‘Gandhiji realised the making of India as a nation did not require erasure of linguistic diversities in the European way’ Premium

The roots of the "one nation, one language" debate in India can be traced back to colonial-era Europe.

The “one nation, one language” debate has been simmering for a while now, with leaders of the ruling party, from time to time, proposing Hindi as a medium to unify the country.

What few people may know is that the roots of the idea of a national identity based on a single language can be traced back to colonial-era Europe. And it was challenged during the Indian freedom struggle by none other than Mahatma Gandhi.

The idea of “one nation, one language” or that every language group will have its own nation took shape in the late 19th and early 20th century European political theory, said Ashutosh Varshney, political scientist, academic and Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University.

“Led by Mahatma Gandhi, the freedom movement fundamentally challenged the dominant concepts of nationhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” he said, speaking at the Constitution and National Unity Convention held by the Karnataka government in Bengaluru. 

 “As with so many things in modern political theory, it begins with John Stuart Mill,” Varshney said.

John Stuart Mill, also known as the father of modern liberalism, was an English intellectual, philosopher and economist of the 19th century.

“In his great text Representative Government, 1869, John Stuart Mill wrote linguistic diversity was a ‘special, virtually insuperable hindrance to nation making’.  This is about the improbability of Indian nationhood,” Varshney said.