Gora Sahib left, the linguistic hierarchy stayed

George Orwell was worried about what happens when language serves power. In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, he showed how political language can make lies sound truthful and violence respectable. Pacification could make bombing villages and burning homes sound like an administrative exercise.

What happens when a language has not been given the institutional scale to develop the words and systems needed to describe reality precisely?

English lets us turn conditions into actions: marginalise, criminalise, stigmatise, traumatise. I can invent illiteratised - someone actively denied the conditions necessary for literacy. Or statelessised - someone pushed into statelessness by circumstances or decisions.

These are not standard words, but you understood them.

Languages do not become powerful simply because they are revered or have millions of speakers. They become powerful when people build things around them: dictionaries, textbooks, professional vocabularies, journals, universities, examinations, legal systems and translation systems.

Scale is a decision, made by someone, paid for by someone.

I began thinking about this twenty-five years ago, in a clinical setting. A young man was told that he had AIDS, and I watched the sentence meant to steady him confuse him further. The doctor tried to explain it in Urdu. She circled the idea, softened it, borrowed English. By the time she finished, he understood less than when he began. This is not a bad doctor, I remember thinking.

This is a language that has not been given enough institutional infrastructure to carry this truth easily. That experience took me into years of research on communicating HIV/AIDS in Pakistani languages.

Words may exist in dictionaries or academic writing, yet remain too vague, euphemistic, technical or uncomfortable to be socially usable. Think of gender, rape, incest and informed consent. The issue is whether people can actually use them to understand, question and act.

This is where colonial history enters. Colonial rule constructed establishments in which English acquired enormous authority – administration, courts, universities, examinations and professional education.

Urdu developed enormously too, in poetry, literature, journalism, religion and everyday speech. But its institutional development has not been equal across modern knowledge. Our regional languages have often been pushed even further from formal institutional power. After 1947, we reproduced much of it.

I have endeavoured to work against this. In an Urdu-medium social entrepreneurship project, the purpose was not to prove English unnecessary. It was to make ideas, tools and opportunities accessible without requiring people to cross an English-language gate.

Decolonising language does not mean abandoning English. It means cancelling the idea that English must remain the price of admission to knowledge.

English opens gates to global knowledge; I have no interest in closing them. The problem is when English becomes a proxy for intelligence, quality, class and human worth.

This brings us to Pakistan's stubborn medium-of-instruction argument.

We keep debating English versus Urdu as though choosing one language will solve the education crisis. It will not. English-medium education does not automatically mean good education.

For an affluent child, English can be an environment, parents, books, tutoring, internet and educated adults around them. For another child, English may be a subject, taught by a teacher who may herself struggle with it, while the child is expected to learn mathematics, science and everything else through that language. Both may be called "English-medium educated". They are not receiving the same education. The medium of instruction is therefore not merely a pedagogical choice.

In Pakistan, it is also a class arrangement. There is another contradiction I have watched over the decades. Some of our most celebrated writers, prominent activists and distinguished politicians have rightly argued for education in the mother tongue or first language.

I agree with the principle, but I sometimes wish the emphasis had also been on the more basic injustice: getting every child into school, and making sure the education they receive is good. Because there is something obnoxious here. The children of the class making these arguments are rarely confined to under-resourced mother-tongue schools. Their children study in expensive English-medium schools, and many eventually study outside Pakistan.

There is nothing wrong with choosing English for one's own children. The problem begins when English is defended as a global language for the privileged while mother-tongue education is presented as adequate for everyone else.

Why should Pakistan not allow its competitive examinations to be attempted in Urdu alongside English, as India allows candidates in its Civil Services Main examination to write answers in Hindi and other Eighth Schedule languages? This would not abolish English. It would refuse to make it the only language in which intellectual ability can be demonstrated.

This brings me to Literacy Day. Every September, we rightly talk about children out of school and educational access. But even for children inside classrooms, we should ask: In what language are we asking them to become literate? And another question: Whose language have we invested in enough to make it a language of serious knowledge?

Literacy is not simply the ability to decode a page. It is the ability to understand what the page is saying. To understand a doctor. To question an official. To recognise violence. To understand your rights. To name what is happening to you without borrowing somebody else's language of authority.

We do not need a war between English and Urdu. Nor should we romanticise any language as an automated solution.

We need multilingualism without linguistic hierarchy. We need children to learn deeply in languages they understand, while acquiring English well enough to access the wider world.

We need to stop treating ordinary people's languages as inadequate for science, law, medicine, technology or thought.

Gora Sahib left. The linguistic hierarchy stayed.

Perhaps Literacy Day is a good time to ask who has been allowed to build the languages in which we learn, work, govern and imagine our futures, and who has been left trying to become literate without ever being given the language of power.