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Shailaja Paik’s recent piece, “How the hard ‘na’ insists on Marathi’s caste hierarchy”, makes an argument worth engaging with seriously.

She observes that the Pune Brahmin register of Marathi has functioned as a social credential, leaving speakers from other parts of Maharashtra feeling as though their Marathi is lesser.

The phenomenon she describes is real: pronunciation can, in many contexts, function as a social marker. Yet she ends by writing, “The hard ‘na’ is a small sound with a long history and deep politics of caste creating segregated sociability.” In doing so, she conflates social hierarchy with linguistic structure, attributing caste politics to the phoneme itself. That is a grave mistake.

Retroflex consonants are produced when the tongue curls back toward the hard palate. They correspond, in Devanagari, to ट, ठ, ड, ढ, ण, ळ, and their equivalents across dozens of Indian scripts.

If retroflexion were truly a Brahmin marker, we would expect it to diminish sharply in the speech of non-elite communities across South Asia. The linguistic record shows the opposite: retroflexion is pan-Indian, structurally embedded, and socially non-exclusive.

A wide range of Indian languages employ the retroflex ṇa. In my mother tongue, Gujarati, the consonant is shared across caste names, ranging from Chāraṇ and Vaṇajārā, to Vāṇiyā, Luvāṇā, and Brāhmaṇ.

In Tamil...

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