India's language politics is frequently theorized as a site of identity contestation or federal negotiation. This paper challenges such reductionism and argues that linguistic conflict in postcolonial India is, fundamentally, a problem of structural power and epistemic hierarchy. The central contention is that colonial-era institutionalization of English within the domains of governance, law, and higher education produced a durable linguistic hierarchy that persisted, through administrative routinization and epistemic normalization, into the postcolonial state, despite formal constitutional commitments to multilingualism. Drawing on a qualitative historical-institutional analysis of colonial language policy, constitutional provisions, administrative practice, judicial structure, and education policy, the paper demonstrates that formal multilingual recognition has not dismantled the structural centrality of English, which continues to mediate access to democratic participation, legal redress, and epistemic legitimacy. Existing scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on linguistic identity mobilization or center-state negotiations, leaving the structural and epistemic dimensions of linguistic hierarchy insufficiently theorized. To address this gap, the paper advances civilizational pluralism as a normative framework grounded in India's pre-colonial tradition of dialogical multilingualism. This framework calls not for the exclusion of English, but for a structural institutional rebalancing that enables meaningful multilingual participation across governance, justice, and knowledge systems. The paper concludes that such rebalancing is a prerequisite for deepening democratic inclusion and strengthening the communicative foundations of nation-building in linguistically diverse polities.
Ashish Kumar (Fri,) studied this question.