Is English the Best Language of Them All?

Amrita Ghosh and Bhakti Shringarpure discuss the supremacy of the English language in South Asia. While there is immense pride in mother tongues and local languages, it is hard to imagine career and business success, literary and cultural currency, and social mobility without fluency in English. Can our polyglot subcontinent ever shake off this colonial domination over our minds and lives? Guest Daisy Rockwell won the International Booker Prize in 2022 for her translation of Hindi writer Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand into English. This prestigious award spurred debates about the ways in which it was English, after all, that finally allowed for the recognition of Hindi literature internationally. She weighs in on some of the changes that might be afoot when it comes to the politics of languages.

Om Podcasten

Extra Salty: Not your bag of chips but two women with their fingers on the pulse. Each week, Amrita Ghosh and Bhakti Shringarpure dive deep into a question that’s been floating around in the zeitgeist. Expert guests weigh in. No topic is off limits. Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of South Asian literature and cultural studies at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of Kashmir’s Necropolis: Literary, Cultural and Visual Texts (2023), and co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Re-envisioning (2022). She is the co-founder of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary and arts journal. Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and creative director of the Radical Books Collective. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019) and she recently co-edited the collection Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War for Zubaan Books (2023).