The politics of language in India is closely tied to identity, belonging and power. In April 2025, the Supreme Court observed that the prejudice against Urdu stems from the false belief that it is ‘alien’ to India. Rejecting the colonial ‘Hindu-Hindi’ and ‘Muslim-Urdu’ binary as a “pitiable digression from reality,” the Court affirmed Urdu’s deep Indo-Aryan roots and cultural legitimacy (Jeelani, 2025). This judgment marks an important moment of linguistic justice and challenges state discourses that marginalise certain languages.
In this context, the recent labelling of Bangla as a ‘Bangladeshi language’ in an official Indian document must be read as far more than a clerical mistake. It is part of a larger ideological project where the naming of languages is never neutral and embedded within contested histories of nationalism, migration, and communalisation. Like Urdu, Bangla too is increasingly subjected to subtle forms of delegitimization through bureaucratic and media discourse, particularly in relation to Muslims and border populations.
Bangla is spoken by approximately 270 million people worldwide (Van Schendel, 2022). It is the official language of Bangladesh and is constitutionally recognised in several Indian states, including West Bengal, Tripura, and parts of Assam and Jharkhand. Its literary and cultural history predates the Partition of 1947 and spans centuries of evolution across both sides of the political border. To refer to Bangla simply as a ‘Bangladeshi language’ not only distorts these historical realities but also contributes to the discursive alienation of Indian Bengali speakers, especially Muslims, from the nation’s imagined cultural core.
As Louis Althusser (1971) posited, the state operates through ideological state apparatuses, such as education, media, and language that shape individuals’ subjectivities and reinforce hegemonic narratives. A seemingly benign bureaucratic mislabelling can thus, become a weapon for legitimising exclusionary ideas of who belongs and who does not. When a language spoken by millions within India is described as foreign, it subtly reinforces suspicion toward its speakers, positioning them as potentially ‘external’ to the nation.
This phenomenon is not new. After Partition, Urdu was gradually constructed as a ‘Pakistani’ language despite its Indian origins and widespread use across regions and communities. This process led to the erosion of Urdu from school curricula, its replacement in state institutions, and the decline of its literary visibility. Francesca Orsini (2012) documents how Urdu’s marginalisation was less about its utility or richness and more about its association with Muslims in a climate of Hindu majoritarian nationalism. A similar pattern of erasure is now emerging in the case of Bangla, particularly in this politically fractured environment.
In states like Assam and West Bengal, where migration and religious identity are already hyper-politicised and hyper-visible, Bangla-speaking Muslims often find themselves at the intersection of multiple forms of marginalisation. Referring to Bangla as a language of Bangladesh plays directly into the rhetoric of ‘illegal infiltration’, a discourse that has been used to disenfranchise and detain individuals under laws such as the NRC and CAA.
Further, this discursive alienation is reinforced by internal hierarchies within the Bangla language itself. The prestige of ‘Shuddho Bangla’ or ‘standard’ Bengali, often associated with upper-caste, upper-class, urban or semi urban speakers, has long rendered other dialects as inferior or impure. Variations of Dialects such as the use of ‘Jal’ versus ‘Pani’, or ‘Mashi’ versus ‘Khala’, become not just markers of regional or religious difference but also of cultural legitimacy. Muslim speakers of Bangla who use terms common in Bangladeshi registers are often viewed as less authentically Bengali, reinforcing caste and religious hierarchies through linguistic practice. As O’Neil (2025) observes, the institutional processes of language standardisation often result in the erasure of subaltern speech-forms under the guise of promoting purity and correctness. These mechanisms do not operate neutrally; rather, they selectively legitimise certain linguistic variations while rendering others invisible or illegitimate within official discourse. This dynamic aligns with what Pierre Bourdieu (1991) conceptualised as “linguistic capital,” referring to the symbolic power attached to particular forms of speech that are socially sanctioned and institutionally valued. In this framework, describing the language Bangla as Bangladeshi in a government document does more than simply mislabel a language. It actively delegitimises the linguistic practices of entire populations whose Bangla does not align with the historically dominant, Sanskritised, upper-caste Hindu variant that the Indian state has traditionally recognised and promoted.
Moreover, the idea that languages are bounded neatly by nation-states is a product of colonial modernity, not a reflection of linguistic reality. There is no language called Bangladeshi, just as there is no language called Indian. National borders are basically ‘no man’s land’ and do not contain languages; they fragment and politicise them. Cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha (2012) emphasises the concept of hybridity and the third space where identities are continually negotiated. Bangla exists precisely in such a space shaped by successive partitions, followed by cultural as well as human exchange, religious differences, and state policies. Attempts to keep it within fixed national boundaries simplify the otherwise complex history, obscuring the dynamism and reifying the borders where fluidity has long persisted.
The official labelling of Bangla as foreign, even inadvertently, must therefore be understood within this broader ideological context. Hall and du Gay (2011) explore how cultural identity is constructed, contested, and embedded within discourse and that naming is a central act of power. To call a language foreign is to position its speakers in relation to the national self as either insiders or outsiders, citizens or strangers. These acts of naming shape the nation’s symbolic boundaries just as much as its physical ones. Some have argued that the controversy around the Bangladeshi language label is an overreaction, or even a politically manufactured distraction. While such concerns should be taken seriously, they do not negate the implications of state discourse. As Judith Butler reminds us in Excitable Speech (2021) that language is performative. Thus, a single phrase in an official document may carry material consequences, as its power lies not just in the literal words, but also in the histories and the structures it reiterates.
References:
- Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation). In Lenin and philosophy and other essays (B. Brewster, Trans., pp. 85-126). Monthly Review Press. (Original work published 1970).
- Bhabha, H. K. (2012). The location of culture (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203820551 (Original work published 1994).
- Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Polity Press.
- Butler, J. (2021). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative (1st ed.). Routledge.
- Hall, S., & du Gay, P. (Eds.). (2011). Questions of cultural identity. SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446221907
- Jeelani, G. (2025, April 16). Urdu a language misunderstood as alien to India, says SC – ‘prejudice stems from misconception’. Mint.
- O’Neil, D. (2025). Standardization, power, and purity: Ideological tensions in language and scientific discourse. Education Sciences, 15(4), 489.
- Orsini, F. (2012). The Hindi public sphere, 1920-1940: Language and literature in the age of nationalism. Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198062202.001.0001
- van Schendel, W. (2022). Rebuffing Bengali dominance: Postcolonial India and Bangladesh. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 23(1), 105–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2022.2150870
Urbi Bhandary is a third-year undergraduate student of Sociology with International Relations at Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
TheDaak review 
Leave a comment