Is Rajasthani a single language or a spectrum of many related but distinct tongues? How can a language with all the granularity and diversity that comes out of a thousand years of evolution be adapted to contemporary institutions? A Rajasthani manuscript, possibly from Mewar. | Public domain To mark Mother Language Day (February 21) in 2020, we wrote about the significance of mother tongues in allowing us to access our pasts and our identities: “One’s mother tongue is really one’s oral inheritance – a collective repository of our cultural memories: Stories, songs, legends, lore and sayings – an ever-growing, ever-mutating mass of shared knowledge that exists only in minds, memories and words – in our language. The existence and transmission of this knowledge is fragile – and depends on the ability of different generations to have conversations with each other. Taking away language is to take away memory, to take away identity, to take away continuity.