At the India Today Conclave Mumbai 2025 session titled The Language War: The Art of Identity Assertion, Professors Ajay Gudavarthy and Narendra Jadhav unpacked the politics, culture, and class tensions shaping India’s language debates.Narendra Jadhav, a former Rajya Sabha member and chair of Maharashtra’s new language committee, outlined how the long-standing “three-language formula” became a flashpoint.“All education commissions, from the Kothari Commission to the National Education Policy (NEP), have recommended three languages in school,” he said. “But they never said it must start from Class 1. It was always gradual and never compulsory.”Conclave Mumbai Full CoverageMaharashtra currently teaches Marathi, Hindi, and English, with Hindi introduced in Class 5. After the NEP’s release in 2020, the state’s Mashelkar committee proposed that all three languages be compulsory from Classes 1 to 12. “In 2021, nobody paid attention,” Jadhav recalled. “But when the chief minister tried to implement it in 2025, hell broke loose.”Political parties, particularly the Thackeray-led factions, opposed the move and the government withdrew its order, appointing a new committee under Jadhav to decide when languages should be introduced, he said.Jadhav warned that forcing children to learn three full-fledged languages from the first day of school risks academic overload.“Mother tongue is the best medium of instruction,” he said. “When multiple languages with all their grammar and syntax are taught from Day 1, children can’t master any of them. Instead of creating multilingual experts, it stifles creativity and productivity.”Citing NGO Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report, which shows that half of rural fifth graders cannot read a second-grade text in any language, he argued for fewer compulsory languages and more focus on comprehension.“There is no substitute for English in a globalised world,” Jadhav added. “For the foreseeable future, India’s future is tied to English.”Jadhav added a personal perspective on how caste shapes language. Growing up in Maharashtra, he spoke a regional dialect and recalled classmates laughing at his speech. “The so-called purity of language has a caste dimension,” he said. “Good Marathi, as spoken by Pune Brahmins, was the standard. Any variation revealed your caste.”Ajay Gudavarthy, Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), emphasised that language politics cannot be separated from caste, class, and religion. “What causes uproar state after state is not just language or its imposition,” he said.Historically, he explained, upper castes embraced English to gain early educational advantages, while socialist leader Rammanohar Lohiya and others once led anti-English movements. “Today it’s reversed,” Gudavarthy noted. “Dalits and backward castes want English for economic mobility, while dominant castes, led by the BJP and RSS, push for protecting Indian languages and for Hindi as a national language.”He highlighted the religious dimension, especially in Tamil Nadu, where opposition to Hindi often carries resistance to “an Indian Aryan culture” linked to Sanskrit. “Even in the Hindi heartland, Hindustani had Urdu and Persian roots and Hindi has a Sanskritised cultural message,” he said.Gudavarthy distinguished between everyday spoken Hindi, which many southern states now accept, and “standardised literary Hindi” used for administration. “People don’t mind colloquial Hindi,” he said, “but when the government talks about making standardised Hindi mandatory for education and governance, resistance returns.”He cited Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s remark that Indians should be “ashamed to speak English” within a decade as a provocation. “Globalisation had loosened linguistic identities,” he said. “Statements like this risk taking us back 50 years, reviving resistance even to spoken Hindi.”Beyond language, Gudavarthy flagged the National Education Policy’s multiple exit points, allowing students to leave after Classes 8, 10, or 12, as a concern.“This can deepen exclusion,” he warned. “China is investing heavily in education, while India risks pushing students out early. Linguistic questions cannot be isolated from broader policies that affect access.”“You can’t discuss the linguistic question only in terms of culture or Marathi pride,” Gudavarthy concluded. “The real debate is about access and exclusion.”Jadhav echoed that sentiment: “Those agitating are not against Hindi per se. They are against its compulsory imposition from Class 1.”
NEP debate in India: Balancing three-language teaching and Hindi imposition
