Political Philosophy
Official and Authoritative: The Two Languages Part XVII Keeps Apart
25 September 2026 · 23 min read
A Constitution has to be written in a language, and a State that administers itself has to conduct its business in one. These are usually treated as the same question, and the answer to the second is taken to settle the first. Part XVII of the Constitution of India separates them, and keeps them separate by drafting rather than by implication.
The separation is not between Hindi and English as political preferences. It is between two different things a language can be to a legal system. A language can be the one in which the State transacts its affairs — the language of the file, the order, the correspondence, the debate. Or it can be the language in which an enactment is what it is: the text a court reads when the question is what the law provides, and against which any other version is a translation. Part XVII names Hindi for the first and English for the second, and the two clauses that do it are drafted in visibly different ways.
The clause that names the official language
Article 343(1) is one sentence: "The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script." An unnumbered sentence follows, on numerals, prescribing the international form of Indian numerals for the official purposes of the Union.
Clause (2) then suspends the whole of it:
Notwithstanding anything in clause (1), for a period of fifteen years from the commencement of this Constitution, the English language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement.
A proviso permits the President, during that period, to authorise Hindi in addition to English, and the Devanagari numerals in addition to the international form, for any of those purposes. Clause (3) then provides that notwithstanding anything in the article, Parliament may by law provide for the use, after the fifteen years, of the English language or of the Devanagari form of numerals, for such purposes as the law specifies.
Three features of that drafting are worth fixing before anything else.
It is a declaration with a date. Hindi is the official language from the commencement, but for fifteen years the article's own operation is displaced in favour of the language that was in use before.
It is a declaration Parliament may qualify. Clause (3) allows Parliament to legislate for the continued use of English after the fifteen years, without limiting how much of the field the law may cover.
And it is a declaration about purposes, not about texts. What clause (2) continues is the use of English "for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used" — a functional description, not a list of documents.
The two articles about legislative business are built the same way. Article 120(1) provides that business in Parliament shall be transacted in Hindi or in English, with a proviso permitting the presiding officer to allow a member who cannot adequately express himself in either to address the House in his mother-tongue. Article 210(1) does the same for a State Legislature, adding the official language or languages of the State. And each is given the same clock, in identical form: unless the legislature by law otherwise provides, the article shall, after fifteen years from the commencement, "have effect as if the words 'or in English' were omitted therefrom". The provision does not expire. It amends itself, and the amendment is the deletion of two words.
Article 210(2) then carries two provisos substituting longer periods for particular States — twenty-five years for Himachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura, and forty years for Arunachal Pradesh, Goa and Mizoram. Each was inserted or substituted by the statehood or reorganisation legislation for the State concerned: the State of Himachal Pradesh Act, 1970, the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act, 1971, the State of Mizoram Act and the State of Arunachal Pradesh Act of 1986, and the Goa, Daman and Diu Reorganisation Act, 1987. The point of the provisos is not the arithmetic. It is that the drafting treats the end of English in legislative business as a date that can be moved State by State, which is what a transitional provision looks like.
The clause that names the authoritative one
Article 348 is drafted on none of those assumptions, and its position in the Part is the first thing about it. Part XVII is divided into four chapters — Language of the Union, Regional Languages, Language of the Supreme Court, High Courts, etc., and Special Directives. The provision that fixes the language of the authoritative text of every Act, Ordinance, rule, regulation and bye-law in the country is the opening article of the third. The Constitution files the question under the courts that read the law rather than under the legislatures that make it.
Clause (1) reads:
Notwithstanding anything in the foregoing provisions of this Part, until Parliament by law otherwise provides—
(a) all proceedings in the Supreme Court and in every High Court;
(b) the authoritative texts—
(i) of all Bills to be introduced or amendments thereto to be moved in either House of Parliament or in the House or either House of the Legislature of a State;
(ii) of all Acts passed by Parliament or the Legislature of a State and of all Ordinances promulgated by the President or the Governor of a State; and
(iii) of all orders, rules, regulations and bye-laws issued under this Constitution or under any law made by Parliament or the Legislature of a State,
shall be in the English language.
There is no period in it. Every provision in the Part that fixes a period — Article 343(2), and the five and ten years in Article 344(1), and the fifteen years in Article 349 — is about the language of business or the machinery for reviewing it. Where the Part prefers English without a date it does so twice, and both times on a condition rather than a clock: the proviso to Article 345 continues English for a State's official purposes "until the Legislature of the State otherwise provides by law", and Article 348(1) continues it for the authoritative texts until Parliament does. The difference between the two devices matters more than it looks. A clock runs whether or not anyone attends to it. A condition does not run at all; it waits.
The two non-obstante formulas are the second half of the design. Article 348(1) opens "Notwithstanding anything in the foregoing provisions of this Part" — over Articles 343 to 347, which is the whole of the Union language chapter and the whole of the regional language chapter, the proviso to Article 345 included. And Articles 120(1) and 210(1) open "Notwithstanding anything in Part XVII, but subject to the provisions of article 348". Legislative business is lifted clear of the Part; it is not lifted clear of Article 348.
Put those together and the arrangement in the text is exact. A House may transact its business in Hindi. A member who can manage neither Hindi nor English may be permitted to address it in his mother-tongue. A State Legislature may work in the official language the State has adopted for itself. And the authoritative text of what any of them passes is in English, because the article that says so survives every provision that says otherwise.
That is not a rule about the competence of legislators or the reach of a language. It is a rule about where the law is to be found. The debate is one thing and the enactment is another, and the Constitution declines to assume that the language of the first is the language of the second.
What the framers hedged, and what they did not
It would be possible to read Article 348 as an oversight — a transitional provision that was simply not given the date the neighbouring ones got. Two other provisions make that reading difficult, because both treat Article 348 as the provision most likely to be revisited.
Article 344(1) requires the President to constitute a Commission on official language at the expiration of five years from the commencement and again at ten years, consisting of a Chairman and members representing the different languages specified in the Eighth Schedule. Clause (2) sets out what the Commission is to recommend on: the progressive use of Hindi for the official purposes of the Union, restrictions on the use of English for those purposes, the form of numerals — and, in sub-clause (c), "the language to be used for all or any of the purposes mentioned in article 348". The Article 348 purposes are on the Commission's agenda by name. Clause (4) then provides for a Committee of thirty members of Parliament, twenty from the House of the People and ten from the Council of States, elected by proportional representation with the single transferable vote, whose duty is to examine the Commission's recommendations and report to the President their opinion on them.
Article 349 does the rest. During the fifteen years from the commencement, no Bill or amendment making provision for the language to be used for any of the purposes mentioned in Article 348(1) could be introduced or moved in either House without the previous sanction of the President; and the President was not to give that sanction except after taking into consideration the recommendations of the Commission and the report of the Committee.
That is a special enactment procedure, and it exists in the Part for exactly one subject: the language of the authoritative texts and of proceedings in the courts. Nothing in Part XVII protects Article 343 that way. The framers did not omit to put a date on Article 348 and then leave it unattended. They put no date on it, referred its subject to a Commission by name, and made legislation on that subject procedurally harder than legislation on anything else in the Part.
The hedge was itself temporary. Article 349 ran for fifteen years and ceased to bite on 26 January 1965. What it was protecting did not. A Bill today making provision for the language of the authoritative texts needs no previous sanction, no Commission and no Committee report — it needs an ordinary majority in both Houses and assent. The safeguard has expired and the clause it was built around is still there.
What Parliament provided
Parliament did legislate, and within the period during which Article 349 applied. The Official Languages Act, 1963 — Act 19 of 1963, dated 10 May 1963 — describes itself in its long title as "An Act to provide for the languages which may be used for the official purposes of the Union, for transaction of business in Parliament, for Central and State Acts and for certain purposes in High Courts". The last two limbs are the Article 348 subjects.
What the Act did with them is the thing worth reading closely, because it set a pattern that the Constitution itself later followed.
Section 3, as substituted with effect from 8 January 1968, provides that notwithstanding the expiration of the fifteen years, the English language may from the appointed day "continue to be used, in addition to Hindi", for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before that day, and for the transaction of business in Parliament. That is the Article 343(3) and Article 120(2) power exercised, and the operative words are in addition to. Three provisos work out the consequences for communication between the Union and a State that has not adopted Hindi; sub-section (3) requires both Hindi and English for a listed class of instruments, from resolutions and notifications to contracts, licences and tender forms, and for papers laid before either House.
Sub-section (5) decides how long the arrangement lasts, and it names no date:
The provisions of clause (a) of sub-section (1), and the provisions of sub-section (2), sub-section (3) and sub-section (4) shall remain in force until resolutions for the discontinuance of the use of the English language for the purposes mentioned therein have been passed by the Legislatures of all the States which have not adopted Hindi as their official language and until after considering the resolutions aforesaid, a resolution for such discontinuance has been passed by each House of Parliament.
The condition is conjunctive and it is unanimous. Every non-Hindi State Legislature must resolve, and then both Houses must resolve after considering those resolutions. Parliament replaced a clock with a condition of its own, and made its own condition considerably harder to satisfy than the one in Article 348.
Then sections 5 and 6, which are about authoritative texts rather than official purposes. Section 5(1) provides that a translation in Hindi published under the authority of the President in the Official Gazette, of any Central Act or Presidential Ordinance, or of any order, rule, regulation or bye-law issued under the Constitution or under any Central Act, "shall be deemed to be the authoritative text thereof in Hindi". Section 5(2) provides that "the authoritative text in the English language of all Bills to be introduced or amendments thereto to be moved in either House of Parliament shall be accompanied by a translation of the same in Hindi" authorised as the rules prescribe. Section 6 deals with a State whose Legislature has prescribed a language other than Hindi for its Acts: a Hindi translation may be published under the Governor's authority in the State Gazette, "in addition to a translation thereof in the English language as required by clause (3) of article 348 of the Constitution", and the Hindi translation is then deemed the authoritative text in Hindi.
Read the three together. Section 5(1) creates a second authoritative text of a Central Act; it does not displace the first. Section 5(2) calls the English text of a Bill "the authoritative text in the English language" in the very sentence that requires a Hindi translation to accompany it — which is to say that the statute Parliament passed under the condition in Article 348 continues, on its own face and as it stands today, to describe the English text as the authoritative one. Section 6 treats the English translation of a State Act as something Article 348(3) requires and adds a Hindi one alongside it.
That last characterisation is worth a moment, because Article 348(3) is not drafted as a requirement. It provides that where a State Legislature has prescribed a language other than English for its Bills, Acts, Ordinances or subordinate instruments, an English translation "published under the authority of the Governor of the State in the Official Gazette of that State shall be deemed to be the authoritative text thereof in the English language under this article". The clause attaches a consequence to publication; it does not in terms direct anyone to publish. Parliament in 1963 read it as a requirement, and said so in the text of section 6. The reading is a natural one — Article 348(1)(b) demands an authoritative English text, and clause (3) supplies the only means by which a State legislating in its own language can produce one — but it is Parliament's reading of the clause rather than the clause's own words.
So the condition in Article 348 — until Parliament by law otherwise provides — has been satisfied, and what the satisfying law provided was not a different authoritative text. It was an additional one, authenticated by publication in a Gazette under the authority of the President or the Governor. The technique is worth naming, because it recurs: the authority of the new text comes not from the body that enacted the law but from an officer of the executive publishing a translation of it, and a deeming clause that follows.
The judgment, and the court the Part leaves out
Article 348(2) supplies the only route out of clause (1)(a) that the Constitution itself provides, and it is narrow in three respects.
Notwithstanding anything in sub-clause (a) of clause (1), the Governor of a State may, with the previous consent of the President, authorise the use of the Hindi language, or any other language used for any official purposes of the State, in proceedings in the High Court having its principal seat in that State:
Provided that nothing in this clause shall apply to any judgment, decree or order passed or made by such High Court.
It is narrow as to who exercises it: a Governor, and only with the previous consent of the President. It is narrow as to forum: the High Court having its principal seat in that State, which says nothing about the Supreme Court. And it is narrow as to what it reaches: proceedings, but not the judgment, decree or order that concludes them.
The third limitation is the substantive one. It separates the conduct of a case from its disposal. Argument, examination, submission — everything that passes between the parties and the Bench — may be in Hindi or in the State's language. The document that states what the Court has decided may not. What is preserved in English is the part of the proceeding that binds, is executed, is appealed against and is cited.
Section 7 of the 1963 Act, brought into force on 7 March 1970, then opens that door and closes something behind it. From the appointed day the Governor may, with the previous consent of the President, authorise the use of Hindi or the official language of the State, "in addition to the English language", for the purposes of any judgment, decree or order of the High Court for that State; and where a judgment, decree or order is passed in such a language other than English, "it shall be accompanied by a translation of the same in the English language issued under the authority of the High Court". The permission the Constitution withheld was granted by statute, on the statute's own terms: the English version is not dispensed with, and its issue is the High Court's own responsibility rather than the executive's. It is the one place in the whole scheme where the authority behind the English text is the court that decided the case.
The Supreme Court is outside all of this. Article 348(1)(a) covers its proceedings; Article 348(2) does not extend to it; section 7 of the Act is confined to High Courts. Neither in Part XVII nor in the Official Languages Act is there any provision by which any authority may authorise the use of another language in the Supreme Court. The only route the text leaves is the one in clause (1) itself — Parliament otherwise providing by law — and the law Parliament made does not do it.
The Constitution's own text
Everything so far has been about the language of Acts, Ordinances and subordinate instruments. Article 348 says nothing about the language of the Constitution itself, and for thirty-seven years no provision of the Constitution did. Article 394A, inserted by the Constitution (Fifty-eighth Amendment) Act, 1987 with effect from 9 December 1987, was the first to address it. The same amendment inserted the words "authoritative text in Hindi" into the heading of Part XXII, which before that mentioned only the short title, the commencement and the repeals.
Clause (1) directs the President to cause to be published under his authority "the translation of this Constitution in the Hindi language, signed by the members of the Constituent Assembly, with such modifications as may be necessary to bring it in conformity with the language, style and terminology adopted in the authoritative texts of Central Acts in the Hindi language, and incorporating therein all the amendments of this Constitution made before such publication"; and the Hindi translation of every amendment made in English thereafter.
The definite article is doing work. Clause (1)(a) does not speak of a translation of the Constitution into Hindi. It speaks of "the translation of this Constitution in the Hindi language, signed by the members of the Constituent Assembly" — and so does not commission a translation. It identifies one, as a document that already exists and that the members of the Assembly signed, and directs its publication with conforming modifications and the amendments of the intervening years written in. On the Constitution's own account of itself, therefore, a Hindi text signed by the framers existed from the outset and was not the authoritative text of anything until 1987.
Clause (3) makes it one: the translation of the Constitution and of every amendment published under the article "shall be deemed to be, for all purposes, the authoritative text thereof in the Hindi language". The formula is the one section 5(1) of the 1963 Act used for Central Acts — publication under the authority of an officer of the executive, followed by a deeming. The Constitution acquired its second authoritative text by the same device its own Article 348 had made available for everything else.
Clause (2) is where the arrangement says something it says nowhere else:
The translation of this Constitution and of every amendment thereof published under clause (1) shall be construed to have the same meaning as the original thereof and if any difficulty arises in so construing any part of such translation, the President shall cause the same to be revised suitably.
Two things are settled in that sentence. The first is nomenclature, and it is not incidental: the Constitution's word for its English text is the original, and its word for the Hindi text that clause (3) makes equally authoritative is the translation. Both are authoritative; only one is original; and the article says which.
The second is the remedy. Clause (2) contemplates that a difficulty may arise in construing the Hindi text to mean what the English text means — a discrepancy, that is, between two texts each of which is authoritative for all purposes. It does not resolve the discrepancy by a rule of construction, and it does not send it to a court. It directs the President to revise the translation. The divergence is treated as a defect in the Hindi version, to be corrected by republishing it.
That is the only place in the scheme where the possibility of two authoritative texts disagreeing is addressed at all. Neither Article 348(3) nor sections 5 and 6 of the 1963 Act says anything about what is to happen if the deemed authoritative translation of an Act does not carry the meaning of the text it translates. Article 394A does, and the answer it gives is that the translation yields.
What is given to a person
Set beside all of this, the Part's provisions about individuals run in one direction only.
Article 350 provides: "Every person shall be entitled to submit a representation for the redress of any grievance to any officer or authority of the Union or a State in any of the languages used in the Union or in the State, as the case may be." It is rights-conferring language — every person shall be entitled — and it sits in Part XVII rather than Part III. Articles 350A and 350B, both inserted by the Constitution (Seventh Amendment) Act, 1956, add two more: it is to be the endeavour of every State and local authority to provide adequate facilities for instruction in the mother-tongue at the primary stage to children of linguistic minority groups, and there is to be a Special Officer for linguistic minorities, appointed by the President, who investigates the safeguards provided for them and reports to the President. The provisos to Articles 120(1) and 210(1) complete the set: a member who cannot adequately express himself in the prescribed languages may address the House in his mother-tongue, if the presiding officer allows it.
Every one of these secures an ability to address the State. A person may complain in any language in use. A child may be taught in the mother-tongue. A member may speak in it with permission. What none of them does is undertake that the law the person is complaining about, or that binds the child, or that the member is voting on, will exist authoritatively in that language. Article 348 answers that question separately, and answers it for everybody at once.
The Eighth Schedule makes the same point from the other side. Its headnote refers it to Articles 344(1) and 351; it lists twenty-two languages, Hindi among them at entry 6. The list has been enlarged by amendment three times — Sindhi in 1967, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali in 1992, and Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali in 2003 — and one entry was respelt, Oriya becoming Odia in 2011. English is not in it, and has never been. Article 351 then imposes a duty: it is the duty of the Union to promote the spread of Hindi, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India, and to secure its enrichment by assimilating the forms, style and expressions of Hindustani and the other Eighth Schedule languages, drawing for vocabulary "primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages".
So the language in which every Act of every legislature in India is authoritative is the one language the Part neither lists in its Schedule nor undertakes to develop; and the language the Union is under a duty to develop is not the language of the authoritative text. There is no contradiction in that. The two provisions are answers to different questions, and the Part is drafted on the footing that they are different questions.
What the arrangement decides
The usual way of putting the language question is as a contest — which language the country belongs to, and how long the other one gets. Part XVII does contain that contest, in Articles 343, 344 and 351 and in the clocks attached to Articles 120 and 210. Every provision in that group is drafted as a stage in a process: a date, a Commission, a Committee, a duty of promotion, a period extended by twenty-five years here and forty there.
Article 348 is not in that group, and nothing in the structure suggests it was meant to be. It is placed above every provision that precedes it in the Part by its own non-obstante clause, and above the articles on legislative business by theirs. It fixes no date. Its subject was put on the Commission’s agenda by name and, for fifteen years, behind a special enactment procedure. And the law Parliament made under it added a language rather than substituting one, using a device — executive publication, followed by a deeming — that the Constitution then used on itself in 1987.
What the arrangement decides is narrower than a preference between languages, and more durable than one. It decides that in a State which may transact its business in one language, debate in another, hear a case in a third and receive a grievance in a fourth, the question what does the law provide has one text it is to be answered from, and that any other text answering it is a translation whose warrant is a deeming clause. Part XVII does not treat that as the same question as which language the Union is to use. It answers the second with a declaration, a clock and a duty. It answers the first with a clause that names a language, subordinates everything before it to itself, and stops.
Authored by Eshan Kumar Gupta, Advocate, Hon'ble Allahabad High Court, Lucknow Bench.