Mapping Linguistic Sociality in Rural India: Children and Youths' Perceptions of Self and Language in Space

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

“I am only drawing the places where Marathi is spoken,” Rekha1 told her friends as they drew maps in their school dormitory on a leisurely weekend in July 2022. Marathi is the official language of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Rekha and the majority of her peers belong to a Denotified Tribe community across India whose name and language are both called Banjara. Multilingual Banjara students in rural Maharashtra navigate a setting that includes schools where the language of instruction is not the language spoken in their socially and linguistically segregated hamlets, known as tandas (Ramaswamy and Bhukya 2002; Shah and Bara 2020). We asked the girls and young women between the ages of 11 and 17, to draw a freehand map that showed their understanding of places surrounding them and languages that they use or know to be used in those locations. As researchers, we are non-Banjara women from Marathi and English-speaking urban backgrounds and while the young women freely spoke in Banjara amongst themselves, we spoke Marathi with them. Our gender made it possible to spend time with the girls and young women who drew the maps in their female-only dormitory. Out of 23 maps, we explore four which most clearly help us to understand how Banjara youth make sense of their identities within a multilingual landscape and its spatial organization through language. Not only do we consider how Banjara children and youth understand places that they navigate on a regular basis, such as their home tanda, other villages, and school, but also how language negotiations are a part of that process.

Publication Title

NEOS: A Publication of the Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group

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