English in India is steeped in paradox. It retains its colonial legacy and its prestige as the language of the metropolitan elite. Its expanding use as a medium of instruction is widely believed to “advantage some, but disadvantage most” (Mohanty, 2017, p. 261). Yet English is also positioned as a decolonial language with potential to disrupt entrenched class, caste and gender hierarchies, and provide a viable pathway to socioeconomic mobility for the most marginalised communities in India (Vaish, 2005).

In this thesis I explore how English is at once a source of empowerment and disempowerment for young women from outside the metropolitan elite, as they confront gender and social class barriers while navigating their higher studies and their lives beyond. The study is based at an English-medium women’s college in a middle-sized city in South India, where many students are the first in their families to have access to English and higher education. As a privileged White male researcher in this postcolonial context, I was compelled to be reflexively mindful of my positionality, my ethical approach and my research design, as I strove to follow a participant-centred decolonial ethos.

By way of student narratives and interactive interviews, and the theoretical lens of the capability approach, I explore how English bolsters key capabilities like aspiration, autonomy and voice. However, I also assess how status, fear and patriarchy interact with English to form structural constraints which undermine these capabilities. Additionally, I propose emancipatory pedagogical changes which foster a translingual, participatory and decolonial language learning space, thereby supporting students to use English on their own terms.

This study offers a rare excursion into the lives of seventeen young women who sit on the fracture line of India’s English divide as they negotiate the persistent tension between the promise and the despair that enshroud English in an unsettled postcolonial world.