Navigating Linguistic Identities: Indian Multilingualism in the Cold War Era

The new postcolonial Indian state overlooked the demands for linguistic states, prioritizing the preservation of its fragile sociopolitical unity. However, by 1952, with a constitution, parliament, and government in place, the issues of territorial reorganization and the push for linguistic states became central to the sociopolitical discourse. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, concerned about the potential Balkanization of India, established the States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) in 1953. The SRC was tasked with reorganizing India’s territories within two years, balancing the urgent and often violent demands for linguistic states with the need to strengthen the Indian Union. In doing so, the SRC attempted to capture the features of Indian multilingualism in a single report and inadvertently uncovered conceptual challenges.

This paper examines how the SRC Report highlighted two conflicting conceptions of Indian multilingualism, arising from the limitations of experiments in the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. The SRC was established at a time when several vernacular languages had been standardized during British colonial rule, leading to more stable and widely accepted importance of linguistic identities. In this context, the SRC viewed the creation of linguistic states as a natural progression, similar to developments in 19th-century Europe. Conversely, the SRC also recognized India’s uniqueness within the framework of the global Cold War and believed that India needed to cultivate an indigenous understanding of linguistic identities by questioning the primacy of language in cultural identity.

This paper examines the SRC Report as a sense-making exercise compelled by the pressures of language politics in India and the limitations of multilingual projects to its West. It highlights how the SRC members sought to explain linguistic identities and multilingualism amidst the inadequacies of mainstream discourses.