In April and June of 2025, the government of Maharashtra, led by the Mahayuti coalition, issued two resolutions mandating Hindi as the compulsory third language for students from Class 1 onwards in Marathi- and English-medium State board schools, citing alignment with the National Education Policy of 2020. The announcement was, by any administrative measure, modest in scope, though its political consequences were anything but.
Within weeks, the streets of Mumbai and Pune were filled with protesters. Two figures who had not shared a platform in years, Uddhav Thackeray of Shiv Sena (UBT) and Raj Thackeray of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, found themselves, improbably, on the same side. By the end of June, the government had withdrawn the orders. The grammar of this linguistic confrontation is centuries old.
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 all conducted their affairs in Persian. Marathi-speaking people were governed, taxed, and adjudicated in a language foreign to them.
Shivaji did not accept this. In 1630, approximately 86 per cent of the vocabulary in Maratha administrative documents was Persian. By 1677, it had fallen to 37 per cent. The instrument of this transformation was the Rājyavyavahārakośa, the Thesaurus of State Usage, commissioned and completed in that same year. Every Persian and Arabic administrative term was given a Marathi or Sanskrit equivalent. Forts received Sanskrit names: Sindhudurg, Suvarndurg, Prachandgarh, Pratapgarh, etc. The royal seal was inscribed in Sanskrit.
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Every subsequent episode of Marathi linguistic resistance is a repetition of this founding act.
Jyotirao Phule’s deposition to the Hunter Commission on Education in 1882 is among the most important documents in the history of Indian educational policy. Phule argues that colonial educational expenditure overwhelmingly benefits the upper-caste elite, using revenue extracted from Shudra labour to subsidise the very class that oppresses them. He demands compulsory primary education for all, teachers drawn from the cultivating classes, and instruction in Modi and Balbodh, the two Marathi scripts. His writing in the spoken tongue of working people was itself the 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 mobilisation: Marathi for the people, English for the world.
Tilak’s Home Rule speech at Ahmednagar on June 1, 1916, put the question of vernacular education in his characteristic direct manner.
“Is the question whether education should be given through vernaculars such a big one? Our voice is nowhere. Do the English educate their people through the French language? Do Germans do it through the English language? Because we have no authority. You have not got the authority.”
Yet, Tilak was also the first Congress leader to advocate Hindi in Devanagari as India’s national language at the Nagari Pracharini Sabha in Banaras in December 1905.
Vinayak Savarkar’s Bhāshā Shuddhikaran, first published in 1926, was political surgery: a comprehensive project to replace Arabic and Persian borrowings in Marathi with Sanskrit-rooted coinages. The results are now embedded in daily speech across India. Savarkar coined or revived: doordarshan (television), akashwani (radio), sansad (parliament), and hutatma (martyr, one who has sacrificed their soul). Doordarshan became India’s national television network. Sansad is in the Constitution. Hutatma names the traffic circle 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 telegrammed the Constituent Assembly in August 1949 with the request: “I beseech 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, Sanskrit-rooted Hindi as the proper national language of a Hindu civilisation in the throes of revival. He was a fierce champion of Marathi within Maharashtra but an advocate for Hindi outside it. Savarkar never resolved this contradiction; perhaps he did not see it as such.
On the day Hindi was formally adopted as the official language of the Union, the Maharashtrian Congress leader Shankarrao Deo spoke not against Hindi but for a different conception of India entirely:
“It is not uniformity but unity in diversity. It is Vividhata (diversity) that India stands for. That is our richness; that is the contribution that India can make to the world-culture and world progress... I admit India is a nation and I am an Indian, but if you will ask me what is your language, Sir, you will excuse me if I say ‘My language is Marathi’... If you mean by national language one language for the whole country, then I am against it.”
And on Marathi’s sufficiency: “I do not want to belittle the culture or the richness of Hindi, but as far as culture goes, I can receive it from my own language, Marathi and Sanskrit, the grandmother of all languages. They are rich enough to do that.”
B.R. Ambedkar’s position in the same debate was, characteristically, more layered. As Chairman of the Drafting Committee, he ultimately presided over the adoption of Hindi as the official language, a constitutional outcome he accepted as the will of the majority. But he warned, on September 14, 1949, that Hindi speakers, while a significant group, remained “a minority of the population,” and that privileging one language risked fracturing the federal spirit. His earlier pamphlet Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province (1948), submitted to the Dar Commission, had already argued formally for a unified Marathi-speaking State - the position eventually vindicated by the creation of Maharashtra in 1960. And his Thoughts on Linguistic States (1955), written in the last year of his life, articulates with characteristic rigour his conviction that the stability of Indian democracy depends on the recognition of linguistic identity at the level of the state: “One State, one language” is a universal democratic principle, not a nativist claim.
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Ambedkar’s great argument in the Assembly, for mother-tongue primary education as a precondition of democratic participation, is perhaps his most durable contribution to the language question. Speaking on September 2, 1949, he argued that a child educated in a language foreign to their home is disadvantaged from the start in the race for knowledge and civic life. For communities already disadvantaged by centuries of caste exclusion, that additional burden is not merely unfair. It is politically disabling.
The constitutional settlement did not resolve Maharashtra’s boundaries. On January 15, 1956, Nehru declared Bombay a Union Territory. The streets filled immediately.
The Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, formed on 6 February 1956 with Prabodhankar Thackeray, poet and father of Bal Thackeray, among its key members, organised a sustained campaign of strikes and mass demonstrations. Morarji Desai, Chief Minister of Bombay State, ordered police to fire. On November 21, 1955, police opened fire on demonstrators at Flora Fountain, killing fifteen. In the months that followed, as Morarji Desai continued ordering police action, the death toll climbed. It reached 106 before the movement was over. The square was later renamed Hutatma Chowk, using a word coined by Savarkar.
Maharashtra was formed on May 1, 1960. The memory of those 106 is not ceremonial. It connects every subsequent confrontation over the language to the knowledge that recognition required blood, and that the State did not hesitate.
Bal Thackeray, son of Prabodhankar, launched Marmik in 1960 and the Shiv Sena on June 19, 1966, to protect the cultural and economic standing of Marathi workers in a city filled with migrants. The Sena began by targeting South Indians, then pivoted as the demographics of migration shifted northward.
By the 1990s, the name of Bombay itself became a political question. The city’s name derived from the Portuguese Bom Bahia (Good Bay), overlaid on the older name Mumbai, which itself derived from Mumba Aai, the name of the tutelary goddess Mumbadevi whose temple has stood on the site since before the Portuguese arrived. The Shiv Sena campaign to restore the name Mumbai, the name by which the city’s 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 simultaneously a de-anglicisation and a re-Marathicisation: the city was being given back, in name, to the community that believed it most deeply belonged to them.
The 2025 government orders were resisted not out of hostility to Hindi but because state power was being used to privilege one language with material consequences for children. Children are required from age six to study a language their family does not speak, at additional expense, conferring benefit primarily on those seeking employment in the Hindi belt. Ambedkar said it in 1949: Education in a foreign language is not a gift. It is a burden. The coalition that formed, Uddhav and Raj Thackeray on the same platform, joined by literary organisations and citizens across party lines, reflects not party politics but civilisational memory.
Marathi is not threatened by other languages in the abstract. It is threatened by specific institutional arrangements that advantage one language over another in daily life. And Marathi itself has never been pure: its vocabulary retains Persian-derived words that centuries of use have made its own; its great literary tradition was radically inclusive. What it asks, what every living language asks, is not immunity from change but reciprocity: time to absorb change on its own terms rather than by institutional imposition.
B.R. Ambedkar, who had the foresight to see where competitive loyalties would lead, expressed his view of these fissiparous tendencies that would likely plague the future of India’s body politic in his 1949 Constituent Assembly speech.
“We are all Indians. I do not like what some people say, that we are Indians first and Hindus afterwards or Muslim afterwards. I am not satisfied with that. I frankly say that I am not satisfied with that. I do not want our loyalty as Indians should in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty whether that loyalty arises out of our religion, out of our culture or out of our language. I want all people to be Indian first, Indians last and nothing else but Indians.”
Published - July 10, 2026 08:30 am IST