Scrolling through my internet feeds one morning, I happened upon a video interview with an Iranian woman, a legal scholar who had previously been a student at Yale University in the US, saying that she made the decision to leave North America and return to Iran to be “freer” to do her research. As an academic, she said, she wanted to help “relocate knowledge production” and be among Iranians “inside”, so that they would no longer have to understand themselves through the lens of the outside worldWhen one reads of public figures in Iran, one often hears of how educated they are, with postgraduate degrees and publications. So I searched out the books by Ali Ardashir Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, who was killed in a targeted assassination in March 2026. They were all in Farsi. The philosophical issues he discussed, and for which he was famous, were part of a discourse that was happening in Iran in Farsi. Not only were his writings accessible to ordinary Iranians, they were also already part of a national conversation about these issues.

When we write in English in India and think our books are doing well, we have no idea how much better book sales are in places like China or Iran, where the penetration goes far beyond the tiny layer of population that reads English without dictionaries close at hand. All this time, publishers in India have assumed that the things we write about in English would not be of interest to the people who don’t know English and depend for their reading on what is written in Indian languages. But in the last few years, there has been a change.

All of a sudden, there is a rising demand for some of these books to be translated into Indian languages, a demand not coming from the government, or publishers with their eyes on the bottom line, but from readers. Small publishing houses and maverick translators are now approaching some of us who write in English for permission to translate our books into various Indian languages.

We do not need to “awaken” Indians outside the citadel of English to all that they are missing: They are approaching us on their own to find out. There is now a huge demand for translation, and the right people to do this are, ironically, the same students in our universities who are being told that without English they will face unemployment after they graduate with degrees in Indian languages, or in subjects taught with Indian languages as the medium of instruction. As it happens, they are exactly who we need for the mammoth task of translation that would integrate the rest of our society into “knowledge production”.

What would it take for India, with our many languages and different scripts, to have a robust “Indosphere”, where, like in China, a mind-boggling 900 million internet users would communicate every day to link this diverse land and build an open-ended future? The simple answer is a home-grown AI focused not on translating from English into Indian languages, or from individual Indian languages into English, but on translating input in any written Indian language into output in any other written Indian language in real time. Where Indian languages would, at last, be “talking to each other”.

This is not a difficult proposition, nor is it anywhere near as computationally heavy or energy-consuming as the AI that is required for mass surveillance and military applications. And far from causing unemployment, it would actually add to job opportunities by creating a whole new employment stream, one that specifically seeks out the sort of Indians who know Indian languages best, to use them as translators, revisors of AI-translated text, and as the designers of the system itself.

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It is not that Iranians and Chinese are vastly more intelligent than us. It is simply that Iran and China have been using their human resources more efficiently. India is like a car that is unable to fire on all its cylinders, and must watch the others racing ahead despite all our best efforts. When all of our population is able to participate in “knowledge production” we will pick up speed and move forward to take our place in the coming Asian century.

Mohan is a linguist who writes on the history of Indian languages. Her forthcoming book, Framing The Future, will appear as a Penguin publication in September 2026

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