Opinion: A wage must not require surrendering your mother tongue

A supervisor in Bengaluru reportedly told Kannada-speaking warehouse workers to learn Hindi or leave. He later apologised in Kannada. That sequence, threat first and folded hands later, should not be filed away as a social media embarrassment. It is a labour question, and it goes to the root of self-respect.

Periyar's politics began with a refusal: the refusal to accept that dignity must be begged for in someone else's tongue, caste, god or office. Anna carried that refusal into a language policy, insisting that Tamil Nadu would not be made a subordinate province of Hindi. Kalaignar treated language not as decoration but as a public right, tied to education, work and the state. Their argument was never that Indians should not learn many languages. It was that no Indian should be made smaller at work for speaking their own.

That distinction is lost in the warehouse clip. Learning Hindi as an additional skill is a choice. Being ordered to learn Hindi to keep a job in Bengaluru is coercion. The worker in Karnataka does not owe the supervisor fluency. The supervisor owes the workforce communication. A company that operates across states must build that bridge with bilingual leads, translated instructions, safety training in languages workers understand, and managers who are assessed on whether their teams understand them.

The apology matters, but only as an admission. It does not repair the power relation that made the sentence possible. If the same supervisor returns to the same floor with the same unchecked authority, the apology becomes a public relations interval between threats. Workers will remember which language carried the warning.

India's platform and logistics economy runs on people whose names, villages and languages are treated as background noise by the apps above them. Delivery workers, pickers, packers, drivers and nurses are asked to be flexible in every direction: flexible hours, flexible pay, flexible bodies, and now flexible mother tongues. Flexibility demanded only from below is not modern management. It is the old hierarchy with a barcode scanner.

The Dravidian answer is plain. A wage must not require linguistic surrender. A state, a market and a workplace that want the labour of Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali and every other mother tongue in India must learn to speak to workers with respect in the languages where their lives are actually lived. Anything less is not national integration. It is imposition, and workers are right to name it as such.