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Chief Editors: Aanvi (23b2139@iitb.ac.in), Ashish Ranjan (23b2216@iitb.ac.in)
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বুঝলেন?
புரிந்ததா?
समज़लात?
అర్థమైందా?
સમજાયું?
समझे?
or… did the language get in your way?
Beneath the Translation
We come from a country which is home to hundreds of languages and dialects, each tied closely to regional identity, culture, and everyday life. In most parts of the country, people grow up speaking their mother tongue at home and in their communities. Yet when it comes to higher education, government, and corporate employment, English occupies a uniquely powerful position.
This prominence is not a one-day sandcastle story, but is rather rooted in India’s colonial history, and its continued influence shapes present-day realities quite evidently. This bifurcation started with how older generations in India used to treat this foreign language as not just a language, but something which clearly defined one’s class and position in society. Eventually, the post-independence era continued treating fluency in English as a marker of superiority, a perception that has carried on into the modern era as well. While professional spaces such as government jobs and civil services are no longer colonial institutions in the same sense, the association of English with education, professional competence, and upward mobility has allowed some of the social prestige attached to the language to persist. In this sense, what was once an explicitly English-dominated system has evolved into one where English continues to function as a marker of competence, even when the institutions themselves no longer do. This language of ‘winners’ or the ‘elite’ has effortlessly drifted into how societies and communities form and function, even today.
A modern paradox of Indian society exists in how the English language, used as an instrument to distinguish the privileged and marginalised sections in society, has turned into a language that ‘binds’ us all. While officially presented as a neutral medium that helps connect a multilingual nation, in practice, it can also function as a gatekeeper- shaping who feels confident, who participates freely, and who is forced to spend additional effort translating their thoughts before expressing them.
“Language is very integral to culture; we can’t remove it from the latter. But sadly, language also becomes a way of identification and hence stereotypes and discrimination. It becomes a tool for colonisation, but yes, it can also be used to push back those discriminations!”, describes Professor Elloit Cardozo, who is part of the Centre for Writing & Communication at Ashoka University and has been an HS113 instructor in the previous years.
A more important question is not simply whether English connects us, or whether it divides us. It is what English has come to represent in the process. In a country where the language someone speaks has historically been associated with their education, upbringing, social class, and access to opportunity, fluency in English can communicate far more than the words being spoken. It can become a marker of sophistication, confidence, and even belonging.
The argument here is not that English is inherently elitist, nor that its presence in institutions should simply be replaced by another language. In a country as linguistically diverse as India, having a common language at administrative and institutional levels is not merely convenient but, in many contexts, unavoidable. English has become deeply embedded in our systems of higher education, governance, professional employment, and communication across states, and the historical circumstances that brought it here cannot simply be undone. Instead of asking whether English should exist in these spaces, this article tries to understand who becomes more comfortable when a particular language (here: English) dominates in spaces conventionally perceived as elitist, who has to adapt, and also whether the language that allows us to communicate liberally also unintentionally creates hierarchies socially.
The existence of English as a uniform medium of institutional mechanisms appears to be working fine as a middle ground, but the extent of compromises to be made by different groups is worth taking a look. Why?
Language naturally becomes one of the first points of intersection where differences such as different regions, cultures, economic backgrounds, and lived experiences meet in a common institutional framework. It is through language that students ask questions, form friendships, express opinions, seek help, and gradually build a sense of belonging. Consequently, it evidently shapes participation, confidence, identity, and the feeling of whether one truly fits into a space, one like ours at IITB.
Language-driven grouping of people may seem basic, but it so coincidentally happens that people holding the highest proficiency in a language that is considered ‘for the rich’, themselves belong to privileged backgrounds. It proves that the language may not merely divide groups; the privilege associated with it also determines who is more likely to acquire proficiency in it, which in turn reinforces the perception of that language as a marker of privilege in a self-propagating cycle. This may be similar to how some spaces may be dominated by Hindi, some by another regional language, where people from other backgrounds may not be equally weighted against each other naturally.
Everyone carries a different language that has shaped how they think, learn, joke, argue, and connect with people on campus. Just like somebody with Marathi as their mother tongue would unintentionally switch to it whenever possible, the same student cannot be inherently expected to think and process English at the same level.
In many ways, the diversity of students represents one of IIT Bombay’s greatest strengths, and to accommodate this diversity, English naturally assumes the role of the institutional language, which, from an administrative perspective, is perhaps the most practical arrangement possible.
English, as a language, is not an entirely alienating concept for a lot of us. Of course, everyone entering IITB possesses a certain degree of familiarity with English; the very mechanisms through which students enter the institute, like JEE, GATE and UCEED, require them to engage with it to a certain extent* While JEE (Main) is conducted 13 languages, JEE Advanced is conducted in English and Hindi and UCEED and GATE are conducted only in English , yet proficiency cannot be judged by a single examination. A person may be excellent at solving a mechanics problem, but it may be a completely different consideration to benchmark them against a set of people who understand the problem in a language better than them, the same language which is used in every form of instruction in professional spaces. For most, it has remained largely confined to textbooks and examinations, while most conversations, classrooms, and everyday interactions have taken place in another language.
Can Support Qualify as a Solution?
“When I came to IIT Bombay, it was shockingly different for me. In my perception, I assumed most students would carry the same background as me, would have a similar way of receiving and sharing feelings, but reality hit differently. People do not even share languages here, and if they do, it is the most evident form of segregation that someone can observe immediately.”
The institute recognises this gap and has introduced mechanisms to address it, the primary one being HS113, or Academic English, for first-year undergraduate students. Traditionally offered as an eight-credit course, HS113 has been revised to a four-credit course from Autumn 2026 for students identified through a screening test as requiring additional support in academic communication. The course functions as an alternative to the regular first-year HASMED core requirements. Its broader goal is not simply to improve grammar but to develop students’ academic reading, writing, and communication skills, helping them participate more comfortably in an English-medium environment. The course attempts to address the differing needs of students by grouping them into different sections, based on their level of proficiency in English to cater to their needs accordingly.
The second major mechanism available in the institute is the English Language Improvement Training or ELIT. ELIT operates within IIT Bombay’s broader English Learning Programme (ELP). They run two major initiatives, both of which focus on the practical aspects of language development. The first is the Conversation Club, which imitates group discussions to foster natural conversations, whereas the second is one-on-one sessions, which provide semester-long personal attention to address the student’s weaker aspects of the language.
Adjacent to ELIT sits another arm of the institute’s language support infrastructure: the Language Resource and Writing Cell (LRWC), which runs walk-in consultations, weekend writing-practice sessions, and short courses, typically capped at fifteen participants per batch and aimed at written and spoken English. They aim to cater to presentation skills, academic writing and grammar. But this mechanism can reach only a small fraction of those who might benefit, and disproportionately those who already have the confidence, spare time, and institutional know-how to seek it out in the first place.
“I can understand English, but I was never taught to think in English. Everything in MA105 and CS101 moves so fast, and there are no regular Hindi resources to help me catch up”, recalls a sophomore when interviewed on his experience with HS113 in the first semester.
To address this problem, apart from the regular Tutorial Service Centre (TSC) sessions that support students through challenging first-year courses, Student Support Services also runs separate ExCeL (Explaining Concepts and Lectures) sessions in Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil for students more comfortable in those languages. Unlike HS113, ELIT, or LRWC- all of which work by bringing students closer to English- these sessions bring the material to the student instead.
Such sessions often observe appreciable participation in the institute, proving the existing void of regularly available resources in languages apart from English. This raises a doubt regarding how well students needing this mechanism may be able to grasp the concepts through regular hours in English. After all, what is covered over many weeks, revised in a single session, given the limited proficiency in English, already makes an otherwise hard syllabus even harder.
The broader issue we noted is that while these mechanisms may have their inherent shortcomings, such as limited capacity and the challenge of having to cater to people with differing levels of proficiency simultaneously, these alone do not determine effectiveness.
“The professors were really good and took an ample amount of effort throughout the semester. The efficacy of the course majorly depended on the students’ willingness to listen and participate in class discussions.”
Through interviews, Insight notes that people generally have had subjective degrees of utility that they were able to derive, depending on the amount of interest and effort that they put into these courses and programs.
Does Language Define Capability?
There exist spaces in the institute which are marketed as a neutral medium with an equal playing field, but those more proficient or comfortable in English, and in quite a few cases, Hindi, often have an edge in accessing and making the most of what these spaces offer.
In order to examine the implications of language as a marker of competence, it is imperative to look beyond IITB and understand why many of these fields came to be associated with proficiency in English in the first place, and how this association continues to shape the way people interact with such spaces today.
The first thing to address is whether these fields even necessitate the requirement of being proficient in English for success. A superficial look at them would probably give one an answer in the affirmative, but reality is otherwise.
The distinction between having requisite skills and the language through which the skill is expressed is important, and oftentimes, the line between them has become blurry, which is why in the vast majority of cases, people associate the latter with these fields and never find the courage to delve into them. For instance, persuasion is not a skill endemic to English. Similarly, leadership, critical thinking, creativity and a vast myriad of skills have never been native to English. They have always existed independently of language, and have existed across cultures and civilisations long before English gradually emerged as the dominant medium of academia and professional life.
In Insight’s conversation with Prof. Elloit Cardozo, he remarked
“Language becomes a means of socialising and social identity. When a person’s identity is through their mother tongue, then it is natural to proactively ‘choose’ to bond with people rooted in similar identities (language) and this is how social circles are then formed via the platforms of ‘clubs’.”
This association between proficiency in these skills and proficiency in English is not entirely accidental. Several circles within the institute community, that are perceived to be ‘elitist’ or as ‘requiring English’, such as consulting, public speaking, journalism, etc., rely heavily on similar skills such as communication, persuasion, articulation, critical thinking and leadership, all of which are strongly demonstrated through language. Though not entirely similar in how one may face exclusion in the above-stated avenues, these same activities usually operate without acknowledging the same exclusion that is leveraged on their cultural capital, which may also be class-coded in certain ways.
On the other hand, some institutional ecosystems operate predominantly in Hindi or some other regional language, thereby allowing someone with limited proficiency in English, but a strong command of a regional language, to participate just as meaningfully in these spaces. This is important, as it explains that it may not be just English that these fields inherently demand, but rather proficiency in a specific language through which the particular space operates. Over time, this distinction has become blurred, and competence in their underlying skill is mistakenly associated with fluency in English, even in instances when the two aren’t necessarily correlated.
What is a Language Barrier?
This realisation is quite crucial because it helps us understand what a language barrier actually is. This term is often a misnomer, as people perceive it as the inability to communicate. But a language barrier is rather a condition in which access to a particular opportunity becomes contingent on the mastery of a particular medium, irrespective of whether the underlying capability exists. Someone may possess the analytical ability to excel in fields like consulting, the persuasiveness for public speaking and journalism, or the creativity for other allied fields, and yet find themselves unable to participate meaningfully because the accepted language of such a space is unfamiliar to them.
The mechanisms discussed earlier all intervene at the same point: after a student has already arrived at IITB. But the disadvantage they respond to is set years earlier by the K-12 education system, which determines how much exposure to English a student carries with them long before they ever apply to college.
It is interesting to note, however, that this earlier stage is not equally accessible either. Some arrive at IITB with years of exposure to English-speaking environments already behind them, others begin that process of adaptation only once they are here, and this gap is already uneven before either group reaches campus. The existence of bridging mechanisms, then, does not eliminate the language barrier so much as relocate it, changing only where and how a student comes to confront it.
This pre-existing unevenness cannot be traced to geography or income alone, since both are sometimes underpinned by a structure that the institute rarely names directly: caste. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu offered a vocabulary for what is otherwise easy to feel but difficult to argue. Certain families, he observed, transmit to their children not lessons but a disposition, what he termed habitus: an accent that carries no trace of translation, a vocabulary reached for without searching, an ease with abstraction that classrooms mistake for intelligence rather than inheritance. In India, this particular inheritance – fluency in English, acquired before a child can walk into a classroom and feel the difference, accumulated for generations within upper-caste, urban households, while rural, lower-caste, and first-generation-learner families are largely denied the conditions in which such fluency could take root.
When an institution places every student against the same measure of English proficiency, it performs what Bourdieu called symbolic violence: the quiet crowning of one inherited form of capital as a neutral, universal standard, so thoroughly naturalised that those without it come to read their own struggle not as evidence of a rigged starting line, but as a personal failing.
This is not an argument confined to theory. Scholarship on Indian higher education has documented, with names and transcripts, students, disproportionately first-generation and lower caste, being singled out in classrooms for the specific offence of speaking imperfect English, and has traced how such moments do not exist in isolation but layer onto, and reinforce, the very caste hierarchies that decades of policy have tried to dismantle. None of this suggests that every student who struggles with English at IITB does so because of caste, nor that every student who speaks it fluently arrived with a destined advantage. But the pattern is real enough to be named, and naming it unsettles the comfortable assumption that English functions here as a neutral bridge between languages. For some students, crossing that bridge meant being carried. For others, it meant building it themselves, plank by plank, while everyone else was already on the other side.
It is undoubtedly evident that English has always been treated as a ‘historically’ important barrier to overcome. This is crucial because the reasoning behind this observation raises an interesting question: what determines which language barriers we feel compelled to overcome and which we’re okay living with?
“I wanted to join the Telugu community as soon as I came to college. I just wanted people around me with whom I didn’t have to make an extra effort to communicate in the language I wish to talk in.”
The intuition behind this is straightforward. Someone unfamiliar with Hindi may feel a far greater need to adapt to it to participate comfortably in various informal campus activities. However, the same expectation rarely applies to languages spoken within smaller regional circles; people may not feel the same need to learn a particular language simply to interact with those groups. The difference, then, perhaps isn’t in the languages themselves, but rather their perceived importance and the access that learning them provides. This means whether a language is ‘worth’ learning is shaped more so by the perceived effort involved relative to the social opportunities it opens up.
Beyond the Barrier
Suppose linguistic barriers were, in principle, overcome. Every student arrived at a point where every language felt familiar in classrooms, and none felt alien in hostel corridors. Language, in this scenario, would seem to recede into the background, reduced to a mere conduit for ideas. But this assumption deserves scrutiny: does language stop shaping experience once it stops obstructing communication, or does its influence simply become harder to see?
The answer may lie in recognising that language is unlike most skills we acquire. Learning a language equips us to communicate; living inside one gradually makes it a part of how we see ourselves and others. The language in which we instinctively laugh, remember home, or reach for the right word in a moment of excitement carries years of accumulated experience that no vocabulary list can replicate. Somewhere along the way, language stops being a means of expression and becomes a marker of familiarity.
This is where homophily, our tendency to gravitate toward what feels familiar, becomes useful. It explains why linguistic communities persist even once communication itself is no longer an obstacle. Familiarity can arise from shared interests or hometowns, but language is often its first visible signal. Friendships rarely begin as conscious decisions about inclusion or exclusion; they begin in conversations that feel like home, a familiar accent in the mess hall, a joke that needs no translation, the unexpected comfort of one’s mother tongue in unfamiliar surroundings. Such moments lower the threshold for the next conversation, and the next. These experiences are among the fundamental reasons why certain language-based student associations and communities thrive so well.
This forces a reframing of what we mean by “language barrier”. We began by treating it as a condition of entry, access contingent on mastering a medium. But a subtler barrier remains, one not of entry but of ease. Two students may share a room, a fluency, an opportunity, and still inhabit that space differently, because only one of them feels immediately at home in its language and culture. Language is not only a barrier to communication; it is one of the quiet mechanisms by which communities reproduce themselves, through a social world that feels entirely natural to those already inside it, built on histories and inequalities that remain largely invisible to them.
What emerges, then, is not a question of whether language barriers disappear when a language is learned, but whether they disappear only when language stops determining where we feel we belong.
Can a language barrier ever truly disappear?
We reside in an ecosystem which hints at the existence of possessiveness towards a language, declaring it as ‘elite’, yet at an individual or even a community scale, we are powerless to change it. This may not just be specific to IIT Bombay, but in fact, the Indian society in general. Such a barrier can never be reduced to a simple binary of inclusion or exclusion, nor can it be solved through a linear checklist of remedial courses like HS113 and an aspirational training program such as ELIT. The institutional necessity of a shared tongue will always exist alongside the deeply personal, messy, and emotional reality of human connection.
It may be fair to understand that while bridging programs and academic support can give a student the tools to articulate a complex technical argument or navigate a competitive selection process, perhaps no curriculum can bridge the subtle, unwritten distance of feeling like an outsider in a room where everyone else seems to move with innate ease. Should it then be better to accept that the true complexity of our campus life lies in acknowledging that both of these linguistic realities are real, necessary, and inherently in conflict?
The institutional demand for a uniform medium creates a shared stage, yet the quiet human pull toward familiarity ensures that our informal worlds remain wonderfully, stubbornly diverse. Our realities are shaped by the differences in the environments we grew up in: the social, cultural, linguistic, economic and caste settings that we call home. These differences need not prevent meaningful engagement; rather, they require one not to instinctively dismiss the possibility of a genuine connection, but to take the effort of empathising; a lost art in today’s fast-paced world.
Ultimately, as we carry different parts of India within ourselves through these corridors, we are left to wonder whether our goal should ever be a complete erasure of language barriers, or if the deeper task is to cultivate a space where we recognise those barriers for what they are: not measures of capability, potential, or worth, but simply the quiet, enduring ways we seek home in one another.
References:
●https://sociology.institute/sociology-of-education/language-social-class-influence-education/
●https://www.academia.edu/48903673/Language_Discrimination_in_Indian_Higher_Education
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