Can a Language Become Indigenous or Must It Be Born That Way?

What Chilli Peppers Can Teach Us About Whether English Is "Indian"

Ask most people whether chilli is an authentically Indian ingredient and the answer is an immediate yes - it defines Andhra curries, Naga cuisine, Rajasthani pickles. Ask them when chilli actually arrived in India and most won't know: the Portuguese brought it from the Americas in the 16th century.

No Indian cuisine existed with chilli before that. And yet nobody today treats chilli as "foreign" to Indian food. That gap between origin and belonging is exactly the gap the Supreme Court's recent question about English exposes - and it points toward an answer more interesting than either "English is colonial, therefore foreign" or "English has been spoken here long enough, therefore Indian."

Appropriation, Not Birth, Determines Belonging

English arrived through empire, not choice - introduced for administration, commerce and what colonial rulers called their civilising mission. But origin froze nothing. By 1823, Raja Ram Mohan Roy was already using English to petition against colonial press restrictions - turning the coloniser's language into a tool for Indian argument within decades of its imposition.

Dadabhai Naoroji weaponised it further, using English to build the Drain Theory that exposed British economic exploitation to a global audience. Gandhi, writing Hind Swaraj originally in Gujarati, translated it into English once the original was banned - recognising that English could carry anti-colonial ideas exactly where they needed to travel.

None of this was passive absorption. It was active seizure: Indians taking a language built for administration and remaking it into a vehicle for Indian self-assertion. The literary tradition that followed deepened the claim further.

Raja Rao's 1938 defence of Indian English in Kanthapura and the work of R.K. Narayan, Amitav Ghosh and A.K. Ramanujan after him, didn't just use English - they bent its rhythm, vocabulary and sensibility until it could carry specifically Indian experience with the same authenticity as any Indian-origin language.

Chilli followed an identical trajectory in a completely different domain: introduced by outsiders, then transformed through generations of regional cooking until it became inseparable from what "Indian food" even means. Nobody demands chilli prove indigenous botanical origin before accepting it as Indian.

The proof it offers instead is depth and creativity of use.

Why This Matters Beyond Language or Food

The pattern that emerges from comparing these two, genuinely different domains is this: indigeneity understood as a birth-origin test is a poor, almost irrelevant, measure of belonging. What actually decides whether something belongs to a culture is whether that culture has appropriated it deeply and creatively enough that removing it would now impoverish, not merely inconvenience, the culture's own self-expression.

English cannot claim indigenous origin. It can claim something that has turned out to matter more: two centuries of Indians making it say things no coloniser intended, in ways no coloniser could have predicted. That is a stronger, more durable claim to belonging than any origin test could ever provide.