Can English Be Treated as the Native Language of India?
An Analysis of Law, Linguistics, History, and Lived Reality
Prologue: A Question from the Bench
In July 2026, a Supreme Court bench heard a batch of petitions. The bench had three judges. Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi, and Justice V Mohana sat together. They were hearing a challenge to the CBSE mandatory three-language policy. The CBSE had categorized English as a non-native language.
Justice Bagchi posed a disarmingly simple question. It exploded into a national debate.
“We do not understand the expression native Indian language. A native Indian language may be understood as an indigenous Indian language.”
Senior Advocate Gopal Shankarnarayan, appearing for the petitioners, saw an opening. He said if the court simply declared English a native Indian language, the whole dispute would resolve itself.
Justice Bagchi did not agree. He gave a direct answer.
“It cannot be treated as a native Indian language. The spirit of the notification is to carry forward the constitutional goal of developing Hindi and other regional languages.”
This is the crucial detail many reports missed. The judge asked an open question about the meaning of native. But when pressed for a direct ruling, he answered it himself. English does not qualify.
The question still seems innocent enough. Yet it opened a Pandora’s box. The issue has been sealed since 1947. The answer requires us to cross multiple borders. These include law, linguistics, history, sociology, and philosophy.
My guess is that the term native has a colonial touch, and that provoked the remark from the bench. CBSE was simply following an old colonial tradition. It treats languages as native to India or foreign to India.
What Is a “Native Language”?
Before judging English, we must define native. The word is dangerously imprecise.
Justice Bagchi noted a key detail. The Indian Constitution never uses the term native language. It relies on other terms instead. These include mother tongue, regional language, and Indian language. This matches his own words in court. Each term carries distinct legal and emotional weight.
Linguists view nativeness through three separate criteria.
1. The Historical Origin
A native language originates from the soil. It grows from within a civilization. It is not transplanted onto it. By this definition, Sanskrit and Tamil are native. Telugu, Bengali, Hindi, and all scheduled languages are also native. They evolved on the subcontinent. They encoded its philosophy, culture, and ecological knowledge.
English arrived with the East India Company in the 17th century. The British later imposed it through administration. It was a deliberate colonial project of cultural replacement.
Thomas Macaulay wrote an infamous minute in 1835. He wanted a class of persons Indian in blood, but English in taste.
The purpose was not simple communication. The very purpose was civilizational transformation. A language with such origins cannot claim historical nativeness.
2. The Statistical Usage Criterion
Look at the 2011 census of India. Barely 0.02 percent of Indians claimed English as their first language then. This was roughly 226,000 people, out of a population near 1.21 billion. For the remaining 128 million English speakers, it is a second language. They learn it in school. They do not absorb it in the cradle.
Compare this with Hindi. Over 528 million people speak Hindi as their mother tongue.
Bengali has 97 million speakers. Telugu has 81 million. Marathi has 83 million. Tamil has 69 million. Indians live these languages daily. They speak them at home. They pray and argue in them. English is merely a skill acquired on the way.
3. The Practical Function:
Sociolinguistics separates language into two domains.
- The first is the instrumental domain. This is utility and professional skill. We use it for commerce, law, and global networks.
- The second is the integrative domain. This represents personal and emotional connection. It is the language of family and internal thought.
English in India belongs to the instrumental domain. An engineer writes code in English. However, they think through personal dilemmas in their mother tongue. They grieve in their mother tongue too.
By all three criteria, English fails the test of nativeness. This is true for the vast majority of Indians.
The Case for English as “Indian”
The case for English is not trivial. It deserves a serious look. We must ask what English does to us. We must ask what it does for us.
English is a native tool. It is not a native identity. This difference is vital. It is like a weapon borrowed from a conqueror, unlike a mother’s lullaby.
The Argument from Duration
Two hundred years is a long time. It represents eight to nine generations of use.
English has been the language of Indian legislation since 1835. The higher judiciary has used it since its inception. Journalism and higher education rely heavily on it. Even the Indian Constitution is written in English.
Many argue this longevity grants it a kind of citizenship.
The Argument from Transformation
Indian English is unique. It is not the English of London. It is not the English of New York.
Indian minds have transformed it. It has its own vocabulary. Words like jugaad, lakh, crore, anti-incumbency, and prepone are common.
It has its own grammatical patterns too. Speakers add “only” or “itself” for emphasis, as in “I was there only” or “today itself.” A true suffix example is “-ji,” borrowed from Hindi as a mark of respect, as in “Gandhiji.”
Indian writers have bent the language. They use it to express Indian philosophies. The language is now naturalized.
Mix Language Habit
Indians rarely speak pure English. They use blended frameworks. These include Hinglish, Tanglish, and Punglish. People say: “Please balance check kar lo.” This is a new linguistic alloy.
Code-switching shows deep absorption. A foreign language cannot be woven so easily into daily life. This blending suggests English is part of the household. It may not be the head of the house. Still, it belongs.
But is this absorbed English the one we are talking about? Every dialect has its own filler habits. English speakers in England often repeat “you know” through a paragraph. It sounds normal to them, but strange to outsiders. Indian English has its own fillers, like “only” and “itself.” These are not signs of a broken language. They are signs of a living one, shaped by its speakers. The real question is whether this shaped, absorbed English is native, or just a well worn dialect still tied to a foreign root.
Barriers To Nativeness
There are serious barriers to the adoption of English. Three main issues prevent English from being truly native.
Barrier 1: The Phonetic Rupture
India values phonetic precision. The word Veda means knowledge transmitted through sound. Indian scripts are highly phonetic. What you see is exactly what you say. This reflects a deep cultural respect for spoken sound.
English is orthographically chaotic. It patches together Latin, Greek, French, and Germanic roots. The same written letters sound different. Consider words like tough, through, and though. For a long time there were no settled spellings for words. Standard spellings are at best two to three centuries old.
Silent letters are common. Examples include the “k” in knife and the “b” in doubt. This makes English hard for children. They must memorize thousands of arbitrary exceptions.
In 1906, Andrew Carnegie funded a spelling reform project in the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt supported it. It sought to simplify spellings. The project collapsed under public ridicule and congressional opposition, not simple inertia.
An Indianized phonetic English would help. Spelling physician as fizishan would remove mental gymnastics. It would bridge the class divide. Literacy would become accessible to everyone. However, a unilateral change creates problems. India would become a linguistic island. India’s IT and corporate services rely on global standards. A phonetic reform would isolate the economy.
Barrier 2: The Epistemic Wound (Translation’s Damage)
Forced translations into English have damaged Indian thought. Complex concepts get reduced into inadequate Western categories. Consider these examples.
Dharma (धर्म) is translated as religion. The Sanskrit root dhri means “that which sustains.” It covers duty, righteousness, and cosmic order. Religion implies a rigid creed. It is a system of beliefs. It separates believers from non-believers.
Dharma is different. An atom has Dharma. A king has Dharma. They do not have a religion. Translating Dharma as religion erases deep philosophy.
Ishwar or Brahman (ईश्वर / ब्रह्म) is translated as God. The Western God is an external creator. People fear this deity. Ishwar represents all-pervading consciousness. The phrase “Aham Brahmasmi” means “I am Brahman.” This has no monotheistic equivalent. It is heresy in those systems. The word God contradicts Ishwar.
Puja (पूजा) is translated as worship. Worship implies adoring a superior entity from below. Puja is an act of hospitality. You host the guest as divine. You recognize the divine within yourself. Puja is an act of veneration, not submission.
Poojya (पूज्य) names what is worthy of puja. It is translated as respectable or venerated. The contradiction is clear.
These are not small arguments. These translations distort self-understanding. They affect how law defines religion. The solution is lexical adoption. English must adopt words like Dharma and Karma directly. This is better than using false equivalents.
Read about the project of mistranslation of Sanskrit terms into English in Operation Sanskrit Mill.
Barrier 3: The Colonial Social Architecture
English remains a weapon of exclusion. The bureaucracy and elite feel it is native. This is because our institutions were never decolonized.
The British designed their administration to rule, not serve. They wanted to govern a large population with few people. English created a buffer. It separated the rulers from the ruled. This structure survived independence. The IAS inherited the collector system. The judiciary kept British robes and language. The police kept colonial codes.
These realities persist today. Walk into a police station in most Indian cities. Speak to an officer in your regional language, and you may face impatience. Speak in English, and you get immediate respect.
The same happens with traffic police on the street. Wear a tie and suit, add spectacles, and the officer waves you through with a smile and a warning. Without that, you pay.
Court judgments are written in English. Arguments are made in English. Phrases are quoted in Latin. Litigants often cannot understand the arguments made about their own lives. Many cannot even read the judgment they are bound to obey.
Job applications prioritize English too. It is not always necessary for the actual work. It simply signals elite class membership.
This is not naturalization. It is gatekeeping.
The Supreme Irony
The judge asks why English is not native. Yet that same judge speaks a regional language at home. He speaks to his mother in her mother tongue. She does not know English. The next morning, the judge enters the courtroom. There he asks why English cannot be native.
English is a skill set required to work in India. But it is not a language of communication. Irony is that I am writing in English to say it.
This is a colonized consciousness. The elite internalizes the colonizer’s values. They see the machinery of rule as natural. The split is clear. Home represents emotion and authentic reality. The courtroom represents power and English. The institution has used English for two centuries. The court mistakes its habits for culture. The language of the chair becomes “native.”
The system leaves 1.4 billion people behind.
In the next chapter we shall talk about decolonizing the language, and thereby India itself.
References
- Is English Now an Indian Language? Supreme Court’s Big Question Sparks Debate?
- Nomenclature “Native Indian Language” May Require Relook: Supreme Court Issues Notice On Fresh Pleas Challenging CBSE’s Mandatory Language Policy.
- CBSE Language Scheme: Supreme Court Questions Use of “Native”, Asks If English Is “Indian Indigenous Language”.
- “Worth a relook”: Supreme Court questions whether English can be called an indigenous language.