IIn April and June of 2025, the Mahayuti alliance-led Maharashtra government issued two proposals mandating Hindi as a compulsory third language for students from Class 1 in Marathi and English-medium state board schools, citing alignment with the National Education Policy of 2020. This declaration was, by any administrative measure, modest in scope, although its political consequences were nothing short of monumental.
Within a few weeks, the streets of Mumbai and Pune were filled with protesters. Two personalities who had not shared a stage for years, Shiv Sena’s (UBT) Uddhav Thackeray and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena’s Raj Thackeray, found themselves, improbably, on the same side. By the end of June the government had withdrawn the order. The grammar of this linguistic conflict is centuries old.
I. First Language War
By the beginning of the 17th century, Persian was the language of power throughout the Deccan. The Mughal court, the Adil Shahi Sultan of Bijapur and the Nizam Shahi of Ahmednagar all conducted their affairs in Persian. The Marathi-speaking people were ruled, taxed and adjudicated in a language foreign to them.
Shivaji did not accept it. In 1630, about 86 percent of the terminology in Maratha administrative documents was Persian. By 1677, this had fallen to 37 percent. was the means of this change encyclopedia of state behaviorThesaurus of State Use, commissioned and completed the same year. Every Persian and Arabic administrative term was given a Marathi or Sanskrit equivalent. The forts received Sanskrit names: Sindhudurg, Suvarnadurg, Prachandagarh, 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 statement to the Hunter Commission on education in 1882 is one of the most important documents in the history of Indian educational policy. Phule argues that colonial educational expenditure overwhelmingly benefited the upper caste elite, using the revenues derived from Shudra labor to subsidize the same class that oppressed them. He demands compulsory primary education for all, teachers drawn from the peasantry and instruction in the two Marathi scripts Modi and Balbodh. His writing in the spoken language of the working people was the very logic behind this: this language is sufficient for the highest moral and political purposes.
establishment of saffron (Marathi) and Mahratta (English) In January 1881 Chiplunkar, Agarkar and Tilak turned 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 local education in his characteristic direct manner.
“Is the question so big as whether education should be given through the local languages? Our voice is nowhere. Do the British educate their people through the French language? Do the Germans do it through the English language? Because we have no rights. You have not got the rights.”
Nevertheless, Tilak was the first Congress leader to advocate Hindi in Devanagari as the national language of India at the Nagari Pracharini Sabha in Banaras in December 1905.
Third. The paradox of purity and pluralism
Vinayak Savarkar’s language refinementFirst published in 1926, it was political surgery: a comprehensive project to replace Arabic and Persian borrowings in Marathi with Sanskrit-based coinages. The results are now included in daily speech across India. Savarkar coined or revived: Doordarshan (Television), Oracle (radio), Parliament (Parliament), and Martyr (Martyr, one who has sacrificed his soul). Doordarshan Became the national television network of India. Parliament It is in the constitution. Martyr Name the traffic circle in central Mumbai where the martyrs of the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement are remembered. Savarkar’s linguistic project exists in the name of the country’s own institutions.
And yet it was Savarkar who wired the Constituent Assembly in August 1949 with this request: “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 pure, Sanskrit-based Hindi as the proper national language of Hindu civilization in a period of revival. He was a strong supporter of Marathi within Maharashtra but of Hindi outside it. Savarkar never resolved this contradiction; Maybe he didn’t see it that way.
On the day Hindi was formally adopted as the official language of the Union, Maharashtrian Congress leader Shankarrao Dev spoke not against Hindi but for a different concept of India altogether:
“It is not uniformity but unity in diversity diversity (Diversity) For which India stands. That is our prosperity; This 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, you will forgive me if I say ‘My language is Marathi’… If by national language you mean one language for the whole country, then I am against it.’
And on the adequacy of Marathi: “I don’t want to diminish the culture or the richness of Hindi, but as far as culture is concerned, I can get it from my own language, Marathi and Sanskrit, which are the grandmothers of all languages. They are rich enough to do that.”
BR 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 an official language, a constitutional outcome which he accepted as the wish of the majority. But he warned on September 14, 1949, that Hindi speakers, though an important group, remained a “minority of the population” and that privileging one language risked fragmenting the federal spirit. his earlier pamphlet Maharashtra as a linguistic province (1948)In the proposal submitted to the Dar Commission, it had already formally argued for a unified Marathi-speaking state – a position ultimately confirmed by the creation of Maharashtra in 1960. and their Reflections on Linguistic States (1955)Written in the last year of his life, it expresses with characteristic rigor his conviction that the stability of Indian democracy depends on the recognition of linguistic identity at the state level: “One State, One Language” is a universal democratic principle, not a native claim.
Ambedkar’s great argument in the Assembly for mother tongue primary education as a precondition for democratic participation is perhaps his most enduring contribution to the language question. Speaking on September 2, 1949, he argued that a child educated in a foreign language at 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 only unfair. This is politically inefficient.
IV. Blood at the Flora Fountain
The constitutional agreement did not resolve the boundaries of Maharashtra. On January 15, 1956, Nehru declared Bombay a Union Territory. The roads were filled immediately.
The Samyukta Maharashtra Committee, formed on 6 February 1956, whose leading member was Prabodhankar Thackeray, the poet and father of Bal Thackeray, carried out a sustained campaign of strikes and mass demonstrations. Bombay State Chief Minister Morarji Desai ordered the police to open fire. On November 21, 1955, police opened fire on protesters at the Flora Fountain, killing fifteen. In the months that followed, as Morarji Desai continued to order police actions, the death toll continued to rise. Before the movement ended it reached 106. Using the term coined by Savarkar, this Chowk was later named Hutatma Chowk.
Maharashtra was formed on May 1, 1960. The memory of those 106 is not formal. It connects every clash over language with the knowledge that recognition requires blood, and the state has no hesitation.
Prabodhankar’s son Bal Thackeray launched touching in 1960 and by Shiv Sena on 19 June 1966 to protect the cultural and economic status of Marathi workers in a city filled with migrants. The army began by targeting South Indians, then changed direction as the demographics of migration moved north.
By the 1990s, the name of Bombay itself became a political question. The city’s name is derived from the Portuguese bomb bay (Good Bay), based on the old name Mumbai, itself derived from the same name Mumba AayiName of the patron goddess Mumbadevi, whose temple has been standing at this place since before the arrival of the Portuguese. The Shiv Sena’s campaign to restore the name Mumbai, 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 de-Anglicisation and re-Marathaisation: the city was being given back, in name, to the community that believed it was deeply theirs.
V. Indian first, Indian last
The 2025 government orders were opposed not because of hostility towards Hindi, but because state power was being used to privilege a language with material consequences for children. From the age of six, children have to study at additional expense in a language that their family does not speak, the benefit of which mainly goes to those seeking employment in the Hindi sector. Ambedkar had said in 1949: Education in a foreign language is not a gift. It is a burden. In the alliance that was formed, the coming of Uddhav and Raj Thackeray on the same platform, the involvement of literary organizations and citizens irrespective of party lines, reflects not party politics but civilizational memory.
In short Marathi is not in danger from other languages. It is threatened by specific institutional arrangements that give one language an advantage over another in daily life. And Marathi itself has never been pure: its vocabulary retains Persian-derived words which centuries of use have made their own; Its great literary tradition was fundamentally inclusive. What it demands, what every living language demands, is not immunity from change, but reciprocity: time to absorb change on its own terms rather than through institutional imposition.
BR Ambedkar, who had the foresight to see where competitive loyalties would lead, expressed his view in his Constituent Assembly speech of 1949 about these divisive tendencies that could potentially affect the future of India’s political system.
“We are all Indians. I don’t like that some people say that we are Indians first, Hindus second or Muslims later. I am not satisfied with that. I clearly say that I am not satisfied with this. I do not want our loyalty as Indians to be influenced in the least by any competing loyalties, whether that loyalty arises from our religion, our culture or our language. I want everyone to be Indians first, Indians last and nothing else but Indians.”
