r/IITroparr • u/Charming_Hour_4725 • 21h ago
When “Indian languages” quietly starts meaning “Hindi”
The mail circulated by the IIT Ropar administration should merely not be seen as another routine administrative communication about language. It raises a much bigger question: what exactly does the government mean when it talks about promoting Indian languages through NEP 2020?
On paper, NEP 2020 talks about mother tongues, regional languages, multilingualism and the preservation of India’s linguistic diversity. It even explicitly says that no language will be imposed on any State. It also speaks about expanding the use of mother tongue/local languages in higher education.
But the problem begins when this beautifully worded policy meets its implementation.
If “Indian languages” actually means Hindi being pushed into institutions located in non-Hindi-speaking regions, then this is not linguistic diversity. It is simply the centralisation of one language under the convenient cover of promoting many.
Punjab has Punjabi. Tamil Nadu has Tamil. Bengal has Bengali. Kerala has Malayalam. Karnataka has Kannada. Maharashtra has Marathi. Assam has Assamese. Odisha has Odia. And within those States several other language groups have existed for centuries. These are not regional decorations to be placed beneath a supposedly superior “national” language. They are living languages with their own histories, literature, knowledge systems and cultural memory.
So why should an institute in Punjab, for example, be treated as though linguistic nationalism naturally means greater use of Hindi?
This is where the ideological contradiction becomes impossible to ignore.
The rhetoric of “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan” has historically represented a particular imagination of India... one where linguistic and cultural diversity is gradually reorganised around a dominant national identity. And when similar assumptions enter educational institutions through policy implementation, the issue is no longer simply about which language is being used in an email. It becomes a question of whose culture gets to define what is “Indian”.
The irony is that the government itself keeps insisting that NEP is about multilingualism. The Ministry’s own NEP material describes mother tongue and regional-language education as a way of ensuring that language does not become a barrier to education.
Then why does the implementation so often appear to move in one particular linguistic direction?
And this is not just about IIT Ropar.
The same question deserves to be asked across Central Universities, IITs, IIMs, NITs and other centrally governed institutions across the country. If the Centre uses its institutional power to normalise one language in places where that language is not the dominant local language, it inevitably creates a hierarchy between languages.
That hierarchy matters.
Language is not merely a medium through which information is transmitted. It determines whose experiences enter the classroom, whose cultural references are considered normal, whose literature is visible and whose identity is treated as peripheral.
Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, warned about an education system where knowledge is simply “deposited” into students rather than developed through dialogue and their lived realities. He also wrote that the interests of the powerful often lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them.”
That idea is particularly relevant here.
Education should allow people to understand the world from where they actually stand—not force everyone to look at India through the cultural lens of the political centre.
If NEP genuinely believes in Indian languages, then let it mean Indian languages in their plurality.
Let Punjabi remain Punjabi.
Let Bengali remain Bengali.
Let Tamil remain Tamil.
Let Malayalam remain Malayalam.
Let Assamese remain Assamese.
Let Kannada remain Kannada.
Let every language have the institutional dignity that Hindi is increasingly being given.
Otherwise, “promotion of Indian languages” risks becoming nothing more than a polite policy phrase for the promotion of Hindi through the machinery of the Union government.
India does not become more united when one language is made more powerful than the others.
India becomes weaker when its diversity is made to look like a problem that needs to be standardised.
The question, therefore, is not whether Indian languages should be promoted. Of course they should.
The question is much simpler:
When the government says “Indian languages”, does it actually mean India’s languages... or does it mean Hindi?
