This book was conceived over the past decade as I reflected upon the linguistic battles that had accompanied the first years of India's independence. The better I grasped the deeper meanings of the language controversies that had pushed India to the brink of instability during that period, the more I came to admire Nehru's handling of the situation. I as an historical linguist by training and academic discipline have not been able to see it another way.
Language is no longer the threat to the national unity of India that it was once felt to be.
Nothing has happened in the last decade to undermine seriously or for long my optimism that the worst of India' s language problems have receded into its history, neutralized now as forces for national disequilibrium. In any country with as many different established languages as India, language will never not be a problem. One must learn to live with that as India by and large has done. For much of the first two decades after independence in 1947 language politics pushed India in the direction of serious disorder. A large amount, a disproportionately large amount, of political energy was expended in the language controversies of the 1950's and 1960's, but the advantages of hindsight now suggest more strongly than ever before that those struggles were the birth pangs of a new India, not harbingers of a permanent fragility.