The States Reorganisation Commission Report — yesterday marked fifty years of its implementation — was a remarkable exercise in political acuity. At one stroke it defused a catastrophic politics of linguistic nationalism by recognising India’s linguistic diversity and giving it some political expression. It also recognised that, to some degree, the language question cannot be resolved by insisting on singular solutions emanating from the centre, and premised on the thought that a nation has to speak a single language.

As Sheldon Pollock has pointed out in his magisterial The Language of Gods in the World of Men, India’s linguistic history is distinctive in many respects. In India language was historically never harnessed to a political project, religion played little part in the choice of language, there was no concept of mother tongue in pre-modern India and no sense of a language tied to a group identity or a particular ethnos. There was no sin of Babel. Linguistic diversity was considered in some sense natural, not a deviation to be corrected. Despite linguistic diversity, different languages could share literary forms, a common intellectual culture and through a range of common references even develop in relation to each other.

The States Reorganisation Commission was an inspired response to the challenges posed by this alignment of language and politics. It saved India that fate of every multi-linguistic society that has tried to impose a single language on the country: civil war. To that extent it was remarkably successful. But there is a danger that we might misinterpret the true lesson of the success of 1956. That lesson is not diversity, but freedom.

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