ABSTRACT
Language can become an identity issue only where a doxastic experience of community exists. That is because the doxastic experience ceaselessly transforms aspects of practical life into identity indices of a supposed corporate body. In India, what we think of as identity claims, fundamental commitments, and foundational categories that emerge in the name of language are invariably spectral in nature. Indian phenomena grouped as linguistic nationalism come together: they display various features of language loyalty, linguism, and devotion, but they never work as identitarian claims. For the same reason, they are not nationalist (or sub-nationalist) claims either. Although they betray random features of nationalism and identity claims, they lack a central aspect: a doxastic core to sustain an identitarian claim. They also lack another aspect: identitarian claims index communities. These communities, whether real or constructed, are different forms of life, forms of life which may be ancient or modern, religious or secular, as is the case. In India one sees that linguistic claims index neither communities nor forms of life.
