ABSTRACT

Language is seen as a central aspect in the forging of the Indian nation. Beginning from the partition of Bengal in British India in 1905, to the Linguistic Reorganisation of States during the early years of Indian independence, to current linguistic conflicts within and between states, language has repeatedly figured as a prominent rallying point for various identity-based assertions in Indian politics. The centre pin of such explanations is that language is a natural carrier of identities of communities and that language indexes actual linguistic communities in India. I argue that neither of those claims is valid in a society like India and the idea of language as a bearer of identity is not more than two centuries old. If linguistic identity is an idea constructed by only nationalist discourse, then it implies that it (linguistic identity) needs nationalism to be intelligible. As a corollary, it also implies that the language problem has no intelligibility independent of the history of nationalism.