Positions · Language
Two languages, no impositions
Tamil Nadu teaches Tamil and English, and has done for generations. Salem Dharanidharan's answer to the National Education Policy's three-language formula is short: the third language belongs to the student, not the syllabus.
Debating the NEP in the spring of 2025, Dharanidharan was asked the perennial question: what is the harm in a third language? His reply reframed it. Tamil Nadu's students already master two — Tamil, one of the world's oldest living languages, and English, the language of global work. The question is not what a third language adds, but who gets to make it compulsory.
The state's answer has been settled for over half a century. The two-language policy is not an oversight to be corrected by Delhi; it is a considered position, born of the anti-Hindi agitations and carried from Periyar and Annadurai to the present government. When Hindi arrives as a requirement — through a policy formula, a funding condition, an exam — Tamil Nadu reads it as imposition, whatever the covering letter says.
Those who wish to learn Hindi should learn it — by choice, not by circular.
His positive case rests on India's own design. A country of many languages holds together, he argues, precisely because none is placed above the others; privileging one undermines the pluralism the Constitution assumes. Uniformity is not unity — it is merely uniformity, purchased at the expense of the diversity that makes the union worth having.
And the record, he notes, is on Tamil Nadu's side: near-universal enrolment, colleges ranked among India's best, a workforce fluent enough in English to staff the world's back offices and its own factories. A state does not arrive there by accident; it arrives by policy — its own.
Two languages, then, and an open door to any third. The door, he insists, must open from the inside.