felt impasses” (Peters, 1999: 1). Some of the chief dilemmas of our age, according to Peters, whether public or personal, turn on communication or communication gone sour. The book offers a compelling intellectual history and critique of the idea of communication and the central place it occupies in contemporary life. Peters argues that the post war years, led to two dominant visions—the technical and the therapeutic—both of which are rooted in American cultural history and rest on the belief of communication’s ability to remove obstacles either due to improved technology or better techniques of relating interpersonally. Given that communication has become the property of politicians, bureaucrats, technologists and therapists, Peters notes that its popularity exceeds its clarity (1999: 6). In an extensive mapping of the subject, Speaking into the Air shows how, while the difficulty of communication confronts us daily, communication also presents itself as an easy solution to intractable human troubles. This critique of the dualistic view of communication as both disease and cure or bridge and chasm that Peters raised over two decades ago continues to gain traction, not just in the United States, but globally as well. These visions have travelled widely following the itineraries of the neoliberal economy and its expectations for the neoliberal subject. In this essay, I follow the travel of these visions in the linguistic terrain of India.

Communication today serves as the supremely malleable, performative site that can be scripted and managed to justify various institutional agendas. Communication is also trumped up as a conduit, a morphing placeholder where individual aspirations, market expectations and national interests are made to reside. Failures in communication, Peters maintains, owe less to semantic mismatches than to unjust allocations of symbolic and material resources (1999: 125).  If communication derives its force as a compensatory ideal from its contrast with breakdown (Peters, 1999: 6), how then do we approach the politics of defining the norm and, in turn, identifying and naming communicative failure? How are these models of effective communication or more often banal templates of performative conformity reproduced globally? Whatever communication might mean, Peters does stress that it is not a matter of improved wiring or freer self-disclosure (1999: 29) and it is a mistake to think that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts (1999: 9).

Both the field of communication, especially in its early hegemonic disciplinary formations, and the popular consolidation of communication as best interpersonal practices have quite strategically remained apolitical and have steered clear of any contested histories. The material conditions that frame prescriptions for dialogic connection are, most often, left unmarked and evacuated of contextual particularities or acknowledgement of historical entanglements. Peters writes about the troubling “righteous tyranny” about communication since “the term can be used to browbeat others for ‘failing to communicate’ when they are opting out of the game” (1999: 267). Failure is not only quickly attributed to miscommunication, but also attached to the qualities of an individual or group and their communicative proclivities. This tendency for reductive explanations diverts attention from political or structural issues and instead focuses on culture, the individual and the realm of psychologistic interiority. Offering a more critical formulation, Appadurai and Alexander (2019) note that failure is “a product of judgements that reflect various arraignments of power, competence and equity in different places and times. As such, failure produces and sustains cultural fantasies and regimes of expectations” (1). Communication breakdown and the perception of failure is entangled within precisely the power relations that sustain a web of judgements, fantasies and expectations.

Both the dream of communication and the specter of miscommunication assume layers of complexity within the complex multilingual infrastructures of postcolonial geographies. The bristling media and linguistic landscape of India serves as a dynamic example of how both the promise and failure of communication have been defined, enforced, judged and attached to imperial ambitions, nationalist agendas, regional politics and capitalist aspirations. But these vexed questions of postcoloniality were slow to arrive in the communication discipline in the United States and when they did, they appeared in the register of lack. The partitioned aerial study of the non-West instituted during the Cold War years was mirrored within the communication discipline where entire regions were held steady and contained within disciplinary sub-areas like intercultural communication or development communication. These were mainly the spaces where the rest of the world was allowed entry into the discipline and were kept at bay. This model of institutionalizing the separation of world regions within the discipline maintained the centrality of national or specifically American interests (Hegde, 2006). The highly influential contribution of scholars like David Lerner and Wilbur Schramm (1967) linking communication and national development made the global south visible through the lens of modernization and the benevolence of American exceptionalism.[1]  As Rajagopal (2019) writes, “media technologies and the idea of communication in general became crucial ways of rendering the United States’ influence into something apparently inexorable and universal” (411). Within this framework, the non-Western world continued to be imagined in terms of inadequacies or lack or consigned endlessly in Dipesh Chakraborty’s (2000) memorable words to “the waiting rooms of history” (8).

Language choice and linguistic infrastructures play an important aspect of this game of catching up with modernity. The legacies of colonialism, development and Western benevolence have crept predictably into the neoliberal economy’s prescriptions for success and to popular iterations of what constitutes global communication skills in India today. Taking a cue from Peters’ approach of thinking with the past, this essay discusses how an ongoing narrative of deficit and failure with colonial roots is reproduced in the realm of language and communication in the service of the global economy. The language issue has been strategically used to advance political interests at every step and stage of Indian history (see Ramanathan, 2005). The consequences and after-life of imperial decisions made two centuries ago to impose English in India continue to define the politics of communicability in the postcolonial world and creep into ongoing and divisive narratives of communication failure in various spaces of public life. Even though English is widely hailed as another Indian language, the weight of the colonial baggage is too heavy to shake off. Everyone has an opinion about English, its presence, its power and the politics. While disadvantaged Dalit communities see liberatory possibilities in English and some right-wing nationalist groups argue aggressively against the colonial import, the corporate sector seeks to cash in on the presence of an English-speaking workforce in India. During fieldwork in India on this subject, I met an entrepreneur in the outsourcing industry who rolled his eyes in disdain about endless political debates over language or what he described as ‘the continuous hoopla’ about choosing between English or the regional language as the right medium of education. To him, the logic was simple and straightforward: “Who cares about how we got English? We have it now and we are in the global game today”.

It is this global game that drives the frantic search for skilled communicators and redraws the social divide in terms of communication, miscommunication and, even more drastically, the failure to communicate. The dualistic view of communication as both bridge and abyss, advanced by Peters, assumes a complex twist and meaning in the context of India skilling workers for the global economy. In the institutional domains of business, government, and increasingly education, this binary is evoked to commodify communication as well as to fortify the need for individuals and institutions to invest in communication training and soft skills development. Communication as disease and cure work in tandem or as Peters describes it, they are in cahoots as in a homeopathic remedy (1999: 6). While this turn to therapeutic discourses on communication is alive and well in other places, the long histories of English in India give it particular inflection and even an ironic poignancy. The country now seeks deliverance from communication deemed the great solution to what is flagged as a crisis of employability, to which I next turn.

 

Deficit and Solution

Deficit is an integral part of the ongoing story of the English language in India. Its arrival or rather colonial imposition and its continuing identity in the social life of India are all predicated on some variation on the theme of lack. First of all, the imperial enterprise of instituting English in the areas of education and commerce in India was premised on the colonial belief in the superiority of English to Indian languages. Colonial choices about imposing English as a medium of education in India were tied both to a civilizing mission and the objective of furthering imperial rule through social stratification. The English language has always been embroiled in a space of contestation, whether in pre-independence India, British-colonized India, postcolonial India or globalized India (Uma, Rani and Manohar, 2014). Class and caste privilege have been historically related to English-language usage and fluency and the English-speaking Indian elite have also been historically complicit in the denial of access to the language and its social worlds to the underprivileged. Today the ability to speak English is widely imagined and claimed, across lines of class and caste, as the magic key to access global futures.

“Without English, I feel naked”, says Madhav, the hero of a best-selling pulp novel, Half Girlfriend, by Chetan Bhagat (2014), one of India’s most popular novelists writing in English. Talking about his college admissions interview conducted in English by three professors, Madhav, portrayed as being petrified about his shaky English skills, adds, “I didn’t belong here—these English-speaking monsters would eat me alive” (Bhagat, 2014: 10). Such sentiments are commonly raised in popular culture and in everyday life since English has been historically linked to caste and class positions in the social life of India. Many share that same feeling of excruciating diffidence to be in the privileged spaces of English-speaking India. Students who come from under-privileged communities are distanced structurally and socially from access and exposure to the English language. For these students, the predominant motivation to learn English is to prepare for the future and be ready to navigate the digital and global workplace. Crossing the linguistic barrier is part of an aspirational trajectory that feeds into an industry devoted to teaching communication skills. This growing desire to learn English and become communication literate is linked to the fear of being on the brink of two colliding horizons that entangle the personal and public fields. The first that Appadurai (2004) astutely describes as the “brittle horizon of aspirations” (69), because, as he notes, the pathways of aspiration are more rigid, less supple and less strategically valuable. The second, discussed insightfully by Peters (1999) as “horizons of incommunicability” (2), captures the felt impasses that characterize the modern experience of communication.

The current politics of language and communication central to India’s developmental and global vision have to be contextualized within the liberalization of the economy, the explosion of the information technology industry in India and the exponential growth in the use of mobile media technologies across the country. The rapid expansion of the digital media environment and the growth of the Indian middle class has unleashed new desires, new imaginaries and possibilities of personhood (Baviskar and Ray, 2011; Upadhya, 2016). With the consumerist economy and digital culture making rapid inroads into the social fabric of the country, English is gaining renewed importance as the language of technology—the passport for prestige and upward mobility in the world of information technology. Next, there is a widespread discourse concerning the disconnect between education and employment which rehearses the complaint that students are ill prepared by educational institutes and is becoming a stock media story. The solution is to fast-track young Indians through courses in English and communication or English communication or soft skills, which is most often conflated with English language competence.  For example, the Vice President of India, Venkaiah Naidu in a recent inaugural address to the Indian Business Schools Leadership Conclave made a plea for socially relevant education and mentioned that only 54% of the country’s MBA graduates are deemed employable (Rajya Sabha TV, 2021). The Vice-President offered the predictable advice to increase interactions between academia and industry, in order to expose students to real life situations. In addition, he made it a point to stress the importance of enhancing soft skills of students. The ambiguity of the term soft skills is leveraged strategically and its definition and scope are flexed in accordance with the accompanying pedagogy and its tool kit. Soft skills training is a rubric that houses a variety of domains ranging from etiquette, professional conduct, teamwork, emotional intelligence, adaptability skills, non-verbal communication, even time management and resumé writing. English, communication and soft skills are being linked together as prerequisites to even consider the possibility of a job in a technologized economy. The technical and therapeutic vision that Peters describes (1999: 29) is conflated to serve different institutional agendas and produce a space for defining failure and promoting the remedy of language as self-development.

The singular fact that English separates worlds, social spheres and lifestyles in India has created an economic opportunity. Across diverse domains of Indian society and class lines, there is an increasing demand for English-language competence and communication skills. At the same time, corporate players and politicians alike bemoan the chronic shortage of ‘employable’ youth in the country who can communicate in English. A recent World Bank Group report (2018) declared that in order for India to transition as projected to higher and shared levels of prosperity by 2047—the centenary of its independence—it has to upgrade India’s human capital. Projections about the window of time India has available to skill this population and prepare them with skills for the workforce stirs up anxiety, but also presents an economic opportunity. A growing industry has emerged across India to meet this need for English language and communication training with the promise that the language fix will remake personalities and build confident communicators. Corporate recruiters often allege that young Indians are adequately qualified in their technical knowledge, but they lack proficiency in English necessary for being a professional in today’s world. These terms are used as if they are tethered to commonly understood universal requirements.

In the current environment in India, English is associated with a specific habitus attached to cultural and behavioral expectations of success in corporate environments. Particular ideologies of personhood are built into neoliberal calculations where English language skills are perceived as the prerequisite for polish. The knowledge of English is associated with a particular type of body and social comportment or possessing specific behavioral skills. This proliferation of English language and communication training centers started in the nineties after the explosive growth of the call center industry when India was regarded the back office of the world. Now the emphasis is on creating communicators at large, and communication and fluency in the English language have become synonymous. A neoliberal ethos of self-improvement is firmly entrenched within the systems of language pedagogy which abound in platitudes about confidence, assertiveness, adaptability, emotional intelligence and more. The new turn to soft skills offers communication makeovers which actively gloss over the materialities of class, caste and gender. Language coaching centers are business spaces where the national urgency for skilling becomes opportunities to innovate, to create content, capture a market and scale up operations. The entrepreneurial zest creates both the panic and readies the ground for branding the cure.

A series of judgements about success and failure both cultivate and sustain various types of expectations and serve as the operating rationale for the proliferation of a communication industry. Words like deficit, disconnect, gap, inadequacy or lack are commonly used in this industry to capture the situation of unemployable youth and identify them as being in dire need of a communication and language makeover. Individual traits, backgrounds, societal and regional cultural attributes are stereotypically named as the cause for communication failures. There is also a cascading pattern of scapegoating actors and institutions for the problem of unemployability including ill equipped colleges, untrained teachers, lack of digital infrastructures, a rural mindset or caste backgrounds. These naturalized understandings of failure and miscommunication are incorporated into the design of the communication pedagogy and the diagnosis of the problems to be overcome or rectified. As Peters writes, “miscommunication is the scandal that motivates the very concept of communication in the first place” (1999: 6).

 

Tool-kit or Shakespeare?

Communication coaching institutions routinely evoke the promise of English and the magic it can deliver in terms of both individual growth and economic enhancement. The belief that English language skills will democratize the playing field in terms of employment opportunities in the digital age is widely held in the public and increasingly being acted upon by educational institutions. The criticism about colleges not preparing students well for employment opportunities has made public academic institutions revisit their English departments and rework the curricular offerings to include service courses for all students in soft skills and applied courses such as English language teaching and business writing. In short, with the applied turn, the teaching of English is currently being demystified of its literary emphasis that produced a generation of elite, postcolonial Anglophone Indians. Instead, the communication training schools focus on context-specific needs and stripped-down vocabulary with the goal of preparing a communication savvy workforce.

Who needs Shakespeare? This memorable and rather dramatic phrase was repeated quite often to me in the course of conversations with English language and communication trainers in India. The bard has held an illustrious place in the history of Indian education. Students for long time have annotated, interpreted and wrestled with the works and words of Shakespeare, the centerpiece of English literary studies in India. In fact, the teaching of Shakespeare in schools and colleges began not in Britain but in India where the civilizing power of Shakespeare was one of the tools by which Indians were to be made quasi-English (Viswanathan, 1998; Marcus, 2017). Today in the rush to skill Indians for a global future and the global market, there is a curious reversal of the old logic. A professor who teaches business communication in a well-known business school in India told me that Shakespearean rhetoric is reinvented in his classroom and used to inspire persuasive business presentations. Scenes and characters from literary texts from a variety of authors are used in colleges as examples to frame discussion of assertiveness, confidence and politeness, all of which are seen as part of the tool kit of good communicators (Dhanavel, 2010). The neoliberal economy has successfully reinstated decontextualized language training in the postcolony as an important asset to building self-confidence for global careers.

Language and communication skills training has become a lucrative enterprise drawing a diverse range of actors and institutions together to what is represented by both the public and private sector as a social project to create and finesse India’s labor pool. In the context of the new literacies demanded by globalization, Deborah Cameron (2004) writes that “we are witnessing the consolidation of a new and powerful discourse on language and communication, which has significant implications both for language teaching and for discussions of its politics” (68). Skilling India’s youth in communication is also framed in economistic terms such as transforming them as employable assets. For example, one often hears phrases such as value-added benefits, maximizing returns, assessing outcomes, optimizing resources or reaping benefits when it comes to skill development. To the student dreaming of being employed and successful in the workplace, communication skills are packaged in the language of instant self-transformation. A carpenter in his sixties whom I met in Bangalore told me that when he was a young apprentice he learnt his trade and was trained to work with wood. Now, he added with irritation, his son who aspires to work in the information technology sector has to learn computers and also go to another school to ‘learn to speak stylishly’. In spite of the public demand, there remains the lingering skepticism whether this new therapeutic and, at the same time, technical discourse of linguistic solutionism will lead to such dramatic transformations of social conditions. Can style fix the system?

The skill sets and communication competencies promoted for the global economy are premised on building the capacity of individuals to adapt in modular fashion to cultural contexts which, in turn, are also defined in static, essentialist terms. These skills acquire an identity of their own and their effects are treated as tangible and measurable and hence useful to the project of self-making in the neoliberal economy. As Urciuoli (2008) writes, skills have become highly fetishized and “workers have come to be seen as personally responsible for skills acquisition, to the point of self-commodification” (212). In neoliberal terms, the self is an incomplete project that has to be constantly updated with newer versions and scripts. For optimum results which can be recorded as an assessment metric, the update has to be initiated and administered by the specialist. The likelihood of failure is worked into the project of self-management. As Ilana Gershon (2011) remarks “selves may intend to choose and risk well, but the potential for failure always haunts such projects. When failure occurs, the responsible self turns to an expert to learn how to choose more effectively” (542). Gershon adds that the expert serves only as an external corrective for unsuccessful self-management and individuals bear sole responsibility for their failures.

In the Indian context, the language soft skills training industry has given rise to a diverse slew of communication specialists. Professors of English literature are now required to teach communication, business writing or soft skills in revamped English departments or coaching centers. The majority of trainers (those who teach in institutes not affiliated with universities) are recruited from diverse backgrounds as long as they possess ‘good communication skills’. A popular recruitment website in India, naukari.com, lists a number of jobs in the categories of communication trainer, soft skills trainer, voice and accent trainer, English and communication trainer or communication coach and the qualifications for these positions are, at best, vague and generic. Most jobs for an English communication trainer state that the candidate should have a passion for teaching and technical knowledge of English communication, an analytical bent of mind and good communication and interpersonal skills. One of my favorite listings for a trainer to prepare students for an international English assessment test asks for “candidates from any specialization who are sound in the English language and possess excellent verbal and written communication skills along with the tact to rectify errors and convey the same in an attractive and engaging manner” (Naukari.com, 2021). There are also expert consultants who are invited by colleges and corporations to bridge the so-called disconnect between education and employment. Urciuoli (2008) argues that there is an inbuilt denotational vagueness about skills that is central to their strategic deployment and communication skills particularly are “fetishized as surefire techniques that can transform users and bring in the bucks (or pounds or euros)” (211). A cottage industry in communication and English training continues to grow and churn out ‘content’ that promises to be user friendly and guarantees results.

However, amidst all the new content, one colonial relic of a textbook continues to live and is a trusted source for all things grammatical in the subcontinent—Percival Christopher Wren and Henry Martin’s High School English Grammar and Composition written in 1935 for use by students in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies of British India. This book has had a long shelf-life even after India’s independence from colonial rule in 1947. It has since been considerably revised by Indian authors but still remains the trusted book for grammar and is recommended widely even by the new community of English trainers.

Flipping through the pages of the 31^st edition of the book reprinted in 1956, I stumbled on the references that were, no doubt, very strategically chosen to educate the Indian school children on the glories of the English language and the British Empire. Consider a few of the sentences used to teach specific principles in grammar. For the use of adjectives and degree of comparison is this sentence: “Shakespeare is greater than any other English poet” (Wren and Martin, 1956: 41); for the use of the definite article: “the immortal Shakespeare” (51); for the parsing of gerunds: “my friend boasted of having read the whole of Shakespeare” (158); special prepositions: “I speak of Shakespeare than whom there is none greater as a dramatist” (192). To fill in the blanks with conjunctions: “Our proudest title is not that we are the contemporaries of Darwin—but that we are the descendants of Shakespeare” (Wren and Martin, 1956: 224). Another version reappears as an example of a complex sentence: “Among the many reasons which make me glad to have been born in England, one of the first is that I read Shakespeare in my mother tongue” (Wren and Martin, 1956: 297). To illustrate the difference between the particularity of proper nouns and the collective nature of common nouns is the example: “Kalidas is often called the Shakespeare (=the greatest dramatist) of India” (Wren and Martin, 1956: 6). Although the grammar text was written in the waning days of Empire with a fair amount of references to Indian characters, Britishness was blatantly projected in the minds of Indian children. The grammar text now works its way back into the corporate communication toolkits.

 

Allure and Tyranny

For the last few years, I have been traveling in India talking to various groups of people who, in their words, are working in the English-communication space. This is not a new space, as I have tried to show in this essay, but one that has been revived in the context of the global economy and its attendant neoliberal ethos. On one level, the promise of English as opening doors does have its appeal but the templates being churned out and the rules of good communication take their cue from the ghosts of intercultural communication pasts where communities and nations were all collapsed into harmonious and homogenous collectivities with similar communicative predispositions. In the teaching of English, deep social differences are revived and reinserted into the discourse and practice.

As a student of English literature in India, copies of Wren and Martin’s grammar, single editions of Shakespeare’s plays and the Oxford Dictionary were arranged prominently as references on my desk. The colonial curriculum lingered on, unacknowledged and unmarked, even as postcolonial literature made its appearance in our academic reading lists. In my scholarly grandfather’s library, bookshelves with Sanskrit texts, Tamil literature and books on Indian music and politics were arranged separately from the bookshelves with leather-bound volumes of all of Shakespeare’s plays, the Lake Poets, library editions of Dickens and Swift along with his favorite Russian masters. English defined the lives of the Indian postcolonial elite and their place and outlook on the world but it was shelved alongside and with another life. From the early nineteenth century, the question of how to educate Indians was debated vigorously in both India and England. British statesmen like Thomas Macaulay, according to Rimi Chatterjee (2006), had, “somewhat naively, believed that exposure to ‘superior’ Western culture would convert ‘savage’ Indians into uncritical admirers of the West, but in practice each educated Indian came to terms with Western-ness” from their standpoint within Indian culture (6). Of course, this negotiation was not open to all but only for the elite educated in the medium of English. The allure and tyranny of English continues in a reworked register and with a new alliance with the idea of communication.

Returning to Speaking into the Air, Peters writes powerfully that communication is a registry of modern longings. Reading the unfolding story of linguistic infrastructure in India, one sees new longings and desires drawing on the fantasies and ambitions of distant temporalities and geographies but acquiring material forms in the present. The breakdown is a provocative place to start thinking about the layers of connection and networks of meaning enabled and disabled by the material, transnational politics and histories of linguistic choices. Or, in the memorable words of John Durham Peters, we have to pay attention to the unfolding “tragedy, comedy or absurdity of failed communication” (1999: 2) and its global travels and avatars.

 

References

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Appadurai, A. and Alexander, N. (2019) Failure. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Baviskar, A. and Ray, R. (2011) Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Class. New Delhi: Routledge.

Bhagat, C. (2014) Half Girlfriend. New Delhi: Rupa Publications.

Cameron, D. (2004) ‘Globalization and the Teaching of “Communication Skills”’, in: D. Block and D. Cameron, eds., Globalization and Language Teaching. New York: Routledge, pp.67-82.

Chakrabarty, D. (2008) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chatterjee, R.B. (2006) Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India under the Raj. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dhanavel, S.P. (2010) English and Communication Skills. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

Gershon, I. (2011) ‘Neoliberal Agency’, Current Anthropology 52(4): 537-55.

Hegde, R.S. (2006) ‘Globalizing Gender Studies in Communication’, in: B. Dow and J. Wood, eds., Handbook on Gender Studies in Communication. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, pp.433-449.

Marcus, L. (2017) How Shakespeare Became Colonial: Editorial Tradition and the British Empire. New York: Routledge.

Naukari.com (2021). IELTS Trainer. Available at: https://www.naukri.com/ielts-trainer-jobs-in-bangalore-bengaluru?expJD=true (Accessed: 29, June, 2021).

Peters, J.D. (1999) Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Rajagopal, A. (2020) ‘Communicationism: Cold War Humanism’, Critical Inquiry 46(2): 353-380.

Uma, A., Suneetha Rani, K. and Murali Manohar, D. (2014) ‘Introduction’, in: A. Uma, K. Suneetha Rani and D. Murali Manohar, eds., English in the Dalit Context. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, pp.1-9.

Upadhya, C. (2016) Reengineering India: Work, Capital and Class in an Offshore Economy.  Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Urciuoli, B. (2008) ‘Skills and Selves in the New Workplace’, American Ethnologist 35(2): 211-28.

Viswanathan, G. (1989) Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Wren, C.P. and Martin, H. (1956) High School English Grammar and Composition. Bombay: K& J Cooper.

 

Notes

[1] For robust histories of the history of communication and media theory, see Pooley (2018); Rajagopal (2020).

 

Radha S. Hegde is Professor in the department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.

Email: radha.hegde@nyu.edu