This hurts their performance and their post-graduation prospects. Proficiency in only a regional language also restricts them to regional opportunity and discourse. For better or worse, the highest levels of Indian business, bureaucracy, diplomacy, media, education and so much more function primarily in English. A great number of global institutions do so too. Shudras have no space in that world,...

In bringing them to where they are today, MK Gandhi and Ram Manohar Lohia were crucial not just as politicians, but also as thinkers who shaped Indian mores. Both were organic intellectuals of the Banias, both had prestigious Western educations and mastery over English, and both wrote and published extensively. They gained immense stature amid the largely Brahmin thinkers who...