How Osho taught Hindi to think

When Wild Wild Country came out on Netflix in 2018, Acharya Rajneesh – or Osho, as he came to be known – was, in many ways, exiled twice over. For an older generation, the documentary confirmed their unease as they were reminded that he had been a symbol of scandal, excess and the West’s dangerous fascination with Indian mysticism.

For many Indians, Osho remains an enigma – too spiritual for academic philosophy, too rational for religion and too unconventional for polite conversation.

But for anyone who studies the Hindi language, as I do, Osho cannot be ignored. As a linguist, I see philosophers as test cases for any language. A philosopher stretches a language to its limits. She does not just use it to communicate, she uses it to think. Through her, you see how flexible, how nuanced and how alive a language really is.

Osho did this for Hindi. His words were not borrowed or polished in translation. They were born in the rhythm of Hindi itself.

Hindi has always carried a peculiar anxiety about its identity. It is a young language compared to Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit. It has neither the literary antiquity nor the classical status of India’s older languages, critics remind us. Its early literature is...

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