Can India’s Liberal Arts Universities Think in Indian Languages?

On other days, I enter a private liberal arts university where the buildings shine with new paint and carefully designed glass. The sun bounces off the lawns as if the entire campus is posing for a brochure. Students arrive with coffee from the campus cafe, wearing clothes that signal comfort and cosmopolitan ease. Their English flows easily, but their sentences are often rehearsed, shaped by how they imagine a well-educated person should sound.

Between these two Indias, I have found myself wondering about something that began as a passing curiosity and grew into a quiet obsession: Can liberal arts universities in India truly become liberal arts institutions if they refuse to think in the languages of the country around them?

The question surprised me when it first appeared, but I kept meeting it in classrooms. Like the young woman in a state university who answered a question beautifully in Marathi but froze when asked to say the same thing in English. Or the young man in a private university who wrote striking essays on Indian politics but confessed that he had not read a single Hindi writer since high school because the campus culture made it feel unnecessary. Or the earnest student from a village in Gujarat who whispered to me after class that she felt she had to leave her Gujarati self at the gate each morning.

These moments made it clear that language was not just a medium but a place where thought begins. When students cannot think in the language of their own childhood, they begin thinking like visitors in their own minds.

KC Bhattacharya warned about this almost a century ago. In his book Swaraj in Ideas, he argued that India would never achieve true intellectual independence until it freed itself from thinking only through borrowed categories. He was not asking for isolation. He was asking for courage.

The courage to think in one’s own tongue.
The courage to trust one’s own metaphors.
The courage to build ideas from one’s own soil.

That courage is what I find missing in many of the liberal arts campuses now growing across India.

The Ethnographer’s Walk

If you walk through one of these new universities as an observer, you will see many things that look impressive. The architecture resembles a foreign campus. The walls carry posters about gender, climate change, and global justice. The seminars promise fresh ways of reading politics and philosophy. Students carry laptops covered in stickers announcing their identities, their convictions, and their sense of belonging to a world they hope to inhabit.

But if you stay long enough, you will notice something else. The debate is strangely thin.

Students speak about charged topics, but the tone carries the caution of someone navigating a fragile social script. They know exactly which positions are acceptable and which would bring silence or raised eyebrows. Some campuses tilt clearly in one ideological direction, and dissent feels unsafe. Others maintain a polite neutrality that leaves no space for strong disagreement at all.

Krishna Kumar once wrote that Indian education is slowly losing its culture of conversation. Not that students do not speak, but that they no longer take risks in speech. Avijit Pathak observed something similar: that the Indian classroom, instead of being a place where sincerity is possible, has become a stage where students perform what they think is expected.

I see this often. A classroom full of intelligent, sensitive young people who know how to repeat the grammar of critique, but who hesitate to express anything that might unsettle their peers. The result is a culture that looks like liberal arts education from the outside, but lacks the friction that makes intellectual life real.

Sometimes when I speak to these students individually, I sense a longing for something deeper. For conversations rooted in reality rather than posture. For writing that feels honest rather than polished. For thought that emerges from their own life rather than from borrowed frames.

And always, quietly, for permission to speak in the language that feels most natural to them.

The Quiet Sorting of Students

The more I observed life on these campuses, the more I noticed something that felt like a sociological map hiding in plain sight. Students clustered by schooling background.

State board students stuck together out of instinctive solidarity.
CBSE and ICSE students formed their own circles.
Cambridge and IB students found one another almost immediately.

No one announced these groupings.
No one even acknowledged them.
But the groups existed as clearly as the lunch tables in a high school cafeteria.

Pierre Bourdieu would have recognised this instantly. Their schooling had imprinted on them different forms of confidence, posture, vocabulary, and even humour. It had given some of them cultural capital that others lacked. Some entered classrooms with an ease that comes from years of English-medium schooling. Others entered carrying fear of mispronunciation.

I have watched these hierarchies unfold subtly. A student from a state board begins to speak, hesitates, and switches to a simpler sentence. A student from an IB school interrupts without realizing they are doing so. Another student stays silent because the idea in her head arrived in Malayalam, not English, and she cannot translate it quickly enough.

Bourdieu said that habitus is not a set of habits. It is a way of being in the world. These students carry their habitus into every classroom, every group discussion, every friendship. And language becomes the quiet boundary that separates confidence from hesitation.

A Problem Older Than the New Universities

None of this is new. India has lived through long struggles over language and belonging. Gandhi insisted that education in the mother tongue was essential for clarity and moral courage. Tagore built Vishwa Bharati on the belief that India’s intellectual journey required multilingual freedom and connection to its own artistic soil.

Their visions feel far from our present. Modern campuses celebrate freedom, yet require students to think in a language of distance. They offer courses on world literature, but not on the literary worlds of our own languages. They produce confident graduates, but rarely thinkers shaped by India’s lived complexity.

The older generation of Indian intellectuals did not face this contradiction. Girish Karnad could move between Kannada theatre and English scholarship without guilt.
S. L. Bhyrappa drew philosophical depth from Kannada while entering national debates. U. R. Ananthamurthy shaped Indian public thought precisely because his sensibility grew from Kannada modernism.

Similarly, Nirmal Verma carried European interiority into Hindi with ease. Agyeya, Raghuvir Sahay, and Rajendra Mathur reshaped the emotional vocabulary of Hindi. S. C. Dube built an anthropology rooted in the Indian village without eroticizing it.

Their ability to cross worlds came from linguistic freedom, not linguistic compromise. 

The question now is whether modern liberal arts universities can cultivate such thinkers.

Or whether their monolingual imagination will keep them from ever doing so.

The Campus as a Stage, The Classroom as a Mask

Walk through the café of any new liberal arts university in India and you will hear a familiar cadence. A group of students discussing a documentary on women’s rights. Another analyzing the latest political controversy. A few talking about their capstone project on caste or climate. The conversations sound lively, even urgent. But if you listen carefully, you begin to notice something unsettling.

The vocabulary is fluent.
The tone is assured.
The references are global.

Yet the content feels strangely weightless.

It is as if the students have learned not only what to think, but also how to appear thoughtful. They speak in well-structured sentences, with pauses that signal seriousness, but rarely do they ask questions that break away from the well-travelled paths of campus consensus.

This is not their fault. It is the culture of the institution shaping them.

On one campus I visited, students joked that you could predict someone’s views on any issue within two minutes of meeting them; not because they were predictable, but because the campus had only one acceptable position on most debates.
On another, students avoided discussing Indian politics entirely, afraid that any disagreement would affect their social standing.

This fear is quiet, but real.

Krishna Kumar once wrote that modern classrooms prepare students for obedience disguised as participation. They learn to perform engagement without taking risks. Avijit Pathak noted that they encourage performance more than honesty. Students worry more about appearing intelligent than about embracing confusion.

These insights have stayed with me, especially when I watch students navigate ideological climates where one wrong sentence can cost them friendships. These campuses claim to celebrate critical thought, but their culture often discourages any thought that challenges prevailing currents.

There are right-leaning campuses where certain topics cannot be questioned.
There are left-leaning campuses where certain positions are unmentionable.
In both places, genuine exchange dries up.

Ashis Nandy would say that these institutions have inherited the brittle spirit of modernity, where conformity wears the mask of sophistication. His critique of the “mind-colonized self” comes alive in these classrooms. Students abroad in their own minds, fluent in theory but unsure of the inner compass that guides courage.

And again, beneath all this lies the deeper problem: the language in which they are expected to think.

Where Language Becomes an Unspoken Rule

In one of my seminars, a student from Uttarakhand raised his hand to describe how a concept we were discussing, the idea of home, was understood in his village. He began speaking hesitantly in English, then paused, flustered. I asked if he wanted to switch to Hindi. He nodded. The change was immediate.

His voice grew stronger, his sentences grew longer, his imagery vivid with mountain light.

But when he finished, he looked around the classroom with a hint of apology, as if he had broken an unwritten rule.

Later, he asked me privately, “Is it okay to speak in Hindi? Nobody else does.”

This moment revealed something I had seen many times.
Students imagine English not as a medium but as a passport; to respect, to visibility, to belonging. Indian languages become the ones you hide, not the ones you think in.

The problem is not English.
The problem is the loss of linguistic intimacy.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote that language carries memory and imagination. When we abandon our first language, we abandon part of our mind. KC Bhattacharya warned that freedom cannot grow where thought has been outsourced. Gowri Vishwanathan showed how colonial education made English seem natural while making native languages appear unsuitable for scholarly life.

Modern liberal arts universities unconsciously repeat this history. They promise freedom, but through a language that distances students from their inner world.

A Future Still Waiting for Its Language

A memory from my time as a visiting scholar at Hiroshima University often returns to me. The seminar room was ordinary: whiteboard, projector, a circle of tables, yet what happened there revealed something I had never quite faced so clearly.

The professor from Hiroshima led discussions in English, but his Japanese students frequently shifted into Japanese when their ideas needed precision. They began in English, slipped into their mother tongue without hesitation, and the conversation continued naturally. Their voices strengthened, their examples grew richer. The language switch was not self-conscious; it was simply the route their thinking trusted.

Those of us from former colonies responded differently. We stayed in English even when our thoughts arrived in Hindi, Tamil, Bangla, or Kiswahili. We translated before speaking. We rarely switched back. The hesitation was quiet but unmistakable.

This contrast stayed with me. It revealed how deeply colonial histories linger, shaping not only accents but confidence itself.

Later, in Indian liberal arts classrooms, I recognized the same pattern. Students thought in one language but felt compelled to speak in another. They worried that slipping into their mother tongue would seem like a failure, not a resource.

And that is the heart of the crisis. These universities aspire to cultivate free inquiry, yet ask students to think in a language that distances them from their own minds. 

The gap between thought and speech becomes a quiet barrier, invisible yet powerful enough to narrow the space where originality should grow.

The Idea of the Liberal Arts, Lost in Translation

Every liberal arts institution claims to encourage critical thought. But critical thought cannot grow where language itself creates emotional distance.

When a student must translate her deepest insights into English before she can express them, the idea changes shape. The edges soften. The urgency fades. The thought becomes safer, less embodied. What remains is not her idea, but the English version of it, a version shaped by what the institution expects.

This is why campuses look lively but feel cautious.
It is why debate is noisy but not deep.
It is why disagreement is rare and leaves no mark.
It is why students perform conviction instead of inhabiting it.

Language is not the only reason, but it is the deepest one.

What Intellectual Life Requires

Liberal arts education demands three things:

None of these can flourish in a monolingual system in a multilingual country.

If a campus is built on the assumption that English is the only legitimate language of serious conversation, then everything that cannot be easily expressed in English— emotion, memory, family, place—remains outside the classroom door.

The student enters, but her world stays behind.

And a liberal arts institution that cannot bring the student’s world into the classroom is not a liberal arts institution. It is a curated simulation.

Tagore, Gandhi, and the Horizon We Lost

Tagore dreamt of a university that would be global in its reach yet rooted in India’s many languages. This dream did not emerge from idealism alone. It came from a long study of how civilizations learn. Tagore believed that genuine scholarship required porous borders: the ability to welcome ideas from Greece, Persia, China, Japan, and Europe while still speaking from the center of one’s own cultural and linguistic world. Vishwa Bharati was not meant to be a replica of any existing model. It was designed as a meeting ground, a place where Indo-European, Indo-Asian, and Indian regional traditions could share a table without hierarchy.

He imagined students reading Kalidasa and Homer with equal intimacy, listening to Baul singers in the morning and scholars of Chinese poetry in the afternoon. He believed that when languages speak to each other, cultures begin to see their shared human questions. Knowledge for him was not a contest for superiority but a long conversation across time and place. And conversation, he understood, cannot grow if one language dominates others.

Gandhi, thinking in a very different key, arrived at a parallel conclusion. For Gandhi, mother tongue was not just a medium of instruction but a moral position. He argued that the first language is where a child learns honesty, care, and the early vocabulary of right and wrong. To uproot a learner from that ground was to create an inner fracture. Gandhi was not dismissive of English. He simply insisted that clarity cannot grow in a borrowed voice. A child who learns to think in a language that does not feel natural becomes dependent on others for the meaning of their own experiences.

Gandhi warned that societies that give up their mother tongues risk giving up their sense of self. Tagore warned that societies that close their linguistic worlds lose their imagination. Taken together, their visions offer a map for what a university in India could have been: globally curious yet culturally steady, open to the world yet confident in its own language traditions.

Their visions were not identical, but they converged on one truth.

Freedom begins with language. 

Not political freedom alone, but intellectual freedom. The freedom to ask questions shaped by one’s own memories. The freedom to disagree in one’s natural voice. The freedom to name the world in words that feel honest.

And this is the truth modern liberal arts universities have forgotten. 

Many of these institutions celebrate globalism but marginalize the linguistic traditions that have carried Indian thought for centuries. They adopt international curricula yet remain unsure about what it means to think from within India’s own cultural and linguistic soil. The result is campuses that appear worldly but struggle to produce thinkers who can see India clearly.

Tagore and Gandhi, writing at very different moments, understood something our present institutions often overlook: a university cannot grow confident minds if it asks its students to think in a language that does not recognize their inner world. The crisis is not aesthetic or administrative; it is existential. A university that forgets the languages of its own society cannot become a home for intellectual courage.

What a Liberal Arts Institution in India Should Be

A true liberal arts institution in India would not be a copy of American campuses.
It would not rely solely on English.
It would not fear disagreement.
It would treat multilingual life as an intellectual resource.

Such an institution would:

It would ask students to bring their entire selves into the classroom, not just their English-speaking selves.

The Final Return to the Classroom

When I think back to the classrooms I have walked through in India, and the seminars I sat in at Hiroshima, a single insight grows clearer each time. The moments when students speak most honestly are the moments when they stop worrying about the language required of them and begin speaking in the language that carries their memories.

In those moments, language was not a barrier but a doorway. Thought and memory aligned. The classroom felt more human, less rehearsed. And something genuine passed between those who spoke and those who listened.

A liberal arts university should be a place where such moments are ordinary.
A place where languages do not compete but speak to each other.
A place where a student’s inner world does not require translation before it becomes knowledge.
A place where confidence is not measured by fluency in one language alone.

India deserves institutions that recognize this. Because until they do, we will continue building campuses that appear successful but feel oddly hollow. They will be full of conversation yet strangely thin in conviction. Full of activity yet light in intellectual courage. Full of performance yet short on the risk that makes thinking meaningful.

The future of Indian higher education will not be shaped by infrastructure, fundraising, or international collaborations. It will be shaped by a quieter question:

Can our students speak in the language that they think?

If the answer becomes yes, we may still nurture a new generation of writers, philosophers, and social thinkers who carry within them the same fullness that marked the work of Karnad, Verma, Ananthamurthy, Bhyrappa, Dube, and others who moved freely between India’s languages and the world’s ideas.

If the answer remains no, our universities will continue to produce articulate graduates in impressive buildings, but very few minds capable of shaping the intellectual life of the country. Thought will be spoken, but rarely born.