This paper investigates the ways in which Hindi and English have come to be used and idealized in contradictory ways by members of different socioeconomic classes in Hindi-speaking India. In particular, the paper focuses on divergent orientations to the English language in Bhopal and New Delhi by three groups of Hindi speakers -- self-identified hijras, kotis, and gays -- who occupy lower, lower middle, and upper middle class positions, respectively. The rise of Hindu nationalism in northern India, which has as one of its targets non-normative sexual and gender expression, has compelled these communities to develop distinctive modernities that lay claim to progressive and cosmopolitan understandings of sexuality and citizenship. An examination of code-switching and code-mixing practices evidenced in over 100 hours of recorded interviews, life stories, and informal conversation reveals that modernity can be indexed as much by resistance to the transnational prestige of English as by its embracement. Because Hindu fundamentalism has become increasingly associated with the Hindi language, all three groups reject traditionalist assumptions regarding the position of Hindi in the contemporary nation-state, adopting divergent and often oppositional understandings of the place of English in the articulation of modernity. This research therefore has important implications not only for the sociolinguistic study of global English, which has tended to focus somewhat narrowly on the international growth of English among educated elites, but also for the ethnographic study of language and identity more generally. Specifically, the paper argues for the importance of considering the complex interplay of local, national, and global discourses in everyday articulations of identity.