Why India’s language and history wars miss the real crisis

Can you change history by rewriting it? Or force people to stop studying English — the global lingua franca — which you are currently using to read this column?

Can you teach people a third language by using force, and use violence to impose regional language diktats?

And are these even real issues that a country with the largest population in the world — struggling with endemic poverty, widespread illiteracy, huge unemployment, and situated in a hostile neighbourhood — should even be thinking about?

I would reckon not. But what do I know? I’m just a columnist who thinks that India — which faces all of these urgent problems — needs to worry about much more than ridiculous fights over our history.

Here’s the thing: our government-empowered textbook writing body has just highlighted the brutality of the Mughal period in new history books, and a noise war has broken out on the self-styled “news channels”, which are more noise than news (repositories of WhatsApp wisdom) and more darkness than light on any current events issue.

I am a student of history, and as any student of any subject will tell you, you cannot change history — it’s stubborn that way. You can only learn from it. And how sane is it to judge absolute despotic rulers — Hindu or Muslim — by the civilisational norms of the 21st century? Aurangzeb died 300 years ago. Why are we fighting over him today?

What we should actually be worrying about is why our history and other school textbooks are so shoddily written that children forced to use them resort to rote learning. In the age of AI, should we be overhauling our curriculum, preparing kids for the new digital world — or feeding them stale, rehashed history?

At one time, we had a demographic dividend. Now, because of thoughtless priorities and a giant, ever-growing unemployment problem, it is fast turning into a demographic nightmare.

While China marches ahead, taking a commanding lead in AI — manifest on 11 July this year, when it was reported in Science magazine (using the proprietary Dimensions database) that China leads the world in AI patent filing and number of AI researchers — India is getting left behind. Consider this: from fewer than 8,500 papers in 2000, China published 57,000 AI-related research papers in 2024. China’s output now tops the combined output of the United States (6,378), the United Kingdom (2,747), and the European Union (10,055).

The fact is, whichever country leads in AI will dominate the world and geopolitics. Currently, China has no peer in the field.

In India, we are busy conducting cutting-edge research with the very limited resources at our command in cow urine therapy and the merits of the lota (metal vessel).

The Chinese government offers near-unlimited funding for AI research. We, on the other hand, teach an outdated, mediocre syllabus in nearly every subject. Worse, English — our global edge — is the permanent victim of insecurity-ridden leaders who seem to have a massive grudge against the universal teaching of a universal language.

Leaders in India — and I can give you the full exhaustive list, which would fill many columns in this edition — send their children to the best English-medium schools that money can buy, and then to the Ivy League in the US, or to Oxford and Cambridge if they are anglophones. Yet, they want poor Indian kids studying in Indian schools not to learn English from the get-go.

The poorest people in India even take loans to afford an English education for their kids, knowing it could be their passport to a better life and upward mobility. Yet our leaders say publicly that those who know English will soon regret it and have an inferiority complex.

Pray, why so much hatred for a language and such contempt for people’s choices?

So, hate for English is politically correct — but only for other people’s children. Meanwhile, mired as we are in division, cities like Bengaluru — which became a global call centre and even a verb (“Bangalored”: job outsourced to India) — are now in the throes of a battle to impose the local language, Kannada, and also an endemic infrastructure crisis.

Bengaluru boomed, and Indians from all over moved in. Now, huge violence is witnessed almost daily over the volatile language issue. It’s the same in Mumbai, where poor economic migrants face violence from various local “Senas” for not speaking or knowing Marathi.

Mumbai and Bengaluru are rare economic success stories, attracting migrants looking for employment. These are hard workers and bright. Surely, they deserve a chance in every part of India.

It’s great to know your mother tongue. It’s also good if you can find employment in it. But should your pride make you violent — attack shops and banks, beat up hapless staff manning front desks in all-India cadre banks and the railways? The answer is fairly obvious to any sane person.

Sadly, these are our current preoccupations in India. Sometimes, I truly think that history won’t judge us very kindly on what we added to our civilisational heritage.