This is the age of language politics. The world over, it is a contest over authority disguised as cultural housekeeping. But the truth is that the more languages one speaks, the more worlds one inhabits, and the more sharply one understands one’s own. Language politics is rarely about language alone; it’s about who gets to belong, who gets to rule, and whose past is treated as “official”. The confidence with which the CBSE has decided to rescue Indian civilisation from the grave threat of French verbs and German syntax , and the corrupting influence of Moliere and Goethe is puzzling. The world is busy learning each other’s languages to trade, collaborate, and innovate, but we, in a fit of cultural vigilance, have chosen to build a fence around the young Indian mind.
Two out of three languages in schools must now be “native” to India, as though exposure to the outside world is a contaminant. It is a curious nationalism that fears vocabulary, indicating a ruling imagination so fragile that a child conjugating a French verb might somehow dilute the nation’s soul. This is not cultural pride; it is cultural provincialism masquerading as policy. The inconvenient truth is that languages are not merely aesthetic pursuits. They are economic tools, diplomatic bridges, and intellectual passports. You cannot shape the global conversation if you insist on listening to it through translation. The 21st century does not reward minds that are parked in imposed zones, but only those who can navigate complexity across borders. A student who knows Spanish, French, or German is not betraying India; instead they are expanding its global reach. They are not abandoning Hindi or Sanskrit; they are gaining access to an engineering culture. When they learn French, they are not diluting their Indian-ness; they are stepping into diplomatic, academic, and cultural circuits that operate in that language. Spanish is not a hobby; it is a gateway to entire continents. And yet, when global mobility is offering opportunities, our establishment is nudging students toward a narrower horizon. It is an odd strategy for a country that exports talent as one of its primary global commodities. Indian professionals especially in technology, healthcare, academia already operate in foreign ecosystems where language is often the first barrier to integration. To pretend otherwise is not patriotism; it is policy blindness.
Class hypocrisy is embedded in this decision. The children of the elite will continue to attend international schools, learn multiple foreign languages, and glide into global networks with ease. It is the poor middle-class CBSE student, who is forced to follow the prescribed curriculum, only to find career doors harder to open, conversations slightly harder to begin and opportunities more distant. In other words, CBSE’s is not a protectionist policy. It is a selective handicap. But Indian languages are not endangered relics. They are living, evolving systems spoken by hundreds of millions. But strengthening one does not require weakening the other. A confident civilisation does not fear addition; it thrives on it. India’s own history is proof—Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English, and regional languages, all have coexisted, collided, and enriched one another.
There is also a deeper irony at play. What we are witnessing is a retreat into symbolic nationalism: the comfort of appearing rooted rather than the harder work of being relevant. It is easier to issue a circular than to fix teacher training, infrastructure, or curriculum depth. Easier, in short, to police what children learn than to improve how they learn. CBSE’s lingo-claustrophobia signals a mindset more secure with control than with curiosity. Students will learn more Indian languages which, in itself, is valuable and necessary. The tragedy is the false choice being imposed that knowing the world is somehow knowing India less.
However, India isn’t alone when language became a proxy battlefield for power. After the French Revolution, standard French was elevated while Breton, Occitan, and Alsatian were shamed out of classrooms under the watchful eye of Académie française. Quebec used state power to entrench French against English. In Ukraine the privileging of Ukrainian over Russian after the Annexation of Crimea has intertwined language with an ongoing armed conflict and questions of sovereignty. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhala Only Act helped ignite grievances that fed a full-scale civil war. In Turkey, decades of restrictions on Kurdish language and identity have run alongside a violent insurgency. Taken together, all these cases show that language policy is rarely administrative trivia, but a lever of power that can quietly stratify societies or, when pushed hard enough, spill into open confrontation and even sustained armed conflict. A nation confident in its identity would know that. A nation unsure of itself writes circulars.
