As someone who had ventured out in the field to understand the everyday language discourses and use in a vernacular medium school, the statement “you don’t talk like us” immediately made me feel very distant from the students. This was accompanied by a realisation about the Assamese accent I had. The Assamese I speak is one that is associated with the region of Upper Assam. It also has a touch of the Kamrupia[i] dialect, since I was born and brought up in Guwahati, Kamrup district. Nevertheless, the dialect of Upper Assam was dominant in my speech, as my mother hailed from a town in Upper Assam. The dialect I speak is also closer to the standardized Assamese, the form in which we read and write Assamese. Historically, there has also been a rift between the dialects of Upper Assam and Lower Assam. The school that is selected for the study is situated in Guwahati, Kamrup district of lower Assam. Pertaining to the city’s metropolitan nature, having the imprints of waves of migration from all over Assam, the actors in my field spoke in dialects that had roots in both upper and lower Assam. Nevertheless, the Kamrupia accent still held substantial space in the everyday language use in the field. The Kamrupia version of Assamese was historically seen as an incorrect form of Assamese in the project of creating a uniform version of Assamese in the form of a standardised vernacular (Goswami, 2023). The statement “you don’t talk like us” did not just imply my accent of Upper Assam, which was laden with power. My accent was also very much cloaked in my English accent- an effect of my own schooling, of studying in an English-medium convent school in the same city. Not being able to talk or sound like the students came across as a major jitter, that was both overwhelming and unsettling to my sense of self as well as my positionality as a fieldworker.

The self in fragments

Quite often, I was requested by a few of the teachers to take a “proxy” class or be a substitute in cases where they had other engagements. On some occasions, I would be asked just to keep the students “engaged,” and while some would provide me with guidelines for conducting the class in their absence, others would leave it to me to have it my way. It was in such situations that I had to adopt the role of a teacher, while simultaneously being the ethnographer whose interest lay in learning the experiences of the students than schooling them in a certain way. In cases where there were no guidelines given, I would very consciously consider to engage with them through exercises like group discussions and activities where I would also be a participant. The idea was to treat them as interlocutors whose everyday experiences would set the course of the discussions, contrary to the conventional top-down approach of teaching. The classes where I had to follow guidelines given by the respective teacher, I had to constantly oscillate between the roles of a teacher and the ethnographer. As an ethnographer, my role in the classroom was generally to observe and learn the classroom interactions and experiences, besides the classroom pedagogy and teaching-learning processes. Although I still got to observe the classroom interactions while being in the classroom as a substitute for their teacher, playing the role of a teacher came with a baggage of emotional dilemmas. There was one such occasion where I ended up correcting the pronunciation of students.

I was once asked to make the students do a reading of a chapter. It was with the students of class 6. The last period of the day is usually dedicated to doubt clearance sessions, if there is any, but in the words of a teacher, “It is this last period where the students have it their way. They mostly sit and talk”. It was in one of these periods that I was asked by the teacher in-charge to make the students do a reading of a chapter from their moral science textbook. The teacher apparently had to rush to another class since the teacher in-charge of that class was caught up with some work at the principal’s office. As they took turns to read, I found myself helping them with words that they either could not pronounce or the pronunciation was incorrect. My act of correcting the students’ pronunciation may look appropriate when seen from the vantage point of the teacher, the role I was playing while I made them read, it was the ethnographer self in me that had pushed me into a state of dilemma for having to correct the language of the students. Dilemmas are not characteristic of the classroom setting only, but are engendered in other alternative spaces and practices. I was once told by a teacher to get a wooden stick (usually used by some of the teachers) from the teacher’s common room to make the students “silent”. That was in the library, and I was in charge of ensuring that the students sat down to read. Although I had denied the suggestion of the teacher, it was the expectation of the teacher for me to perform in an “authoritarian” manner that reminded me of the fragmented self I had and the roles I was having to play in the school setting. At other times, I had to request the students to enter the classroom, as they began to follow me out of the classroom once I stepped out after a class. That was expected of me, especially when I had walked out of the classroom as someone who did not belong to the cohort of students, but was required to act like a teacher in the classroom on some occasions. As an ethnographer, I am rather interested in these alternative spaces and the potential they hold in providing a sense of the schooling cultures- in the corridors, outside classrooms, staircases, and playgrounds, to cite a few.

In conclusion, I would like to weave together these experiences while reflecting upon the ways in which I navigate my way through the field. A part of it is done by constantly improvising my own ways of being within the spaces and in the interpersonal relations I share in the field. Since Assamese is the medium of instruction of the school, the students mostly spoke in Assamese regardless of their mother tongue. My own command over the language eventually enabled me to build rapport with the students while simultaneously being aware of the regional variations and variety in dialects in conversations. It is in the ethnographic writing where the terms, words, and phrases used by respondents would be retained, treating them as ethnographic categories. This can also act as a means of critiquing the control of categories by relatively dominant cultural groups. The liminal (Turner, 1969) position I held as an ethnographer oscillated between two roles- the student-like and teacher-like roles. Such liminal positions often asked for strategic engagements, which I had to indulge in every day. It is often the circumstances that imply the proximity of the ethnographer-self to either of the roles. As an ethnographer interested in classroom pedagogy and experiences, I attended classes as part of the students’ cohort that enabled me to be a fly on the wall at times and at other times even partake in the informal discussions that happened amongst the students in between classes as well as outside of them. In situations when I had been made requests to act as a substitute teacher, I had manoeuvred my way out by being mindful of the space I inhabit and the role I play inside the classroom. I would avoid sitting on the teacher’s chair and engage with the students as a participant in the activities with the children. The constant improvisation and strategies adopted to maintain the ethnographer self can be transformed into ethnographic writing as experiences, only by laying bare the circumstances that had led me to act in a certain way. In other words, it is by only making explicit the “ethnographer’s path” (Sanjek, 1990) that would possibly enable establishing ethnographic validity.

[i] Kamrupia dialects are a group of regional dialects of Assamese, spoken in the Kamrup region