Marathi and the Politics of Linguistic Survival
IIn April and June 2025, the Mahayuti coalition-led government of Maharashtra issued two resolutions demanding Hindi as a compulsory third language for students from Class 1 onwards in state-run boarding schools with Marathi and English, citing alignment with the National Education Policy 2020. The announcement was modest by any administrative measure, though modest in scope.
Within weeks, the streets of Mumbai and Pune were filled with protesters. Two figures who did not share a platform for years, Shiv Sena’s (UBT) Uddhav Thackeray and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena’s Raj Thackeray, found themselves unlikely on the same side. By the end of June, the government had withdrawn the orders. The grammar of this linguistic confrontation is centuries old.
I. The first language war
By the early 17th century, Persian was the language of power across the Deccan. The Mughal court, the Adil Shahi Sultans of Bijapur and the Nizam Shahi of Ahmednagar conducted their affairs in Persian. The Marathi speaking people were ruled, taxed and judged in a language that was foreign to them.
Shivaji did not accept it. By 1630, approximately 86 percent of the vocabulary in Maratha administrative documents was Persian. By 1677 it had fallen to 37 percent. The instrument of this transformation was the Rājyavyavahārakośa, a thesaurus of state usage, commissioned and completed in the same year. Each Persian and Arabic administrative term was given a Marathi or Sanskrit equivalent. The forts were given Sanskrit names: Sindhudurg, Suvarndurg, Prachandgarh, Pratapgarh, etc. The royal seal was inscribed in Sanskrit.
Each subsequent episode of Marathi linguistic resistance is a repetition of this founding act.
II. Colonial period
Jyotirao Phule’s testimony in the Hunter Commission on Education in 1882 is among the most important documents in the history of Indian education policy. Phule argues that colonial spending on education overwhelmingly benefited the upper caste elite, using the income earned from Shudra labor to subsidize the very class that oppresses them. It calls for compulsory primary education for all, cultivation class teachers and instruction in Modi and Balbodh, the two Marathi scripts. His writing in the spoken language of the working people was itself an argument made visible: this language is adequate for the highest moral and political purposes.
The founding of Kesari (Marathi) and Mahratta (English) in January 1881 by Chiplunkar, Agarkar and Tilak transformed Marathi into an instrument of mass political mobilization: Marathi for the people, English for the world.
Tilak’s Home Rule speech at Ahmednagar on 1 June 1916 raised the issue of popular education in his characteristic direct manner.
“Is the question whether education should be given through the vernacular so great? Our voice is nowhere. Do the English educate their people through the French language? Do the Germans do it through the English language? Because we have no authority. You have no authority.”
Yet Tilak was also the first Congress leader to advocate Devanagari Hindi as India’s national language at the Nagari Pracharini Sabha in Banaras in December.
III. The paradox of purity and pluralism
Vinayaka Savarkar’s Bhāshā Shuddhikaran, first published in 1926, was political surgery: a comprehensive project to replace Arabic and Persian loanwords in Marathi with coinages with Sanskrit roots. The results are now embedded in everyday speech across India. Savarkar coined or revived: doordarshan (television), akashwani (radio), sansad (parliament) and hutatma (martyr, one who sacrificed his soul). Doordarshan became India’s national television network. Sansad is in the constitution. Hutatma names the roundabout in central Mumbai where the martyrs of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement are commemorated. Savarkar’s linguistic project is present in the names of the country’s own institutions.
And yet it was also Savarkar who telegraphed the request to the Constituent Assembly in August 1949: “I request the Constituent Assembly to adopt Bharat as the name of our nation, Hindi as the national language and Nagari as the national script. He saw a purified Hindi rooted in Sanskrit as the proper national language of a Hindu civilization in the throes of revival. He was a fierce champion of Marathi in Maharashtra, but outside it he was a supporter Hindi. Savarkar never resolved this contradiction; perhaps he did not see it that way.
On the day Hindi was formally accepted as the official language of the Union, Maharashtra Congress leader Shankarrao Deo spoke not against Hindi but for a completely different concept of India:
“It is not uniformity but unity in diversity. It is Vividhata (diversity) that India stands for. That is our wealth; that is the contribution that India can make to world culture and world progress… I admit that India is a nation and I am an Indian, but if you ask me what is your language, sir, excuse me if I say ‘My language is the national language for me against the whole country’…
And on the abundance of Marathi: “I don’t want to diminish the culture or richness of Hindi, but as far as culture is concerned, I can take it from my own language, Marathi and Sanskrit, the grand-mother of all languages. They are rich enough for that.”
BR Ambedkar’s position in the same debate was characteristically more layered. As Chairman of the Drafting Committee, he eventually presided over the adoption of Hindi as an official language, a constitutional outcome that he accepted as the will of the majority. On 14 September 1949, however, he warned that Hindi speakers, though a significant group, remained a “minority of the population” and that privileging one language risked undermining the federal spirit. His earlier pamphlet Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province (1948), submitted to the Dar Commission, had already formally advocated a united Marathi-speaking state—a position eventually confirmed by the creation of Maharashtra in 1960. And his Thoughts on Linguistic States (1955), written in the last year of his life, characterized by the stability of linguistic identity at the state level: “One State, One Language” is a universal democratic principle, not a nativist claim.
Ambedkar’s great argument in the assembly, for primary education in the mother tongue as a prerequisite for democratic participation, is perhaps his most lasting contribution to the language question. In his speech on September 2, 1949, he claimed that a child educated in a foreign language is at a disadvantage from the start in the race for knowledge and civic life. For communities already disadvantaged by centuries of caste exclusion, this additional burden is not only unfair. It makes it politically impossible.
IV. Blood at the fountain with flora
The constitutional agreement did not resolve the boundaries of Maharashtra. On January 15, 1956, Nehru declared Bombay a Union Territory. The streets immediately filled up.
Formed on 6 February 1956 with Prabodhankar Thackeray, the poet and father of Bal Thackeray, among its key members, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti organized a sustained campaign of strikes and mass demonstrations. Morarji Desai, the Chief Minister of Bombay State, ordered the police to shoot. On November 21, 1955, police opened fire on demonstrators at the Flora Fountain, killing fifteen. In the months that followed, as Morarji Desai continued to order police action, the death toll rose. It reached 106 before the movement was over. The square was later renamed Hutatma Chowk using a word coined by Savarkar.
Maharashtra was created on May 1, 1960. The memory of those 106 is not solemn. He links every other confrontation over language with the knowledge that recognition required blood and that the state did not hesitate.
Bal Thackeray, son of Prabodhankar, launched Marmik in 1960 and Shiv Sena on 19 June 1966 to protect the cultural and economic position of Marathi workers in a city full of migrants. The Sena started by targeting southern Indians, then pivoted as the demographics of migration shifted north.
In the 1990s, the name Mumbai itself became a political issue. The city’s name derived from the Portuguese Bom Bahia (Good Bay), superimposed on the older name Mumbai, which itself came from Mumba Aai, the name of the tutelary goddess Mumbadevi, whose temple stood on the site even before the arrival of the Portuguese. The Shiv Sena’s campaign to restore the name Mumbai, the name by which the original Koli fishing community and most Marathi speakers had always known it, succeeded in 1995 when the Sena-BJP government made the change official. The renaming was both de-Anglicization and re-marathization: the city was returned by name to a community that believed it deeply belonged to them.
V. Indians first, Indians last
It was opposed by the 2025 government order, not out of hostility to Hindi, but because state power was being used to privilege one language with material consequences for children. From the age of six, children are required to study a language not spoken by their family at an additional cost, benefiting mainly those seeking employment in the Hindi belt. Ambedkar said this in 1949: Education in a foreign language is not a gift. It’s a burden. The coalition that emerged, Uddhav and Raj Thackeray on the same platform joined by literary organizations and citizens across party lines, reflects not party politics but civilizational memory.
Marathi is not threatened by other languages in the abstract. It is threatened by specific institutional measures that favor one language over another in everyday life. And Marathi itself has never been pure: its vocabulary contains words derived from Persian, which through centuries of use have made their own; his great literary tradition was radically inclusive. What it demands, what every living language demands, is not immunity to change, but reciprocity: time to absorb change on its own terms, rather than by institutional imposition.
BR Ambedkar, who had the foresight to see where competing loyalties would lead, expressed his views on these divisive tendencies that would likely plague the future of the Indian body politic in his 1949 Constituent Assembly speech.
“We are all Indians. I don’t like what some people say that we are Indians first and Hindus second or Muslims second. I’m not happy with that. I honestly say I’m not happy with that. I don’t want our loyalty as Indians to be affected in the least by any competing loyalties, whether that loyalty comes from our Indian culture or our first religion.” Indians persist and nothing but Indians.”