Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places 9781847697653

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Language and Mobility

CRITICAL LANGUAGE AND LITERACY STUDIES Series Editors: Professor Alastair Pennycook (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia), Professor Brian Morgan (Glendon College/York University, Toronto, Canada) and Professor Ryuko Kubota (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada) Critical Language and Literacy Studies is an international series that encourages monographs directly addressing issues of power (its flows, inequities, distributions, trajectories) in a variety of language- and literacy-related realms. The aim with this series is twofold: (1) to cultivate scholarship that openly engages with social, political, and historical dimensions in language and literacy studies, and (2) to widen disciplinary horizons by encouraging new work on topics that have received little focus (see below for partial list of subject areas) and that use innovative theoretical frameworks. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. Other books in the series Collaborative Research in Multilingual Classrooms Corey Denos, Kelleen Toohey, Kathy Neilson and Bonnie Waterstone English as a Local Language: Post-colonial Identities and Multilingual Practices Christina Higgins The Idea of English in Japan: Ideology and the Evolution of a Global Language Philip Seargeant Gendered Identities and Immigrant Language Learning Julia Menard-Warwick China and English: Globalisation and the Dilemmas of Identity Joseph Lo Bianco, Jane Orton and Gao Yihong (eds) Language and HIV/AIDS Christina Higgins and Bonny Norton (eds) Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan Laurel D. Kamada Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism Gregorio Hernandez-Zamora Contending with Globalization in World Englishes Mukul Saxena and Tope Omoniyi (eds) ELT, Gender and International Development: Myths of Progress in a Neocolonial World Roslyn Appleby Examining Education, Media, and Dialogue under Occupation: The Case of Palestine and Israel Ilham Nasser, Lawrence N. Berlin and Shelley Wong (eds) The Struggle for Legitimacy. Indigenized Englishes in Settler Schools Andrea Sterzuk Style, Identity and Literacy: English in Singapore Christopher Stroud and Lionel Wee Talk, Text and Technology: Literacy and Social Practice in a Remote Indigenous Community Inge Kral

Language and Mobility Unexpected Places

Alastair Pennycook

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Pennycook, Alastair, 1957Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places/Alastair Pennycook. Critical Language and Literacy Studies:. 15 Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Language and languages—Variation. 2. Intercultural communication. 3. Communication, International. 4. Native language and education. I. Title. P120.V37P46 2012 417'.7–dc23 2012009342 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-764-6 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-763-9 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Copyright © 2012 Alastair Pennycook. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Techset Composition Ltd., Salisbury, UK. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd.

In memory of William Pennycook who might have enjoyed Chapter 8. 1926 (Leeds, England) to 2011 (Truro, England), ** And for Joan Pennycook (Hawkings) 1926 (Peermade, India) and still going strong In memory of those others on the steps of Lahai in 1927 (see Figure 1.3): Dorothy Hawkings (Cummings) 1897 (Topsham, England) to 1990 (Wellington, England) Frank Hawkings 1898 (Finchley, England) to 1975 (Culmstock, England) Gladys Eadie (Cummings) 1887 (Topsham, England) to 1953 (Sydney, Australia) Donald Eadie 1914 (Topsham, England) to 1992 (Guildford, England) Elizabeth Eadie (later Moore), 1919 (Topsham, England) to 2008 (Merimbula, Australia) And Jenifer Groves (Hawkings), not yet on the steps at Lahai (the little girl under the trellis, Figure 1.5): Peermade (India) 1930 to Woking (England) 2003

Contents

Acknowledgements Series Editors’ Preface

ix xiii

1

Retracing Routes: Manjari Seeds and Nutmeg Trees

2

Turning Up in Unexpected Places The Ordinariness of the Unexpected Transgression and the Boundaries of the Expected Moving Moments Being Out of Place Writing and the Personal: The Passion behind the Trade Expecting the Unexpected

17 18 21 24 27 29 35

3

Through Others’ Eyes and Thinking Otherwise Through Others’ Eyes Ethics and the Other Critical Resistance

38 41 44 46

4

Constrained Mobilities: Epistolary Parenting From the Trenches to Cheruvally ‘Mullamutu, Have You Heard That Our Sinna-Dorri is Going to be Married?’ Epistolary Parenting: ‘Everyone at Home Should be Proud to be Shabby’ Traces of Empire

49 49 54

Resourceful Speakers A Double Failure to Pass

74 74

5

vii

1

63 70

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Native and Non-native English Teachers Proficient, Passable or Legitimate Speakers Speaking Like a Local The Racial Construction of Nativeness Resourcefully Passing as a Non-native Speaker 6

76 86 89 94 97

Elephant Tracks ‘With Painful Feelings of Deep and Genuine Regret . . .’ Farewell Addresses Creating Local Worlds: Genres, Discourses and Styles Language, Class and Globalization Not Just the Oddity of Unusual Juxtapositions

101 107 117 121 124

7

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackboard

127

8

Beyond the Boundaries of Expectation An Indian Game Accidentally Discovered by the English War Oll an Norvys ‘th on ni scollys a-les Conclusion: As Expected

150 152 164 171

References Index

174 186

Acknowledgements

This book owes much to two different instigations to write differently. The first came from a project with Vaidehi Ramanathan. In the context of various discussions about India, postcolonialism, Gandhi and so on, we discovered that our mothers had both been born in Kerala, South India, and from there had started to try to weave a complex tale of families, history and postcolonial theory. We ambitiously hoped to think and write our ways out of embedded colonial and postcolonial framings of history, politics and identity. In the end, however, such a task floundered on some of the shoals of difference that still lurk beneath the waters of postcolonial history. Some of this writing emerged from that project even if it has now split into different trajectories, and it was Vaidehi who encouraged me to try writing in ways that I have done in Chapter 1. The second instigation came from Julie Choi as part of her edited book with David Nunan. Julie invited us to write a reflective account on an incident in our pasts that shed light on questions of language and culture. Some of the notes I initially wrote for that developed into the background of Chapter 5 of this book, while the piece I ended up writing for that book has now become the basis for Chapter 3 here. It was that incitement to write about my own experiences, to try writing in a different mode and to reflect on such moments that opened up new possibilities for writing. My thanks for permission from Routledge/Taylor & Francis, and to the editors David Nunan and Julie Choi for permission to use a much rewritten version of that chapter, Pennycook, A. (2010c) Sweating cheese and thinking otherwise. In D. Nunan and J. Choi (eds) Language and Culture: Reflective Narratives and the Emergence of Identity. New York: Routledge, pp. 194–198. Thanks too to Cambridge University Press and Bonny Norton and Kelleen Toohey for permission to use a rewritten version of Pennycook, A. (2004) Critical moments in a TESOL praxicum. In B. Norton and K. Toohey (eds) Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This is now Chapter 7, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackboard. ix

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Thanks to Vintage Books, Random House and Faber & Faber for permission to use Wallace Steven’s poem Thirteeen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I owe thanks to Bonny Norton and Vaidehi Ramanathan, the former coeditors of this book series. We had agreed that not only would we encourage new authors to contribute to this series but we would also try to publish some of our work (subject to the same strict criteria of proposal and manuscript reviews), and here, finally, is my contribution. This series has been a lot of work but it has also been encouraging to see the new critical work emerging from many different quarters. I also owe a great deal to the new co-editors, Brian Morgan and Ryuko Kubota, who have brought new energy and ideas to this work. They also gave me extensive, informed and critical feedback on an earlier draft of this book, as did Stephanie Vandrick, whose review of the first draft was very helpful in crafting a more sophisticated, polished and readable (I hope) final version. Arleen Schenke also gave me invaluable feedback on an earlier version of the first chapter. And many thanks to my sharp-eyed and thoughtful indexer, Astrid Lorange. Also thanks to the great team at Multilingual Matters, Anna Roderick, Tommi Grover, Sarah Williams, Elinor Robertson, Martisse Foster and Laura Longworth. I owe as ever many thanks to my generous colleagues and thoughtful graduate students. My colleagues in Language Studies and the Language and Change Research Stream at UTS, including our ever-supportive and intellectually engaged Dean, Theo van Leeuwen, continue to provide a strong scholarly environment in which to work. Two major research projects funded by the Australian Research Council, and in collaboration with colleagues Liam Morgan (early literacy) and Emi Otsuji (metrolingualism) have opened up significant spaces for research and reflection. My doctoral students – Julie Choi, Bong Jeong Lee, Shaila Sultana, Sender Dorchin – continue to push my thinking in different directions. And former doctoral students, now colleagues and co-authors – Celia Thompson, Ros Appleby, Adam Le Nevez, Emi Otsuji, Maria Harissi, Marianne Grey – sustain the intensity of intellectual work. As ever, I am greatly indebted to that wonderful worldwide community of scholars with whom I am privileged to be able to talk through my ideas, and from whom I learn so much, including Lynn Mario Menezes de Souza, Elana Shohamy, Bonny Norton, Vaidehi Ramanathan, Tim McNamara, Stephen May, Steve Thorne, Brian Morgan, Sinfree Makoni, Suresh Canagarajah, Jan Blommaert, Chris Stroud, Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, Ryuko Kubota, Claire Kramsch, Ruanni Tupas, Beatriz Lorente, Angel Lin, Adrian Blackledge, Angela Creese, Andy Kirkpatrick, Monica Heller, Alexandre Duchêne, Luisa Martin Rojo, Melissa Moyer, David Block, Ben Rampton, Christina Higgins, Ahmar Mahboob, Ingrid Piller, Kimie

Acknowledgement s

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Takahashi, Cynthia Nelson, Brian Paltridge, Martin Nakata, Walter Mignolo, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Mary Louise Pratt and many others. Thanks to family members, especially Trish Burgess in Canberra and Ann Jones in Melbourne, for helping fill in family details. Thanks as ever to Dominique Estival, who journeyed with me to stand on the steps at Lahai and has supported and encouraged my work especially through some of the harder times. And thanks to my mother, Joan Pennycook, born in India, living in England, who watched parts of this project with a touch of scepticism, but eventually saw why it could be interesting, and gave it her support.

Preface

The usual purpose of a preface is to locate the new text within current disciplinary standards and habits of thought. When the author is Alastair Pennycook, with an extensive and formidable body of field-leading and fieldtransforming publications, such conventions feel less relevant in that academic conformity and caution have never been his strong suits. Coming boldly on the international scene in 1989, Pennycook’s Foucauldian take on Method as ‘interested knowledge’ in TESOL Quarterly broke paradigmatic ground in a profession steeped in ideological neutrality and the presumed universality of its favoured modes of practice. Over the years, Alastair has also been comfortable in assuming the role of the playful provocateur, taking pleasure in moving scholarly goal posts, bending rules, and at times poking fingers in the eyes of the established order. A most vivid example would be his unflattering avian metaphor for linguistic impartiality, ‘liberal ostrichism’—whose public explanation at a 2001 TESOL conference was interrupted mid-sentence by the arrival of a tall, major figure in the field, known for his critiques of this political turn in applied linguistics, followed by Alastair’s impromptu response: ‘Well, speak of the Devil.’ For some, the humour of the moment was in many ways carnivalesque, following Bakhtin, where public laughter serves to undermine received wisdom and authority. This spirit of inventive and transgressive play runs through many of Alastair’s previously coined and conceived notions: for example in the promotion of raplish and hip hop pedagogies (2007), in proclaiming the myth of English as an international language—and as part of larger project in language disinvention (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007); or in the parodic acronym TEML (Teaching English as a Missionary Language; Pennycook & CoutandMarin, 2003); or on the cover of his book, Critical Applied Linguistics (2001), and the unusual insertion of a copywriter’s caret in the subtitle (i.e. ‘a critical introduction’)—a visual cue for the ‘restless problematizing of givens’ (cf. Dean) underpinning Pennycook’s reflexive notion of the critical. The list could be easily extended. xiii

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The Critical Language and Literacy Series is most fortunate to have Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places as part of its growing list of books. It is an aptly titled contribution in which conceptual and thematic mobility are generously displayed in each chapter, while a broader sense of the unexpected comes to unify a rich diversity of topics and settings. While language, particularly when conceptualized as a local practice (see also Pennycook, 2010), is a central concern, broader forms of meaning making are explored through an unusual array of artifacts and integrated textual practices. For example, we are invited to share the ‘mnemonic traces’ of manjari seeds from Kerala, a tactile reminder of Pennycook’s own familial roots in colonial India. In ways similar to Vandrick’s (2009) reminiscence of tea ceremonies and memories of her missionary youth in India, such objects incite contemporary awareness of privilege and racialized hierarchies, some of which remain stubbornly inscribed in TESOL’s knowledge base. Yet the agency of the colonized is also illuminated through Pennycook’s analysis of farewell addresses to British colonial managers. Written in a high literary poshness worthy of an Oxford don, though written by Indian nationals, these formalistic English addresses carry the strategic traces of Malayalam discourse norms, suggesting a localized textual hybridity that is seemingly compliant but also resistant. This recurring theme—of out-of-place, ostensible ‘imports’ (imagine cheese in Hunan, Cornish anthems in South Australia)—is developed most prominently in Pennycook’s impressively detailed discussion of the sport of cricket and Indian cricket, in particular. In ways similar to Foer’s (2004) classic ‘How Soccer Explains the World’, the game becomes a surrogate for historical grievances and contested national/postcolonial narratives (see also Miss World or Miss Bantu? Competing dialogues on female beauty; Ch. 4 in Higgins, 2009). In style and attitude, the Indian (or Caribbean) version of cricket begins to take on local sensibilities; it becomes transformed— decolonized, re-semiotized—in flamboyant ways likely to outrage far-away traditionalists, and perhaps intentionally so. And much like the English language, it is no longer ‘owned’ by so-called native-speakers/players. Ever the provocateur, Pennycook claims that it never was: ‘Cricket is an Indian game accidently discovered by the English.’ Of course, the ‘accident’ here is not a dispute over dates and patents. It is in how the newly indigenized game (or language, or cultural practice) is re-presented to ‘us’. In unexpected ways, the familiar becomes unfamiliar and unsettling, and by accident we come to see ourselves through the eyes and practices of the Other; in Levinas’s sense, we are presented with new opportunities to think, act and teach otherwise (Säfström, 2003). Being out-of-place, in this sense, is as much in the mind as it is on the map, and it can apply to the everyday as much as the exotic.

Pref ace

xv

Moreover, it is a state of being/knowing that expands the possibilities for critical work. As Luke (2004) suggests: ‘To be critical requires an analytic move to self-position oneself as Other even in a market or field that might not necessarily construe or structurally position one as Other’ (p. 26). Such re-positioning, if it is to be utilized for pedagogy, requires new conceptualizations of locality, particularly on the processes of localization that foster critical, reflexive awareness and the agency of subjects-in-discourse. One way to consider this process, might be to borrow an ecological metaphor and think in terms of a deep locality—an active and selective process that simultaneously receives and transforms (or re-traditionalizes) externalities in the service of local continuity in contexts of change. Bateson’s (1972) term, the status quo ante, comes to mind, as does van Lier’s (2004) detailed account of emergence and affordance. A complementary understanding can be gained from indigenous knowledges, particularly in a postcolonial frame as exemplified by Menezes de Souza’s (2007) description of Kashinawa multimodality as a form of ethnogenesis: ‘“entering a culture quietly”… not to remain, … but to appropriate and transform, in order to preserve one’s own (indigenous) culture’ (p. 166, italics in original). Stroud and Wee (2012), in their recent contribution to this series, foreground this agentive dimension through their important discussion of style ‘as a form of bricolage … where pre-existing elements are appropriated and combined in new and different ways to create distinctive styles’ (p. 66). In common, such syncretic and emergent conceptualizations of locality/localization counter imitative and deficit orientations to ‘external’ standards and practices (see e.g. Sterzuk’s discussion of Indigenized Englishes, 2011), and they underpin a perspective on continuity/ change that unifies much of this book. In Pennycook’s words, ‘If hip hop or English or cricket in unexpected places are conceived not so much as having spread and been taken up, but rather as having always been local, then we can start to think about language, culture and identity in similar terms’— terms by which we might re-focus critical work in support of the resourceful practices of language users, learners and teachers. Expected and unexpected language use is closely tied to our assumptions about native speaker (NS) and nonnative speaker (NNS). While NNSs (especially teachers of English) have become a popular focus of scholarly investigation, rarely is this linguistic categorization questioned or ‘critically resisted.’ Pennycook disrupts this linguistic distinction by reconceptualizing the notion of passing for a NS not as crossing this false linguistic boundary but as an act of becoming and performing. Here the identity of NNS, positioned as opposite to NS, is disrupted, as consistent with the assumption behind ‘queer’ in queer theory which nonetheless poses a tension between identity politics and troubling sexuality as an identity category (Nelson, 2009). When

xvi L anguage and Mobilit y

the idea of race, as well as gender, class, and sexuality, comes into play, performing NS identity becomes further complex. Women of mixed race, for instance, might try to ‘pass’ through language use in order to avoid stigmatized racial, gendered, or socioeconomic identifications or conversely to construct an ethnically authentic self (Bucholtz, 1995). Pennycook’s skepticism of linguistic categorization offers a new way of approaching NS/NNS issues in our field, taking an important step toward more complex understanding of these linguistic categories that are bound up with personal and political struggles in racial, gender, class, and sexual hierarchies of power. In respect to teachers, several field-internal constraints should be considered. From a critical perspective, language teacher education has been consistent in its non-local orientations to language, and arguably more so in recent years as the neoliberal instrumentality and commodification of English and English language teaching is increasingly advanced through ‘value-adding’ curricula in the service of global capitalism (e.g. Chun, 2009; Clarke & Morgan, 2011; Kubota, 2011). When language is objectified, de-contextualized and treated as an innocent code (e.g. empiricist/idealist notions of language), within this economistic framework, then awareness of language and power are removed from the lexico-grammatical knowledge expected of teachers, conflating options for ‘resourcefulness’ to communicative efficiencies and entrepreneurial literacies (Clarke & Morgan, 2011; Luke, Luke, & Graham; 2007). In terms of constraints, the possibilities for critical language teacher education are further reduced by the typically modularized approach to preservice training in which critical pedagogy often gets presented, if at all, as a late add-on, a set of abstract concepts, from which interested teachers must create their own lessons and in zero-sum terms that threaten to take time away from other language work deemed more important. In Chapter 7, Pennycook proposes an alternative: ‘It seems to me that trying to be a critical educator is more often about seeking and seizing small, unexpected moments to open the door on a more critical perspective’. Towards this goal, he re-visits his notion of the praxicum (practicum meets praxis) to help teachers notice and act upon unplanned opportunities when critical moments arise in class. Readers then accompany Alastair on a round of student-teacher observations in suburban Sydney, where several unexpected moments are explored. In a post-observation session with a student-teacher named Liz, a fascinating example regarding the appropriateness of teaching/ using ‘close the tap’ in place of its more familiar phrasal verb substitute, ‘turn off the tap’ is recalled. In the dialogic discussion that follows, we come to see how a seemingly insignificant language choice can become a window onto much larger issues of language and power, and the politics of language standardization in the context of nation-state identity. Perhaps most important

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for this specific chapter, we come to share Liz’s emerging awareness of her own critical agency around such syllabus choices. One of the more intriguing aspects of this chapter is the juxtaposition of short passages from Wallace Stevens’ poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. While the poem’s immediate purpose might be elusive, its cumulative effects seem contrapuntal, each stanza or iteration reminding us of the multiple voices/harmonies available in every language lesson (contra zerosum, one-dimensional reasoning) and through which critical moments are recognized and improvised by the resourceful teacher. The art of critical teaching is thus foregrounded with due caution given towards doctrinaire prescriptions (i.e. emancipatory modernism). Some readers may not agree and find the poem a distraction both in style and its relevance for social justice concerns. Yet, for Pennycook, who views the problematizing of givens, as a permanent task of the subject (in Foucault’s sense), critical work must always be agile, mobile and responsive to unexpected domains and modalities in which power/knowledge curtail human freedoms and possibilities. To be critical, we may need to think not only of new sites of power but also of new modes and articulations of meaning making. Towards this goal, and throughout the book, Alastair has engaged in a more personalized, narrativized style of writing. As well, he has explored and shared intimate details of his own life experiences and familial background. The ‘danger’ of such writing is in how it (mis) aligns with readers’ prior assumptions of the critical and expectations of what a critical life should look like. On both accounts, Alastair is up for the challenge, and in this new book is certain to engage all readers—in unexpected ways. Brian Morgan Ryuko Kubota

References Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantyne Books. Bucholtz, M. (1995) From Mulatta to Mestiza: Language and the reshaping of ethnic identity. In K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (eds) Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self (pp. 351–374). New York: Routledge. Chun, C. W. (2009) Contesting neoliberal discourses in EAP: Critical praxis in an IEP classroom. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8(2), 111–120. Clarke, M. and Morgan, B. (2011) Education and social justice in neoliberal times: Historical and pedagogical perspectives from two postcolonial contexts. In M. Hawkins (ed.) Social Justice Language Teacher Education (pp. 63–85). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Foer, F. (2005) How Soccer Explains the World. New York: Harper Perennial. Higgins, C. (2009) English as a Local Practice: Post-colonial Identities and Multilingual Practices. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

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Kubota, R. (2011) Questioning linguistic instrumentalism: English, neoliberalism, and language tests in Japan. Linguistics & Education, 22, 248–260. Luke, A. (2004) Two takes on the critical. In B. Norton and K. Toohey (eds), Critical pedagogies and language learning (pp. 21–29). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luke, A., Luke, C., & Graham, P. (2007) Globalization, corporatism, and critical language education. International Multilingual Research Journal, 1(1), 1–13. Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (eds) (2007) Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Menezes de Souza, L. M. T. (2007) Entering a culture quietly: Writing and cultural survival in indigenous education in Brazil. In S. Makoni and A. Pennycook (eds) Disinventing and reconstituting languages (pp. 135–169). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Nelson, C. D. (2009) Sexual Identities in English Language Education: Classroom Conversations. New York: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2001) Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Approach. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pennycook, A. (2007) Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2010) Language as a Local Practice. London: Routledge. Pennycook, A. and Coutand-Marin, S. (2003) Teaching English as a missionary language. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 24, 337–353. Säfström, C. A. (2003) Teaching otherwise. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 22, 19–29. Sterzuk, A. (2011) The Struggle for Legitimacy: Indigenized Englishes in Settler Schools. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Stroud, C. and Wee, L. (2012) Style, Identity and Literacy: English in Singapore. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Vandrick, S. (2009) Interrogating Privilege: Reflections of a Second Language Educator. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. van Lier, L. (2004) The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning: A Sociocultural Perspective. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

1 Retracing Routes: Manjari Seeds and Nutmeg Trees

The rough road to the manager’s bungalow at Lahai Estate in Kerala winds its way up to the top of the hill between the rows of rubber trees that march in straight terraced lines around the sloping plantation. From the rubber tappers’ spiral cuts in the dark grey bark, white latex drips slowly into the half coconut shells hanging below. The ancestors of these rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) grew quietly in the Brazilian rainforests, tapped only by indigenous people, before the demand for rubber disrupted and destroyed this way of life. When seedlings finally germinated and pushed through the soil of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London – the great greenhouse of the British Empire – the days of the Amazonian wild rubber trade were numbered. Shipped in 1876 to Ceylon and Singapore, these first shoots of the British control of rubber started a dynasty of rubber trees across India and Malaysia, where indentured Tamil labourers were transported to work on the plantations. ‘Imported men, an imported plant, and imported quinine to control malaria all combined to make the Malay States an embodiment of the ideal colony, and to make rubber the most satisfactory plantation crop in all of British controlled Southeast Asia’ (Brockway, 2002: 164–165). The unexpected Tamil on today’s street signs in Singapore was carried there to care for these transplanted trees. It is this estate road that my mother drove down in 1933, leaving the lawns of Lahai where she had played with her pet rabbit, the mango tree where the monkeys used to come to eat the young fruit, the dark stone bungalow with its white beams supporting the red-tiled roof, the cool of the wide verandas either side of the living room, with its doors opening to the steps down to the lawn. She is setting off for England, a distant country she has visited but once before, the big black car winding down the road through the rubber trees – the luggage has gone ahead on a buffalo cart – past the tappers’ huts by the roadside and on through Ranni, Mallappally and Kottayam, 1

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until it reaches the coast at Cochin (Kochi). Cochin, that bustling port of people and spices: ‘Pepper it was that brought Vasco da Gama’s tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon’s Tower of Belém to the Malabar coast; first to Calicut and later, for its lagoony harbour, to Cochin. English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee, so that in that period called Discovery-of-India – but how could we be discovered when we were not covered before? – we were “not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment”, as my distinguished mother had it’ (Rushdie, 1995: 4–5). In Cochin my mother, along with her younger sister, Jenifer, and their mother board the British India Steam Navigation (BI) Company ship the SS Chakdina.1 With them too is a nanny, Maude Bartlett, a ‘mixed blood’ AngloIndian. Like other mixed children of colonial encounters, she had been brought up in an orphanage in Coonoor, the high hill station in the Nilgiri Hills, surrounded by tea plantations. She had been hired to help with the journey back to England, where she hopes to stay and find work.2 They are bound first for Colombo, Ceylon, the city where my grandparents had been married 11 years earlier. There the four of them board the Orient Steam Navigation Company ship the SS Ormonde and begin the long voyage back to England, a country that only my grandmother knows with any familiarity. Sea voyages between India and England became a defining part of these empire lives, and companies such as P & O or the British Steam Navigation Company held a special place in their lives. The SS Ormonde had been launched as a troop carrier in 1917 and sailed regularly between Britain, Suez and Australia between the wars. My grandmother would make this journey numerous times; for my mother, although she did not know it at the time, this journey from the familiar surrounds of Lahai to the unexpectedly unfamiliar textures of England was to be her last such journey. Travelling in the opposite direction – from Cochin up into the hills of the Western Ghats towards the tea and rubber plantations – I pass again through this city of trade, travel, mixtures, peppers, spices: ‘Christians, Portuguese and Jews; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy ladies, skirts-notsaris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns . . . can this really be India?’ (Rushdie, 1995: 87). Returning to Cochin, May Joseph (2007) too feels this history of traders, boats, merchants and sailors that have always filled this port: ‘The sweeping views of the magnificent Cochin harbour and the islands of Vaipin, Bolghatty and Willingdon greet me. A momentary flicker to the fifteenth century when elaborate Chinese junks with their fan-shaped sails, high freeboard and square transom; Arab dhows; catamarans, Portuguese ships and a flotilla of Kerala vallams filled the harbor, flashes across my mind’ (Joseph, 2007: 74). She is drawn again to the ‘graceful architectural legacy of that encounter’, the ‘long trail of cantilevered Chinese fishing nets’

Retrac ing Routes

3

(Joseph, 2007: 74). These elegant nets, lowered into the water by giant counter-weighted wooden hands, draw photographers: I, like my grandfather (according to his photographs taken 70 years before) like May Joseph returning to Cochin, am drawn to these stately nets (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Cochin, like many port cities, has seen religions, cultures, languages flow across its quays and through its streets over its 3000-year history (it was mentioned by the Romans), and has been home to many people of different origins. According to Ashis Nandy (2006, np), in ‘600 years of recorded history there is no instance of any serious ethnic or religious violence’ between its many communities – Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Portuguese, some 14 identifiable communities. Attributed at first by locals as a result of being progressive, educated and secular, such harmony, Nandy maintains, has been more a result of the fact that in ‘Cochin, nobody liked anybody

Figure 1.1 Chinese fishing nets, Cochin (picture by Frank Hawkings, 1930s)

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Figure 1.2 Chinese fishing nets, Cochin (picture by author, 2006)

else – Cochin’s religious and ethnic amity alas was built on mutual dislike.’ But this dislike, Nandy continues, was informed by three cardinal principles: First, that others are not only others: you may dislike them, but they are a part of yourself, they are introjected, they are internalized, so they are recognizably part of yourself. Second, everybody also knew that while they disliked others, others also disliked them, and they granted that right to others, because they felt this was a kind of natural order of things – that some of those whom you do not like, do not like you either. And third, they cannot imagine Cochin without the others; somewhat akin to an epic where the gods and demons both have to be there for the story to be complete. Traditional societies, Nandy suggests, may have lived together like this – not because they were all oozing brotherly love, but they could not imagine the world without the others, the world was defined partly by these people they did not like. And these newer arrivals, these hill-dwelling white people, are added to the list as they pass through, part of a new era of mutual dislike. Port cities give us insights into contemporary diversities, for in an era of airports, every city becomes a port city. Much is made of current urban diversity brought about by increased levels of immigration, but port cities

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have always been places where people of many backgrounds came to trade and live. The denial of diversity has been a strange artefact of colonial and modernist thought, but diversity has always been both ubiquitous and ordinary (Higgins & Coen, 2000). Lee Su Kim describes the Baba/Nyonya (Peranakan) culture that grew up around ports such as Malacca on the West cost of Malaysia, when Chinese (mainly Hokkien, but also Teochow and Cantonese) moved to the region in the 15th and 16th centuries, as ‘a rare and beautiful blend of many cultures — Chinese and Malay, mixed with elements from Javanese, Sumatran, Thai, Burmese, Balinese, Indian, Portuguese, Dutch and English cultures’ (Kim, 2010: 12). These European influences only came later as the representatives of new trading empires blustered their way into already diverse trading ports. Even the adopted terms Baba (male) and Nyonya (female) have travelled diverse routes, the former (used as an honorific for grandparents) shipped by Indian traders from Persian into Malay via Hindustani, the latter probably coming from Italian or Portuguese (nona or dona) via Javanese, as an honorific for foreign women or women married to foreigners. From Malacca to Hoi An in Vietnam, which was once the largest harbour in South East Asia, and where the Cham people controlled the spice trade with Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Indians and many more, on through to Cochin, port cities have always been diverse places of linguistic and cultural mixing, where the people may not necessarily have liked each other, but they made do with these languages turning up in unexpected places. Beyond the bustle of Cochin, the road crosses and recrosses the Kerala backwaters, the rivers, estuaries, lakes, canals where once black-hulled barges ferried coconuts, coir ropes, toddy and rice to Cochin, and where today black-hulled barges, with their newly traditional basketwork superstructures, bring tourists punting slowly through the calm waters; on past the Kumarakom bird sanctuary, where Siberian stalks, fleeing their northern winter, swoop down in long-legged greed on the life-filled waters, and ducks and cormorants dip their bodies between the floating clumps of weeds; up to Kottayam, a town of unexpected, old Christian Orthodox churches and seminaries that moved inland when the Portuguese started pushing Catholicism along the Malabar coast. The Syrian Knanaya Christians had come to this coast long before in the fourth century. The many bookstores of this literate town are closed this Sunday, not because of the churches but because of Kerala’s long-term communist government, itself responsible for the almost universal literacy in the district, as well as the injunction to allow workers a day of rest. Near Kottayam is the small village of Aymanam that becomes Ayemenem in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: ‘May in Ayemenem is a hot,

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brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear window panes and die, fatly baffled by the sun.’ (Roy, 1997: 1). So starts The God of Small Things. The twins, Esther and Rahel, who, ‘even when they were thin-armed children, flat-chested, worm-ridden, Elvis Presley-puffed’ did not get the usual ‘“Who is who?” and “Which is which?” from oversmiling relatives or the Syrian Orthodox Bishops who frequently visited the Ayemenem house for donations’ (Roy, 1997: 2). They learned to swim in the river, the Meenachal, ‘Greygreen. With fish in it. The sky and the trees in it. And at night the broken yellow moon in it . . . The first third of the river was their friend. Before the Really Deep began. They knew the slippery stone steps (thirteen) before the slimy mud began. They knew the afternoon weed that flowed inwards from the backwaters of Komarakom.’ (Roy, 1997: 203). Arundhati Roy and her characters also make this trip, to Kottayam, to Cochin, down the coast to Allepey. As my mother rode down the slopes of Lahai estate in 1933, she was on her way to school, across oceans to a cold, damp country she did not know. As Buettner observes, the lives of families in parts of the British Empire such as India that were not regarded as places for permanent settlement were ‘defined by long-term patterns of work and residence overseas that alternated with time spent in Britain for schooling, on periodic furloughs, and ultimately in retirement. This created specific forms of racial, class, and geographical identity that enabled them to remain separate not only from Indians but also from members of European-descended communities domiciled in India who failed to participate in ongoing cycles of migration’ (Buettner, 2004: 2). Sending children to school in England was one of the common reasons for such voyages. As Buettner shows, there were strong arguments concerning the detrimental effects – physical, moral, cultural and educational – of bringing children up in India, and in favour of the benefits of an education in Britain: ‘Leaving the subcontinent enabled children to benefit from exposure to Britain’s climate, culture, and schooling provisions, factors that, taken together, inculcated highly coveted forms of cultural and career competence connoting whiteness and respectability’ (Buettner, 2004: 110). Such separations, however, sometimes came at considerable emotional cost, especially, as was to be the case in my mother’s life, when unexpected circumstances (Second World War) turned this period of separation into a decade of distant letter writing (see Chapter 4). Yet while these voyages and separations, these journeys from one unexpected place within the empire to the unexpectedness of ‘home’, were part of a designed separation, part of a carefully regulated process of cultural and

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racial identification, something always rubbed off, some trace was left behind. This journey into the past, to the places of my mother’s birth and my grandparents’ working lives, is more than some nostalgic attempt to revisit the past, as if it were some tourist destination waiting immobile for visitors. Instead, by revisiting landscapes, histories, objects, feelings and senses, by retracing routes taken long ago, I am asking what these traces are that I am following, what I can learn from what Joseph calls mnemonic traces: ‘Amidst the fury of modernity’s upheavals float the fragments of cultures in transition, of peoples adrift. These shards of exchange are borne by a myriad of actors such as migrants, nomads, seafarers, travelers, refugees, immigrants, exiles and the curious. Their mnemonic traces are embedded in the debris of trans-oceanic contact and permeate the ebb and flow of global social exchange’ (Joseph, 2007: 62). Many of us live lives of movement, travelling here and there, living elsewhere. What rubs off in this process? What mnemonic traces are left in these places and in ourselves, and where do they find their unexpected places in language? On the way to Lahai, as the road climbs into the hills of rubber, we stop at Mundakayam Estate. This is the world that Kannan in David Davidar’s The House of Blue Mangoes enters, working for the ‘Pulimed Tea Company . . . located high in the central Travancore hills . . .’ (Davidar, 2002: 305). ‘No sooner had they left the brawling heat of the plains behind, than the hills began to place their enchantments before them. Forests quiet with rain, and valleys where clouds came to rest’ (Davidar, 2002: 322). For the Europeans that ran these tea and rubber plantations, there was not only good business to be had in these hills, but also temperate weather, misty mornings, flowering gardens. ‘The mossy smell, the hills helmeted with tea or forest, the sound of running water, the fresh cold breeze on their faces . . . Pulimed lay before them. It was a sunny day, and every detail of its beauty was sharply etched, though the mist had already begun smoking out of the crevices and crags of the hills, streaming across the tea bushes that democratically massed on every slope as far as the eye could see’ (Davidar, 2002: 322). Driving through these hills of Kerala – what was then Travancore – I feel again the softness of these hills, the congregations of light-green tea bushes, the light scents of flowers and spices on the cool air. My grandparents moved from Peravanthamam Estate near Mundakayam in October 1927 to take up the new position at Lahai. The workers at Peravanthamam presented them with a farewell address: ‘To Frank Hawkings Esq., Manager Peravanthamam Estate, Mundakayam’ from ‘Your most obedient and loving boys, The staff of Peravanthanam Estate.’ ‘Dear Sir,’ it opens, ‘With painful feelings of deep and genuine regret, we, the Staff of the Peravanthanam Estate, Mundakayam, venture to avail ourselves of

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this opportunity, so kindly offered by you, to bid you farewell on the eve of your departure from our midst, to take up the Management of the Lahai Estate. While soliciting every good fortune for you, we still wish you had been longer spared to us. But rather than selfishly pine at our bad luck our hearts go with you, let us assure you Sir, at every tide of your fortune.’ The letter goes on to praise his ‘uniform kindness, unruffled patience and amiable manners’ that ‘have left their indelible impression on our hearts and shall ever stand as examples for our future guidance’. Thanks are also given to my grandmother, ‘who has always bestowed a mother’s love and solicitude on us’. It closes by praying that ‘you will pardon any wrongs that unknown to us and innocently we might have done to you . . . Our sincerest prayers shall waft your footsteps to the goal you desire and help to crown all your efforts with the success that they richly deserve, making a long life happy and prosperous to you and useful to others’. These farewell addresses (see Chapter 6), beautifully produced, lavishly written, became treasured items, unexpected material mnemonic traces of those years in the misty hills of tea and rubber. By November 1927, they were settled in Lahai. In the photograph (Figure 1.3) taken on the steps at Lahai, my mother, 18 months old, stands

Figure 1.3 Visiting Lahai, 1927. From left to right: Gladys Eadie (Cummings) and her children, Elizabeth and Donald; Joan, and her parents, Dorothy (Cummings) and Frank Hawkings

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Figure 1.4 Dominique Estival and Alastair Pennycook, on the steps at Lahai, 2006

in front of my grandmother and grandfather. Eighty years later I too stand on these steps that lead up through the double doors into the light-filled front room (Figure 1.4). In the picture they are newly built but they have changed little over time. They built the bungalows well in those days, Cherrian George tells us in his office at Harrison-Malayalam headquarters in Kochi. I had gone to the head offices to ask permission to visit these old homes of my grandparents. The receptionist looks quite rightly a bit suspicious but tells us Mr George will see us if we would like to wait. He is courteous and asks what it is I want. I talk of my grandfather and the estates he worked in for the old company Harrison and Cosford at Peravanthamam, Lahai, Kumbhaza. Cherrian George nods and smiles. Yes, he knows these estates, he has worked there too and indeed he has also, like my grandfather, worked his way up from assistant to deputy to manager in a similar way. Your grandfather was one of the people that helped build this company up, he suggests. It is only now, I think, with enough time passed, enough history between the struggle for independence, the election of Kerala’s first communist government, the forcing out of the

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Figure 1.5 Jen, Kumbazha, 1937

European managers, and the present, that he can make this remark, envisage an unbroken line of British and Indian tea and rubber planters building this company. I show him pictures – photocopied pictures my mother has sent (a little reluctantly, wondering what I am trying to do with this journey back into old and uncomfortable times and spaces) – and he peers at them intently: my aunt Jen, a young girl, under an archway of flowers in front of a wide bungalow (Figure 1.5). This is Kumbazha Estate, he explains. My grandfather was manager at Kumbazha for many years, I add, and he nods appreciatively, knowing the place and the work that involves. A picture of Jenifer again with her parents in front of a waterfall (Figure 1.6). The Valanjankanam waterfall is on the road between Mundakayam and Peermade, he explains. Ah, Peermade is where my mother was born, I tell him. He nods and smiles, asks if he can make copies of the pictures. When we leave his office, with warm handshakes and visits arranged to Lahai and Kumbazha, we are clutching large packs of Harrison Malayalam tea. The tangy scent of the tea drifts up

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Figure 1.6 Jen, Dorothy, Frank, 1935

from the package, and I ponder the unexpected proposition that my grandfather had helped make all this possible. In the picture on the steps (Figure 1.3), he looks as if he has been working hard, sitting down in his work clothes during a busy day, perhaps a little frustrated at the time it takes to set up this photograph (it all took much longer in the 1920s). To the left of the picture on the steps at Lahai are my grandmother’s elder sister, Gladys, and her two children, Elizabeth and Donald, who were on their way from England to Melbourne, Australia. Gladys had married Donald Eadie, who moved to Melbourne to run the Williamston dockyards, and was here visiting her younger sister in India. On these well-built steps, different parts of the family pass through to different parts of the empire. Liz, here a young girl peering out at the camera, lived much of her life (she died, greatly mourned, in 2008) in Merimbula, down the New South Wales coast from where I now live in Sydney. I often still see her daughters, or the children and grandchildren of her brother, Donald, sitting next to her on these steps. The traces of these families seeking new horizons beyond the battlefields of Europe

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in the 1920s, the travel by ship and extended stays, the ties to Australia that somehow brought me too to live on the opposite side of the world from my birthplace, sit as a sedimented layer on these steps. As we traverse the narrow bridge across the Mundakayam River, a woman and her children are washing in the river. I have with me a picture of my grandmother and her friend Mrs Stanton, dressed in dark bathing suits and light bathing caps, poised on the bank before swimming here. As Heraclitus reminded us almost 3000 years ago, we can never step into the same river twice; we live in a world of flows, as Appadurai (1996) has also reminded us more recently. And here, 70 years since my grandmother went for a swim, the river is, as Heraclitus suggested both the same and not the same. On the road between Mundakayam and Peermade, we indeed stop at the waterless waterfall, where 70 years ago my grandparents and my aunt posed in front of the falling water. Perhaps we can never pose in front of the same waterfall twice. My mother was not in the photograph: it was taken in 1935 and she was already in England. These were now her connections to India: black and white photographs of her sister and parents by the waterfall, or at Patamally near Peermade in Christmas 1934, up in the hill station at Coonoor in April 1935. My grandparents left Lahai Estate in 1936 and moved to Kumbazha. Again the employees ‘beg leave to avail ourselves of this opportunity of testifying our sincere appreciation of your beneficent and able management and to bid farewell to your goodself and Mrs. Hawkings on the eve of your departure on transfer from this estate’. Again the praises of F. Hawkings Esq. are loudly sung. ‘During the six years of your regime, your behaviour towards those employed under you was always marked by extreme kindness and sympathy’; even though life on the estate is ‘more or less an exile’, ‘kind treatment from our superiors’ meant that ‘we had no occasion to regret our sojourn to these hills’. ‘Your courtesy, ardent desire to understand our wants and satisfy them as far as possible, your deep devotion to duty, your love of order and discipline and, above all, your ready forgiveness whenever we committed mistakes, have put one and all of us under a deep debt of gratitude and obligation to you and we shall ever cherish happy memories of your various acts of goodness in our grateful minds.’ Mrs Hawkings also comes in for a share of the praise for ‘the ever-memorable deeds of charity and kindness’ that she ‘generously extended to those that have been sick and needy’; the employees pray that ‘Almighty may vouchsafe to her a long life of ever more useful service to the suffering humanity.’ By the time my mother receives a Christmas picture from Kumbazha Estate in 1939, her sister Jenifer is no longer in the pictures. She too is in that damp and distant island off the coast of Europe, peering at pictures of their

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parents dressed for warm afternoons on the veranda. The manager’s bungalow at Kumbazha Estate, where my grandparents lived from 1936 to 1953, is in the same style as Lahai, but bigger, grander; a strongly built stone house, stretching across the flattened top of the hill with its views across the estates and hills to the Western Ghats. The rooms are large, high-ceilinged, elegant, airy; the verandas offering wide wings of shaded comfort. The garden, then and now, is spacious with its flat lawn (unlike the sloping grass at Lahai), its neatly cut hedges and flower beds. Kumbazha was always an important estate, one where tea was brought from other estates to the central tea factory built in the 1930s, down the hill from the bungalow. We pass the tea factory on the way up, an elegant, white building with shuttered green windows, yet apparently no longer in use. I find the corner of the drawing room where my grandfather played the piano and my grandmother the violin (Joseph Raff’s Cavatina for violin & piano, Op. 85, No. 3, was her favourite). The current manager points to the fireplaces in the front rooms of the house. Of course, he says, these would have been used in those days. I wonder if he is suggesting that the British liked their fires while the new generations of Indian managers no longer use them. But no, he explains that it used to be cooler in these hills. This used to be a tea plantation, hence the old disused tea factory, but now it is all rubber. The climate changed in the 1970s. In the hierarchies of the hills, tea was always on top: It needs a cooler climate to grow, so it is only when you have passed through the warmer bands of rubber trees that you reach the green hill tops coated in tea plants. And it is the more prestigious product, more valuable, with a history of great sailing ships racing to bring the new crop back to Europe. A cooler Kumbazha Estate had once been the centre of the local Harrison and Cooper tea industry; now it was a quieter place surrounded by rubber. In a corridor of the house there is an old teak cupboard with offset handles, a style I immediately recognize. It is made from the same wood, in the same 1930s style as the sideboard I have in Sydney. As they cleared the forests for the tea and rubber plantations, plenty of good teak became available, the rich, heavy, brown wood that grows in the forests here, where elephants, tigers and wild boar still push through the undergrowth. My grandparents’ furniture – cupboards, bedside tables, desks, dressers, the sideboard I now have in Sydney – was all carefully carpentered on this estate. This hallway cupboard is also from here, made on this estate, made from this same local teak, made, perhaps by the same carpenter, or his son, or an apprentice or a friend. As a child in my grandparents’ Devon farmhouse, I used to hide in the teak laundry box, with its heavy lid and wicker sides, amid smells of used clothes and Indian wood. I have known this wood all my life, its heaviness,

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texture and smell, and I recognize this style of furniture, careful local craftsmanship and 1930s European design, joineried together. At Kumbazha I look for the archway of flowers in the garden where my aunt stood in March 1937, a black and white photograph my mother looked at with longing back in England. But it is gone. Later, we have lunch with the assistant manager in his bungalow further down the hill. Kannan, in David Davidar’s The House of Blue Mangoes has just been promoted to assistant manager and has moved to a new bungalow which ‘stood in a little clearing hacked out of a hill. Tall eucalyptus trees, their trunks grey and ghostly in the evening light, fringed the front garden, beyond which the hill fell away steeply. Against a backdrop of tea, hollyhocks nodded their heads in the breeze. Petunias, gerberas, camellias and phlox coloured the garden’ (Davidar, 2002: 323). The assistant manager asks me if I have seen manjari seeds before, and drops a handful of bright red seeds in my hand. They come from a tree outside; children like to play with them. As I hold the seeds in my palm, I too unexpectedly remember playing with them as a child, in the Devon farmhouse where my grandparents lived when they left India in the 1950s. They must have brought them with them, the little seeds they used as counters for card games, the seeds we too used in our childhood card games. Like the teak furniture, the manjari seeds are part of my past, linked to smells, feelings and childhood games. So this is where they are from. My childhood games connected through these little red seeds that drop from the trees of Kerala. These bright red traces link histories and identities along tactile lines. Where do we seek the traces of others and ourselves? In photographs, in attachments to objects, in memories invoked by music, sounds, smells. And yet, I also want to invoke here the idea of the trace in a way akin to (though not identical with) Derrida’s (1976) use of the term. A central concern for Derrida, following Heidegger, was that Being – that central concern of philosophy – was all too often understood in terms of presence, of being in the here and now (the metaphysics of presence). Derrida, by contrast, wanted to understand the importance of the trace, the ways in which being must also be related to what is not there, to the absence of presence. The trace, that which is left behind, relates to other times and other beings, to the nonpresence of the Other. As we shall see in subsequent chapters (particularly Chapter 3), this form of thinking obliges us to consider carefully what is left behind in the presence of signs and objects – what is not present when I hold these manjari seeds in my hand – and also to consider the ethical obligation to engage with otherness. When I talk of traces, of retracing history, therefore, I intend much more than finding objects in the past, of walking along pathways previously walked; rather, I aim to invoke those absences that are part of the present, past and future.

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When we retrace our steps, we follow what has been invisibly left behind. What interests Joseph in particular are the ‘spheres of tactile exchange that layer the postcolonial urban sensorium beyond the visual’. This form of ‘tactile knowing’ (Joseph, 2007: 63) is in part what I have been trying to grasp here, this way in which the smell and feel of teak furniture, the colour and lightness of manjari seeds, are part of the postcolonial sensorium that connects my family’s movements across time and space. While the constant connections and voyages to Britain ‘combatted the suggestion of racial hybridity’ since it lessened the possibilities of connections with India – social, sexual, familial – becoming too close, the return to England from India often also ‘underscored their cultural hybridity within British society’ (Buettner, 2004: 4). Recounting the memories of those who have returned to Britain from India, Brendon (2005) speaks of ‘sounds, tastes or smells experienced in England which remind them strongly of India: the crowing of a cock, the clip-clopping of a pony and cart, the sweetness of mangoes, the scent of a wood fire and, of course, the spicy aromas wafting from Indian restaurants’ (Brendon, 2005: 157). These unexpected mnemonic traces, these remembered tastes, smells, colours, languages, sounds recall unexpected places and echo down through the years, and into future generations. These bright-red seeds have become what Thomas (1991) has called ‘entangled objects’, things that have become caught up in different histories, entangled in different movements of people, Indian and non-Indian, European and non-European. They exist amid the disparate and unequal histories produced by colonialism, small objects that children and adults picked up and passed around. Like the teak furniture, with its history of Kerala forests soaked up into its heavy lustrous grains, the manjari seeds are objects in Mary Louise Pratt’s (1992: 6) ‘contact zone’, perhaps even contact objects, light, colourful articles of sensory pleasure that sit along the fault lines of colonial divides. These mnemonic traces turn up in unexpected places, they travel, they invoke different histories, different sensory recollections of the past. Here in my hand on Kumbazha Estate, these seeds are the descendents of the seeds my grandparents picked up, the seeds the local children still play with, the seeds I played with as a child. I still have the seeds in my pocket as I am walking round Lahai Estate in the soft sunlight of late afternoon. My mother only knew Kumbazha from years of photographs arriving in letters from India. But Lahai she knew. And I am wondering what she would have known. I have come to the estate as a visitor, walked across the lawn, stood on the veranda and sat in the teak and wicker chairs in the drawing room. It strikes me I am looking at this too much from the outside in, arriving up the road through the rubber plantations, walking into the cool quietness of the house. But my mother saw it

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the other way round, she left from this place, never to return, she spent her early childhood here, lived on the inside looking out. I walk out to the back of the house, thinking she would have spent time here, with the cooks, listening to the buzz of Malayalam where life was lived around the kitchen. The old cook sees me and beckons me to follow him across the back lawn. I follow, puzzled. He takes me to a huge, old nutmeg tree, and picks a nutmeg for me. He is proud of this splendid tree and its fragrant spice. It is 75 years old, he tells me. It must have been planted at just the time my mother left. I call my mother later, but she does not remember. I send her the nutmeg and she’s moved by this scented connection to the place she left. And your grandmother used to love nutmeg, she tells me. Even carried a nutmeg and a little nutmeg grater around in her purse in her old age, complaining that you had to have your own to make sure it was done properly. The nutmeg, the seeds: traces of connections to unexpected places.

Notes (1) The 3033 ton SS Chakdina, with room for 15 1st class, 36 2nd class and 1619 ‘deck’ passengers, was launched in 1914, and sank ferrying troops in the Mediterranean on 5 December 1941, near Tobruk. (2) She eventually found work as a maid in Southend in England.

2 Turning Up in Unexpected Places

This book is an exploration of language, locality and mobility through a series of narrative accounts that interweave family history, travel, language and culture. It explores questions of how we relate affectively to particular places and how travel, movement and mobility are essential for an understanding not only of the contemporary world but also of how our contemporary conditions came to be. It also looks at how we understand ourselves and others in relation to objects around us, what it means to ‘speak locally’, to be a resourceful speaker, and how ‘expecting the unexpected’, being ready to engage with the critical moments of the everyday, has to be part of our critical pedagogical toolkit. Central to much of this discussion is the idea of the unexpected, and how reflection on why languages, events, moments may be unexpected sheds light on the normative vision of the expected. I have taken the term unexpected places from Monica Heller’s comment that ‘languages turn out to be floating around in unexpected places’ (Heller, 2007: 343). Writing on the limitations of the idea of ‘bilingualism’ to capture the ways in which languages turn up where least expected, she writes ‘As soon as we start looking closely at real people in real places, we see movement. We see languages turning up in unexpected places, and not turning up where we expect them to be. We also see them taking unexpected forms. Just moving to an idea of bilingualism is not enough containment for this movement and multiplicity, probably not under any circumstances, but certainly not under current ones’ (Heller, 2007: 343). These ideas of the unexpected, of people and movement, are central to many of the concerns I wish to explore here. The comment too that ideas such as ‘bilingualism’ cannot contain the mobility and dynamics of language use is also important, since in later chapters I will explore further some of the ways in which we need to open up ways of thinking about language in order to capture its unexpected ways. 17

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The Ordinariness of the Unexpected The idea of languages floating around in unexpected places was a comment that resonated for the work Emi Otsuji and I (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010, 2011) have been doing on language use in a ‘bilingual’ workplace. It seemed to capture the ways in which languages were less tied to place, territory or cultural identity than often assumed. Terms such as bilingualism, multilingualism and multiculturalism did not seem to do enough to capture the dynamics of language use we were encountering. Other terminology, such as plurilingualism, and the recent polylingualism (Jørgensen, 2008), also seemed to fall short in their attempts to capture a sense of diversity by pluralizing languages (though polylingualism pluralizes a notion of language ‘features’ rather than languages themselves). Instead, we tried working with the idea of metrolingualism, which describes the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language; it does not assume connections between language, culture, ethnicity, nationality or geography, but rather seeks to explore how such relations are produced, resisted, defied or rearranged; its focus is not on language systems but on languages as emergent from contexts of interaction. Put differently, this is about languages turning up in unexpected places. Likewise, problems with the recent fascination with hybridity reveal some of the issues I want to get at here. Reacting against purported ideas of purity and essence, a range of scholarship has taken up a focus on linguistic and cultural mixing, from Rampton’s (1995, 2006) studies of crossing, styling and the language of late modernity in school classrooms, to studies of multilingual creativity in hip-hop (Lin, 2009; Omoniyi, 2009). But once hybridity becomes the end point of such analysis, once it is assumed that non-mixture is the norm and mixture the hybrid exception, we are reproducing the normative vision of modernity, we are in fact indulging once again in ‘la fascination pour l’origine’ (Canut, 2007: 78). How has the hybrid become the unexpected? What is it that has made the finding of hybrid languages, peoples, cultures a search for the unexpected? One side to this is the history of modernity that constructed its many social and cultural purities: nations, languages and cultures all conceived as coherent entities. It took the work of many postcolonial, postmodern or poststructuralist scholars to dismantle this edifice so that we could focus on the hybridity of all things. And yet, hybridity is therefore also a product of this history, the mixed counterpart to colonial/modernist monism. Hybridity has been mobilized to oppose what are seen as essentialist accounts of culture and identity. Rather than people being assumed to adhere

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to ascribed identities (Indian, Singaporean, man, woman, native speaker, teacher, linguist) whose characteristics are pre-given and known, hybridity has emphasized multiplicity and the diversity of mixed outcomes. This leads to the problem, however, that hybridity is always looking backwards, always invoking precisely those essential categories that it aims to supersede. As Hardt and Negri (2000) explain, the politics of postcolonial and postmodernist thinkers have been to identify the operation of power through binary oppositions, and then to oppose these through strategies of hybridization. Hybridity is thus ‘a realized politics of difference, setting differences to play across boundaries’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000: 145) but these strategies ‘remain fixated on attacking an old form of power and propose a strategy of liberation that could be effective only on the old terrain’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000: 146). It is to move beyond this focus on hybridity that Otsuji and I (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2012) argue that not only should the notions of bilingualism and multilingualism be open to critical reexamination, since they are all too often premised on the pluralization of discrete mono-languages, but so too should notions of hybridity be questioned, since these may similarly posit underlying categories that have become blended together. Multilingualism, and versions of hybridity based on it, may therefore continue to support assumptions about the discreteness and the location of languages. We need, then, a different starting point that takes us beyond ideas such as hybridity (with their necessary underlying assumptions about entities that are mixed together) and instead assumes the use of diverse resources where genres, styles, practices and discourses are mobilized as part of everyday linguistic interaction (Blommaert, 2010). If we operate within the playing field of modernist expectation – what we might expect to encounter where – then turning up in unexpected places might be seen as an aspect of postmodernism or globalization. Indeed, turning up in unexpected places might be offered as a reasonable definition of globalization. While one view of globalization dwells on the macrostructures of global finance and their many attendant concerns, another take on globalization focuses primarily on the unexpected connections globalization affords: stuffed koalas for the Australian tourist market made in China, or an Australian cricketer being adopted by the diasporic Indian crowd when he captains the Rajasthan Royals against the Kolkata Knight Riders in a match in South Africa (see Chapter 8). While there may be interesting things to be said about these ‘hybridities’, mixtures or unexpected places, we also need to ask why these experiments with modernity (Appadurai, 1996) are not expected. The idea of unexpected places therefore raises questions about the expected. Why is something unexpected in this or that place? The focus on unexpected places in this book

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does not therefore assume the expected and unexpected as a given (we know what should be where) but rather asks how it is that our expectations are formed. The idea of languages turning up in unexpected places is not a study in exotic strangeness, of the surprising and the extraordinary; rather it is akin to Higgins and Coen’s point that diversity is very ordinary: ‘diversity is the given reality of human social action’ (Higgins & Coen, 2000: 15). It is precisely this unexpectedness that needs to come under critical scrutiny. Particular modes of thought have constructed sets of expectations about language and place, about things being in their right place. Take this example of something unexpected, out of place. One afternoon in April 2010, while resting between dives near Sumilon in southern Cebu, as part of the Saving Philippines Reefs project of the Coastal Conservation and Education Foundation1 (CCEF, Cebu, Philippines) I noticed that one of the CCEF staff had a tattoo in Hebrew on her back. Now what is Hebrew (or modern Israeli; see Zuckerman, 2009; and further discussion in Chapter 8) doing unexpectedly tattooed on the back of a Philippine diver and conservation worker? An unexpected script (Hebrew alphabet), used in an unexpected way (tattoo), in an unexpected context (the English/Tagalog/Cebuano world of the Visayas), related to an unexpected religion (Judaism in the deeply Catholic Philippines), in an unexpected place (a dive boat on the edge of a marine protected area (MPA) in the Philippines). She had it done, she explains, when she got engaged. A bit of Googling, a nice saying, an interesting script, a visit to the tattoo parlour, and there it is. Such a process, not surprisingly, means the Hebrew is not quite right: The translation does not quite work and the words are the wrong way round (left to right, rather than right to left). The text reads (with the words the right way round) ‫ףאל ךייש ינא‬ ‫םיחצנ חצנל התא לבא – דחא ףא דחא‬: ANI (I) SHAYAX (belong) LE-AF EHAD (to nobody) AVAL (but) ATA – (you); LENETZAX (for eternity), NETZAHIM (of eternities).2 If we want this to be Hebrew invoking Israeli and Jewish identity, we are working only along expected pathways. If we accept the unexpected and allow it to open up new pathways, to think otherwise (see Chapter 3), then the presence of Hebrew script on a back in the Philippines becomes something else again – not expected, but not so unexpected either. Tattoos? These unexpected ink etchings in unexpected places have become so common that it is now bare skin that may present a disconcertingly blank slate to the modern eye. Hebrew? Well, English might be too global, Cebuano too local, Tagalog too national, and the point about this use of Hebrew script is that it hides the meaning for many readers. A Christian text might invoke certain discourses in the Philippine context that the wearer wants to avoid. A love message tattooed in Hebrew starts to make quite good sense.

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Hebrew tattoos have in any case become quite popular, driven in part by the rising popularity of the language’s symbolism among various celebrities, with a number of influential bodies – those of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, for example – sporting them. While for some (including Madonna) this was linked to an interest in Kabbalism, for others, such as Victoria (Posh) and David Beckham, their matching tattoos appear to be more simply fashion statements. They read (hers down her spine, his on his forearm) ‫יִדוֹדְל ִינֲא‬ ‫( יִּנםַשוֹשַּּׁב הֶעֹרָה יִל יִדוֹדְו‬Song of Solomon 6:3), translated roughly as ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine, who browses among the lilies.’ David Beckham’s should not in fact be the same as Victoria’s since the word ‘my beloved’ (dodee) would make more sense in the feminine form in this context. But none of that matters so much: tattoos in Hebrew are a global fashion option. The unexpectedness of a Hebrew tattoo expressing love for all eternity on the back of a Philippine diver is no more unexpected than the presence of English and Catholicism across these islands. In this book, I want to explore these ideas through a focus on places, movement, people and the personal. As will already be clear from the previous chapter, this will be rather different from what might be expected of a standard scholarly text. Some of it at least will be written differently, drawing on different modes of writing and empiricism. While making the notion of unexpected places central – cheese in rural China in the next chapter, Cornish in South Australia in the final chapter, for example – this book addresses unexpectedness in a number of ways. Turning up in unexpected places needs transgressive treatment and this book aims to look at this through alternative modes of writing and storytelling. The idea of unexpectedness thus takes up the idea of transgression, which itself relies on the question of how boundaries are made and unmade (Pennycook, 2007).

Transgression and the Boundaries of the Expected David Beckham (in addition to the Hebrew tattoo, he has one in Thai) is commonly seen as the epitome of the new metrosexual man. If the idea of metrolingualism draws on the one hand on urban (metro) contexts of mixed language use for its exploration of unexpected language use, it also on the other hand takes the queering possibilities of metrosexuality seriously. While the popular image of the metrosexual ‘new man’ (it appears to be always gender specific) focuses on seemingly superficial interests in hair styles, skin products, clothing, nouveau cuisine and other trappings of affluent urban life, there is also important work going on here in terms of the practices that distinguish the metrosexual from the ‘retrosexual’ (the old-fashioned male)

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(Coad, 2008). There is an undoing of gendered orthodoxies here, which resonates with the metrolingual undermining of ortholinguistic practices. Just as the metrosexual challenges hetero-/homosexual and masculine/feminine dichotomies, so the metrolingual undermines retrolingual mono-/multilingual dichotomies. Thus, while metrosexuality and metrolingualism may sometimes appear only playful and cool, there is also serious business at work here in terms of identity politics, of the queering of language, gender and sexuality (Nelson, 2009). Both are transgressive practices not only of crossing borders but also of disrupting boundaries. Transgressive ideas therefore not only trespass on forbidden territory (unexpected places) but also attempt to think what has not yet been thought (unexpected ideas). Transgression ‘is that conduct which breaks rules or exceeds boundaries’ (Jenks, 2003: 3), taking on the categories of modernity in all their fixity, limits and tidiness, and seeking to cross and to question those boundaries that have been made around people, languages, cultures, ideas, disciplines and identities. Thus, the transgressive is a reflexive questioning of the ways in which otherness has been constructed, investigating the ways in which common sense, the normal, the law, the taken-for-granted, the given are often arbitrarily fixed around relations of power yet also complicit with what they exclude. As Foucault (1984b) puts it, rather than Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment (Aufklärung) project of seeking knowledge structures of universal value which adhere to the boundaries of thought, of knowing the limits that knowledge cannot transgress, we need instead to seek to understand how it is such boundaries, structures and ways of being have been historically constituted, and then to traverse these boundaries (and see Chapter 8, for boundaries both literal and metaphorical). Thus, transgression may be seen as the desire to go beyond, to think otherwise, to transcend the boundaries of the modern. Exploring unexpected places is about queering the expected. Through a range of different contexts in this book, from the process of retracing histories in the first chapter to singing a Cornish hymn in South Australia in the last, I explore what it means to expect and to do the unexpected. I look simultaneously at the implications of things being unexpected and the reasons for not expecting them. In his discussion of 19th century African-American writing, Gardner (2009) likewise invokes the notion of unexpected places to point to the very unexpectedness of African-American writing in these places and times. This unexpectedness is on the one hand a result of that racial world in which to write as an African American was not expected; and on the other hand, testimony to all those African Americans who did write in places unexpected. This is not, then, only about place, but is also a question of space, time and ideology: ‘In some ways, within the dominant structures of the time, any black literary location – be it in the

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person of an individual or in the instance of a cluster of individuals – was and had to be “unexpected”’ (Gardner, 2009: 21). My project here relates to this in various ways. While Gardner’s work focuses on the very particular racial politics that make writing both unlikely and difficult, my interest here is the broader set of considerations that lead us to expect certain things to be in a certain place, for people to speak a certain way. Nowhere does this concern become more obvious than in areas such as asylum applications, where ‘the imagination of language, notably, is dominated by frames that refer to static and timeless national orders of things’ (Blommaert, 2010: 155). The sociolinguistic repertoire of an asylum seeker from Rwanda, Blommaert argues, ‘is indicative of time, not just of space: it connects to the history of a region over the last two decades, not just to the region. Thus, sociolinguistic repertoires index full histories of people and of places, not just institutionally genred “origins”’ (Blommaert, 2010: 155). In this particular case, the life history of this young man – from living in Kenya as a young child, to the death of his family when back in Rwanda, from his arrest by soldiers for smuggling arms to his imprisonment in a cell with a speaker of Runyankole (spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda) – meant that he had a sociolinguistic profile that did not fit what was expected from a Rwandan: ‘his knowledge of English and Runyankole were taken as strong evidence that he was from Uganda, not from Rwanda (where proficiency in Kinyarwanda and French would be expected)’ (Blommaert, 2010: 159). As Blommaert goes on to show, this asylum seeker, whose application is rejected, is confronted by a range of assumptions about his expected sociolinguistic profile, based on a view of the state, of origins and of what is normal. This ‘monoglot ideology makes time and space static, it suggests a transcendent phenomenology for things that define the nation state, and presents them as natural, neutral, a-contextual and non-dynamic: as facts of nature’ (Blommaert, 2010: 165) rather than the ‘densely mixed, polyglot repertoires’ (Blommaert, 2010: 166) that in fact reflect the lives, and in particular disrupted lives during periods of immense upheaval, that are the norm. Given the description of his life, ‘very little of a “normal” sociolinguistic profile can in fact be expected’ (Blommaert, 2010: 171). Here, then, we see how deeply expectations matter, and how embedded they are in particular normative ideologies. We also see how important questions of languages in unexpected places are, as well as issues of time, place and movement. Eades similarly observes that a basic assumption of many tests to identify the background of asylum seekers is that they ‘will use just one language in their interview, and that any use of even one word from another language can be evidence that the interviewee is being dishonest about their origins’

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(Eades, 2010: 255). Put another way, words in unexpected places are taken as an indication of an abnormal sociolinguistic profile, revealing of course as much about our assumptions of normal, expected language use as any abnormality in the applicant’s history. As Eades goes on, ‘Since leaving their place of origin, there may be many places where an asylum seeker stays for varying amounts of time, such as different locations in their own country, as well as in neighbouring countries, including multilingual refugee camps, and various other countries through which they travel before arriving in the country in which they seek asylum. In each of these locations, asylum seekers are communicating with others, and this can involve picking up new words, new ways of speaking, new language varieties’ (Eades, 2010: 255). Many who move, but in particular asylum seekers and refugees and those who are forced to move under conditions of great hardship, then have to confront their static nemesis, the fixed identity regulations of institutional modernity. When judgments in law courts, educational systems, asylum tribunals, job interviews or hospital waiting rooms are brought to bear on their language use, the full discriminatory apparatus of the state all too often works only with what it has deemed to be expected.

Moving Moments If the idea of the unexpected poses questions about the discourses of expectation, the idea of place is also revealed as one that needs to be understood in relation to time, movement and feeling. In the previous chapter, the sense of place I was trying to capture was deeply tied to questions of movement, of travel, of coming and going, as well as to traces, histories and affective relations. A sense of place is related to a sense of movement. In that chapter I tried to develop a feeling of movement – my own movement travelling in Kerala, my mother’s in the opposite direction, the broader context of movement within the empire, the movement of people around cities such as Cochin, of tea and birds (Siberian stalks) and even of rubber trees. In later chapters, movement will continue to be a theme as I consider other moments of location and dislocation, of languages or people being in unexpected places. While part of the story I told in the previous chapter might be seen as one of ‘travel’, I would prefer, following Simpson, to recast it in terms of movement or mobility: ‘by directing the emphasis of critique toward the problematic I call the politics of mobility, I mean to refuse travel’s hegemony in favor of mobility’s contest’ (Simpson, 2005: xvi). Mobility, unlike the more general ‘movement’, raises the question of who is able to move, of certain types of travel being very clear sites of privilege.

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While it is certainly not the case that only the privileged move – from refugees to migrant workers, there are many with very little material wealth who are obliged to move for economic, political, environmental or cultural reasons – it is the case that to choose to move in certain ways is a reflection of material well-being. As Massey (1991: 27) remarks, ‘mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power. It is not simply a question of unequal distribution, that some people move more than others, and that some have more control than others. It is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people’ (Massey, 1991: 27). If my grandfather, like many a worker in the colonial regime before him, was not from a privileged background (see Chapter 4), the conditions that the empire made possible for such workers were sites of immense privilege compared to those alongside whom they worked. The hill-top Kumbazha Estate bungalow, surrounded by lawns and flowers, with views across to the distant hills, and cooling breezes wafting through the wings of the veranda in summer, was a place of great comfort compared both to the background from which my grandfather had come and, much more starkly, the living conditions of those who worked on the estate. Doubtless, their conditions were improved with health and education (there are pictures too of my grandparents at the estate school and estate hospital), but their options were limited. It was Indian independence that shifted these conditions of mobility, forcing my grandparents to return to England. And for me to retrace my grandparents’ steps is another site of privileged mobility. Part of the background to an idea of unexpected places is therefore the question of mobility, of who can move, of who can reflect on landscapes because of their forced or volitional mobility. A focus on mobility, however, is also part of a more general inquiry into questions of movement in relation to time and space, ideas set in motion by Massey’s insights into the politics of mobility and the ways in which places are produced by the flows and movements through them. Human life, Thrift tells us, ‘is based on and in movement’ (Thrift, 2007: 5). A focus on movement shifts our understanding of human life away from ‘a consciousness-centred core of self-reference’ where the centrality of our own sense of being defines where we believe we are towards an understanding where movement captures a certain attitude to ‘life as potential’. ‘Movement,’ argues Chew is essential to existence: ‘nothing that has life is without motion . . . Hence languages’ unceasing companion is change and together they affect socio-cultural-political structures and these structures, in turn, influence and affect language change’ (Chew, 2010: 47). Once we make this shift to see movement – across space and across time – as central to human existence, we can start to see both human existence and

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language from a different perspective. Mobility, argues Blommaert, ‘is the great challenge: it is the dislocation of language and language events from the fixed position in time and space attributed to them by a more traditional linguistics and sociolinguistics’ (Blommaert, 2010: 21). Place or locality are not so much defined by physical aspects of context, by tradition or origins but by the flows of people, languages, cultures through the landscape. If, as I have argued elsewhere (Pennycook, 2010a), one of the shortcomings of the move to make structure a central part of social and linguistic analysis was its freezing of time and space, so it is important if we are to give life to alternative ways of thinking, that we do not seek motion only in indistinct ideas of floating signifiers or the indeterminacy of meaning, but rather ground our thinking about language in questions of place and movement. One way in which space has been opened up recently as a category for analysis in relation to language has been through the idea of ‘linguistic landscapes’, the ways in which language is not something that exists only in people’s heads, in texts written for institutional consumption, or in spoken interactions, but rather is part of the physical environment. At least in urban contexts – as Coulmas (2009) points out, a better term might indeed be linguistic cityscape – language surrounds us, directs us, hales us, calls for our attention, flashes its messages to us. Linguistic landscapes take us into the spatiality of language; we are invited to explore what Scollon and Scollon call from a related perspective geosemiotics: ‘an integrative view of these multiple semiotic systems which together form the meanings which we call place’ (Scollon & Scollon, 2003: 12). The idea of linguistic landscape (LL) ‘contextualizes the public space within issues of identity and language policy of nations, political and social conflicts . . . LL is a broader concept than documentation of signs; it incorporates multimodal theories to include sounds, images, and graffiti’ (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009: 4). And yet, as Sebba (2010) warns, if we focus too much on signs in particular places, we may lose sight of the significance of mobility: ‘while fixed signage is undoubtedly of great interest in its own right, it needs to be seen and analysed as a subset or a “special case” of the set of all public texts, which also include mobile or “non-fixed” public texts’ (Sebba, 2010: 59). Different kinds of mobile texts have varied types of relation with their potential readers: An advertising slogan on a bus seeks to reach a wider audience than a fixed text may be able to and by so doing to fix stable associative relations with a product brand and image across as broad an audience as possible. Leaflets handed out to passers-by, bus timetables, or banknotes have rather different lives as mobile semiotic texts. As Szerszynski and Urry (2006) remind us, furthermore, mobility is a crucial part of cosmopolitanism. The language of landscape and of

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cosmopolitanism, they suggest, is ‘a language of mobility, of abstract characteristics and comparison. It is not just that such mobility is necessary if one is to develop the capacity to be reflexive about landscape. It is also that landscape talk is itself an expression of the life-world of mobile groups’ (Szerszynski & Urry, 2006: 127). Sinfree and Busi Makoni’s use of the idea of vague linguistique in their analysis of signs on taxis in Ghana and South Africa likewise emphasizes the importance of mobility, of signs moving through space. Not only are these complex linguistic mixes of language varieties, and complex multimodal mixtures of text and image, but they are also ‘multilingualism on wheels’ (Makoni & Makoni, 2010: 265). This perspective on language, in a way similar to Blommaert’s (2010) account of an asylum seeker above, opens up an understanding of languages not as entities stuck in one place but rather as mobile resources that move across landscapes. It is also important, as Thrift (2007) makes clear, to link space and movement with affect. When we start to address questions of identity and belonging, which ‘quiver with affective energy’ (Thrift, 2007: 172), we cannot effectively do so without bringing our affective relations to space into the picture. This affective relation to space is also of significance to the stories I want to tell here. The journey in the first chapter was not just travel, not just history; it was also emotional in unexpected ways. I had thought it might just be ‘interesting’ but when the old cook dropped the nutmeg on my hand, when the assistant manager poured the manjari seeds into my palm, when I clasped the tea from the headquarters of Harrison-Malayalam, these were, as suggested in that chapter, objects entangled in complex emotional histories. They were affective objects. So too, the lawns at Lahai, the rubber trees at Mundakayam, the drawing room at Kumbazha; all these places brought different emotional states. Not in the same way as when we return home, go back to our old high school, visit a favourite old pub, drop in to a classroom, walk in a garden whose scents we recall, for all these are revisiting places we know (at least, pace Heraclitus, to some extent). Rather the affective relations to place I sensed in India were not about places I had visited before. They were unexpected affections, relations to places I had not visited, to places that only came into my ambit of experience through my unexpected relocation into a space where my grandparents’ lives had been played out.

Being Out of Place In his memoir Out of Place, Said reflects on growing up a Christian Palestinian (with a Christian name) in Cairo, and his overriding sensation of ‘always being out of place’ (Said, 1999: xix). As he describes these early years

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elsewhere, ‘when I was born in Jerusalem in 1935, my parents were commuting between Palestine and Egypt. I didn’t spend a huge amount of time in Palestine or, for that matter, anywhere really; we were always on the move’ (Said, 2004: 233–234). This being out of place is a result both of those material histories that locate Palestinians outside Palestine, that have rendered Islam the majority religion of the region, as well as those discourses that suggest a proper place to be. Said’s reflections are not, to be sure, on a simple physical and cultural dislocation, but on the mixture of influences as he grew up: the easy movement when he was young between Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon (the land of his mother); the languages they spoke – he grew up speaking English and Arabic, the two languages having ‘always been together in my life, one resonating in the other sometimes ironically, sometimes nostalgically, most often each correcting, and commenting on, the other. Each can seem like my absolutely first language, but neither is’ (Said, 1999: 4); the later feeling of unease as he became uncomfortable with both languages in the United States; the diverse and cosmopolitan Cairo he grew up in, a city of movement, mixtures, the old and the modern, and the life he came to lead in the United States, with his work on the construction of the Orient. On the one hand, Said links this ‘unsettled sense of many identities, mostly in conflict with each other’, with an ‘acute memory of the despairing feeling that I wish we could have been all-Arab, or all-European and American, or all-Orthodox Christian, or all-Muslim, or all-Egyptian’ (Said, 1999: 5) if only to counter all those questions that seek to locate him somewhere in particular. ‘To me, nothing more painful and paradoxically sought after characterizes my life than the many displacements from countries, cities, abodes, languages, environments that have kept me in motion all these years’ (Said, 1999: 217). And yet, he also cherishes this sense of being out of place because of the way in which it obliged him to think differently, to question in unexpected ways: ‘Now it does not seem important or even desirable to be “right and in place” (right at home, for instance). Better to wander out of place, not to own a house, and not ever to feel too much at home anywhere’ (Said, 1999: 294). He learned to appreciate this ‘form of freedom’, coming to ‘prefer being not quite right and out of place’ (Said, 1999: 295). This is why, for me too, this ‘retracing’ in the previous chapter is not a search for place as origin but a search for precisely those mixtures that may be part of our make up. If for Said, his particular history immediately gives him a label of being a ‘strange composite’ (Said, 2004: 234), for me I have wanted to ask why it is that I have always felt out of place. And why has deliberately making myself feel out of place through travel and displacement made me feel at home? Was that moment of standing on the steps at Lahai

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(Chapter 1), those steps sedimented with family movement to India and Australia, a moment of being at home? Said ties his state of exile to the more metaphorical domain of being an intellectual out of place. On the one hand, is that sense of never quite feeling at home, never quite knowing what those long-term insiders are talking about; on the other hand, that intellectual ‘restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others’ (Said, 1994: 39). This is akin in some ways to Dean’s ‘restive problematization of the given’ (Dean, 1994: 4), a problematizing practice that never rests with assurity in any one place. In the next chapter, this sense of being out of place, the practices of intellectually unsettling expected modes of thought will be taken up in terms of what Hoy (2004) calls critical resistance. These are some of the issues I tried to raise in the previous chapter: What kind of relation can I have to a particular place in Kerala? What is the affective attachment to a place my grandparents lived in, this place so far and yet linked in traceable ways? As I suggest in Chapter 5, I too have always felt out of place, and have often taken pleasure in that. While I wanted the other languages I have spoken to be local, I wanted my English to be harder to locate, to always be from somewhere else. And as I suggest in the next chapter, one of the goals of travel, of living and being in unexpected places, is not only an engagement with difference, an attempt to see oneself through others’ eyes, but also potentially an act of more radical alterity, of unknowingness, of becoming undone, of demanding to think otherwise. Here, following Hoy’s discussion of critical thinking that demands that we think differently, that ‘critical resistance requires freedom, and freedom is tied conceptually to the openness to possibility’ (Hoy, 2004: 234), I am looking at ways in which our relations to place, being in or out of place, turning up in unexpected places, are tied to the possibilities of critical thought.

Writing and the Personal: The Passion behind the Trade Critical resistance also needs critical writing. Much of the writing in this book, as will be very evident from the first chapter (though not this one), brings unexpected writing into this academic space, or brings personal and reflective writing into unexpected places. There are a number of things going on here. The writing in Chapters 3, 5 and 7 use ‘critical moments’ in my own past to open up questions for reflection on language, culture and location. In the next chapter, for example, I take an incident a number of years ago, when an unexpected object (cheese) turned up in an unexpected place (rural China), to reflect on what it means to think otherwise (penser autrement), to

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question our assumptions about what we know and can know of others. Chapter 3, based around a seemingly small incident, is about our relation to alterity. Chapter 5 draws on critical moments and reflective narratives in my own language-learning history, exploring the idea of what it means to ‘pass’ as a speaker of a language, to be an unexpected speaker, and to be a resourceful speaker. That chapter is a reflection on what speaking a language entails, and indeed what languages themselves may be. Chapter 7 describes a visit to a language class to observe a teaching practicum. It asks how we can deal with critical (unexpected) moments in our teaching and turn them to a wider critical agenda. Chapters 1 and 8 link these narrative accounts to the themes of Chapters 4 and 6. While all these chapters might be seen as connected through a focus on the ‘personal’, these two are somewhat different. Chapter 4 takes up again the context laid out in Chapter 1, looking in particular at the role of writing within contexts of separation. Drawing on letters written by my grandmother in India to my mother in England in the 1930s and 1940s, the interest here is how questions of distance are bridged while particular forms of identity are emphasized. This is an exploration of writing, identity, mobility and place. Staying in the Indian context, Chapter 6 asks what is retained from periods of travel and residence in different places. Looking at my grandfather’s work with elephants in the forests of Kerala, this chapter also analyses the particular genre of farewell addresses to departing colonial workers. This leads to a consideration of genres, writing and the ways in which it is not so much languages as abstract entities as the local practices engaged in that are the most important ways in which difference occurs in language. The final chapter draws together the two interwoven contexts (those related to familial connections to India and those related to personal accounts of critical moments) by looking at several further examples of language and unexpected places, including a discussion of cricket in India and Cornish in Australia. These chapters all share a focus on the personal, though in different ways. They are also experiments in writing, attempts to write differently. One reason for this is Canagarajah’s (1996) observation that critical work that remains in standard form may reproduce as much as it resists. If we talk of critical resistance, of openness to possibilities, but do so only in a form that reproduces textually the very lack of possibility that much academic writing constantly repeats, we run the danger of closing down those possibilities precisely in the moment we aim to open them up. This is also a question of disciplinarity. Applied linguistics has generally located itself as a form of social scientific inquiry into language problems. While arguably giving itself a level of rigour and respect, this location also narrows the modes of enquiry available to it.

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As part of an exercise in transdisciplinarity, therefore, I have also attempted not only to write differently but also to interweave texts that might normally have no place in such an enterprise, in particular fictional writing by authors such as Salman Rushdie. In part, as in Chapter 1, this was just to acknowledge that Rushdie, Roy and Davidar are far better creative writers than I am. When I wished to evoke certain scenes – the bustle or the backwaters of Cochin, or the tea plantations in the Travancore hills – I might as well let them do it for me. Yet this was also to play with the unexpected, to allow different voices to creep into the text, to allow for a multivocality where Indian writers (in English) do some of the storytelling for me. And along with the poetry that creeps into various chapters, especially Chapter 7, which is structured entirely around one of Wallace Stevens’ poems, this is an attempt to allow unexpected forms of writing to tell an applied linguistic story in ways that prose such as this cannot always do (and see Vandrick, 2009). Using personal accounts, writing narratives, indulging in literary forms nevertheless raises some important concerns, and certainly may be open to challenges of self-indulgence, bad research and authorial over-presence. In her discussion of the use of autobiographies in applied linguistics research, Pavlenko (2007) points to the significance of personal accounts of language and language learning as a source of data, suggesting too that alongside the benefits there are also dangers. On the upside is their potential interest, accessibility and aesthetic appeal, making for good reading. Such texts may ‘have reflective value for their authors and for the readers who are encouraged to imagine alternative ways of being in the world’ (Pavlenko, 2007: 180). Beyond such reflective and imaginary possibilities, accounts written by learners themselves are potentially ‘transformative as they shift the power relationship between researchers and participants, and between teachers and learners, making the object of the inquiry into the subject and granting the subject both agency and voice’ (Pavlenko, 2007: 180). Pavlenko’s focus here is on the use of others’ autobiographical accounts of their language learning rather than the researcher’s own writing. Todeva and Cenoz (2009) argue, however, that the introspective personal narratives of multilingual language users themselves can ‘redress the inbalance between emic and etic studies by giving greater prominence to the emic, i.e. the insiders’ perspectives, while juxtaposing those insights with etic, scholar-generated, research priorities and findings’ (Todeva & Cenoz, 2009: 1). Narratives, they argue, ‘offer a holistic, qualitative type of inquiry, which moves us away from more traditional subject manipulation and focuses instead on learners in their natural environments, with all their complexities and interconnectivities’ (Todeva & Cenoz, 2009: 12–13). Whether analysing others’

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autobiographical accounts as data, or writing reflective accounts that mix personal narratives with other research, there is a good case for the use of such material as part of the applied linguistic enterprise. Nunan and Choi (2010) make a case for autobiographical writing as a reflective research process, arguing that the development of reflective narratives brings to the fore questions not only of what the story is about but also how it is told. Stephanie Vandrick’s (2009) work makes a similar case, and indeed has a number of strong resonances with this book in the self-reflective narratives linked to both English language teaching and India (in her case her own childhood there). She too reflects on the relation between objects with a past – a teacup collection – and her present work as an English educator. She too recalls driving up the rough, winding roads between tea plantations. And she also has been seeking those connections between colonial histories and an English teaching present. Vandrick argues that ‘personal narrative can be a powerful and effective form of scholarly writing’ (Vandrick, 2009: 9), the emphasis being on connecting personal accounts that resonate with the reader with more theorized reflections of pedagogy, identity, social class and gender. Writing, therefore, is no longer here a transparent medium of research reporting but rather a medium for reflection in itself. As Bonny Norton suggests in the foreword to the Nunan and Choi book, such reflective accounts render the voice of the author visible while also validating history and experience. But more than this, as Claire Kramsch comments in the afterword, ‘The autobiographical genre has revealed the passion behind the trade, the fire behind the expertise . . . These deeply personal essays speak volumes about the close link between scientific inquiry and narrative imagination in applied linguistics’ (Kramsch, 2010: 224). Revealing the ‘passion behind the trade’ brings us again to questions of affect. I was intrigued a few years ago when presenting a paper drawing on the material in Chapters 1 and 4 (to do with my grandparents’ lives in India and my visit to these places) at a conference in Goa on Territory and Affect, that while other participants seemed to be talking about emotional attachments to land (through literary texts and theory), I was talking, at times emotionally, about my own affective relation to territory (and, rather improbably, talking to a largely Indian audience about my unexpected affective relation to the hills of Kerala). Herein are some of the dangers and the possibilities that such writing can bring about: there are dangers because appeal to the emotional has been, not without good reason, something we have sought to exclude from academic writing. While not necessarily acceding to the excesses of objectivity, we might nevertheless want to maintain a degree of distance, diffidence, detachment. Emotional appeal may run counter to ways in which we wish to make serious argument central to our endeavour. Just

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as certain film or literary plots may leave us feeling somehow ‘manipulated’– even if we enter these realms of fiction in willing readiness for some emotional seesaws – so affective appeal in an academic text may make a reader feel cheated, drawn in to a story that appeals not at the level of cognitive distance that may be the norm in scholarly engagement but at an inappropriately emotional level. On the other hand, the exclusion of the personal, the affective, narrative imagination and ‘the passion behind the trade’ has all too often made us lose sight of the personal, political and affective aspects of language and life. This is why writers such as Dorothy Smith (1999) have argued for the need to introduce more time and space and bodies into academic texts. We talk, walk, write, learn and teach in particular locations and in particular time frames. We need, she suggests, to take ‘one step back before the Cartesian shift that forgets the body. The body isn’t forgotten; hence, the actual local site of the body isn’t forgotten. Inquiry starts with the knower who is actually located; she is active; she is at work; she is connected up with other people in various ways; she thinks, eats, sleeps, laughs, desires, sorrows, sings, curses, loves, just here; she reads here; she watches television . . .’ (Smith, 1999: 4). This is why Kramsch (2009) insists on the importance of the ‘embodied self in language’. Language, she suggests, ‘plays itself out in the body of language users in the form of representations that are at once objective as emotion and subjective as feelings’ (Kramsch, 2009: 74). We therefore need to engage with personal accounts of language learning since these are about ‘the serious life of the self: desire, fear, and survival’ (Kramsch, 2009: 75). Latour points out that change does not come about ‘without resorting to new combinations and surprising events’ (Latour, 2005: 252), or, as we might put it, to deployments in unexpected places. For Thrift this involves bringing the ‘energy of the performing arts into the social sciences’ (Thrift, 2007: 12). This is not, he suggests, a retrograde step that denies the rigour attained by the social sciences for several reasons: first, the performing arts in any case are just as rigorous as any social science; second, capturing the diversity of the world ‘will clearly involve unconventional means, a kind of poetics of the release of energy that might be thought to resemble play’; third this can ‘inject a note of wonder back into a social science which, too often, assumes that it must explain everything’; and finally because we need to understand the ‘multiple registers of sensation operating beyond the reach of the reading techniques on which the social sciences are founded’ (Thrift, 2007: 12). Again echoing Latour’s (1999) argument for a settlement of the divisions of modernity between mind and body, individuals and society, that have been the mainstays of thought for many years, Thrift goes

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on to argue that the incorporation of affect in studies of society, geography, history and culture, allows us to ‘give up the ancient settlement between knowledge and passions (and nature and culture, and people and things, and truth and force) in favour of considering what ties things together as an explicit politics’ (Thrift, 2007: 197). Along with these considerations about the affective in academic writing, there are further concerns with the writing of the personal. As Pavlenko reminds us, the immediacy of autobiographical accounts may lead an analyst to overlook the difference between text and reality, forgetting that ‘narratives constitute, rather than reflect, reality’ (Pavlenko, 2007: 180). This concern, of course, is one that applies to all forms of data that come via the personal stories of research participants, whether by way of interviews or narrative accounts. When such personal accounts derive from the researchers themselves, questions around the subject emerge. Ethnographic research may lie on a continuum from those that still make claims to objective observation, to those that acknowledge the authorial presence of the researcher, or write about the researcher’s role as participant ethnographer. When the researcher becomes part of the focus of that research, there are further possible distinctions between autoethnography (Ellis, 2004; Ellis & Bochner, 2000), autobiography (Austin, 2005; Benson, 2005) and at some point mere story-telling. The basic question we need to face as researchers engaging with these different modes of research is: once we have moved beyond crude beliefs in objectivity, how do we nonetheless maintain that level of critical distance and rigour that remains important for any good research enterprise? Aside from certain methodological solutions (in particular forms of careful analysis) the answer lies in the forms of reflexivity, in the moves between theory, description and analysis. It is that careful reflective process that brings personal stories under critical and theoretical scrutiny that allows for rigourous discussion. As will be clear from the chapters in this book, my use of personal data – either personal in the sense of pertaining to my life and family or personal in the sense of drawing on accounts of my own experience – is to generate further reflection. There is no interest here in an autobiographical account, nor in a form of ethnography in which I play a central role. Rather, the point is to use particular ways of writing to unsettle those old divisions between knowledge and passion, people and things, writing and research, fact and fiction, in favour of an understanding of how the self entails forms of politics and desire (Kramsch, 2009; Thrift, 2007). This is part of a project in critical resistance, to think otherwise (Hoy, 2004) and to reflect on the central themes of this book: unexpected places, language, locality and mobility.

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There are, then, several different things going on here. I am using personal stories, either drawn from my own experiences or from my family history, as data, or at least as an incitement to reflect. I am attempting to write, particularly in the autobiographical accounts, in a mode closer to creative writing than ethnography. This ties to modes of writing such as fictocriticism. As Muecke points out, fiction writing ‘repackages experience as illusion, and puts it on the production line to sell as if the literary product were so much ore. Non-fiction is outselling fiction because people want real stories again, not the pretty pictures or imaginings of isolated artists’ (Muecke, 2010: 163). But as writers of real applied linguistic stories, we have to be able not only to give accounts of reality but also to do so in newly readable ways. And as applied linguists, we are also interested in the writing itself, as both medium and object. Writing is being held up for scrutiny in different ways in this book, on the one hand as overt and unexpected modes of creative writing in an academic text, on the other as texts for analysis (letters and addresses). Writing, including academic writing, is a highly difficult and complex process, and to be a writer in an unexpected place, or to write in unexpected ways is to engage in a reflexive struggle over text. As Gardner (2009) observes, to write as an African American at a certain point in history could only be unexpected. In a related vein, Allan Luke notes that ‘for those of us whose ancestors weren’t supposed to be in the Western academy, writing hurts. Perhaps we are the light that the cracks let in’ (Luke, 2010: 137). Writing and scholarship, he points out, are ‘forms of semiotic self-representation’ over which we have but limited control. ‘Academic writing entails risk, insecurity, and immanent hurt’ (Luke, 2010: 137). Unlike Allan Luke, I write much more as an insider than an outsider in the academy. And yet, like Allan, I have also challenged the academy for its claims to knowledge and its modes of writing, and by doing so have at times found myself ‘out of place’. The writing in this book, then, the emphasis on unexpected places, is about what Kramsch (2010: 224) calls the ‘passion behind the trade’, the affective, embodied, physical spaces in which language occurs; it is about bringing in new ways of thinking through new ways of writing as part of a project in critical resistance; and it is in the hope that this writing can also be part of the light that the cracks let in.

Expecting the Unexpected ‘To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect,’ Oscar Wilde (1895/1998) reminded us in An Ideal Husband, reiterating an idea that goes back to Heraclitus (c. 535 BC–475 BC), ‘If you do not expect the

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unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out, and difficult’ (Or: unless you expect the unexpected you will never find truth, for it is hard to discover and hard to attain.) (Kahn, 1979). This overused phrase, beloved by those that teach ‘creativity’ (Von Oech, 2002), often turns up as part of the contemporary injunction to ‘think outside the box’: it reminds us, as do research manuals, that we should be wary of only looking for what we think we will find. This demand to expect the unexpected, while potentially little more than a paradox (if we expect the unexpected, it is no longer so) or an all-too-easy emphasis on creative thinking, can nevertheless be used to pursue more interesting questions. As I have argued in this chapter, and elsewhere in this book, this is not so much about being light on one’s feet, ready for the new, as it is a question of asking why the unexpected is unexpected. As suggested earlier, one definition of globalization might be something along the lines of languages, cultures, objects, people turning up in unexpected places (the multilingualism of urban transport, the strangeness of cricket in the Trobriand Islands, Hebrew script on a Philippine back). And yet, as we dwell on such wonders, we forget that mobility and movement have always been part of human life. This is why I am interested in port cities, such as Cochin or Malacca (Chapter 1), since their histories have always been of people and languages in unexpected places. As, Vincent Kolbe, a former resident of the diverse District 6 in Cape Town, an area where former slaves (Africa, India, Indonesia) merchants, artisans, dock workers, Indians, Malays, Jews, Cape Coloureds, West Indians lived their lives, comments ‘. . . it is amazing how culture travels around; your choice in clothing, your choice in food, your choice in music, your choice in language – how you make it your own, and how it bounces around the world and why people from Rio could find affinity with square music here . . . Because ports are connected by trade, whether it’s slave trade, or commercial trade, or by war, or by armies or navies’ (Interview, Vincent Kolbe, 1998, District 6 Museum, Cape Town). District 6 was cleared, raised, emptied and knocked down under the Apartheid regime, its residents moved off to different townships. And in some ways, that Apartheid segregation, that removal to racially defined townships, represents in the extreme that modernist move to define people, languages and cultures along predefined lines. The unexpected, then, only exists in relation to the expected, and the expected is laid down along very distinctive lines according to what should be where. If we can accept the ordinariness of diversity, then expecting the unexpected is not so much a question of being ready for what we do not expect as an undoing of the lines along which our lines of expectation run. Expecting the unexpected, as part of a critical educational practice

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(Chapter 7), therefore, is not just about being ready for something unusual to happen in class, being prepared to exploit a critical moment, but also about using that moment to investigate the pathways of thought that have blinkered our expectations. Or, as I argue in the next chapter, this may be a moment of unexpecting the expected. What assumptions do we make about where things should be that lead us not to expect this language to turn up there, this script to be tattooed on this back, this text to take this form? In the next chapters, through a block of cheese in China, a series of letters from India, a game of football in Germany, elephants and farewell addresses in Kerala, an English class in Sydney, a dam builder, a cricket player and a Cornish anthem, I will explore people and languages in unexpected places.

Notes (1) See http://www.coast.ph/ accessed 21 February 2012. (2) Thanks to Elana Shohamy for help with this text.

3 Through Others’ Eyes and Thinking Otherwise

Sitting unexpectedly on a plate in the middle of the round table in the senior staff dining hall, the cheese starts to sweat. It is that time after lunch when the campus clears, all but mad dogs and English teachers slithering away from the heat behind mosquito-net-curtained beds. For several hours, until the afternoon heat recedes, screeching cicadas are the only creatures active across the shimmering campus. Hunan province is always red and hot, but especially at this time of the year: stifling, humid summer days stretching on into thick, sweaty, insect-humming nights. The iron-rich red earth burns rustily in the heat. Water buffaloes, knee deep in mud, turn the thick soil over between the two summer crops, mixing in pungent nightsoil that has been scooped up from behind the student dormitories and carried across the campus in buckets swinging on poles slung from thin shoulders. The rice here is fresh, succulent, learned, local, though scattered with teeththreatening stones swept up from farm courtyards where the husks are laid out to dry. This thick, fertile summer will eventually give way to the clear blue skies of autumn, hazy afternoons full of smoke from burning rice stalks drifting across the valley, as the hard-worked fields have yielded up their second harvest and are about to rest through the cold damp winter. Winter is a hard time – further north, on the other side of the Yangtse River, it is much colder, but they have coal, stoves, pipes, added warmth. Down here in Hunan, it does not freeze or snow, but the winters are cold and damp and there is no hot water or heating. We bundle up in as many layers as possible, balls of cotton and wool, wrapping arms around ourselves and each other as we huddle together. The wind whistles through the broken window panes in the classrooms, students stamp their feet on the concrete floor and clutch their pens painfully in chilblained hands. We plan our classes with breaks to warm up. And then winter slides into spring, when the rain starts in earnest. It rains, heavy, thick, day after day, red soil washing down pathways, floors 38

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always damp, books and shoes going mouldy, rice fields brimming, until at last it starts to steam again, as the summer heat settles over the countryside, the peasants push bright green rice shoots into the freshly turned mud, and the schedule includes the two hour summer nap. This is peasant country, red and hot. Down the road is ShaoShan (㖻ጊ), Mao Ze Dong’s (1893) birth place, a small village with a vast railway station, a remnant of the years during the Cultural Revolution when Red Guards would pour into the Hunan countryside to visit the Great Helmsman’s birthplace. Now it is another sleepy, Hunan village, a bicycle-ride away, where we go now and then, pilgrim-like, clutching an old copy of the Little Red Book. This university, a concrete and brick sprawl across rice fields, was supposed to be Mao Ze Dong University, but changing politics had it renamed in the end after the nearest town, Xiangtan. But this is still Mao country. Across these rice fields between his birthplace ShaoShan and the provincial capital Changsha, much of early Maoist thought and action was grown, from his education (1914–1918) at the First Provincial Normal School of Hunan province, the development of local education for peasants in the 1920s, the antielitist, practice-based, revolutionary educational principles he came to espouse: ‘Our educational policy must enable everyone who receives an education to develop morally, intellectually and physically and become a worker with both socialist consciousness and culture’ (Mao Ze Dong, 1957/1972: 165); the 1927 Autumn Harvest Uprising, when he led the Revolutionary Army of Workers and Peasants against the local authorities, before fleeing to the Jinggang Mountains on the border with Jiangxi Province, where, with Zhu De, he created the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army of China, known as the Red Army in short. This is red country, where the land reforms after the 1949 revolution are still remembered by old peasants, sitting smoking ragged cigarettes under the eaves of their houses on land reclaimed from the former landowners; where students and workers flocked in their millions to visit the birthplace of the Great Leader; where bourgeois intellectuals and capitalist roaders were sent during the Cultural Revolution to be reformed among the peasants and workers; where Mao Ze Dong himself used to return to his secret hideout – the Di Shui Dong (Ṣ᳓ᵢ) (dripping water cave) – in the hills above ShaoShan. Here he is still seen by some as the ‘Red Sun that never sets’. And in this dining hall, old cadres with long memories and tenuous links to the university come to eat in their low-collared jackets and caps, eyeing foreign nouveaux-Maoists with suspicion. So much that China has been over the last century has emerged from this thick, red earth. And with the rice, there is always chilli, red and hot. Not the hot sauces of Szechuan, but simpler, hotter. There is pork and chilli. You can always

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hear when a pig, kept in pens by peasants’ houses, is being slaughtered. First the sound of a squealing pig roped down on a simple wooden wheelbarrow, pushed along the narrow, winding paths between the rice fields, a jolting, wailing ride across the valley; then, as if an advertisement to the community across the fields, the pig screeching towards its silence. Fresh pork to be had across the fields. With chilli. Chicken and chilli, squawking poultry chased down across the farmyard, or brought clucking from the market, feet tied over the handlebars of a clanking bicycle. With chilli. Sometimes fish, big, heavy grey-meated fish from the muddy ponds between the fields, slices of chilli mixed with the watery sauce. In summer, frogs, plucked from the pond-sides at night in mid-croak, a torch fixing their gaze for a frozen moment while a hand reaches behind and snatches the body; then left overnight in a bag hanging from the kitchen door, a croaking, twitching sack of captured frogs, to be skinned and served up whole the next day for lunch, fresh and tasty, with chilli. Or mudfish, eels that live in the water of the paddy fields, cooked to a crisp in a wok, with a dash or two of chilli. In winter, when the meat and vegetables are scarce, other meat appears: the paw of a hind leg sticking out from the cook’s basket portends dog meat with chilli, doubly good for keeping you warm in winter (dog meat is a yang food, good in winter). And when the meat is low and the vegetables are running out, just chilli. With chilli. And the cheese is sitting uncomfortable, sweaty, out of place. Like Wallace Stevens’ jar in Tennessee – round it was, upon a table/it made the slovenly dining hall/surround that table . . .1 – it starts not only to fill the dining hall with its unlikely presence, but to make the dining hall surround it. One of our old colleagues, visiting China from North America in 1987, has brought it with her. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ she says, after lunch, bringing this round of blue cheese on a plate borrowed from the coal-smoky kitchen. We do not get many visitors here in the Hunan countryside, and even fewer exotic tastes from the outside world. The cheese has been brought as a present, but also as something we probably miss. Other foreigners in China often talk of things they miss, and that they think we, so far from everything, ought to miss. But do you not miss television, chocolate, music, salad, strawberries, wine . . .? people ask. These lists of tastes and sounds and sights thought so necessary to our lives. No, we have frogs, mudfish, dog, chilli. But do you not feel cut off? There are 60 million people in Hunan. ‘Cut off’ has very particular assumptions behind it that do not seem to describe life well here. Fu Shifu, the head cook, comes over to have a look. We know him well – a gentle, congenial man, with sadness in his recent past. He likes to talk about food and life, to sit down with us and share a drink. He is a man of

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many sympathies. We always call him shifu – (Ꮷῳ) master – like the drivers. There is a great respect in this term, an acknowledgment that cooks (not chefs) are crucial members of society.2 The drivers, who drive the cars from each unit’s car pool, are also shifu, and always eat with those they drive. So when professors and vice-chancellors from other universities come to visit, and eat in this dining hall, the drivers always sit at the table too. Fu shifu runs a good dining hall. But lactose products are not something he deals with. There are virtually no cows in Hunan. There is no milk (only powdered milk for nursing mothers). And cheese? He looks at it suspiciously. We start to explain, grasping for suitable terms in Chinese. Well it is sort of old milk, left to go mouldy. A bit like choudofu (⥇⼺⣣) – stinky, fermented tofu, but made from cow’s milk. He sniffs, and wrinkles his nose. We urge him to taste a bit, and cut a narrow slice. He holds it between thumb and forefinger, sniffs again. Finally, he tries it on his tongue. The wrinkle on his nose spreads across his face. The sides of his mouth turn downwards. He shakes his head. And walks away.

Through Others’ Eyes For a lot of people other tastes always remain other, if not downright unpalatable. For many, the hot chilli-laden food of Hunan, the frogs, the dogs, the endless rice and vegetables from a wok, was too spicy, too much of the same. For our students, by contrast, a trip down south into the better-known gastronomic zones of Guangdong (Cantonese food) meant sweet, bland food that could only be improved with a few spoonfuls of chilli, carried lovingly in jars from home to turn otherness into comfort. Australians have been known to travel with Vegemite (that strange, dark bitter paste made from malt extract, apparently deeply different from its British cousin Marmite). Argentinians may have a packet of mate with them; Dutch may be on the lookout for pickled herring; Koreans may be on the lookout for a bowl of wellspiced kimchi. For some, travel or living elsewhere is bound up with attempts to recreate the familiar, to find those tastes, smells and sensations that bring a sense of sensory assurance. For others, it may be all about the adventure of new sensations: chilli dog, if nothing else, is tasty because it is different. The cheese was meant as a trace of home, an assurance of belonging, taste and texture that could transport us back to a sense of the familiar, a reminder of what we should miss. For Fu Shifu, a man who lived with tastes and smells and food preparation, this was just too different, too alien. But why, if I could like his chilli frog, could he not like my cheese? Perhaps it was a question of wider experience, of the politics of mobility: I had travelled

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and tasted my way across Europe and South East Asia, a luxury that was not afforded to this cook from Hunan. Is this the cosmopolitan and the local in conflict? But this was a man whose life was bound up with food, who knew a great deal about tastes and subtleties of difference, a man whose views I would be reluctant to confine to a category of non-cosmopolitanism. Perhaps we could invoke an understanding of context: this cheese is out of place. This is partly a question of terroir, of the particular relation between local products – this cheese with this wine, this beer with this frog – but it also has to do with a deeper sense of locality, of the way in which some food or drink seems part of the locality itself, why we may be tempted to eat or drink something only in this particular place. Things have their place, and cheese may taste fine in some places, but in others it just does not work. This is not just a question of what goes with what (certain tastes accompany each other well) but that contextual arrangements – weather, furniture, smells, sounds – reconfigure space so that places are always in a state of becoming (Crang & Thrift, 2000; Thrift, 2007). What is excellent, rich, tangy, cheese in one place is simply no longer so in another. Yet the question I want to explore here is a broader one of how we engage with otherness. For in that moment something else happened. As I sat there watching Fu Shifu taste and reject his sliver of cheese, I felt for a moment that I saw myself through his eyes. Instead of looking at a Hunanese cook trying to come to terms with exotic lactose products, I started to see the cheese not as part of my northern European lactose-oriented culture, but as his otherness. This cheese, and those of us round the table, were not part of this world. I saw my own strangeness, my being out of context, my incompatibility. And when I too am offered a slice of cheese, brought as a gift to old friends, carried on crowded trains and buses across China, offered as something that will connect us, something from home, I too turn it down. Cheese has become other to me. And at that moment it’s not just the cheese that has become other but I that have become other to myself. We are located, constructed by our practices, and to reject the cheese-eating is to reconstruct myself. ‘Je’, as Rimbaud famously announced, ‘est un autre’.3 This is one of the goals of intercultural communication. As we go through the many stages or waves of disorientation, confusion, recognition or alienation that engagement with cultural difference can entail, an end goal may be the development of an increasing awareness of oneself, of one’s own difference, of how one may look through the eyes of others. Dealing with the complexities of intercultural communication, according to Sercu et al. (2005), requires a range of characteristics and competencies, including ‘the willingness to engage with the foreign culture, self-awareness and the ability to look upon oneself from the outside, the ability to see the world through others’

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eyes, the ability to cope with uncertainty, the ability to act as a cultural mediator, the ability to evaluate others’ points of view, the ability to consciously use culture learning skills and to read the cultural context, and the understanding that individuals cannot be reduced to their collective identities’ (Sercu et al., 2005: 2). At this moment, when the cheese became other to me, and I became other to myself, it seems that I was having a critical moment, an instance not just of dealing with an unexpected food in an unexpected place, but of seeing myself in unexpected ways, looking upon myself from the outside, seeing the world through others’ eyes. Yet such claims immediately need to be dealt with cautiously. To suggest that we can see ourselves through others’ eyes, and to take this as a central goal of intercultural communication, looks appealing. This is where we step out of ourselves, shed our assumptions, see ourselves as others see us. And yet, such a goal, estimable though it is, raises a host of further concerns. What kind of assumptions are we making in the belief that we can know another and that we can know how another knows us? All our understanding of intercultural communication should surely be setting off alarm bells at this juncture; how can we claim to know someone else to the extent that we can also know how they view us, a viewing which itself must surely be constrained? To suggest that I could see myself through others’ eyes implies not only a capacity to step outside oneself, to think outside one’s own locus of enunciation, but also to enter the position of another, to know how a cultural other is framing the world, and in addition to know how this other is framing you. And we also have to acknowledge that the self changes at the moment of being viewed. A self that can view itself through others’ eyes is no longer the same self that is doing the viewing. There are too many moments of transformation, assumption and interpretation to allow us simply to believe that we can see ourselves through others’ eyes. This is why the Through Other Eyes’ (TOE) project developed by de Souza and Andreotti (2009) to enable teachers and students ‘to reflect on their own knowledge systems and to engage with other knowledge systems in different ways, in their own learning and in their classrooms’ insists that this has to be a process not of learning to learn but rather of ‘learning to unlearn’, of becoming aware both of one’s own ways of thinking and of other possibilities. As discussed further in Chapter 7, this process of unlearning (and see also Morgan & Ramanathan, 2005), is a practice in questioning the expected, making the expected unexpected. Drawing on the work of Benhabib (2002), Brown (2006), Butler (2005) and others, de Souza and Andreotti ask how we can escape the post-essentialist relativism of views of culture that fail to locate their own location. The point here is that in moving beyond those limited framings of culture that have now been largely decried as essentialist,

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we cannot simply fall back on a cultural relativism that apparently acknowledges difference without locating itself. This, then, has to be a process of unlearning, of questioning the familiarity of one’s own location. To claim that one might be able to see the world through others’ eyes, while an estimable goal of intercultural communication, runs the danger of overlooking the location from which both the knower and the known, and the perceived knowledge of the other’s understanding of the knower, are enunciated. There is no ‘zero point’ from which I can know the other, he or she can know me, and I can believe to know both. Hence, as Mignolo insists, ‘the knower is always implicated, geo- and body-politically, in the known, although modern epistemology (e.g. the hubris of the zero point) managed to conceal both and created the figure of the detached observer, a neutral seeker of truth and objectivity who at the same time controls the disciplinary rules and puts himself or herself in a privileged position to evaluate and dictate’ (Mignolo, 2009: 162). Tempting though a belief in seeing oneself through others’ eyes may be, we need to do more work here to understand space, politics, ethics and the other.

Ethics and the Other Both the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1979) and the anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983) confront this problem of the Other in their similarly titled books (Le temps et l’autre and Time and the Other). For Fabian, the problem has been anthropologists’ ‘denial of coevalness’, the refusal to accept the others of anthropology in terms of contemporary difference (lumping them instead into categories of traditional, primitive, early, underdeveloped and so forth): ‘The failure of anthropological discourse has been a failure to recognize the epistemological significance of alterity . . . Recognizing an other = alius as other = alter is a condition of communication and interaction, hence of participating in social-cultural practices (or whatever sociological categories, from group to society, apply); or of sharing a Lebenswelt. Without alterity no culture, no Lebenswelt.’ (Fabian, 2007: 27). For Levinas, Western philosophy has consistently denied the alterity of the other, insisting instead on similarity, on the incorporation of the Other into totalizing frameworks of universality. Western philosophy, argues Levinas (1991 [1969]), has long been caught up with the dual obsessions of Being and the Same. It has sought to account for human ontology through an appeal to similarity. Thus, in his critique of Heidegger (whose great work Sein und Zeit – Being and Time – is directly alluded to in the title of Time and the Other), Levinas insists that the philosophical tradition that has focused

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on being – ontology – has failed in the ethical demand to engage with difference. ‘Western philosophy’ Levinas asserts, ‘has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being’ (Levinas, 1991 [1969]: 43). We need, by contrast, a philosophy that takes otherness seriously as an ethical concern. ‘The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics’ (Levinas, 1991 [1969]: 43). For Levinas, central to any philosophy must be an ethics of responsibility towards the other: how can one coexist with the other and still leave their being, their otherness, intact? So what then is this moment of awareness? What is it that I saw when Fu Shifu rejected the cheese, and I, in a sense, rejected myself? This was more than a mere awareness of myself, more than just an ability to see that others might think differently about me and my cultural artefacts than I do. Travel writing and books on intercultural communication may endeavour to make the unfamiliar familiar, to render the strangeness of other languages, cultures and tastes assimilable into our own frameworks, turn the unexpected into the expected. We have long known, too, that travel, our encounters with difference, may be a journey into ourselves as much as a journey elsewhere. My interest here, however, is in the moment when the familiar becomes unfamiliar, when what we think we know, and like, and do becomes unfamiliar to us, when the expected becomes unexpected. As suggested above (and for further discussion, see Chapter 7), this is a process of unlearning. Rather than expecting the unexpected (see previous chapter), this may be thought of in terms of unexpecting the expected. If we consider seriously the difficulty of engaging with the Other, of the incommensurabilities of cultural difference, what then can it mean to assume the double distinction of both knowing the other and knowing the others’ reading of oneself? This is a moment not only of otherness, but of double otherness. It is a moment not only where cheese-eating becomes unfamiliar to me but also when the ‘I’ that thinks it can reflect on this unfamiliarity becomes unfamiliar to itself. Rather than assuming, therefore, that this is a moment of seeing through others’ eyes, I would rather reframe it as a moment of thinking otherwise – penser autrement, as Foucault (1984a) called it. As Foucault argued towards the end of his life, it becomes indispensable at a certain point to try to think otherwise if we want to continue to think and reflect usefully. If philosophy is to do anything other than continue to rethink the already-thought, we have to ask how and how far we can start to think otherwise. In the same way that Foucault presents us with the need to seek new schemas of politicization,

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transgressive theory (see Chapter 2) is not so much about establishing a fixed and normative epistemology as it is about seeking new frames of thought and conduct, or, as Kearney puts it ‘the ethical demand to imagine otherwise’ (Kearney, 1988: 364). This ethical demand to unexpect the expected is not only a response to the need to think differently but is also a response to Levinas’ ethics and the demand to confront our ethical relation to the other.

Critical Resistance For Hoy (2004), the line of critical thinking that can be followed back through Derrida, Foucault and Levinas to Nietzsche may be best described as a form of critical resistance. Many forms of resistance to power and domination, and many ‘utopian imaginings of freedom may not be aware of the extent to which they presuppose the patterns of oppression that they are resisting’ (Hoy, 2004: 3). This is the territory on which many of us engaged in critical work in applied linguistics part company: on the one hand, those who maintain a realist epistemology, whether in language policy, discourse analysis or sociolinguistics, and aim, from their critical standpoint to critique that reality and present us with a better one. The problem is that these solutions presuppose precisely those conditions that are part of the problem. As Sonntag (2003) points out a rights-based approach to promoting linguistic diversity, for example, ‘reinforces the dominant liberal democratic project rather than dismantling it’ (Sonntag, 2003: 25). Likewise, Rajagopalan (1999) suggests that ‘the very charges being pressed against the hegemony of the English language and its putative imperialist pretensions themselves bear the imprint of a way of thinking about language moulded in an intellectual climate of excessive nationalistic fervor and organized marauding of the wealth of alien nations, an intellectual climate where identities were invariably thought of in all or nothing terms’ (Rajagopalan, 1999: 20). Similarly, in studies of language and gender, if we operate only with simple gendered binaries, we are presupposing the patterns of oppression that we are trying to resist (Cameron, 2005). On the other hand, if we follow the line of critical resistance put forward by Hoy (2004), we need to take seriously a form of ‘deconstructive genealogy’, a philosophical approach that, following Derrida (1993), ‘recognizes the duties of criticizing totalitarian dogmatism and of cultivating “the virtue of such critique, of the critical idea, the critical tradition, but also submitting it beyond critique and questioning, to a deconstructive genealogy that thinks and exceeds it without yet compromising it”’ (Hoy, 2004: 227, citing Derrida, italics in original). In this formulation of a critical project, therefore,

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we combine the ethical imperative to the Other as argued by Levinas; the irreducibility of difference, on which Levinas and Derrida agree; the deconstructive (properly understood, rather than its common use merely as critique) force of Derrida, where the importance of critique also has to operate with the questioning of critique; and the genealogy of Foucault, which can help us account for the origins of beliefs and where resistance comes from. This form of critical resistance, Hoy argues, ‘requires freedom, and freedom is tied conceptually to the openness to possibility’ (Hoy, 2004: 234). Critical resistance, in other words, needs ways of thinking otherwise, of seeing other possibilities. And, as suggested in this chapter, it needs dialogue, engagement with otherness. At this moment in the 1980s in rural Hunan, not far from Mao’s birthplace, I was deeply engaged with these questions about how we do our politics. I had also started to read Foucault, who, despite some Maoist sympathies in the 1970s, was asking very different questions about how we need to do our politics. The fixed beliefs, assuredness about ‘correct’ thought, reliance on the state and the party to assure the freedom of the people, all this and much more needed more profound questioning. No longer, as Scott explains Foucault’s legacy, should politics ‘be allowed to rest on the satisfaction of its own self-conception, on the identities it affirms as the constituents of its community’ (Scott, 1999: 207). Here we have this alternative line of critical resistance that raises profound questions about those categories that we presuppose in our thought and action. While I was convinced (and still am) of the importance, for example, of the post-revolutionary land reforms for Chinese peasants (and frustrated by the revisioning of Chinese history that has started to efface this as part of the background to China’s ascendancy), and while I was also convinced of the importance of the opening of markets for the peasantry (you only had to step over the campus wall and talk to the peasants to confirm either of these), I was also starting to wonder whether a critical politics also needed to move beyond some of these assumptions about politics and the economy. Perhaps we needed to start asking different epistemological questions about the cultural and philosophical assumptions we brought to any analysis. Critical resistance required an openness to possibility, and seeing cheese through others’ eyes, or acknowledging the importance, yet the impossibility, of doing so, was one such moment of possibility. This moment of believing that I can see myself through the eyes of another, then, is better thought of as a moment of not knowing, of radical decentring. As Butler (2005) puts it at the end of her discussion of what it means to ‘give an account of oneself’, ‘we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what

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forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human’ (Butler, 2005: 136). It is this that is ultimately important here. As the cheese sits sweatily unconsumed on the table, this is far more than a moment of going off cheese, of opting for chilli frog over lactose products. At that moment when I feel what Fu Shifu signals with his wrinkled nose, I have understood more than the relativity and contextuality of taste. There has been a moment where the possibility and then the unfeasibility of seeing oneself through others’ eyes has presented itself. It is a moment of impossibility, of vulnerability, of unknowingness, when a willingness to become undone constitutes a moment of humanity. And it starts a whole new way of thinking, of searching always for ways of thinking otherwise. For, what else is worth doing in this world?

Notes (1) Adapted from Wallace Stevens’ (1967) Anecdote of the Jar. ‘I placed a jar in Tennessee/ and round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness/surround that hill’. (2) In a review of an earlier version of this chapter (Pennycook, 2010c) Sarris (2011) suggests that I overlook power relations here since ‘Pennycook’s antagonist is the Hunan cook who works for him’ (Sarris, 2011: 563). As well as an odd representation of his role in this encounter (antagonist), this is an inappropriate capitalist (and bourgeois) reading of a communist work relation. Fu Shifu, as I explain here (and in that earlier version) was no more working for me than I for him. We were considered experts/masters in our fields – he as cook, me as teacher – and our relation was absolutely not one of employer/employee. Such relations are disappearing in modern China, but it is important not to interpret 1980s China through a 21st-century neo-liberal capitalist lens. (3) ‘I is another.’ In a letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871. This idea has been taken up by many French thinkers, from Lacan to Derrida and Deleuze.

4 Constrained Mobilities: Epistolary Parenting

From the Trenches to Cheruvally ‘I love you darling sweetheart,’ writes Frank Hawkings (letter, 21 October 1921), ‘and my one tantalising dream, is to have your sweet softness for my own to caress and kiss, to hear your voice in the bungalow, to lay my cheek against your hair and to kiss your eyes.’ He is writing from an unexpected place, Cheruvally Estate, Travancore, to Dorothy Cummings, his fiancée, whom he had met while on leave from the front during the First World War (Figure 4.1). He has been working on this rubber plantation in South India for two years, writing ardently to his fiancée to join him. For her, of course, this is no easy decision. They met during the First World War, and became engaged soon after, but now she has to decide whether to follow this ardent young man to India, to leave a comfortable, semi-rural middle-class life in the pretty riverside village of Topsham in Devon (southwest England) where she grew up, to embark on the long sea journey to India, and to enter a life very different from everything she has known. Sitting in the heat of India, Frank keeps on writing. Still 16, but lying about his age, Frank Hawkings had left school and joined the Queen Victoria’s Rifles (QVR) as a private in 1914 (see Figure 4.2). Soon he was experiencing the grim, cold, wet life of the trenches. As Frank described his early introduction to winter in the trenches near Wulverghem (West Flanders, Belgium) on 1 December 1914: it is beastly cold and wet and our feet are frozen. We are looking forward to the night. We can then get out and run about a bit and so get up the 49

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Figure 4.1 Frank and Dorothy, Topsham, 1918

circulation. Our attempts to light fires with wet wood have ended in failure and so we are feeding on bully and biscuits, washed down with a little rum. The trenches do not seem to be connected to each other. We are occupying the ditches dug by the troops a few weeks ago. There are herds of cattle wandering about all over the place, many of them wounded. (Hawkings, 1914/1973: 24)

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Figure 4.2 Frank: Queen Victoria Rifles, 1915

Two weeks later, they marched through the night to Lindenhoek (today the Wulverghem-Lindenhoek Road Military Cemetery is located nearby), arriving at night at trenches in Lindenhoek, where there are no shelters – nowhere even to sit; so, after sentries had been posted we took off our packs, dropped them in the mud and with our

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backs resting against the muddy wall of the trench, we prepared to await the dawn, smoking, eating chocolate and taking periodic swigs of rum to keep the chill from our bones. As soon as there was sufficient daylight to examine our surroundings we realised from the water which flowed steadily past our ankles, that the trench is actually a stream which had had one bank converted into a parapet. Patches of scarlet half-submerged in the water revealed the bodies of Frenchmen, as it is impossible to bury in this mud especially as the Fritz trenches are only forty yards away. (Hawkings, 16 December 1914/1973: 27–28) And so this life of mud, death and dampness became the norm for much of the next four years (Holmes, 2004). After two months of winter in these trenches, in February 1915, he is sent to hospital in Etretat, suffering from bronchitis, dysentery and frostbite. A month later he was back at the front, fighting at the second battle of Ypres (22 April to 25 May 1915) and the bloody struggles for possession of Hill 60, a low but strategically important rise that the Germans had taken a few months before: ‘Glimpses of the fighting round the craters revealed an inferno, in which groups of men flung bombs or fired rifles until, one by one, they slid back to join the dead in the bottom of the pits’ (Hawkings, 21 April 1915/1973: 48). It was here, in April 1915, that the Germans first used poisonous gas (chlorine) on the battlefield: ‘Their faces were ghastly, they gasped for breath and staggered about like drunken men. Among them was a Zouave1 whom I stopped and asked what was wrong. ‘Des gazes asphixiantes – le retraite – le retraite’, he croaked and stumbled on after his comrades’ (Hawkings, 22 April 1915/1973: 51). Unlike many infantry who fought at the battles around Ypres, Frank Hawkings survived. A year later, in June 1916, he is in the trenches at the Somme in France. This battle of the Somme, an offensive by British and French troops against the German trenches, lasted between 1 July to 18 November 1916, and was one of the largest and costliest of the First World War battles, with more than 1.5 million casualties. On the opening day of the offensive, 1 July 1916, the British Army had almost 60,000 casualties, the worst losses in one day in its history. Most of these were mowed down by guns, hand grenades or artillery shells as they charged from their trenches across the shellholes and barbed wire towards the German lines. Frank Hawkings was one of the many who was ‘sent over the top’ on that morning: Shells were bursting everywhere, and through the drifting smoke in front of us we could see the enemy’s first line from which grey figures emerged and hurled hand grenades. We moved forward in long lines, stumbling through the mass of shell-holes, wire and wreckage, and

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behind us more waves appeared. As we neared the enemy line, a low flying shrapnel shell burst right over my head, completely deafening me. I ducked and slipped head first into a shell-hole. Simultaneously several more shells burst close around. We must have been in the midst of the Hun barrage. I felt a sharp pain in my back, and my next recollections are of a medley of Huns and QVRs at close quarters with bomb and bayonet. The tide of battle rolled on as our fellows forced their way to the Hun trench, and when I recovered my wits, I found myself bleeding profusely from a wound in my left forearm. There was a patch of blood on my breeches from the wound in my back. (Hawkings, 1 July 1916/1973: 99) Eventually, he makes his way back to the trench, from there to the now familiar hospital in Etretat, and back to England. Once recovered, he is offered a commission (remarkable for a young man who left school at 16 to join up as a private), and returns to France in 1917 as a lieutenant. He fights on through the Battle of the Hindenburg Line in September 1918, and eventually the second Battle of Cambrai (North France) in October 1918 (the first battle of Cambrai, a year earlier, had been another bloody battle with few territorial gains but casualties of about 45,000 on each side). On 28 September, they are ordered to advance. They make their way through woodland ‘littered with the bodies of the fallen’ (Hawkings, 28 September 1918/1973: 134), across the Escaut Canal and into shallow trenches overlooking Cambrai. On 1 October he leads his troops in another attack on enemy lines: We left the trench and moved rapidly forward. When we were almost within bombing distance the Huns opened out with a machine-gun. A few men were hit but the majority of the bullets passed between Petty Officer2 Price and myself. Several hit him in the legs. A spray of bullets riddled my haversack, but only one struck me, passing through my leg just below the knee-joint and bowling me clean over. The men had taken cover in shell-holes and shouting to them to remain there, I called to the petty officer and together we crawled painfully back to the trench, Fritz sniping at us the whole way. (Hawkings, 1 October 1918/1973: 137–138) Wounded again, he makes his way back to the Casualty Clearing Station in Boisleux-au-Mont (Pas-de-Calais), then to the hospital in Camiers and from there is taken back to England. On 10 November, he goes to Exeter on convalescent leave, where Dorothy Cummings (whom he had met earlier on leave) lives. When he had been wounded at Cambrai, she had received a Field Service Post Card, a pre-written card that allowed a minimum of

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information by choosing between various options. Frank had crossed out ‘I am quite well’ leaving therefore the other option: ‘I have been admitted into hospital.’ He had crossed out ‘sick’, leaving the option ‘wounded’ though also ‘and am going on well’. Such were the simple and difficult communications on which their early relationship had developed. It is on the unexpected place of the platform at Exeter station that he hears of the armistice. ‘I was astounded. It seemed impossible to contemplate a life without war, a life with a future in which there would be no need to keep up the mental habit of regarding existence as a matter of a few weeks or months at the most’ (Hawkings, 11 November 1918/1973: 142).

‘Mullamutu, Have You Heard That Our Sinna-Dorri is Going to be Married?’ Less than a year later, he has taken up a job on Cheruvally Estate, in the humid hills of Travancore (later part of Kerala), from where he writes on 16 August 1919 to Dorothy, ‘My own darling little girl’, back in Devon, ‘it’s love, old thing, longing and aching’. He tries hard to explain things to her in Travancore: ‘The climate here is different from Burma. The monsoon starts the beginning of June and on till September or later. During this time, the weather is hot but not overbearing’ (letter 16 August 1919). His plan is for her to come to Colombo, and then to Travancore, so that they can be ‘married at Kottayam by the Bishop . . . Then off to the Hills for our honeymoon’. Meanwhile as he waits, ‘The Malayalis have their great Hindu Harvest Festival during the next three days. It’s called “Onum”. I have just been issuing them with extra quantities of rice and a rupee cash each. They all seem very happy and content with life, and I am just praying that I shall be granted my great happiness in 2 or 3 months time’ (nd). Trying to persuade his fiancée to take this massive leap, to leave England to come and join him in India, he sends her drawings of the bungalow, (Figure 4.3), and sends reports of the comfortable aspects of a European life in India: ‘On Saturday at 4.0 p.m., Hall, Thom and I met the Carson Parkers, the Stantons and Shore at the river. (it’s gloriously pretty there. Great stretches of sand with overhanging trees and creepers and the river meandering along sometimes rushing over rocks and at other times staying in deep pools). We had a tophole mixed bathe followed by tea given by me.’ The appeals to his fiancée are thus made on several grounds: from one position, the fervent pleading of a lovesick young man, yearning for companionship; from another direction, the lure of adventure, the image of a young explorer who has survived the First World War, travelled across the world,

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Figure 4.3 The bungalow by moonlight (sketch by Frank, Cheruvally, circa 1920)

and now poses carefully amid the luscious growth of Travancore jungle (Figure 4.4). There are also the temptations and comforts of a colonial life in a spacious bungalow, surrounded by lawns and thick greenery, or the light entertainment of a swim in the river with its pretty scenery, or those familiar comforts of afternoon tea and English acquaintances. There is also the more staid image of serious work and industry, as the estate workers line up with their buckets of liquid latex to be weighed in at the estate weighing station (Figure 4.5). Surely one of these will work. But it takes him longer than he had hoped before he is finally granted his wish. At last, on 12 October 1922, he writes again from Cheruvally Estate, having finally heard that Dorothy is on her way: ‘In that mysterious way of natives it has been telegraphed all over the countryside that a new Dorri-Sahni is coming to Cheruvally, and they are exceedingly interested. The bungalow servants for once in their lives are working quite hard to get the place ready for you.’ He goes on to report that: ‘The rubber-maker (who is terribly fat) waddled up this morning with a much soiled copy of the “Times of Ceylon” under his arm and stated that he had seen that “Mr and Mrs Hall and child and Miss D Cummings” were coming out. I suggested that the notice was merely to say that the passages had been booked. Thereupon he waved the aforementioned soiled T of C and said “But the names are here, so the lady must be coming.”’ Meanwhile ‘in the Boga bushes in the clearing’ he

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Figure 4.4 Frank Hawkings, circa 1920

Figure 4.5 Weighing in: Rubber at Cheruvally circa 1921

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overhears: ‘“Mullamutu, have you heard that our sinna-dorri is going to be married” “Yes, Supoma told me last week” “I hope she will be a nice Dorrisahni and give us presents at Amercoodi (festival)”’. ‘Words of Indian origin,’ noted Yule (1903: xv), in the introduction to his famous Hobson-Jobson, ‘have been insinuating themselves into English ever since the end of the reign of Elizabeth and the beginning of that of King James, when such terms as calico, chintz and gingham had already affected a lodgment in English warehouses and shops, and were lying in wait for entrance into English literature’ (Yule, 1903: xv). While these Indian words in unexpected places started through trade in the early 17th century, by the 19th and 20th centuries the colonial presence in India had brought a flood of new terms into English. Many, as we know, have stayed (the bungalow in which Frank is living, and enticing Dorothy to share with him, is from the Hindi for Bangla, referring to a Bengali-style house; the jungle that surrounds the plantation is from Hindi jangal, forest), though the words that Frank is using here are less well known. As Bailey notes, ‘the administrative language used within the East India Company was crammed with loanwords for the various economic practices that were involved in the extraction of riches from the subcontinent. Without the aid of a glossary, the letters sent from one English officer to another from the beginning of the Raj until its end are now virtually unintelligible’ (Bailey, 1991: 140–141). In his novel Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh (2008) plays with this language of the longterm Anglo-Indians: ‘“Aimable was he?” Mrs Burnham gave her a shrewd glance. “The kubber is that there’s more than one young missy-mem who’s got a mind to bundo this fellow”’ (Ghosh, 2008: 194). And here in his letters to Dorothy, it is almost as if Frank is wooing her with these unexpected words, these pointers to a life, a set of relations and a vocabulary that is at once exotic and enticing. Some years later, Frank Hawking’s former assistant at Kumbazha Estate, Pat Hall, recalls him saying, on hearing the news that his daughter was engaged to a lawyer in England, ‘Joan is going to marry a vakil (the Malayalam for a lawyer) and I should at last have the law on my side’ (quoted in a letter from Pat Hall, 5 October 1998). Indian words, or their Anglo-Indian variants, crept into unexpected places in the language and letters of these colonial workers, who in other ways often resisted the incursion of Indian cultural practices into their lives. Frank and Dorothy are married in Colombo (the plan changed from his original idea that they would marry in Kottayam) on 22 November 1922 (Figure 4.6). The Times of Ceylon carried the announcement: ‘The marriage took place at St Michael and All Angel’s Church, Polwatte, at 11 a.m. today of Mr Frank Hawkings, of Travancore, son of Mr E Hawkings, of East Finchley, London, and Mrs Hawkings, and Miss Dorothy Winifred Cummings, youngest

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Figure 4.6 Frank and Dorothy: Wedding, Colombo, 1922

daughter of the late Mr R.H. Cummings, and of Mrs Cummings, of Topsham, Devon. The bride, who arrived from Home yesterday by the Bibby boat, was given away by Mr Eric Hall, of Travancore. She wore a simple dress of white crêpe-de-chene and a hat to match, and carried a bouquet of carnations and tube roses’. From here they settle into the busy life of an assistant manager and wife of tea and rubber plantations, moving estates as he is promoted.

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For women coming to India as wives of men variously employed in public or private enterprise – government, the judiciary, the army, or planters – they were entering a world both exotic and constrained (Brendon, 2005; MacMillan, 1988). Coming most often from middle-class backgrounds in England, they moved into a society that lived in careful isolation from its Indian surrounds yet was always confronted by the Indianness around: there were servants, cooks, gardeners and ayahs to care for the children; there was the heat of summer and the monsoon rains; the insects, scorpions and snakes, as well as tigers, elephants and monkeys. They joined tight-knit communities, often with only a very small circle of friends. They were of course also expected to bear children, and here, as MacMillan suggests ‘they were bound to fail in part as wives and mothers’. Because of the ‘unwritten law that British children must not stay in India after they were seven, women faced the choice of abandoning either their husbands or their children for years on end’ (MacMillan, 1988: xxiii). Their first daughter, Joan, is born in 1926 (Figure 4.7). Dorothy writes: ‘From Peravanthanam Estate, Mundakayam, I moved up to the Peermade “Hospital” a few days before my first baby was due. This was a 2-roomed building, with a kitchen, about 100 yards or so from the (European) Doctor’s house. I took with me the Anglo-Indian midwife I had secured from Madras, and a Cook. I had been taking my regular before-breakfast walks on the estate, and was delighted to find more scope still for walking in that cool climate over the lovely sweep of Downs behind the “bungalow”’ (Notes written by Dorothy on the birth of her first daughter, 1926). Dorothy concludes her notes on the first few months of bringing up her new daughter with some observations on local ayahs (Figure 4.8) and the difficulties she had in this cross-cultural and cross-linguistic context. As MacMillan (1988) observes, almost all British mothers had nannies or ayahs (the former wore European clothes, the latter saris). While servants of various types – cooks, maids, nannies – were quite common among British middle-class families in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, dealing with Indian Ayahs proved a different concern. For Dorothy, ‘As Indian & European ideas about treating babies & bringing up children generally are entirely different, it is impossible to teach Ayahs the virtue of sacrificing immediate convenience for ultimate good. In addition, the language barrier prevents even the certainty that simple orders are understood. Consequently I soon decided that all an Ayah was fit for was to wash nappies, and push a pram. I shudder to think of the damage many children have suffered through being left to the sole charge of an Ayah, and as soon, therefore, as my baby reached toddling age, I dispensed with Ayahs for good, and thereafter employed Anglo-Indian or European Nannies. These girls were trainable and anxious

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Figure 4.7 Dorothy with Joan, 1927

to learn. They understood what they were told to do, and did not fraternise with the servants.’ A lot could be said about this rather imperious dismissal of local ayahs, from the clear belief in superior ways of child-rearing (a sterner European disciplinary orientation as opposed to a more gentle and fluid sense of caring), to the language barrier (there is little consideration here that this might go

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Figure 4.8 Joan and Amah, 1927

both ways, that learning Malayalam, as Frank did, might be a necessary part of this relationship), or the supposed damage done by being brought up by an ayah (there are many accounts of the warmth of this relationship, as well as accounts of Indian languages and songs learned and fondly retained by children; see Brendon, 2005; Flemming, 2004). For my grandmother, however, like many others caught in these webs of colonial discourse,

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bringing up children in an unexpected place was not to be an experiment in thinking otherwise (see Chapter 3). When Dorothy takes her two daughters, Joan and Jenifer, back to England in 1933 – Joan to start school and never to return – Frank stays behind. ‘Fancy the kids getting colds – after Joan’s innoculation, too,’ he writes in a letter on 16 April 1933. ‘Do tell me what their reaction to Home life is like. Does Jenifer seem to miss the Indians, and what do your people think of her?’ he asks. While his daughters suffer from colds back in England, and he wonders both how they react to England – Home life (always with a capital H) – and how Dorothy’s family views them, he has by contrast come down a week later with malaria, with fevers mounting during the day, cold shivers, and a temperature of 104 by evening: ‘You would be amused at the arrangements I have to make when I know an attack is coming on. I have to collect the servants – have everything I require ready by my bed and give them full instructions, for I am usually quite helpless for sometime and during the height of the fever – more or less in a coma’ (letter 23 April 1933). These letters from Frank to Dorothy in 1933 and later when she visits England again in 1937 are full of concerns about money – how he will manage to send Dorothy 15 pounds per month so that she can buy things in England – and distress at their long and uncertain separations: he’s still wondering when he will be allowed by the company to go on ‘furlough’ in 1933 when Dorothy has already been back in England most of the year. But they plan a trip to Paris – he will take the ship to Marseille, and they will meet in Paris, even though they cannot afford the extravagance and will need to borrow money. They are also full of the local life on the estates, and full of that local vocabulary with which Dorothy was presumably now familiar. As he writes from Kumbazha in 1937, Harrison ‘had come up to meet the Peishkar and the Tahsildar about A.J.W.’s samaan. He also brought an Amin to arrest Narayna Pillai’ (letter Kumbazha, 20 June 1937). There are other issues to be solved too, such as ‘that canned beer I was trying to get from Madras. Well, I haven’t got it yet. First there was the trouble getting a permit out of the Excise people, then it had to go to Madras to get an export permit from British India, then it had to come back to Punalur, and the last I heard was that the beer was in Punalur but the Chewkey were holding it’ (10 July 1937). He worries about the state of things in Europe: ‘I still adhere to my opinion that a war in Europe is most unlikely and if there was one Hitler would not be the cause of it’ (30 September 1937). Things have changed in their relationship by this time too. Although Dorothy is still ‘My dearest Squidge,’ ‘My dearest darling girl’ and Frank professes his love constantly, they have also worked out an arrangement which allows her to travel with her lover

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George (another tea planter) in Europe. As Frank explains, ‘I think a great deal of the extra-marital idea. I have not been able to avail myself of it (apart from one incident), but nevertheless, it has given me a lot of happiness as it has wiped out repressions, and given me a greater appreciation of and a deeper love for you.’ (18 October 1937). When Dorothy and George decide not to carry on their relationship, Frank writes in great sympathy, but also joy that he and Dorothy are still together. And life goes on, with Frank still in Kumbazha in 1938: ‘Paid off the tea coolies on Friday. Most of them had pretty good balances this year due to the increased crops. The Halls came over for the day on Thursday and played tennis. Apart from this, it has been a fairly quiet week. Beginning to hot up a bit of course. Gosh, I am looking forward to seeing you again.’ (9 January 1938). Which he finally does after sailing to England later in the year, and writing to Dorothy on 5 May 1938, from the P & O Ranpura in Port Sudan, telling of his ‘hilarious and somewhat drunken send off from Cochin’.

Epistolary Parenting: ‘Everyone at Home Should be Proud to be Shabby’ The two daughters are left in England in 1938, an instance of ‘the pain that the British Empire in India caused to those who worked for it. There were sad leave-takings, mothers saying good-bye to their children who were staying at Home to be educated’ (MacMillan, 1988: 12). Dorothy writes to them on her way back to India on the SS Orontes (Orient Line): ‘I didn’t like leaving you two darling little sprats at all – But I know you are both very sensible, and will be perfectly happy and well cared for till I see you again’ (nd). The story of the children of the Raj, which as Brendon notes, included a vast number of children, so much so that few families in Britain do not have some connection to India, is ‘dramatic and traumatic, involving dangerous voyages, vivid experiences in exotic places and profound emotions springing from the sudden, unexplained and lengthy separation of children from their parents’ (Brendon, 2005: 1). But why, she asks, ‘since English schools were so often unsatisfactory, did Anglo-Indian parents not make greater efforts to educate their children in India, where they could have kept a closer eye on their progress and welfare?’ (Brendon, 2005: 40). The answer, Brendon suggests, lay in their desire for an education that while perhaps lacking educationally, might nevertheless produce the desired social effects, educating children as members of a social class that played an important role not just within Britain but now within a global empire. As with the more general rise of the public (private) schools in Britain, their role

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was not so much to educate the children of the upper class, but to educate the children of a newly aspirant middle class. These schools were a significant instrument in social change, educating children within the Empire who might not come from upper class backgrounds but might possibly accede to those class pretensions as a result of their education. If these children ‘survived the rigours of their childhood, lonely, young exiles of Empire would stand to gain from Britain’s increase of power and wealth during the years when she became mistress of the seas and the workshop of the world’ (Brendon, 2005: 40). In pursuit of such gentility, ‘small children were dispatched on dangerous six-month journeys halfway round the world, to be received by relations and guardians they had never met, not knowing when (or whether) they would ever see their parents again’ (Brendon, 2005: 40). In earlier times, it had indeed been quite possible for children to be sent to England never to see one or both of their parents again. John Macarthur, for example, son of the John Macarthur (1767–1834) who played a major role in the development of agriculture in the early years of the colony of New South Wales (Australia), was sent back to England in 1801 at the age of seven (his elder brother Edward had already been sent to England in 1797). There he went to school, and later university (Cambridge), before becoming a lawyer. While he travelled with his father on that first journey to England in 1801 (his father was being sent under arrest to England for wounding his commanding officer in a duel), and saw him again when he travelled to England in 1809 (bringing two more sons, James and William, to be educated in England), John never returned to New South Wales, and died in England in 1831 (at the age of 36), never having seen his mother again, who had stayed in New South Wales looking after the farm and her daughters (Historic Houses Trust, 1984). It is not of course a practice limited to the British Empire for children to be sent away to school. British public (private) schools developed predominantly as boarding schools to which children were sent, either internally within Britain, or from overseas as the British Empire expanded. Indeed, the British public school and the British Empire have a complex intertwined history. Elsewhere, parents from many parts of the world have been known to send their children to unexpected places for their education. In the 21st century, many thousands of children are sent away to gain access to English language capital. There are, for example, more than 40,000 school-aged Korean children – known as jogiyuhaksaeng (early overseas students) studying in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia and elsewhere. Typically, the young children go to live overseas with their mothers, and ‘this particular form of separated family is referred to as a “wild geese” family, who live apart so that

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they can educate their children in English-speaking countries’ (Jeon, 2010: 59; for further discussion see Chapter 7). For these children of the British Empire, however, the journey was a particular one in that they were being sent ‘Home’ to a place they did not know, and they were often destined to periods of enforced separation from parents. Indeed, when Dorothy leaves England in 1938, she does not realize that she will not see her daughters again until 1946. From 1938, with both daughters back in England, and travel back to Europe impossible because of the war, Frank and Dorothy no longer need to write to each other. Now it is to their daughters that they write. Once movement is constrained, letters, the moving back and forth of the written word, become the central act of mobility in these lives. As Buettner notes, the painful family separations enforced by Empire lives, ‘generated a wealth of written documentation and some of the most detailed accounts about British-Indian family practices, anxieties, and aspirations’ (Buettner, 2004: 14–15). Writing letters became ‘a common weekly ritual’ (Buettner, 2004: 130), the means by which ‘long-distance intimacy’ and the ties within the Empire were maintained. These letters would have to do a lot of work, articulating much that in other circumstances would be taken for granted, spoken or delivered through many other means. This was epistolary parenting: ‘Sorry to hear you fell over on your skates, and cut your knee so badly. I expect the dressing hurt you, and made you feel a little faint – That’s why you feel so queer, but I’m glad you are O.K. again, – and please be more careful on those skates, or I shall have to take them away again.’ A 12-year-old child with a cut knee, a mother writing to her so long after the event. At this point, there is still every expectation that they will see each other again before long, so Dorothy’s threat to take away the skates again remains a possibility. Later she will have to write to her sister, Nell, who looks after the two girls in the holidays, to manage such parental actions. Meanwhile ‘Daddy says he thinks he can easily put your watch right for you, so can’t afford to pay a jeweller to do it. And as it seems to be going alright, you can just allow for it losing a bit, until you see him. Put it on 5′ each day when you wind it if necessary. But if you are very anxious to get it seen to at once, you must manage it out of your own pocket money. I’m glad you were no lower than B. this week. Try to get back to A., old bean.’ (20 June 1938). Writing letters is the only means of contact, and letter-writing itself becomes a subject of communication, admonition, concern. Back in Kumbazha on 31 October 1938, Dorothy writes: ‘It seems awfully queer to have no children in the bungalow, and I find myself just counting the days till your letters come. Please write both sides of your sheets, to save weight.’ She is constantly urging her daughters to write, worrying that no letter has

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been received, telling them how often they should write, expressing exasperation at the delays: ‘I fear I have maligned you, my lamb. You HAVE been writing to me regularly, and it was very sweet of you to write on Xmas Day. But I didn’t get the letters for a fortnight, and thought you had not written . . .’ (13 January 1939). When war comes, things get harder: ‘War appears to have descended upon us, and all air-mails suspended’ (3 September 1939). ‘No letter from you this week, I very much hope there will be one from you next week, as I miss your letters badly’ (3 December 1939). ‘How about allowing yourself a good quiet half-hour, to sit down and answer this with one of your old, nice, long chatty letters, neatly written in ink, with the date at the top?? I have had nothing but rather scrappy pencil scrawls, with no date, for MONTHS.’ (29 December 1939). ‘No letter again from you this week . . . Ask your Council, Joan, if it doesn’t think that Mothers living 7000 miles away from their children, deserve nice long letters from them every week?’ (12 January 1940). ‘I am sure it is quite clear to you now, that we want an Air-mail letter (or P.C.) EVERY week’ (8 March 1940). There are airmail letters and later in 1942 and 1943 dozens of ‘airgraphs’ (letters shrunk onto cards). There were photographs too. Joan kept an album of pictures, first of ‘Jen, Mummy and Daddy’, then later, when her sister had joined her in England, just of ‘Mummy and Daddy’. This album represented in some ways her absence from India. India is always where she is not. And Dorothy had her counterpart, a scrapbook of pictures sent by her daughters, pictures of school, of holidays, pictures that emphasized her daughters’ absence. These two albums, kept for all these years, tell a very different story from the letters. India is full of smiling Europeans, forever drinking tea, playing tennis, going swimming; the letters show us a world of busy people, worrying about their children, working on the estate, concerned about money. Photos from England show happy, smiling children playing on their aunt’s lawn in the holidays, not grazed knees or the cold loneliness of school on rainy days. Several dilemmas now face this divided family. What is the safest place for the two girls? It seems the school may be moved because of its proximity to London, and Dorothy wonders where they may be moved to: ‘You may as well be getting some lessons knocked into your little noddles, while Mr Hitler gets on with his nasty games’ (16 September 1939). There were quite definite plans for them to go to Canada. Dorothy writes in August 1940 wondering why they have not gone. The three Park children (and see Chapter 6), friends from India who were also at the same school in Ashford, were on their way back to India (24 August 1940) ‘so we have felt very tempted to cable for you two to come’. On 8 September 1940: ‘I am sorry that you are not all safely settled in Canada by now.’ They had also

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‘PROVISIONALLY booked passages for you both to come to India.’ Dorothy had found a school for them in ‘Ooti’ (Ootacamund). As Eleanor Wilson (Parks) recalls, it was a long and dangerous journey back to India in 1940. The Suez Canal was closed, and the ship, with up to 500 children returning to India from England, took the long route round the Cape of Good Hope. They arrived back in India in 1940 and went back to Venture estate where ‘we were greeted by a decorated drive to the bungalow. I remember being very excited. I was 13, Catriona was 11 and Heather was 9. We didn’t go to school until January the next year, when we went to a Convent as day girls in Kodaikanal in the hills.’ Lessons were taught to the English curriculum by nuns of various nationalities, I don’t remember much about them except we seemed to have an awful lot of homework and had to learn quite a lot off by heart. (This was not how we had been taught at Ashford). The most important teacher, by far, was an Indian gentleman who had the reputation of being able to knock Maths into a wooden head! If I was to name anyone who influenced me more than anyone else in my school career, it was that teacher. He used to tell us stories towards the end of the lessons as he said we had worked so hard. We loved him. (Eleanor Parks, personal communication, 09/06/07) After several years at school in England, which she found cold and wet, the return to the hills of Travancore was not only about being back with her parents and the comfortable life on the tea estates, but also a return to smells and sounds from her childhood. ‘As we climbed the hill to the hill station I remember the smell of the eucalyptus trees so well. We were there until June when we came back to Venture for the holidays. The school year started in Jan/Feb. After the holiday we went to another school, St. Hilda’s which was formed from all the youngsters out from England.’ This was the school in ‘Ooti’ (Ootacamund) in the Nilgris hills, a place known for its pleasant climate, where Dorothy had considered sending her daughters. St Hilda’s was a common option for those whose children had remained in or been brought back to India (Brendon, 2005). But it was not to be. From Dorothy’s letters, it seems Joan was not keen on returning, having apparently written to say she would prefer to stay in England until she has finished her education (23 October 1940) and suggesting she was not happy with the provisional bookings her mother had made. Eleanor Parks, meanwhile, started school at St Hilda’s and still, almost 70 years later recalls the ‘24 hour train journey back to the estate . . . . The train journeys were quite exciting, with the smoke and soot, the food, and the smells. I remember with amazement the way people could drink by pouring the liquid straight

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into their mouths. The monkeys at the station were a nuisance as one had to keep the carriage windows locked to prevent things being stolen.’ (Eleanor Parks, personal communication, 09/06/07). If, as was the case, the two girls were not to return to India, then how to get the tone of parenting right when your only medium is the written word? Without all those extra clues – facial, spatial, emotional – parenting by letter is a difficult task. Dorothy responds to a story her elder daughter has sent her: ‘Thank-you for your story, which I enjoyed. It is very “colourful”, and well expressed in parts, as well as being most dramatic, – but, if you’d like me to be really critical, – just a little too dramatic. What is termed “melodramatic”’ (13 November 1938). Two weeks later: ‘I am so sorry to hear that Joy and Bunny don’t want to be your friends any more. A “three-some” in friendship, is not often very successful, – but I just wonder, if perhaps, you have done anything unkind or selfish, to upset them?? Anyway, darling, there must be lots of other nice girls, you can make friends with’ (26 November 1938). And alongside advising her daughter on questions of writing, friendship and selfishness, there are always concerns about schooling itself: ‘I have a nasty taste in my mind after getting yours of Feb 19th. C, plus – again, and another stripe [for bad behaviour]. Not very good, is it, for a girl who is usually in the A.s and B.s??? Now just “pull your socks up”, and show me what you are made of – otherwise, we shan’t see much point in straining ourselves to send you to a good school’ (4 March 1939). ‘I’m sorry to hear you don’t like your form-master. Perhaps you have been a nuisance to him? Otherwise, I don’t suppose he would be “piggish”’ (29 December 1939). Joan still has these letters 70 years after they were sent, and she can still bristle at her mother’s admonitions and advice. As is so often the case, it is the woman, as mother, wife and scribe, who does almost all the writing. Only occasionally does Frank write, here giving his 12-year-old daughter advice on pocket money: ‘Your pocket-money is of course, for you to do more or less what you like with, on yourself, for postages, or for presents. But you’ve got to apportion it out on all these things as far as it will go, and no further. If you were earning 8 pence a week, and wanted to spend 10 pence, it would not avail you because there would be no more to come, would there? The moral is, make your money last out and do not buy presents of a greater value than you can afford, or give more than are necessary’ (6 November 1938). Joan, as the older daughter, is also given responsibility for caring for her younger sister. Her mother scolds her for apparently not looking after Jen when she was sick in the sanatorium (san): ‘Did you know that Jen had been in the San from Jan. 28th – Feb 5th; and again from Feb 8th – Feb 21st.? Did you enquire for her when she was ill, or send her any notes to cheer her up? (4 March 1939).

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The daily life and difficulties of teenage girls are negotiated by letter. ‘I was very sorry to hear from Tante [Nell], that your eyes have been misbehaving themselves, and do hope that it is only a temporary strain, which can be cured with the right glasses. But Daddy and I are very surprised, because both of us have very strong eye-sight. And so we wonder, if you have perhaps been straining your eyes, by too much reading?? Or by reading in a poor light?? What have you got to say about that, old bean? You remember I spoke to you about this when I was at Home last year, and it will be very sad if you have brought this on yourself, by forgetting what I told. You would hate to have to wear glasses always, wouldn’t you; so do please be careful about eye-strain. I was also interested to hear from Tante that you have started menstruation. Yours is just about the usual age to start it, and although it is rather a nuisance for a few days each month, Tante will have told you that it is nothing to worry about’ (03/12/39). The war is a quiet rumble in the background. ‘I hope you are all making a very special effort towards general orderliness, and implicit obedience, just now. That will be one of your best contributions to the war’ (11/6/40). ‘I’m so glad to hear you are doing lots of knitting for the soldiers, and suggest you do more knitting, and less reading, until you have your eyes seen to’ (13/12/39). ‘It’s beginning to get very hot here, now, -and I have to carry a tin of Talcum in my knitting bag, to prevent myself sticking to the knitting. I’m making sea-boot stockings, -and what queer things they look! But they should help to keep some poor sailors warm’ (5/2/41). There is occasional commentary too on events in the war: ‘I expect you are all disappointed that poor little Greece has fallen after her very gallant fight. It does seem sad, – but it is only temporary, for we shall conquer that rotten, nasty bully, Hitler, somehow, – and lets hope we shall not take too long to do it’ (8/5/41). By March 1942, however, the threat of a Japanese invasion of India means that they too are making preparations for war, practising morse signals from estate to estate. The South Peermade Mounted Rifles (SPMR) with which Frank has long been involved, are getting new uniforms (June 1942). Letters are filled with requests and responses about more clothes, and a protracted negotiation over a new bike. Joan wants a new coat and wedgeheeled shoes, but most requests are denied since they will cost too much and seem extravagant during the war: ‘Everyone at Home should be proud to be shabby, – to show how they are cooperating in the War Effort.’ (25 November 1941). Despite their apparent struggles to pay for the items their daughters long for, their life continues in relative comfort. While Joan writes of the cold and hardships in England, Frank and Dorothy take a holiday down at Cape Comorin, the southernmost tip of India, swimming in the salt water pool, playing tennis and bridge. They buy a new car: ‘a new big Chevrolet . . . The

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terrific two-note horn makes coolies jump sky-high when they hear it’ (22 May 1941). And there is always work to be done on the estate: ‘Daddy is busy felling out another 300 acres of Jungle for next year’s clearing, and everybody is working as hard as usual on this great big place’ (10 December 1939). ‘Daddy has just cleared another 200 acres of Jungle, and yesterday “burnt it off”. The weather is very dry now, so all the undergrowth went up in a terrific blaze’ (12 January 1940). Letters often end with the intrusion of the estate world: ‘Here’s Daddy just thundering up on his motorbike, for tiffin, so I had better stop’ (16 April 1941). In Sept 1941, they finally get electric light at Kumbazha. And meanwhile Joan and Jen are getting older. Joan is now in her midteens, and Dorothy starts to advise her on other matters. ‘If you ever get a chance of anyone teaching you Contract Bridge, – do seize it. It’s a grand game, and would be a tremendous asset, if you ever pay a visit to India, after you have left school’ (5 February 1941). Dorothy is worried that she will need lessons in etiquette (how to introduce inferior (gentleman, young person, spinster) to a superior (lady, elder, married woman) – ‘the only way to help you over “social graces” seems to be by letter’ (16 April 1941). They discuss possible career choices – Joan has suggested journalism. Dorothy is encouraging: ‘You might get married of-course, – but NO girl should count on this, and even if you do, I always feel that a girl makes a far better wife, if she has had a career first’ (7 July 1941). And so epistolary parenting continues through 1942 to 1945, until Dorothy is finally able to make a trip to England after the war, only to find that she and her two daughters, these children whose shrill voices once filled a bungalow in the Travancore hills but who are now in their late teens, do not recognize each other at the railway station where they are due to meet.

Traces of Empire Frank and Dorothy, who have not needed to write to each other during the long war years, find themselves once again caught up with boats and letters. As Frank writes from the ‘the Blasted Strathmore’ as he stood typing a letter to Dorothy (she has gone on ahead to England): ‘I am typing this standing up with the typer on a rack. This is simply bloody. 100 of us – no mattresses (just a canvas) – one blanket – half dozen wash basins – no drawers, ward-robes – no tables’ (letter, Tues eve, 1946). Although this was an emotional and lengthy stay back in England, this was still only a temporary trip back Home. Soon they would be back in India, an India moving towards independence, an India going through many changes. And soon they would

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be back to their letter writing, though now, with their epistolary parenting done, they would move into different modes of writing across the distances of Empire. The colonial enterprise had many effects, one of which was the disruption of lives. While the Empire produced many new conditions of possible mobility for the British (Lambert & Lester, 2006; Pietsch, 2010), it also had many effects on Indian mobility. For a few of aristocratic background, such as Ranjitsinhji (see Chapter 8), it presented new possibilities of relocation within the Empire’s centre, but for many others within India, it produced changed, but often enforced or constrained mobilities (Nair, 1990). As one of the farewell addresses discussed in Chapter 6 notes, even though Frank Hawking’s apparently benevolent attitude towards the estate workers meant they had ‘no occasion to regret our sojourn to these hills’, this time was nevertheless ‘more or less like an exile’. While both estate managers and estate workers shared these dislocations in some ways, the conditions of such exile and separation were very different. For the British, having taken the move to seek work within the wider scope of the British Empire (an optional move even in those hard times following the First World War), these separated lives, lonely childhoods and disrupted families were the result of those views that dictated that children should be sent Home at the age of seven. Education in those private schools in Britain that had grown up to cater for this lifestyle was not particularly good and these institutions were often cold, harsh and lonely places for the children of the Empire. These separations and deprivations, exacerbated in this context by the Second World War, came about not only because of the movement of labour within colonial capitalism, but also of the insistence that children should not be brought up in contexts such as India lest too much of India – its languages, cultures, smells, tastes, foods, heat, diseases, colours, this whole sensual emporium – rubbed off on these impressionable young souls. Far better to be Home, even if Home meant a cold and unforgiving environment calculated in part to recycle these young people into the circuits of Empire. As a princely state administered by an Indian ruler rather than by the British (though the British exerted considerable influence over its affairs by indirect rule), Travancore was not, in fact, formally part of British India. It was not, therefore, a colony, so nor was life there strictly speaking ‘colonial’. Later in his life, Frank nevertheless felt hurt by and objected to the criticisms of colonial ways of life, arguing that ‘lying propaganda’ had unfairly characterized this ‘community of administrators and business men’ as ‘exploiters and enslavers’. ‘We can look the world in the face’ he went on, ‘knowing that whatever our shortcomings, whatever we may have failed to achieve in this

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country, we have a record of which any man can be proud’ (see Chapter 6). How that relationship, or more particularly the work relationships on the tea and rubber plantations of Travancore, can be read, especially as stated in the genre of the farewell address, will be part of the focus of Chapter 6. This status outside the formal constructs of colonialism, however, raises useful questions for contemporary relations of commerce and power. It connects the work of this ‘community of administrators and business men’ more directly to all those current administrative and business positions, whether in industry, service or English language teaching, taken up under conditions of globalization, and urges us to ask (for this concerns many of us in many fields of work) whether we are confident that the records of which we may feel we are proud may nevertheless look less estimable under the lens of historical scrutiny. These separations also produced vast troves of writing. Epistolary parenting meant that, when the letters and pictures were kept (and they often were, for these were the traces of family within the Empire), we have densely documented histories of these times. Such histories bear the traces of Empire and also of those particualt lines of class, education and literacy that underpinned such letter writing. With travel, movement, and mobility constrained, with different members of a family stuck in unexpected places, letters became for this generation the only means of contact. In an era of global interconnectivity where the transnational families of today can chat to each other over Skype, send an SMS or check out a Facebook page, it is hard to grasp the importance of these letters and the work they had to do. For my grandmother, Dorothy, her epistolary parenting needed to do so much, to connect, to nurture, to advise, to admonish, to encourage, to direct. These letters also map out a particular temporal frame and rhythm of writing. There were constant admonitions to write more often, to send a letter every week, to reply regularly. With the war slowing the progress of sea mail even further, there were long gaps between requests and responses, reports and advice. Such patterns of communication continue under conditions of global communication but with much shorter time frames (did you receive the email I sent yesterday?), different expectations of what a reasonable delay may be, and different amounts of information packed into different types of transnational texts. For people for whom Home is always written with a capital H and is always somewhere else, life will always have a sense of displacement. These colonial lives were lived with a constant sense of travel, of being somewhere else, and of being connected to family and Home either by long journeys by ship or by the constant writing of letters. It was not necessarily uncomfortable travel by any means but it was serious travel, a voyage Home taking at least several weeks. These relations across Empire, these comings and goings,

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letters and artefacts, ‘exemplify the extent to which metropolitan Britain was pervaded by peoples, commodities, understandings, and practices that originated in the empire or reflected the range of the nation’s range of overseas projects’ (Buettner, 2004: 18). These mnemonic traces (Joseph, 2007) in unexpected places linger on.

Note (1) The Zouaves were French light infantry troops from North Africa. The soldier warns him: Asphyxiating gases – retreat, retreat. (2) When he was commissioned as an officer, Frank Hawkings joined the Anson Battalion of the Royal Navy Division, which meant he was formally no longer part of the army. His uniform carried both the rings of a naval sub-lieutenant and the shoulder stars to mark his rank as an army lieutenant. Likewise, a petty officer had crossed anchors on one sleeve as well as three stripes to designate an army sergeant.

5 Resourceful Speakers

A Double Failure to Pass I turn sharply to my left, my running shoes squeaking on the polished wooden floor, and sprint down the side of the hall. Frantz sees the run, and flicks the ball across the gym. The pass is beautifully weighted and with one touch, I accelerate away from the other player, the ball at my feet. Frantz has run into the gap to my left, as the defender moves across to cut me off. ‘No a moy. No a moy!’ he shouts urgently. I slow down as the defender approaches. ‘No a moy?’ I ask myself, trying to link something on an indoor soccer pitch to this series of sounds. ‘No a moy?’ I ask myself as I push the ball further down the wing. What on earth is ‘No a moy’ supposed to mean?’ The defender has closed my angles down and pushed me into the corner. Frantz gesticulates, hands held wide. I switch the ball to my left foot, feint a cross, cut back to my right and try to get past the defender. He sticks out a foot, and the ball slides off to the back wall. We retreat, Frantz muttering under his breath. What was I to do with this unexpected language in this unexpected place? Later, Frantz remonstrates with me (in Bavarian German), criticizing my English football style, my inability to pass, my lack of control. No wonder the English soccer team is so bad and never wins anything: no skills, no teamwork, it is all just about individuals, long balls and hard tackling. Not like the German way, the European way, with quick passing, an emphasis on skill. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ he asks. ‘I was yelling at you to pass the ball back, but, no, you wanted to try to beat the defender on your own, play the English style.’ Yes, yes, I know. But I’m puzzled. When did you tell me to pass the ball back? ‘Are you deaf too? I was shouting – No a moy, no a moy.’ He looks at me, exasperated. ‘No a moy. Noch Ein Mal.’ Ah, things finally start to fall into place: no a moy = Noch einmal = Once 74

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again = Pass the ball back. Ah, it was a language issue all along. Somewhere between the Bavarian ‘No a moy’ and my inability to interpret it as ‘pass back to me’, we had lost a good chance to attack. Why could people not use Hochdeutsch (Standard German – noch einmal) when things were really important? Perhaps the whole game had hinged on that failed counter-attack. Other things hinged on that moment too. In failing to pass the ball, I also failed to pass as a competent speaker (or listener) of the right type of German. This was a double failure to pass. I had failed to pass as a soccer player and I had failed to pass as a competent user of Bavarian German. Perhaps, if it had not been for my supposedly crude English soccer skills, I would have been looking for that pass back and been more ready to interpret these unfamiliar sounds. If my soccer skills had been better, and I had passed as asked, I might quite easily have passed as a user of Bavarian German in that moment. Indeed, as the year went on, and my Bavarian and soccer improved, I increasingly passed in such circumstances. It is not, therefore, necessarily so hard to pass as a legitimate language user. It is to questions of passing, of what it means to be taken as a competent, legitimate or native speaker of a language that I shall turn in this chapter. How much do we need to be able to do to pass as a particular kind of language user? This question matters because it opens up considerations of what it means to ‘know a language’, which is related in turn to questions of native speakers, language competence, repertoires, registers, what people want to learn, and indeed what languages themselves are. As Harris (2009) remarks, from an integrational1 point of view, the idea of ‘knowing a language’ is one that is best discarded: on the one hand it presents us with numerous problems about the idea of what is meant by the terms knowledge, and more particularly language; on the other hand, it obscures the point that for communication to occur, participants need to ‘integrate their own semiological activities with those of their interlocutor (e.g. in such matters as paying attention, making eye contact, answering questions, complying with requests, responding to greetings both verbal and non-verbal, laughing at jokes, etc.). This is both much more than and much less than is involved in “knowing a language” as traditionally interpreted’ (Harris, 2009: 75). As the example above suggests, had I passed the ball back to the feet of the running Frantz, I might also have passed as someone with an adequate knowledge of Bavarian. This question also matters for an account of language in unexpected places since it raises the question of what it is we need to know in these moments of language mobility to get by.

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Native and Non-native English Teachers I have taken the idea of ‘passing’ from Piller’s (2002: 179) discussion of ‘passing for a native speaker’. In her study of proficient adult second language users, she looks at moments when second language users are not perceived as such, as part of ‘an effort to reconceptualize advanced L2 learners as expert L2 users, and to transcend the pervasive non-native-native dichotomy’ (Piller, 2002: 180). Many adults who have learned a second language as an adult (her study focuses particularly on bilingual couples) may reach a level of the language in which they are taken by others to be native speakers. While helpfully overcoming the idea that adult second language users cannot achieve high levels of fluency, and showing that so-called non-native speakers may perform in ways that make them indistinguishable from so-called native speakers, the idea of passing for a native speaker nevertheless leaves us with two problems. On the one hand, the idea of passing implies being something that one is not, fooling others into believing that one actually is a native speaker; on the other hand, therefore, this idea potentially reinforces, rather than undermines, the non-native/native dichotomy. At the heart of this question, then, is the issue of whether being a native speaker is a given identity that one can imitate (pass as) but not become, or whether it is a capacity that one can achieve. If the former, then as a second language learner, one can only by definition possibly pass as a native speaker; but if the latter, then one might indeed not only pass as a native speaker but become one. Also central to this discussion, however, is the question of whether it is worth keeping the notion of the native speaker at all: if we can become rather than pass as a native speaker, has the distinctive character of nativeness perhaps become redundant? Much has already been written on the many problems with the idea of the native speaker (Braine, 2010; Canagarajah, 1999b; Davies, 2003; Mahboob, 2004, 2010; Paikeday, 2003; Piller, 2001; Rampton, 1990; Singh, 1998; amongst many others), and I do not intend here to go over this ground again. In order to pursue the question of passing as or becoming a particular type of speaker, however, it will nevertheless be important to interrogate the idea of the native speaker once more since it still takes up an inordinate amount of space within both linguistics and more applied domains such as second language education. In the context of English language teaching (ELT) the central focus of attention has been on native and non-native teachers of English. A large body of work has now emerged aimed principally at unsettling the hegemony of the native speaker of English as a teacher (Llurda, 2005). Thus, as Braine notes, while he has ‘no wish to explore the NS and NNS debate, which in my

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view, is unlikely ever to be resolved’ (Braine, 2010: 9), the struggle for the legitimacy of the NNS teacher in face of the discourses about NS teachers, is a long and crucial battle against fixed, naive and often racist views on the values of multilingual educators. At least since Phillipson’s (1992: 194) powerful critique of the ‘native speaker fallacy’ – the idea that native speakers of English make the best teachers – a growing body of work has pointed to the interests behind it: from textbook sales to control of the vast ELT industry, there have been economic and ideological interests in emphasizing the native speaker as the ideal teacher (Canagarajah, 1999b). These have been reinforced through a range of ELT dogmas that proscribed translation, emphasized the use of only English in the classroom, and maintained the idea that the goal of learning English was somehow to emulate this mythologized native speaker. Much of this focus has been on discriminatory hiring practices that favour any native speaker over any non-native speaker, and the ensuing debates on who makes the better teacher. Part of this discussion has focused on the relative merits of native and non-native teachers, a question of education, language knowledge, pedagogical skills, cultural orientations, ability to translate and so on, rather than one’s status as a native or non-native speaker. As many critics have pointed out (e.g. in Llurda, 2005), teachers who have learned English as a second language have experienced the same process that their learners are going through, while native speakers of English by definition have not done so. The role of English in the world (discussed further below) as well as the lack of good language learning in various Anglophone countries (the two are connected) means that many native speakers of English have little or no strong experience of engagement with linguistic and cultural diversity. Depending on the context, non-native teachers of English may speak the same language as their students, which, by contrast with several decades of discourse to the contrary, may not be such a bad thing. As Modiano puts it, ‘the NNS practitioner has certain advantages over the NS instructor – not only because they have knowledge of the linguistic complexities of the mother tongue and the target language in contact – but more importantly because the NNS practitioner is well suited to provide students with a pluralistic cultural perspective’ (Modiano, 2005: 26). A related focus has questioned in particular the presumed goal of ELT, once again attempting to decentre the position of the native speaker. Once we take on board views such as Kirkpatrick’s that ‘multilingual speakers themselves should provide the linguistic models for language learners, rather than native speakers’ (Kirkpatrick, 2007: 57), then the goal of ELT is no longer to emulate native speakers but rather to communicate with the wider NNS world. This is a core axiom of most work on English as a lingua franca

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(ELF), and although Jenkins and others do not exclude NSs from being speakers of ELF (Dewey & Jenkins, 2010), the focus is on the decentring of the role of native speakers in language interactions and language authority. ‘Younger English speakers in Expanding Circle countries, particularly in East Asia,’ suggests Jenkins, ‘are beginning to realize that native-like English is no longer relevant to their international communication needs. Instead, they seem increasingly to wish to make their own decisions about the kind of English they speak, and to protect – by means of the influence of their L1 on their English accent – a sense of their own local identity, as well as to develop some kind of hybrid global identity in their English, instead of being told to take on the identity of an NS of English in the US or UK’ (Jenkins, 2009: 54). We also have to deal with the possible implications of the global spread of English, which, because of its massive dispersion and diversity may present a special case. While some other widely spoken languages such as French and Spanish raise similar issues about who makes the best teacher (French teachers from la Martinique, Mali or Montreal, or Spanish teachers from Mexico, Medellin or Managua, have also struggled for legitimacy), the widespread use of English and the capital to be gained from teaching and learning English, make the issues more salient with the language of globalization. Now that English is commonly pluralized into Englishes (Kachru, 2005), it is less clear what a native speaker of English may be a speaker of. In his influential paper on the ‘ownership of English’, Widdowson (1994: 385) pointed out that ‘It is a matter of considerable pride and satisfaction for native speakers of English that their language is an international means of communication. But the point is that it is only international to the extent that it is not their language.’ As Rajagopalan remarks, ‘In its emerging role as a world language, English has no native speakers’ (Rajagopalan, 2004: 111). The argument here is that because English has become the property of all, a language spoken by different people around the world, because English has become an international language, no one can claim to be a native speaker of the language. Or, put differently, the varieties of English to which native speakers may lay claim are not the varieties spoken as global Englishes. And yet, while all these challenges to the hegemony of the native speaker have been important, few of them directly challenge the notion itself. The goal has been to weaken the position of the native speaker as teacher and guardian of the language, but in so doing these arguments have also maintained and in some cases strengthened the distinction. The relative merits of native and non-native teachers have been weighed up, pointing both to the need to oppose discriminatory hiring practices and the need to appreciate the relative skills of teachers from different backgrounds. The arguments for the superiority of NNS teachers over NS teachers draw attention to the

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different skills that NS and NNS teachers may bring to the classroom rather than whether the distinction is of much use to start with. The distinction has thus been kept intact while the argument has been that the model for our students should not be the unattainable notion of the native speaker but rather the competent non-native speaker. The focus on the special case of English, for example, confounds the issue: is it only English that has no native speakers? If this is the case, then as Hutton (2009) notes, this strengthens the notion of the native speaker in general since it is only English by dint of its global spread and diversity that has no native speakers, whereas all other languages are by contrast owned by those born into the language. The implication seems to be that languages spoken across national borders – international languages such as English, French, Arabic, Spanish, Hindi, Indonesian, Chinese, Portuguese and various others – do not have native speakers while those spoken only within a more local domain do. To suggest that it is only English that has no native speakers leaves other languages stranded with the same old dichotomy. Discussion of the ‘ownership’ of English, furthermore, with claims that English is owned by everyone who uses it, that English is the property of all, might be critiqued as a liberal aspiration rather than a political reality. Questions of access and ownership, as Tupas (2006) reminds us with respect to English in the Philippines, need a much sharper political analysis about who gets to speak. Similarly, while the world Englishes and English as a lingua franca frameworks have taken aim at the dominance of certain assumptions about native speakers, both approaches to the global spread of English have, in other ways, reiterated key ideas about native speakers. As Rajagopalan (2007) points out, the pluralizing strategy of the world Englishes movement, while apparently aimed at decentring what are seen as native speaker varieties of English, in fact reinforces the notion of the native speaker. On the one hand, the concentric circle model of English (inner, outer, expanding) ‘assigns to certain inner circle varieties the pride of place at the very epicentre’ (Rajagopalan, 2007: 198). Thus, while the focus is on the description and recognition particularly of outer circle varieties, the inner circle native speaker varieties are left unquestioned. On the other hand, if it is allowed that different world Englishes do indeed have native speakers, then these are seen as speakers of varieties of English, which still maintains the fiction of an English core, even if its native speakers now speak a wider variety of Englishes. Likewise, discussions of English as a lingua franca maintain the distinction between native speakers and non-native speakers, but argue for the possible irrelevance of the former for the linguistic education of the latter. These various approaches to the roles of native and non-native teachers of

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English have sought to shift the focus away from native speakers as models and to arrive instead at a much better appreciation of the multicompetent non-native speaker teacher. Yet they have not by and large sought to question the distinction itself. Should we give up on this question as never likely to be resolved, and direct all our energies instead at enhancing the rights and status of non-native speakers (Braine, 2010), or is there still work to be done here in questioning the idea of the native speaker?

What comes with being a native speaker? The central question we need to ask is this: with what does the notion of the native speaker correlate? That is to say, what entails from speaking a language like a native? One erroneous assumption that we need to do away with from the outset is that the idea of a native speaker somehow tallies with a particular variety of a language. All too often, we see ideas such as ‘native speaker English’ as if this implied both capacity in a language and a particular form of language. We need to delink the idea of native speakers and language varieties – the idea that ‘native speaker English’ or ‘native speaker Chinese’ implies a particular variety of a language. The idea of a standard variety – a problem in itself – is in no way connected to the idea of a native speaker, despite the continuing belief in some quarters of the notion of ‘native speaker English’ as some kind of standard. ‘In trying to square the common-sense notion of the native speaker with this common sense notion of the standard language’ Piller points out, ‘a most striking fact emerges: a native speaker of Standard English is logically impossible! A native speaker is supposedly born into the language while the standard is supposedly attained through superior education’ (Piller, 2001: 112). Although educated middle-class families may to some extent have adopted a form of standard language as a familial code, the possibility of being a native speaker of standard language nevertheless remains unlikely. Not only does being a native speaker not correlate with a variety of English, but it cannot tally with the notion of standard English: we are not born into a standard. The same point needs to be made about any language that has a standardized version used as a medium in education. In China, for example, Putonghua ‘has become standardized as the national model for pronunciation (and to a lesser extent, for literacy), a form of semiotic capital, associated with linguistic “correctness”, and socially recognized as indexical of speaker attributes such as social status and advanced education backgrounds’ (Dong, 2010: 265). It is unlikely, therefore, that one could be a native speaker of Putonghua, since it is acquired ‘through formal education, as it is institutionally supported as the language of instruction in schools, as well as the official

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language in the state’s other institutions’ (Dong, 2009: 16). To the extent that one may be a native speaker of Chinese, therefore, this is almost inevitably of a variety of Chinese. Indeed, to the extent that ‘Chinese’ – like ‘English’ – is an ideological construct based on a will to nationhood and ethnicity (or in the case of English a will to global commonality), it is unclear as to what in any case one is supposed to be a speaker of when such broad labels are applied. Most people in the world grow up speaking several languages. Given too that speakers of only one language nevertheless have variable competence in that language, the notion of being a native speaker does not guarantee much. A native speaker of a language is often assumed to be more fluent, or to have more intuitive ideas about a language, than their non-native counterparts, though neither of these assumptions is necessarily the case, as Davies (2003) shows. There is no good reason to assume particular levels of fluency or competence with a language based on the idea of a native speaker. To be sure, if we have learned a language from an early age, we may be more likely to have certain levels of comfort and fluency in that language, but this by no means suggests that we have capacity across many domains, that we can read and write as well as we speak. If one has grown up speaking a language at home, but only at home, for example, available registers may be quite limited. If one has grown up speaking only one language, it may be the case that one has therefore acquired a strong capacity in that language across multiple domains, but this is still dependent on context, social environment, access and so forth. This also leaves the question of the variety of language unexamined. The idea of ‘native speaker English’, or of any other language in relation to the idea of a native speaker, does not tell us anything at all about the variety of language spoken (Mukherjee, 2005). Use of different languages also changes over time, so that one may be far less proficient in one’s native language than in languages learned subsequently. This is why it may be more useful to talk in terms of a mother tongue or first language (as a language learned first, in a home context, and with which one may have particular affective affiliations), which does not imply any particular levels of competence, as opposed to second (third etc.) languages, learned later in which one may have more or less competence than the first. Ostler (2010) proposes a basic distinction between mother or vernacular languages on the one hand (languages learned at home) and lingua francas on the other (any language learned outside the home, which must be a contact language in one way or another). All these terms, however, come with their own problems. As Rajagopalan points out, the notion of the native speaker, like much of linguistic thought, has not been able to escape its 19th century colonial and

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nationalistic origins: ‘let us not forget that the idea that individual languages exist in their own right and as discrete, all-or-nothing entities is itself a 19th century invention’ (Rajagopalan, 2007: 194). A defining characteristic of the idea is that one is born into or brought up speaking a particular language which is distinct from other languages. ‘If individual languages are considered discrete objects, it follows that the speakers of each such language must also form a class unto themselves’ (Rajagopalan, 2007: 201). Hutton argues along similar lines that a ‘Romantic native-speaker model from northern Europe has been generalized as the universal, panchronic natural state of affairs’ (Hutton, 2009: 101). While we still await a good genealogy of the native speaker – when did the term come into use and how has its use evolved over time? – these comments raise further concerns about the language ideologies the term invokes: it suggests that we are born into languages, that our linguistic abilities are independent of class, access, and schooling and that languages are discrete entities of which we are either native or nonnative speakers. This is what Shuck refers to as ‘the ideology of nativeness, an Us-versus-Them division of the linguistic world in which native and nonnative speakers of a language are thought to be mutually exclusive, uncontested, identifiable groups’ (Shuck, 2006: 260). So does the notion of the native speaker describe anything useful? Certainly we need to be cautious not only with the assumption that the idea of ‘native speaker English’ describes a variety of English that is preferable and desirable, but also with the idea that native speakers produce some form of ‘correct English’. As a recent study of Dutch showed, in spoken tasks native speakers produced ‘grammatical errors constituting obvious violations to the grammar of Dutch, such as violations of noun gender and violations of subject-verb agreement (number agreement)’ (Mulder & Hulstijn, 2011: 491). Abstract notions of native speaker varieties and competence are problematic, therefore, since they fail to account for language usage. We can try to get round this with tautological distinctions between competence and performance (if the language use fits the predefined norms, it is competence; if it fails to do so, it is a matter of performance) but such moves merely confirm the belief that native speakers use language in preconceived ways. At the end of his book-length discussion of the notion of the native speaker, in which he shows that all supposed categories of nativeness may also be achieved by non-natives (which therefore makes the distinction more or less redundant), Davies nonetheless concludes that there is value in the ideal of the native speaker, rather than the reality: the ideal native speaker, he argues, rather than the real ‘flesh-and-blood’ version ‘is a myth but a useful myth’ (Davies, 2003: 214). So is there value in an ideal, prototypical version of the native speaker? Mukherjee points to the problems with this

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argument, suggesting that there are strong reasons to reject such ‘historically loaded usage-independent, attitudinal and ideological definitions of the many-sided native speaker concept’ (Mukherjee, 2005: 9). Abstract notions of the native speaker, he suggests, where the native speaker is tied to particular varieties of language or is assumed to be an idealized monolingual language user, and thus at odds with linguistic reality, are unhelpful. For Mukherjee, however, it is nonetheless possible to maintain the idea of the native speaker based on language use rather than idealizations. From this point of view, then, while it is important to avoid the idealized usage-independent idea of the native speaker, arguments, for example, that multilingual language users do not conform to idealized notions of monolingual native speakers can be countered by a notion of the native speaker based on language use. The native speaker as idealized speaker of a particular variety of only one language is a misguided idea but should not render the idea of the native speaker itself implausible. For Mukherjee (2005), narrow and mistaken views of linguistic nativity that imply particular varieties of language or monolingualism as the norm should not prevent us from maintaining a usage-based view of native speakers. Likewise, examples of individuals who have dissociated themselves from their mother tongue and adopted another language do not undermine the notion of the native speaker since, in his view, the notion of a native speaker is one of competence in usage: ‘from an ideologically neutral perspective, nativeness is about nothing else but linguistic competence as instantiated in language use’ (Mukherjee, 2005: 11). The idea of linguistic competence instantiated in language use cannot, however, be claimed as ideologically neutral. Nor can it escape the circularity of argument that starts and ends with the same presuppositions of native speaker competence. Mukherjee (2005) argues that it is not a question of birth but rather one of competence: ‘The notion of nativeness remains a useful linguistic concept because it captures a level of competence which is mirrored in language performance that is considered to be native-like’ (Mukherjee, 2005: 13). From this view, one does not need to pass as a native speaker since one can indeed become one. So nativeness is not a product of being born into a language but of achieving a level of competence. The idea of considering the native speaker in terms of language ability (high-level linguistic competence), however, is based on the prior assumption that native speakers (those born into the language) speak the language fluently. Otherwise, the idea of the native speaker would not necessarily imply competence. But since this assumption is highly questionable, and since the argument here is that the idea of the native speaker is not tied to birth but to language competence, then there is no reason to maintain the term native speaker to describe this capacity.

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The circularity of the arguments around native speakers is equally evident in Davies’ (2003) arguments for the native speaker as an ideal. Davies lists characteristics of native speakers (such as intuitions about grammatical acceptability and the ability to write creatively – characteristics that themselves are evidently problematic) and then asks whether a second language speaker could share such characteristics. Carefully going through each in turn, he answers in the affirmative for all but one (the first): ‘the native speaker acquires the L1 of which s/he is a native speaker in childhood’ (Davies, 2003: 210). Otherwise second language learners can acquire equal fluency, intuitions, ability to translate and so on. So what is it that someone acquires in childhood that distinguishes the native speaker? Here, Davies admits, ‘is where the circularity lies’ (Davies, 2003: 212) since the answer is that what one acquires by learning a language from childhood are all the characteristics that he has just admitted could be acquired by second language learners. He concludes that ‘mother tongue is not gender, it is not a given from the womb. It is classically social, just as culture is’ (Davies, 2003: 214). While this is a misunderstanding of gender, which is generally defined precisely in cultural and social terms,2 the analogy is potentially useful: just as we are not born into genders but become gendered, so we are not born into languages but are gradually languaged. This nevertheless leaves us with several questions that still need to be pursued. In the first place, to deny the usefulness of the term native speaker is not to deny various propositions: people often do have a strong affective tie to a language associated with home, family and comfortable ways of being. There may well be a language in which we prefer to sing, count or dream. People who have grown up with a language and used it widely in many domains, furthermore, usually have a facility with that language that allows them to draw on a diversity of idioms and phrases that are interlinked with particular cultural contexts with which a language may be associated. When we learn a language, we may indeed have clear goals of accuracy and fluency, and there are often aspects of a language we struggle to master. The point is, however, that the notion of the native speaker does not help our understanding of this. Mukherjee maintains that ‘Native-like performance is not an illusion. Every single learner of a natural language as a foreign language knows about the problem of reaching a level of competence which would allow him/her to use the language at hand accurately, fluently and idiomatically so that he/ she could pass as a native speaker in a native-speaking context’ (Mukherjee, 2005: 13). There is a strange irony in these debates about passing as a native speaker that those who wish to challenge the notion of the native speaker, such as Piller (2001), potentially end up promoting its continuity through

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such notions as ‘passing as a native speaker’ (non-native speakers can become as good as native speakers), while those who wish to maintain the idea, such as Mukherjee (2005), argue that it is only a category of language ability and that anyone can therefore become one. Once we make it a category only of language ability, however, allowing anyone to become one, there is no good reason to tie this to the notion of a native speaker. Once we move to a notion of language use, and accept that native speakers are made not born, then the notion of nativeness, of the ‘native speaker norm’ (Mukherjee, 2005: 19) does not correlate with enough to be useful. As Mulder and Hulstijn’s (2011) study of Dutch speakers showed, there are ‘substantial differences among native speakers both in linguistic subskills and in speaking proficiency, suggesting that it is impossible to define the prototypical native speaker in terms of language ability’ (Mulder & Hulstijn, 2011: 491). Once it is argued that it is not a question of birth, but rather of ability in a language, and once we define that ability and acknowledge that we can become native speakers by reaching that level, then all we have is a description of a certain capacity to use language, and therefore no need to tie it to the idea of the native speaker. On the other hand, we still have to deal with the discursive power of the idea of the NS. In a review of Davies (2003) Rajagopalan (2007) concludes that ‘Davies is right in saying that the native speaker is real in some sense too. But it is only as real as Mickey Mouse and Batman are real. In the multibillion dollar EFL industry, the figure of the native speaker is a product of intense and very successful marketing indeed’ (Rajagopalan, 2007: 203). This takes us back to an important point, suggesting that although the idea itself may be hollow, the ways in which it is marketed and promoted render it very real in certain contexts. Anyone who has been turned down for a job on grounds of not being a native speaker of the language can testify to the reality of this distinction. Sinfree Makoni and I (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007) wrestled with a similar concern in our discussion of languages as inventions: languages, and the metalanguages used to describe them, may be the products of particular language ideologies, but these inventions have very real effects. Languages may be inventions but language policies, language-ineducation practices and language discriminations are deeply real. We need to appreciate that the NS is a proxy for other things, for discriminatory hiring practices along racial lines, for ideas of standard languages imbued from birth rather than inculcated through education, for prejudicial categorizations of the language spoken by others. It is a folk concept, held in place to signal certain ideas about language. It is very real in the sense that it is invoked as an arbiter on language correctness, as a level of ability or as a preferred employee. This is why activists campaigning against discriminatory

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hiring practices in the field of ELT may indeed duck the question of whether the NS/NNS distinction is useful in itself, and instead address the direct concerns of education and employment (Braine, 2010). But to do so also comes with other dangers: arguing that NNS teachers are as good if not better than their NS counterparts keeps in place the very distinction we need to break down. Maintaining this dichotomy, as Faez (2011) shows, may also be very unhelpful for many language users for whom it is ‘confusing, variable, and meaningless’ (Faez, 2011: 246). And finally, we are left with the dilemma of what to call those levels of ability that we are trying to describe. If native-speaker-like competence only takes us in a circle, what should we use instead?

Proficient, Passable or Legitimate Speakers The idea of the NS still holds a strong place in theoretical discussions of language, studies of second language acquisition and hiring and firing in the ELT job market. And as the illustration above of my failure to ‘pass’ suggests, for those of us learning a language, we are nevertheless usually keen to achieve a level of language ability often described in terms of native-speakerlike competence. So if we are to move forward in this discussion, we will need to come up with some other way of thinking about what is at stake here. If one is not trying to pass as a native speaker, how else might we describe this? Three possible ways forward are to talk in terms of being proficient, passable, or legitimate. Each of these takes the discussion in useful directions but each also has its drawbacks. The first drops the idea of ‘nativelike’ in favour of other criteria focusing on the ability of the speaker as proficient, competent, capable, skillful or expert (Rampton, 1990). Certainly such terms can help us challenge normative and largely undefined notions such as native-speaker-like. These terms, however, run the danger of locating the ability in the individual rather than in the social domain, where it depends on the judgment of others. This is why Piller’s (2002) idea of passing is important, since it stresses the perceptions of others in viewing one’s expertise as passable. They also potentially leave unexamined the question of what one is proficient in: the language domain is predefined in a generic language proficiency rather than a more specific domain of use. These terms therefore need to be located in specific and unexpected places and to account for how one is viewed as a language user. Another approach is to think along pragmatic lines of being a passable speaker. Here we are looking at language learning goals in terms of getting things done, of language use being sufficient, adequate, tolerable, satisfactory

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or passable. This may enable us to think in more contingent, local terms, but runs the danger of suggesting ideas of being ‘just good enough’, which is always potentially patronizing to those learning a language (an accusation that has been aimed at the notion of English as a lingua franca by some of its detractors). If the argument is that the NS/NNS division is not important and it is OK, therefore, to speak passably well, language learners may feel they are not being well served. This concern touches many of the discussions around critical literacy and pedagogy (Pennycook, 2001; see Chapter 7). A criticism of the argument that students are aiming for a non-native version of English with local, first-language inflections (Jenkins, 2009) is that this is a disingenuous liberal argument, stressing freedom, liberty and diversity at the expense of access to the goods that matter (the English that counts). This debate echoes the famous stoush between Quirk (1990) and Kachru (1991). Quirk, favouring a global standard version of English, accused Kachru’s emphasis on diversity of being a form of ‘liberation linguistics’. As Seargeant (2009) points out, however, although these two positions have partly defined the terms of the debate for the last 20 years, and have been constantly invoked as cornerstones of the arguments between monoand pluricentrism, the two positions arise from different understandings of political outcomes yet derive from ‘a similar democratic position’ (Seargeant, 2009: 10): for Quirk, social mobility could be achieved through learning a version of standard English whereas for Kachru such a single standard went against the sociolinguistic realities and aspirations of people around the world. Underlying both positions is a similar liberal democratic understanding of learning and social change. As Luke (1996) perceptively argues in relation to the parallel genre versus voice debates in literacy (should we teach the genres of power or encourage individual expression?) these dichotomous disputes are deeply flawed in that they ignore the contingencies of power. What we actually need, he argues, is not one version or the other, not genres or voice, standard or non-standard, NS or NNS English, but rather local understandings of the social operation of language and power, made possible by the more sociological tools of theorists such as Bourdieu. More promising ways of thinking about language use than proficient or passable, therefore, may be expressions that locate the capacity to speak in the social domain, such as legitimate, valid, genuine, suitable, appropriate, fitting, apt or acceptable. The idea of the ‘legitimate speaker’, for example, locates the capacity to speak firmly in the social domain: I was, in a sense, seeking legitimacy as a Bavarian-speaking indoor soccer player. This allows us to avoid problematic terms such as ‘native-speaker like’, which do not actually tell us anything, ‘proficient’, which locates language ability in the individual, or passable,

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which lacks an adequate sense of social power. The idea of the ‘legitimate speaker’ draws on the work of Bourdieu (1991) and allows us to use a social category (legitimacy) without all the problematic linguistic terminology of natives, mothers or numerical ordering. For Bourdieu (1991), legitimacy flows from the symbolic power attached to forms of capital. Such legitimacy, for Bourdieu, is a result of the misrecognition (méconnaissance) of power, and thus, in an idea similar to Gramsci’s hegemony, this presents a way of seeing why people accord legitimacy to forms of power when it is not in their interest to do so. The idea of a legitimate speaker, therefore, is used to address ways in which people are accorded a place to speak, seen as a rightful speaker, given a voice at the table. Thus, Widin (2010), for example, focuses on who gets to speak in international English language development projects: ‘Who is a legitimate speaker within the field of ELT projects?’ (Widin, 2010: 18). As she shows, ‘often insurmountable barriers prevent host-country project team members from participating fully and equally in the decision-making processes of the project, to have what Bourdieu would call a “legitimate” voice in the project practices’ (Widin, 2010: 146). The idea of a legitimate speaker, however, is also problematic in at least two ways. First, the misrecognition embedded in the idea of symbolic power suggests that such legitimacy is only achieved through an act of symbolic violence. This is a product of the second common problem with Bourdieu, the assumption of the prior operation of social power – not a bad place to start but ultimately limiting in what it allows us to understand in relation to language. For Bourdieu (1991), symbolic power ‘is defined in and through a given relation between those who exercise power and those who submit to it, i.e. in the very structure of the field in which belief is produced and reproduced’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 170). While Bourdieu sees great power in language, ‘a power capable of maintaining or subverting the social order’, it is social power that makes this possible. The role of words in symbolic power is ‘an almost magical power’, a power of ‘constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world, and, thereby, action on the world and thus the world itself’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 170). Such power, however, is not in the words but in the misrecognition of the social power that backs up those words. For Bourdieu (1982: 63) légitimité linguistique (linguistic legitimacy) depends on un coup de force (taking over power). While Bourdieu’s understanding of language helpfully insists that legitimacy only comes about in relation to social power, this ‘conservative account’ (Bourdieu, 1982: 142), as Butler (1997) points out, leaves us with language as a static and closed system whose power lies in the social positions of the speakers. By claiming that ‘utterances are only effective when

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they are spoken by those who are (already) in a position of social power to exercise words as deeds’, Butler suggests that Bourdieu ‘inadvertently forecloses the possibility of an agency that emerges from the margins of power’ (Butler, 1997: 156). Terms such as ‘legitimate speaker’ highlight the judgments made by other speakers of one’s acceptability, but they run into the problem of consenting to normative judgments of acceptability, social status and language variety. Here, in contrast, I want to emphasize the ways in which one can become a legitimate speaker not by dint of prior social status alone (though of course this matters), nor by dint of mastery of a certain standard, but rather by being taken, in whatever context, as someone whose local language practices (Pennycook, 2010a) are deemed to be acceptable. This position challenges both static notions of speaker power, as well as ideas about ‘knowing a language’, speaking a standard language or speaking like a native speaker. This idea of performing like a local gets us out of some of the problems of other terminology: we need a way of thinking about using language that is not based on individual capacity to use language according to prescribed competencies (proficient speakers achieve predefined norms), not patronizingly pragmatic (it is good enough to get the job done), nor sociologically normative (social power brings legitimacy). In the following sections I will discuss why the idea of a resourceful speaker may ultimately be the preferable way to frame this.

Speaking Like a Local The idea of speaking like a local raises some further problems: it runs the danger on the one hand, as with the critique of being a passable speaker, of seeming too tied to local aspirations. It may also, on the other hand, be tied to a very particular and privileged language learning history that allows one to learn a specific local version of a language for particular reasons. The example at the beginning of this chapter – of learning Bavarian in the context of a Bavarian soccer game – points to the privileged language learning experiences I have enjoyed. Although I did study both French and German in the stultifying context of secondary school and later university (with large doses of grammar and long lists of words to be learned by heart, followed by heavy dollops of literature), I also had the advantage of learning these and other languages where they were widely spoken, which has important implications for learning to ‘speak like a local’. For many language learners, however, such opportunities may be unlikely to occur. And since it is hard to know what local forms of language we may later encounter, we learn generic,

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perhaps standard, forms in the hope that this will give us a foundation for later localities. A course in Bavarian German or Quebec French might not have helped much had I subsequently gone to live in Switzerland or Senegal.3 The idea of speaking or performing like a local is not, however, intended in this way. It has to do with speaking in unexpected places, with passing in unexpected ways. Although I have pointed to the particular ways in which Bavarian is ‘local’, it is not this limiting sense of locality that is central here. To shed more light on what I mean, it may be useful to return to some of my own language learning experiences. As that year in Munich went by, my Bayerisch got better. I was tutored in those semi-shibboleths, those particular phrases that become representative of local expression, such as the Bavarian Oachkatzlschwoaf, the tail of a squirrel (Eichhörnchenschwanz in standard German). This wonderful word is interesting not so much for its usefulness – squirrel tails really do not come up that much in conversation – but for its divergence from Hochdeutsch: the swerving diphthongs: O-ach and Schwo-af; the lexical variation: Oach for Eich (oak), Schwoaf for Schwanz (tail); and the different morphology: instead of Hörnchen (small horn), the distinctive Katzl (small cat), with its diminutive ending –l rather than umlaut + -chen (hence Bavarian for a girl is Madl as distinct from high German Mädchen). And beyond such terms, my German gradually became Bavarianized, so much so that North Germans (‘die Preissen’), when told in that inimitable, rough Bavarian way (reserved for non-locals) to shut the door [Dir zua] of a ski hut on a cold morning in the Alps might take me for a local (and shut the door quickly). To be taken, even momentarily, for a ‘real Bavarian’ raises a number of issues, however. Bavarians were rarely fooled, but a northerner might be. The localness of my speaking made it less likely that I was an outsider. So let us make a few initial observations here: first, of course, you do need certain linguistic and imitative capacities to pass, however momentarily, as a local. You need to get things ‘right’ so that, for example, ‘wir haben’ is ‘mia hom’ (we have), pack ma’s means something like ‘let’s go’, Deutsch sounds like Deitsch (cf die Preissen above), ‘Hoost mi?’ is common for ‘Hast du mich verstanden?’ (did you understand? Or rather, perhaps, ‘Know what I’m sayin’?), and goodbye is ‘Servus’. Second, the capacity to pass as a local is a relative and perspectival affair: you may sound like a local to an outsider but you have less chance of fooling the locals themselves. As with German, my ability in French was confronted not only by living in a place where French was widely used but also by a version of French for which I was not prepared. When I lived in Montreal, it was a question of getting my head round the Quebec accent: Québécois was a whole new and wonderful way of speaking. Like many of us when we get into these new contexts, there’s the delight in the swear

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words: in Quebec, you start to pick up terms such as ‘Tabernacle’, which means, not surprisingly, ‘tabernacle’, but when spoken with a Quebec twang and a hint of annoyance, it conveys a world of feeling and a history of religion. It has its bilingual variants, too, such as ‘taberfuckinnacle’. But try it out in France, and people look at you in puzzlement. Other Quebec words also cause puzzlement or amusement in France: when I explain that I intend to ‘magasiner’ in town, they know what I mean – to shop, as in ‘un magasin’ – but ‘faire des courses’ (to make some purchases) would be the common French way to say it. Likewise, if I say ‘J’ai jazzé avec sa blonde’ for ‘I chatted with his girlfriend’, both jazzer and blonde raise metropolitan eyebrows. And when I use such words, my vowels drift towards those Quebec variants. What was also intriguing about my use of Quebec French was the difficulty in locating where I was from: for Québécois I was clearly not from Quebec, but neither did I seem to be an AngloCanadian. On good days, I might be asked if I was French, on other days, various other possibilities. Outside Quebec, people notice those Quebec vowels and words; so I am clearly not from France, but not from Quebec either. Perhaps Anglo-Canadian? And these traces of locality often remain: at a recent conference in Luxembourg I was asked by one sharp-eared participant how it was that I spoke French like a Quebecer and German like an Austrian (similar in a number of ways to Bavarian). This did not of course mean necessarily that I would be mistaken for, that I was passing for, a ‘native speaker’ of Quebec French or South German (I was, after all, ‘from Sydney’ and have a name that suggests Celtic origins) but rather that my French and German seemed to have those notes rather than others (it was not ‘Australian French or German’). ‘Da lali ke?’ I used to inquire of passing peasants in the Hunan (China) countryside: ‘where are you going?’ a question both pragmatically important – where are you going?, like Have you eaten yet? is a common form of greeting – and locally marked – da lali ke? a Xiangyu (Hunanese) version of (Ni) dao nali qiu? ‘Fe ke’ they might reply with a smile and a quizzical look: Hui Qiu – Going home. China, of course, might be one of those contexts where it is never going to be possible to ‘pass’ as a local: you simply don’t look like one. The diversity that is China, however, complicates this. Those passing peasants in the countryside never really seemed to know what to make of me, but were happy enough to reply to a passing ‘da lali ke?’. If you spoke some Chinese, it was common enough for people to comment on this, perhaps on a good day (though without much to compare with), ‘Nide hanyu hen hao’ (your Chinese is very good), more likely, the slightly less flattering ‘Nide hanyu bu zou’ (your Chinese isn’t bad). One day, however, in a shop in town, I got a mixture of the two: ‘Nide Hanyu bu hao’ (your Chinese isn’t good).

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I was about to go into denials – no, no it is no good, I need to study more – when I realized I had been criticized rather than praised. I had, in fact, passed as a bad speaker of Chinese who ought to be better. The shopkeeper assumed I was from some other part of China (possibly from the North West province of Xinjiang, a not uncommon guess) and ought to speak better Chinese. While not the most flattering moment, I had, in a way, passed as Chinese, though not presumably as a Han Chinese. I seemed to have passed as a Chinese citizen who ought to speak Chinese (whether or not this was a first or second language) better. On another occasion I was riding a local bus. To board the bus, one assembled in the huge, dimly lit waiting hall until about 10 minutes before departure. Then the gate would be opened, and we would squeeze through a narrow entrance where seat numbers would be written on our tickets as we passed. I sat down in my assigned seat, only to be confronted a few minutes later by a worker who also appeared to have the same seat number. After a brief exchange, I gave up and let him have the seat – he looked as if he had had a longer day than me, and the journey was only an hour or so. As I stood in the middle of the crowded bus, an argument started up – a woman criticized the man who had taken my seat for being rude to a foreigner. He argued back that I was not a foreigner – look, Chinese clothes, a Chinese shoulder bag. But look at his nose and the colour of his eyes. No, look, he is eating betel nut – that means he is from round here. And on it went. No one could decide and when I smiled at some of their comments this confirmed to some that I was from there because I spoke Chinese but for others was less convincing. Perhaps the fact that no one actually asked me where I was from was evidence that the general feeling was that I was from elsewhere. If they had, my standard answer – Guojigongmin (the old Marxist term for an international worker) – would not have helped much anyway. My learning of Japanese was a little different, but there are ways other than dialectal in which variation occurs. After I had been in Tokyo a couple of years, a Japanese colleague listening to me speak Japanese suggested that I had a Japanese girlfriend and practised martial arts. How on earth did he know? Because my Japanese wavered between two registers: on the one hand, I could be very polite, speaking in a register that suggested I was learning my Japanese from a woman. Once, playing with local kids near my apartment, one of them asked ‘Why do you speak like my grandmother?’, which set them off shouting ‘obaasan, obaasan’ (old woman/grandmother). But when I tried to be less formal, my register sank a few levels too low, to the male language of the dohjo. ‘Ouss’ I would greet my colleagues with a bow. Ohayo gozaimasu, they would reply (Good morning – Ouss being a very

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reduced form). Here it was sociolectal variation that brought particular forms of locality. In Japan, too, I also learned to learn locally. At the school where I was teaching English, I was struggling against the curriculum centred around English 900, a series of six books and 900 sentences (150 per book, 10 per week over 15 weeks), to be taught, repeated, drilled, repeated, analysed, studied, repeated. And I rebelled, tried to do things differently, set up different programmes, insisted this was not the way to learn English. Meanwhile, early in the morning, I would study aikido: ‘Ouss’ I would greet my fellow practitioners at dawn, walking barefoot across the cold mats of the dohjo floor, kneeling for an hour doing ‘ki breathing’, and practising, repeating, doing things over and over. If not quite the kinesthetic version of English 900, the way we learned was by doing and repeating, doing and repeating. You do not ask questions, or raise your hand for an explanation. You keep your head down, kneel without moving while snow blows in through an open window, stand up, joints aching and repeat the move again, throwing and being thrown onto the cold mats. Until one day, you seem to have got it. It may not be clear what has changed. All you seem to have done is repeat and follow, but one day the teacher nods and confirms you have got it. My English also carries mixed messages of locality: with its bits and pieces from different places, it often seems to sound from somewhere else. Denise Murray (2010) notes a similar experience with her English, having lived and worked in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Part of this, as she notes, is deliberate – just as she now uses American terms such as ‘elevator’ (while her American husband accommodates by using ‘lift’) in Australia, so I find I deliberately distance myself from my United Kingdom background by using non-British terms. Like her, ‘in some situations, I’m a chameleon; in others, like the tiger, I can’t and don’t change my stripes. I prefer to be different’ (Murray, 2010: 167). We also share the experience of speakers of different varieties of English assuming that you are from elsewhere while also being amused when others believe you speak their variety (Canadians being amused, for example, when someone non-Canadian assumes I am Canadian). One further shared experience is the interest listeners have in our accents, so that after a talk, it is common for someone to come up and ask where we are from: ‘I receive numerous paraphrases such as “I love to hear you talk”. I wonder “Do they ever listen to the content of what I say?”’ (Murray, 2010: 166). And when I have spoken about the contents of Chapters 1 and 4 in this book, talking about the fact that my mother was born in India, and suggesting that I might therefore be from Kerala, I have often been asked ‘But where are you really from?’

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The Racial Construction of Nativeness So where does this leave us? My own language-learning history has been a privileged one (and compare Vandrick’s, 2009, explorations of privilege and language education) in that I have often had the chance to learn in the context of where the language is spoken, and thus have taken on particular elements of ‘speaking like a local’, and because I speak from a privileged racial position, which marks my capacity to pass in particular ways. The idea of speaking like a local, however, is neither dependent on some notion of speaking like a native speaker (which, as has been repeatedly noted, tells us very little) nor on having the chance to learn in context (an opportunity denied to many). Neither is it based on a local/global dichotomy that might render the idea of speaking like a local incompatible with wider linguistic needs. Nor is it premised on an acceptance of limitations: I did not want to speak French, German, Chinese or Japanese with an English accent. I wanted to sound local. I wanted not just to sound French but to sound Québécois, not just German but Bavarian, not just Chinese but Hunanese, not just Japanese but like a true aikido practitioner. What I wanted to be able to do was to draw on local linguistic resources to achieve local goals. On occasion that actually meant being really taken for ‘a local’ – those moments when someone French thinks I am from Quebec, or a North German turns up their nose at me for being an uncouth southerner (we also learn local bigotries and the assumptions of bigotries in others). And while this was never going to happen in Japan, I still wanted to be accepted as an aikido practitioner, not a foreigner. And in China, it was not always clear what I was being taken as. Performing like a local is not about achieving a level of phonological or syntactic accuracy as measured by some external criteria (proficient), nor just getting by (passable), nor being acknowledged by dint of prior social status (legitimate) but rather is a question of one’s language use being perceived to work. Nor is this a case of being tied to a particular, circumscribed locality; rather it is a case of language as a local practice. The ability to use nonstandard features of a language (from particular pronunciations to particular lexical items) can also influence the perception of one’s ability to belong. This is therefore a case of using linguistic styles that mark one as local and not using language that is deemed to be stereotypically that of the other, not so much passing as a native speaker as avoiding being seen as a non-native speaker. Such membership may equally be denied not on measures of ability but according to skin colour, or other visible characteristics. As we know from many accounts, both in educational and other social contexts, people may be deemed to be or not to be native or legitimate speakers of English not

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on the basis of how they speak but on the basis of how they look (Kandiah, 1998; Lippi-Green, 1997). Here we have to confront again one of the central dilemmas of the native speaker/non-native speaker divide, and the arguments in favour of nonnative English speaker teachers (NNESTs). As Shuck (2006), Romney (2010), Kubota and Lin (2009), Liggett (2009) and others emphasize, the idea of the non-native speaker is deeply bound up with questions of race: ‘Both race and nativeness are elements of “the idealized native speaker’’’ (Romney, 2010: 19). People of colour may not be accepted as native speakers (who are assumed to be White): ‘The problem lies in the tendency to equate the native speaker with white and the nonnative speaker with nonwhite. These equations certainly explain discrimination against nonnative professionals, many of whom are people of colour’ (Kubota & Lin, 2009: 8). Passing as a native speaker is regulated by all those external judgments that have nothing to do with language, and everything to do with skin colour. This is why people of colour who consider themselves native speakers may be denied access to this category (or at least denied access to teaching jobs) while White non-native speakers (especially if blond) may be given honorary access. The discussions of passing as a native speaker cannot be abstracted from these prior racial categorizations. I may not be allowed to pass as a native speaker of Japanese on racial grounds (linguistic too, of course) but that denial is within a very different racial formation than that which people of colour may be denied access to this category for English (or other languages). This is part of the political background to NNESTs joining forces to oppose discriminatory practices: given that admittance to the NEST club may be on racial as well as supposedly linguistic criteria (Grant & Lee, 2009; Nero, 2006), there are strong reasons for NNEST solidarity. The question this raises, however, is whether the best move politically is to then rally under the sign of the ‘nonnative speaker’. It is one thing to argue for the values of NNESTs (multilingualism, intercultural communication, local knowledge, good role models) over NESTs in general but the question becomes more complex once we acknowledge that this is a discriminatory classification and that at its core, it may be a meaningless categorization. Like the Black/White divide, the NS/NNS divide is based on a fragile epistemology, in the first case racial theory and all the denigratory assumptions associated with it (Essed & Goldberg, 2002; Murji & Solomos, 2005; West, 2000); in the second linguistic hierarchies and their accompanying discriminations. Just as superficial characteristics such as skin colour may appear to give a solidarity to the idea of race, so superficial linguistic differences may appear to support an NS/NNS divide. Such hierarchical categorizations are based on differences from an assumed and often hidden norm. Thus President

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Obama, the son of a Black father and a White mother, is considered to be the first Black president of the United States because he is non-White: if we were to accept racial distinctions on a simple level, he might be considered as much White as he is Black. But that is not, of course, what this is about: Black means not White. At least with the NS/NNS divide, this discriminatory hierarchy is made explicit: non-native speakers are non-natives. As with racial divides, it is the invisible category White and the silent category Native Speaker that need critical exploration. Such discriminatory divisions can be countered in various ways. One strategy is to shift terminology: the term African American, for example, suggests a different identification, as do notions such as a bilingual teacher. While adopting new and positive terms may be productive, this may leave the discriminatory terminology in place. An alternative way forward is to try to reappropriate the term. When Obama is seen as Black that is also to acknowledge that the term has been reappropriated by Black communities and that many of his identifications have been with aspects of Black culture and politics. Just as the category Black had been reclaimed from racist terminology to become a term of positive identification, so too the idea of the non-native speaker, however questionable its epistemological foundations, might be considered a term of political reappropriation: if this distinction is to be applied, and aspects of pronunciation or grammar to be the superficial characteristics of the distinction, then why not claim back this space with NNS pride? I have drawn this analogy with racial politics both because non-native speaker discrimination is often bound up with race, and because the parallels between the fiction of race and the fiction of native speakerdom are revealing. The related needs to challenge discrimination, to reappropriate terminology, and to be wary lest such reclamations reinforce those lines of discrimination, suggest lessons can be drawn across domains even though the histories and formations of all such discriminations – along lines of class, race, gender, sexuality or language use – also have to be seen in their very different and particular forms of determination and identification. We need to be cautious in equating the effects, forms and foundations of different discriminations. Nonetheless, in this context of appropriation, queer theory may be instructive, since the reclamation of the notion of Queer has also been done alongside a problematizing of the epistemology that produces the distinction. Cynthia Nelson explains that whereas ‘sexual identity formed the basis of the lesbian/gay movement and community, queer theory follows poststructuralism and deconstruction in making sexual identity the subject of critique’ (Nelson, 2009: 22). This relates to the arguments made particularly in Chapters 3 and 7 that critical resistance requires that we turn our critical gaze on those categories that are also part of the

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identity struggle. As Nelson goes on to argue, this means that ‘there is a fundamental tension between the two meanings of “queer,’’’ a paradox central to queer theory and other forms of critical inquiry: ‘The term includes all “minority” sexual identities, while, at the same time, it troubles the very notion of sexuality as a basis of identity’ (Nelson, 2009: 22). This is the key concern to grasp for work that takes up Hoy’s (2004) challenge of critical resistance: whether critical race studies, queer theory, gender studies, or critical evaluations of the concept of non-native speakers, this work needs to engage not only with sexism, racism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination, and needs not only to counter this with a positive epistemology of difference (understanding sexual identities, showing how nonnative speakers of English are multi-competent users) but also to question the very concepts implied by these categorizations. Just as critical race studies do not merely name racism, nor just claim pride in being Black, but also ask what Whiteness is, and what work this division does, so for NNESTs the political strategy must be not only to say we need to support NNESTs, claim equal pay, show that NNESTs make better teachers than NESTs, but also to undermine this division, to work with the paradox of reclamation and rejection simultaneously. This is the hard work of critical resistance.

Resourcefully Passing as a Non-native Speaker Part of this work of critical resistance is to search for new understandings. Locality, the ability to perform like a local, I have argued, is always in relation to others, to the way one is perceived. When someone from somewhere else – metropolitan France or North Germany, for example – recognizes you as not one of them, the possibility opens up that one may therefore be, by the sound of it, one of the ‘others’. It is less likely that the locals themselves are so easily fooled; it is more that outsiders think you are differently local. This points to the relativity of location: we are, most often, destined to be judged as speaking like someone from elsewhere; but how that judgment is made depends on the locality of the speaker. More generally, when we talk of ‘passing’, of speaking well, of being intelligible, we have to ask for whom? As Rajagopalan (2010) notes, much of the discussion on intelligibility in the context of the global spread of English still posits some undisclosed central norm as the hidden standard by which we judge intelligibility. We have to ask, instead, for whom is something intelligible? The spectre of mutual unintelligibility that is raised when confronted by divergent ways of speaking needs to take into account for whom such unintelligibility is presupposed.

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Likewise, then, with speaking locally, the point is not that we pass as a native speaker of a language to everyone (a proposition both unlikely and more or less meaningless), but rather that from the point of view of different speakers, our language practices evoke different forms of localness. Speaking like a local is always relative to the locality of our interlocutor and the language practices we engage in. The intention here is not to suggest a narrow set of options: all you have to do is speak in a manner that is locally appropriate, and you will be OK. The idea of the local I am using here is not confined in this way. The local here is not defined by comparison with something else, such as the global. This local–global dichotomy is a category error: they are quite different things that cannot be easily juxtaposed and certainly should not be elided in terms such as the glocal. The idea of the local here is about the need to deal with both space and movement (Thrift, 2007). As Blommaert puts it, sociolinguistic life is best understood as ‘mobile speech, not as static language, and lives can consequently be better investigated on the basis of repertoires set against a real historical and spatial background’ (Blommaert, 2010: 173). Everything that happens, happens locally, but this by no means implies smallness or immobility (Pennycook, 2010a). Learning to speak in unexpected places is a question of resources and mobility. What we need, suggests Blommaert, is a ‘sociolinguistics of speech and of resources, of the real bits and chunks of language that make up a repertoire, and of real ways of using this repertoire in communication’ (Blommaert, 2010: 173). This is about repertoires and registers (see also Chapter 6). Speaking locally is about getting local stuff done through language. I did not in fact need to know much Bavarian to pass successfully. And if I had been a better soccer player, perhaps I would have needed even less. I may never have been able to pass as a Japanese in Japan, but I did eventually pass as an aikido practitioner. None of us speaks ‘a language’ as if this were an undifferentiated whole. We do not learn languages as if these were discrete listings of syntax and lexicon (despite what years of schooling and tests may try to tell us). Rather, we learn how to do certain things with words, and with varying success. The capacity to pass, then, is almost always within a specific domain and in relation to specific interlocutors. We do not actually ‘speak languages’, we are not in fact ‘native speakers’ of things called ‘languages’ (Canut, 2007). Rather, we engage in language practices (Pennycook, 2010a), we draw on linguistic repertoires, we take up styles, we partake in discourse, we do genres. It might in fact be possible to be capable only of understanding the phrase ‘No a moy’ and to pass quite consistently as a Bavarian soccer player (though the conversation over a couple of litres of beer after the game might be less successful).

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Being a resourceful speaker is what we are surely aiming at. By this I mean both having available language resources and being good at shifting between styles, discourses and genres. This brings Blommaert’s emphasis on the sociolinguistics of resources into conversation with the emerging focus in discussions on lingua franca English for the need to learn how to negotiate and accommodate, rather than to be proficient in one variety of English. Communication may be possible, as Canagarajah (2007) puts it, because people bring their ‘own strategies to negotiate’ between different cultural and linguistic conventions; they ‘do their own thing,’ but still communicate with each other. Not uniformity, but alignment is more important for such communication. Each participant brings his or her own language resources to find a strategic fit with the participants and purpose of a context’ (Canagarajah, 2007: 927). Block’s (2010: 23) notion of ‘speaking Romanceesque’ gives one example of speaking resourcefully: as a good speaker of Catalan he can get by in Italy (or indeed, as he and I have done, in an Italian restaurant in Utrecht, in the Netherlands). While some speakers of Italian may balk at the suggestion that he will speak Catalan while they speak Italian, it nevertheless works well enough. More generally, it is as a resourceful user of language resources that we gain legitimacy. I have used these examples of my own language learning to raise several points. They have been part of the general attempt in this book to use personal moments as points for reflection, and also to write differently, to let some light in through the cracks of formal prose, to expose the passion behind the trade (see Chapter 2). They have also served to keep on the agenda the point that when I have learned languages, I have not been content with sounding like a non-native speaker, if this is what it means to retain one’s English accent in other languages. Some of the writing on English as a lingua franca has appeared to operate with this slightly patronizing attitude towards not needing to speak like a native speaker. Neither have I wanted to, or believed I could, sound like a native speaker, if this suggests that I could be taken across many domains to be a fluent speaker with no traces of otherness. But I wanted to pursue this in part through some of my own experiences, successes and not-so-successful moments in other languages. The idea of native and non-native speakers really does not do any useful work in thinking about real language use, and does a great deal of harm as a categorization that cannot escape its roots in nationalism, racism and colonialism. Not only is it a product of the nationalist agenda behind much linguistic theory but also of a major marketing offensive by global textbook and other industries. The very notion of native and non-native speakers is based on profoundly questionable views of language. A goal of this chapter has also then been to search for something else, for a way to think about language

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use that focuses on the question of how language abilities may be perceived (it does not ascribe to some external notion of language measurement); takes passing as an act, a performance, something that one does rather than a state of being (and thus sees this as an achievable performance at a particular time, in a particular place, using a particular repertoire of language resources); destabilizes the membership categories that one may be passing from and into (if one can pass as belonging to a different category, the borders of that categorization become less clear); and allows for a multimodal model of performance (passing may be achieved or denied through embodied linguistic and cultural performances). We do not pass as a native speaker of some imaginary thing called a language; if we pass as anything, it is always in a particular context, in a particular genre, style, discourse or practice. And once it becomes clear that so-called NSs cannot pass either at many things, we can see why we need alternative ways of thinking here. Rather, we have repertoires of linguistic resources which we use locally. This is about successful language use as resourceful language use, about speaking languages in unexpected places, or alternatively, being an unexpected speaker of a language. Speaking like a local does not necessarily mean you fool people into believing you are one of them, since it may also be a question of being always from elsewhere. As I suggested in Chapter 2, this ‘being out of place’ can be something we embrace. I admit a certain pleasure in a recent conversation with a respected linguist colleague who was trying to work out my language background. How well did I speak this language, how much did I use that one? she wanted to know. I was not, she decided, a native speaker of English because she could hear a certain nonnative accent underneath. Where was I really from? I have finally managed to pass as a non-native speaker of English. Now that is resourceful.

Notes (1) Integrational refers to Harris’ (1990, 1998) and others’ argument that we no longer need to assume, for example, that ‘(i) that the linguistic sign is arbitrary (Saussure’s premier principe); (ii) that the linguistic sign is linear (Saussure’s second principe); (iii) that words have meanings; (iv) that grammar has rules; and (v) that there are languages’ (Harris, 2009: 74). (2) This supposed distinction between gender as sociocultural and sex as natural has in turn been further questioned by Butler (1990), but here is not the place to explore this. (3) Or at least such courses would not necessarily help. It is nevertheless worth noting that the complexities of linguistic variation might indeed render such knowledge of local variety usable elsewhere, and the knowledge generally of linguistic variation can also help in understanding new varieties when we encounter them. The notion of learning a putative standard as the best strategy to deal with variety is questionable.

6 Elephant Tracks

Towards the end of the Second World War, Frank Hawkings addressed the Maharajah of Travancore, Chithira Thirunal Balarma Varma, on his birthday celebration, first in Malayalam – ‘Manya Maha genangeli, Tiruvithancoor Maharajavu tirumansile iruwitomba thamathu tirunal ahgoshikinathinai . . .’ – and then in English, congratulating him for his famous Temple Entry Proclamation1 and the introduction of forms of industry (ceramics, aluminium) to the state. Most important at this time, however, was his contribution to the war effort: ‘You may see therefore how Travancore through its Maharajah has contributed towards the fight for freedom and democracy. After the enemy has been defeated you may see how our victory will advance Travancore and India as a whole among the nations of the world, instead of the slavery which Hitler promises should be our portion. Let us join together in wishing HH a long life of prosperity and happiness.’ (Speech to the Maharajah of Travancore, circa 1945). But although both of them would live on into old age, neither would hold on to their positions in Travancore much longer. The age of European estate managers and maharajahs was drawing to a close. After the war, the estate managers were faced by several dilemmas. On the one hand, of course, they could finally travel to England again, and reunite with family they had not seen for many years (see Chapter 4). But India was moving towards independence, raising many questions about their futures in the country. In a speech as chairman of the Travancore Branch of the European Association on 3 March 1946, a speech concerning issues such as refugees from Burma, and securing passages back to Europe, a major concern for Frank Hawkings and the other planters was their future status: ‘I put forward as my own personal view, that we might perhaps be well advised instead of seeking Indian citizenship, to accept the status of foreigners, a status which I understand, works very well for British communities in other countries where they maintain a respected position without political rights’. The possibility of becoming Indian citizens was a major point of debate at the time. Under discussion too was the future status of India itself: Frank 101

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was of the view that ‘Dominion Status was possibly not suited to India, and that she should have complete independence on a treaty basis as in the case with Iraq and Egypt’. Closer to home, Travancore itself was a different case since ‘the new Constitution for Travancore will include not only European seats for institutions such as planting and commerce, but also probably one for Europeans as a community’. The speech goes on to outline ways in which they will work towards this representation. Finally, however, Frank concludes with his frustrations at how their community is perceived, particularly at this time of postcolonial upheaval: A great deal has been written and said in recent years in various parts of the world, notably in the U.K. and the U.S., to the detriment of the British connection with India. Most of it has been unfair and much of it downright falsehood. We are a community of administrators and business men, and we do not have within our ranks that leisured class of lecturers or writers who could speak for us. As a result our case has gone largely by default, and lying propaganda has dubbed us exploiters and enslavers. Ladies and Gentlemen, you will know what our forefathers did for India, and what even we have been able to contribute. We shall give to India a legacy of two centuries of peace, with a high standard of administration, law and order, irrigation, health and sanitation; and above all of education which has taught our Indian brothers the meaning of the liberty for which they now cry. British liberty such as they never knew before. This is a standard never seen since the days of the Romans. We can look the world in the face knowing that whatever our shortcomings, whatever we may have failed to achieve in this country, we have a record of which any man can be proud. Perhaps it was time to leave. Perhaps this idealistic young man who had survived the horrors of the trenches, who had been wounded at the Somme (Chapter 4), who had left for a better life in India, who had persuaded, through several years of ardent letters, his fiancée to join him, who had made for himself a comfortable and happy life in the spacious bungalow at Kumbazha, perhaps he had become too steeped in the colonial discourses that made up so much of European communication in India. From a young man from a fairly poor background, who had left school at 16 to fight in the trenches, who had taken the step of moving to India and had worked his way up through the tea and rubber plantations, too many years rubbing shoulders with people from other class backgrounds, with colonial pretensions to a higher civilization, had left too deep an impression to make it

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possible to stay. Perhaps it was time to go. Increasingly, the local population thought so. By the 1950s, things had become difficult on the estates. India had gained its independence, and Travancore, after brief attempts to remain a separate state outside the Indian Union, had been through much upheaval. The state of Travancore-Cochin had been established in 1949, and eventually, with the addition of the Malabar district, the new state of Kerala was established in 1956, with a governor replacing the Maharajah (who, removed from office and stripped of his former privileges, lived on until 1991), and the communist party winning the 1957 election. Amid these turbulent times, there was a strike on Kumbazha Estate in 1951 arising it seems from an assault on a Union worker (not employed by the estate). As tensions rose and Nair, the President of the Union, went on hunger strike, groups of ‘students’ came to the estate, and when the full strike started ‘a gang of 400 students arrived at the factory compound demonstrating’ (Frank Hawkings’ ‘notes on strike at Kumbazha’). The disputes lingered on from November into January and February of 1952. On 29th February Frank ‘received warning that I was to be molested on the way to the office. Proceeded to the office at 8:55. Was mobbed by a gang just short of the office. Rescued by watchers who escorted me to the office, Mr B.K. Nair and his associates were haranguing the labourers in front of the office, in the course of which some disreputable things were said about the wives of the staff who were assembled on the office veranda. Three or four of the staff objected, whereupon the crowd advanced on the office in a menacing manner. At that precise moment the van arrived with a police party and order was restored’. And soon after, they left for England, never to return to their beloved Travancore (Figure 6.1), its teak trees, elephants, tea plantations spread across rolling hills (Figure 6.2), teas on the lawn, monkeys in the mango trees. What traces are left? The bungalows sitting amid the gardens on the Kerala hilltops still carry that history. These bungalows, with their wide verandas, tiled roofs, high ceilings, solid stone, not Indian nor British, are now the homes of the Indian managers and families, people who have also worked their way up through the company, moving from Mundakayam to Lahai to Kumbazha: Indian families who no longer use the fireplaces (see Chapter 1) since the climate changed and these tea plantations were given over to rubber, whose cooks now prepare curries in the kitchen at the back of the house. Something remains here in the furniture, the gardens and the nutmeg tree. What did these Europeans take ‘home’? Despite their hurried exit, packing up and leaving as angry crowds urged the foreigners home, they managed to bring things back with them. The heavy, cool teak furniture of my childhood was packed up and shipped back to England. Photographs too. There was always an excitement, a hint of the exotic, a smell of other places,

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Figure 6.1 Frank and Dorothy with Geoffrey the monkey, Kumbazha, 1951

when as a child I visited my grandparents’ thatched farmhouse, and pulled out musty photograph albums from teak book cases. Two other things came home with them too. Elephant stories and farewell letters. Elephants are central to many parts of Indian life, particularly in Kerala. When a new team from Kerala was proposed for the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket competition for 2011 (and we will be getting back to cricket in the final chapter), there was strong argument on the online community for elephant references (see Kerala Tuskers, 2010). In February

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Figure 6.2 Tea pickers: Kumbazha, 1952

2011, the new team name was announced as ‘Indi Commandos Kerala’, causing a major backlash particularly through Facebook. An online vote was organized to reconsider the name, popular options being Commandos, United, Titans, Cobras, Tigers and Tuskers. Eventually, although no decision could be made between Kochi and Kerala, it was Tuskers that won the day (Kochi Tuskers Kerala, 2011), and thus, in April 2011, the new Kochi Tuskers Kerala played their first game in the Indian Premier League (which they lost to the Royal Challengers Bangalore)2. Elephants remain of great importance to Kerala life, and Tuskers is a common term for elephants in India. As an article in the New Indian Express (Varma, 2006) explains, From time immemorial the most famous tamed tuskers in Kerala were the senior-most members of the Aana Tharavadu (Punnathoor Kotta) of Guruvayoor Devaswom. The tusker that topped the list in yesteryear was the celebrated Guruvayoor Keshavan. Now Guruvayoor Padmanabhan tops the list . . . Thechikottu Kavu Ramachandran with a height of 10.3 ft is second in demand. Though he stabbed the celebrated tusker Thiruvambadi Chandrasekharan, Ramachandran is still the hot favourite . . . Among the nadan (born and brought up in Kerala/Mysore forests) tuskers, Pambadi Rajan tops the list. With more than 10 ft height, fleshy trunk that touches

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the ground, beautiful tusks and wide ears, the tusker enjoys the status of the most ideal tusker from Kerala forests. (Varma, 2006: 3) According to the website Elephant-Kerala.com, the 43-year-old Gajakesari Thechikkottukavu Ramachandran is ‘the king among the tamed elephants of Kerala’. He ranks first in ‘thalayeduppu’ and ‘Edaneelam’ (body length). The second tallest elephant in Kerala (10.3 ft.), this Bihari elephant is ‘the hero of elephant lovers of Kerala because of his manliness and the majestic appearance’. During festive seasons he may participate in as many as 120 poorams, and has brought considerable income to his temple, so that they have been able to construct an auditorium, have bought a lorry for his transport and purchased another tusker. Pambady Rajan, meanwhile, is confirmed as ‘the No.1 among the nadan elephants (born and brought up in Kerala/ Mysore forests). Considered as the most ideal tusker from Kerala. Height 10 ft. Beautiful tusks, projected forehead and fleshy trunk that touches the ground make him more special’. For Frank Hawkings, working with elephants to clear the forests and haul heavy teak logs (Figure 6.3), and learning the local appreciation of

Figure 6.3 Hauling teak: Kumbazha, 1952

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elephant aesthetics had become a normal part of his working life. Later, in England, asked to give a talk to the Culmstock (Devon, England) Women’s Institute, he chose to talk about elephants, showing how his life had been deeply involved with these animals. ‘Logging is the work on which elephants are mostly employed in Travancore. In the old days they did many jobs which are now done by tractors or bulldozers, but they still do logging in the forests, and I myself often employed a half a dozen of them for this purpose; and was in fact doing so just before I left India 3 years ago. This is how it is done. It is usually the teak trees and maybe the rosewood trees that you want to get out of the forest or from an area that you have felled out for planting . . .’. He noted too some of the complexities of the naming practices of elephants: ‘It is strange that although every elephant is given a name, the name is not used when addressing him. The mahout simply shouts “Elephant go on. You are a lazy fellow. Why are you wasting time”’. There are elephant anecdotes too: ‘I was riding slowly on my motorbike just before sundown along a narrow winding path through a dense patch of elephant grass growing 6 to 8 feet high. Suddenly I turned a corner and crashed into the front leg of an elephant standing on the path. Bike and self fell in a heap and the elephant trumpetted into my ear’. And these of course were the stories that my grandfather told his grandchildren. There were elephant bookstands, ebony elephant carvings and elephant stories in the Devon farmhouse where they lived out the rest of their days.

‘With Painful Feelings of Deep and Genuine Regret . . .’ Farewell Addresses And hanging in the unexpected place of the walls of that old house were also farewell addresses. These were a prized possession, it seems, for several reasons: They were beautifully printed (perhaps with a few too many font changes), often with elaborate floral or patterned borders (Figure 6.4). They carried fond memories of these places where people had worked and lived, testament to the good relations between managers and workers, colonizers and the colonized. But there was also an ambivalence in these documents, since they also amused with their quaint prose and formulaic sayings. And in that ambivalence there also ran a slight undercurrent of uncertainty: Were these letters sincere or did they perhaps also have a hint of mockery about them? Certainly former managers held on to these documents, and often enough hung them on walls, with a pride, a joy and a smile. Above all, these farewell addresses carried traces of these colonial3 working relations, both pleasures and uncertainties, compliance and resistance, in their elaborate prose and praise.

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Figure 6.4 Farewell address: Peravanthanam estate

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The first that I know of that my grandfather received was when he left Peravanthanam Estate, Mundakayam, on 23 October 1927. The letter is addressed ‘To Frank Hawkings Esq, Manager, Peravanthanam Estate, Mundakayam. ‘Dear Sir’ it starts, ‘With painful feelings of deep and genuine regret, we, the Staff of the Peravanthanam Estate, Mundakayam, venture to avail ourselves of this opportunity, so kindly offered by you, to bid you farewell on the eve of your departure from our midst, to take up the Management of Lahai Estate. While soliciting every good fortune for you, we still wish you had been longer spared to us. But rather than selfishly pine at our bad luck our hearts go with you, let us assure you Sir, at every tide of your fortune.’ It goes on to praise his achievements at Peravanthanam Estate during ‘the short compass of the two years and a half of your tenure’ and to point to ‘your untiring energy, your keen sense of duty and your unique administrative capacity’. His personal qualities also receive praise, among them his ‘uniform kindness, unruffled patience and amiable manners’. Mrs Hawkings is thanked for bestowing ‘a mother’s love and solicitude on us’. It concludes ‘In fine, we pray that you will pardon any wrongs that unknown to us and innocently we might have done to you. Our sincerest prayers shall waft your footsteps to the goal you desire and help crown all your efforts with the success that they richly deserve, making a long life happy and prosperous to you and useful to others.’ It is signed ‘Your most obedient and loving boys, The Staff of the Peravanthanam Estate’. What can we start to make of this trace of the past, this memento, with its elaborate language and design? 4 The language, even for the 1920s, is ornate and somewhat archaic, but then such prose styles have long been noted in writing in India (Y. Kachru, 1997). It is echoed in certain phrases in the 2006 newspaper article cited earlier. ‘From time immemorial the most famous tamed tuskers in Kerala were the senior-most members of the Aana Tharavadu (Punnathoor Kotta) of Guruvayoor Devaswom. The tusker that topped the list in yesteryear was the celebrated Guruvayoor Keshavan.’ The style also appears to be locally derived from Malayalam forms of politeness. The provenance of these letters is hard to ascertain, though evidently they were instigated by at least some of the workers on the estates and executed in the main by letter and petition writers, who generally maintained an office (or at least a desk) near the magistrate’s office in local towns. This particular document was printed at V.G. Press, Kottayam, which although local also necessitated travel and organization. It is possible to identify certain generic conventions in these documents. When Frank Hawkings left Lahai Estate in 1936 to take up his position at Kumbazha (from where, in changed circumstances, he never had a farewell address), he received another such manuscript. This one, slightly less

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elaborate than the first, nevertheless follows a similar structure: In the opening paragraph the staff ‘beg leave to avail ourselves of this opportunity of testifying our sincerest appreciation of your beneficient [sic] and able management and to bid farewell to your goodself and Mrs Hawkings’. It moves on to recognize his ‘extreme kindness and sympathy’. In a slightly less common note, the lives of these workers intrudes into the next paragraph as they lament that ‘life on the estate, to most of us is more or less like an exile’ before thanking him again for helping them ‘to forget our loneliness’: ‘We hope it will be gratifying to you to learn that your genial manners and pleasant ways have made a deep impression our minds, so that we had no occasion to regret our sojourn to these hills.’ Despite the elaborate vocabulary and similarity of structure, this moment, this parallel of exile, does allow a more personal, a more intimate bond to peep through the prose, which leads me to ask whether the following paragraph is a reversion to formulaic sayings or whether it hints at a more personal disciplinary style in Frank Hawkings’ ‘deep devotion to duty, your love of order and discipline, and above all, your ready forgiveness whenever we committed mistakes’. As with the Peravanthanam Estate letter, the text then turns to ‘the charity and kindness which Mrs Hawkings has generously extended to those that have been sick and needy’. It concludes with regrets at ‘your inevitable departure from amongst us’ but expresses ‘comfort in the thought that your sphere of activities will still be in the Ranni Valley District’, and wishes him a ‘long life, perfect health and uninterrupted happiness’. Clearly, these letters are not so generically formulated that they all have the same phrases, yet they do all appear to follow a clear organizational pattern. These are the only two such letters to my grandfather that I have. Fortunately, he was not the only planter who received and treasured such documents. His old friend, Thomas Park (who took the risk of bringing his daughters back to India after the outbreak of the Second World War – see Chapter 4) also kept his farewell address from Venture Estate, Tenmalai, 21 March 1948. Addressed to ‘Thomas Walter Urquhart Park Esquire, Superintendent, Venture Estate, Malayalam Plantations Limited’ (the name itself suggesting a different class background to Frank Hawking’s more modest origins), this document follows a similar pattern, begging leave to ‘express our deep sense of gratitude and humble admiration for your meritorious services to our Company during the past twenty five years and more’. The inability to express their true feelings is explained in terms of ‘the psychological truth that when emotion is strong, the tongue refuses to speak’. The address then moves, like the others, to refer to his work on the estate: ‘Respected sir, you first arrived from England in 1920 and by your character

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and capacity you rose to the position of the Superintendent of Venture Estate in April 1932. Your administration of the estate was marked by unusual prosperity and all around progress in the affairs of the Company. Your grasp of the Plantation problems is profound and no wonder that you were elected as a Member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Planters of Travancore and Rubber Advisory Board of India’. The next move is to address his more personal qualities and treatment of the workers, where he has done all he can ‘to make them happy and contented’. Particular emphasis is put on the Venture Estate School which he started and in which he has always taken ‘a keen interest . . . donating year after year decent sums towards prizes for deserving pupils and sumptuous meals, cloth and sweets for all pupils on the “School Day”’. His work for the Estate hospital also receives considerable praise, as does the fact that he was able ‘to get food grains for the Estate during the dark days of the War and after, and kept us free from want’. Finally, as seems to be a common pattern, the address turns to his ‘talented wife, Mrs E.M. Park, noble and broadminded by temperament and a doctor by profession’ who ‘has been by your side through the times of stress and has ably supported you in all your ameliorative schemes’. ‘The people of this country’, it concludes, again echoing other letters, ‘whatever their faults, are not wanting in feelings of gratitude and we assure, Sir, that your name as well as that of Mrs Park will be cherished with affection and admiration for a long time to come’. Frank Hawkings’ assistant at Kumbazha, Pat Hall, also received two such farewell addresses from other estates where he worked. Of significance here is the fact that he continued to work in Kerala (Travancore had become part of Kerala) after others had left. The first, from Nagamally Estate, South Kerala, is dated 20 June 1965. Unlike the others, this one is hand written in a careful and elegant script and colourfully decorated. Otherwise, it follows a similar pattern to the older letters: The style remains ornate: ‘Now that the time to say adieu is here . . .’ and the qualities of the superintendent are praised using elaborate vocabulary: ‘We express with great regret the fact that we will be missing an affable, considerate, and highly principled employer.’ Following this, the text turns in familiar style to recognition of his work and that ‘you have promoted between yourself and the staff a mutual sense of confidence and respect, which highly evokes our admiration’. It moves, again in generic fashion, to point to their own ‘shortcomings and failures, which on occasions may have aroused your justified annoyance and displeasure’ before commenting on how he had ‘tackled the various social and economic problems that confronted you here, with consumate tact and intuitive foresight, inspite of the fact that these problems were often counter to your personal inclinations and alien to your belief’. Here, as with other points in these

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letters, these more personal and local stories, these likes and dislikes, questions of discipline and tackled problems, emerge in their particularity but never show themselves beyond these hinted-at histories. He is also commended for encouraging sports, and finally it is suggested that he ‘would have found Mrs Hall not only a willing companion, but also a source of inspiration and guidance’. This address is also interesting for one quirky characteristic: The capital letters opening each paragraph, read vertically, spell out the name of the estate NAGAMALLAY. Perhaps this was an emerging trend, for the capital letters of Pat Hall’s farewell address from Dymock Estate, Vandiperiyar, delivered 24 April 1967, spell out his full name: PGSHALLESQ (or perhaps they had seen the earlier address, and chosen to follow the example). Visually much more like the other addresses – printed with an ornate border – this document too follows the same general outline and style, commenting in decorative prose ‘on this the eve of your departure from our midst’ on their ‘heartfelt appreciation of all that you have done for us’. There is a more personalized comment, drawing attention again to one of his evident personal interests: ‘Sports activities were encouraged and often organised under your personal supervision. The volley-ball court and the Foot-ball ground and the opening of the Staff club will stand as silent yet permanent testimony to the interest you took in the welfare of the estate employees.’ Alongside thanks for ‘your institution of trophies for volley ball tournaments and for runners-up in badminton’, his general ‘earnestness of purpose, determination to improve the estate and the lot of all connected with it’ are singled out for attention. What can we make of these farewell addresses, often to be found hanging in unexpected places in the dampness of British homes? How do we account for this genre, its continuation over many years? What did the makers, presenters and recipients make of them? A slightly different document gives us a clue here. This is not a farewell address like the others, but nevertheless a document my grandfather kept. It is an open letter, dated 22 August 1941, to Sachivothama Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar, Dewan of Travancore (Figure 6.5). This chief minister would play an interesting role in the history of Travancore, particularly in his insistence in 1947 that the state should not join the Indian Union following independence, but should instead become a separate country. Following opposition from both Congress and Communist parties, and an attempt on his life, he left his position, and Travancore eventually became part of the Indian state of Kerala. The purpose of this letter from the ‘public of Pathanamthitta’, evident only in the final few paragraphs, is to request assistance in developing ‘extensive tracts and bogs and marshes in our forests’ for ‘paddy cultivation’, the ‘harnessing of

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Figure 6.5 Letter to the Dewan of Travancore

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Perunthenaruvy falls’ for the generation of hydroelectric power, improvements to the ‘chief channel for the flow of traffic’ in the area, ‘the Mundakkayam-Punalar road which unhappily is broken up in more than one place – at Ranni and Kumbazha – by intersecting rivers and rivulets’, and finally ‘a humble prayer for the establishment of a Veterinary Hospital and an Ayurvedic Hospital with a herbarium attached thereto’. These were clearly local concerns that also concerned my grandfather: the damaged road at Kumbazha directly affected the Kumbazha estate and the transportation of tea, rubber and other goods. In order to lay the ground for such requests, the letter makes many moves similar to those we have already seen in the farewell letters: It is printed in similar style and font with an elaborate floral border (each, however, is different). It starts, like the others, with gratitude and praise in elaborate prose: ‘We deem it a great privilege to have been allowed to welcome the administrative head of the State to our Taluque’ (Taluque or Taluk is an administrative region). The letter turns to praise his involvement in a number of important political actions: ‘We do not propose to recount the innumerable blessings you have conferred upon this State. But it is improper not to mention the Great Temple Entry Proclamation that has wafted the fragrance of the fame of our beloved Maharaja and his Royal mother to the ends of the earth.’ This is a reference, as in my grandfather’s address mentioned earlier, to the temple entry proclamation made on 12 November 1936, which allowed entry by all Hindus irrespective of caste to the temples (kshetram) of Travancore, a proclamation that received considerable attention and praise across India. The letter goes on to suggest that Travancore ‘has been substantially benefitted by the profundity of your erudition in the realm of law and particularly of constitutional law inasmuch as the laws of this country have been brought up-to-date and into line with those of British India’. After further praise of Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar’s many achievements, any one of which would be ‘sufficient to win for a statesman an everlasting niche of fame’, and before making their specific requests, the writers of the letter talk specifically of their local situation: ‘away from the highways of Travancore we are often left in the lurch to languish in obscurity, though noted for our unflinching loyalty and selfless service to the King and country. We have a hoary past for religiosity and culture as is eloquently proclaimed by the famous shrine of Sabarimalai Sastha in whose presence no distinction between man and man has ever been recognized from time immemorial’. And so, they finally move to their request for marsh clearance, hydroelectric power, road improvements and a hospital. This letter helps locate the other farewell addresses in relation to local language practices. It is important, of course, that these letters are in English,

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and, as noted above, were written by professional petition writers. Their style would seem to emerge from several sources: In a number of ways, they reflect local, Malayalam practices of politeness and praise, ways of addressing those seen as holding higher social status. They also draw on English formulae employing Latinate vocabulary (‘substantially benefitted by the profundity of your erudition in the realm of law’), which may be seen as simultaneously translation equivalents of the Malayalam, as reflecting phrases found in other colonial documents, and as an attempt to achieve a high literary tone of erudition, of benefit both to the status of the petition writer and of the petition itself. The writer also appears to wish to demonstrate a level of familiarity with idiomatic English phrases (left in the lurch to languish in obscurity, a hoary past for religiosity), again, we can assume, to show an alternative aspect of mastery of this colonial language English. Interesting to note too are those phrases such as ‘from time immemorial’ which, as we saw in the article on Kerala elephants (‘From time immemorial the most famous tamed tuskers in Kerala’) written some 65 years later in 2006, still have currency in the region. While the farewell addresses differ in two important ways – they are farewell salutations rather than requests, and they are addressed to European estate managers rather than Indian administrators – they share many features in common, in style, organization and framing. When we look to understand the provenance of these farewell addresses, then, we need to locate this within (Southern) Indian forms of address and interaction, while also acknowledging the overlay of English and colonial relations. The ornate language is at once a reflection of formal Malayalam modes of address, the development of an equivalent style in English (with its very different options of idiom and vocabulary), a form of display to demonstrate command of an elevated style of English, and, perhaps, a weapon of the weak (J. Scott, 1990). From this point of view, this style, with its mixture of elevated, Latinate vocabulary and more colloquial turns of phrase – from ‘venture to avail ourselves of this opportunity’ to ‘rather than selfishly pine at our bad luck our hearts go with you’, from ‘avail ourselves of this opportunity of testifying our sincerest appreciation of your beneficient and able management’ to ‘no occasion to regret our sojourn to these hills’ – can be viewed in terms of those ‘hidden transcripts’ that underlie many local acts of resistance to domination. As Scott (1990) points out, acts of resistance, whether conducted linguistically (gossip, rumour), culturally (performances and subcultures) or physically (poaching, squatting, deserting) are often hidden and subversive. These ‘simple acts of false compliance, parody, pretence, and mimicking are the strategies by which the marginalized detach themselves from the ideologies of the powerful, retain a measure of critical thinking, and

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gain some measure of control over their life in an oppressive situation’ (Canagarajah, 2000: 122). The generic pattern here – in the letter to Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar, a long introduction praising his work and qualities before finally getting to the various requests; in the farewell addresses, similar lengthy lists of qualities and achievements on the estates, before wishing them good fortune – can be seen in other forms of writing in South Asia, where as Kachru (1997; Kachru & Nelson, 2006) notes, lengthy preambles (from an Anglonormative perspective) with recurrent use of stylistic embellishments and idioms will frequently come before arguments, requests, explanations or statements of intent. And while we should be very cautious about invoking an ‘Indian style’ of writing, these texts do show similar features to those identified by Kachru (1997) in terms of an incantatory style (although retained as written documents, these were nevertheless ‘farewell addresses’) and exuberant rhetorical flourishes. While conforming to certain patterns found elsewhere in India, however, we also have to see them as reflecting certain commonalities across colonial lines with regard to the social order (in the thanks, for example, at the end of each address, to the wives of these estate managers in terms of ‘a mother’s love and solicitude on us’ or the ‘the charity and kindness . . . extended to those that have been sick and needy’), and as expressive of colonial work relations. And in these acts of linguistic mimicry, rhetorical flourish, and perhaps exaggerated compliance, we have to see not just the reproduction of rhetorical structure but also the agentive traces of resistance, the multivocal expressions of both compliance and defiance. If, then, we can give a rough indication of both their general provenance and their generic form, we are left with the question of how they serve as mnemonic traces, those ‘shards of exchange’ that are ‘embedded in the debris of trans-oceanic contact’ that ‘permeate the ebb and flow of global social exchange’ (Joseph, 2007: 62; see Chapter 1). While elephant stories called up a world of jungle clearing, of mahouts and temples, of the dangers and the domestication of the wild, these texts brought memories of service, both service by estate workers to the managers and service by these managers to the company and to the Empire. Within these texts, however, Malayalam ways of being peep through, reinsert themselves in the rhetorical style, the flourishes, the sentiment, the affect. As mnemonic traces of estate relations between European and Indian workers, these farewell addresses carry with them traces of caste, of other languages, of other rhetorical styles, of lives in parallel exile in the hills of Travancore, of privations suffered or overcome, of sports tournaments and trophies. They also carry with them traces of how Indian officials and European managers occupied parallel positions in India

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at the time, and they show how a certain genre can develop and continue over many years in a language implanted in the Indian continent.

Creating Local Worlds: Genres, Discourses and Styles These texts present us with another question, a more general one for understanding language and culture, and it is to this I shall now turn in the final part of this chapter. This also ties in to the discussion of the previous chapter, where it was suggested that we do not speak languages so much as draw on linguistic resources. Here I shall look at this from a slightly different perspective. Genres are usually understood as those aspects of textual forms – internal or external – that help us recognize a text for what it is, a poem, a bus ticket, a newspaper, a shopping list. The genre of these farewell addresses – these genres in unexpected places, these unexpected genres – present us with an intriguing challenge: Given that they are in English, and that from their style and language display much more than mere translations from Malayalam, how do we understand the work they do linguistically and culturally in the context of Travancore? If we view languages as key means of categorization of the world, then the argument here would be that these texts either reflect Malayalam sentiment in translation (if such a possibility is realisable across languages), or they must be inevitably English in their cultural orientation. Clearly, however, as the discussion above suggested, there is much more going on here. A dominant focus of approaches to variety suggests that it is the way that languages cut up the world differently that is central to understanding cultural diversity. As I have discussed at length elsewhere (Pennycook, 2010a), there are considerable problems with this focus on languages as representing local realities. Blommaert explains: ‘There is a linguisticideological dimension to this, in which it is assumed that language functions in a community because it provides local meanings: meanings that provide frames for understanding the local environment, to categorize and analyse the (strictly) local world. References to the unique worldviews enshrined in these languages often revolve around local functionality as well; the worldviews are expressed in terms and grammatical relations that address or articulate a local decoding of the world’ (Blommaert, 2010: 44). In the previous chapter, I emphasized the importance of understanding language as locally used. This argument, however, concerns local practices (Pennycook, 2010a) rather than particular languages in relation to local worldviews, a focus which lacks consideration of mobility and of other modes of local organization. On the one hand, then, we need to consider that

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languages are not stuck in one place but are mobile. Mobility, argues Blommaert (2010) is the central challenge for new sociolinguistic analysis. While traditional sociolinguistics fixed languages in time and space, recent sociolinguistic work (Makoni & Makoni, 2010; Sebba, 2010) has tried to account for the dislocation of languages, of languages in motion. As I have been arguing throughout this book (and see particularly Chapter 2), we need to embrace an understanding of unexpected places – languages turning up in unexpected places and the reasons why this turning up is not expected – as part of a general view that can avoid the local being conceived in static terms. All too often, the global is considered to be the context of movement and fluidity to be juxtaposed with the fixity of locality. This is not just a question of increased mobility brought about by changing material conditions of late modernity but also a need to change our accounts of language in motion at all times. Synchronic structuralist snapshots of languages stuck in time and place have never been able to account well for languages as used by mobile humans, let alone humans with mobiles. On the other hand, we need to consider not only languages but resources, discourses, genres and styles. In his reworking of Halliday’s (1978) tripartite distinction between ideational/field functions (what is being talked about) interpersonal/tenor functions (relations between interactants) and textual/ mode functions (textual organization), Fairclough (2003: 27) proposes the following ‘types of meaning’ (rather than functional categories): ways of representing (discourse), ways of being (style) and ways of acting (genres). These elements – discourse (the content of the text), style (the particular panache of the writers) and genre (those textual habits they draw on) – can be clearly seen in the addresses discussed in the previous section. While this may usefully take us beyond the problems with these functional categories (e.g. the problem, that ideational and interpersonal functions are realized through the third, textual, function), Fairclough’s framework can also be improved. It is not just genres that are actions, for example, since genres, discourses and styles all need to be seen in terms of practices. It is also limiting to look at discourses in terms of representation since this takes us back into the trap of a representational view of language. As Foucault pointed out long ago, discourses are not ‘a mere intersection of things and words’ (Foucault, 1972: 48); rather than ‘treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations)’, he suggested, we need to understand discourses ‘as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things’ (Foucault, 1972: 49). And to view style as being (rather than, say, becoming) similarly lacks a dynamic element of practice (Fairclough’s alternative term

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identification gives a better sense of the active process of styling). A preferable way of framing this, then, drawing on non-representational theories of practice, becoming and mobility (Pennycook, 2010a; Thrift, 2007) is to look at genres, discourses and style as practices that form the objects of which they speak: Texts, knowledge and identity are the inter woven effects of discursive, generic and stylistic practices. The notion of register is useful here since all languages are ‘culturally differentiated into distinct registers of discourse that are associated with particular social practices and categories of persons’ (Agha, 2007: 79). For Agha, the key process to understand is that of enregisterment, whereby different forms of semiotic material (linguistic and non-linguistic) become registers, or ‘cultural models of action’ (Agha, 2007: 81) that acquire particular sets of value that take on the status of ‘social facts’. The question, then, is not one of how languages cut the world up differently, but rather how different texts, different ways of knowing and different identities are produced by the often interlingual use of language resources in repeated generic, discursive and stylistic practices; and how these become settled – enregistered – fixed into ways of acting and understanding that consolidate meaning in temporary, or longer-lasting frameworks. While languages do of course influence aspects of our cultural and perceptual worlds, it is local discursive, generic and stylistic practices that play a far greater role in the organization of social life and cognition. As with the farewell addresses written in English, it is the local conditions of caste, class and estate work, the local patterns of addressing superiors, of expressing politeness and of organizing text that matters. Let me provide an example from a very different context. At the Clunes and District Agricultural Society Spring Show (the 149th such show, held in Clunes, in Victoria, Australia, on Saturday 21 November 2009), there were a number of ‘special attractions’, from the Shetland Pony Feature show, and the Chain Saw Sculpter, to the Black Snake Reptile Display, Speed Knitting Competition, Ladies Woodsplitting Competition and Gum Boot Throw. Amid this organization of local activities – and it is worth pausing to reflect on how entertainment and competition is being organized here – there are intriguing sub-categories. The Bute Ute competition, for example, features a range of different types of Ute (a utility or pick-up truck), including B & S (Bachelor and Spinster) Ute – pre-1986, Chick’s Ute, Town and Country Ute, 4WD Street Ute (over 5000 km), Business Promo Ute, Working Farm Ute, Loudest Ute ((a), V8 Utes; (b) 6 cyl Utes; (c) 4 cyl Utes), Feral Ute, Ute with a boot and so on. This categorization of local vehicles, while containing terms that are interestingly Australian (the very term Bute Ute, for example), is less interesting for being ‘in English’ than for being a local town

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and country categorization of local vehicles. Difference is not constructed here along lines that are significant as linguistic categories; rather these are questions of genre, discourse and style, of the active organization of text, knowledge and identity. Section X – Craft, meanwhile, contains not only an interesting categorization of local crafts – 1. Hooked hand made floor rug or mat; 3. Article using recycled material, to be listed; 14. Article of China painting; 16. One handmade greeting card; 17. Page of scrapbooking (in plastic pocket) – but also the intriguing 19. Any other article not specified above. This brings an odd echo of Borges’ well-known ‘Chinese encyclopaedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’ which divided up the animal world into the following categories: ‘a) those that belong to the emperor; b) embalmed ones; c) those that are trained; d) suckling pigs; e) mermaids; f) fabulous ones; g) stray dogs; h) those that are included in this classification; i) those that tremble as if they were mad; j) innumerable ones; k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush; l) others; m) those that have just broken a flower vase; n) those that resemble flies from a distance’ (Borges, 1942/1999: 231). Borges’ invented classification probably derives inspiration from some equally strange list, possibly of Chinese origin, and, as Lakoff (1987) has pointed out, is not dissimilar from various classifications in different cultures, but it also seems to echo these competitions at the country fair, with ‘Any other article not specified above’ recalling ‘those that are included in this classification’ and ‘others’ as part of a classificatory system. Above all, however, it is not so much that this list is supposedly in Chinese (which in Borges’ time suggested general ‘otherness’ whereas today it has become a sign of more pragmatic engagement with difference) but that it suggests a local practice of organizing. It is unfortunate that at times it has been interpreted as a statement about languages. Thus in an introductory text to sociolinguistics, this same text is cited as evidence of the ways in which ‘The many languages of the world are. . .a rich source of data concerning the structure of conceptual categories’ (Romaine, 1994: 25). For Foucault, by contrast, it was reading this very passage from Borges that inspired his writing of Les Mots et Les Choses (words and things, translated as The Order of Things): ‘This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old definitions between the Same and the Other’ (Foucault, 1966/2002: xvi). This is not about thinking in a particular language – French

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versus Chinese, for example – but about the way the world can be categorized. And from there follows the question of how it is that our worlds are ordered the way they are, a question of local practices, not languages.

Language, Class and Globalization There does not in fact seem to be any strong reason why we should group people together on the basis of supposed joint membership of a language club. As noted in the previous chapter (Chapter 5), it is this clubbing together of supposed affinities around supposed languages that allows for the strange idea of the native speaker. Cameron observes that a ‘McDonald’s restaurant in Budapest must serve its customers in Hungarian, but it will be Hungarian spoken according to the same norms of interaction which govern the company’s service in Chicago’ (Cameron, 2003: 33). This has more to do with particular language practices than with separate languages. Kramsch (2006) draws attention to a similar concern when she points out that if one American speaks of ‘options and opportunities’ and the other of optiones y opportunidades, they may in a sense be speaking the same language. ‘Many Europeans’, she suggests, ‘talk the same globalspeak even as they speak German, Italian or Dutch about minority rights, women’s rights, race and ethnicity concerns. Many Chinese or Koreans now speak an American neoliberal discourse of consumerism, entrepreneurship and economic competitiveness even as they speak Chinese or Korean’ (Kramsch, 2006: 102). These two cases differ in that the first is the result of the global imposition of norms of interaction – generic and stylistic practices – whereas the second is the result of engagement in similar discursive practices. In both cases, however, the language practices the speakers have in common unite them more than their different languages divide them. One of the more extreme versions of the argument that it is social class rather than different languages that is the greater determiner of difference came from Russian linguist Nikolai Iakovlevich Marr (1865–1934), who argued that language is a product of social and historical class formations, and evolves in direct relation to social and economic change. From this point of view, ultimately, languages are class based and thus cut across national language boundaries, so a French labourer has more in common linguistically with a German labourer than with a French capitalist (Newmeyer, 1986). Rather than the dominant narrative of historical linguistics in which one proto-Indo-European language is thought to have evolved into a multitude of European languages, Marr takes as a starting point a multitude of conflicting dialects that move towards unity (Helsloot, 2010). Marr’s argument was

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the ultimate superstructuralist position, suggesting that class-based language practices were more significant than other linguistic formations. Although Marr’s views were highly influential in the Soviet Union under Stalin, they were later strongly refuted, including by Stalin himself in his 1950 article on Marxism and Problems of General Linguistics. Language, Stalin argued, was not part of the superstructure determined by the economic base, but instead operated independently: ‘In this respect language radically differs from the superstructure. Take, for example, Russian society and the Russian language. In the course of the past thirty years the old, capitalist base has been eliminated in Russia and a new, socialist base has been built. Correspondingly, the superstructure on the capitalist base has been eliminated and a new superstructure created corresponding to the socialist base. The old political, legal and other institutions, consequently, have been supplanted by new, socialist institutions. But in spite of this the Russian language has remained basically what it was before the October Revolution.’ (1950, np). Language was not, for Stalin, class based. If Marr’s arguments were perhaps a step too far, a rather over-determined version of class, they nevertheless made the point – along lines of international rather than national socialism – that among possible categories of language users, one based on a view of languages as national entities and their speakers is not necessarily a very useful one. It is precisely because of this anti-nationalist stance that Stalin intervened, since by the 1950s the Soviet Union had shifted from its earlier ideals of socialism: while still ever more interested in the goal of spreading socialism internationally, it now combined this with a fervently patriotic orientation towards the Russian homeland. A linguistics that promoted a vision of shared class-based language over nationally based language differences (the language of steel-workers rather than the language of Russians) had therefore become anathema to a new era of postwar nationalism. By ‘de-historicizing and de-socializing language’ by declaring it politically neutral, Stalin was able to argue along national lines for Russian as the language of the Soviet Union, with minority languages (‘dialects’) no longer classified as languages (Helsloot, 2010: 234). Twentieth century linguistics, in Russia and elsewhere, has followed this nationalist trend, focusing on languages as abstract national entities, ignoring the material domains of language use and unfortunately obscuring significant observations about the commonality of language practices. Marr’s version of international class dialects is of course somewhat different from Cameron’s remarks about McDonald’s workers: they do not speak as they do because of a commonality of class practices from which their speech derives but rather from the global imposition of modes of communication in all McDonald’s outlets. A similar point might be made about

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the global spread of linguistic practices in call centres (Cameron, 2003; Friginal, 2009) where particular modes of communication are imposed and localizable variants largely expunged: These ‘customer oriented’ language practices are not speech variants emerging from the commonality of work practices so much as the global imposition of language practices. ‘What is exported globally,’ in such contexts, argues Hultgren (2011: 37), ‘is a linguistic style, not the language itself’. This is precisely what is at stake in conditions of globalization: the regulation of language practices is part of the construction of class. While the class base of workers in fast food outlets and call centres is very different in different parts of the world – these are relatively prestigious forms of work in many economies, and the requirement of strong English skills is largely dependent on several forms of capital (economic, linguistic, cultural) – the regulation of such language is also part of the formation of class conditions defined by the nature of the linguistic interactions one is engaged in. Globalization thus creates global classes of workers – fast food or call centre workers for example – whose material class positions may vary quite considerably: A call centre worker in Dundee, Scotland may typically be a high-school-educated woman on a relatively poor salary, while a call centre worker in Manila in the Philippines may more likely be a college-educated male on a relatively high pay scale. Yet both, in effect, may be part of the same linguistically regulated class formation. Duchêne and Heller (2011) show how values attributed to languages within older nationalist orders have been changed under conditions of late modernity and neoliberal ideology so that multilingual capacities are valued differently according to local conditions of capital and labour. While similarly intersted in the shift away from nationalist language ideologies, my argument here is a different one, focusing on the possibility of language-based class formations rather than the necessary primacy of economic determinations of value. Stalin was probably right that a view of language only as a superstructural reflection of socioeconomic infrastructure was to take materialist ideology beyond its boundaries, but his insistence that national languages somehow exist outside class relations marked the triumph of nationalist over critical linguistics. What Stalin could also never have foreseen was the poststructuralist inversion of base and superstructure. This ‘superstucturalist’ orientation which inverts ‘our ordinary base-and-superstructure models until what we used to think of as superstructural actually takes precedence over what we used to think of as basic’ (Harland, 1987: 1–2) is in its own way perhaps as distorted as Marr’s view of language: On the one hand all language is a supertstructural reflection of socioeconomic relations; on the other, all social realities are the product of superstructural discourses. In between

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these extremes, but assuming neither Stalin’s insistence on languages as divorced from socioeconomic relations nor a realist refutation of the power of discourse, we can discern two distinct possibilities. In the first, a case can be made that the language practices of people engaged in similar forms of labour – say fishing people in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines or Vanuatu – may have much more in common with each other than with other users of the ‘same language’. In the second, the imposition of global stylistic and generic practices as well as the participation in global discourses (which may be less agentive than this phrasing suggests) may in various ways constitute language-based class conditions. Language practices may therefore be as much part of the formation of global linguistic classes as the material conditions of the speakers.

Not Just the Oddity of Unusual Juxtapositions Elephant stories, farewell addresses and Bute Ute classifications have opened up several lines of thought in this chapter. As Foucault noted in his discussion of Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia, it is ‘not simply the oddity of unusual juxtapositions’ (Foucault, 1966/2002: xvii) that is both amusing and disconcerting in this list, but rather the ‘fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed. What is impossible is not the propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their propinquity would be possible’ (Foucault, 1966/2002: xviii). Where, he asks, could frenzied and innumerable animals meet those that have been drawn with a very fine camelhair brush except in such listings made possible by language? These animals turning up in unexpected places, in unexpected classifications, raises the questions of how and why we order the world the way we do. Once we take non-representational theories of practice, becoming and mobility seriously, we can understand genres, discourses and style as practices that form the texts, knowledge and identity of which they speak. This position then makes it possible to see language practices as part of the formation of the social. While the examples from the Clunes and District Agricultural Society Spring Show suggest that craft and Ute styles are locally engaged social practices, their listings also provide the frame on which these practices can make sense, the place where a Working Farm Ute and a Ute with a boot can meet. Such organizations of social sense are grounded in local discursive, generic and stylistic practices rather than in some abstract organizational principle based in a notion of language. The carnivalesque in Borges and the attempt to develop a linguistics in relation to Marxist thought, brings to

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mind two or Marr’s contemporaries, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895– 1975) and Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (1895–1936). Although Bakhtin’s work, with its focus on carnival, intertextuality and double-voicing, has been widely adopted in linguistic and cultural studies, the socialist politics and anti-nationalist implications of his work are often overlooked in the liberaldemocratic centrism of contemporary cultural and linguistic orthodoxies. A similar point can also be made about that other contemporary, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896–1934), who has provided the base for so-called sociocultural theory, without the nature of the materialist social theory with which he worked being adequately understood (Holborow, 1999). Voloshinov (1895–1936) linked Marxist thought and linguistics explicitly, critiquing the ‘individualistic subjectivism’ and ‘abstract objectivism’ (Voloshinov, 1986/1929: 48) of the emerging science of linguistics in the early 20th century. The idea of a synchronic linguistic system, he pointed out, ‘does not correspond to any real moment in the historical process of becoming’ (Voloshinov, 1986/1929: 66; italics in original); ‘the divorce of language from its ideological impletion,’ he argued, ‘is one of abstract objectivism’s most serious errors’ (Voloshinov, 1986/1929: 71). and it is ‘not experience that organizes expression, but the other way around – expression organizes experience.’ (Voloshinov, 1986/1929: 85; italics in original). Stalin’s stamping out of a Marxist-oriented, class-based version of language that placed becoming, practice and expression to the fore, in favour of an abstract nationalist vision of language, perhaps ranks low on the long list of his massive sins and errors (he was, after all, only mirroring the nationally-oriented linguistics at play everywhere else) but this intervention marks a sad moment in 20th-century linguistic thought. Bakhtin’s ideas emerged before the Stalinist – and more general linguistic – attempts to deride linguistic theory grounded in practice in favour of nationalist oriented views of language. His focus on parody and multivocality undermines the separability of languages inherent in ideas of nations and native speakers. The potential of this thinking can be seen in Blackledge and Creese’s (2009) use of Bakhtinian ideas to shed light on ‘heritage’ language classrooms in the UK, where students used ‘varieties of parodic language to mock their teacher, to mock each other, to mock notional students as second-language learners, and to mock their school’s attempts to transmit reified versions of “cultural heritage”’ (Blackledge & Creese, 2009: 252). In the actions of these students as they mock the reified notions of language and culture presented by ideas of heritage, in the invocation of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque with its focus on voice and intertextuality, we can see similar use of the weapons of the weak (parody, mimicry) discussed earlier, as well as challenges to the reifications of language and culture that were part of the modernist and nationalist dream.

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If critical theory around languages gives rise only to a view of languages in competition, of English as dominant because of the economics that drive globalization, and other languages as suffering in relation to it, we run the danger of operating only with the abstract entities of languages underpinned by loose descriptions of socioeconomic relations. We need instead to grasp that while Marr overstated the possibility of thinking in terms of class languages, Stalin’s counterargument that languages were not superstructural is challenged both by a poststructuralist inversion that sees infrastructural relations in part produced in language, as well as by a focus on language practices that grounds language use in the everyday. In the organization of Bute Utes, the traces of elephants and the Malayalam voices seeping through the English farewell addresses, we see the ways in which it is not languages but local generic, discursive and stylistic practices that produce the texts through which we understand the world.

Notes (1) On 12 November 1936, the Maharajah had proclaimed Hindu temples (kshetram) in Travancore open to all castes, a move that was greatly praised by Mahatma Gandhi. (2) The Kochi Tuskers Kerala franchise was terminated in September 2011. (3) Formally, these were not colonial relations since Travancore was not part of British India. (4) I asked a similar question about this letter in my 1998 book (Pennycook, 1998), arriving at a rather inadequate answer since that book framed everything in terms of colonial relations of Self and Other. Now that I have gathered more examples, and looked in greater depth at this period, my interpretation is somewhat different.

7 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackboard

I Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.1 The two-level suburban train clanks out of Central Station. Heading away from the city against the inbound swell of commuters, it is not as crowded as the incoming trains, but still I end up standing by the doors. We creak and clatter across several sets of points before finding our track, rattling our way through crowded stations. It is an achingly clear blue morning; the air is chilly, but the sun is starting to warm the day. It is June, which means the start of winter, and the end of the semester just round the corner. Essay marking and clear blue skies. And that end-of-semester exhaustion. It has been another long semester; international conferences in different parts of the world, teaching from 7 to 9 last night, and here I am on a Friday morning, heading off to find a small language school somewhere in the suburbs. I check my bag to see if I remembered to bring the e-mail with the address that I printed out late last night. Like the other 20 or so passengers standing in the space between the doors, I stand still, motionless, while my mind moves quickly, restlessly, thinking of the quandaries this work presents. The TESOL practicum: watching student teachers perform their lessons. For many of us involved in teacher education, the teaching practicum seems to hold a certain ambivalence: it is hard work; it is disruptive; it involves lots of travelling; it is too time consuming; it demands that we show expertise in a domain from which we are often increasingly distanced in our current work. And yet, it is also a welcome break from offices, meetings, seminars, problems with the printer, furtive corridor conversations; it takes us back to the classrooms where, in moments of unlikely nostalgia, we often seem 127

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to place our happiest and most successful teaching moments; it gives us a chance to engage directly with the hard work of teaching – the ‘chalkface’, the ‘real world’ (those metaphors that construct both teacher educators and the classroom in ways we may embrace and resist at the same time). A chance to forget the books, the theories, the papers, the articles, the paradigms, the concepts, the need to keep up. The opportunity to get back to something that, at least for those of us who have taught English for many years, we may feel we really know how to do: a dozen or so years of practice written onto our teacherly bodies. The train pauses at another station, and I gaze out through the grubby window, trying to remember when I was last in this suburb. Most of the people on the platform look Southeast or East Asian. As the doors open and people squeeze onto the train, I try to listen in to conversations: A snatch of Cantonese, then, I think, Vietnamese (or was it Khmer?). This time definitely Putonghua, from the north of China, with its distinctive retroflex ‘r’. Two young men, possibly Lebanese, Arabic music coming from the headphones in their ears; a group of schoolgirls, Asian and Pacific Islander, talking noisily in English. Another of those complexly mixed suburbs whose daily metrolingual practices are part of the way in which cities are managed and achieved linguistically (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010). The train pulls out of the station, and I glance up at the route map above the door. Three more stations to go. II I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. I am travelling light, a briefcase with some papers for a midday meeting back in the city slung over my shoulder. At the same time, as with all journeys, there is a lot of other baggage with me too. This notion of embodied teacher knowledge – that I can make good judgments about this teacher based on my own ingrained feel for teaching practices – also makes me feel uncomfortable: I am not very sure about how my embodied knowledge of teaching relates to the curriculum the students have been following. I need more explicit as well as embodied knowledge. I have not been teaching any of the subjects that the students take as part of the foundation for this teaching, the practicum subject itself, or the courses on curriculum design and methodology, on TESOL in context. Do I really know what I am supposed to be looking for? Will I start to question precisely what this learner teacher has just been taught to do? I recall a practicum observation from the

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previous year when I asked the teacher why she did not make use of the students’ languages in the class. She was puzzled. She thought she was not supposed to be using other languages. Were we not supposed to be using only English? But then, it was not clear where she had got that idea from since in our programmes we have always promoted a more open, bilingual approach to English teaching (Forman, 2010) than some of the English-only ideologies (Auerbach, 1993) elsewhere. So where in fact do her and my knowledge come from? Two more stations to go. In addition to these insecurities about my knowledge, I also have other concerns. One of my agendas on these practicum visits is to introduce a critical element into the discussion, to be a bit disruptive. But what is meant by this overused term ‘critical’? I have been exploring this question in numerous ways over the years (see Pennycook, 2001, 2010b), and now all this baggage has come along for the ride too. There is the sense of critical used in critical thinking, the weakest and most common version of the critical in many domains of education. This view of being critical sees the issue as only one of rational questioning procedures, as a way of trying to create objective distance, of identifying bias or lack of logic. This is all very well as far as it goes, but it is what I once (2001) termed liberal ostrichism in that it buries its head in the sands of objectivism (ostrichism) and fails to link its questioning to a broader social agenda (and by so doing, of course, reproduces its own rational and liberal social agendas).2 One more station to go. We pass through an area of brick warehouses and low factories, the drab, decaying industrial structures of a passing era. Weeds are growing from cracks in the crumbling brickwork, strands of ivy creeping across broken window panes and cracked roof tiles. A second approach to being critical is to incorporate explicit social critique and to see one’s work as overtly aimed towards trying to change inequitable social conditions and people’s understanding of them. This is what I have termed emancipatory modernism (Pennycook, 2001). Its strengths are its clearly articulated social critique and explicit agenda for change; its weaknesses can be its static assumptions about social and political relations and its belief in awareness of inequality as a step towards rationalist emancipation. It is this version of critical work that came to dominate critical work in TESOL and applied linguistics towards the end of the 20th century, as found in critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Wodak, 1996, for example), critical pedagogy (Giroux, 1988; Kanpol, 1994), critical literacy (Clark & Ivanič, 1997; Janks, 2010), or critical views on language policy (Phillipson, 1992, 2009). While crucially putting questions of power, inequality, rights and injustice to the fore, this focus tends also to reaffirm

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concepts such as emancipation, awareness, rationality, objectivity, equality, democracy and transformation, which, from another perspective, may be viewed as products of the same system that gives rise to those very problems that this framework aims to critique. Thus, it both critiques and reproduces at the same time. The train pulls into the station and I walk down the platform towards the exit sign. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, this dilemma – that the tools for rethinking the future cannot simply be the tools of the past – suggests we need a different form of critical resistance (Hoy, 2004). A final way of viewing the notion of critical, then, is as a form of problematizing practice (see Dean, 1994; Pennycook, 2001), a means to think otherwise (Chapter 3), a perspective which questions those very categories – awareness, rationality, emancipation – that underpin a socially transformative agenda. This position, of course, also needs to be subject to critique, not only because of its sometimes difficult theoretical apparatus but also because of its difficulty in establishing a clear political stance. As Foucault put it, ‘the problem is not so much one of defining a political “position” (which is to choose from a pre-existing set of possibilities) but to imagine and to bring into being new schemas of politicisation’ (Foucault, 1980: 190). From this perspective, it is possible to embark on the ethical task not only of seeking to understand different forms of politics but also of provincializing those European frames of knowledge (cf Chakrabarty, 2000) that have come to dominate what counts as the critical. At the very least, viewing the critical in terms of problematizing practice or critical resistance gives us a way of working in language education that does not reduce critical work either to the domain of critical thinking or to modernist frameworks of emancipatory rationality, while simultaneously keeping questions of language, discourse, power and identity to the fore. It is not so much that this problematizing practice should replace these other perspectives but rather that we need to be able to be of three minds, to hold these different ideas simultaneously: we need to think critically, to draw on that long history of critical work and to problematize our practices. Any sophisticated approach to language and politics must inevitably operate with a tension between the need for firm enough ground to engage in political action while always simultaneously questioning the grounds on which such thought and action are located. Critical resistance may be seen in terms of a long project of ‘decentring’. From the humanist challenge to the centrality of religious thought, Freud’s unravelling of the hidden workings of the mind, or Marx’s insistence that history and change had to do with the masses rather than the bourgeoisie, to the feminist challenge to man’s assumptions of centrality, the postcolonial

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challenge to Europe and European history, the fight against white privilege, or the struggle against heteronormativity, critical work has always sought to challenge an assumed centre where power and privilege lie, and to rework both the politics and the language that sustain them. It has thus always had to struggle against the language and ideas through which the world is defined as well as the inequalities these maintain: the givens, the assumptions, the generics, all that makes the centre invisible. III The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime. As I climb the stairs towards the bridge over the tracks, I start to feel weighed down by all this baggage. All I was supposed to do was watch the learner teacher give her lesson, discuss any particular concerns and give her some comments as a basis for writing in her reflective journal. And yet, there is another sense of the notion critical that seems important here, too: critical as in a critical moment, a point of significance, an instant when things change. It seems to me that in the practicum observation, and, come to think of it, our teaching more generally, this is what we are looking for, those critical moments when we seize the chance to do something different, when we realize that some new understanding is coming about. This takes us back to the dilemma of expecting the unexpected (see Chapter 2), the need to be ready to take advantage of those unexpected moments, to grab hold of that unexpected comment, to take up the idea that turns up in an unexpected place, and to acknowledge that we cannot expect the unexpected, since to do so is to undo that unexpectedness, to fail in our readiness to be open to the new. As I argued in Chapter 3, this becomes a question of unexpecting the expected. The classroom is a pantomime, a play of languages and ideas, and as we watch amid the swirling currents of interactions, we know we can only understand some of what is happening and can never know what is about to come. The idea of ‘critical incidents’ has of course received attention in the literature on general teacher education, and to a lesser extent in second language education. As Farrell comments, ‘when a critical incident occurs, it interrupts (or highlights) the taken for granted ways of thinking about teaching’ (Farrell, 2008: 3). This approach to teacher education combines the notion of critical incidents with critical reflection. While sharing an interest in this focus on critical incidents, my approach differs in some important ways: the idea of what is meant by ‘critical’ is located not within the liberal discourses of criticality – critical thinking and critical reflection, where the

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idea of the critical is about stepping back and viewing from a distance – but draws on that intellectual and political history in which the critical is concerned with questions of power and inequality. The common teacher education focus on critical incidents is therefore centrally concerned with subjecting unplanned incidents to reflection in order to shed light on teaching, classroom management, or the curriculum. My focus on critical moments, by contrast, while sharing an interest in the unexpected, makes central the social and political implications of discursive shifts in the classroom. How do we capture those critical moments where something changes, where someone ‘gets it’, where someone throws out a comment that shifts the discourse? A tough question for all teachers is how we manage to pick up on those unexpected moments of potential transformation in the classroom pantomime and turn them into critical moments in both senses. How to turn the unexpected into the productive? And given the limited input I have to this part of the teacher education programme, it is this sense of the critical that will, indeed, be critical here. As Marianne Grey (2009) points out, if in our critical pedagogy we want a serious engagement with difference, and if such an engagement necessarily entails our students exploring the boundaries of how they themselves understand difference – becoming, as she puts it ethnographers of difference – then such critical enterprises have to work through such critical moments, unexpected incidents in the classroom where things shift and unravel. Critical education has to work with the unexpected as much as the expected, for if we have laid out our critical agenda beforehand, we may miss precisely those critical moments that matter. Next to the station, I cut down a small back street to the main road until I find the solid dark brick of the church. There is a bustle of different local shops and businesses – Chinese, Korean, Eastern European – that suggests this suburb is doing well enough. The church stands close to the road, a large imposing structure surrounded by a low wall. Quite strikingly, it is surrounded by notices: one announces in English and Korean its Presbyterian orientation and the times of the services; another asks in English ‘What good is it to gain the whole world and lose your soul? (Mark, 8:36)’; three more announce the presence of the English Language School, one claiming ‘We can help you speak better English – ENROL NOW,’ another ‘Improve your listening, speaking, reading and pronunciation skills.’ Classes are on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9:30–12:30, with ‘Child care available’ (‘Women only’ has been whited out), or Tuesday and Thursday, 7:00–9:00 p.m. for ‘Men and women.’ I start trying to recreate the history behind that white-out and the relationships between these layerings of signs.

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Part of one of the signs has been covered by a poster – a sign of important local concerns – urging that ‘It’s time to have your say! ON BROTHELS . . . Brothels will affect you, your children, your life . . .’ But the sign I linger over longest, in English and Chinese, announces: Easy English Church For New English Speakers Sundays 9:00 a.m.–9:45 a.m. Come and join us – Everyone welcome I am intrigued by this idea of an ‘easy English church’ and the long and difficult history of teaching English for missionary purposes (Pennycook & Coutand-Marin, 2003), ‘There has long been a strong connection between Christian missionary work and English language teaching (ELT) worldwide’ Varghese and Johnston (2007: 5) point out. ‘Today, a significant number of ESL and EFL teachers are evangelical Christians for whom faith and professional work are inextricably intertwined’ (Varghese & Johnston, 2007: 5). Long ignored by the TESOL profession, this connection between Christianity and ELT has only recently been brought into the open for discussion (Wong & Canagarajah, 2009), so that the deep moral questions it raises can be confronted. As Varghese and Johnston argue, for example, ‘Both teaching and research have to rely on a fundamental ability to question and be questioned, to challenge and be challenged; doubt and the capacity for changing one’s mind are a crucial part of the intellectual foundations of teaching and inquiry’ (Varghese & Johnston, 2007: 27). This questioning attitude, this problematizing practice, they argue, is at odds with a religious position that ‘claims a monopoly over the truth’. The idea that ‘certain basic ideas are simply unchallengeable’ (Varghese & Johnston, 2007: 27) may not fit so well with the critical ideas I want to bring to these classrooms. From the waves of born-again teachers from the American mid-west, heading off to China, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union as English teacher-missionaries, to the bible-clutching Seventh Day Adventists offering ‘Free English Lessons’ at the corner of Hyde Park in Sydney, English teaching and Christianity have become strange bedfellows. And despite attempts to promote dialogue across the divide between critical and Christian educators (Wong & Canagarajah, 2009), we seem to date only to have achieved a level of ‘conciliatory dialogue’ that helps clarify certain misconceptions (Canagarajah, 2009: 16). Many moral and political concerns remain to be worked through in this difficult conjunction. Easy English Church for New English Speakers. I seem to have arrived with even more

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baggage. And I am almost late, so I hurry round the back of the church to the church hall. IV A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. This is old-style community ESL, a long way from the brave new world of whiteboards, coloured marker pens and plastic chairs with fold-down desks. Upstairs in the large main room of the hall two uneven tables are covered with assorted, chipped teacups. Chairs gather in a circle. Leading off from the main room with its worn floorboards, threadbare carpet, high wooden ceiling and tall church windows, there are several smaller rooms that also serve as classrooms. A brief wave of nostalgia comes over me. It has been a while since I was in a place like this, and it reminds me of some of my first teaching jobs 30 years ago. I find Liz, the student teacher, and her cooperating teacher, Barbara, and start talking about the upcoming lesson. How will Liz’s lesson today fit into the broader programme? What level are the students? What kind of backgrounds? What will the main focus be today? Why? Soon the students start arriving, so I settle myself in a corner to observe. It is a small class (about 10 students) at a lower intermediate level. The majority are under 20 and Korean: apparently a number of them have come from Korea to stay with relatives here and learn English. Some connection through the church. Korea has been widely noted recently as a country with perhaps an unhealthy obsession with English. Not only are vast amounts of money spent on private English language classes – 20.9 trillion won ($22.9 billion) on private English language education in the year 2008 (Jeon, 2010) – but more than 40,000 Korean school-aged children have been sent to Englishspeaking countries – Australia, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and also Singapore, the Philippines and others – some alone but most with their mothers while their fathers remain in Korea to support them. These families have been termed ‘wild geese’ for their migratory patterns, for turning up in unexpected places to study English, while their fathers are classified variously as the more wealthy ‘eagle fathers’, who visit their families several times a year, as opposed to the poorer ‘penguin fathers’ who cannot afford to do so (Onishi, 2008). The effects on the children (often disoriented between languages and cultures), the mothers (struggling to cope overseas), the fathers (on their own in Korea, battling to

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support their family) and the families as a whole (many do not last the experience) have been enormous. In order to counter this flight of young Koreans, thousands of new English teachers are being hired or imported, and ‘English villages’ are being built so that Koreans get to have an international English experience at home. I try to put all this aside and to focus on the class, the teacher, the blackboard. For a moment, we become one. The teacher has chosen to do a lesson focusing on practical language for what to do when something is broken at home: vocabulary for describing various problems (my sink is blocked, the fuse has blown); practice dialogues for talking to plumbers and electricians; ways of asking a landlord/lady to get something fixed for you. There is a good mix of activities, a bit of grammar, plenty of vocabulary, practice dialogues, free dialogues and some reading. The blackboard is used well, there are pictures to elicit and explain vocabulary items, a tape for a short listening activity. It is going to be followed up by a writing task in which they will write a letter requesting for various items to be fixed. The students participate fairly actively: there is clearly quite a variety of levels in this class, but they all seem to find something useful. The main difficulty is a student of Italian background who wants to talk and to keep the teacher’s attention. It is fun for a while – he is amusing and very active – but soon it becomes too much: his English is hard to follow and the others tune out when he is talking; he tends to go off on tangents and keeps demanding the teacher’s attention. But how to stop him? I make a note: clearly this is something to talk about afterwards. But what else? What else can I find that could be deemed critical? I have become one with the teacher and the blackboard but now I must distance myself again. V I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. Afterwards, we find a quiet space in another of the small rooms off the central hall and sit down to discuss the lesson. The general process here is for the observer to give the teacher-learner a copy of the notes written during the class and to discuss various points. For the student, one goal is to write up in the reflective journal (which will later be handed in to the teacher supervising the practicum) some point of interest. This focus on reflection fits closely with current thinking on teacher education (Farrell, 2007).

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Summarizing trends in the 1990s, Freeman and Johnson (1998) point out several emergent reconceptualizations of teacher education in TESOL. Most significant is the recognition that ‘much of what teachers know about teaching comes from their memories as students, as language learners, and as students of language teaching’ (Freeman & Johnson, 1998: 401). Thus, we have to take into account our students’ embodied histories of learning and teaching, the memories, pains and desires that have been written onto their educated bodies. Learning to teach is not just about learning a body of knowledge and techniques; it is also about learning to work in a complex sociopolitical and cultural political space (see Liston & Zeichner, 1991; Pennycook, 2000) and negotiating ways of doing this with our past histories, fears and desires, our own knowledges and cultures, our students’ wishes and preferences, the institutional constraints and collaborations. The practicum has a very particular role in this process of teacher development. Johnson (1996) discusses the mismatch between a student teacher’s ‘vision’ of what teaching should be and the discovery of the realities of high school classrooms. She concludes that preservice teacher education needs to move away from its prepackaged bits of knowledge delivered in a series of courses and instead provide preservice teachers ‘with realistic expectations about what the practicum teaching experience will be like and what they can expect to gain from it’ (Johnson, 1996: 48). Indeed a common theme in discussion on the TESOL practicum (Crookes, 2003; Richards & Crookes, 1988) is this mismatch between teacher education courses and classroom realities. There is an enormous amount packed in to this sliver of the curriculum: the learner-teacher not only has to learn how to plan and run a class, deal with students, teach language points effectively, but is also expected to develop a much wider understanding of educational philosophy, so that ‘any ES/FL teacher who is trying to construct or reconstruct a personal philosophy of teaching needs to know the historical inheritances with which s/he is working’ (Crookes, 2003: 62); and to understand the moral and political implications as an English teacher of being involved in ‘implementing or resisting national educational policy, and . . . contributing . . . to the reproduction of society or to changes in society’ (Crookes, 2003: 94). English teachers are never just English teachers (teachers are never just teachers, and English is never just English). After the closeness, intensity and inflections of the classroom, we now have to deal with its innuendoes, with all that it might mean. VI Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass.

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The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause. If the practicum itself is a complex and intense microcosm of education, intervention by an observing teacher is a dense and often isolated fragment. There are those expected places of intervention – teacher talk, the blackboard, use of time, sequencing, level and so on – but what about the unexpected and the critical? How to unexpect the expected? How to work through critical moments to develop a wider critical agenda? How to know from this brief observation, with no real knowledge of what has gone before and what is to come, the indecipherable causes of these classroom moments? How to find ways of intervening in the process of the practicum observation in order to bring about potential change? Such concerns derive not only from a busy schedule that makes the practicum visit a peripheral part of my work, but also from my insistence on the moral imperative for critical education and my pedagogical interest in the critical moment. Looking at the process of intervening in the practicum, Freeman (1990) discusses various modes of intervention: the directive, where the purpose is to ‘improve the student teacher’s performance according to the educator’s criteria’ (Freeman, 1990: 108); the alternatives option, in which the aim is to ‘develop the student teacher’s awareness of the choices involved in deciding what and how to teach, and, more importantly, to develop the ability to establish and articulate the criteria that inform those decisions’ (Freeman, 1990: 109); and finally, the nondirective option, the purpose of which is to ‘provide the student teacher with a forum to clarify perceptions of what he or she is doing in teaching and for the educator to fully understand, although not necessarily to accept or agree with, those perceptions’ (Freeman, 1990: 112). Such a framework sits well with recent thinking on teacher education, with its emphasis on ‘reflective teaching as a means by which teachers can work, alone or with students and colleagues, to develop their practice’ (Crookes, 2003: 180; Farrell, 2007). This is a time for teacher-learners to try to reconcile three competing domains: the knowledge and ideas gained through their formal study; the history, beliefs and embodied practices they bring with them; and the constraints and possibilities presented by the particular teaching context. And yet, the focus on reflection runs the risk of maintaining the status quo, of lacking a push, a direction, a motive for change. While for Freeman (1990), the goal of the educator is ‘to help the student

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teacher move towards an understanding of effective teaching and independence in teaching’ (Freeman, 1990: 116–117), we also need to consider how also to maintain a focus on the wider moral and political landscape (Crookes, 2003). How to develop not only effective teaching and independence but also critical practice in teaching, or ‘that continuous reflexive integration of thought, desire and action sometimes referred to as “praxis”’ (Simon, 1992: 49)? Indeed, instead of thinking in terms of the practicum, in which learnerteachers get to practise what they have learned in their theory courses, we might do better to consider the praxicum, in which teacher-learners develop the continuous reflexive integration of thought, desire and action. VII O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you? How, then, to work in a critical agenda, to make this a praxicum rather than a practicum, amidst all the other things we need to deal with? Critical approaches to language education, particularly critical pedagogy, have been critiqued for their bombastic posturing, for creating their own regime of truth, for developing forms of language and knowledge that do not seem helpful for teachers (see Gore, 1993; Johnston, 1999, 2003). At the same time, mainstream approaches to teacher education in TESOL have frequently lacked a social or political dimension that helps locate English and English language teaching within the complex social, cultural, economic and political environments in which it occurs (Auerbach, 1995; Canagarajah, 1999; Pennycook, 2000). As Norton and Toohey (2004) explain, critical second language educators share an interest in ‘how, in diverse sites of language education, practices might be modified, changed, developed, or abandoned in efforts to support learners, learning and social change’ while also acknowledging that ‘critical pedagogy cannot be a unitary set of texts, beliefs, convictions, or assumptions’ (Norton & Toohey, 2004: 2). TESOL, as Allan Luke points out ‘is a pedagogical site and institution for educating the racial and linguistic Other’ (Luke, 2004: 25). It cannot be separated from its colonial, missionary and racist history, nor from its contemporary location amid the politics of globalization, immigration and discrimination. Second language teacher education, the education of teachers about to enter this field, then, has to be a critical education. Yet given the complexity of classrooms, we need ways of doing critical teacher education

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that do not put all their eggs in a pregiven critical curriculum (a criticaldirective option) but rather seek ways of probing, discussing, negotiating in these moments of teacher reflection. ‘To be critical,’ as Luke reminds us, ‘is to call up for scrutiny, whether through embodied action or discourse practice, the rules of exchange within a social field’. This entails ‘an epistemological Othering and “doubling” of the world – a sense of being beside oneself or outside of oneself in another epistemological, discourse, and political space than one typically would inhabit’ (Luke, 2004: 26). In other words, a critical pedagogical enterprise is not foremost about ideology critiques of schooling or the curriculum, nor about teaching subject matter we believe may empower students, nor merely opening a space for our students to speak. Rather it is about the ethical and political demand to think otherwise, to develop a form of critical resistance, to see other possibilities (see Chapters 2 and 3). It is a question of the unexpected and of becoming Other. How to open up a critical agenda through the pursuit of critical moments, to avoid too strong a faith in the promises of a golden curriculum when the possibilities of the unexpected may be at your feet? Rather than a critical-directive framework in which the ideas and issues have been laid out beforehand, I am interested here in the unexpected, in the ways in which we can work with critical moments. How can we make the unexpected part of what we do? VIII I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. Two other recent practicum observations have provided small examples of this. In the first, I was talking to two teachers, Sarah, whose first language was English, and Christian, for whom English was a second/third language, after their co-taught class. We got onto the topic of grammar and knowledge of language and out of this discussion emerged a shift of power. Whereas the so-called non-native speaker of English (see Chapter 5; Braine, 2010; Brutt-Griffler & Samimy, 1999; Kirkpatrick, 2007; Llurda, 2004; Singh, 1998), Christian, had until then always been the disadvantaged one of these two teachers – worried about his command of English, deferring to Sarah’s judgments, over-preparing materials to compensate for this presumed deficiency – as we talked our way through this, the tide started to turn: Christian was proficient in at least one other language, he had been an extremely

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successful learner of English, he had traveled, learned languages, engaged with other cultures; he had at his fingertips a broad and formal knowledge of the language and how it worked. As we talked, Sarah, as a teacher of English who did not speak other languages, started to become aware of her monolingualism and monoculturalism, the fact that it was she who was more out of place in the multilingual, multicultural context of the ESL classroom, not her ‘nonnative speaker’ coteacher (Mahboob, 2010). This shift in power and moment for reflection, then, came from a small opening in the feedback session after class. It is all too common to ascribe noble accents, lucidity and clarity of intonation to some mistaken idea of the native speaker; what we actually need, in contrast, is to understand the multifaceted resourcefulness of language users, whether as teachers or students. And we need a critical stance that can handle this paradox of both supporting nonnative teachers of English and undermining the distinction (Chapter 5). Soon after this, I was observing Bob, a teacher in a lower intermediate reading class. The text was ‘Charlie Two Shoes,’ a simplified newspaper article telling the story of a young Chinese boy who had been exchanging fresh eggs for canned food with US soldiers in Southern China in 1948. Eventually, after establishing a close relationship with them, and having been given the name Charlie Two Shoes as the soldiers’ closest approximation to his Chinese name, the boy had been left behind when the army pulled out. In the 1980s, one of them had received a letter from Charlie and had invited him to the United States. After various visa problems, he and his family had been granted permission to stay, and thus we see a smiling Charlie Two Shoes now living in Ohio close to his old American friends. Why this text? I wanted to know, when we discussed the lesson afterwards. Well, basically, it turned out, because they had not done it before. But did Bob have any problems with it? What else is involved in what we know? One of the first things that came up is the problem with the name. Yes, he did not much like this idea of changing the name. He has always objected to this practice and feels Australians should learn other names. So here we started to touch on an odd disparity between Bob’s own beliefs and his use of this text. I kept pushing. Why an American text? How might this text about an immigrant arriving happily in the US relate to the lives of these students, most of whom were recent arrivals in Australia? What about the war background and the US military (and the silences about what the United States was doing supporting the Guomindang in 1948)? As we talked on, the text, and its potential relationship to these students, and the silences about all of this in the reading lesson (with its nicely presented vocabulary and well-conducted discussion of grammar and meaning) became increasingly problematic. Why were we presenting stories of the happinesses of migration, with the home

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country only as a place to be left behind, and the new country as a friendly accommodating place that will bend visa rules to secure a happy ending? Around the same time a recent immigrant to Australia had burned himself to death when he had heard that his family would not be allowed to join him; more recently Australia developed a ‘Pacific Solution’ in which potential immigrants were kept in camps on Pacific islands, and an internal policy in which new arrivals were detained for long periods in shameful conditions in detention camps. Despite a change in government and promises to develop a more ‘humane’ approach, those legitimately seeking asylum in Australia, fleeing strife, death and torture in countries such as Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq have again been demonized and confined. A new policy sought to send 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia (not a signatory to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees convention) for processing, in return for 4000 people assessed as refugees in Malaysia (a disgraceful proposition thankfully overturned by Australia’s High Court). In this climate, when people legitimately seeking asylum in Australia are being demonized by media and politicians of most political orientations, what sense does it make to present happy tales of the state helping visa applications when for many immigrants, this is a battle where one confronts razor wire, discrimination, deprivation of liberty and the tedium of uncertain bureaucratic outcomes? If nothing else, after this long discussion, we walked away from this feedback session very aware that no text is ever innocent, that what our students may take from a text may be very different for our reasons for presenting it. IX When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. So we start talking about the class. Liz has got a 30-minute break between classes, Barbara can join us for the first 15 minutes, and I have a meeting to get back to. There is never enough time. And the small wooden chairs designed for young children are not the most comfortable things to sit on. Now that we are away from the classroom and its carefully used blackboard, many wider concerns circle around us. The most obvious issue was how to manage the one Italian male in the class. He wants to talk; he is happy to fill the space with hard-to-understand Italian English; he wants the teacher’s attention and he is not so interested in the other students. And the other students find his English difficult to follow. They tune out and do other things when he is talking. We talk about this for a while; it is clearly the most overtly difficult aspect of the class. And, of course, both Liz and

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Barbara are very aware of it. I seem to be restating the obvious. They have discussed it before. Perhaps someone needs to talk to him outside the class. But are we being fair? After all, he is an active and motivated student, behaving in what may be a culturally appropriate manner for him. But there are gender politics at play here too; and cultural appropriacy needs to be negotiated, not just accepted. And his right to behave as he wants clearly impinges on other students’ rights. So, as we move from a discussion of a student who talks too much, to questions of gender, culture and rights, more critical questions start to emerge. There are bigger issues here than just concerns over an individual student; this is not just about personality, and certainly should not be reduced to simplistic discussions of cultural difference (Kubota, 2004, 2010). Rather, it is a question of who gets to dominate the class, about student and teacher gender, about power. This seems a good direction for a critical discussion but we have used up almost half the time talking about this one issue. We try and come up with strategies for dealing with him, but I cannot see much scope here for further critical exploration. Barbara has to go back to the class. I take up a couple of other issues with Liz. I liked the practicality of the lesson, the clear focus on helping students to get things done. But I wonder how many people it was relevant for. The younger Korean students are living with relatives and are unlikely to have to call a plumber to get something fixed; others also did not appear to be relating to the situation easily; few appear to be in rented accommodation where they see themselves as likely to have to deal with these sorts of situations. On the other hand, for one woman, parts of the class seemed to be exactly what she wanted; she asked urgent questions, checked answers, brought in other situations, wrote careful notes. To the extent that this sort of language practice may give people more possibilities to get things done and more power in interactions, this lesson certainly might be seen as critical in terms of helping to provide access to domains that are often denied. Perhaps that is enough to justify the lesson. Certainly the class got some good concentrated language practice and some useful vocabulary. But we discuss ways in which she might tailor it more for the class. I do not want to be too critical here: this sort of contextually relevant language class is surely exactly what we need to encourage. How contextually relevant are we supposed to be? X At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

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I want to push the issue of the dialogues. I felt they were too cooperative. There is a long history of this problem in ESL. On the one hand, we might take this up in terms of the debate over authenticity: should ESL classes aim to be ‘authentic’, or should we accept them as inevitably inauthentic learning spaces? The extremes at either end of this debate seem problematic: classes that try completely to replicate the world outside might be very unproductive learning spaces, but classes that see themselves as wholly separate might be unhelpfully detached. On the other hand, we might take this up in more political terms as reflecting consensual versus conflictual views of society. From a liberal point of view, the social world is generally one in which we have common goals, and although these may at times be in conflict, and although we may need laws, regulations, and police forces to limit ‘antisocial behavior’, civil society should generally be able to proceed as a cooperative venture. From a more critical point of view, however, society is seen as inherently conflictual, riven either by mutually exclusive class interests or by other gender, ethnic or racial divisions. From the one perspective, cooperative dialogues are the norm, and it is only antisocial or other abnormal behaviors that prevent them from happening. From the other perspective, there are no relations without power, and thus any dialogue reproduces relations of power and may be seen as ideologically normalized (Fairclough, 1995). Joseph’s (2006) reminder that all language is ‘political from top to bottom’ is useful here since it draws attention to the point that no language use can stand outside relations of power. Cooperative dialogues therefore need to be seen as reflecting a view that ‘conformity, consensus and cohesion are integral aspects of the perfect society and there is no room for conflict and disruption’ (Williams, 1992: 228). This suggests both a view of society where consensus is the norm and a view of communication, especially interactions involving immigrants and second language learners, where the goal is integration into those consensual norms. While we should not fall into the trap of assuming that such dialogues play too great a role in the socialization of ESL students – they are often far smarter than the dialogues they are asked to perform – it can nevertheless be argued not only that consensual dialogues are inauthentic, but also that they provide passively cooperative subject positions for language learners, or at least that such dialogues limit discursive possibilities for students. The students were given semiscripted dialogues into which they were supposed to interject different details. The topic was calling plumbers and electricians to get things fixed. Again, nice contextual work, but I would have liked them to be more conflictual. When I call a plumber (something I put off unless I really have to), they do not say, ‘Yes certainly, I’ll be there at 6:00.’ Rather, they are busy for the next few days. They may be able to

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squeeze it in on Tuesday at 7:00 a.m. on the way to another job. They will call if they can make it. Or, if not, they will try to come around at lunch on Friday. Will I be home? They will call. Yes, they can call me at work, but I will have to make sure I am home to let them in. Yes, they may be able to send someone today if it is a real emergency, but it will cost extra. They do not understand what I am talking about: what did you say was broken? Perhaps you should try a builder. They do not do that sort of work. Sure they could come and have a look at it next week, but it sounds like a big job. I suggest that for these students with their limited English skills it will be twice as hard. So they need tougher dialogues. A number of people have developed materials based on a more difficult world than the insipid vision of collaborative ESL texts (see Auerbach & Wallerstein, 1987; Goldstein, 1994; Wallerstein & Auerbach, 2004), where students are given more help in negotiating the discriminatory world they will face. We talk about this possibility for a while and agree that it might be useful to try to make dialogues a bit harder, less collaborative. But I am also a bit uncomfortable that this has been a critical-directive intervention, that I have imposed my own agenda too much. Perhaps I should stop pushing my critical views here and just give this very competent student-teacher the green light to get back to her blackboard. There are some good critical possibilities here that raise questions of language, gender, power, and discrimination, but it is also not clear that these concerns are foremost in what Liz wants to do. XI He rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds. Finally, we move on to a few language points. I ask Liz what she thinks about having accepted ‘Close the tap’ to her question about what to do when water is pouring from a tap. She is surprised. I explain that when a student offered this solution, she took it up: ‘Yes, you could close the tap, you could close the tap. But what if you can’t close the tap?’ I ask if this was a strategic move to accept this form; she says she had not noticed it. What did she think about having, in a sense, modelled a nonstandard form for the students? This idea worries her. Did it matter? She cannot believe she actually said ‘Close the tap.’ What if the students learned this from her? We talk about this some more and consider different ways of understanding it. Modelling

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this apparently nonstandard form might be considered as: (1) an inappropriate act that would have misled the students (but a reasonable knowledge of second language development suggests that we should not be too concerned about such risks), (2) an irrelevant act (we have to make our choices about what to focus on and what not to) or (3) a locally appropriate act, not just in terms of student development, but more interestingly, in terms of what language forms are commonly in use. While ‘turn on’ and ‘turn off’ are considered more ‘standard’, at least in what Kachru (2005) terms ‘inner circle’ varieties of English, it might also be argued that they are more opaque than ‘open’ and ‘close’, which are widely used in many other varieties of English. According to Platt et al., ‘The use of open and close for electric switches is common in many of the new Englishes, e.g., East African English, Hawaiian English, Hong Kong English, Malaysian English, Philippine English and Singapore English. It is possible to open or close lights, fans, radios and the TV’ (Platt et al., 1984: 111). And, presumably, taps. Phrasal verbs have always been one of those awkward and variable parts of English, with emergent varieties or lingua franca English regularizing patterns of use (discuss about, request for, voice out), dropping prepositions (‘pick’ for ‘pick up’, ‘throw’ for ‘throw out’) or substituting alternative non-phrasal verbs (‘assist’ for ‘help out’, and, as here, ‘open’ or ‘close’ for ‘turn on’ and ‘turn off’) (Schneider, 2007). Several questions emerge from these observations. Was the phrase ‘close the tap’ that was produced by one of the students a learned or a created phrase? Did it reflect first language influence, a guessed or generalized term, or was it perhaps a term he had already heard used? Should we count it is an error because of its deviation from certain forms of inner circle English or should we count it as a varietal possibility given that it is used across a number of varieties of English? Since it seems less communicatively opaque than ‘turn off’, might it not be a better term to use? At the very least, might it not be a term to be accepted, if not necessarily taught? Liz is intrigued. I had not expected this to emerge as a point of discussion from this class. She has never considered these bigger questions about varieties of English. We move on to the idea of English as a lingua franca (Canagarajah, 2007; Jenkins, 2006, 2009; Kirkpatrick, 2006), and the point that as English teachers we need to engage with the flexible negotiation of English across communities. But do students in Sydney not need to know ‘correct’ Australian English? The answer to this is not straightforward. In a multilingual city like Sydney, English is used as a lingua franca; it is negotiated, changed and adapted in its many contexts of use. Perhaps ‘close the tap’ is the common form used across Sydney. Plumbers, in any case, may be from a variety of backgrounds and used to negotiating the Englishes of Sydney. Of course, there’s the whole issue

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that many communities use services from within that community, with the result that a lot of service encounters are done in languages other than English anyway. Perhaps all those dialogues for getting the plumber are missing the point: Korean students rent from Korean landlords who use Korean services. But when English is used, forms such as ‘open’ and ‘close’ are the likely forms of urban Englishes in cities such as Sydney. I mention a sign I had seen recently in a sink in a washroom instructing people ‘Do not open the tap’ (language turns up in unexpected places). And indeed, a look at website advice for home plumbing in Australia (How-To Australia, 2011) seems to show that while ‘turn on’ and ‘turn off’ are the common terms, ‘close the tap’ also occurs. On reflection, ‘open’ and ‘close’ may indeed be the best terms to teach. We should be careful not to mistake our own versions of English for those that operate in urban contexts such as Sydney. This intrigues Liz and we use up our allotted time, and a bit more, talking about the possible Englishes of Sydney. XII The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying. But time is moving on and I have to get going. Back to the station. Just time for a quick stand-up espresso on the way. What can we learn from this? There is quite a lot to think about on the ride back into the city (the train is fairly empty and I get a seat). Having finished our talk and wished Liz well in the rest of her teaching, I reflect that we seem to have covered three critical moments: turning the discussion of the difficult student into a broader consideration of gender, culture, power and rights; looking at how consensual dialogues not only fail to prepare students for the world outside but also potentially construct passive, consensual roles for them in the face of more powerful others; and the notion that it may not be the so-called standard versions of English that are the most common or useful for students. And out of these moments comes a further lesson for me: the first issue might be seen as critical-alternative, in that it provided Liz with a forum for clarifying the broader background issues involved in dealing with a ‘difficult’ student; the second as critical-directive, in that I pushed my own concerns about consensuality and conflict; and the third as a critical-nondirective option in that it helped develop Liz’s ability to see potential choices and to become more aware of the politics of language and standardization. So which mattered most? Which was most critical? One of the reasons for writing this chapter in this way has been to capture the critical moment as it happens, to show the contingencies of the moment that more standard

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academic writing may start to sanitize. Some time sequences and events, I have to admit, have been shifted in order to make a cleaner story. Thus, although everything here is based on real events (though certain locations and names have been changed, and pseudonyms have been used), not everything happened quite in this way. Related approaches can be found in Cynthia Nelson’s (1999) approach to capturing classroom dynamics as they unfold, or the work by both herself (Nelson, 2002, 2009) and Tara Goldstein (2000, 2004) to turn ethnographic data into ‘performed ethnographies’ in the forms of plays. There are doubtless dangers with such autobiographical narratives since they are never transparent accounts: they are filtered, mediated, constructed, and carry as many silences as presences. As Sharkey reminds us, in moving ‘beyond the uncritical celebration of stories to the recognition of stories as complex texts that require writers to interpret social conventions for storytelling and negotiate the political contexts in which their stories are produced’ (Sharkey, 2004: 496) we create many particular images and silence many other possibilities. And yet, as discussed in Chapter 2, these personal, narrative accounts, do allow us to present a sense of time, place, action and affect that are inevitably missing in other ways of writing. They allow us a sense of the passion behind the trade (Kramsch, 2010) of the light the cracks let in (Luke, 2010). I have tried here to recreate the everydayness of doing critical education and the frustration at coming up against that nagging question: am I being critical (enough)? We can write our grand abstractions about pedagogy, resistance, hidden curricula, multiliteracies or dialogism, and we can present our examples of the ideal critical lesson, the critical curriculum, the comments from transformed students, the empowerment that came about. But it seems to me that trying to be a critical educator is more often about seeking and seizing small, unexpected moments to open the door on a more critical perspective. We may hope to expect the unexpected, to aim to take up and work with those unexpected moments in classrooms that open up new possibilities, but the unexpected remains the unexpected and cannot be captured in other ways than the momentary. Time moves quickly in the classroom and we have to be nimble enough to make something fly in that moment. XIII It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.

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These 13 ways of looking at a blackbird have been used as another way of shifting from the realism of academic prose into the realm of imagery, opacity, language that cannot be pinned down so easily. I have left these blackbird/blackboard images largely uninterpreted because I want them to do the imagistic work that belies transparency. These thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird/board, placed unexpectedly at points in this text, have also been used to suggest the deeply perspectival nature of observing and of teaching. There are at least thirteen ways of looking at a blackboard. Being a critical educator has less to do with the ponderous pronouncements of emancipatory modernism and more to do with the unexpected outcomes of problematizing praxis. Critical education, as Simon (1992) argued, is a pedagogy of possibilities, not a pedagogy of certainties. It is ‘a process of unlearning internalized and habitual ways of seeing and being, naming the world and imagining social futures’ (Morgan & Ramanathan, 2005: 154). Learning to unlearn (see Chapter 3), unexpecting the expected, problematizing assumed norms about possible Englishes and possible pedagogies, is a critical part of the critical project. At least 13 ways of looking at things. This discussion during the teaching praxicum did not raise any great moments of enlightenment, empowerment or emancipation, but it was at least unexpected. I remain uncertain: if Liz does take up a different view about possible Englishes in her classroom, will the students be ‘empowered’? I am not sure what my colleagues will think (You told her what?). But the significant lesson for me here was that the potential critical moment emerged not so much from the expected critical agenda I tried to take up so much as from an unexpected and seemingly inconsequential issue to do with language form (close the tap). Underlying this question of language form are a range of issues to do with what forms we model as teachers, how and in whose interests standard varieties are constructed and maintained, what language varieties our students may need, what forms of what varieties may be used in what communities, how language forms may be related to local configurations of power, how notions of correctness may need to be put on hold. These are small moments of critical language education, critical moments embedded in the process of discussing teaching, and these have affected both Liz’s and my own thinking about apparently minor issues in English language teaching. So the challenge was to make it critical in that moment. As Grey reminds us, ‘As critical moments are unpredictable it is impossible to say when they will occur and what form they might take. Critical moments are always interconnected with past events’ (Grey, 2009: 124). Critical moments are always unexpected, and this is part of the terrain on which critical pedagogy has to operate. As critical educators, however, we can at least try to help our

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students to develop ‘greater openness to unexpected futures’ (Appleby, 2010: 171). Society has not been transformed. Ideological obfuscation has not been removed. But in many ways, this is what critical language education is all about. It is the quiet seeking out of potential moments, the results of which we do not always know. It is about the everyday and unexpected futures. The train pulls back into Central Station, and I hurry off through the clear sun-filled streets to my midday meeting.

Notes (1) The title of this chapter is a play on Wallace Steven’s poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. Each section starts with a stanza from that poem. I am indebted to Scott Thornbury for our discussion of this poem and its applicability to language education. I am also grateful to our Sydney poetry group for our many discussions of poetry and the chance to indulge my fascination for Wallace Stevens. ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a divison of Random House, Inc. And taken from Collected Poems © Estate of Wallace Stevens and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. This chapter is a much reworked version of an earlier paper (Pennycook, 2004) that appeared in a book edited by Bonny Norton and Kelly Toohey. (2) There is another politically liberal sense of the critical that I do not intend to deal with here (see Pennycook, 2001, for further discussion), concerned mainly with showing that language and literacy are social activities, a case that we should never have needed to make in the first place. If this remains the end point of the analysis, if there is no larger vision of social critique, this critical-as-social view does little more than take our applied linguistic concerns into the social domain from which they should never have been removed.

8 Beyond the Boundaries of Expectation

The end of a long day, leaving Lahai Estate (see Chapter 1) in the soft, slanting late afternoon sunshine, we drive back down the bumpy, winding road through the rubber trees, back along the main road through Mundakayam, where my grandfather, Frank Hawkings, had worked before Lahai, past the Valanjankanam waterfalls, through Peermade at the top of the hill and the hospital where my mother was born, and where now schools (CPM Government Higher Secondary School, Mariagiri English Medium Higher Secondary School, Technical Higher Secondary School) jostle with other establishments (Mar Baselios Christian College of Engineering and Technology, St Joseph’s Monastery, Sahiayadiri Ayurveda Factory) in the cool mountain air. Perhaps indeed in these new roads and facilities some of the requests to Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar, Dewan of Travancore, from the ‘public of Pathanamthitta’ in 1941 (see Chapter 6) have been met. The road passes on through the undulating soft greenery of the hilltop tea estates, past Old Pampanar Tea Estate and the Chidamparan tea plantations and tea factory that sit around the imposing stone Pattumala Church and Pilgrim Centre. Finally, beyond Vandiperiyar, we turn off to Thekkady and arrive at our hotel in Periyar. I still have the nutmeg from Lahai in my hand. My pocket rattles with the bright red manjari seeds from Kumbazha Estate. The manager of the hotel greets me in the lobby and starts up a conversation, asking after my family connections in the area. He has heard – such information ends up in unexpected places – that I have been visiting parts of the region where my family once lived. I nod. Are you therefore, he continues, a relative of Sir John Pennycuick? Who? Sir John Pennycuick ? This throws me. My connections to this part of India go back through my mother’s side (my grandfather’s name was Hawkings), not the Scottish background of my father. Who on earth is Sir John Pennycuick? The manager explains that he had seen my name in the 150

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hotel register and had heard I had connections to the area, so he had assumed I was related to the famous Pennycuick of the area, the man responsible for building the Periyar dam. His name is widely known and revered, especially across the border in Tamil Nadu, where he is still worshipped in some temples for bringing water for their crops. Unexpected places. The unexpected bumps into us when we least expect it. Was I linked to the hills of Kerala through both sides of my family? Who was this Pennycuick? The Periyar Dam across the Periyar River in what was then the Province of Madras, was constructed for irrigation purposes, the water from the reservoir to be carried into the Vigay River by means of 6650 foot long tunnel, for irrigating about 140,000 acres of land. The project, which had been discussed from early in the 19th century was revived in 1867 by a Major Ryves. In 1868 Colonel Pennycuick (who as far as I know was never knighted – his elevation from Colonel to Sir is part of local legend) was given full charge of the project, and argued the necessity for a masonry dam in place of the proposed earth dam. Construction was started in 1888. The construction was difficult: along with a lack of skilled stonemasons, there was widespread malaria, particularly from March to June, a limited period for construction during the dry months of January to March, and the difficulties of working in a jungle inhabited by nothing but elephants, bison, and tigers, seventeen miles from the nearest habitation and eighty-three from the nearest railway station. Labor has to be paid for at appalling rates, and the country bears a bad name for fever, of which the natives are much afraid. We have, in fact, to stop work entirely on that account for three months, and those the best of the year for river work; add to this that except in February and March you cannot be certain of a fortnight, at a time, without a flood, and that it is an every-day occurrence for the discharge to rise in a few hours from 500 cubic feet per second to 4000 or more, and you will understand that putting a dam across a river of this kind is not an easy job. (letter from Colonel Pennycuick, April, 1890, in Wegmann, 1899: 80) That a member of the Pennycook clan, one with whom I am connected, as far as I know, only through those long-forgotten chains of relation that link names based on places, should find himself in that region is not perhaps so surprising after all. The name is of locational origin, from the Barony of Penicuik, in Midlothian, Scotland, about 10 miles outside Edinburgh. The name, which was recorded in 1250 as David de Penikok, is derived from Pen y Cog, meaning ‘Hill of the Cuckoo’ in the Old Brythonic language (also known as Ancient British and the forerunner of modern Welsh; and see

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below for further discussion of Celtic languages). The surname is also found as Pennecuik, Pennycock, Pennycuik, Pennycuick, and Pennycook (the most Anglicized version), but I have limited means for tracing family links on this side of the family: the name may have its origins in the countryside outside Edinburgh, but it came to me via the working class suburbs of Glasgow, and there are few photographs, letters or family connections to take any pursuit back more than a generation or two. Family histories – the desire and the capacity to locate one’s family in a lineage of people and place – are bound up with class, literacy and memory. The British Empire, however, provided the conditions for many forms of work (Lambert & Lester, 2006), for people like my grandfather to walk away from the trenches of Europe at the end of the First World War in search of new employment opportunities. For Colonel Pennycuick, work as a military engineer virtually guaranteed that a considerable amount of his time would be spent in the colonies, and building dams was a likely enough occupation. While unexpectedly well known in the Periyar region of Kerala, and across the border in Tamil Nadu, this strange out-of-place name Pennycuick attracts interest elsewhere. Writing in The Hindu in 2003, S. Muthiah mentions a letter from a G.S.M. Khader Khan referring to the same Col. John Pennycuick, R.E., who built the ‘world-famous Mullai-Periyar Dam at Kumili near the Kerala border, which helped irrigate over 3 lakh acres of dry land in the Theni, Madurai and Virudhunagar districts, where not a drop of water from here is wasted’. Intrigued by the name, Muthiah recalls another John Pennycuick, who also spent ‘his career in India with the Royal Engineers, but in my memory, seemed to have spent more time on the cricket fields of Madras, particularly Chepauk, and Bangalore’. Muthia notes that in April 1865 ‘Lt. J. Pennycuick, writing as Secretary of the Madras Cricket Club, sought permission from Government for a piece of ground at Chepauk to which the club’s activities could be moved. Having got the permission, he arranged to have the ground enclosed and leveled – and, so, ‘Chepauk’ became the ‘Lord’s1 of cricket in South India.’ In the oldest available scorecard (1875) of a match between Madras and Bangalore, Muthiah reports, ‘he is shown as having taken five wickets, in each innings, enabling Bangalore to win by eight wickets’ (Muthiah, 2003).

An Indian Game Accidentally Discovered by the English And so, by a circuitous route, to cricket. One might expect this peculiar English sport, with its need for flat, grassy playing fields, bats made from

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willow trees,2 balls cased in leather, smart white outfits, and games lasting all day and continuing for several days (not entirely suited to the heat of India) to have returned home to its damp origins after independence. But no, like the English language, it remains in unexpected places. Indeed, the final of the Indian Premier League (IPL, in which – see Chapter 6 – the Kochi Tuskers Kerala played) on 28 May 2011 at the Chidambaram Stadium, Chennai, Bangalore (now the Royal Challengers Bangalore) lost to Madras (now the Chennai Super Kings) by 58 runs, reversing the result of that game 136 years earlier in which John Pennycuick figured. These days the Chennai Super Kings (brd] id R{g]gh] fp']!] ,CSK), whose home ground, the M.A. Chidambaram International Cricket Stadium, is also still commonly known as the Chepauk Stadium, are owned by India Cements Ltd, who bought the franchise rights for US $91 million in 2008. Winners of both the 2010 and 2011 IPL, the CSK, resplendent in their canary yellow outfits with blue trimmings, are led by the current captain of the Indian national team, M.S. Dhoni. The star of that final was the Chennai-born Indian player, Murali Vijay, though these IPL teams now feature a mixture of Indian and overseas players (lured by the chance to add a few rupees to their mercenary coffers), Vijay being assisted by the ageing Australian batsman Mike Hussey, with South African Albie Morkel and West Indian Dwayne Bravo also in the side. India now largely dictates the directions and fortunes of world cricket, much to the dismay of those still ensconced in what they believe to be the ‘home’ of cricket in London: ‘In the contemporary world, few would doubt that India is the new cricketing superpower. It is more often than not that Indians lead, the others follow. Without exaggeration, Indian cricket is a mirror in which nations, communities, men and women now see themselves’ (Majumdar, 2011: 173). How long before this shift in the centre is acknowledged for English too? The sense of racial inferiority that marked relations between Indians and British through the colonial era and on into postcolonial times, and which was also played out on the cricket field, has now, argues Majumdar, shifted to a sense of racial superiority, marked by India’s rise in global status and aided by the public image of the IPL. When John Pennycuick, by 1890 a colonel and the Secretary of the Public Works Department, sanctioned the repairs of the Madras cricket club’s cyclone-damaged pavilion – a pavilion only pulled down in 1981 – and when on his retirement in 1896 he was honoured for his 30 years of dedicated service to the club and to cricket in the Madras Presidency, and when he presented the first trophy to be awarded for intercollegiate cricket in the Presidency, little did he know what an unexpected train of events he had set in progress.

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A discussion of cricket, as with many of the other topics of this book – manjari seeds, cheese in China, letter writing, passing the ball in indoor soccer games, farewell addresses, talking to a teacher about the use of ‘close the tap’ – is always about far more than the apparent boundaries of the event. Indeed, as Ashis Nandy points out, ‘some arguments about colonial, neo-colonial, anti-colonial and post-colonial consciousness can be made better in the language of international cricket than of political economy’ (Nandy, 1989: ix). Likewise C.L.R. James’s (1963/1993) classic work Beyond a Boundary links, amongst other things, the struggle for West Indian self government and the battle to ‘break the discrimination of sixty years and have a black man, in this case Frank Worrell, appointed captain of a West Indies cricket team’ (James, 1993: 225). For James, the indomitable writer, political activist, and cricket lover, cricket was a game of aesthetics and politics, a domain through which we can explore epic stories, beauty, grace, race, class and colonial politics. The great critical literacy educator, Chris Searle (1990, 1993), also drew on the work of C.L.R. James. For Searle the struggles for literacy were political struggles that reflected battles fought elsewhere, such as against the racism that had been part of cricket for so long and in the battle for political independence that was waged in part on the cricket field. Caribbean cricket, he explained, was ‘a cricket of resistance and assertion, which mirrored an entire people coming into their own, rejecting colonial divisions imposed upon them and bringing a new confidence and will for cultural construction’ (Searle, 1990: 36). And alongside Appadurai’s well-known focus on the flows and scapes of globalization (mediascapes, financescapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes), he has also argued that ‘decolonization is a dialogue with the colonial past, and not a simple dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life. Nowhere are the complexities and ambiguities of this dialogue more evident than in the vicissitudes of cricket in those countries that were once part of the British Empire’ (Appadurai, 1996: 89). For C.L.R. James, the story of cricket needed to contain a ‘deep history’, a history beyond the boundaries of cricket, a story that showed not only how West Indian cricket became a dominant force in the 1960s into the 1980s, but how the team that did so ‘consisted entirely of Afro-Caribbean and Asian-Caribbean players belonging to the hitherto subaltern (i.e. non-white) West Indian classes’ (Surin, 2011: 134). This reference to Asian-Caribbean players also tells another part of this diasporic history and politics. Generations of players of Indian background (descendents of indentured labourers brought to the Caribbean to work at the sugar plantations, or of other small-business South Asian migrants) have become part of the West Indian cricket scene, including captains of the West Indian team such as

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Rohan Kanhai in the early 1970s or Shivnarine Chanderpaul (both from Guyana) in the first decade of the 21st century. The current West Indian side may now include Chanderpaul, the Trinidad bowler Ravi Rampaul, Ramnaresh Sarwan or the new young leg spinner Davendra Bishoo. In Britain, it has taken a long time for a new generation of players of South Asian background to emerge, but now the England team may feature Monty (Mudhsuden Singh) Panesar (born Luton, England), Owais Shah (born Karachi, Pakistan), Sajid Iqbal Mahmood (born Bolton, England), Amjad Khan (born Copenhagen, having first played for Denmark before England) or Ravi (Ravinder Singh) Bopara (born London, England). Meanwhile, tall, elegant, bearded and Muslim, Hashim Amla (born Durban, South Africa) now presents a new face of South African cricket, and Imran Tahir (born Lahore, Pakistan), who has played for various Lahore teams, Pakistan International Airlines, English county sides such as Middlesex, Yorkshire and Warwickshire, and the South African Titans and Dolphins, has also started playing in South African colours. Jeetan Patel (born Wellington, New Zealand) has likewise changed assumptions of what it is to be a New Zealand cricketer and Usman Khawaja (born Islamabad, Pakistan) has finally been given his chance in the all-white Australian 11. Perhaps one day, cricket will only be played by players of South Asian background competing for different countries. My interest here is to explore questions of mobility, movement and indigenization in relation to cricket, since this can shed light on practices of localization more generally as well as on questions of the localization of languages such as English. Put another way, if one of the concerns of this book is the ways in which languages turn up in unexpected places, as well as the reasons why their presence is deemed unexpected, then one way forward is to look at other cultural forms that have spread and been taken up locally. When the Australian cricketer Shane Warne, captaining the Rajasthan Royals against the Kolkata Knight Riders in an Indian Premier League game in South Africa (the IPL was played in South Africa in 2009 due to security concerns in India), is warmly applauded by the ‘large Indian diasporic crowd’ and ‘has suddenly been appropriated and indigenised’ (Majumdar, 2011: 178), what can this tell us about mobility, identity, and the ways in which the unexpected becomes expected? I explored similar issues in relation to English and the global spread of hip hop elsewhere (Pennycook, 2007), questioning in the process the use of metaphors such as the global spread of English. In terms of English, the question is how we can account for the passage of British English travelling in the mouths of its colonial masters to the current state of English as a global, free-flowing language embedded in the mouths, minds and languages of a sizeable chunk

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of the world population. Aside from a simple metaphor of spreading, which does not have much to say about the ways in which it has been taken up, changed, resemioticized to sound and mean differently, the idea of indigenization is often employed to account for these processes by which language or culture are taken up locally. Indigenization, however, potentially makes certain assumptions about place, origins and locality that I have aimed to challenge in this book. It runs the danger of presupposing a static context that absorbs practices from elsewhere. I prefer, therefore, the more dynamic idea of localization, which has the potential to accommodate a more flexible set of relations between what is already in place and what is arriving from elsewhere, between what was before and what is now in Appadurai’s (1996) ‘dialogue with the past’. How did cricket get from the gentle game Colonel John Pennycuick played in the late 19th century to the colour, cash and combustion of the IPL in the early 21st century, from the Madras Cricket Club to the Chennai Super Kings? Cricket was encouraged as part of colonial culture, since it was seen to embody British ideals of muscular Christianity, teamwork and sportsmanship. One of its greatest promoters was Lord Harris (1851–1932), a classic figure of Empire. Born in Trinidad, where his father was governor, and later living in Madras, where his father became governor, he was sent to Eton at the age of 13. He went on to become the second captain of the English cricket team, leading a touring side to Australia in 1878–1879, and later becoming Governor of the Presidency of Bombay from 1890 to 1895. Harris strongly promoted cricket in the colonies ‘as a “healthy, active pastime” which would be “a counter-attraction to paise3 and politics”’ (Nandy, 1989: 5). This ‘games ethic’ that grew in the British public schools and elite universities in the late 19th century was linked not only to aspects of imperial command – courage, endurance, assertion, control and self-control – but also to aspects of imperial ‘manliness’ – both dominance and deference, the ability to take command and the ethic of loyalty and obedience. It was therefore ‘a useful instrument of colonial purpose. At one and the same time it helped create the confidence to lead and the compulsion to follow’ (Mangan, 1985: 18). Not only were the playing fields of Eton seen as the best preparation for colonial service but the Empire was seen as one vast playing field, a playing field on which the natives might also be invited to play as part of their incorporation into colonial culture. One might try to tell this story of localization, then, through a topdown process, whereby the elite colleges of colonial India started to educate Indian aristocrats in the finer arts of being British. Best known of this line of cricketers, was the princely Ranjitsinhji. Educated at Rajkumar College Rajkot, and later at Trinity College, Cambridge, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji

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(1872–1933; later the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar), went on to play cricket for England, and to be regarded as one of the finest batsmen of any era. His ‘dazzling batting exploits on the cricket fields of England made him one of the most recognised public figures within the British Empire during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras’ (Kidambi, 2011: 188–189). As Appadurai (1996) comments, Ranjitsinhji had an ‘orientalist glow’: not only was he a fine player who revolutionized aspects of the game, but ‘English audiences could always read in his performances a loyal and glamorous offering of the mysterious Orient to the playing fields of Eton. Ranji was the ultimate brown Englishman’ (Appadurai, 1996: 97). For many in England, he represented an orientalized, mystic India, a land of princes, jewels, and exotic ways. Clearly, too, his presence in the England team had an effect for Indian and other players elsewhere. James (1963/1993) recalls as a young boy growing up in Trinidad in the early years of the 20th century being obsessed by both the great Victorian player WG Grace and by the graceful Ranjitsinhji; and Ranjitsinhji’s Jubilee Book of Cricket became one of his most treasured possessions. As Nandy points out, however, although some see Ranji as the player who showed that the British could be beaten at their own game, he remained ‘a blatant apologist of the raj’ (Nandy, 1989: 56). An Indian aristocrat playing cricket for England might open up possibilities for Indians and other colonial people to take the British on at their own game, but his role equally reproduced colonial relations of difference. It would be unwise, therefore, to overplay the role of Ranjitsinhji (or his nephew Duleepsinhji, who also played for England) in any process of localization: this was more about the localization of an Indian in England than of cricket in India. These accounts of diasporic cricketers also underscore questions of mobility. While the first expansion of cricket was with soldiers and officials of the British Empire, in countries such as Australia, it was soon embedded in the public culture of the settler colony. The first cricket team from Australia to tour England in 1868, however, was a team made up entirely of Aboriginal Australians (apart from the captain). Various Indigenous Australians, particularly those working on rural sheep and cattle stations, had taken up cricket. In 1866, an Aboriginal team played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, their skills surprising at least one local journalist: ‘the blackfellow has an extra-ordinary readiness for picking up a knowledge of cricket, however deficient he may be in other respects’ (cited in Mulvaney & Harcourt, 1988: 45). Many members of this team then made the journey to England aboard the sailing ship Paramatta in 1868. Their arrival was announced with some excitement in Sporting Life (May 16, 1868), listing their ‘native names’ and their ‘soubriquets’, including Dick-a-Dick, Mullagh, Cuzens, King Cole,

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Bullocky, Jim Crow and Twopenny: ‘They are the first Australian natives who have visited this country on such a novel expedition, but it should not be inferred that they are savages; on the contrary, the managers of the speculation make no pretence to anything other than purity of race and origin. They are perfectly civilized, having been brought up in the bush to agricultural pursuits as assistants to Europeans, and the only language of which they have a perfect knowledge is English’ (Arrival of the Black Cricketers; Figure B in Mulvaney & Harcourt, 1988). Such comments necessitate great caution in how we read this indigenization of cricket in Australia and this tour itself. Both Ranjitsinhji and these Aboriginal cricketers became objects of exotic fascination, though in rather different ways. Both could be deemed ‘perfectly civilized’ because of their knowledge of English and cricket. On the one hand, Aboriginal Australians had taken up cricket and gave a good account of themselves on this sixmonth tour of England, which included a game at Lord’s (the ‘home of cricket’) on 12–13 June 1868. On the other hand, while Ranjitsinhji was to bring an ‘Oriental glow’ to the fields of England, this Aboriginal team brought a ‘native glow’, a display of Empire natives performing for English crowds. The tour was a commercial enterprise, and alongside the cricket, the Aboriginal players also gave exhibitions of what were termed ‘native sports’: spear- and boomerang-throwing, running backwards, and Dick-a-Dick’s hybrid specialty, fending off cricket balls with a traditional club and shield. In the end, while both Ranjitsinhji and these first Australians to tour England give significant examples of cricket having being exported and then brought back to the homeland in different embodiments of the game, in different bodies, with different styles, it is also clear that these incipient localizations were also very much according to the racial visions and controlling conditions under the gaze of the British Empire. A very different account of localization can be found in the magnificently fanciful Bollywood film Lagaan (2001), which was nominated for the best Foreign Film in the 2002 Academy Awards. Set in late 19th century north central India, local villagers are unable to pay the high taxes (Lagaan is Hindi for tribute or land tax) imposed by the British rulers because of failing crops during a period of drought. The village is forced into a wager: if they win a game of cricket (which they have never played before) against the British, they will have no tax to pay for three years; if they lose, they will have to pay three times the normal tax. As the team is assembled, amid local rivalries and some fine song and dance numbers, even caste is put aside as a dalit leg-spinner is drafted into the side. Eventually, the local team defeats the British, Captain Russell is forced to pay the local taxes, the rains come, and Bhuvan marries Gauri. The colonial struggle is carried out through cricket,

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and the local villagers, overcoming their caste and other differences, triumph at the very sport that defines the British. It is an enjoyable tale of British arrogance and Indian courage and ingenuity, and it suggests a bottom-up struggle for ascendancy through the localization of cricket. As a fable, it gives us a sense of how localization may be developed through processes of resistance rather than the more acquiescent stories of Indian princes and Aboriginal cricketers. As an historical account of the development of cricket in the Empire, it is less reliable. The indigenization of cricket in the Trobriand Islands (Papua New Guinea), however, gives us greater insights into cricket localization. Introduced in the early 20th century, the process by which cricket has become indigenized and fused with local kayasa (ritual warfare) traditions has become, despite questions about the way in which the game was staged for the film, a classic example in the anthropological literature of syncretism, where cultural practices are fused together. Made famous by the film Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response to Colonialism (Kildea & Leach, 1974), it is played between villages by teams of up to 50 players, and according to rules that have shifted greatly from the original source. In some ways we might see this as akin to the development of a creole, where two different sets of tradition have been grafted onto each other in such a way that it is hard to recognize the origins of either. This is the fear we see in discourses around Singlish in Singapore, that the indigenization of English will lead to a distinct variety of English incomprehensible to the outside world, a syncretic language of use only in that local context. In the case of Singlish or, for example, Jamaican Patwa, these new or creolized Englishes exist on a continuum from basilectal versions that have diverged greatly from lexifier languages to acrolectal varieties that vary much less. The same case might be made for cricket – the more standard version of the game is played in Papua New Guinea as well – but there is less evidence of anything like a cricketing continuum that connects cricket in the Trobriand Islands to cricket in Port Moresby. One reason for this may be the point made by James (1963/1993) that the strict and highly revered rules of cricket can be linked to a puritan ethic. According to Appadurai (1996), cricket might therefore be classified as a ‘hard cultural form’, one that is less amenable to indigenization than other cultural practices because of its strict rules. This observation relates to Robbins’ argument (2001) in the context of indigenization of religion in Papua New Guinea that the content of what is being localized matters. A problem, he suggests, in many discussions of indigenization is that the content of what is indigenized and the local practices into which it is indigenized are not sufficiently accounted for, the common argument being that ‘when

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local cultures cut modernity to fit their own dimensions, they can make it assume almost any form they like’ (Robbins, 2001: 901–902). While an appealing account of the processes and possibilities of indigenization, this lack of consideration of the form and content of cultural practices, overlooks the more complex processes of localization. Similarly, where languages are concerned – and Robbins’ interest is in the different linguistic ideologies of modernity and traditional local practices – we run the danger of assuming that new cultural and linguistic forms are simply taken up locally. What we need, in contrast, is to understand that language and sport, and indeed different languages and different sports, have different rules, structures and ideologies that mean their localization will always be different. For Appadurai, the quandary of how cricket became an Indian sport can be found in ‘collective and spectacular experiments with modernity’ (Appadurai, 1996: 91). First, in order for the English to have someone to play against ‘“India” had to be invented, at least for the purposes of colonial cricket’ (Appadurai, 1996: 99). It was then, he argues, through the processes of linguistic vernacularization – the radio, newspaper and television broadcasts in Hindi, Tamil and Bengali, and later in many more Indian languages – that the esoteric English of cricket was turned into vernacularized versions accessible to all. New money, sponsorship and media then shifted the game away from its Victorian ideals into an aggressive, spectacular and nationalist game. Nowhere can this be better seen, he suggests (writing in the late 20th century, before the IPL and the extravagant new era of Indian cricket) than in a competition staged in Sharjah in the Persian Gulf between India and Pakistan, fuelling nationalist divisions, watched on television by millions, and bringing in vast amounts of advertising revenue: ‘here, finally, is the last blow to Victorian upper-class cricket codes, and here is a different global ecumene. After Sharjah, all cricket is Trobriand cricket, not because of the dramatic rule changes associated with that famous form of cricket, but because of the successful hijacking of a ritual from its original English practical hegemony and its Victorian moral integument’ (Appadurai, 1996: 108). ‘From the perspective of Sharjah,’ Appadurai goes on to argue, ‘it is the Etonians who seem like Trobrianders today’ (Appadurai, 1996: 108). For Appadurai, the localization of cricket – and that localization may be in Sharjah (where there is not only abundant money but also a sizable population from South Asia) as much as Mumbai or Karachi – within new conditions of modernity turns the tables on discourses of originality and authenticity: now it is the syncretic fusing of British cultural norms with cricket that is the anthropological outlier, while the cricket played under global Indian control has become the norm. The analogy with English is evident: where once exotic new Englishes that had developed as English was

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taken up in diverse contexts were the equivalent of Trobriand Island cricket, now it is the English spoken in England that is the Trobriand Island variety. A different version of this reversal, whereby the periphery becomes the centre, the appropriation becomes the norm, and the original becomes the exception, is given by Nandy, who asserts that cricket ‘is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English’ (Nandy, 1989: 1). Like the adoption of imported chilli to become a central part of Indian cuisine, cricket to most Indians ‘now looks more Indian than English’. From one point of view, one can argue that the way Indians have ‘taken to this anachronistic colonial game like fish to water’ is an example of Indians becoming captives of colonial consciousness. From this position, what is Indian has to be sought in Indigenous historical practices. From a different point of view, however, ‘cricket can be given the credit for having introduced into Indian society a new and unique means of cultural self-expression’ (Nandy, 1989: 2). For Nandy, there is an underlying mythic structure to cricket that renders it highly amenable to Indian adoption. That is to say, Nandy argues that there is a set of cultural practices, beliefs and story lines in cricket that render it ideally suited to India, and possibly better so than to England. This is an importantly different way of framing questions of indigenization, since it suggests that imported cultural practices may fit preexisting practices in unexpected ways. Rather than culture spreading and taking on local characteristics, it is the local practices that adopt the imported ones. This connects in various ways to arguments about the indigenization of hip hop (Pennycook & Mitchell, 2009): rather than viewing hip hop through a lens that locates its origins necessarily in the United States and its spread in the processes of indigenization as people take up forms of hip-hop culture and render them local, the arguments of a number of artists suggest a different possible interpretation: hip hop from this point of view is a continuation of indigenous traditions; it draws people into a new relationship with cultural practices that have a history far longer than those of current popular music. Yet in doing so, it also changes those cultures and traditions, rendering them anew. The processes of localization are more complex than global hip hop taking on local flavours, just as the processes of localization of English are more complex than English taking on local flavours. In this sense, English has always been Indian. It is not so much the case that hip hop merely takes on local characteristics, but rather that it has always been local. As Wire MC says, ‘Hip hop is a part of Aboriginal culture, I think it always has been’ (interview, see Pennycook & Mitchell, 2009: 30). In the same way that Fijian Australian MC Trey argues that many aspects of hip hop – rapping, break dancing, spray painting – can be connected to Pacific Islander cultures, so Wire suggests that ‘being an Abo-digital in the 21st century, it

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was a natural evolution for me to move into hip hop and continue the corroboree, but with the modern day aspect’ (interview, see Pennycook & Mitchell, 2009: 35).4 Wire’s argument that hip hop has always been Aboriginal, that by taking up hip hop, he is continuing the traditional corroboree, takes us a long way from the first Aboriginal cricket tour of England. Perhaps too it gives us insights into the struggles those cricketers were engaged in as they tried to make this game their own. Was there ever an available argument for them that cricket has always been Aboriginal? The idea that languages and cultural forms that have apparently spread to unexpected places can also be seen as having always been local returns us to a key point in understanding place, movement and locality. This takes us back, in part, to the discussion in Chapter 2 about being ‘out of place’, of growing up somewhere where one never feels comfortable, the feeling of always being dis-placed. This in turn presents the possibility of finding one’s place in an unexpected place, of finding oneself at home where cultural and linguistic norms ought to render one an outsider. Here too is the possibility that it is being an outsider itself that makes one feel at home. And if hip hop or English or cricket in unexpected places are conceived not so much as having spread and been taken up, but rather as having always been local, then we can start to think about language, culture and identity in similar terms. The boundaries drawn around languages and cultures, with their fixed definitions and relations to place, make this a difficult move to make, but once we start to look beyond such boundaries, it becomes possible to suggest that languages in unexpected places might indeed be already local. Nandy (1989) warns that in the changes to the modern game (and he was writing 20 years before India’s takeover of the game and development of the IPL) Indian cricketers now have two main options before them, either to play in an Indian way, to win ‘by being Indians’, or ‘they can try to win the way modern cricket encourages them to win, by mortgaging their future to a unilinear theory of history’ (Nandy, 1989: 122), and by so doing ultimately to lose their Indianness to a new global vision of sport, money and manliness. Following Nandy’s line of thinking, then, this modern form of the game, this short, noisy version in coloured clothing where the Royal Challengers Bangalore face off against the Chennai Super Kings, where, under lights in packed and noisy stadiums, the orange and mauve-clad Kochi Tuskers Kerala battle against the purple and gold Kolkata Knight Riders, is not so much the ultimate indigenization of cricket in India but in fact the selling out of cricket as an Indian way of life to a new global culture of money and short attention spans. By analogy, for local hip hop artists to try to enter the mainstream commercial world, to take on American accents and

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imitate African American hip hop, is to give up their local cultural tradition and to mortgage their musical future to a unilinear theory of history. Likewise, for speakers of English to give up on their local ways, to become part of a new, global English-as-a-lingua-franca ecumene may be seen as mortgaging their linguistic future to a unilinear history of language change. But this is where we have to reconsider Appadurai’s point about ‘collective and spectacular experiments with modernity’ (Appadurai, 1996: 90). For Appadurai, the alliance of forces of vernacularization and commercialization have ‘permitted the gradual unyoking of cricket from its Victorian value framework and its animation by new forces associated with merchandising and spectacle’ (Appadurai, 1996: 110). For Nandy, this is a move away from cricketing and Indian values. While Nandy thus allows the possibility that cricket has always been Indian, this Indianness is reinscribed as a set of stable characteristics than can be betrayed by the modern game. We need to avoid that trap, to take up Wire MC’s complaint that he is tired of being told to sound Australian. As he puts it, ‘having white boys come up to me and saying “you know, maybe you should rap a bit more Aussie.” And I’m like “what?!” Are you trying to colonise me again dude?! Stop it. Stop it’ (Pennycook & Mitchell, 2009: 37). I imagine M.S. Dhoni, captain of India and the Chennai Super Kings, being tapped on his shoulder and being told to play cricket in a more Indian way, responding in a similar way. It is one thing to argue that cricket reflects Indian values but it is another to view such values as static and immobile. These new cricketing millionaires are unlikely to accept an argument that they should play in more stately, gentle, mythical Indian ways. Cricket may be an Indian sport discovered by the English but it is now a global sport run by Indians. The global cultural practices of cricket – the money, the shortened games, the coloured clothing – are now part of what India is in the 21st century. The histories of cricket localizations show why, as Appadurai (1996), James (1963/1993) and Nandy (1989) all affirm, a study of cricket, its diasporic flows, its counter-diasporas, its indigenization and localization, can provide us with as good an account of postcolonial politics and globalization as can accounts of econoscapes or technoscapes. The arguments about how cricket became local – from Nandy’s view that cricket was an Indian game discovered by the English to Appadurai’s focus on spectacular experiments with modernity – suggest that once cultural practices are localized, questions of origin, authenticity and ownership may be reversed. The guardians of English become Trobriand Island cricketers. English and cricket share many similarities: both can be traced to England, both spread with the British Empire, both are governed by sets of rules that the old imperial centre tries to hold on to, both have become large commercial enterprises that distress

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those for whom language learning and sport were always amateur pastimes, and both now seem to have become localized in such intricate ways that modern versions may have little resemblance to original forms. It has certainly been possible to draw parallels between cricket becoming local and the localization of English. And the idea that cricket may turn up in unexpected places in unexpected forms that on consideration may not be so unexpected ties to the arguments I have been making in this book about language in unexpected places. Nonetheless, cricket and language are very different types of cultural practice, so it is to a consideration of a language – Cornish – turning up in unexpected places that I shall now turn.

War Oll an Norvys ‘th on ni scollys a-les One afternoon a few years ago, I find myself in Moonta, South Australia. We are singing: Bro goth agan tasow, dha flehes a’th car, Gwlas ker an howlsedhes, pan vro yw dha bar? War oll an norvys ‘th on ni scollys a-les, Mes agan kerensa yw dhis. Kernow! Kernow, y keryn Kernow; An mor hedra vo yn fos dhis a-dro ‘Th on onan hag oll rag Kernow! [Old land of our fathers, thy children love thee! Dear land of the west, what country is thy peer? Over all the world, we are scattered abroad, But our love is for thee. Chorus: Cornwall! Cornwall, we love Cornwall! While the sea is like a wall around thee We are one and all for Cornwall!] Bro Goth agan Tasow (‘Dear Land of our Fathers’) is one of the anthems of Cornwall. It is sung to the same tune as the Welsh national anthem, Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. The Breton anthem Bro Gozh ma Zadoù also uses the same tune. As can be seen from the similarity in the titles (Bro Goth agan Tasow and Bro Gozh ma Zadoù) Cornish and the Breton language (spoken in Brittany in France) have much in common. Various versions of British history suggest the Celts were the original inhabitants of the British Isles when the Romans

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arrived, to be pushed out later by the invading Anglo Saxons, though an alternative account might suggest that all of these and subsequent groups – Celts, Belgae, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings, Normans – were all in a sense immigrant minorities. Myths about the Celts come in several layers, glorified by those claiming Celtic origins, romanticized and Christianized through Arthurian legends, repeated in many versions of popular history. A great deal of what we are supposed to know about the Celts as a sophisticated iron age culture from central Europe who moved into the British Isles, only to be forced into exile in the periphery (Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, Brittany) by the Anglo Saxons, does not stand close scrutiny (Collis, 2003). This is unfortunately true of most myths of origin: everyone came from somewhere else. Humans have always moved and have always turned up in unexpected places. A case can nevertheless be made that the Celts were the people on whom the English first practised colonialism, imposing local rulers (it is no coincidence that the English monarch’s eldest son is Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall), working the colonized lands for profit, and gradually imposing their alien tongue. Celtic history and legend is full of stories of resistance, slaughter, famine and forced migration, the Irish having suffered most grievously at the hands of the English, but so too the Scots, the Welsh and the Cornish. This is why people of Celtic origin can be found so widely dispersed around the world. By the 19th century, many were also active participants in the British Empire: at the same time that John Pennycuick was taking advantage of a career in the Royal Engineers that offered the chance to build dams in Kerala (just as Frank Hawkings had taken advantage of the greater possibilities offered by working in tea and rubber plantations in India after the First World War), so Cornish tin and copper miners headed to wherever work might be found. Holding firmly to the belief that they were the most skilled hard-rock miners anywhere, Cornish miners headed across the world, fuelling the notion that the Cornish were to be found ‘wherever there was mining to be done’ (Payton, 2007: 34). In his classic book The Cornish Miner, Hamilton Jenkin (1927) recounts the common saying that ‘wherever a hole is sunk in the ground . . . no matter in what corner of the world – you will be sure to find a Cornishman at the bottom of it, searching for metal’ (cited in Payton, 2007: 34). The hymn is being sung at the Kernewek Lowender (Cornish Happiness) festival in Moonta, claimed to be the largest Cornish Festival in the world. Responding to the welcome by the Mayor of Northern Yorke Peninsula, the chief bard has responded ‘Pur dha yu genen-ny, Byrth an Orseth Kernow yn Australya, rak agan bos cuntellys warbath omma yn Kernow Vyghan Australya le may whruk tryga he whelya pur gemmys tus ha benenes

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Kernewek nany yu moy es cansdledhen. Y’n jeth hedhyu, lyes map ha myrgh an dus-na a dryk ha whelya omma whath, he prowt on ny y dhe ry dhe Australya an pyth a wruk ry dhe Gernow aga hendasow, – aga lelder ha’ga crefter’ [We, the Bards of the Gorsedd of Cornwall in Australia, are very pleased to be gathered together here in Australia’s Little Cornwall, where so many Cornish men and women lived and worked more than a century ago. Today many of the descendants of these men and women still live and work here, and we are proud that they give to Australia what their forefathers gave to Cornwall, – their loyalty and their strength]. This area of the Yorke Peninsula is known as The Copper Triangle or Little Cornwall. The festival, like many invented traditions, dates back only to the 1970s, though the presence of the Cornish in the region goes back much further. Cornish miners arrived in the second half of the 19th century to work in the copper mines. They were drawn by the rich copper deposits found in the 1860s, though they were equally pushed by the poor economic conditions and the decline in the tin and copper mining industries in Cornwall. Like the Welsh diaspora, this led to Celtic languages turning up in unexpected places, such as Patagonia (Garrett et al., 2009). The Cornish diaspora brought Cornish miners to North and South America, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Although part of a relatively impoverished 19th century industrial emigration, Cornwall became ‘the epicentre of a complex international information network. People at home in Cornwall had ready access to remarkably accurate intelligence about the relative fortunes of different potential destinations on the ever-expanding international mining frontier’ (Payton, 2007: 33). Sometimes miners from this copper and tin diaspora returned to Cornwall, and there are many stories of miners propping up a Cornish bar and telling tales of Moonta and other distant mining communities. Many more, however, became part of the wider transnational Cornish community, staying in touch with other Cornish people both in Cornwall and elsewhere in the world. These Cornish miners formed new translocal kinships, maintaining their Cornish connections and practices across time and space. They stayed in touch for generations through letters, newspapers, marriages and migrations to the Cornish homeland, while constantly reiterating the status of Moonta as the ‘spiritual home’ of ‘Australia’s Cornish identity’ (Payton, 2007: 219). As with many such diasporic communities – the vast number of Filipinos currently working as domestic workers, ships’ crews, labourers, entertainers makes an interesting 21st century comparison (see Lorente, 2011) – remittances home became an important part of the local economy (Panayiotopoulos, 2010). These movements of people ‘created a “culture of mobility” in Cornwall, an attitude of mind in which long-distance journeys and sojourns . . . were

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seen as normal, and where a network of linkages with overseas lands was already in place’ (Payton, 2007: 36). As Walker (2011: 168) remarks with respect to such mobility amongst people such as the Comorians, ‘the fact that structural mobility, persisting as a strategy over several generations, is something familiar to many individuals in a community has important ramifications in other spheres of social and cultural activity’. As he goes on to argue, a study of the ‘social processes of adaptation, accommodation, and change that occur within highly mobile groups’ would also shed light on all people, since it is mobility that we all so often have in common. Through the 19th century, this culture of mobility developed into an array of Cornish communities around the world that became potential destinations. Meanwhile in Cornwall, a local industry involving newspapers, shipping agents, legal firms and transport workers grew up to service the Cornish on the move. Cornish myths have become mixed up with modern nationalist struggles for independence (all the Celtic nations have fought independence struggles): even Mebyon Kernow (Cornwall’s own nationalist party, see Mebyon Kernow 2011) is fighting for regional autonomy: ‘It is our belief that the historic nation of Cornwall, with its own distinct identity, language and heritage, has the same right to self-determination as Scotland and Wales. We should have more say in how our lives are run and Mebyon Kernow is leading the campaign for the self-government of Cornwall, through the establishment of a legislative Assembly’ (Mebyon Kernow, 2010: np). Cornish myths have also become tied up with tourism and particular representations of Celtic symbols. Like Cornish, Manx (spoken on the Isle of Man) is supposed to be ‘dead’, having lost its last speaker in 1974 (Sebba, 2010). Nevertheless, some 2% of the population claim to be speakers of Manx (though all speak English too) and there is now, among other things, a state-run Manx-medium primary school (Bunscoill Gaelgagh). As can be seen from the term Gaelgagh, Manx is closer to Scottish and Irish Gaelic than to Welsh and Cornish. The Isle of Man, a British Crown Dependency which is not therefore part of the United Kingdom, is also seeking to maintain a separate identity. With the rise of tourism, the capacity to market itself as ‘Celtic’ and the push for language and cultural revival, bilingual signs have proliferated. As Sebba points out, a ‘Celtic font’ is often used for Manx words, though what it is intended to index is less clear. The questions about the historical provenance of this script (similar to that found on many ‘Irish pubs’ ) and its use in juxtaposition with English, construct these Celtic texts as ‘ornamental’ or ‘decorative’ rather than authentic or authoritative (Sebba, 2010: 68). Irrespective of the arguments over the purity of the Celtic race, their origins in parts of Europe, the debates over the extent of movement of people or transfer of language and culture, or the current tourist-oriented mixture of

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Celtic symbols, pre-modernist myths, Celtic scripts and mystic Celtic harp music, Celtic languages are still around and have much in common. Cornish, Breton and Welsh are known as Brythonic Celtic languages (distinct from the Goedelic Celtic languages, Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx). My name, Pennycook (see discussion above), although derived from the Scottish locationary name Pennicuick, is from this strand of Brythonic Celtic, which was spoken in southern Scotland (Scots Gaelic was a highland language) and may pass as almost Cornish (cf common Cornish names such as Penhaligon, or even the legendary King Arthur Pendragon, or the supposedly last speaker of Cornish, Dolly Pentreath). I grew up in Cornwall as a Celt out of place, but this is the first time I have sung Bro Goth agan Tasow (though I know the tune from Welsh rugby matches). An unexpected language in an unexpected place. While Breton and Welsh have survived and, particularly in the case of Welsh, have been enjoying a reasonable period of growth and support, Cornish officially died. Yet on we sing: Gwlascor Myghtern Arthur, an Sens kens, ha’n Gral Moy kerys genen nyns yw tiredh aral, Ynnos sy pub carn, nans, menydh ha chi A gews yn Kernowek dhyn ni. [Realm of King Arthur, the early saints and the Grail, No other land is more beloved by us; In thee every tor, valley, mountain and house Speaks to us in Cornish.] While we might question the authenticity of such anthems that have taken on the particular romanticist histories of King Arthur and the Holy Grail (Lancelot and the Holy Grail were added by Chrétien to Troyes to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s rather fanciful 12th century history of King Arthur), the song is nevertheless one steeped in accounts of location (even the English translation ‘tor’ (a hill) remains obscure for many). So what is this dead language doing in this unexpected place? Cornish is said to have died, if indeed languages can be said to die, with the death of its last speaker, Dolly Pentreath in December 1777. Such myths of language death are questionable on many grounds. There are always counter claims of other possible speakers: John Davey of Zennor, for example, who died in 1891, is also claimed as the ‘last surviving native speaker of the language’ (Ellis, 1998: 20). As Ellis argues there is evidence that the last native speakers did not die out until the end of the 19th rather than the 18th century, since ‘there were at least a small number of Cornish who had learned the language, or phrases of it, from their parents’ (Ellis, 1998: 20).

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The expression ‘the language, or phrases of it’ raises some difficult questions, however, about what we indeed count as knowing a language (see Chapter 5). Does knowing a few phrases constitute knowledge of a language? What do we need to know of a language in order for it to be considered alive? Does it matter whether these phrases were learned from a ‘native speaker’ (thereby possibly conferring some nativespeakerhood on the learner) or can any knowledge of phrases in a language bring it back from the dead? Language death arguments may insist that true language use is not a matter of using such fragmentary language resources, but rather is a question of the loss of native competence. Yet the last speakers of a language – particularly because they have no interlocutors – may themselves only be users of language fragments. Language death is all too often located in the death of the last speaker rather than a much more complex social, cultural, economic and historical context in which language resources are used in multiple ways. So is Cornish dead? If so, it is certainly also being ‘revived’ and has even been noted as the closest parallel to the revival of Hebrew (Jones & Singh, 2005). The revival of a language such as Cornish, however, presents many problems, particularly to do with battles over authenticity. The difficulties in trying to establish spelling, pronunciation, grammar and particularly current terminology can lead to interminable debates. Cornish revivalists split into various camps, some favouring a version of Cornish based on the more recent texts in the language, others favouring texts from an earlier period, since the more recent ones were seen as having been corrupted by English. Price (1984) drew a distinction between traditional and authentic Cornish and ‘modern pseudo-Cornish’, which he termed ‘Cornic’ (Price, 1984: 141). Although Kernewek Kemmyn (Common Cornish) was adopted by the Cornish Language Board in 1987 to replace the earlier Unified Cornish, arguments over spelling and pronunciation have continued (Deacon, 2006; Ellis, 1998; George & Dunbar, 1997). Nevertheless, a Standard Written Form of Cornish was agreed on in 2008 for official use and for formal education. Certainly, Cornish is now reappearing on street signs in Cornwall: fordh/ forth = road; rosva = avenue; stret = street; kew = close; bownder = lane. Signs welcome visitors to Cornwall in Cornish: Kernow a’gas dynnergh (welcome to Cornwall). A sign of welcome in Truro Cathedral says not only bienvenue, willkommen, and benvenuto, but also Ny a’gas dynergh. 5 The Western Morning News now has a weekly column in Cornish (Kernewek) with a translation in Sowsnek (English). The Cornish traditions of tin mining are a common theme in this section of the paper. An article discussing the new park (‘Heartlands’) at Pool, a gateway to the World Heritage Site (Dyller Ertaj an Bys) that the old Cornish tin mines have now become, is devoted to ‘agan ertaj a wayna moon a’n dor’ (our heritage of winning ore from the ground)

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(Western Morning News, 13 July 2011: 13). In the Western Morning News for 20 July 2011, a short piece about alternative energy in Cornwall (‘Kernow o an kynsa tyller yn Breton Veur dhe gavos bargen-tir gwyns’ – Cornwall was the first place on Great Britain to have a wind farm), points out that the first solar farm in Cornwall was at the site the old Wheal Jane (Hwel Jayn) tin mine. This leads on to that parallel hurt in Cornish history, the closing of the mines and the decline of Cornish: ‘Hwel Jayn o onan an diwettha balyow yn Kernow hag a dhegeas pan godhas pris sten yn 1991′ (Wheal Jane was one of the last mines to close in Cornwall when the price of tin plummeted in 1991) (Western Morning News, 20 July 2011: 13). The parallel with Hebrew, although perhaps rather fanciful, is intriguing. As Zuckerman (2009) argues in relation to what he prefers to call ‘Modern Israeli,’ rather than Modern Hebrew, language revivals are always mixes of languages, influenced by the first languages of the revivalists and learners of the language: ‘the revival of a no-longer spoken language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s). Thus, revival efforts result in a language with a hybridic genetic and typological character’ (Zuckerman, 2009: 41). Alongside questions of authenticity, are questions of purpose. A problem for Cornish, as with other language revivals, is what it is for. Hebrew or Israeli had the advantage of a deep religious link and the foundation of a new nation (though now it has been revived, it has also become a language in which one might get a tattoo as one global fashion option – see Chapter 2). While the move to impose this language as the first language of citizens of Israel has both ignored the other official language, Arabic, cruelly dispossessed speakers of Yiddish of a public voice, and ignored other languages of Israel such as Russian (Shohamy, 2006), its revival had a strong purpose and is generally cited as the great success story of language survival. Cornish, however, has had much less going for it, though in 2002 it was formally recognized by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML). There are now various claims to numbers of first language speakers and in 2010 a bilingual Cornish/English Skol dy’Sadorn Kernewek (Cornish Saturday School) was established in Camborne. The idea of language revival brings several questions to the fore. Had I suddenly come across revived Cornish on that weekend in Moonta? The problem, as with its corollary language death, is the ways in which so much of this discussion still hinges on notions of native speakers, languages as entities, and on questions of purity and authenticity. As I argued in Chapters 5 and 6, we do not speak languages so much as bits of languages. We use various language resources, and our goal as language educators might be better understood as developing resourceful speakers rather than some vague notion of native competence. We have repertoires of genres, discourses,

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and styles and these may be available in and across languages. Whatever we mean by ‘languages’, language death and language revival may not be as important an idea as the various language practices we engage in across languages. These ideas of language death, language revival or language maintenance will always be misnomers. Languages are reinvented, recreated, made into new hybrid objects. As Mufwene explains, ‘Some linguists advocate language activism, undoubtedly as good world citizens committed to maintaining biotic diversity in a heterogeneous global ecosystem. For them, languages represent invaluable world views and typological specimens that must be maintained at any cost, almost romantically, or, should I say with some embarrassment, in the interest of linguistics as a discipline’ (Mufwene, 2010: 928). This view of languages (and their supposed worldviews) as entities that die and yet may be reborn, is not useful for linguistics just as it is not useful for many people who are pressured to maintain their languages. There is a ‘tension between the interests of speakers and those of linguists, which appear to be different in many cases. Speakers of minority languages routinely experience various pressures from their socioeconomic ecologies (to which they must adapt) to communicate in specific languages in particular domains’ (Mufwene, 2010: 928). I by no means wish to belittle some of the work done in the name of language revival and maintenance projects: while some may seem to have more to do with the self interest of linguists, many are very significant for the self image of dispossessed people, for their education, identity, health and well-being. I was happy to have the chance to sing unexpectedly in Cornish in Moonta, and I enjoy reading the Cornish column in The Western Morning News. Once we get away from outdated beliefs in language, once we acknowledge that it is always language resources that are at stake, rather than languages as imagined wholes, then we can see that such moments are language renewals and reinventions, then we can carry the hopes of people in a far more sustainable way through an understanding of resources. That day in May in Moonta, we sang in Cornish, unexpectedly. Cornish was being sung, re-versed, reinvented, relocated, resourceful.

Conclusion: As Expected From cricket in Kerala to Cornish in Moonta, this chapter has further explored what it means to turn up in unexpected places. To observe only that linguistic and cultural practices turn up unexpectedly, however, would not make for an extended discussion. Part of the exploration in this book has been to ask why things are unexpected: why do we not expect something to

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turn up somewhere? What normative assumptions lie behind unexpectedness? And how might we start to unexpect the expected? This play of expectation was explored first though the processes of cricket localization. How has cricket become part of the Indian landscape? How has Indian cricket come to dominate the world scene? As the discussion of localization suggested, this should not be seen in terms of cricket simply being taken up by Indians. Rather, it is a question of the relationship with what is already there, of cricket being already Indian, a proposition that raises further considerations for how we think about things being in place. The second example raised questions of language and mobility, of Cornish being linked to a culture of mobility, which itself was tied to Cornwall’s peripheral existence and mining expertise. When Cornish turns up in the 21st century in South Australia, has it been revived? These questions link to the broader themes that run through this book to do with how we think about language. Here I have asked what it means to revive a language, suggesting that the ideas of languages as whole entities, as pure, authentic, original or discrete, takes us into unhelpful territory. Rather this is about getting local stuff done through language. We do not actually ‘speak languages’, we are not in fact ‘native speakers’ of things called ‘languages’ so much as we engage in local language practices (Canut, 2008; Pennycook, 2010a): we draw on linguistic resources, we take up styles, we partake in discourse, we do genres. Questioning the idea of the native speaker in Chapter 5, I concluded that becoming a resourceful speaker is what we are surely aiming at, an idea that embraces both the ability to accommodate to others and to manipulate different resources. Central to the book has been the idea of unexpected places. This has not, however, been a focus only on the obvious state of movement under globalization but rather a questioning of those very discourses that render the unexpected so. The idea of languages turning up in unexpected places has not therefore been a study in exotic strangeness, of the surprising and the extraordinary so much as an argument about diversity, movement and mobility as the commonplace. Modernist modes of thought have constructed expectations about what it means to be in place, about where things belong, about languages, mother tongues, territory and place. The unexpected only exists in relation to the expected, and the expected is laid down along very distinctive lines according to what should be where. If we can accept that diversity is very ordinary, then the idea of expecting the unexpected is a question of undoing the lines of expectation, of unexpecting the expected. This argument was developed in a pedagogical direction in Chapter 7, where I explored the idea of critical moments as unexpected happenings. These small, unexpected moments in education are the incidents

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from which we have to mould our critical practice. We can develop curricula or create a critical syllabus, but unless we are light enough on our toes to take up unexpected moments and to ask why they are so, we will miss the educational potential of the everyday. Part of this critical project has also been based on the idea of critical resistance, and the ethical imperative to think otherwise. As I argued in Chapter 3, a critical engagement with cultural difference leads us to consider the impossibility of seeing ourselves through others’ eyes. Here we have to confront harder questions of alterity, ways of thinking otherwise, of seeing other possibilities, of transcending the boundaries of expected thought. The unexpected is also deeply linked to questions of place, and this I have explored through an emphasis on locality, mobility, affect and narrative. The journey I recounted in Chapter 1, and to which I returned at the beginning of this chapter, was not so much travel across physical space as it was an emotional and temporal journey. This was an exploration of mnemonic traces, of those sensual and tactile pieces of history that connect across unexpected places. Through the letters written when mobility was constrained, the strains of epistolary parenting, I explored the difficulties of displacement, of lives unexpectedly lived in other places. This book has been about being out of place and about writing differently, the light the cracks let in, the passion behind the trade, the incitement to reflect.

Notes (1) Lord’s is the name of the cricket ground in St John’s Wood, London, England, home of the Marylebone Cricket Club (founded in 1787), which has generally been acknowledged as the ‘home’ of cricket, a claim increasingly contested in a new world cricket order. (2) The British imported willow trees to Kashmir in the 1920s, which later (1970s) became the source of a major cricket bat industry. (3) Paise (the plural of paisa) is one-hundredth of a rupee (cf cents). Here it is being used to refer to what elite colonial administrators, with their particular class backgrounds, saw as an undignified interest in mercantile and financial affairs in many parts of the Empire. (4) See Mitchell (2006), Pennycook (2007), Pennycook and Mitchell (2009) for background to these interviews. The word corroboree refers to events or meetings (as opposed to ceremonies) which typically include songs, dances and other social and cultural activities. Like a number of such terms, it is a word that has been appropriated into English and then reappropriated by Aboriginal communities. There is a further reappropriation of the term in Wire MC’s use here. Wire’s neologism ‘Abodigital’ refers to a 21st century Aboriginal Australian who is connected to mobiles and laptops but also to the soil through his fingers (digits). (5) Despite agreement on the standard written form of Cornish, variation in spelling such as dynnergh or dynergh is still common.

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Index

affect and the experience of place 27, 32–33, 35, 84 and language 33, 81, 84 African-American writing 22–23, 35 aikido 93–94, 98 Aiyar, C. P. Ramaswami 112–114 Andreotti, Vanessa 43–44 Appadurai, Arjun on cricket 154, 156–57, 159–60, 163 on ‘flows’ 12, 154, 163 on globalization 12, 154, 163 Appleby, Ros 149 asylum seekers 23–24 Australia cricket in 155, 157–58 Englishes of 145–46 hip-hop in 161–62 immigration policy of 141 autobiography 31–35, 147

Call centres 123 Cameron, Deborah 121, 122 Canagajarah, Suresh 30, 76–77, 99, 116, 133, 138, 145 Chew, Phyllis Ghim Lian 25 China Cultural Revolution 39 Hunan province 38–41 languages in 80–81, 91–92, 128 Choi, Julie 32 Coen, Tanya 20 colonialism ‘contact zones’ (Pratt) of 15 and the denial of diversity 5 ‘entangled objects’ (Thomas) of 15 Cornish (language) 164–66 in Australia 166 revival 169–70 cosmopolitanism 26–27 Coulmas, Florian 26 Creese, Angela 125 cricket Appadurai on 154, 156–57, 159–60, 163 in Australia 155, 157–58 and colonialism 154–59 and decolonization 154 and globalization 163–64 in India 152–53, 156–57, 160–61, 172 Indian Premier League (IPL) 104, 153 Nandy on 154, 157, 161–63 in New Zealand 155 in Papua New Guinea 159–61 and politics of race 153–55 in the West Indies 154–55 critical thinking 129 critical resistance 29–30, 34–35, 46–48, 97, 130, 139, 173

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 125 Blackledge, Adrian 125 Blommaert, Jan 19, 23–27, 98–99, 117–8 Borges, Jorge Luis 120, 124 Bourdieu, Pierre 87–89 Braine, George 76–77 Brendon, Vyvyen 15, 63 British Empire and colonial capitalism 1, 2, 71–72 cricket in 154–59, 163 and education 63–65, 67, 71 families of 6, 63–65 and letter-writing 65–68, 72–73 and migration 6, 15, 71, 165, 152 rubber trade in 1, 7–8, 13 tea trade in 7–8, 13 Buettner, Elizabeth 6, 65 Butler, Judith 43, 47, 88–89, 100

186

Inde x

Davidar, David 6, 14 Davies, Alan 81, 82, 84, 85 Dean, Mitchell 29 Derrida, Jacques 14, 46 De Souza, Lynne Mario T.M. 43–44 difference ethics of 45 and language 30, 121 and otherness 42, 97, 119–20, 142 and pedagogy 132 politics of 19 diversity in cities 4–5 denial of 5 ordinariness of 5, 20 Duchêne, Alexandre 123 Dutch (language) 82, 85 Eades, Diana 23–24 East India Company 57 English (language) and colonialism 32, 81–2, 99, 115, 138, 153, 155–56, 159 global spread of 78, 79, 97, 155–56 as ideological construct 81 and imperialism 46 indigenization of 155–56 in India 57, 115, 160–61 as a lingua franca (ELF) 77–79, 85, 87, 99, 145, 163 ‘native speaker’ of 80–86, 94–97, 99–100 ‘ownership’ of 79 in the Philippines 79 and race 94–97, 99 Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) see TESOL world Englishes 79 English language teaching (ELT) job market 86 and Christian missionaries 133 and native/non-native speaker distinction 76–86 enregisterment 119 ethics Levinas on 44–46 and otherness 44–48

187

Fabian, Johannes 44 Faez, Farahnaz 86 Fairclough, Norman 118–19 Farrell, Thomas 131 feminism 130 fictocriticism 35 food 41 Forman, Ross 129 Foucault, Michel on Borges 120–21, 124 and critical resistance 46 on discourse 118 and ‘genealogy’ 47 on knowledge 22 on politics 130 on ‘thinking otherwise’ ( penser autrement) 45, 130 Freeman, Donald 136, 137–38 Freud, Sigmund 130 Gardner, Eric 22–23, 35 gender and language 46, 84, 96 and pedagogy 142, 143, 146 queering of 22 and writing 32 gender studies 97 geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon) 26 German (language) Bavarian 74–75, 90 Hochdeutsch (Standard German) 75, 90 Ghosh, Amitav 57 globalization Appadurai on 154, 163 and class 121–24 and English 72, 78, 138 and labour 121–23 and language 36, 72, 78, 121–26, 138 and unexpectedness 19, 35–36 Goldstein, Tara 147 Gramsci, Antonio 88 Grey, Marianne 132, 148 Halliday, Michael A.K. 118 Hardt, Michael 19 Harris, Roy 75, 100 Hawkings, Frank 7, 12, 49–71, 101–111

188 L anguage and Mobilit y

Hawkings, Dorothy 12, 49–50, 54–70, 104, 109–111 Hebrew 20–21, 170 Heidegger, Martin 14 Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) 44 Heller, Monica 17, 123 Heraclitus 12, 27, 35–36 Higgins, Michael 20 hip-hop in Australia 161–62 global spread of 155 indigenization of 161–62 and multilingualism 18 in the USA 163 Hoy, David Couzens 29, 46–47, 97 Hulstijn, Jan H. 85 Hultgren, Anna Kristina 123 Hunanese (language) 91–92, 94 Hutton, Christopher 79, 82 hybridity and cultural identity 18–19 critique of 19 identity and hybridity 18–19 and language 22, 26–27, 78, 96–97, 119–20, 130, 162, 167, 171 India British families in 59, 63–65, 101–103 Cochin (Kochi) 2–5 cricket in 152–53, 156–57, 160–61, 172 importance of elephants in 105–6 independence of 9–10, 25, 70–71, 101, 103 James, C.L.R. 154, 159 Japanese (language) 92–93 Jenkins, Jennifer 78 Johnson, Karen E. 136 Joseph, John E. 143 Joseph, May 2–3, 6 ‘mnemonic traces’ 7–8 Kanhai, Rohan 155 Kachru, Braj B. 78, 87, 145 Kachru, Yamuna 109, 116 Kant, Immanuel 22 Kearney, Richard 45–46

Kirkpatrick, Andy 77 Kolbe, Vincent 36 Kramsch, Claire 32, 33, 35, 121 Kubota, Ryuko 95 Lagaan (2001) 158–59 Lakoff, George 120 language and affect 33, 81, 84 bilingualism 17–19 and class 121–24 deaths of 168–69 education 130–31 (see also pedagogy) and globalization 36, 72, 78, 121–26, 138 and identity 22, 26–27, 78, 96–97, 119–20, 130, 162, 167, 171 as invention 85 ‘knowing a language’ 75, 89, 168–69 as local practice 89, 94, 98, 119, 160, 172, 117–18 and locality 17, 26, 97–98, 162 and Marxism 124–25 metrolingualism see metrolingualism and mobility 17, 24–27, 30, 75, 87, 98,117–19,155–56, 167, 172 multilingualism 18, 19, 22, 27, 123 and native/non-native speaker distinction 76–77, 80–86, 95–97 and ‘passing’ (Piller) 75, 76, 84–86, 91, 94–95, 97–100 plurilingualism 18 polylingualism 18 and power 87–89 and privilege 94 and race 94–97 queering of 22 and unexpectedness 17–18, 20–22, 24, 36, 75, 98, 100, 118, 155, 162, 171–72 Latour, Bruno 33 Lee, Su Kim 5 Levinas, Emmanuel 44 Lin, Angel 95 Luke, Allan 35, 87, 138–39 Macarthur, John 64 MacMillan, Margaret 59 Mahboob, Ahmar 76, 140

Inde x

Majumdar, Boria 153 Makoni, Busi 27 Makoni, Sinfree 27, 85 Malayalam (language) 61, 101, 115–117 Manx (language) 167 Marr, Nikolai Iakovelich 121–26 Marx, Karl 130 Marxist linguistics 124–26 Massey, Doreen 25 MC Trey 161 metrolingualism definition of 18, 21 in Sydney, Australia 128 and the queering of language 22 Mignolo, Walter 44 mobility Blommaert on 26 and cosmopolitanism 26 and language 17, 24–27, 30, 75, 87, 98,117–19,155–56, 167, 172 Massey on 25 politics of 41–42 and privilege 24–25 Simpson on 24 Sebba on 26 modernity and hybridity 18–19 and mobility 7 Modiano, Marko 77 Muecke, Stephen 35 Mukherjee, Joybrato 82–85 Mulder, Kimberley 85 Murray, Denise 93 Nandy, Ashis 3–4 on cricket 154, 157, 161–63 narrative and autobiography 34, 147 and critical writing 29–34 Native/non-native speaker distinction 76–77, 80–86, 95–97 Negri, Antonio 19 Nelson, Cynthia 96–97, 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich 46 Nunan, David 32 Norton, Bonny 32, 138 Obama, Barack 95–96 Ostler, Nicholas 81

189

Otsuji, Emi 18, 19 otherness and ethics 14, 44–45 Fabian on 44 and intercultural communication 42, 47 and language 120–21 Levinas on 44–46 Parks, Eleanor 67–68 Passing as a native speaker 75, 76, 84–86, 91, 94–95, 97–100 Pavlenko, Aneta 31, 34 pedagogy cultural space of the classroom 142–43 critical language education 129, 131–32, 138–40, 146–49, 172–73 teacher education 135–38 Pennycook, Alastair and hip-hop 155, 161–62 and language as invention 85 and language as local practice 89, 94, 98, 119, 160, 172, 117–18 and liberal ostrichism 129 and metrolingualism 18, 21–22, 128 Pennycuick, John 150–153 Phillipson, Robert 77, 129 Piller, Ingrid 76, 80, 84–86 poetry 31 postcolonialism 18, 19, 130–31, 163 in India 102, 153 Pratt, Marie Louise 15 Putonghua (language) 80–81, 128 Québécois (Quebec French language) 90–91 queer theory 96–97 Quirk, Randolph 87 race and cricket 153–55 and native speaker construct 94–97 Rajagopalan, Kanavilil 46, 78–81, 97 Rampton, Ben 18 Rimbaud, Arthur 42 Robbins, Joel 159–60 Romney, Mary 95 Roy, Arundhati 5–6

190

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Said, Edward 27–29 Scollon, Ron 26 Scollon, Suzanne Wong 26 Scott, David 47 Scott, James C. 115 Seargeant, Philip 87 Searle, Chris 154 Sebba, Mark 26 sexuality 21–22 Sharkey, Judy 147 Shuck, Gail 82, 95 Simpson, Mark 24 Smith, Dorothy 33 Sonntag, Selma 46 sociolinguistics 23, 26, 98, 118 Stalin, Joseph 122–26 Stevens, Wallace 31, 40, 127–149 Szerszynski, Bronislaw 26–27 TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) 127, 128, 136–39 Thomas, Nicholas 15 Thrift, Nigel 25, 27, 33–34 Toohey, Kelleen 138 traces ‘mnemonic traces’ (Joseph) 7–8, 14–15, 73, 116, 173 Derrida on 14 and retracing history 14–15 transgression politics of 45 and unexpectedness 21–22

Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response to Cricket (1974) 159 unexpectedness and globalization 19, 35–36 and language 17–18, 20–22, 24, 36, 75, 98, 100, 118, 155, 162, 171–72 and pedagogy 131–32, 147–48 and transgression 21–22 and writing 29, 31, 35–36 Urry, John 26–27 Ute, Bute competition 119 vague linguistique (Makoni and Makoni) 27 Vandrick, Stephanie 32, 94 Voloshinov, Valentin Nikolaevich 125 Vygotsky, Lev Semyonovich 125 Widdowson, Henry 78 Widin, Jacquie 88 Wilde, Oscar 35 Wire MC 161–62 World War One 49–54, 71, 152 World War Two 69, 101 writing autobiography 31–35, 147 and critical resistance 29–30 ethnography 34 fictocriticism 35 racial politics of 22–23