More than language: the work of an English training centre in Delhi

Abstract

English language training centres (ETCs) have become increasingly ubiquitous in urban India over the last two decades. Such centres promise individuals not just fluency in the language but also professional ‘success’ in the urban job market, particularly in the retail and service sectors. ETCs seek to reconceptualise the English language as a workplace ‘skill’ and primarily target individuals who did not have access to an education in English. However, the refashioning of English as a skill intersects with the power of English as socio-cultural capital, just as the work of such centres intersects with the aspirations of its learners and the expectations of employers. Teaching English as a ‘skill’ is therefore embedded both in the wider discourse of urban skill-training that aims to produce a desirable labour force, and in the dynamics of language power, cultural capital, class mobility and ideas of desirable personhood. The present ethnographic case study of an ETC in Delhi analyses this convergence and examines whether the reconceptualisation of English as skill democratises access to the language or, conversely, engenders newer registers of inequality.

Keywords:

• English
• youth
• class
• personhood
• skill
• inequality

Introduction

It is not an uncommon sight in big cities like Delhi to come across entire neighbourhood walls plastered with advertisements promising discount rates for spoken English classes. The mushrooming of such privately run English language training centres (henceforth, ETCs) for adult learners over the last two decades is often traced back to the call centre boom of the early 2000s and the broader opening up of India’s economy (LaDousa 2007; Proctor 2014b). This phenomenon is not unique to India, as the expansion of English-language training over the last two to three decades and its reconceptualisation as a marketable ‘skill’ have garnered significant scholarly interest around the world, particularly those programmes targeting learners in the Global South (see Ashraf 2018; Hickey 2018; Jahan and Hamid 2019; Lee and Jenks 2019; Sah 2021) and migrant youth in English-speaking countries (see Cooke 2008; Moyer 2018; Swift 2022; Warriner 2016). The growing demand for English is often attributed to its perceived centrality in the global flows of capital, commodities, ideas, ­opportunities and desires – everything that is commonly indexed by the term ‘globalisation’ (Lee 2016). Learners, particularly adult learners, hope to gain working proficiency over a short period, fuelling a reconceptualisation of the language at ETCs as a quantifiable ‘skill’ – a process that has been called a curricularisation of language in order to make it more teachable, with a focus on speed, efficiency and replicability (Swift 2022). However, a cross-section of global scholarship reveals noticeable gaps between what ETCs promise and what they deliver, and between the aspirations of learners and their actual experiences. Two key concerns that motivate scholarship on ETCs are (a) the extent to which the curriculum and training offered in such institutions democratises access to linguistic resources or, conversely, sustains or exacerbates existing socio-cultural inequalities enregistered (Agha 2007) in English; and (b) the impact ETCs have on language ideologies and hierarchies in multilingual contexts, particularly in the Global South where English is commonly viewed as a ‘prestige language’ and is inextricably linked to ideas of desirable personhood. This article investigates these concerns through a case study of an ETC in New Delhi, India to contextualise what happens there and how it impacts local inequalities, linguistic and otherwise.

This article is based on data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork conducted at two centres of an ETC in New Delhi in 2019.¹ The ETC chosen for the study is one of the more prominent such institutions in the city and has been operational since 2002. This was important as the relative longevity of this ETC enabled the documentation of shifts and changes over the last two decades. The ETC has several branches in the National Capital Region (NCR) where Delhi is located, and fieldwork was conducted at two of their largest and busiest centres in south and central Delhi. The ethnographic method was found to be particularly useful for this study – of an institution that claims to help individuals on a path to ‘success’ – because the experiences, expectations and reflections of the agents and subjects of this process are critical in piecing together an understanding of what happens inside an ETC. Fieldwork for this project was reviewed and approved by the research ethics committee (CUREC) of the University of Oxford. The name of the ETC where fieldwork was conducted has been withheld, and names of all respondents have been pseudonymised throughout this article. The researcher also made it clear to all respondents that the study does not endorse the ETC’s projection of English as a ‘global language’ or normative language of urban employment. In order to encourage honest and frank conversations, both students and teachers were assured that nothing they said in the interviews would reach the ETC’s management. Interviews for this study were conducted in both Hindi and English, with most students using a combination of the two. The teachers and management, however, spoke exclusively in English during the interviews.

Context and background

In documenting the rise of ETCs in India in the 2000s, scholars like Proctor (2014a) have noted how access to English through ETCs was seen as a means of achieving socio-economic mobility (primarily through jobs in the then-expanding voice-based Business Process Outsourcing industry) as well as negotiating the ‘global’ in a rapidly transforming urban India. More recent studies of ETCs (see Jayadeva 2018) map a somewhat changed landscape where there is much more focus on ‘indigenisation’ and where the ‘global’, while remaining an important concern, is becoming increasingly overshadowed by more immediate and localised negotiations of class, status, employment and professional ‘success’. This is noteworthy as the indigenisation of English in India, much like that in other parts of the Global South, produces the kind of diversity based on local needs that Kachru (1992) identified in his conception of ‘World Englishes’ wherein ‘outer’ and ‘expanding circles’ of the Anglosphere can challenge the normative expectations and perceived superiority of ‘inner circle’ varieties of English. However, indigenisation and standardisation, especially in the fast-paced and job-oriented teaching promoted by Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) curricula that ETCs follow, also become exercises in delimiting the language by creating borders ‘which make salient particular features and characteristics’ and ultimately shape a new normative that privileges and legitimises one local variety over others and therein risk engendering newer forms of inequality (Valdés 2015, 1; see also Swift 2022). This is precisely why the key question this study asks is how the work of an ETC in India might simultaneously challenge global hierarchies of English(es) while fostering local ones.

In the South Asian context, as the language of the ruling classes during the colonial period, English continues to be associated with prestige, aspiration and social mobility (see Bharadwaj 2017; Bhattacharya 2017; Jayadeva 2018; LaDousa 2014) and this has long meant that English proficiency is inextricably linked to embodied socio-cultural capital and ideas of desirable personhood. A resurgence of interest in the language since the end of the Cold War has been attributed to technology-driven globalisation, the dominance of Anglo-American mass media and popular culture, and the uncontested hegemony of American capitalism, all of which have made inroads in India since economic liberalisation (Pennycook 2000; Nault 2012). But perhaps the most significant factor in understanding the demand for learning English as a ‘skill’ is the steep inequality in access to the language in the nation’s education system. India’s public education system consists of multiple examination boards run by the Union, state and local governments. Across such a diverse spectrum of public schools, English language education is of vastly unequal quality due to a lack of resources, training and, with a few notable exceptions, political will. This has resulted in a situation where, by and large, an education in English is far more expensive than one in Hindi or another vernacular ­language-medium, and ‘good’ English-medium schools tend to be more often private than public schools (Bhattacharya 2017; LaDousa 2005, 2007). This is further compounded by the politicisation of language in a multilingual polity like India where ‘mother tongue’ is an emotive subject intrinsic to a community’s sense of identity and cultural authenticity. The rise of Hindutva² politics and its stated aim of establishing Hindi as the national language of India (sometimes accompanied by calls for phasing out English entirely) has meant that English occupies a complex position where it is sometimes denounced as ‘foreign’ and ‘western’ and at other times embraced as ‘essential’ for India’s modernity and global ­aspirations. What this political doublespeak over English ultimately does is exacerbate inequality of access to the language in the name of prioritising and promoting the ‘mother tongue’ in public schools while the wealthy and privileged continue to access English education through expensive private schools. It is therefore unsurprising that most learners who go to ETCs are those who could not access quality English education in their schools and are left to learn it later as a ‘skill’. Crucially, what this divide does is further entrench the association of English with privilege and class mobility, reinforcing the dialogic connection between language and desirable personhood. This study therefore tries to understand the extent to which the desire for English proficiency is also an aspiration for a desirable personhood and, more importantly, what role an ETC plays in this.

In the context of desirable personhood, Jayadeva’s (2018) ethnography of ETCs in Bengaluru demonstrates that the use of English is a highly diverse practice with its own internal stratification. Her concept of ‘many English lines’ highlights that it is not just the use of English but the ‘type’ of English that defines one’s perceived social standing and the kind of personhood associated with it. Her respondents identify various ‘types’ of English – ‘local’, ‘normal/good’ and ‘hi-fi/professional’ English. Thus, even though ETCs market themselves as providing unlimited mobility through access to the language, the mobility actually achieved is significantly graded. This should prompt us to rethink earlier conceptions of English use like the one used by Proctor (2014a) who identifies people as ‘English-dominant’ or ‘English-excluded’, ignoring the spectrum of English speakers who lie somewhere in between. This echoes Bourdieu’s (1991) conception of linguistic power which is embedded (and embodied) in specific speech acts and effects between a habitus and a linguistic field or market. The habitus of English embodied by the abstract idea of it as a marker of social mobility is then subject to the linguistic field and market in which specific speech acts are expressed, and the latter may produce varying effects of mobility because of the cultural ‘value’ associated with specific varieties in specific contexts. For this study, the role of ETCs in sustaining or disrupting/democratising language hierarchies is therefore subject to not only the kind of English that is taught and learnt, but also the kind of personhood associated with the language that is upheld as the standard that one should aspire towards and how individuals negotiate this aspiration against the actual, more limited abilities acquired at the ETC.

The other significant dimension of the work of ETCs is its embeddedness in post-­liberalisation conceptions of labour, skill and training, where the aim of English training is creating a desirable and ‘skilled’ workforce. This is important as such an instrumental turn in language acquisition engenders the possibility of cultivating and consolidating neoliberal subjectivities, with further implications for our previous discussion of desirable personhood (Nambiar 2016). Over the last three decades, a rapid expansion in the retail and service sectors of the urban economy and the desire to project Indian private enterprise as ‘global’ and aspiring to ‘international standards’ has generated demand for new ‘qualities’ from employees that incorporate ‘embodied capacities and attributes’, including ‘dress code, bodily deportments, personality traits, speech/accent, voice modulations, etc.’ (Maitra and Maitra 2018, 342). Such workplace requirements are broadly conceptualised under the framework of ‘aesthetic labour’, and proficiency in the English language is an important component of this (Maitra and Maitra 2018). This has come to constitute a new ‘service style’ in cities like Delhi, and its prevalence and association with English is such that a study in Bengaluru found people identifying physical spaces of private enterprise and consumerism (like corporate offices and shopping malls) as the ‘English spaces’ of the city (Jayadeva 2018). Moreover, this ‘service style’ can also be seen as extending the association that some scholars have observed between speaking in English and being ‘stylish’ or ‘doing style’ among youth (Nakassis 2013; Proctor 2014a). Thus, both ‘English as socio-cultural capital’ and ‘English as a skill in post-liberalisation India’ have a strong focus on embodied qualities and on performing/being a certain type of English speaker in order to be perceived as a particular kind of person – upwardly mobile, ‘stylish’, well educated, etc. This study therefore seeks to tease out how the teaching of English at ETCs straddles or combines these two ‘domains’ of English usage (as cultural capital vs job-skill) and, most importantly, what discourses of personhood emerge from this.

In the context of personhood, it is also important to note that teaching English as a ‘skill’ at ETCs draws on the paradigm of skill-training based on neoliberal management pedagogies that are often premised on characterising the existing subject as ‘deficient’ (Cayla and Bhatnagar 2017; Maitra and Maitra 2018). Moreover, skill-training mechanisms are almost always imbricated with self-improvement and self-management, constituting a new paradigm of ‘politics of the self’ (Gooptu 2013). This insistence on self-management and self-­improvement may be seen as propelling particular types of individualisation and governmentality at the cost of recourse to organised, collective, structural and state action (Gooptu 2013, 2016). Moreover, the suitability and employability of an individual is held to be the individual’s responsibility, that they need to constantly demonstrate through self-management and skill-training, or risk losing their job. In the context of English language learning at ETCs, such a neoliberal paradigm not only holds individuals personally accountable for their ability to learn English (by emphasising ‘hard work’) but, more crucially, also legitimises the English proficiency of the private-school-educated, English-speaking Indian elites as a sign of personal achievement and individual ‘merit’ that negates their socio-­economic privileges. This particular dynamic is crucial in understanding the work of ETCs as they hold up such privileged English-speakers as the standard that their learners should seek to emulate, thereby creating an aspiration that ends up reinscribing linguistic and social inequality (Swift 2022). Building on this body of scholarship, this article argues that not only is English learning at ETCs about much more than language, encompassing behaviour, style, ‘exposure’, ‘confidence’ and a certain kind of neoliberal individualism, but it is fundamentally about desirable personhood, where English is reified as a legitimate marker of social ­distinction. This case study demonstrates that the reconceptualisation of English as a ‘skill’ at the ETC only ends up legitimising the dominance of English as socio-cultural capital and, crucially, does so while sidestepping questions of inequality and socio-economic disadvantage and instead emphasising individual hard work, enterprise and ‘merit’.

Case study

The global and the local: changing appearances and aspirations

As I entered the South Delhi centre of the ETC on my first day of fieldwork, I immediately noticed that there was something different about the place. The freshly painted walls, the sleek new reception area, the new glass doors – none of this was there when I last visited the centre two years ago. When I asked one of the managers about these changes, she said that the extensive renovations were felt necessary to give the ETC a ‘facelift’, adding that ‘people expect a place like ours to look modern’. The ‘modern look’, I realised as soon as I walked into the staffroom, was primarily for the consumption of the students because the staffroom, which students usually never entered, looked exactly the same, with its old wooden shelves overflowing with paper. The emphasis on a ‘modern’ appearance took a more global dimension when it came to the classrooms of the ETCs. At both centres, every classroom was named after a different city in the world: Moscow, Dhaka, Rome, Athens and Cairo. Some of the classrooms even had greetings in the native language of the city it was named after drawn on the walls. Right off the start, the very appearance of the ETC was engineered to give the impression of a space that was ‘global’, where the knowledge of English opened doors to the whole wide world.

The ‘global’, however, played the opposite role in the ETC’s curriculum. When I asked the manager in charge of curriculum about colonial and elite associations of English, she ­categorically dismissed the importance of such perceptions, saying that those were in the past and ‘things have changed now … it is no longer about inferiority but about learning a language to get things done … to be successful’. To her, the colonial connotations of English only meant a comparison between India and the ‘inner circle’ nations of the anglosphere, led by the erstwhile coloniser, completely sidestepping my question which was actually about English language inequalities within India. Nonetheless, to further demonstrate that Indians now learnt English on their own terms and free from the hegemony of Britain or USA, she told me that the original textbooks sent to the ETC from their global headquarters (this ETC is the Indian franchise of an international chain) had all been ‘very European’ in their images and contexts. To make the books more ‘relevant’, the ETC brought out its own Indian editions of the textbooks. One certainly finds more Indian-sounding names alongside Anglo-American ones in the new textbooks, and references to rugby or basketball have been changed to cricket. There was even mention of the Hindu festival of Diwali in one of the books which had previously been a page on Guy Fawkes Night. But the most striking feature I observed was the consumerist slant in the vast majority of the language lessons. Lessons on ‘leisure activities’ had people going to shopping malls or on holidays to Europe, and the ‘target language’ to be learnt was asking your way around a mall or a city, asking and answering questions about restaurants, cafes, bars, bowling alleys and the like, buying a variety of goods and services, ordering a meal at a ‘food court’, navigating an airport, making hotel reservations, etc. Even when a specific classroom activity was about conversation between friends, it was almost inevitably about sharing experiences of doing these same things. What is remarkable about these lessons is that despite switching to Indian names and festivals, the ‘lifestyle’ they exhibited, as Proctor (2014a) notes in her ethnography of an ETC in 2011, was still the idealised version of American middle-class life. The indigenisation of these books therefore represents the projection of ‘global’ aspirations and appearances on local sites and spaces in a way that better enregisters the taught language to the template ‘lifestyle’ of the ideal/idealised Indian English-speaker/consumer. This is held up as the standard that learners should aspire towards, effectively legitimising the ‘superiority’ of those who speak this kind of Indian English (and are therefore assumed to occupy a certain class-caste position). This finally helped me understand why the manager, when I asked about linguistic inequality in India, assumed that I was talking about global disparity between nations and not internal inequalities among English speakers and users within India. Such inequalities, it would appear, were not only taken for granted but, tacitly, encouraged by the ETC in the figure of the ‘standard’ and idealised Indian English speaker. The construction of such a normative merely reinforced the identification of those who did not have adequate access to English as ‘deficient’ and in need of the services that the ETC offered.

In my group discussions with students, almost everyone agreed that learning about such spaces and experiences was an important part of learning English. To compare the textbook contexts with the life experiences of just one set of students, six out of eight had never taken an international flight and four had never seen the inside of an airport. All of them had been to malls but only three of them said they went there to buy something. Five of the eight mentioned feeling uncomfortable if they couldn’t speak in English at such places. Ravi, a college student, said that he felt a new sense of ‘being accepted’ at restaurants and cafes if he spoke and ordered in English. Another student said that learning about ‘brand names’ and how to ‘say them correctly’ was very useful, while a third mentioned that he realised the importance of wearing ‘branded clothes’ after attending English classes at the ETC. ‘There is a way of doing things’, one student explained to me in Hindi, ‘we do things [without English] in one way… but with English, we have to learn how to look, behave, think … that’s how I want to be, just like my teacher’.

The desire to emulate their teachers was something nearly every student talked about. The ETC is aware of this, which is why the final touch in projecting a certain appearance involves its teachers. ‘It’s not just about their teaching qualities’, the ETC’s HR manager told me when I asked about the recruitment of teachers, ‘when I look for a teacher, I look at their personality… how well they can fit into our classroom … if the students will like them …’. ‘Energetic’, ‘dynamic’, ‘smart’ are some of the qualities the manager mentioned, but what was implicit was that the ideal teacher had to not only be charismatic but also embody the ‘lifestyle’ of the textbooks. The manager also mentioned that when the ETC started out in 2002, they had hired British and American expat teachers, at least part of the reason for which was the then-popular demand for ‘voice and accent training’ and ‘accent neutralisation’ courses to cater to call centre requirements. Over time, however, the management realised that this was not very effective as it failed to attract learners beyond call centre employees, and even their numbers started declining from 2010. Local teachers who spoke a distinctly ‘upper middle-class’ variety of Indian English were found to be much more suitable for the job, far cheaper to hire and, crucially, were far more popular with learners. One of the teachers, Bhavesh, acknowledged this and said, ‘My students like me and look up to me because they think I am well-travelled, have a good command over English, know about all the things [they see] on television and internet’. Whether the life-experiences of the students matched the textbook ‘lifestyle’ or not, the ones of the teachers had to, or at least appear to, so much so that there was even a dress code for the teachers: ‘smart casual’. ‘It’s semi-formal’, one of the teachers explained, ‘just like what you would expect in a corporate office’. But in this convergence of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, ‘smart casual’ captures an important paradigm shift in the contemporary urban economy where the emphasis is on ‘getting things done’. Alongside the rise of ‘casual labour’ in the urban economy and projects envisioning ‘smart cities’ in the country, the currency of ‘smart casual’ at the ETC, as indeed its unique hybridity of the global and the local, partakes in legitimising this new-normative of the post-­liberalisation city where full participation is premised on certain modes of being, behaving, interacting and consuming (Gooptu 2013; Cayla and Bhatnagar 2017; Maitra and Maitra 2018). The English language, as a skill for professional success, becomes a useful way to enregister this, and teachers become the ideal (and idealised) poster-figures to promote the aspiration for this kind of personhood. What seems to have changed is that this now works not by holding up the promise of inculcating American accents (and getting call centre jobs) or through images of an ‘American/Globalised’ lifestyle, but by foregrounding the urban ­middle-class Indian as the ideal or ‘natural’ speaker of Indian English. Changes in both the textbooks and the hiring policy of teachers at this ETC highlight this significant shift where the dominance of ‘global’ English (and things like an American accent) have eroded and given way to a standardised upper/middle-class Indian English.

Teaching ‘confidence’: personhood as an assemblage

As in most other ethnographies of English learners in India (Bhattacharya 2017; Jayadeva 2018), one of the main factors in joining English classes that students reported was what they identified as their ‘lack of confidence’. The main deterrent was the fear of being ‘judged’ by others for their lack of proficiency. ‘I can understand everything [in English]’, Sumedha, a student who works as a hairdresser, told me, ‘but beyond “yes” “no”, I am not confident speaking more … [in such situations] it is better to stay quiet’. She told me that her colleagues who can speak English ‘have a different relationship with their clients … they laugh, joke, share experiences … like equals. I just quietly do my work and nothing more’. In Sumedha’s case, the yearning for ‘confidence’ was a yearning for acceptance in a space where she spends the majority of her time; a yearning to be a certain individual who can be an equal to her clients, even for just that brief moment. Sumedha’s experience also tells us that, on an everyday basis, people’s perception of what constitutes ‘proficiency’ is a relative and relational construct drawn from comparing oneself to one’s peers and being deemed desirable in specific contexts.

Nearly all the teachers interviewed mentioned confidence as an important element of what they try to teach in their classes. ‘But it is difficult’, admitted Tamanna, a teacher at the ETC, ‘because we can teach structures, words, pronunciation, but not change their personalities or intelligence’. Another teacher, Akash, agreed that while an improvement in one’s English proficiency can boost one’s confidence, what the students desire is something that can only happen if they ‘open their eyes, go out and see the world, read up on things … I can’t teach those things to them’. In fact, there was a keen awareness among the teachers of what they perceived as a ‘class divide’ between themselves and their students, the majority of whom they believed came from smaller cities and towns, had had a poor public school (presumably ‘Hindi-medium’) education, or simply lacked the necessary ‘exposure’ to English (a euphemism for socio-economic disadvantage). It is clear that the teachers, and students like Sumedha, recognised that there were socio-economic factors beyond English proficiency that shaped the ‘confidence’ that students at the ETC ‘lacked’. As in Sumedha’s experience, this ‘confidence’ is the ability to be a certain individual who can claim acceptance and participation, even momentary equality, in the ‘English spaces’ of the city, and the ‘lack’ of this confidence is the ‘deficiency’ of the particular kind of personhood demanded by such spaces.

One of the ways the ETC seeks to ‘teach confidence’ is by offering a simulated exposure to the idealised ‘lifestyle’ through the textbooks. Another is through the presentation of teachers in the classrooms as embodiments of this confidence. However, the most significant way in which the ETC facilitates the teaching of ‘confidence’ is through their own pedagogic conceptualisation of ‘skill modules’. The academic layout of the ETC is divided into general courses on spoken English and more specialised ‘skill’ courses on particular aspects of communication. There are courses on ‘interview skills’, ‘presentation skills’, ‘telephonic skills’, ‘conversation skills’ and recent efforts to start courses on ‘personality development’. On the one hand, these courses cater to workplace demands where some employees are required to specialise in specific skills. On the other hand, such a modular curriculum of ‘skills’ reconceptualises linguistic competence and proficiency as an assemblage of several individual pieces. The enumeration of competence into discrete components helps quantify, standardise and regulate otherwise intangible and abstract ideas like ‘proficiency’ and ‘confidence’. However, the actual effectiveness of this in making students feel confident by completing various courses and skill modules is questionable because, as mentioned earlier, people calculate their own ‘proficiency’ (and subsequent ‘confidence’) by comparing themselves within and across peer groups in everyday contexts.

In sharp contrast to the overt advertising and marketing of ETCs that emphasise the ease and speed of learning English, the front-desk staff told me that they make it clear to the students that gaining mastery over the language is a sustained process. Using the metaphor of a long road, one front-desk staff told me that she tells dissatisfied students that while they have covered ‘one stretch’ of the road, there is more ahead. This is usually followed by a recommendation to sign up for a new ‘skill’ course to cover the ‘next stretch’. Another front-desk staff said she illustrated this by telling students that all parts of the body needed to be ‘treated’ one by one, and while some ‘skills’ will heal the hands, others will heal the feet, head, eyes, and so on. Besides the revealing characterisation of the non-English speaking individual as a diseased body in need of ‘treatment’, this illustration also captures the centrality of the student’s own actions in pursuing a long-term goal. In this case, the counselling offered at the ETC reaffirms the ‘deficiency’ of the student as the main reason for their lack of confidence, identifying the student as responsible for their own disadvantage. If ‘confidence’ here works as an alibi for a particular kind of personhood required for full participation in these spaces, then, by that logic, becoming such a person is also an assemblage of various components that need to be actively procured and cultivated by an individual but, peculiarly, without any acknowledgement of the inequalities or disadvantages that might prevent one from doing so.

On the merits of such self-cultivation, Varun and Ahmed, two ex-students, had contrasting experiences. Ahmed was happy that he had completed the set of courses recommended by his counsellor at the ETC and had changed jobs to a better paying, senior position in a different company. ‘I feel more confident here, because I see others in my new office who can’t speak good English … and lack confidence’ he told me, adding that while he feels bad for their situation and that it’s unfair, ‘because English is not intelligence’, he still feels a reassuring sense of superiority for being ‘better than them, at least in English’. Varun, on the other hand, felt that while his time at the ETC was fun and memorable for the friends he made there, the courses didn’t really help him much. ‘I am still bad in English’, he informed me, ‘and even if I did a hundred courses, I won’t be able to reach the level of my seniors who had private school education’. Ahmed told me that he found the advice given to him by his teachers very useful, and how things like watching English movies and TV shows really helped. The intended transformation that they both aspired to is something Varun cannot see in himself, even though he admitted that he might resume English classes at some point in the future. But, more tellingly, Ahmed’s own reflection on his transformation and ‘feeling superior’ best captures the relationship between ‘confidence’ and desirable personhood that this section has tried to map. ‘I can see it in how I talk, how I walk’, he told me happily. ‘I feel like a different person now’.

Communicative competence and the hard boundary

The pedagogy followed at the ETC is the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) method of second language (L2) teaching that has been popular since the 1970s (see Atkinson 1999; Savignon 2002; Sheorey 2006). The three main components of this pedagogy are monolingual classrooms in the target language (in this case, English), the eschewing of teaching grammar in favour of learning through practice, and classes that are less teacher-centric and more focussed on students and activities (Richards and Rodgers 2001). All the teachers at the ETC undergo compulsory in-house training to use this method in their classes. The head of teaching at the ETC told me that this method is the fundamental advantage the ETC has over its competitors because ‘it’s effective, it’s not dull, and it shows results’. Six of the 10 teachers interviewed also supported this claim, while others conceded that teaching grammar directly was sometimes unavoidable. What all the teachers and the management agreed on was the need to keep the classrooms ‘only English’ spaces and encourage students to talk more and ‘practice’ the language they learnt in class. In scholarship on L2 acquisition, this complete segregation of the target language from the wider multilingual context in which it may be taught is termed a ‘hard boundary’ (Cenoz and Gorter 2013). This hard boundary at the ETC extends beyond the classroom to other spaces like the reception and cafeteria where one routinely encounters teachers or front-desk staff reprimanding students for not speaking in English.

Suresh, an older student at the ETC, felt that this was the ‘right environment’ to learn English and that ‘if I had such an environment when I was younger, I would have been very good by now’. Another student, Payal, agreed, adding that ‘we can only start speaking good English … and thinking in good English … [if] we remove our minds from Hindi’. In fact, ‘thinking in English’ was a major concern for many students. Even in the group discussions, everyone agreed that this was an important step in becoming a fluent speaker. Teachers routinely asked their students to proactively switch to English in their conversations with friends outside the ETC so as to get more ‘practice’ using the language. But convincing all the students to do this is not easy, as a front-desk staff and counsellor informed me. ‘I keep catching them speaking to each other in Hindi’, she said, ‘so sometimes I just tell them that if they keep speaking in Hindi, they will never learn English’. Maintaining the hard boundary at the ETC, it would appear, becomes an exercise in not just disciplining the use of other languages at the centres but extending it to the everyday lives of students. The belief about ‘thinking in English’ also precludes reconciling multiple language use in the multilingual lives that these students lead. This also entrenches the governmentality that is propelled by self-management and self-discipline by policing the boundaries of what constitutes legitimate and desirable speech practices. Most importantly, and regardless of any pedagogic wisdom in reprimanding students for speaking in Hindi at the ETC, the very act of an English-speaking teacher admonishing students for not speaking in English reinforces the superiority of the English speaker and the marginality of the learner.

The focus on policing a hard boundary between Hindi (or other languages) and English in not just the classrooms but the lives of students also appears odd given that many of the teachers admitted to using a combination of Hindi and English in their personal lives. ‘Hinglish’ is a portmanteau often used to describe a variety of hybrid speech practices including code-switching and code-mixing between Hindi and English, writing Hindi in the Latin script, or using direct translations that infuse the flavour of one language into the other (Orsini 2015). Seven out of the 10 teachers interviewed said that they used such a mix of languages in their lives, and four reported doing so regularly. One of the teachers said that code-switching between English and Hindi was very common in her circle of friends because ‘it comes naturally, and it’s more relaxed and comfortable to communicate like that with friends’. Another teacher, Bhavesh, agreed and said that Hinglish is an important expression of ‘our multilingual identity … and comfort in mixing languages like that generally indicates a level of proficiency in both’. None of the teachers I spoke to have any problem with Hinglish and code-switching in their personal lives, but all of them were against its use by students. The consensus on this was that Hinglish, when it came from an inability to speak in English (as was perceived to be the case with students) was not desirable, but its use by those who had a ‘fair command’ of both languages was permissible or, indeed, a sign of that individual’s ‘comfort’ and proficiency.

Most students agreed with their teachers that Hinglish was not something to be encouraged. Both Suresh and Payal understood ‘Hinglish’ to mean ‘broken English’, something that they had in fact come to the ETC to remedy. Moreover, ‘Hinglish’ was seen as being at odds with the practice of ‘thinking in the language’. ‘It doesn’t sound good’, said another student, ‘people will think you don’t know English, or have a bad education’. The effect of this hard boundary on the students was evidently a purist notion of language use and a fear of mixing languages. But asking students to only use English in their social circles also negated their particular socio-cultural contexts. Ravi, a student, told me, ‘If I suddenly start speaking in English with my friends, they will either laugh at me or think I am trying to show off … they may even stop being friends with me’. But even the fear of losing his friends doesn’t deter Ravi from agreeing with his teachers. Pravin also admitted that he had to do more, saying, ‘I also catch myself using Hindi words in English, but I keep telling myself to stop doing that … I have to discipline myself’. The fact that Pravin understands this as a question of ‘discipline’ speaks volumes about how students have internalised the importance of this hard boundary. The overall significance of this is the manner in which the notion of self-cultivation of language, discussed in the previous section, is compounded here by a system of linguistic control that not only alienates students from the multilingual contexts of their friends and families but also holds them responsible for ‘disciplining’ themselves in order to improve their English and, by extension, the ‘personality’ they aspire towards.

Unequal plurilingualism, unequal speakers

The contrast between the teachers’ embrace of Hinglish in their own lives and the prescription of a hard boundary for the students has another interesting dimension. Talking about how they prepared for their classes, many teachers mentioned that they taught a particular lesson in a way that their students would understand. When asked what these considerations might be, the teachers spoke about ‘thinking’ from a Hindi-speaker’s perspective and teaching what might appeal to them. ‘I sometimes think about what the Hindi equivalent of something is in English’, said Tamanna, ‘and then see how best I can illustrate that equivalence in class through English’. Asked if this contradicts the pedagogy that prohibits translational teaching, most teachers didn’t seem to see this as translation per se. ‘I am not translating in class’, argued Christine, ‘I am doing [this] in my head to find the most effective way that a Hindi speaker can grasp something’.

In fact, understanding how their students ‘think’ was an important consideration in planning lessons for nearly all the teachers interviewed, and the overwhelming consensus on this was that the students ‘think in Hindi’. The teachers therefore felt that this mental exercise was useful in anticipating the impact of a lesson and modifying their lesson plans accordingly. While this is undoubtedly a clever way of tracing why a student might repeatedly make the same mistake, what is fascinating about this is that it is the knowledge of Hindi, and not just English, that enables English teachers to do so. Almost all the teachers interviewed considered themselves fluent in Hindi. When I put this observation to two of the teachers and asked how things might be different if they didn’t have a knowledge of Hindi, one of them admitted that, ‘things would be difficult … I would have a hard time … understanding the context from where my students came [from]’, while the other claimed that, ‘I won’t understand the reason for half their mistakes’.

Plurilingualism is a term that denotes a person’s ability to use two or more languages, and access two or more linguistic and/or cultural contexts, simultaneously (Lüdi and Py 2009). A plurilingual speaker has a blended grasp of both languages whose competence is construed as a combination of both languages and not separately for each language (Lüdi and Py 2009). The teachers, both in their use of Hinglish in their personal lives and in planning their lessons, demonstrate plurilingual competence. Even in L2 teaching scholarship, there is increasing recognition that a ‘hard boundary’ between languages in multilingual settings might be less favourable than a ‘soft boundary’ that enables the cultivation of plurilingual (and pluricultural) competence (Canagarajah and Ashraf 2013; Cenoz and Gorter 2013). The teachers’ use of their plurilingualism and the denial of it to the students is strikingly odd and may have a significant impact on how these two groups access language(s) and their concomitant symbolic power. This is also despite evidence that hybrid speech practices like use of Hinglish are increasingly common among urban youth and can make for more inclusive communication (see Orsini 2015).

When I asked students if they envision themselves speaking as well as their teachers in the future, all of them agreed that it was entirely possible if they ‘worked hard’ and followed the advice given to them. It appeared that they accepted their own primary responsibility in this and didn’t see any particular circumstantial or structural challenges. Only one student, Sangita, raised the issue of lack of ‘support’ back home saying that it was difficult for her to become fluent given that none of her family members spoke the language and neither did her friends. ‘But if I try hard, I can also speak like [my teacher]’, she said, ‘with enough dedication … anyone can be who they want’. There is a blurring in this statement between speaking like her teacher and being her teacher, indicating that at least some of the students themselves understand the overlap between language learning and personhood that the ETC facilitates. Ethnographies of ETCs have already noted the existence of gradations and hierarchies within speakers of the language and that ‘Indian English speakers’ does not denote a homogeneous category (LaDousa 2005; Jayadeva 2018). Diverse as they are in themselves, if one were to consider the teachers and the students as two separate groups of English speakers, it would appear that while the students aspire to become and envision themselves becoming like their teachers one day, the teachers recognise the limitations in this actually happening. The head of teaching summed this up well when she said, ‘we are empowering them for work … for jobs … they need to know what their employers demand from them’. She informed me that several companies were asking the ETC to train their employees and they were all demanding ‘customised’ courses that catered to specific needs. The ‘requirement’ was ultimately not about training learners to become the idealised Indian English speaker that is promoted through the textbooks and teachers at the ETC, but to produce customised English-speaking employees who are acutely aware of their limitations while, at the same time, recognise the legitimacy of the idealised Indian English speaker as normative and ‘superior’ to them.

Conclusion

A lot has changed in the way this ETC functions today, compared with when it started operations in 2002. Right from the way it emphasises a uniquely ‘glocal’ appearance to the consumerist slant in its textbooks, the professional ‘success’ that the ETC promises seems to be premised on much more than just learning the grammar, pronunciation or vocabulary. In particular, the enregistering of a particular type of English with upper/middle-class Indian lifestyle and ‘personality’, and the appeal of this among learners, indicates that what people come to ETCs for is less about the language and more about personhood. On the other hand, the ETC’s incorporation of a more specifically Indian context and ‘lifestyle’ in its language teaching serves to provide a goal for learners to aspire towards while legitimising the dominance of the English-speaking Indian elites by construing them as the normative. For the students, the English language becomes indistinguishable from the embodied qualities and associated personhood promoted by the ETC. The overall effect of this is that students understand ‘success’ and ‘confidence’ to imply not just being proficient in English but being and embodying a ‘personality’ that is determined by certain ways of behaving, interacting and consuming. This is not just an aspiration that students bring with them to the ETC, but one that the ETC actively promotes and indoctrinates through its workings. While the perception of English as a vehicle for personal transformation and class aspiration is well documented in existing scholarship (see Bhattacharya 2013; Jayadeva 2018; LaDousa 2007), what this case study adds is the active and crucial role played by ETCs in producing such a perception. Moreover, it would appear that neither the teachers nor the management of the ETC actually believe that most of their learners can achieve the kind of proficiency and personhood idealised by the ETC, which is particularly troubling given that the ETC also characterises such a failure as something students are individually responsible for because of not working hard enough.

This case study also corroborates existing scholarship that highlights self-management and self-improvement as new paradigms of ‘politics of the self’ that facilitate a new kind of individualism and governmentality (Gooptu 2013; Maitra and Maitra 2018). In the context of English language acquisition, the constellation of communication-skill courses offered to students as a way of gradually gaining ‘confidence’ works through the characterisation of an individual as ‘deficient’ and because this additive logic of skill-training becomes a metonym for an additive, self-cultivated and consumption-based individualism. Moreover, the ‘lack of confidence’ experienced by students at the ETC may be seen as an affective embodiment of the precarity of labour in the urban economy that is thrust back on the students as their responsibility that they need to rectify ‘within themselves’. An individual’s inability to do so is ultimately rendered as their own personal failure. ‘Skill’, as conceptualised by institutions like ETCs, much like ideas of ‘merit’ (see Subramanian 2019, for a detailed analysis of the relationship between ‘merit’ and caste), invisiblise economic and socio-cultural inequalities while promising to offer an objective and acceptable marker of social distinction premised on individual capability. As stated earlier, what this really achieves is only to further legitimise the inequality between students who seek to learn English and their English-educated upper middle-class peers whose relative ‘superiority’ is normalised and reinforced.

This study demonstrates how the pedagogic ‘hard boundary’ of the classrooms spills over and gives way to a system of surveillance, control and ‘disciplining’ at the ETC which is particularly problematic given India’s unequal multilingualism. Admonishing someone for not speaking in English beyond the immediate classroom is a form of ‘shaming’ that reinforces the dominance of English as socio-cultural capital. This hard boundary not only fails to adequately address and imbibe the multilingual context of the students’ lives, it also compounds their precarity by characterising any transgression as a ‘lack of discipline’. As a space where non-speakers of the language come to learn and improve their English, and therein hope to include themselves in the English public sphere of the city, this bizarre insistence on monolingualism only throws their exclusion in sharper relief. This gives some indication of the harmful ways in which such a pedagogy places undue strain on students to disavow their plurilingualism and runs the risk of reinforcing language hierarchies and stereotypes. While this was not a pedagogical study to compare the relative merits of language teaching strategies, the findings here certainly reinforce the need for a more plurilingual approach in language teaching that has been pointed out in existing scholarship (see Canagarajah and Ashraf 2013; Cenoz and Gorter 2013), which may be more suited to an Indian context where English proficiency is so dangerously tied to self-worth and social standing.

On the question of democratising access to English, this study finds that the overall work of the ETC engenders the creation of unequal speakers and, as an institution, it largely sidesteps any direct responsibility for empowering its students despite promising otherwise. Moreover, drawing from Bourdieu’s (1991) conception of symbolic power, the ETC may be seen as institutionalising a kind of symbolic violence in its promotion of skill-training that demands ‘discipline’ and self-management while being blind to the specific needs of specific learners. While certain individual students may indeed have a liberating experience learning English, the project of the ETC itself is quite simply to help employers get suitable English-speaking employees. The mobility promised by the ETC in its construction of the ideal Indian English speaker remains unrealised because they are themselves aware that this mobility has more to do with desirable personhood and socio-cultural capital than language proficiency alone. Instead, the responsibility for achieving this goal is thrust back on students who must complete an endless list of skill modules in the hope of achieving ‘confidence’. As highlighted earlier, one of the ways in which the ETC critically fails to deliver is through its pedagogic unwillingness or inability to grasp the importance of plurilingual competence in an Indian context. This also prevents students who learn some English but don’t match up to the idealised normative standard from feeling empowered because their position as intermediary-level speakers is not positively recognised and is continually reinforced as ‘inadequate’. As Craig Jeffrey (2010) highlights in his ethnography of unemployed youth in Meerut, the selective use of English words and phrases while speaking in Hindi (or other vernaculars) is both popular and seen as a marker of status and mobility which, because of the insistence on ‘only English’, goes unrecognised at the ETC. In fact, the plurilingual and pluricultural competence exhibited by the teachers is a case in point that indicates the need for a plurilingual conception of empowerment through language in multilingual settings like urban India.

The overall findings from this case study highlight several contradictions built into the institutional discourse and practice of teaching ‘English as skill’ at ETCs. However, the most fundamental contradiction is that between the aspirations of students and the expectations of the ETC itself. The promise of mobility that ETCs offer, which is the main draw for students, is undercut by the instrumentalist expectation of the ETC to produce nothing more than suitably trained employees who speak just enough English as required. ETCs, it would appear, have changed significantly, but these changes are a response to shifting labour requirements in urban India. The decline of the BPO industry has prompted ETCs to focus on other, more local labour requirements, particularly in the urban service sector. On the other hand, the aspirations that students come with far exceed this as they hope to include themselves as equals in the urban ‘English spaces’. ‘English as skill’, as envisioned by ETCs, in practice offers a somewhat limited empowerment – but ends up undermining this by overemphasising the ‘ideal’ speaker and legitimising their dominance. Nevertheless, this is both a broadening of the local English public sphere as well as making it more stratified by actively adding intermediary ‘levels’ of English proficiency that eventually make the ‘many English lines’ that Jayadeva (2018) identifies. The reasons why such a stratification remains unequal, and how English proficiency becomes a marker for other forms of inequality, have more to do with class aspiration and desirable personhood that end up reproducing inequalities enregistered in English. While the ETC in this case study does challenge global hierarchies of English by promoting a more indigenised curriculum, this is ultimately driven more by a desire to secure the credibility and self-confidence of the Indian English-speaking elites on the global stage than to empower or educate those who are marginalised for their lack of sufficient English proficiency in more immediate and local contexts.

Ethics statement

The present ethnographic study involving human participants was reviewed and approved by the research ethics committee (CUREC) of the University of Oxford.

Acknowledgements

This article is based on my dissertation for the MSc in Modern South Asian Studies programme at the University of Oxford. The insightful comments and guidance I received from faculty and members of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme (CSASP), particularly Dr Nayanika Mathur and Dr Uma Pradhan, were instrumental in making this research successful. Fieldwork for this research was partially funded by the STAR grant awarded by St Antony’s College, Oxford.

Conflict of interest statement

The author has no conflicts of interest to report.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford.

Notes on contributors

Abhishek Ranjan Datta

Abhishek Ranjan Datta is a Clarendon and Lincoln-Kingsgate Graduate Scholar at Lincoln College, where he is reading for the degree of DPhil in international development from the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID). His research interests span intersectional studies of youth, education, language, media and politics in urban South Asia. His doctoral project explores practices of ‘self-making’ among urban youth in Delhi, focussing on how the discourse and infrastructure of ‘preparation’ (taiyaree, in Hindi-Urdu) in Delhi’s coaching centres shape middle-class aspirations and propel rhizomatic practices of mobility and self-realisation. The project aims to revisit and unpack ‘self-making’ to highlight its hybridity, instability and discontinuities. He holds a BA (with honours) and an MA in English from the University of Delhi, and an MSc in modern South Asian studies from the University of Oxford.

Notes

1 This involved interviews with students, teachers, management and front-desk staff of the centres; classroom observations; and an analysis of textbooks, assessment, registration and certification processes, and pedagogical manuals used for teacher training.

2 Hindutva loosely translates as ‘Hindu-ness’ and is representative of an ideology and political commitment espoused by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological mentor the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), among others, that characterises India as an intrinsically Hindu nation robbed of its gloried past by ‘outsiders’ and ‘foreign invaders’, particularly the Islamic dynasties of India and the British colonial regime, and seeks to undo the constitutional secularism of the nation in favour of establishing an explicitly Hindu nation state that promotes indigenous Indian (Hindu) culture and traditions.