Tahir Abbas, a journalist colleague, had a delectable anecdote about his father. The latter once attended a meeting addressed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Lucknow before Partition. He returned quite dismayed at the great leader’s anglophile conduct. But the maulvis who attended the conference were quite impressed because, they all agreed, “Mian, Angrez bhi aisi Angrezi nahi bol paate (even Englishmen can't match his English-speaking skills)." Jinnah’s linguistic skills, though largely incomprehensible for his target audience, endeared him to the clergy and the masses, revealing that the influence of English is far more pervasive and overweening than we are conscious of or ready to acknowledge. File image of the Supreme Court of India. ReutersFile image of the Supreme Court of India. Reuters That persists even today, and disconcertingly, is practised with complete constitutional sanction by the Supreme Court of India. Get Rich In India Using This System Of Millionaires That is why Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi’s above-mentioned reprimand of an additional judge does not come as a surprise. The details of the incident are not as relevant as the larger issue it exposed, the issue of the language of the law. It was, of course, not the first time the choice of language in conducting the business of the apex court made news. Maverick politician, Raj Narain, wanted to intervene in a case relating to socialist leader Madhu Limaye, but the judges of the Supreme Court objected to his usage of Hindi, and his intervention was cancelled. Of course, the law is on the side of Chief Justice Gogoi. English is the officially the lingua franca of the Supreme Court. This stems from the Constitution. Article 348 (about “Language to be used in the Supreme Court and in the High Courts and for Acts, Bills, etc.”) states that “(a) all proceedings in the Supreme Court and in every High Court... shall be in the English language.” This reflected the challenges, at the time of the Constituent Assembly debates, of building a nation in a multilingual setting. The constitution, however, has been amended several times over but this colonial hangover has survived unchallenged. Many high courts have officially switched to the regional language of the state after seeking assent of the President.