King's College London

India’s foremost linguist and literary critic issued a stark warning about the future of human speech during his recent talk at King's.

The King’s India Institute hosted the 2025 Nehru Memorial Lecture on 14 November, where Dr G N Devy spoke on Language, Civilization and Hegemony.

Dr Devy argued that technology is imposing a new form of silence, threatening linguistic diversity and even the essence of human consciousness.

“Families no longer talk, children retreat into screens, and aphasia is becoming a norm rather than a deviation,” he said. “If the bridge between consciousness and the world – language – is snapped, the homo sapiens may migrate and become cyborg homodeus.”

Tracing the historical interplay of language and power, Dr Devy examined how Sanskrit, Persian and English each shaped India’s social hierarchies and cultural imagination.

Yet, he noted, none of these hegemonies destroyed India’s linguistic diversity. Today’s challenge, he stressed, is different: the virtual world risks silencing hundreds of languages and eroding the ecological and ethical wisdom embedded in them.

Invoking Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of a multilingual India, Dr Devy called for renewed commitment to linguistic democracy as a foundation for civilisation and freedom.

“Every mighty language was once the tongue of a tribe,” he reminded the audience, urging protection of Adivasi languages and smaller speech communities.

Dr G N Devy is a distinguished scholar, writer, and public intellectual, renowned for his contributions to literature, linguistics, and cultural studies.

Writing in Marathi, Gujarati, and English, he has dedicated his career to exploring India’s linguistic and literary heritage. He was the driving force behind the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), a monumental project that documented over 700 languages across 50 volumes.

He began his lecture by situating language at the heart of human history. From the earliest migrations out of Africa, language was not merely a tool of communication but a weapon of survival – enabling humans to imagine the absent, to plan for the future.

This capacity, he argued, underpins civilisation itself.Yet civilisation, as Devy reminded us, is never neutral. It carries within it the imprint of dominance.

Dr Devy’s message was clear: defending linguistic diversity is not cultural nostalgia – it is a fight for the survival of humanity.

His historical sweep identified three major linguistic hegemonies in India: Sanskrit, Persian and English. Each arrived with its own technology – orality for Sanskrit, paper for Persian, print for English – and each reshaped social hierarchies.

Sanskrit’s authority rested on the obscurity of Vedic texts, conferring power on those who could recite them. Persian brought a cosmopolitan culture of love and poetry, while English opened India to a modern world and global networks.

The lecture, chaired by Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal, concluded with a lively discussion on language families, philology and the politics of resistance.

The Nehru Memorial Lecture was endowed by the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Trust in 1966 as an annual lecture to be given in memory of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru by a distinguished scholar, scientist or administrator from the UK or India.

The lecture has been given by former Prime Ministers, senior political figures, esteemed scholars and leading figures in the fields of commerce and the arts.