A Hindi professor responds: English is the real bottleneck stifling other Indian languages

English has done remarkable damage to India’s linguistic progress by stifling other Indian languages. Instead, that blame is conveniently laid on Hindi. Blaming English forces one to confront a hard truth that India’s systems are designed to keep most Indians outside the gate. It is easier to blame Hindi, performing critique, while staying inside the inherited structure.

It is time to break this structure down.

India is a “linguistic surplus” nation. However, the main problem with Indians is that they are somewhat ignorant about what to do with this linguistic surplus, ability and strength. Indians are inherently multilingual, but live in a monolingually institutionalised world.

When I say monolingual world, I don’t mean that there is only one functioning language on earth. Don’t count the number of languages but look at how they operate in the post-industrial world and in the binary of the nation-state. Monolingualism is the favoured approach of colonial and post-colonial institutions. It is how institutions scale, status is produced and knowledge is certified in contemporary times.

India is a peculiar case because, in some exclusive quarters, it practices acute monolingualism, but at other socio-cultural levels it tries to retain its old multilingual character. The higher one climbs, the more the system demands that one...

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