Bharat needs to decolonise the way Bharatiya languages have been seen, examined, studied, interpreted or classified so far. It’s not just a rhetorical statement; it comes from a very specific historical reality of India.
The contemporary linguistic framework through which we classify Bharatiya languages emerged during racio-colonial rule. In the late 18th century, William Jones famously suggested that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin shared a common linguistic origin.
This observation started the field of comparative philology in the colonial world and became the foundation of what we now call language families. Studies classified the languages of the northern part of Bharat at three levels: Indo-Aryan, Indo-Iranian and Indo-European.
In the next century, Robert Caldwell worked on languages of the southern part of Bharat and argued that they formed a distinct “Dravidian” family. On the surface, these look like scholarly breakthroughs, and to an extent they were. But they were also shaped by the racio-colonial climate of the time.
The Macaulay Minute of 1835 clearly stated two colonial positions: “I have never found one among [Orientalists] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” and “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”.
Therefore, colonial scholarship was deeply tied to the broader project of understanding, organising and governing Bharatiya society at large. Languages became one of the tools for that, as classifying them into neat families made it easier to map populations, draw boundaries and construct narratives about their ancestry and inherent differences. Often, these linguistic divisions were aligned with racial thinking.
Later, the overt racial language faded. No one in academia today openly says Indo-Aryan equals one race and Dravidian another. But the categories themselves survived and created other fault lines. Over time, they turned into linguistic identities and began to carry historical, cultural and sometimes political weight far beyond their original analytical purpose.
Now, this is where the concept of language family and classification of Bharatiya languages get tricky. Beyond linguistics, these classifications started shaping how we understand our collective past. Entire narratives were built around invasion, migration, origins, races and ethnicities. These narratives often rest on refined linguistic assumptions of a hypothetical ‘proto’ language.
The concept of a proto language, like Proto-Indo-European, is essentially a linguistic reconstruction, deduction or conjecture. Scholars compare existing languages, identify patterns and then work backwards to propose what a common ancestor might have looked like. In a way, it is a reverse engineering and, to be fair, not inherently flawed. It’s a valid method when used carefully. But one of the most prominent concerns is that there is no direct physical evidence of any proto-language. No inscriptions or texts that we can point to and say, “This is Proto-Indo-European.” What we have are models, reconstructions and educated hypotheses.
So the real issue is not that these linguistic units exist. It is how they are often treated: as established historical facts rather than theoretical constructs. Over time, this has created an intellectual hegemony that has thwarted the decolonisation of linguistics in general and classification of Indian languages in particular. These models have become so dominant that alternative ways of understanding languages have been pushed to the margins. When we apply these inherited frameworks in Bharat, something feels off because the linguistic reality of India doesn’t neatly fit into rigid, tree-like models. Languages here don’t behave like isolated branches splitting cleanly from a single trunk. They behave more like networks by constantly interacting, overlapping and influencing one another.
This is where the idea of Bharatiya Bhasha Parivar starts to make sense. It is not a rejection of all previous scholarship, but a corrective academic measure. Instead of obsessing over distant, hypothetical origins, it asks us to shift focus to the visible lived continuity. What if we look at Bharatiya languages as part of a shared space where interaction matters more than separation?
From that angle, languages like Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Assamese and others don’t appear isolated entities with entirely separate histories. This perspective also changes how we think about knowledge. A lot of Bharatiya intellectual traditions are spread across languages. If we study them in isolation, that knowledge looks fragmented. But seen through Bharatiya lenses, connections begin to emerge.
To be clear, this approach is not about throwing away comparative linguistics or historical analysis. The problem is not of reverse engineering; it’s of one way of looking becoming so dominant that it defines the entire field. Bharatiya Bhasha Parivar opens that space again. It allows us to think in terms of continuity, interaction and coexistence.
Chamu Krishna Shastry
Chairman, Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti,
Union Ministry of Education