A language for lost voices

Deccan Herald

19 hours ago

Jean Paul Sartre in his foreword to The Wretched of the Earth, observes: 'To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation.'.India's Home Minister recently remarked that he was ashamed of speaking in English. The backlash was swift and predictable. He was accused of linguistic nationalism, cultural regression, and endangering India's cosmopolitanism. English remains our bridge to the world – a competitive advantage, and a neutral lingua franca in a multilingual subcontinent. Yet, behind the sharp political criticism lies an uncomfortable truth: the English language, a legacy of colonial rule, continues to dominate not merely our official discourse, but our imagination. In doing so, it estranges the vast majority of Indians from the highest institutions of law, learning, and policy – domains where their voices remain unheard and their intellect unacknowledged. This linguistic bifurcation – between those who command English and those who do not – has become one of the starkest class and power divides in contemporary India. After 78 years of independence, we still lack a national language that speaks to both our civilisational past and our democratic future. Instead, we battle endlessly over Hindi vs. regional languages..Language is both voice and intellect. Language is not merely a medium of instruction or administration. Language is thought. If English remains the dominant language of our higher education, policymaking, courts, and elite discourse, it means that the civilisational logic embedded in English – its categories, metaphors, rhythms, and rationalities – continues to shape how we think. In effect, the coloniser took our language, and by doing so, took our voice – and with it, our intellectual sovereignty. This is not to demonise English. It is a rich and flexible language, and India has made remarkable contributions to it – from RK Narayan to Arundhati Roy, from Amartya Sen to Salman Rushdie. But English in India is not the language of the street, the kitchen, the workshop, or the panchayat. It is not the language in which most Indians dream, argue, joke, cry, or sing lullabies. It is the language of governance, aspiration, and exclusion. And therein lies the problem..What does it mean for a country to think in a language that most of its people do not understand? What happens when the very act of participating in civic life requires a linguistic passport that is inaccessible to the majority? We must move towards a civilisational reclamation. There is no going back to an imagined past where a single classical language held sway. Sanskrit, Persian, Prakrit, and Tamil – all have profound legacies, but none can serve as the common tongue of a modern, democratic, multilingual India. Instead, we must embrace the hybrid tongues already spoken in India's cities and popular culture – Hinglish, Tanglish, and Benglish – not as corruption but as the seedbed of a new, evolving national idiom. These creoles, born of necessity and innovation, already carry our metaphors, our idioms, our lived experiences. They represent a living, breathing negotiation between rootedness and modernity. What if we were to take these mixed languages seriously, not just in cinema and advertising, but in education, policymaking, and civic discourse? What if our textbooks, court judgements, and parliamentary debates spoke in a voice more legible to the majority?.This is not merely an administrative task – it is a civilisational project. It will require investment in translation across Indian languages, nurturing of literature in both vernacular and hybrid forms, and the development of digital tools such as natural language processing engines for Indian tongues. Reclaiming our languages is not anti-modern – it is how we modernise on our terms. Above all, this is an ethical and political imperative. A democracy that does not speak in the voice of its people cannot be truly participatory. The denial of linguistic dignity has cascading effects on education, opportunity, legal rights, and psychological well-being..Frantz Fanon warned that the colonised intellectual, uncritically adopting the coloniser's language and worldview, risks becoming 'a kind of mimic man'. For India, the decolonisation of language is not a nostalgic indulgence – it is the bedrock of self-respecting modernity. In reclaiming our languages, we do not reject English – we provincialise it. We make it one among many, not the only one. In doing so, we open the doors once more to the full range of Indian minds – to speak, to think, and to flourish..Tension korish na, local-a-iruku, swalpa adjust maadi. Some jugaad might help not just express, but belong!