In India, English Is Not a Language Anymore. It Is a Judgement.

My mother tongue is Bhojpuri.

I grew up speaking it at home, with my grandparents, in the lanes of our mohalla. It was the language of our kitchen, our fights, our lullabies. It was the language my grandmother used when she was happy and the language she used when she was angry, and you always knew which one it was.

Then I went to school.

And within a few weeks, something shifted. Something quiet and permanent.

The teacher would ask a question. I would know the answer. I would raise my hand. And then I would say it — in Hindi, in Bhojpuri-inflected Hindi, in the only Hindi I knew — and a few kids would smile. Not at the answer. At how I said it.

I was eight years old. I did not have a word for what was happening. But I felt it completely.

The message was simple: the language you came from is not good enough here. The language you came from is something to leave behind.

I spent the next ten years trying to speak in a way that would make nobody smile like that again.

Here is a question I want you to sit with.

In India, what does it mean to be educated?

Ask ten people. I promise you, at least eight of them — maybe all ten — will mention English somewhere in their answer. Not knowledge. Not curiosity. Not the ability to think or solve or create or connect.

English.

We have quietly, collectively, decided that English is the proof of intelligence. That a person who speaks fluent English with a clean accent is educated. That a person who cannot — regardless of what they know, what they have read, what they have built, what they have survived — is somehow less.

This is not a small thing.

The English language divide in India plays a vital role in determining whom people will marry, which friends they will have, where they will work and shop, what schools they will attend, and how much they will earn.

Read that again.

Whom you marry. Which friends you have. How much you earn.

This is not about communication anymore. This is about identity, class, and belonging. And India built this system so quietly, so thoroughly, that most of us don’t even see it as a system. We just see it as how things are.

Lord Macaulay’s Ghost Is Still Running Your Office

In 1835, a British official named Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote a memo that shaped the next two hundred years of India’s relationship with language.

He was direct about what he wanted. He wanted to create, in his own words, a class of people who were “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Interpreters. People who would stand between the British rulers and the Indian masses, loyal in practice to the empire, useful for control.

That was the design. Not education. Not enlightenment. Control.

India became independent in 1947. Macaulay has been dead since 1859.

His memo is still working.

Walk into any corporate office in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi today. Notice who speaks in English in the meeting. Notice who apologises before speaking in Hindi. Notice who gets interrupted. Notice who gets promoted. Notice who gets called “articulate” — which in these rooms usually means one specific thing: sounds like they went to an English-medium school.

We took the colonial tool and kept it. Polished it. Made it our own measure of each other.

English in India is not just a language anymore.it is a skill, you have to learn it, searching in english like a meaning hindi It is a divider — serving as a reflector of class distinctions. It was purposefully encouraged by elites with the hopes of excluding the masses and maintaining the status quo.

Not my words. Researchers. Academics. People who have spent careers studying this.

And yet here we are. Still dividing. Still excluding. Still calling it merit.

The Girl Called Ghati

Zainab was 22, a college student in Pune.

She was smart. She worked hard. She had things to say.

But she hadn’t grown up speaking English at home. Her school was decent but not the kind where teachers corrected your accent. When she opened her mouth in certain college spaces, something in the room changed.

They had a word for it. Ghati.

Non-English speakers were frequently referred to as “Ghati” — a pejorative term used to exclude the majority of the youth.

Ghati. It means from the hills. From outside the city. From somewhere lesser.

In practice it means: your English marks you as someone who does not belong here.

Zainab’s story is not unusual. It happens in colleges across India — in Pune, in Delhi, in Chennai, in Bangalore. The specific slur changes by city, by region, by decade. The shape of it stays the same. You speak, and something in your voice tells everyone in the room which side of the line you are on.

And here is the part that breaks my heart every time I think about it.

The kids on the wrong side of that line know it. They feel it before they can name it. And many of them spend years — the best years, the years that should be about becoming — trying to sand down the thing in their voice that gives them away. Trying to sound like they came from somewhere else.

Two Children, Two Futures, Same Country

Let me show you how early this starts.

Child A is born in a family in South Delhi. Her parents both went to English-medium schools. English is spoken at home, casually, mixed with Hindi the way urban families do. She watches English cartoons. She reads English books. By the time she walks into Class 1, English is already her second home.

Child B is born in a family in Darbhanga. His parents are educated, downloading salary slip from hrms bihar portal — one is a teacher, waiting for 8th pay commission, keeping eye on 8thpaycommissionsalarycalculator.com , for calculating salary, one runs a small business. They speak Maithili at home, Hindi at the market. English is something that happens in school, in a classroom with forty children and one teacher who is doing her best. He studies hard. He is genuinely intelligent. But English is a foreign country to him — a set of rules to be memorised, not a language to think in.

By the time these two children are 22 and appearing for the same job interview, they will be judged as if they started at the same place.

They did not start at the same place.

English-medium education has been a ticket to vertical mobility in Indian society. At the societal level, it has played a critical role in producing a modernised techno-managerial elite that continues to have disproportionate influence in shaping the discursive terrain of development.

The system doesn’t say: Child A had a 22-year head start.

The system says: Child A is simply more capable.

And Child B — who may be smarter, harder working, more creative — learns to believe it. That is the most damaging part. Not that the system is unfair. But that the system convinces those it fails that they failed themselves.

The Aunty Who Had “Fake Teeth”

Gauri is a 60-year-old grandmother from Pune.

She wanted her grandchildren in a good English-medium school. Her children couldn’t afford the fees. Nobody at home could supplement their English learning. So the grandchildren went to a vernacular-medium school instead.

Gauri had a way of describing this. She said not knowing English was like having fake teeth.

Learning English, she believed, gives them real teeth. But as she looked at her family’s prospects, Gauri only felt toothless.

Fake teeth.

Think about that image for a minute. A 60-year-old woman, who has raised a family, who has seen things and survived things and knows things — describing herself as toothless because she doesn’t speak fluent English.

That is what this system does.

It reaches inside people — people of dignity, people of experience, people of real knowledge — and plants a seed of inadequacy. A quiet, persistent, bone-deep feeling that they are somehow not the full version of a person. That the real version speaks English.

And then it calls this — this installation of colonial shame — it calls this aspiration.

What We Actually Lost

Here is what I want you to understand.

India has 22 officially recognised languages. Hundreds of dialects. Thousands of years of literature, philosophy, science, mathematics, music, medicine — in languages that are not English.

The astronomers who calculated the movement of stars. The mathematicians who gave the world the concept of zero. The philosophers who asked questions about consciousness before Europe had universities. The poets who captured the texture of longing in languages so precise that a single word could carry what English needs a paragraph to say.

None of this required English.

And yet somewhere along the way, we decided that knowledge dressed in English was knowledge, and knowledge dressed in anything else was — what? Folk wisdom? Tradition? Something to be documented by Western academics before it disappeared?

Contemporary India has created a system in which the majority of Indian youth find little educational and economic value in learning their native and regional language.

We are producing generations of young people who are embarrassed by the language their grandmothers sang in. Who switch to English mid-sentence not because English is more precise, but because English is more respected. Who cannot read the literature of their own region because it was written in a script they were never taught to value.

This is not progress. This is a particular kind of loss that does not announce itself loudly. It happens quietly, over decades, and by the time you notice it, the thread connecting you to your own history is already thin.

The Ones Who Perform It Best

I want to say something uncomfortable now.

The people most damaged by English-as-status are not always the ones who can’t speak it.

Sometimes they are the ones who can — but who learned it wrong.

There is a particular performance of English in India. A way of speaking that is not quite British, not quite American, not quite Indian — a kind of accent that signals: I went to a certain kind of school. I come from a certain kind of family. I am not from there.

And people perform this accent — genuinely, desperately, sometimes without knowing they are performing it — because the performance is what opens doors. The accent is the signal. The signal is the thing.

I have met people who speak excellent English — clear, confident, communicative — who are still somehow made to feel inadequate because their accent places them geographically. Places them in a tier-two city. In a government school. In a family that did not have English at the dinner table.

And I have met people who speak mediocre English with a very convincing Convent School accent who are treated, in certain rooms, like they are automatically authoritative.

We are not evaluating language. We are evaluating class. And we are using language as the instrument.

The 96 Percent Question

Here is a number that should stop you cold.

Only about 4 percent of India’s population speaks English with any real fluency.

The majority of the population — approximately one billion — doesn’t speak English. But the language has emerged as one of the most crucial determinants of social status, income, prestige, and employment. That means 4 percent of the country’s population has the ability to determine, control, and shape the majority 96 percent simply by virtue of knowing English.

4 percent.

And yet English is the language of the Supreme Court. Of IITs and IIMs. Of most corporate boardrooms. Of the kind of journalism that shapes opinion. Of the interviews that decide who gets the job. Of the school admissions that decide who gets the education.

If you want to participate fully in the formal economy of your own country — a country where you and your ancestors have lived for thousands of years — you must first become fluent in the language of the people who colonised you for two hundred years.

And if you are not fluent in it, the system will find a way to let you know.

Not loudly. Not cruelly, always. Sometimes just a small smile. A slightly shortened response. A question directed to the person next to you. A promotion that goes to someone else.

You will know. You will always know.

What The Good Students From Small Towns Learn

Mohan grew up in Muzaffarpur.

He was brilliant — genuinely, measurably brilliant. Topped his district in Class 10. Got into a good college in Patna on merit alone.

And then he got to Patna. And he understood, within weeks, that being brilliant was not going to be enough. Because brilliant in a Bihar Hindi accent, in rooms where the benchmark was a Convent School Delhi accent, was a different kind of brilliant. A lesser kind.

So Mohan did what many brilliant people from small towns do. He watched. He listened. He practiced in his hostel room. He modulated his vowels. He straightened out the music of his Hindi-inflected English into something flatter, more neutral, more acceptable.

He succeeded, eventually. He has a good job now. Speaks English confidently in meetings.

But here is what Mohan told me once, late in the evening after a few drinks.

“Yaar, kabhi kabhi I don’t know who I am when I’m speaking English. It feels like a costume. Like I’m playing a character who deserves to be in the room.”

A costume.

He has worn that costume for so long that he is not sure anymore where it ends and he begins. He has paid the price of entry that the system demanded. And the price was a quiet kind of homelessness — not belonging fully to where he came from, not fully accepted as genuine by where he arrived.

The Lie at the Center of All of This

Here is what nobody says out loud.

English fluency — especially the particular, class-coded, accent-specific kind of English fluency that India’s elite institutions and corporate spaces reward — is not intelligence.

It is access.

It is being born into a family that spoke English at home. Going to a school that had English-speaking teachers. Living in a city where English surrounded you. Having parents who could correct your accent, recommend English books, explain idioms at the dinner table.

These are not qualities. They are circumstances.

And when we mistake circumstances for qualities — when we look at a person who was born into English and say they are simply more capable — we are not evaluating merit. We are laundering privilege through the language of meritocracy.

We are taking accident of birth and calling it achievement.

And then we wonder why the brilliant boy from Muzaffarpur feels like he is wearing a costume.

But What About Opportunity? What About the World?

I know what you are thinking. I have thought it too.

English is the language of global opportunity. Of international business. Of the internet, of science, of the kind of work that pays well and travels far. Telling people not to learn English, or dismissing the value of English, would be its own kind of cruelty — sending them into a world unarmed.

This is true.

But there is a difference between teaching English as a tool and making English a moral judgement.

A tool is something you use. It does not define your worth. A hammer does not make you more human. A second language does not make you more intelligent.

The moment we start using English fluency as a filter for intelligence, for competence, for who deserves to be taken seriously — that is when a tool becomes a weapon. And India has, for a very long time, been using this weapon on its own people.

Teach everyone English. Make it genuinely accessible — not just in elite private schools that cost forty thousand rupees a month, but in every government school in every district of Bihar and Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh and every place where brilliant children are currently being told, implicitly and constantly, that the language they think in makes them lesser.

But also — and this is the part we keep skipping — stop treating English as the proof of everything.

Stop laughing at the accent. Stop the subtle redirection when someone speaks Hindi in a meeting. Stop hiring the person with the better accent over the person with the better ideas. Stop calling a child educated because they can recite English nursery rhymes and not knowing enough about their own language to read a poem from their own state.

One Last Thing

My grandmother never learned English.

She could not read it. Could not write it. Could not understand it when someone spoke fast.

But she knew the names of every plant that grew in a three-kilometre radius of her home and what each one could treat. She knew the history of our village going back four generations — who owned what land, who married whom, which year the flood came, which family helped during the drought. She could calculate complex sums in her head faster than I can on a phone. She told stories that made you feel like you had lived a hundred years.

By India’s current measure of educated — the fluent-English-accent-clean measure — she was not educated.

I want to suggest, very gently, that India’s current measure is wrong.

Not all the way wrong. Not wrong enough to abandon English. But wrong enough to question. Wrong enough to notice. Wrong enough to stop treating like it is natural and inevitable and simply how things are.

Because it is not natural. Someone designed it. In 1835. For reasons that had nothing to do with your wellbeing.

And the fact that we are still living inside that design — that my grandmother felt lesser for not speaking the language of the people who colonised her country — is not progress.

It is history that we have not yet decided to move on from.

If you have ever felt smaller in a room because of how you speak — this one was for you. And you were never the problem.