New Delhi, March 5 -- Growing up mostly in Bhopal, then the capital of undivided Madhya Pradesh, I was exposed to a range of language variants that we bundle between Hindi and Urdu, all of which I loved. English was a part of the environment, including at school. My first language, though, was neither Hindi in any of its forms, nor English. It was Chhattisgarhi. My family hailed from a small town called Sarangarh in Chhattisgarh. At home, we spoke Chhattisgarhi.

By the time I graduated from school, I counted various versions of Hindi, Urdu, English and Chhattisgarhi as my own languages. For college, I went to Trichy in Tamil Nadu, and developed deep admiration for the Tamil language and culture. I learnt to understand the language, but c...