Volume 2017, Issue 247 - Special Issue: Language and globalization in South and Central Asian spaces, Issue Editors: Brook Bolander and Till Mostowlansky

In this introduction, we outline our approach to the two main themes this interdisciplinary special issue brings together – language and globalization, and South and Central Asian spaces. Arguing for the importance of exploring these topics from multiple, complementary disciplinary angles (sociolinguistic, anthropological and historical), we delineate a conceptualization of language and globalization which both acknowledges the inextricable relationship between language (use and ideology) and processes of globalization (past and present); as well as the challenges this relationship poses for linguistic research. We thereby adopt a viewpoint which underscores the importance of not a priori assuming that any one layer or scale – local, national, transnational, transregional – will be central to the ways language is used to perform or index globalization. To address questions of language and globalization in connection with South and Central Asian spaces, we further underscore our approach to regions as “process geographies”, an outlook which is suggestive of the importance of critically reflecting on the notion of “areas” as potentially unfixed, unstable and oscillating entities.

India’s “official language controversy” spanned over two decades from 1946 to 1967, during which the proposal to replace English with Hindi met with resistance from various quarters. However, the inter-regional ethno-linguistic politics of India came together with the developmental vision for an industrialized postcolonial democracy to ensure its validation and continuance in as a co-official language of the republic. My analysis identifies a widespread perception, among supporters as well as detractors of English in India at the time, that the “international”/“foreign” credentials of the language made it an instrument of change across various regional, religious, caste, class, and ethnic communities. The language came to be reframed during this period due to the coming together of India’s colonial past and its distinct regional and community histories with the views of leading public figures. Perhaps most surprising, however, is the complex part played by a “hybrid” minority constituency in public debate: the mixed race Anglo-Indian community, in dissociating from the former “home” country of England re-defined itself and its relationship with the new republic, and ultimately served as a catalyst in reframing the language as not merely international or colonial, but as Indian.

This article aims to explore the construction of post-diasporic, hybrid local identities in communicative practices of the younger British Gujarati community. It focuses on the host of a popular BBC Asian Network radio show as a prominent voice of this community, who simultaneously embodies and creates linguistic community values through the use of Gujarati-English code-switching. In doing so, it highlights the role of the media in shaping a space for the linguistic negotiation of local and transnational influences. On a methodological level, the article argues for the combination of data from different domains in the context of transnational identity negotiations, such as linguistic behavior, narrative language biographies, private and public meta-linguistic commentary, indications of language status and attitudes towards alternating language use.

In this article I set out to explore the Tajik-Afghan frontier in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan region as a “contact zone” in which different actors engage in communicative encounters. Against this backdrop I take the construction of bridges across the Tajik-Afghan border river as a point of departure to analyse how these actors envisage processes of globalization. Following Pennycook, I argue that a focus on language as local practice reveals that the Tajik-Afghan frontier is marked by a high degree of different languages, but also by multiple meanings within and beyond these languages. As a result I maintain that highlighting the locality of languages at the Tajik-Afghan frontier provides an opportunity to frame language as tied to specific communicative encounters in semiotized time and space.

The transnational Ismaili community is made up of local communities of Ismailis living in over 25 countries around the world. Despite diversity within and between these communities, the 2.5–12 million Ismailis worldwide share a common identity as Ismaili. Various structures and resources are used to construct and maintain the community. These include an official language – English. In this article, I aim to explore the role of English in connection with Ismaili transnationalism. Drawing on ethnographic data collected during fieldwork in Northern Pakistan and Eastern Tajikistan, and on data taken from digital spaces, I will focus on the movement of local Ismailis away from Northern Pakistan and Eastern Tajikistan, and on the movement of people and ideas to Northern Pakistan and Eastern Tajikistan. I will thereby argue for the importance of including non-mobile individuals in conceptualizations of Ismaili transnationalism. In doing so, I will apply the concept of “motility”, which points to interconnections between social and spatial mobility, and highlights the potential for mobility; and I will underline the role local settings play for transnational processes. In the course of the article, I also demonstrate that Ismaili transnationalism is not homogeneous. Instead, certain people, places and spaces emerge as more relevant to its construction and maintenance. This becomes coupled with access to English and has implications for this issue’s focus on the relationship between South and Central Asian spaces.

Couched in the critical discourse studies perspective and developing the notion of political imaginary, this article explores the imaginaries of the transnational integration project of the Eurasian Union that are produced in elite discourses in its two key states, Russia and Kazakhstan. The corpus used comprises transcripts of the two states’ parliamentary discussions and speeches by presidents Putin and Nazarbaev. The article focuses on meaning construction through the discursive types, strategies, and topoi employed in the discourses of the new Union, and the linguistic forms called upon for their articulation. Two discursive strands narrating the Eurasian Union are singled out – the technocratic and the romantic , the latter being especially potent for identity-building capacity and the production of imaginaries. The article concludes that the object of integration emerging from the two constituent political agents’ collective imagination appears fluid and incoherent both within and between the two states.

This article explores some of the ways in which language was central to the construction of Shanghai spirit , an idiom that has been used to capture multilateral cooperation between China, Russia, and the independent Central Asian states since 1996. That year the heads of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Russia met in Shanghai to enhance confidence-building measures across their common borders. In 2001, this ad hoc mechanism was superseded by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a chartered organization with standing bodies. The SCO was designed for wide-ranging cooperation in a globalizing world, a goal conveyed through a lexicon of cooperation that characterized its formal statements and communiqués: “good neighbourliness”; “win–win”; “mutually beneficial and comprehensive cooperation”; “political multipolarity”; “economic and information globalization”. But today there is discord between the language of cooperation and the SCO’s achievements: over the previous fifteen years, SCO member states have entered into bilateral security agreements with outside countries (including the United States), and trade between SCO countries was, and is, negotiated bilaterally, such as Chinese and Russian investments in Central (and South) Asia. Nevertheless, the vocabulary of cooperation remains important as a space-making exercise envisioning new political configurations in a globalizing world. These new geographical imaginaries of Eurasia have retained the promise of cooperation even if success remains limited.

This article aims to present a synthesizing commentary on the collected articles in this special issue on language, transnationalism and globalization in South and Central Asian spaces. In doing so, it focuses on three main themes that the assembled articles speak to: the role of mobility in the varying ways in which transnationalism operates; the importance of scale in understanding contradictions and disjunctions in the way language intersects with global, national and local mobilities; and the need to deconstruct the prioritization of the trans-national over other levels of inter-spatial connection. I conclude, commending the collection, by suggesting that not only do we discover more here about language and transnationalism in these specifically Asian contexts, but also that, in focusing on one specifically non-Western set of spaces, we can learn, in our research on academically more well-trodden parts of the world, about our own ideologies and assumptions about language, about mobility and about global change.