flâneur

Say Hello to India’s Newest and Fastest-Growing Caste – Sajith Pai

sajithpai.com · 2,990 words · saved by 1 readers

Sometime around 2012 or ’13, my daughters stopped speaking in Konkani, our mother tongue. It isn’t entirely clear what provoked it; perhaps it was a teacher at their Mumbai school encouraging students to speak more English at home. Or perhaps it was something else. It doesn’t matter. What did matter was that our home became an almost exclusively English-speaking household, with the occasional sporadic Konkani conversation. We were not alone. Clustered throughout the affluent sections of urban India are many families such as ours, speaking predominantly English and not the tongues they grew up speaking in. Some of these families, or at least parents in these English-speaking households do make an attempt to speak their mother tongue as much as they speak in English. But even in these bilingual households, English still dominates. It takes an effort for the kids to speak in the Indian tongues, beyond a few simple phrases. English on the other hand comes naturally to them; the larger voca

Say Hello to India’s Newest and Fastest-Growing Caste January 25, 2018 By Sajith Pai in Miscellany 4 Comments Tags: Caste , English , Indo-Anglians Sometime around 2012 or ’13, my daughters stopped speaking in Konkani, our mother tongue. It isn’t entirely clear what provoked it; perhaps it was a teacher at their Mumbai school encouraging students to speak more English at home. Or perhaps it was something else. It doesn’t matter. What did matter was that our home became an almost exclusively English-speaking household, with the occasional sporadic Konkani conversation. We were not alone. Cluste

related reading