Mohini Gupta is a DPhil Candidate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. Her doctoral research is located at the intersection of sociolinguistics, education and anthropology. She has co-edited the books ‘Rethinking Education in the Context of Post-Pandemic South Asia: Challenges and Possibilities’ (Routledge, 2023) and ‘The Hindu Bard: The Poetry of Dorothy Bonarjee’ (Honno Press, 2023). She has been the Charles Wallace India Trust Translator-Writer Fellow in 2017, hosted by Literature Across Frontiers at Aberystwyth University. An alumna of SOAS University of London, she has been a Research Fellow at Sarai, CSDS; and a translator-in-residence at the Sangam House international writers’ residency in Bangalore. Her English-Hindi translations have been published by Tulika Publishers.
Current Research:
My doctoral research is titled “Language and ‘Postcolonial Shame’: The Politics of Policy, Curriculum and Classroom Practices in Urban India”. It aims to investigate the relationship between language and ‘postcolonial shame’ within the context of education in urban India. The thesis applies the lens of ‘postcolonial shame’ (Bewes 2010) to the study of language in India for the first time, using a cross-cultural comparative case study of Wales in the United Kingdom.
The thesis attempts to draw parallels between the historical and colonial construction of language shame in both regions and how this impacts policies, textbooks and teaching practices until today. It explores ‘hidden agendas’ (Shohamy 2005) in policy, ‘hidden curriculum’ (Jackson 1968; Apple 2009) practices and, in some cases, ‘erased curriculum’ (term mine) to study language socialisation in the classroom and language attitudes of shame and pride amongst students.
The thesis also explores the dual position of Hindi, as it loses out socially and economically to English, but politically dominates other Indian languages in the country. Ultimately, the thesis thinks through effective methods that can be used to positively and meaningfully engage students in the language classroom, in order to reverse enduring ideas of language shame in both India and Wales.
Areas of Study:
Sociolinguistics, Language Anthropology, Postcolonialism and Language, Language and Shame, South Asia