English Language and Transnational Networks: A Study of Colonial Punjab.

The journey of English language in India has been variously assessed through tropes of mimicry, agency, resistance, and linguistic hybridity. While these critical assessments are largely placed within local, provincial, and national frameworks, this essay argues for a transnational critical framework to understand the history of English in India. The development of transnational publics at the end of the nineteenth century was facilitated by travel, print networks, and cultural flows between the colonies and the metropole. While English embedded itself into local literary cultures, it was also deployed by colonial subjects in transnational imperial circuits, thus influencing political imaginaries and subjectivities. The essay analyses archival records from the colonial Province of Punjab to see how English was mobilized to project newer identities into transnational print publics and to build transnational networks of solidarity. The essay also examines how the claims made over English help to understand the agency of the gendered colonial subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]