Reworking the Aesthetics of Language Use: The Multilingual Challenge for NEP 2020

Abstract

This article focuses on the ever-increasing stress on multilingual education (MLE) in policy documents, especially its pairing with mother tongues in education (MTE). This focus brings into relief the relationship between MTE, the preservation of linguistic diversity and social democracy. We argue that the outcome of this relationship crucially depends on the nature of processes involved in bringing the mother tongues into the premise of education and transforming them into the languages of stage discourse. The challenges before a substantive vision of MLE include adopting a bottom-up, inclusive approach rather than a top–down, authoritarian one, thereby challenging the existing elitist linguistic aesthetics. We contend that it is only through such a challenge that we can move towards an inclusionary multilingual approach to educational practices. These aesthetic principles constitute the bastion of hegemonic practices of the elite through which they determine the citizenship of the languages in the public sphere that is the world of texts. Without an undoing of this bastion, the article argues, we would simply be furthering the ongoing genocide of our languages and cultures. From this perspective, we offer a close reading of the recently implemented National Education Policy 2020 of India (NEP 2020) as it explicitly focuses on MLE/MTE. We demonstrate that NEP 2020 interprets multilingualism from a monolingual perspective. We show that this perspective stems from its attempts to replace English-centric elitism with a Sanskrit-centric one. Thus, the major challenge before NEP 2020 is to break the confines of elitism and engage with the multiplicities of linguistic practices.