A Republic of Equals: Why the National Assembly Must Speak in Many Voices

Opinion

The languages that built this republic are neither foreign nor ancestral. They are home

By S. Chidambaram

Mauritius is in the middle of a debate about whether Kreol Morisien should become a language of proceedings in the National Assembly. The debate has generated heat, competing press releases, and strong opinions on all sides. But beneath the immediate debate lies a question that most of the commentary has not yet asked, and it is the question that matters most. Not whether Kreol Morisien should be in Parliament, but what happens to the languages that are excluded from this institutional and constitutional recognition when it gets there. To answer that question, two countries come to mind, Wales and Singapore, because they show us both sides of the coin.

In 1536, Henry VIII signed the Acts of Union that bound Wales to England. Among their provisions was a clause that would, over the following four centuries, nearly destroy one of the oldest living languages in Europe. Welsh was excluded from all courts and official proceedings. It was not banned in homes or chapels. It was simply declared unfit for the institutions where power operated. No one ordered Welsh to die. The institutional logic did the rest.

By 1961, Welsh was spoken by fewer than one in four people in Wales. The mechanism of its near-destruction was not a single one or borne out of hatred. It was the accumulated signal, delivered through schools, courts, and public life across generations, that Welsh belonged in private ceremony but not in the spaces where the nation governed itself.

Parents made rational choices. Teachers enforced norms that no statute required. Children grew up understanding, without being explicitly told, that their language was not adequate for the institutions that shaped their futures.

The Fallacy of Numerical Primacy

Just before we proceed, I want to be clear about what I am NOT saying. I am not against Kreol Morisien (KM). It is a living, constitutive feature of Mauritian public life, and the desire to include it in parliamentary proceedings is a legitimate democratic aspiration. It is an aspiration which I share.

But I also share this aspiration for Tamil, and for Bhojpuri and for Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Urdu, and Mandarin. I share it for every language that different communities brought to this island, some under indenture, some through trade, and maintained across generations of hardship, displacement, and institutional indifference.

To see these languages as foreign, as belonging in some distant country of origin rather than in the soil of this Republic, is to deny the most basic fact of Mauritian history: that this country was not built despite these languages, but through them, by the people who carried them. Tamil, Bhojpuri, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Urdu, and Mandarin are not foreign languages that happened to wash up on our shores. They are Mauritian languages. They became Mauritian in the hold of ships, in the fields of sugar estates, in the markets and temples and homes of people who had no other country to belong to. They are as Mauritian as Kreol Morisien, and they deserve the same institutional recognition that that status demands.

A recurrent theme in the debate is that KM is spoken by 90+ percent of Mauritians, that it is the language of national unity, that parliamentary proceedings in Kreol will make democracy more accessible to more people. These are valid arguments. However, the argument from numerical dominance does not become a constitutional principle simply because the numbers are large. In a plural republic, numerical size does not confer the right to institutional primacy over the languages of communities who did not choose the majority language as their own.

And yes, nobody denies that Kreol Morisien is spoken by all communities, and nobody denies that it is spoken not just across them but within them, whether in Tamil homes, in Bhojpuri households, between people who share the same ancestral heritage. But this fact, and particularly the reason for it, makes the case for putting the other languages on equal footing stronger, not weaker.

Taking the Injury as Proof

We must recognize here the historical reasons for the marginalization of languages of indenture and trade. These languages declined as primary domestic languages during the 1950s and 1960s for the numerically small ones, and 80s and 90s for the relatively large ones like Bhojpuri. This did not happen because anyone issued an order. It happened because families made rational calculations about which languages carried futures for their children, and the institutional environment told them, consistently and without malice, that these languages did not.

For many families of indenture, Kreol Morisien has indeed become the primary language of daily life even within the home. But this did not happen because these communities chose to abandon their languages. It happened because generation after generation received the same institutional signal: your language belongs in the temple, not in the institution. Intra-community use of Kreol Morisien is not proof that these communities are represented by it.

Many of us know stories of our elders being turned back from educational institutions because they spoke their language of indenture or trade and not French or Kreol. It is the most visible consequence of the marginalisation this article is describing. In fact, to argue that the fact that many communities use Kreol Morisien to communicate instead of their ‘ancestral language’ is to take the injury as proof that the injury does not exist.

The Singaporean Alternative

The Singaporean model provides the contrast to this. Singapore became independent in 1965 with four distinct linguistic communities in a territory smaller than Mauritius. Its founding leaders faced exactly the argument being made here today: that a single shared language would promote unity, that multiple official languages would create administrative complexity, that the majority language was the most practical vehicle for democratic governance. They rejected that argument because they understood that a state which tells a community its language does not belong in the institutions of power is a state that has already begun to tell that community it does not fully belong.

Singapore designated Tamil, Mandarin, Malay, and English as official languages from independence. Tamil, spoken by roughly 3 to 4 percent of the population, an even smaller share than the languages of indenture represent collectively in Mauritius, has been an official language for sixty years. Tamil MPs address Parliament in Tamil as of right and it does not matter whether they do or not. The signal that Singapore’s institutional landscape sends to Tamil-speaking Singaporeans, and to their children, is unambiguous: your language belongs here.

Today, Singapore is one of the most cohesive, economically successful, and patriotic societies on earth. Its multilingualism has not divided it but has been the foundation of its remarkable stability. Unity built on equal recognition of all its communities has proven more durable than unity built on the administrative convenience of elevating one language above the rest.

Today the question or debate is which language in addition to English and French should be permitted within the walls of the National Assembly, our primary constitutional and democratic space. This is not a question of practicality or accessibility. It is a constitutional question about which communities the Republic recognises as equal participants in its own governance.

Kreol Morisien in the National Assembly, on the day that Bhojpuri, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Telugu, Urdu, and Mandarin stand beside it on equal terms: yes, without hesitation.

Kreol Morisien in the National Assembly while the languages of indenture and trade remain outside: that is not the recognition of all communities. That is the recognition of what colonial institutional pressure produced, while the languages it displaced are left to complete their disappearance without anyone having to issue the order.

A Debt of Foundation and Sacrifice

The people who carried the languages of indenture to this island did not arrive as guests. They arrived in the hold of ships, shackled by systems of indenture that gave them no choice about where they went or what awaited them. They built with their bodies an economy and a nation that they would eventually claim as their own. The traders who followed navigated oceans with nothing but their networks, their courage, and the languages in which they kept their accounts, conducted their prayers, and raised their children.

The languages of indenture were not brought here for cultural decoration. They were the living breath of the people who built this country, carried through back-breaking labour, through grief and death, through the long patience of communities that refused to be erased. Every road, every field, every institution of this Republic stands on the foundation of that sacrifice. The languages of indenture and trade did not survive because they were protected. They survived because the people who carried them refused, generation after generation, to let them go.

These languages became Mauritian languages the minute their speakers set foot on this soil, and they became more Mauritian with every generation that was born here, buried here, and built here. They are not heritage languages. They are not ancestral languages kept alive in a museum of identity. They are home languages, the languages of this Republic’s founding labour, its founding sacrifice, its founding refusal to be nothing. To look at Tamil, at Bhojpuri, at Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Urdu, and Mandarin and see foreign languages that belong somewhere else is not merely a historical error. It is a moral failure. It is to deny that the people who speak them are fully, unconditionally, and irreversibly Mauritian.

And a Republic that cannot extend to these languages the same institutional recognition it is now prepared to extend to Kreol Morisien has not yet finished reckoning with what it owes to the people who made it possible.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 1 May 2026