मराठी | English
All our lives begin, in a sense, when we utter the first word in our mother tongue. With that word we are introduced to the world, and get woven into a fabric of meanings and relations. We learn the sound of our own names. Slowly, a sense of identity is formed. This sense stays with us throughout our lives, as does the language we first spoke. For me, this language was Marathi. I grew up in this language. Yet it took me a long time to make sense of the socio-political dynamics that surround it; the idea of a ‘Marathi identity’, shaped by a complicated history and interlaced hierarchies of economic and cultural power.
Rooted in Maharashtrian Prakrit, Marathi is an ancient language. This language has seen many eras rise and fall. From Satvahan Empire, Maratha Empire, Bhakti movement to social reforms and freedom struggle during the British Raj to the formation of Samyukt Maharashtra, Marathi adapted, evolved and mingled with other languages. Through this history developed an ample amount of oral and written literature, traditions, as well as knowledge systems. Today Marathi shows up in various dialects and regional variations like Malvani, Varhadi and Khandeshi. You can hear different accents of Marathi boli all over Maharashtra. During my fieldwork in Maharashtra, I have had to rely on Marathi to Marathi translation multiple times. The way Marathi is spoken in villages of Vidarbha or Marathwada sounds foreign to my ears familiar with the Marathi of Mumbai city. This rich diversity of Marathi seems to get lost in the long brewing political storm around linguistic identity and dignity.
Marathi and the Politics of Anxiety
Historically, in Maharashtra, struggles over identity, territory, and power have often been articulated through the defense of Marathi. The Samyukta Maharashtra Movement, which demanded a separate state for Marathi-speaking people, culminated in the formation of Maharashtra in 1960 and set the stage for later language-based mobilizations. Regional parties like the Shiv Sena emerged from this context, initially advocating for Marathi linguistic and cultural primacy in employment and public life before expanding into broader political agendas.
Contemporary debates around Marathi continue to reflect these tensions, particularly amid demographic shifts in the state’s linguistic composition, with a notable rise in Hindi speakers alongside steady growth in Marathi, Urdu, and Gujarati. For many groups, such shifts revive long-standing anxieties about language, belonging, and the cultural future of Maharashtra (Oak 2025). For a region historically multilingual and multicultural, this sense of linguistic insecurity is baffling. The dominant narrative around Marathi language tells us that our language is in danger; it will disappear if we do not actively do anything to save it. The sheer consistency and popularity of this feeling of insecurity demand a critical exploration of Marathi linguistic identity.
Historically, the challenges or ‘threats’ faced by the Marathi language have been less about disappearance of language and more about changing relations of power, patronage, and prestige. In the pre-colonial period, Marathi coexisted with and was often subordinated to Sanskrit and later courtly languages like Persian. Nevertheless, Marathi maintained its independent identity thanks to literature such as the ‘Lilacharitra’ and ‘Dhavale’ of the Mahanubhav sect, the devotional literature of the Bhakti movement, and the ‘Shahiri’ and ‘Powade’ found in social life. Under British colonial rule, the introduction of English education restructured linguistic hierarchies more decisively, positioning English as the language of upward mobility, administration, and modern knowledge, while Marathi was increasingly confined to vernacular and literary spheres. At the same time, the nineteenth century print revolution and social reform movements— figures like Balshastri Jambhekar, Lokahitwadi, Jyotirao Phule and later Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, also used Marathi as a radical public language, showing how a language could be both marginalized and politically generative. In the post-independence period, especially after the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement, the perceived threat shifted toward internal demographic and economic changes such as migration, urbanization, and the growing dominance of Hindi and English in cities like Mumbai.
In the last few decades, neoliberal education policies and globalization have intensified the association of English with opportunity, leading to a steep decline in the number of Marathi-medium schools and a reconfiguration of linguistic aspiration. Recent controversy over the implementation of the three-language formula under the National Education Policy and particularly the push to make Hindi a compulsory third language in schools generated resistance from groups who viewed it as a form of linguistic centralization (EPW Engage 2024). Looking at history and current developments, what emerges is not a single, continuous threat but a series of transformations in which Marathi’s status has been negotiated against other languages, institutions, and regimes of power. Thus, we see the anxieties around Marathi Language and Marathi Identity getting intensified.
Living Language, Dead Language
In 2010, Boa Sr, an 85-year old woman and the last speaker of the ancient Bo language, died in the Andaman Islands (BBC News, 2010). With her, the language is said to have died. A decade later, in 2020, the last known speaker of the Sare language named Licho passed away (Terralingua, 2020). In these moments, we are forced to confront an unsettling question: what does it mean for a language to die? Was Bo language ‘alive’ before 2010, even when Boa Sr had no one left to speak it with? As linguist Anvita Abbi notes, Boa had lived for decades as the sole speaker of her language, often in isolation, learning an Andamanese form of Hindi simply to communicate (Abbi, 2006).
If a language survives only in archives, recordings, or dictionaries but not in the everyday speech of people, can we still call it alive? Or is it suspended somewhere between life and death, preserved but no longer lived?
Languages do not exist independently of their speakers; they live through use, through the ordinary and intimate acts of meaning-making. A language lives in a child’s first words, in classroom chatter, in gossip and arguments, in curse words and lullabies, in stories told and songs remembered. Today, it also lives in our messages, our scrolling, our casual consumption of media, our inner voice. The language that comes most easily, that fits your world most closely—that is the language that lives through you.
And yet, we are often taught to think of language as a medium, a vessel carrying culture, identity, knowledge. This assumes a separation, much like that between body and mind where one merely contains the other. Feminist and postcolonial critiques have long unsettled this split, showing how it produces hierarchies that privilege abstraction while obscuring lived experience. To say that we do not have bodies but are bodies that perceive and think is to also recognize that language is not a neutral vehicle. It is lived knowledge, lived culture.
Seen this way, language is not something we use to describe the world—it is one of the ways the world comes into being. You can see this most intimately in a child learning to speak. At first, the world is small, held within the gestures and sounds of care. As it expands, new things are named, remembered, and related through language. Meaning does not arrive before language; it emerges with it. What we know, feel, and imagine is inseparable from the language through which we encounter it. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the way you perceive and understand the world is heavily influenced by the language you speak. This indicates that people who speak different languages will think differently about the world. (Regier and Xu, 2017) Language, then, is not outside us. It is how we live.
Viewing Marathi language through the question of living and dying of languages shows a different picture. The sense of threat felt towards Marathi, and its disappearance is undoubtedly real, but what is the nature of this loss? In Maharashtra today, Marathi is rarely absent; it is heard, celebrated, invoked on significant occasions. However, it is being displaced from the very spaces needed to sustain the life of a language: classrooms, workplaces, aspirations. It does not receive the tactical support and resources needed to grow. Its marginalization is not a sudden loss but a slow reorganization, where it survives in sentiment even as it recedes from structures of power. If language lives through us, then its erosion is not abstract, it is felt in the narrowing of worlds it can inhabit. The declining proficiency of students in the Marathi subject, the trends observed in Class 10 examination results over recent years, the absence of Marathi in the realm of higher education, the priority accorded to the English language across most professional sectors, and the inadequate socio-economic support received by writing and research conducted in Marathi – all these factors constitute integral parts of the process through which the Marathi language is gradually shrinking. What, then, does it mean to keep Marathi alive? What does Marathi call out? Do we really hear all of it, or are we letting a faint echo take its place?
To properly address these questions we need to take a longish route. Here, we will have to look at histories, different/parallel chains of thought and at the same time assess where we stand. We begin with global and local strands of Decolonialism in the context of language and culture.
Decolonial Thought and Deshiwad
The discourse around sustaining indigenous languages like Marathi, in its most popular form i.e. self-assertion, is rooted in decolonial thought. It asks us to question how colonial histories continue to shape knowledge, language, and identity. It reminds us that modernity itself is not neutral, and that other ways of knowing and being have long existed, even if they have been pushed to the margins.
Thinkers like Gayatri Spivak (Spivak, 1988) and Ashis Nandy (Nandy, 1983) draw attention to silenced voices and the subtle ways colonial ideas continue to shape everyday life, while Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Ngũgĩ, 1986) shows how language itself becomes a key site of both domination and resistance. At its heart, decolonial thought is not only about critique, but about noticing, reclaiming, and sustaining ways of knowing and being that have long existed, even if they have been pushed to the margins. For instance, in African cultures, time is viewed quite differently. It is not linear, but an event driven phenomenon. This entails that there is no concrete understanding of the future. According to the renowned African philosopher John Mbiti, the African concept of time focuses on a two-dimensional structure of Sasa (now/recent past) and Zamani (macro-past), rather than a linear future. So in this line of thought, the abstract concept of a grand future does not exist. It is replaced with expectations of repeating cyclical phenomena and experiences (Mbiti, 1969). The purpose of using a concept as fundamental as time as an example is to show how an indigenous understanding fundamentally shifts one’s perception and interpretation of the world. When we look at mainstream discourse in Indian languages today, with perhaps an exception of orthodox thought, we see western logic at play. The discussion on modernity, becomes a mere translation of western thought into indigenous language and culture which unsurprisingly remains utterly inadequate to address the needs of modern Indian society today. The dominance of western logic and epistemology in Indian literature and academia is unfortunate because it cannot be directly applied to Indian society and because we have a rich and complicated history of indigenous modern thought.
In India, decolonial thought takes shape through a long and diverse intellectual tradition that grapples not only with colonial domination but also with deeply rooted internal hierarchies such as caste. During the British Raj , anti-colonial thinkers like Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore critiqued Western modernity and its civilizational claims, while Dr. B. R. Ambedkar exposed how caste structures complicate any simple narrative of decolonization, insisting that social equality must accompany political freedom. This historical dichotomy continues to this day. The critique of western influence more often than not romanticizes indigenous traditions and social structures. Invoking the wisdom of ancient India during its golden age stops at remembrance and reverence. Names like Charvaka are invoked when questions of critical thought arise, conveniently forgetting that thinkers of Charvaka School were persecuted and their primary texts were burned. We have learned to criticize Indian philosophies through the binary or dichotomy (which occurs predominantly in western philosophy) of tradition and modernity. This limits us to seeing two competing teams, Indian tradition and western modernity, in a game where we have to pick a side. But what lies beyond the binary?
In Maharashtra, this question has been tackled at different points in history. The Bhakti movement of saints like Dnyaneshwar and Tukaram reimagined faith that was critical and based on the values of equality. Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule, through their educational work and Satyashodhak movement, used Marathi as a language of critique and transformation, challenging the patriarchal caste system and reimagining knowledge from the standpoint of the oppressed. This legacy continues in Dalit literature and activism, where Marathi becomes not just a medium but a site of resistance, memory, and political assertion. This is the legacy of indigenous critique where we can go towards, beyond condemning colonial influence, and articulate more just ways of knowing and living.
Recent iteration of indigenous critical thought in Marathi language has been through the literary theory of Nativism or Deshiwad as conceptualized by Bhalchandra Nemade. This strand of Indian Nativism has found many proponents in other regional languages and at the same time it has been thoroughly criticized within and outside of Marathi literary thought. Nativism or Deshiwad is essentially an indigenous decolonial theoretical understanding of Indian languages and culture. Nemade critiques what he sees as the excessive influence of English and cosmopolitan aesthetics on Indian writing, arguing that such tendencies produce alienated, derivative literature disconnected from lived realities. This form of Nativism emphasizes the influence of geographical location on culture, where despite historical changes and influences a continuity is maintained because of a geographical constant. Nemade describes Nativism as being an awareness of the ‘totality of the geography, of the consciousness of the homogeneity of all its castes, ethnic communities, sects, religions, traditions, period and places—with their vertical and horizontal intersections’ (Nemade, 2009: 30). This understanding of nativism allows it to be multicultural, and keeps its distance from ethnocentrism. Importantly, Nemade’s nativism, rather than centering on cultural pride, takes epistemic location as its basis, insisting that meaning, form, and literary value must arise from within a specific linguistic world. This epistemic shift makes space for a robust indigenous modernity. This Indian modernity has its initial articulations in Bhakti movement, Phule-Ambedkarite thought and later Dalit literature, however it has either been confined to certain discourses-communities, or is seen through the lens of reverence. Both outcomes limit indigenous modern thought to critiquing social structures from certain standpoints or makes it an object of conservation or veneration. The kind of modernity Nemade indicates moves beyond these confines. It aims to harness the potential of languages like Marathi to create a framework for indigenous modernity that is independent of western thought as well as traditional orthodoxy, and that speaks to the lived realities of Indian people today. The epistemic position that allows for this indigenous modernity desperately needs to be incorporated in our views on language today. Although this move calls for caution. Because Decolonial thought and Deshiwad face a serious problem of appropriation and co-option.
The Problem of Co-option
Major criticisms of Decolonial Thought and Deshiwad revolve around its closeness with essentialism, ethnocentrism and tendency to romanticize indigeneity.In the present political climate, the romanticization of indigenous traditions and culture is easily co-opted by majoritarian and nationalist projects under Hindutva ideology. Here, every value of modernity is associated with the West and colonial past. Indigeneity gets equated with nationalism. This flavor of decolonial thought and nativism is dangerous. It looks to a long past to declare its superiority without properly engaging in its conceptual and linguistic nuances. It defends misogynistic, casteist and exploitative practices in the name of indigenous authenticity. As Kira Huju points out, ‘Postcolonial populism functions on the assumption that there is an uncontaminated pre-coloniality in which to take refuge. This escape foregrounds a morally absolved indigene, secluded from the corruptions of Western modernity and a priori virtuous by its very identity.’ (Huju, 2024) As the conservative political and cultural climate shifts towards ultra-nationalism and fascism, most conversations around nativism and linguistic identity function as spaces of cultural dominance and the prorogation of traditional exploitative practices.
This co-option is the first taste of nativism for many which logically drives them towards a western modernity. This further divides society into a group under western influence and a group under ‘Indian’ traditional influence. It is this co-option that drives away curious, critical people. To ‘save’ Indian languages from western English influence we first need to tackle this co-option of the most potent theoretical/ideological counter that is decolonial thought and nativism by conservative Hindutva ideology.
Languages like Marathi are losing their diversity in this dichotomy caused by co-option. This is because, from a fundamentalist perspective, there is always one correct way to speak a language. Here, a multi-faceted complex language gets confined in a box of formal or pure language in the false hope of protecting it. Other accents, dialects of the language do not get recognition and some are even ridiculed. Defending this language then takes the form of praising its potency, its caliber, its history, its sweetness. Dnyaneshwar’s Abhang about Marathi being sweeter than nectar is invoked in almost every defense of Marathi language. This Abhang pays beautiful tribute to the very real richness and sweetness of Marathi language. This Abhang was, however, written in the context of thirteenth-century India, to prove the capability of Marathi, the language of Bahujan majority, against Sanskrit, the language of scriptures dominated by upper castes. The poem was written to show that knowledge does not need to be confined to one language and one group of people, it can translate. It served its purpose in that context. What purpose does this reference serve today?
Today, such historical references are used to show the superiority and power of Marathi language. It is the formal version of the language indicative of a certain class-caste position; one true language that looks down on its variations and dialects. The emphasis on rich history, ample vocabulary and grammatical complexity become a source of superiority; these elements become reasons for loving and preserving Marathi language. When this happens, we need to ask ourselves some honest questions.
Would you not love this language if it was not as sweet? If it did not possess vast vocabulary and grammatical complexity? If it did not have as rich a history?
Would you not love it simply because it is the language you think and speak in?
The chest-thumping about the richness and history of Marathi shed light on a sense of insecurity hidden under claims for superiority. This insecurity based in fragmentation of self and loss of certainty is real. But it needs to be unpacked and mended. Left unattended, it leads to violent attacks against people who do not know the language. Then we find ourselves straying farther away from what the Marathi language needs of us – to embrace the dynamism of a time and place, and to make it possible for people to live in this language.
This call of Marathi language can only be fully addressed by understanding and respecting the complexity of all the elements we have encountered on this route. Now we reach the end of the road, where we step beyond the binaries.
Beyond the Binary
As we have seen so far, the discourse on Indian languages like Marathi is divided into two opposing fragments; One propagating superiority of traditional thought and uncritical reverence for Indian languages and culture, and the other attempting to bring in values of modernity like freedom, equality, liberty etc. which are primarily backed by English language and European-American philosophy. These two are pitted against each other. In today’s world, with its lack of stability and crisis of identity, the side priding in tradition is stronger. English language and western values are seen as weapons of an enemy trying to rob us of our originality and identity. While there is truth to the question of encroachment, viewing it in binary limits our understanding.
The encroachment of western modernity and the English language cannot be countered with reverence of Indian tradition, not because one can overpower another but simply because they are on two different spectrums. The parallel of western modernity is Indian indigenous modernity, not tradition. Indian tradition has its counterparts in the west, in western traditions of conservatism and Christianity. Modernity in the west is the critique and outgrowing of a society dictated by political-cultural values of monarchy and religion. Similar to western countries, Indian scholars like Kabeer, Bhakti Movement saints, Phule, Ambedkar, Periyar etc. have given us a basis of Indian modern thought. Just like its counterpart in the west, this modern thought criticizes and outgrows traditional structures like caste based on religious scriptures, and oppressive structures like colonialism. In the past few decades, however, there has been very little development in indigenous modern discourse in India that does not heavily borrow translated western concepts. In the absence of a robust, diverse, nuanced Indian indigenous modernity, in today’s time of hypermodernity, we struggle with a fragmented sense of identity.
To safeguard and enrich Indian languages and cultures, we need to inculcate this epistemic shift towards Indian modernity. This should not be confused with never borrowing from other knowledge systems or ignoring all traditions; it is needed to develop a discourse that specifically addresses needs and aspirations of modern Indian society in the context of the present day.
We need to understand what modern concepts of individualism and freedom look like in Indian modernity, we need indigenous feminist theory, we need space to articulate our lived realities and aspirations in our indigenous languages. To create such a space, a strong foundation of diverse indigenous philosophy is required. Philosophy is said to be the art of concept creation, and this work must happen in Indian languages. Marathi and other Indian languages need to be incorporated in the process of knowledge production at an elemental level. We need new, relevant concepts created in Indian languages like Marathi. That is how Marathi will be fully alive; that is what Marathi and other Indian languages call out for.
References
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Image credit: Sarvabhaum, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons