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Titel
11
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Into India
This unit explores English in India. We both engage with colonial India and modern representations of the country, and we explore some of the values and attitudes that characterize modern Indian life. To open the unit, students fill in a timeline that helps them explain the fact that a relatively small island nation on the periphery of Europe came to rule the Indian subcontinent. We then read Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” and excerpts from Macaulya’s “Minutes on Indian Education” to explore the logic of the orientalist and imperialist drive to “civilize” other peoples. We then take a detour around the caste system and modern Indian beauty standards, which we, for instance, explore through analyzing advertisements for skin lightening cream. This gives us a combination of concepts relating both to colonial and modern India, which sets us up to watch the epic Tollywood action film RRR and examine how it portrays everything from social differences to beauty standards to mimicry to caste and class, while drawing on Hindu mythology to idealize the two historical freedom fighters that, at one point, engage in a dance-off against the British colonizers. This is supplemented by a critical review of the film that shows us how it exemplifies the Hindutva ideology of the director. We then read an excerpt from an Indian novel masquerading as a self-help book, which again takes us back to the class differences and gender norms of modern day India, but this time in prose. The unit ends with an article on the status of English in India, and we consider whether it can best be described as a sociolect or a lingua franca.
Key concepts include: company rule, the British Raj, orientalism, mimicry, pigmentocracy, caste, Hindu, Muslim, scheduled caste, class, Hollywood, Tollywood, larger than life, masala, nau raz, visual symbolism, Hindutva ideology, Rama, Sita, Hanuman, beauty standards, narrative and non-narrative functions of song and dance sequences, lingua franca, sociolect
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