ABSTRACT
Nishat Zaidi in her chapter “English and the Vernacular” looks at how the modern vernaculars in South Asia were produced in the political economy of print capitalism and institutional rationalisation, which in turn were intricately entangled with hierarchies of caste, class, religion, and region. Investigating the role of colonial institutions, language nationalism, and post-independence language politics in making bhāṣās into modern print languages, and tracing the way English in its turn has come to be vernacularised, Zaidi takes us through two centuries of subcontinental language history. She ends with a plea to decolonise the vernacular and calls for what she terms ‘decolonial cosmopolitan localism’ as the way forward.
