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Through an examination of the creation of the first linguistically organized province in India, Odisha, Pritipuspa Mishra explores the ways regional languages came to serve as the most acceptable registers of difference in post-colonial India. She argues that rather than disrupting the rise and spread of All-India nationalism, regional linguistic nationalism enabled and deepened the reach of nationalism in provincial India. Yet this positive narrative of the resolution of Indian multilingualism ignores the cost of linguistic division. Examining the case of the Adivasis of Odisha, Mishra shows how regional languages in India have come to occupy a curiously hegemonic position. Her study pushes us to rethink our understanding of the vernacular in India as a powerless medium and acknowledges the institutional power of language, contributing to global debates about linguistic justice and the governance of multilingualism. This title is also available as Open Access.

Through an examination of the creation of the first linguistically organized province in India, Odisha, Pritipuspa Mishra explores the ways regional languages came to serve as the most acceptable registers of difference in post-colonial India. She argues that rather than disrupting the rise and spread of All-India nationalism, regional linguistic nationalism enabled and deepened the reach of nationalism in provincial India. Yet this positive narrative of the resolution of Indian multilingualism ignores the cost of linguistic division. Examining the case of the Adivasis of Odisha, Mishra shows how regional languages in India have come to occupy a curiously hegemonic position. Her study pushes us to rethink our understanding of the vernacular in India as a powerless medium and acknowledges the institutional power of language, contributing to global debates about linguistic justice and the governance of multilingualism.

This article calls for a revision and expansion of our understanding of the concept of 'vernacular' in modern Indian scholarship. Current definitions of the concept pose it as a local, indigenous and powerless language. Scholars like Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee have argued that such indegeneity and exclusion from structures of power provide vernacular languages with the capacity to represent the true voice of the oppressed. While this is true of vernacular languages in some instances, my analysis of linguistic politics in Orissa demonstrates that an overwhelming reliance on this definition of radical powerlessness blinds us to the hegemonic power exercised by regional vernacular languages in determining political and territorial alignments in modern India. This article illustrates how it is only by raising the question of how regional space is produced in India that we can illustrate the hegemonic power of major Indian vernacular languages.

Questioning the Herderian Ideal / Pritipuspa Mishra and Ying-Ying Tan -- Herder: Blessing or Curse for Linguistic Justice? A contemporary assessment / Helder de Schutter -- Rethinking the Principle of Linguistic Homogeneity in the Age of Superdiversity / Stephen May -- From Cultural Difference to Monoglossia: Herder's Language Trap / Tony Crowley -- Multilingualism in the United States: The Long History of Official Translations / Rosina Lozano -- A noble dream?: Hindustani and Indian Nationalism in the early twentieth century / Pritipuspa Mishra -- No Laughing Matter: Learning to Speak the "Common Language" in 1950s China / Janet Y. Chen -- Nationalism, multilingualism, and language planning in postcolonial Africa / Nkonko Kamwangamalu -- Language and National Consciousness in the Postcolonial Caribbean / Andrew Daily -- The Myth of Multilingualism in Singapore Ying-Ying Tan.