Mother tongue influence (MTI) is a widely used yet often underdefined term in India's business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. “Mother tongue” is an unavoidable, yet fraught political category linked to sovereignty, education, region, and ethnicity. Yet in the BPO industry, workers are expected to sound “global” with no identifiable regional “mother tongue” accent. Trainers in the BPO industry have responded to this challenge by working to remove workers’ MTI—and to remove workers with excessive MTI from the industry altogether. This paper argues that MTI gets used in the BPO industry to justify the erasure of both speech and speakers without overtly identifying the systemic privileging of upper-caste, elite, urban varieties of English and their speakers. Regional and ethnic affiliations are treated as intrinsic properties of persons and speech through “mother tongue,” while socially privileged accent trainers are able to claim their own global unmarkedness.

Working with never-published agricultural data collected for Mexico’s pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition, this article argues that manuscript and published statistics represent a space to see state making as a multisided, ongoing process. Whereas historians have largely looked at statistics from the perspective of the state, highlighting bureaucrats’ projections of desired realities and political projects, here I show how local enumerators’ investment in statistical undertakings asserted space for conversations and arguments about the nature and composition of the political or economic whole being represented. I present a methodology for working with historical statistics that takes aberrations, anomalies, and unruly data as signposts to be followed rather than errors to be corrected. In doing so, I argue for seeing not only the frustrated yet durable aspirations of statesmen but also the ways those beyond the central state reforged, reinforced, and remade representations of their homes through engagement with and investment in statistical practices.