THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF LANGUAGE AND POWER: ENGLISH AS SYMBOLIC CAPITAL AND URDU AS MORAL IDENTITY IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

This current paper explores a sociolinguistic situation in Pakistan as one of the problematic social spaces where the hegemonic opposition in the English and Urdu language exists. According to it, this division is not an apolitical linguistic process, but a sphere of symbolic power, the manifestation of the structural tradition of colonialism that the postcolonial state reproduces. The approach followed by the analysis is based on a critical and grounded approach as developed by Talal Asad and Naveeda Khan but synthesizes theoretical school of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Benedict Anderson, and Ernest Gellner. The paper follows the processes of this reproduction, first, by an educational apartheid that institutionalizes English as symbolic capital, the main mode of social economic mobility, thus, establishing a habitus of classes. Such institutional gate keeping is best illustrated with high stakes testing such as high stakes testing like the Civil Superior Services (CSS) exam, which requires high stakes English proficiency. At the same time, it dismantles the state imposition of Urdu as a minority language as a homogenizing nationalistic project aimed to unify a single, unified moral identity. In this top-down project that resulted in the violent marginalization of Bengali, and subsequent marginalization of other regional languages, this lived, ethnographic encounter with Urdu as a language of heart-wounding and heart-religious "striving" and personal "aspiration" in daily life is contrasted. This hegemonic EnglishUrdu episteme, which is cut across by the class and gender division, is shown to be a kind of symbolic violence that marginalizes regional vernaculars and suppresses the subaltern voices in a systematic manner. A peripheral issue, but a key generator of social stratification and the main barrier to the realization of a pluralistic national identity is this unresolved language question.