The language as spoken, especially by Pune Brahmins, is often considered the only correct and culturally respectable register.

One afternoon, at a small gathering in the US, a Brahmin man I shall call Gaurav spoke warmly about his son, Pranav – his academic achievements, his skilled batting on the cricket pitch and his good nature. It was a pleasant conversation, but something caught my attention.

Every time Gaurav uttered his son’s name, he emphasised the nasal weight on the “na” – Pranav. Gaurav, his wife and Pranav himself insisted on this. The retroflex nasal “na” Gaurav and his family insisted on is a caste marker, the performance of Brahmin caste identity. Language is a ledger of the mechanism of caste. It records who you are, where you come from and where you stand in the social caste hierarchy.

The mechanism of caste and the linguistic function to work and maintain it was remarkable. This is what I have described as the vulgar inequality of caste in my book, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India.

Consider another young man I know, also named Pranav. Curious about the divergence in pronunciation and because many parents invest much thought in naming, I once asked Pranav what his name meant. He smiled sheepishly, shrugged, and said, “I have no idea, aunty.”

I suggested it might be related to praan, the breath of life or pran (pronounced prun), an oath. I asked him something more specific: “Do you pronounce your name with a nasal “na” or a flat one? He looked puzzled. I demonstrated both. He laughed and said, “I don’t know much aunty. But it’s just Pranav,” with a soft “na”.

For Gaurav’s family, the nasal inflection was non-negotiable.

But it had never occurred to the other Pranav that his name had different meanings and, most importantly, to cultivate cultured pronunciations and speech. That gap – between those who police pronunciation, regulate language and those who are indifferent to it – is precisely where caste operates. At the same event, Gaurav spoke fondly of a college friend, Pravin. Yet, every time Gaurav said “Pravin,” he imposed the same hard “na”: Pra-vi-na.

Later, when I spoke to Pravin directly, he pronounced his name with a soft “na”. Yet Gaurav had been pronouncing his friend’s name differently: insisting on a sanitised brahmanical phonetic standard that Pravin himself had never claimed. Through his obsession with the hard “na”, Gaurav insisted on the language of high-caste Brahmins as the only correct spoken Marathi.

This is how linguistic caste hierarchy works, by inferences and insisting, pleasantly and politely, on a certain standard until it feels normal.

What’s at stake in the ‘na’?

Gaurav was brought up in Pune and Mumbai, his mother is from Pune, his father from Nagpur. Most importantly, Gaurav chose to speak in Puneri, that is brahmanical Marathi, and not Vidarbha Marathi. In Pune, long regarded as the cultural and intellectual capital of Marathi-speaking high castes, brahmanical Marathi occupies the apex of a linguistic hierarchy that most speakers recognise.

Its tonal markers, the nasal vowels, the enunciations signal education but also origin. Puneri brahmanical Marathi functions more as a credential and less as a dialect. Pune lives in the hard “na”.

Gaurav seemed like a kind and amiable man – and that is the point. The production and reproduction of caste through language requires the confidence of those who have inherited a particular form of speech and believe it to be the correct one.

What Gaurav was reinforcing, likely without reflection, is the brahmanical myth of orality: that there exists one legitimate Marathi, with one proper accent, tone and enunciation – and that is Puneri brahmanical Marathi.

This is not a purely Maharashtrian phenomenon, nor is it confined to the past or just Brahmans. In 2026, whether in Pune, Chennai, London, Houston or Melbourne, wherever Marathi speakers gather, these phonetic hierarchies travel with them.

A Brahmin woman fellow passenger on a train to Chennai said to me, “You said you are from Pune, but your Marathi is very different.” I responded, “Yes, because I have traveled all over the world my Marathi is influenced by global currents.”

Instead of befriending me as a Marathi speaker, this woman was more interested in what she inferenced was not proper Marathi speech and, as a result, I did not belong to her Brahmin community. Through my Marathi, she attempted to dig into my social background, because she could not recognise any other markers of my caste.

This is what I call segregated sociability: the fracturing of a shared linguistic community along caste lines, so that even speakers of the same language cannot meet and be sociable with each other.

People from Vidarbha – the eastern region of Maharashtra – hesitate to converse with me in Marathi, apologising with audible embarrassment: “Our Marathi is not as good as yours.” What they mean is that my Marathi carries the stamp of the Puneri brahmanical linguistic register. In the US, Marathi speakers from Vidarbha often switch to English or Hindi when speaking with me, even when Marathi was our obvious common language.

Although I am Dalit, my brahmanical-inflected Marathi has helped me enjoy some power and privilege in Dalit and some non-Dalit circles. I grew up in Pune and was socialised to speak its Marathi. Yet, my Marathi was not up to mark for the Brahmin woman traveler I mentioned earlier. To speak Puneri Marathi is to be “civilised” and “cultured,” “sanitised,” and sanskritised.

This is the caste mechanism Gaurav was perpetuating, probably without malice. While many non-Brahmin Marathi speakers spoke cultivated brahmanical Marathi, many others did not. But in the brahmanical Marathi framework, they were speaking incorrectly. As one Brahmin physician laughed and said, “People from Nagpur cannot even speak Marathi properly. They mix it with Hindi. Is that Marathi?”

Many non-Brahmins and Dalits also denigrate non-Puneri Marathi. During our conversations in Pune, a retired Dalit man said with disgust, “People from Nagpur cannot speak Marathi, they say abey, tubey.”

Many Marathi speakers from Vidarbha, Konkan, and elsewhere are acutely aware of this dispossession and often work hard to acquire brahmanical pronunciation. In response, while many non-Brahmin Maharashtrians assert their own Marathi, others in the process of linguistic self-erasure – replaced their natural “ha” with brahmanical “ho”, their flat “pani” with nasalised pani, and their incorrect “aani” with the more ornate nasal “aani”.

The goal is assimilation into a so-called legitimate linguistic sociality that conferred respectability. The tragedy is that they feel they must erase themselves to be heard. The cost is the slow disappearance of their own phonetic inheritance.

Puneri brahmanical culture does not need to say anything explicitly. The nasal “na” says it all, reinforcing segregated sociability. It drew lines separating many Marathis and its speakers and made it clear which side of the line conferred legitimacy and dignity.

That is why the urban, educated Indian’s denial of caste is flawed. Caste is hardly a “thing-of-the-past” or a rural malaise. It thrives in the way a father pronounces his son’s name in India and the US, or in the mild embarrassment of a man from Nagpur who apologises for his Marathi.

The linguistic project of caste has always organised who speaks, what counts as correct speech and who has the authority to define authenticity. To acknowledge that a pronunciation encodes caste hierarchy would be to acknowledge one’s own role in perpetuating it. Caste lives in the hard “na”.

Marathi is a plural language, shaped by region, class, caste and migration. It belongs to the Konkani Marathis, Vidarbha Marathis, Marathawada Marathis, the Marathi of the Dalit communities, just as much as it belongs to Brahmin households. Each carries its own grammar, music and dignity. There is no single, correct Marathi – only Marathis.

To speak Marathi freely – in all its registers, accents, tones – is an act of resistance. Recognising this is linguistic justice and intellectual honesty about the persistence of caste in the everyday.

Power operates most effectively along with brutal violence or overt practices of untouchability, but also through the covert insistence and inherited confidence of those who have never had to apologise how they say a name.

The hard “na” is a small sound with a long history and deep politics of caste creating segregated sociability.

Clarifications: The phrase “nasal ‘na’” has been replaced with the words “hard ‘na’”.