An entrefilet recently published in l’express, titled “Bhojpuri speaking”, goes as follows: “Alors que le débat progresse sur l’utilisation du Kreol Morisien au Parlement, un ministre du gouvernement ne se gêne pas pour s’exprimer en Bhojpuri auprès de ses proches collaborateurs au ministère, au grand dam des autres fonctionnaires qui ne parlent pas cette langue.” Since its publication, the contents of this entrefilet have ignited vibrant debate on social media and messaging platforms. Enshrined at the heart of this single sentence are deeprooted questions of language, power and identity, some of which I seek to untangle below.

A key aspect of this entrefilet is its factual ambiguity. The sentence states that a Minister speaks in Bhojpuri to his collaborators, and that this linguistic choice is not appreciated by other civil servants who are not familiar with the language. But did these interactions in Bhojpuri take place in the direct presence of the aforementioned civil servants? Or were they simply overhead? To me – as, it seems, to many others –this distinction is key.

In present-day Mauritius, for someone in a position of authority to conduct an entire conversation in Bhojpuri with his collaborators in the direct and explicit presence of others who do not understand the language (for example, during an official meeting) is indeed disrespectful, not to say problematic: such an approach would have the definite effect, as well as the clear intention, of excluding.

But on the other hand, if this were a case of certain collaborators overhearing a separate conversation in Bhojpuri and feeling incensed at the use of the language in the workplace, then they are the ones whose reaction could be termed disrespectful – and once again, problematic. After all, why should two multilingual Mauritians not feel comfortable speaking to each other in the language of their choice, whichever it may be? Quite on the contrary, why should they feel “gêne”, rather than pride, while expressing themselves in an ancestral language that has overcome centuries of colonial repression, and has been handed down to them through generations?

Also notable is the entrefilet’s juxtaposition of the Minister’s Bhojpuri-speaking practices to the current conversations surrounding the introduction of Kreol Morisien into Parliament. In French, “alors que” expresses both temporal simultaneity (as a counterpart to the English “while”) as well as opposition (in the sense of the English “although” or “whereas.”) This “alors que”, then, aptly signals the present moment as a juncture where questions of language, power and identity are coming to a head. But its latent sense of opposition, whether intentional or not, risks deepening a chasm between two languages that have much more in common than is generally recognized.

Let us not forget that Kreol Morisien and Mauritian Bhojpuri are both languages of survival, resilience and creativity. Each reaches our lips today after having marked its triumph over centuries of colonial oppression: Kreol Morisien emerged from the horrors of plantation slavery, while Mauritian Bhojpuri was transmitted through the traumatizing dislocation of indenture. Even as both languages have sustained rich traditions of political activism and artistic production, they have struggled to be valorized as proper languages in their own right: Kreol Morisien has long been disparaged as “broken French,” while Mauritian Bhojpuri has suffered from a lack of prestige and often been supplanted by Hindi.

The ghosts of these dynamics continue to haunt us today: be it the child from Cité Malherbes speaking English with a Kreol Morisien accent or the child from Triolet speaking French with a Bhojpuri accent, both are ridiculed as having mother-tongues that are somehow “less than” their colonial counterparts. And these linguistic hierarchies can be perpetuated in complicated ways: it is not uncommon, for example, that the same person who is ridiculed for speaking French with a Kreol Morisien accent, will not hesitate before jeering at a fellow citizen who speaks Kreol Morisien with a Bhojpuri accent.

At the same time as we recognize the similarities between these two languages, it would be impossible – and indeed, nonsensical – not to acknowledge the undeniable differences existing among them, key among which is the following: Kreol Morisien is today spoken by the quasi-totality of the Mauritian population, while Bhojpuri speakers remain far more statistically limited. But does the fact that Mauritian Bhojpuri have less speakers mean that it is less important to the fabric of our nation than Kreol Morisien? No, it is by no means less important; it is just as important, but simply in a different way.

And who could best understand that than the defenders of Kreol Morisien themselves – those of us who have experienced, for far too long, what it means to have one’s mother-tongue denigrated, and suffered from the power dynamics that this subjugation implied.

As a nation, we may have reached a momentous occasion: we may be at the cusp of the introduction of Kreol Morisien, our lingua franca, into Parliament. What more beautiful symbol of linguistic resilience could there be: the journey of a language from the sugarcane plantation to the highest levels of state-making, powerfully overcoming centuries of stigma and stereotypes of the most violent kind. May we always honor the essence of this history: the refusal of linguistic denigration in any form.