Khadi Boli.
Ever heard of it?
It’s your native language.
The one that carried your first sounds—before pronunciation became something to manage, before language became a performance.
That was a long time ago.
You’ve moved on since then.
You’re older now. Married, perhaps. Working in a corporate office in a city that teaches you, very carefully, how to present yourself. You know what belongs where. You know which versions of yourself are acceptable in public.
So when your mother calls—from the village—you notice the room before you answer. You lower your voice without thinking. You smooth the edges of your speech, letting the Western UP accent slip into the background just enough to go unnoticed.
It’s not fear, exactly.
It’s awareness.
Nobody should overhear you speaking that language.
That would invite conclusions you don’t have the patience to correct.
And that’s understandable.
You don’t really need Khadi Boli anymore.
You’re educated now. Cultured. You’ve learned that progress has a sound, and it doesn’t quite resemble the language you grew up with. Khadi Boli feels too raw for that world—too direct, too unfiltered, unwilling to soften itself for comfort.
What’s curious, though, is this.
You don’t mind other languages.
When colleagues speak Punjabi, you smile. When someone switches into Bangla, it sounds lyrical to you. These languages seem to travel well. They don’t threaten your image.
But Khadi Boli does.
Something about its sounds makes you alert. You register it as loud, abrasive—out of place. So you decide, slowly and sensibly, not to use it. Not at work. Not in company. Not where it might attach itself to you.
That decision extends homeward.
When your child experiments—only a word, maybe two—you intervene gently.
“What’s this? ‘Gaaddi’? No. It’s Gaadi. Say it properly.”
They don’t argue.
Children are good at understanding rules that are never explained.
Some languages, they learn early, are better kept out of circulation.
And once Khadi Boli stops entering your home, something else becomes easier too.
There’s less risk now—of being misread, mislabeled, quietly sorted into a category you’ve spent years moving away from.
Because Bollywood has trained us, over time, to imagine villages in very specific ways. Say the word villager, and a familiar figure appears: a dhoti-kurta-gamchha, a talisman, a thick gutka-laden accent.
The trouble begins when it becomes the only one available.
When village speech is reduced to a single register. When entire regions—and the languages that live in them—fade quietly out of view.
Bollywood rarely features the dialect of Western Uttar Pradesh—Khari Boli, or Khadi Boli.
And when it does, it gets it wrong.
I belong to Muzaffarnagar, in Western Uttar Pradesh.
In 2006, Bollywood released Omkara.
The director claimed that the language spoken by the characters was Khadi Boli—the dialect of Western Uttar Pradesh.
I watched the film carefully.
What I heard was not Khadi Boli. It was an invented register—stitched together for effect, heavy on aggression, light on authenticity. Apart from a handful of words, there was little that resembled the language actually spoken in the region.
Even references that claim the film used Khari Boli do so loosely, without reckoning with how that language is lived, spoken, and understood by its native speakers.
This kind of misrepresentation does not survive on creativity alone.
It survives because it goes unchallenged.
When a language’s own speakers remain silent, an imitation is easily accepted as the real thing. An accent becomes a caricature. A living dialect becomes a prop.
The pattern repeated itself in 2013 with Zila Ghaziabad.
Once again, the film claimed to use Khadi Boli. And once again, the resemblance was superficial—isolated words, a few familiar sounds, little else. The opening line of the title song carried a trace of the dialect. Beyond that, the language slipped back into something generic, exaggerated, and safe for stereotypes.
This is not merely a failure of research or artistic choice.
It is what happens when a language has no one left willing to stand up and say:
This is not how we speak.
When Khadi Boli goes unheard
The easy thing would be to blame Bollywood.
But this is not, at its core, a failure of filmmakers.
The responsibility lies closer to home.
Across Western Uttar Pradesh—Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Baghpat, Baraut, Saharanpur, Ghaziabad, Bijnor, Bulandshahar—there are thousands of native speakers, who quietly distance themselves from their own language. Most of them are young. College-going. Upwardly mobile. Eager to arrive somewhere else.
They learn quickly which details of themselves should remain unspoken.
So they soften their accents. They rename their places. They hesitate before answering questions about where they come from. And gradually, without ceremony, they stop using Khadi Boli altogether.
Not because the language failed them.
But because it began to feel inconvenient.
What disappears first is not vocabulary, but confidence. Once that goes, representation becomes someone else’s problem. When the language is misused, misheard, or reduced to a stereotype, there is no protest—only silence.
And silence, repeated often enough, begins to look like consent.
Khadi Boli does not fade because it lacks history or substance.
It fades because its own speakers step back, leaving others free to define it in their absence.
She Was Ashamed of Her Language
I once visited one of my maternal aunts.
Her husband had injured his shoulder in a road accident, and my mother and I went to see him. She lives in West Delhi. I had only a rough sense of the route, so I called her for directions.
The voice on the phone startled me.
It sounded unfamiliar—carefully shaped, deliberately distant. For a moment, I wondered if I had dialed the wrong number. This was not how she spoke. Not with us. Not growing up.
When I reached her house, I asked her about it.
“What happened?” I said. “Why were you speaking like a stranger? Have you forgotten how to speak your own language?”
She hesitated before answering.
“People think Khadi Boli is an indecent language,” she said. “Some even say I sound ganvār when I speak it.”
She said this quietly, with a kind of embarrassment that didn’t need elaboration.
I asked her something simple.
“And aren’t you ganvār—someone who comes from a village?”
She didn’t respond.
There was nothing to argue with.
What troubled her wasn’t language. It was judgment.
I told her what should have been obvious: decency does not reside in a language. It resides in intent.
The words we choose matter.
The language itself does not carry the blame.
He Gave up his Mother Tongue to Sound “Educated”
A man named Sunil (name changed) once approached me for advice on self-confidence.
We met at the district centre in Janakpuri, West Delhi. He was polite, attentive, and clearly uneasy in his own skin. His concerns were familiar—career uncertainty, hesitation in interviews, the constant feeling of falling short.
We spoke for a while. I offered what guidance I could.
As we were about to leave, I said something that surprised him. I told him that confidence does not begin with posture or vocabulary. It begins with acceptance. And that, in his case, meant language.
“You say you’re from Western Uttar Pradesh,” I said. “But nothing in the way you speak seems willing to admit it.”
He didn’t disagree.
“I don’t want to sound uneducated or uncivilized,” he said after a pause. “That’s why I had to give it up.”
He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t defensive.
He sounded resigned—as though this were simply the price of moving forward.
I told him something I had learned slowly myself.
Abandoning your mother tongue is like a tree refusing its roots. It may still grow upward for a while. It may even look impressive. But when the weather turns—and it always does—it has nothing to hold it steady.
Confidence built on erasure does not last.
What is rejected eventually returns as uncertainty.
Owning your language does not make you smaller. It gives you something firm to stand on.
She Wanted Me to Change the Way I Spoke. I Didn’t.
It reminds me of another moment.
In 2010, I was working as a Radio Jockey with FM Dilli (100.1 MHz), a channel launched around the Commonwealth Games in Delhi.
One day, a fellow RJ listened to me speak and said, almost casually,
“Avdhesh, your language sounds quite harsh.”
“It does,” I said.
She seemed relieved by the agreement and went on,
“Why don’t you do something about it?”
“Like what?”
“Maybe speak in a softer tone.”
I thought about it for a moment before answering.
“No,” I said.
Not because I misunderstood her suggestion, but because there was nothing to correct.
What she was hearing was a sound shaped by Western Uttar Pradesh.
That difference is real.
But difference is not deficiency.
It does not require adjustment or apology.
What distinguishes one language from another is not politeness, but sound. Cadence. Texture. These are not accidents; they are identities.
The directness of Khadi Boli—its firmness, its lack of ornament—is precisely what gives it character. That is not something to smooth over.
I told her that I respected her language, and her right to speak it as she wished. And that I expected the same courtesy in return.
There was nothing confrontational about the exchange.
I simply chose not to erase myself.
It is about Khadi Boli.
Not as a symbol. Not as a cause.
As a fact.
This is the language that raised me. It formed my mouth before I learned to monitor it. It gave shape to my thinking before I learned to decorate it. Whatever roughness it carries, it carries honestly.
I have seen people abandon it to sound educated.
I have seen it misrepresented and diluted.
And I have heard its own speakers apologize for it—without being asked.
I don’t.
I speak it where it belongs—without concealment, without explanation. Not because it needs defending, but because it needs no defense.
Khadi Boli does not ask to be admired.
It only asks not to be disowned.
And that much, I can give it.
I’ve written before about what happens when people abandon their mother tongue to sound “educated.” This is the ground that story stands on.