A provocative new essay by English professor Suraj Gunwant challenges conventional wisdom about language politics in India, arguing that Hindi—not English—poses the primary threat to the country's linguistic diversity. The argument, published in Scroll.in, comes as debates over language policy intensify across India's federal system.
Gunwant's central thesis overturns the narrative promoted by Hindi advocates, who have long portrayed English as the colonial language undermining indigenous tongues. Instead, the professor contends that Hindi's dominance in northern India creates social hierarchies that shame speakers of regional languages like Bhojpuri, Maithili, Braj, and Awadhi into abandoning their mother tongues.
In India, as across the subcontinent, scale and diversity make simple narratives impossible—and fascinating. The country recognizes 22 official languages under the Eighth Schedule of its Constitution, but linguists estimate that 780 languages are spoken across India, making it one of the world's most linguistically diverse nations. Understanding how this diversity erodes requires looking beyond simple colonial versus indigenous frameworks.
The Social Hierarchy of Language
"Hindi is at the top in most parts of North India," Gunwant writes, describing how speakers of other languages experience "constant shame" for using their native tongues in public spaces. This shame operates not through formal prohibition but through social pressure—the subtle signals that mark regional language speakers as unsophisticated, rural, or backward.
The mechanism of language death, according to Gunwant, occurs in the everyday interactions of homes, markets, and schools. Parents stop teaching children their ancestral languages, framing the shift as acquiring "better manners" and "appropriate speech." What actually happens is linguistic assimilation disguised as social mobility.
Gunwant draws on personal experience to illustrate the process. His Kumaoni-speaking migrant family abandoned their native language for Hindi, driven not by encounters with English but by parental aspirations for their children's advancement. "English was far too distant" to be the threat, he notes—it was Hindi, the language of opportunity and respectability in northern India, that displaced Kumaoni.
This pattern repeats across India's linguistic landscape, particularly in states where Hindi has been promoted as the natural "national language" despite constitutional provisions that designate both Hindi and English as official languages at the central level, while preserving state languages.
Administrative Barriers and Exclusion
Gunwant also challenges claims that Hindi promotes inclusion in governance and administration. Official documents, he argues, contain Sanskritized Hindi that excludes even native Hindi speakers unfamiliar with formal registers of the language. Forms, court documents, and government communications use vocabulary drawn from Sanskrit rather than the Hindi actually spoken in streets and homes.
This creates a paradox: Hindi is promoted as the people's language against elite English, but the Hindi actually used in administration is itself an elite construction inaccessible to ordinary speakers. The promise of democratic inclusion through Hindi rings hollow when the Hindi of officialdom remains incomprehensible to those it purports to serve.
The linguistic politics play out differently across India's federal structure. Southern states—Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, and Telangana—have successfully resisted Hindi imposition, maintaining their own languages in education, administration, and public life. Tamil Nadu's anti-Hindi movement in the 1960s forced the central government to abandon plans to make Hindi the sole official language.
But in northern and central India, where languages exist on a continuum with Hindi, resistance has been weaker. Speakers of Bhojpuri (spoken by an estimated 50 million people), Maithili (35 million), and other languages classified as "dialects of Hindi" face pressure to adopt standardized Hindi rather than assert distinct linguistic identities.
The English Alternative
Gunwant's proposed solution is radical: adopt English as the neutral administrative language, following Singapore's model, while allowing regional languages to flourish without state-imposed hierarchy. This recommendation will strike many Indians as surrendering to colonialism, but Gunwant argues it's precisely the opposite.
English, in his framework, functions as a link language that doesn't claim civilizational superiority over Indian languages. A Tamil speaker and a Bengali speaker can communicate in English without either surrendering their mother tongue to the other's linguistic imperialism. English carries the baggage of colonial history, but not the weight of ongoing internal domination.
This argument resonates with southern Indian states, where English is often seen as preferable to Hindi for inter-state communication and central government business. Tamil Nadu maintains a two-language policy (Tamil and English) rather than the three-language formula (state language, Hindi, English) promoted by the central government.
Yet Gunwant's proposal faces obvious political obstacles. The BJP government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has actively promoted Hindi in central government operations, requiring civil servants to use Hindi in official communications and expanding Hindi-medium instruction. For Hindu nationalists, Hindi represents cultural authenticity against Western influence—precisely the framing Gunwant challenges.
Federal Tensions and Language Politics
Language policy in India cannot be separated from broader federal tensions between the center and states. When the central government pushes Hindi, southern and eastern states see it as northern cultural imperialism. When states resist Hindi, northern politicians characterize it as anti-national sentiment.
These tensions play out in concrete policy battles: what languages should be used in central government exams? Should railway stations and road signs include Hindi in non-Hindi states? What language should be used in Parliament when members from different states debate? Each question carries implications for power, resources, and symbolic recognition.
The linguistic diversity at stake is staggering. India is home to languages from four major language families: Indo-European (including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi), Dravidian (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada), Austro-Asiatic (Santali, Mundari), and Sino-Tibetan (Manipuri, Bodo). Each family contains dozens of languages, many with millions of speakers but no official recognition.
When Gunwant argues that Hindi threatens this diversity, he's not making an abstract point about cultural preservation. He's describing the ongoing process by which speakers of languages with smaller populations and less political power stop transmitting their mother tongues to the next generation.
Economic Dimensions of Language Shift
The language question also has economic dimensions. Jobs in central government require Hindi proficiency, disadvantaging non-Hindi speakers. The growth of national media in Hindi creates economic incentives for content creation in Hindi over regional languages. Educational materials and competitive exam preparation are more readily available in Hindi than in smaller languages.
For parents making decisions about their children's language education, these economic realities matter more than abstract commitments to linguistic diversity. If speaking Hindi opens doors to government jobs, higher education, and geographic mobility, the rational choice is to prioritize Hindi—even if it means the death of ancestral languages.
Gunwant's essay challenges Hindi speakers—and particularly Hindi-promoting policymakers—to recognize their role in this linguistic erosion. The threat to India's languages, he argues, comes not from outside but from within: from the imposition of one Indian language over others, enforced not by law but by social pressure and economic necessity.
Whether his proposed solution of English as a neutral administrative language gains traction remains doubtful. But his diagnosis of the problem—that Hindi hegemony, not English colonialism, drives language death in northern India—deserves serious engagement in debates about preserving India's linguistic heritage. In a nation as diverse as India, protecting that heritage may require protecting diversity from internal homogenization, not just external threats.
