When Prime Minister Narendra Modi released a video recently expressing shock at the profanity hurled at him during the recent NEET protests at Jantar Mantar — and, more pointedly, at his surprise that young girls had used such language — he called it, in his own words, a “cultural shock.” The language of abuse in India has no gender, caste, or creed; it is one of our public culture’s most reliable products, not a deviation from it. Shooter Manu Bhaker recently posted on X that the language we choose reflects our personality and the kind of person we are. If true, the ease with which Indians reach for abuse is not a mystery of national character. It is a gap in national education.

Abuse is learned, not innate and it is learned precisely where no one teaches against it. At home, children absorb the equation that volume and cruelty are what authority sounds like, long before they learn any vocabulary of abuse. Schools repeat the lesson instead of interrupting it. Colleges let ragging persist because their response is disciplinary — punishment after the fact — rather than curricular, with nothing in the timetable that might have preempted it. Cricket, cinema, politics, and social media then reward and amplify what was never corrected. None of this happens because Indians are uniquely prone to abuse. It happens because no point — from school to postgraduate study — formally teaches students to recognise abusive language and choose otherwise.

Ethics of language

This is the gap worth naming plainly: Indian language education, at every level, is built almost entirely around grammar, literature, and communication skills for employability. English and mother-tongue courses teach students to write a report, structure an essay, or clear an interview. They do not teach the ethics of language — the difference between forceful and degrading speech or why certain words function as small acts of violence regardless of intent. A student can clear every language paper set by a university and never once have been asked to think about this distinction.

Other countries have shown that habits like this one are the result of specific and sustained curricular choices, repeated daily rather than delivered as a single lecture. Singapore’s “Keep Singapore Clean” campaign, launched in 1968, paired fines with school inspections and inter-class competitions, turning littering from a norm into a taboo within a generation. Japan’s curriculum guidelines have required schools to teach waste and sanitation since 1968, and Japanese schoolchildren still sort their own lunchroom trash and clean their own classrooms as routine — a practice called gakko soji. In both cases, the correction was built into daily school life, not delivered as an annual sermon.

A language-ethics module built on the same principle would not be abstract. It could include short case studies — a filmed instance of sledging, a viral clip of political abuse, a bullying exchange from a college WhatsApp group — analysed the way a comprehension passage is analysed with students identifying where language crosses from forceful to degrading and why. It could be assessed the way any other language skill is assessed, through short written responses rather than a values lecture. This can be introduced early enough at the school level so that, by the time students reach the age where cricket sledging and film dialogue start to look like adult permission, they already have a framework for evaluating it critically rather than absorbing it as normal.

None of this is complicated to mandate, only inconvenient to fund. The AICTE and the UGC already require language courses in English and the mother tongue at the undergraduate level; the infrastructure to add a module is already there. What is missing is the will to treat this as curriculum rather than as a circular. What it requires also is for the AICTE and UGC to fund the Humanities departments equipped to design and teach it through dedicated grants for pilot modules,teacher-training workshops, and conferences where such curricula can be built and shared across institutions; rather than issuing a mandate and leaving departments to improvise it unfunded, the way most 'education' requirements currently function on paper alone.

Will Smith once warned a comedian, on live television, to keep a certain name out of his mouth. India’s task is to keep the filthy language out of its children’s mouths before it becomes second nature — not with another viral video or a moral lecture, but with a properly funded and properly taught curriculum.

Views expressed are personal

The writer is Assistant Professor of English (Grade-II), Velammal Engineering College, Chennai.

Published - August 05, 2026 02:25 pm IST