There’s a curious double standard playing out in modern India, particularly in its southern states, that’s beginning to grate. Picture the scenario: a young professional from the Hindi belt relocates to Bengaluru. He strides into the city, confident, fluent in Hindi, and utterly unbothered by the linguistic landscape around him. When locals speak to him in Kannada, he blinks, sighs, and responds in Hindi. If questioned, he smiles and says, “Come on, Hindi is our national language. Learn it. It’s easy.”
But the moment someone suggests that he should learn Kannada, or at the very least show some cultural sensitivity to the state he's chosen to live in, the tone changes. The smile fades. Offence is taken. “How dare you force a language on me!” he exclaims, without the slightest hint of irony.
This is the quiet entitlement of Hindi imposition—not the bludgeoning, overt, authoritarian imposition of yesteryears, but the smug, modern, suit-clad version. Polished, polite, and patronising.
It’s not that anyone minds if someone from outside Karnataka doesn’t speak perfect Kannada. What grates is the assumption that locals must accommodate him, while he bears no reciprocal obligation to understand or respect them. What offends isn’t ignorance—it’s arrogance.
Let us be perfectly clear: no one is asking a migrant to master ancient Kannada literature. But the sheer unwillingness to even attempt a basic greeting, to read a signboard, to say “swalpa adjust maadi” instead of “adjust karo yaar”—it reeks not of cultural difference, but cultural disdain.
And why does this matter? Because language is not a mere tool of communication. It is the vessel of a people’s memory, their jokes, their idioms, their curses, their lullabies. It is the soul of a place. When you live somewhere, truly live there—not as a guest passing through, but as a citizen—you owe it a minimal amount of respect. And that respect begins with language.
The situation becomes all the more absurd when you consider that the very people insisting that locals must speak Hindi, do so under the banner of “national unity.” But unity is not achieved through dominance. It is achieved through mutual respect. Telling someone in Bengaluru to abandon Kannada and adopt Hindi is no different from telling someone in Delhi to start speaking Malayalam. Both would be equally unreasonable. Only one, somehow, is seen as “patriotic.”
This behaviour becomes especially galling when juxtaposed against the treatment of South Indians who move northwards. They learn Hindi, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of courtesy. But they rarely, if ever, demand that Delhiites or Lucknowites learn Tamil, Telugu, or Malayalam in return. That sense of linguistic supremacy doesn’t exist. And perhaps it shouldn’t anywhere.
What we’re witnessing, then, is not a linguistic tug-of-war, but a lopsided assertion of privilege: “You adapt to me, but I will not adapt to you.”
If we are serious about being one nation—Bharat, not just India—then we must understand that unity is not uniformity. A truly united India is one where a Kannadiga speaks Kannada with pride in Bengaluru, a Tamilian speaks Tamil in Chennai, and a Hindi speaker learns to say “namaskara” without grumbling.
Respect is a two-way street. And if you're moving to Karnataka, the least you can do is meet your hosts halfway. Not out of compulsion, but out of civility.
And perhaps, just perhaps, when asked to learn Kannada, instead of sulking, one might pause and consider—how very odd it is to complain about “language imposition” while expecting everyone else to speak yours.
What's to be learned from the south?
For all the fiery disputes over water sharing and political boundaries, South Indians have long demonstrated a quiet, instinctive respect for one another’s languages within their respective states. A Malayali in Chennai doesn’t walk into a shop and demand to be served in Malayalam. A Kannadiga visiting Hyderabad doesn’t expect Telugu speakers to switch tongues. There’s an unspoken code—when in Rome, speak Roman, or at least try. One may grumble over river allocations, but rarely does one presume linguistic dominance within another's domain. It’s a mark of mutual regard that, despite all the historical rivalries, each state recognises the sanctity of the other’s language within its own soil. The fights may be loud, but the boundaries of respect are quietly honoured.
