Saving Soul: Reclaiming Identity Through Language
By Aadi Dhoundiyal | Class XII-E, Shri Ram Global School, Greater Noida There are many ways to conquer people—through force, through control, through silence. But the deepest conquest is not of land or power; it’s the quiet, slow erasure of memory. This is the legacy of colonization—not just physical occupation, but the silencing of identities through the erasure of language and culture. When the colonizers came, they didn’t bring just weapons—they brought words. A new language. A new religion. A new system that judged what was right and wrong. And with these came a subtle violence: the dismissal of native knowledge, the silencing of ancestral tongues, the slow but steady dismantling of identity. The Silent Loss Over time, the original language was labeled as broken. Schools stopped teaching it. Parents, afraid their children would be left behind, began using the language of the colonizers. One generation at a time, the native tongue grew quieter. Eventually, the colonizers left—bu...
