People who cannot pronounce ‘Kanimozhi’ are trying to unify Indians. Once, the union home minister Amit Shah, who many South Indians think is a North Indian, said that India needs a unifying language, and that language is Hindi. He immediately unified half of India, for that is all it takes to make South Indians pretend that they love each other and that they are all the same. Then Tamil politicians, who are actually actors, and Tamil actors, who are actually politicians, lamented ‘the imposition’ – an English word that is extremely difficult for most Tamils to pronounce.

The fact is, no one has tried to impose Hindi on the South. But I have no doubt that the nationalistic BJP government in Delhi dreams of an India where there is a single dominant language which, coincidentally, they speak well. After all, there can be no nationalism without a national language. As things stand, there is no such thing as an Indian nationalist; there are only the North Indian nationalists. The exceptions are, oddly, the English-speaking new patriots.

In India, ‘national’ tends to mean a thing that is not national. Like the national animal (tiger), national bird (peacock), national sport (hockey), and national capital (Delhi). National is often someone’s regional stuff, just like ‘global culture’ is the local culture of white people. The South has accepted many alien things as ‘national’, but it is too late for them to accept Hindi. 

The people who want Hindi to be the national language wish that the South agrees to be colonized by the language. Then one half of India will not be so foreign to the other half, and a nationalistic Indian prime minister would not have to, absurdly, speak to the poorest Tamils or patriotic space scientists in English. But then, people do not surrender to a language to be ‘unified’. People learn languages that are useful. What is the use of Hindi? What are the rewards of learning Hindi? Even parents are not very appealing if they are not useful. Hindi cannot colonize the South because Hindi is useless.

Guess who surrendered to Hindi when it appeared to have a certain allure? Rajinikanth. He was willing to act as the hero’s sidekick in Hindi films so that he could have a shot at Mumbai’s film industry, which was at the time more lucrative than Tamil. So did the great Kamal Haasan, another Tamil superstar. A language does not conquer through war; it slowly encroaches through rewards. Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan, who failed in their efforts to become Hindi stars, today condemn Hindi’s attempt to trespass into their fiefdoms. This is because that language was never useful to them.

English, unlike Hindi, has tremendous rewards. Most high-paying or respectable jobs that do not break the law require English. Hindi films are written in English – the instructions in the screenplays are in English, and even the Hindi dialogue is transcribed in the Latin alphabet. Mumbai’s new film stars, like most educated Indians, find it easier to read Hindi if it is written this way. Higher education is mostly conducted in English.

So, millions of poor families spend their hard-earned money on educating their children in English, who then undergo considerable suffering to learn a language that is not a part of their environment; millions then realize that they cannot learn it well enough.

A natural resource appears to benefit all equally, but the upper classes are in the best position to corner a disproportionate share. The same happened with English. Even so, English helps some classes of the poor occupy professions that the elite have vacated.

For the Dalits, English was for long the Western counterforce that can neutralize Indian culture. It is to emphasize this point that the Dalit activist, Chandra Bhan Prasad, built a temple to the Goddess English in an impoverished village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. In his temple, there was an idol in robes, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He planned to encourage young Dalit couples to include a ritual in their wedding ceremony in which they would sign the letters A, B, C, and D on a piece of paper. ‘That would be a promise they make that they will teach their children English,’ he told me. He also planned to fix a loudspeaker in the temple from which a recorded voice would chant the English alphabet, from A to Z, every day at 5 a.m.

His temple didn’t work out. It is hard for Dalits to pretend that the language belongs to them. In early 2011, I wrote in the New York Times, ‘English is the de facto national language of India. It is a bitter truth. ’

It was true then, but I am not so certain any more.

Despite its rewards, English is a cultural failure in India even among the affluent. Its failure across India is far greater than the failure of Hindi in the South. Once, English was the language of the people who ran India. It was a time when class and money meant the same thing. India has changed. Even though English still has prestige, its influence is waning. It now belongs to a confused minority upper-middle class who have been retarded by English. India has to be the only society in the world whose educated upper-middle class does not speak any language with complete mastery. 

Excerpted with permission from Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us by Manu Joseph, Aleph Book Company (2025).