ABSTRACT
The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) offers its set of examinations in a “medium,” whether in an Indian language recognized by the Constitution of India, or in English. The notion of medium in the examination borrows from the notion of medium in schooling where it refers to the primary language of pedagogy. Most students who have studied in a particular medium in school and university go on to attempt the UPSC examinations in the same medium. This chapter reports on fieldwork conducted in 2014 in coaching centers in Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar and in the city of Varanasi. It traces some of the ways in which people hold ideologies about the significance of studying in one medium or another. Much ideological reflection, for example, was oriented to the fierce protesting that broke out in various locations in Delhi during the summer of 2014, just before my fieldwork. The protests were focused on changes made to the UPSC examination in 2011, which initiated increasingly poor results among Hindi-medium aspirants. Yet, institutions are only partly ideologized by language, and the consequence is that we must consider the intersection of institutions and language ideology in ethnographic fieldwork. Indeed, Hindi-medium students still find coaching centers valuable, and new inequalities are emerging in coaching center innovations that are not salient in student reflections on the medium distinction.
